Page 72 of The Salt King

She was right: it was what he should have done, and he had known it. He almost had. The whole idea had filled him with dread, the exhausting ritual of asking a Witan lady for sanctuary, being married without his uncles to give him away, plunged into a new clan with no advice and no one on his side . . .

If he had gone, though, he would have had a family, and a household, and a clan—not just a little room at the back of the Jesuit Curia, a god who didn’t talk to him, and a half-father who still suffered because of him.

If he had gone, he would have met Jericho years ago. Maybe they would even be real friends now, and Avelyn would be able to feel the way he should have, not this maggot-coloured, affection-starved craving. He wouldn’t be so hungry.

Yes, and what if the moon were made of salt?

“My whole clan died,” Avelyn said. “I knew what everyone would say. They’d say the King had cursed me, and that if I married, my new clan would be cursed too.”

“They did say that, but you would have been welcome anyway.”

He looked sideways at her. “I know, my lady. But whenever anything went wrong . . . I think I would have been a little less welcome.”

He heard her sigh even through the mask.

The salt light flared, and they all had to put a hand over their eyes, even with the masks.

“That one was strong,” Ras murmured. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for much further.”

“Let’s see,” Lady Hringen said, but as they passed it, she patted a support pillar as though she was reassuring herself that whatever else was going on, at least the ceiling wouldn’t collapse.

Avelyn slowed down.

Pegged against the pillar, exactly at eye level, where each one was built with a deliberately flawed, glassy base about the height of a person, was a sledgehammer.

The hammers were so big he would struggle to lift one even now, but his grandmother had lifted it. For him, she would be frozen forever in the moment she swung it. She had been a Valkyrie, but not like the ones in the paintings. Somehow those artists had only ever been able to imagine the young ones, the ensigns who were barely grown up; not the general, grey and mighty as a winter oak. He hadn’t seen the hammer strike the support pillar. He’d already been running.

He pushed his hand into his pocket, didn’t find the rosary, and clenched his fist.

“Mind like a rock,” Lady Hringen said to him.

“Oh,” Ras said suddenly. “My lady.”

Something huge was moving among the trees. When Avelyn looked that way, he saw a flicker of what might have been antlers in the shadows.

“Ah,” Ras said, and put his hand out and set it to the side of Avelyn’s eye like a blinker. Avelyn twitched back, annoyed. “Don’t look at them. You’ll make them real.”

Cross-cultural patience could only get you so far. “What?”

“The King’s dreams,” Lady Hringen said, and it struck Avelyn as exactly the way that experienced divers spoke about sharks. “Come on, gentlemen. Eyes on the road. Mind like a rock. Sing to the King, and nothing else. This is dangerous now.”

“Why is it dangerous?” Avelyn said. Could you have an aneurysm from nothing but frustration? If he looked in Jericho’s medical records, would there be a long history of Outside scientists and scholars who had literally popped after being exposed to too much Hreod Thinking and a cover-up so that people like Lady Hringen could continue to get away with it and intone non sequiturs at decades of victims yet to come?

Give me strength.

The King heard. Another salt light flare blasted across the forest, even brighter than the last, and it saved him from having to dredge up a reply. However malignant the King was, it was nice to have a brief alliance.

Thank you, Avelyn thought wryly, and the ras hugged him tight before it slithered off again.

Lady Hringen’s whole posture stiffened. “No,” she said. “No further. Ras, go and get them back.” She meant the miners on shift now. Avelyn could see them: they were working on a glacier of salt at the edge of the oak forest. “We’re going back above.”

As though it was fire and not light arcing across the cavern roof, Ras nodded tightly and ran ahead to fetch the other miners.

“My lady,” Avelyn began. As spectacular as it was, the salt light looked no more dangerous than the other aurora, the one in the north, and they were coated in silver: it wasn’t doing them any damage through all that. “Why is it—”

“Get that ready,” Lady Hringen said about the silver camera. She drew him to the middle of the path, away from the shade of the trees, so they were standing in the full light of the storm. “We’re going to wait for the next flare, and I’ll show you what your Witan in the southeast needs to see. I said don’t look at them!” she added, hard, when a crack came through the trees right behind Avelyn and he twisted around. She smacked him in the head, hard enough to make him see green blotches.

He swung back, incredulous.