Page 37 of The Salt King

“I don’t know.” He was still looking at the picture. They both gave up at the same time. It was one nonsensical thing too many. “But . . . explain what’s going on here as well as you can?”

She felt drunk: the world was at much more of a remove than it should have been. The future seemed bizarre—the idea that she was going to explain what had happened so far to people who might not see it until after both of them were dead, then walk towards the main road and hope she could pick up some signal on the way, just in case they didn’t die . . . it was a maniac’s fever dream.

“Okay,” she said, and gave him the phone.

He held it up. “Ready?”

She pulled some thoughts together. “Okay,” she said again.

16

Hreodwater, England

Avelyn made it almost all the way to An El. He was just feeling pleased with himself when a cold weakness slimed through his whole body. He collapsed on the bridge over the abbey’s lake. That had never happened to him before, and what was shocking was that there was no steering; he couldn’t try not to hit his head or land at a better angle. His joints just—folded.

Jericho caught him an inch before his head smacked the floor. Avelyn thought they would have to stay there until he could stand again, and he was trying to think of a way to say that he couldn’t when, slowly, Jericho straightened and carried him. Avelyn stiffened, his whole skeleton tight with the certainty he would be too heavy. But Jericho only pushed down the Lodge door latch with one elbow and eased through. He wasn’t struggling.

Avelyn clenched his hands. His wet clothes would be soaking disgustingly through Jericho’s too now. He felt like he might have riverweed inside his jeans somehow, and silt and grit right under his collar. But he let his head bump against Jericho’s shoulder, too drained to protest. Hazily, he tried to remember the last time he had been carried. Never in his memory. It was unnerving but good. Like a lot of his overlap with Jericho, really. Jericho’s jumper smelled of beeswax and fire. Yes. From candles. It was so nice.

At least he wasn’t angry now. Just—tired. His mind was ringing hollow, as if he were standing in a vast hall with nothing in it, fever-echoing.

“It’s all right,” Jericho was saying. “You’re just coming down from the adrenaline. Once we warm you up, you’ll be much better.”

Avelyn heard his voice projected through his collarbone more than through the air. At seminary, the Greek tutor used to put one of those tiny metal music boxes on the hot water pipe and play it, and it had sung a hymn all through the college; the very gentlest way of saying, Come on, boys, you’re late. Avelyn, who had always been late because he was smoking behind the bike racks with the later-life converts from the merchant navy, had run inside for that, even when he’d ignored the bells for Mass.

The Lodge was a haven of warmth and quiet, the fire and the candles still burning, paperwork across the desk, and the chair pushed out.

Jericho eased Avelyn onto the fur rug by the fire. It was only then that Avelyn realized he was shaking. He looked at his own hands, feeling betrayed. Jericho knelt down next to him to help him out of the soutane, fingertips swift on the tiny buttons, even though for him they were the wrong way around. Then they were peeling it off, and then Jericho was cutting through his jeans with scissors from the medical kit.

In the echoing hall, Avelyn thought: Those are only six months old. That’s so annoying. Where do I find new jeans in Hreodwater? You can’t order anything, and even if you could, what would you put on the delivery instructions? Proceed past imaginary castle, mind the angry knights, try not to turn to salt for no reason . . . do not leave parcel in a safe place unless you’ve thoroughly checked that nobody has a crossbow.

Silt and blood had marked his clothes and his skin in gritty tidelines. The wound was a furious ravine right through the muscle of his thigh, almost up to his hip. The skin around it was already bruising into thunderclouds. It was interesting: he’d never been hurt like this before, so there was a novelty to it. He tried to not think about what bacteria were finning around in the Flood’s water. He was lucky the eels hadn’t noticed.

“It won’t be infected, don’t worry,” Jericho said, reading his mind. He was cleaning the blood away. “Just think about how often you’re going to eat out on this.”

Some of Avelyn’s normal thinking was coming back, struggling through the sludge his mind had become up on the jetty. He was starting to notice ordinary things again. He was steaming in the heat of the open stove; there were pins and needles right up his arms. Now that they were lukewarm, his wet clothes felt even worse. The thin white top he wore under the soutane was sticking to him so transparently that he might as well not have been wearing anything, tattoos glowing straight through it, and what was left of his jeans felt foul. His leg hurt in a dull pulse, but much less than he would have thought. That was so odd: Jericho hadn’t given him anything. Had he?

Now, Jericho was tipping ethanol from a glass bottle into his hand. He held his palmful of it over a candle. It lit with a rush of blue flame, and he washed his hands with it, shockingly slowly despite the fire racing over his skin. Avelyn flinched, but then Jericho swept the fire out and held his hands up to show he wasn’t hurt. “Plastic gloves salt-tarnish in a few weeks down here, so I hardly ever have them,” he explained.

With the firelight casting shadows down the tendons in his wrists, he threaded a suture needle. “All right: this looks horrifying, but it’s so sharp you won’t feel it, I promise. Ready? If you could keep the screams to a minimum so we don’t startle the Franciscans . . .”

Avelyn nodded to say he understood, and realized too late that it was a joke and he should have laughed.

Jericho bent his neck to start. As he did, he set his free hand on Avelyn’s knee to hold it flat in case he flinched. It was only a sensible thing to do, but Avelyn froze. It felt fathoms too intimate.

As Jericho said, he didn’t feel the needle much, but that might have been because his skin was on fire under the cool of Jericho’s palm. He set his teeth. How did you explain that you wanted something to stop not because it was awful, but because it wasn’t?

“What’s the story, about the knights?” Jericho asked him over the shush of the thread moving.

Avelyn nodded tightly, aware that Jericho just wanted him to talk so that there would be some warning if he fainted again. “When . . . the French chevaliers came to raid Hreodwater after England fell—after Hastings—the King did nothing, even though he had defended the town before that. The French killed the witches, so nobody knew what to do.” That made no sense if you were from the Outside. “A—a witch is something like a doctor mixed with a priest. I’m a witch, you’re a witch. So . . . the Witan sent to Whitby Abbey for a holy woman.” He heard how he was dropping into old-sounding phrasing—that always happened when he was tired or upset. They were Hreod rhythms.

Jericho finally lifted his hand to speed up with the needle. Avelyn had to swallow a surge of loss. That was what happened, with this life. He stared into the middle distance. He was just going to have to accept that all this would be one of the memories that fissioned and burned forever, stellar above the empty glacier of holy orders. He had a few of them, these stars, and he wished he didn’t. It was much harder to be alone when you saw a sliver of what it would be like not to be.

“Little break?” Jericho asked him, dark eyes searching his.

“Mm.”

Jericho held his calf and stroked the hollow of his kneecap. “You’re bloody tough.” His voice turned light with admiration. “I have bishops in here howling about sprained wrists.”