Page 59 of The Salt King

“What!”

“Three, please,” Avelyn said. He didn’t want any wine, but the urge to be annoying was overriding that.

“Take the curse back,” the wine seller said nervously.

“Apologise to Jericho,” said Avelyn, “and I will.”

“I’ll tell the grandmothers,” she snapped, but she sounded worried.

“Do that,” said Avelyn, feeling much more cheerful about the world than he had a few minutes ago. “But I expect they’ll tell you not to be rude to the witches of foreign gods.” He let his eyes tick past her shoulder, as if something unnerving was behind her.

She pushed three cups of wine into their hands and didn’t take any money, though Jericho was holding out the right change, a palmful of amethyst pennies.

“Does that lady think she’s cursed?” Jericho demanded as the three of them moved away.

“N . . . o?” said Avelyn. Technically it was true. Nobody in Hreodwater thought they were cursed. They knew they were.

“If she ends up in my surgery with a femur fracture, I will make you help!” Jericho said indignantly. “It will properly ruin your morning! People take curses seriously here, I really think—”

“You don’t think she maybe a little bit deserves a femur fracture?” Avelyn said, just to see if he could make Magnificent Murder Jericho come out again, because he wanted to show him to Annunciata.

“No, what are you—nobody deserves—I tell you what though, I don’t think men should immediately curse women who annoy them,” Jericho tried.

Avelyn took a breath to point out that the relations between men and women were different in Hreodwater to most Outside places, but Annunciata patted his shoulder in a This one’s for me kind of way.

“Jericho, true equality is admitting when someone’s an arsehole whoever they might be,” she told him firmly, and Avelyn beamed, in love with her.

Jericho sighed and cast another anxious look back at the horrible wine seller. Avelyn wondered what it would be like, to be so cripplingly lovely that you worried about people even if they were raging pricks. Dreadful, probably. He was much happier in the curses and femur fractures camp.

He gave them the extra cup of wine. “Anyway, you two take this extra one, drink it for me. I have to . . . go and see someone I didn’t marry.”

“Can we watch?” Annunciata asked. “Are you going to curse her if she says no?”

“Curse you in a minute,” Avelyn grumbled.

“Ah—Avelyn,” Jericho said.

“If you can look me in the eye and tell me she doesn’t deserve to be cursed—”

“No,” Jericho said. His tone was different, and Avelyn realized that he wasn’t talking to the endlessly gentle, easily flustered Jericho now, but the one who took crossbow bolts out of priests as calmly as he swept floors. “Lady Hringen holds a grudge. If you go down the mine with her, be careful. She will leave you behind if anything goes wrong.”

“Goes wrong,” Avelyn said slowly. “How do you mean?”

“The injuries the miners have,” Jericho said. “Something is down there, something is happening that shouldn’t be, and Lady Hringen is . . . I don’t think she wishes you well. Be careful.”

Avelyn looked up into his eyes and found no trace of a joke or exaggeration. Perhaps it was the fires, but there were more of those lights in his irises than ever.

23

Vatican City

Cai Li hadn’t used to believe in signs, but the older he became, the more he felt as though, sometimes, the Almighty arranged the world in such a way that you could tell what was coming, because this was a person for whom everything had already happened, and so it was impossible to see time like humans did, as a straight line.

It was six o’clock in the morning and he was pacing—as he always did if he couldn’t sleep—through the empty cloisters of the Vatican Museums, which were eerie without the tourists. It was cold today, and the dawn was struggling through an overcast sky. But a single sunbeam was framing the statue of Dionysus, the old god of madness.

He stood in front of it, trying hard to push down the conviction that perhaps, if madness was coming, a beam of light found its way to the mad god.

He had been calling Avelyn every few hours, increasingly worried, because he should have heard from him yesterday. All sorts of things could have prevented that—even if it was just raining hard enough, it became impossible to wade across the fen for three miles to get to a signal—but he couldn’t shift his certainty that something was wrong, despite Avelyn’s reassuring answerphone message.19