Page 64 of The Salt King

Everyone raised a hand.

“Get a herald to phrase that carefully,” Lady Balen said to someone behind her chair, perhaps her husband. He was young, eighteen or nineteen. “Stressing that they are of course right, it is all fairy tales and they’ve persuaded us of the error of our ways.”

Which was . . . not what had happened. At some point, listening to Hreod conversations was going to stop feeling like bashing his face into a wall, and Avelyn was very ready for that to be now, but he was feeling less and less optimistic.

“What’s next?” Lady Hringen said, surfacing from what had looked like a trance.

She was exactly the same as Avelyn remembered. She had that deep glamour sea captains did, the kind who knew their ships and the water so well that nothing would sink them. Her hair was still dark, in a long braid over her shoulder, and her silver sleeves were like mercury. After a lifetime of hauling salt carts up and down the mine, she still looked like she would be able to pick Avelyn up and throw him across the room. He hoped she wasn’t going to.

“You are,” Ras murmured to Avelyn, and ghosted up to her chair to speak against her ear.

Lady Hringen sharpened. “We have a petition from Avelyn tua-Brocken.”

Everyone looked around. If Ras had brought a giraffe into the room, they would have been less interested.

Avelyn bowed, acutely aware that he looked like nothing to these people: just a drab little cat of a witch washed in from some unfortunate place that didn’t matter. The heads of the clans were dressed in fur and exquisite velvet and silk-silver from the Clan Teksa looms. In London, Avelyn knew, there was a beautiful shop on Bond Street that, to the clients who reached the top of a long, carefully curated waiting list, sold Teksa coats like these. They only increased in value. Not long ago, one had made the news: it had been made two hundred years ago, and it had just sold for one and a half million pounds sterling at Southeby’s.

Lady Teksa, Avelyn suspected, had about twenty that she kept for emergency pocket money.

“What can we do for you, tua-Brocken?” Lord Harkta asked.

“I’ve come to ask a favour of Lady Hringen,” he said carefully.

Nobody made a sound—the Hreod Witan was far more restrained than the roaring, jeering mess that was the House of Commons in Westminster—but there was a stir, humming with expectation. A few of the ladies settled back, ready to enjoy the blood sport. Behind them, the young lords caught each others’ eyes, making silent, amused bets.

“Your memory is short if you think I owe you a favour,” Lady Hringen said. “The last I knew of you, you broke a contract with me.”

Everybody looked at Avelyn. Avelyn had a nasty feeling that he was the midmorning entertainment. Behind Lady Hringen’s chair, Ras was watching him, expressionless. It was impossible to tell if he had set this up to help, or to have Avelyn publically humiliated.

“I can’t apologise for that enough, my lady, although . . . I see it’s worked out by far for the best. The current Lord Hringen is performing his duty much better than I would have done.”

She tipped her head and seemed to accept the compliment, more or less, but her expression said it wasn’t enough.

“I went halfway mad, after everything. I didn’t truly know what I was doing, and by the time I did—I was a long way away from here.” He didn’t mean it exactly geographically.

Lady Hringen sat forward. “And now, behind false eyes, with your clan tattoos hidden, you come to ask me for a favour. You, who were once all but consecrated as a witch for the King, but have turned apostate for the nailed god. You want to be an Outsider: why shouldn’t I treat you as one?”

Be polite. Be respectful. Eyes down. There was a Hreod word, ranweth; it meant “elegant and composed, with a kind of soul-deep stillness.” A good man was a ranweth man. Like Ras. “My Witan southeast in Rome sent me to understand what happened to our witch who turned to salt—”

She spoke straight over him. “The King happened to him, boy. You can tell them that.”

“My lady, they don’t understand—”

“That’s more their problem than mine—”

Fuck it.

“They do not know the Salt King,” Avelyn said over her, and there was a renewed prickle of interest through everyone else. “They think he is a story told on a marsh somewhere. Just like,” he said across the annoyed murmuring, “you think the Vatican is a kingdom based on a collection of incoherent nonsense from a desert. It would be helpful if you would allow me to go down the mine and see where the light is bright. At least that would prove for them that something is down there.”

The depth of the silence made him think he didn’t understand what he was asking for. He wished he could guess what they could possibly be keeping a secret. It was a salt mine, for Christ’s sake, not the Pentagon.

Something that could bite.

“It’s too dangerous now, especially for a young man.”

Avelyn didn’t know what to say to that. Snapping wouldn’t help: the opposite. Hreodwater treated its young men a lot like Outside people treated expensive pedigree dogs. You wanted your dog to be happy because you loved it, but it was universally agreed that letting the dog wander off by itself too much was a terrible idea, because it would get flustered and bite someone, or become startled, and you would have a migraine of a time persuading it that barking maniacally wasn’t going to solve anything. Unless, like Lord Harkta, you were known to be an extremely quiet, wise dog who had never bitten anybody who didn’t bloody deserve it, you could forget it.

Ras leaned down to murmur to his wife again. The beads of black salt in his hair glowed, starry.