The ferry horn cut across the lake at half past noon, its mournful note scattering gulls from the pier railings. Wren Greenberry gripped the leather handle of her satchel tighter as the wooden vessel bumped against the weathered boards of Larkspur's dock. The smell of brine and wet rope rose around her, mingling with woodsmoke drifting from the slate roofs of the village beyond.
Two days' walk from the Greenberry inn near Riverdell, and now this last crossing. Her boots were caked in dried mud, her cloak wrinkled from sleeping rough against the ferryman's stacked crates, and the letter in her satchel sat heavy as a stone against her hip. Grandmother's last letter. The ink had run where Wren had wept on it during the long miles.
She stepped onto the dock and felt the boards flex beneath her weight. A gull screamed overhead. The lake stretched grey-green to the far shore, and beyond the rooftops rose the wooded slopes of the Old Scar, half-hidden in low cloud. Somewhere in the village below, a dog barked, then went silent.
"Right then," the ferryman called from behind her. "You wanting to stand there all day, Miss?"
"Sorry." Wren adjusted the satchel strap across her shoulder and moved down the dock toward the stone steps cut into the bank. "Thank you for the crossing."
The ferryman grunted, already coiling rope. Wren did not look back. The lake behind her held too many miles, and ahead the village opened its arms around her in narrow lanes and timber-framed houses. She passed a fishmonger gutting trout on a slate slab, the silver scales catching the thin sunlight. A pair of children darted past, chasing a spotted dog toward the churchyard. Somewhere a bell tolled once, then stopped, as if it had changed its mind.
Wren kept her eyes on the path. She had memorised every word of her grandmother's letter on the road, turning the phrases over until they wore smooth in her mind like river stones. Old Tam would be there. Old Tam, who had treated her through the fever that had laid her low for a season when she was nine, who had taught her to steep willow bark and grind valerian root, who had once told her, half-asleep and burning, that she had the hands for healing. The Wandering Inn kept him. Had kept him for decades. And the innkeeper, whoever they were now, would surely honour a letter bearing her grandmother's seal.
She turned down a lane so narrow the upper storeys nearly touched, their mossy timbers blocking the sky to a strip of pale cloud. Cobblestones gave way to packed earth beneath her boots. The smell of bread baking came from somewhere ahead, warm and yeasty, and beneath it the sharper tang of lye soap from an open doorway. Wren's stomach turned over. She had not eaten since morning.
A painted sign swung from an iron bracket above a doorway: The Wandering Inn , in faded gold lettering on green wood, with a prancing stag beneath the words. The building leaned comfortably against its neighbours, three storeys of warped timber and salt-stained plaster, its windows glowing with firelight even at midday. Wren stopped at the threshold and drew a breath. The door was propped with a chunk of broken millstone, and from inside came the clatter of crockery and the low murmur of conversation.
She pushed the door open and stepped into a taproom that smelled of woodsmoke and old ale. A fire crackled in the great hearth to her left, its flames throwing amber light across a room scattered with mismatched tables and benches. Three men sat over tankards in the far corner, their voices too low to make out. A bar ran along the right wall, polished dark by decades of elbows, and behind it stood a woman of middle years with flour on her apron and a quill tucked behind one ear.
"Afternoon, love," the woman said, without looking up from the ledger she was writing in. "Sit where you like. I'll be with you in a tick."
"Thank you." Wren chose a bench near the hearth, where the warmth could dry the lake-damp from her cloak. She set the satchel on the table beside her and rested one hand on its worn leather. The letter was inside, folded twice, sealed with green wax pressed into the Greenberry crest.
The fire popped, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Wren watched them rise and vanish, and for a moment the weight of the road and the long absence of her grandmother pressed against her chest. She blinked. Crying in a strange taproom would do no good.
A grey shape padded across the hearthstones toward her bench. It stopped two paces off, a cat of indeterminate age, its fur the colour of wood ash, its eyes the pale green of pond water. It regarded Wren with the unblinking appraisal of a creditor.
"Hullo," Wren said softly. "I'm Wren."
The cat sat. Its tail curled around its paws with precision.
"You don't say much."
"I say enough." The cat's voice was a surprising thing, thin but certain, as if she had measured out each word against a sovereign weight. "You smell of road dust and Riverdell clay. And beneath that, beneath the damp wool and the tallow smoke, you smell of the Greenberry taproom. I know that smell." She blinked once, slowly. "I have known it for twelve winters."
Wren stared. "You can speak."
"I can." The cat's whiskers twitched. "Most cannot hear it. You can. Curious." She rose and stepped onto the bench opposite Wren, settling there with the gravity of a magistrate. "I am Bess. I keep this kitchen and have done since before you were born, I expect. Who sent you, and what do you want?"
"I came seeking work. I have a letter." Wren touched the satchel. "From my grandmother. For Old Tam."
Bess's ears flattened a fraction, then rose again. "Your grandmother."
"Helene Greenberry. She passed in autumn."
"I knew her scent." The cat's voice softened, though her posture did not. "Strong tea and lavender soap, and beneath that the herbs she kept in the jars above the mantel. She came here once, years ago, with your mother on her hip." A pause. "You have her hands."
Wren looked down at her own fingers, reddened by the road, the nails trimmed short. She did not know what to say to a cat who remembered her as an infant.
The woman behind the bar approached, wiping her hands on a cloth. "There you are, love. What can I fetch you? We've got broth, bread, cheese, and a bit of smoked fish if you're peckish. Ale or cider, or there's mint tea if your head's tired from the road."
"Broth and bread, please. And mint tea, if you don't mind."
"Coming." The woman glanced at the bench opposite Wren, where Bess sat with the dignity of a dowager. "She's taken to you, then. She usually just hisses and walks off." She smiled and retreated behind the bar.
"Old Tam is not here," Bess said, when the woman had gone. "He went into the marsh three days past. He does that. He comes back when he chooses, smelling of peat and something older."
"Do you know when that will be?"
"No." Bess's tail flicked. "He does not tell me his business. I tell him mine. It is a fair arrangement." She leaned forward, her breath carrying the faint warmth of cream. "Show me the letter."
Wren hesitated. The wax seal was unbroken, the fold crisp. But there was something in the cat's pale gaze that gave her pause, a weight of years behind it. She drew the letter from the satchel and set it on the table between them.
Bess extended her nose and sniffed the seal. Her whiskers trembled. "Helene's hand. She used a drop of bergamot in her ink. I remember." She drew back. "Break the seal. The letter is not for the dead."
Wren lifted the folded paper and broke the wax with her thumbnail. The seal crumbled into green dust on the tabletop. She unfolded the letter, though she knew every word, and read it once more in the firelight, as if the ink might have changed.
To whoever keeps the Wandering Inn,
I send my youngest, Wren, who has the healer's gift though I could not give her the name. She has tended our village through two winters of flux and one of the shaking cough, and Old Tam will know her hands. Take her in, I beg you, and let her learn at the hearth where she first dreamed of the work. She carries my best hopes and my last breath.
Helene Greenberry
Wren folded the letter along its creases and slid it back into the satchel. Her throat ached, but she would not weep in front of a cat.
"She gave you the healer's gift and not the name," Bess murmured. "Curious and curious. Sit. Drink your broth. Tam will come, and the innkeeper will see to the rest. I will watch your satchel while you eat, since you clearly cannot be trusted to chew and guard at the same time."
Wren gave a small, startled laugh. "Thank you, Bess."
"Don't thank me. Thank the mice I have not yet caught, who keep me sharp." The cat settled onto her paws and closed her eyes, though one remained slit in watchfulness.
The woman returned with a wooden tray bearing a bowl of broth, a heel of brown bread, and a steaming mug of mint tea. The broth smelled of onion and thyme, and the bread was still warm from the oven. Wren ate with the quiet desperation of the road-starved, and the fire crackled, and Bess purred once, very softly, as if to herself.
The door swung open, admitting a gust of lake-wind and a man of middling height in a clerk's coat buttoned tight against the chill. He had a pinched face and whiskers that quivered with importance, and he carried a leather book under one arm. His boots clicked on the flagstones as he approached the bar, clearing his throat twice before the woman looked up.
"Mrs. Hauton," he said, in a voice pitched to carry across taprooms. "A word, if you please. There is the matter of the vellum tax. The Ironpot Trading Company has sent me to collect, and I am told there is a sum outstanding."
"Mister Muckleby," the woman said, and her voice flattened like a hand pressed on rising dough. "I paid that in harvest week."
"Receipts have been lost. The Company requires a fresh payment." He set the book on the bar with a thump. "I have the forms here. It is nothing personal, you understand."
"In my experience, Mister Muckleby, when men say it is nothing personal, it generally is."
Wren looked down at her broth. The mint steam curled between her fingers. Beside her, Bess had opened both eyes, her gaze fixed on the magistrate with the patience of a cat watching a wasp.
"The form must be signed," Muckleby continued, his voice tightening. "And the sum tendered. I am empowered to seize goods in lieu of payment, should it come to that, and I would not wish for the embarrassment."
"Embarrassment," Mrs. Hauton repeated, and her knuckles whitened on the cloth she still held. "You may tell Bertha Ironpot that the Wandering Inn has paid every farthing due, and that her clerks are no longer welcome at this door."
Muckleby's whiskers quivered. "I am the magistrate of this village. You cannot bar me from a public house."
"This is not a public house. It is an inn, and my inn, and I may bar whom I choose." Mrs. Hauton's voice was pleasant and very, very firm. "Good day, Mister Muckleby."
The magistrate drew himself up, his collar suddenly too tight. His gaze swept the taproom and caught on Wren at her bench near the hearth. He blinked, as if surprised to find himself observed. Then he gathered his book and turned on his heel, the door swinging shut behind him with a thud that set the prancing stag swinging on its bracket.
The fire popped. Somewhere in the rafters, a pigeon cooed.
Bess rose from the bench, stretched fore and aft with the deliberation of a magistrate herself, and stepped down to the flagstones. "I will see to the kitchen," she announced. "There is a matter of mice in the cheese loft that will not wait." She paused beside Wren's bench. "Finish your broth. When you have done, ask Mrs. Hauton for a room. She is kinder than she looks, which is not saying much, but it is saying enough."
Then she was gone, a grey shadow slipping through a flap in the far wainscot.
Wren lifted her mug and drank. The mint was sharp and cooling, and the warmth of it spread through her chest. Through the inn's narrow windows she could see the lake, grey and restless, and beyond it the dim shape of the far shore where the marsh began. Old Tam was out there somewhere, among the reeds and the peat, smelling of moss and something older.
Wren pushed the bowl aside and stood, brushing crumbs from her sleeve. The broth had been good, the sort that reminded the belly it was still alive, and the mint had settled something jittery behind her ribs. Her satchel rode heavy against her hip, packed with all she had left of home. She did not think about that. She thought about the kettle.
It had gone quiet again, but its handle still quivered with the memory of heat. The hearthstones around it were blackened in a perfect ring, and beyond that ring the floor was scrubbed pale as bone. Someone had cleaned this hearth for years. Someone had scrubbed it today, very recently, in fact, for the flagstones still wore a faint sheen of moisture.
She crossed to the long counter where Mrs. Hauton was polishing a tankard with a rag. The older woman did not look up.
"Madam."
"The room is four coppers a night, with breakfast. Two if you skip the breakfast and do not complain about the lumpy mattress."
"That seems reasonable."
"It seems robbery to most." Mrs. Hauton's eyes lifted, sharp and assessing. "Four coppers is what keeps the roof from caving in. Two coppers is what I charge my neighbours because I am soft, and I resent my own softness daily."
Wren fished in her coin purse and counted out the coins. Four. She laid them on the counter. Mrs. Hauton swept them into a drawer without counting, which told Wren she had known the sum before the money was offered. The drawer rattled shut.
"Second floor, third door on the left. Mind the loose board outside the privy."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Pay me again tomorrow, then we shall see about the thanking."
Wren hesitated. The common room was busy enough. Farmers from the lower pastures crowded three tables, their boots leaving prints of dried mud on the floorboards. Two women in market finery sat near the cold hearth, whispering behind gloved hands. And at a corner table by the rain-streaked window, a man sat alone with a leather ledger and a face like a clenched fist.
He was broad and round and red in the cheek, with muttonchop whiskers that would have been the pride of any dandy unfortunate enough to grow them. His waistcoat strained at its middle button. A brass pin in his cravat bore a crest she did not recognise: a balance weighed down by an iron pot. He had not looked up when she entered, which told her he had looked up and decided she was not worth his notice. Now he was looking up, and she wished he were not.
"Mrs. Hauton," he called, in a voice like a saw dragged across slate, "a word, if you please."
Mrs. Hauton's polishing did not pause. "I am spoken to a guest, Barnaby."
"This is important."
"Your importance is not my emergency."
The man's neck reddened above his collar. He set down his quill with a deliberation that suggested he wished it were a hammer. "Madam, I have been patient. I have been reasonable. I have waited seventeen days for an audience with you regarding certain, ah, certain irregularities in your accounts, irregularities that I am contractually obliged to report to my superiors at the Ironpot Trading Company, which irregularities may or may not involve the disappearance of certain goods that may or may not have passed through your cellar without the appropriate, ah, the appropriate fiscal acknowledgement, and I am afraid, Mrs. Hauton, I am very much afraid that my patience, such as it is, and it is considerable, considerable, has reached its terminus."
Mrs. Hauton set down the tankard and the rag. She folded her hands.
"Barnaby Muckleby," she said, "you have been making that speech in your head for seventeen days, and it has not improved with rehearsal. If you wish to accuse me of smuggling, you will need a witness and a magistrate. You are only one of those. I suggest you find the other before the weather turns, for the marsh road will be impassable by Friday."
Barnaby Muckleby's mouth worked like a fish on a hook. Then, with the slow, agonised dignity of a man who has rehearsed his exit and intends to have it, he rose, tucked his ledger beneath his arm, and swept his gaze across the room. It fell upon Wren.
She felt it like a hand on her collar.
"And who," he said, "is this strapping young person in my jurisdiction?"
Mrs. Hauton did not answer. Wren did not answer. The two market women did not answer, though their whispering stopped and their teacups lowered an inch.
Muckleby crossed the room. His boots were heavy, his stride purposeful, and the farmers' table parted to let him through like water around a thrown stone. He stopped before Wren and looked her over, top to toe and back again, his muttonchops bristling with the intensity of his appraisal.
"Name," he said.
"Wren Greenberry."
"Greenberry." He rolled the word as though tasting it. "Of the Greenberry innkeeping dynasty of, ah, of wherever I am about to accuse you of being from, I presume?"
"Of Crowfield. The Anchor and Spoon."
"Ah!" He raised a finger as though she had confirmed something. "Crowfield. Lovely village. Do you know, Mrs. Hauton, that the Greenberry family of Crowfield has been associated with, ah, with certain irregularities of its own? The Anchor and Spoon has appeared on three separate manifests of the Ironpot Trading Company as a, ah, a waystation for goods whose origins are best left, ah, best left unexamined?"
"Barnaby," said Mrs. Hauton, "you are embarrassing yourself."
"I am exercising my authority, which is not the same thing, and which I shall continue to exercise until someone pays me the courtesy of taking me seriously, which no one in this miserable village has done in twenty-three years of, ah, of dedicated and thankless service."
He turned back to Wren. Up close, she could smell the ink on his fingers and the camphor on his waistcoat. His muttonchops, she noticed, were dyed. The ginger was too uniform, and a faint line of darker stubble showed where the colour met his jaw.
"You are here, Miss Greenberry, on what business?"
"I am here to see my grandmother."
His eyes narrowed. "Your grandmother."
"Mrs. Hauton's cousin. Twice removed."
"Is she, by god." Muckleby's gaze flicked to Mrs. Hauton, who had resumed polishing the tankard with the air of a woman who had never heard the name Greenberry in her life. "And what does this, ah, this grandmother business entail? Visiting? Letter-writing? Inheritance, perhaps?"
"Mending a quarrel," said Wren. "That is all."
"A quarrel." Muckleby's voice sank to a theatrical whisper. He glanced about the room, as though ensuring the rafters themselves were listening. "A quarrel. Now, in my experience, and I have considerable experience, quarrels between family members are seldom, ah, seldom what they seem. Beneath the surface of every family quarrel there lies a, ah, a deposit of unexamined feeling. Or unexamined property. One or the other. And where there is unexamined property, there is, ah, there is the interest of the Ironpot Trading Company, which interest I am contractually, ah, contractually bound to protect."
He drew himself up. The button on his waistcoat gave a tiny, agonised groan.
"Miss Greenberry. As magistrate of this village, and part-time debt collector for the Ironpot Trading Company, I require you to state, here and now, in front of these good people, the precise nature of this quarrel, the parties involved, the property in dispute, and the, ah, the expected duration of your visit."
Behind him, the kettle on the hearth had begun to quiver. Wren watched its lid begin to lift, a thin curl of steam hissing out like a held breath.
"I beg your pardon, Mister Muckleby," she said, "but I was under the impression that you had been barred from this establishment not twenty minutes past."
Muckleby's ears went the colour of beetroot. The farmers at their table stopped chewing. One of them nudged his neighbour. Mrs. Hauton's polishing hand paused for the first time, though she did not turn around.
"That," said Muckleby, in a voice so tight it squeaked, "is a private matter between myself and the, ah, the proprietress, and does not, does not, I say, extend to her guests, who are under the, ah, the protection of the law, which law I represent, which law I embody, which law I have spent twenty-three years upholding through, ah, through thick and thin and considerable personal cost, and which law I shall continue to uphold until I am, ah, until I am removed from office, which no one has the, ah, the authority to do, least of all a woman with a polishing rag and a, ah, a grudge."
The kettle whistled.
Not a polite whistle. A shriek, the lid rattling against its spout in a frenzy of steam. Muckleby flinched. The farmers flinched. The market women clutched their chests. Mrs. Hauton set down the tankard with a calm that suggested she had been waiting for it.
"She does that," said Mrs. Hauton. "Do not mind her."
"She?" said Muckleby, in a very small voice.
"The kettle. She has opinions about guests who overstay. Take it as you will."
Muckleby's mouth opened. No sound came out. He looked at the kettle, which had subsided into a sulky hiss. He looked at Mrs. Hauton, whose back was turned. He looked at Wren, who was trying very hard not to smile and not entirely succeeding. Then he tucked his ledger beneath his arm, gathered the tattered remnants of his dignity, and walked out into the rain without another word. The door swung shut behind him.
The common room exhaled.
One of the farmers raised his mug. "To the kettle," he said.
"To the kettle," said his neighbour.
Wren's shoulders loosened a finger's width. Mrs. Hauton resumed her polishing. From somewhere beyond the wainscot, a low, sardonic purr rose and fell, twice, as if in applause.
The kitchen door creaked open on its iron hinges, and a reek of brine rolled into the common room like fog off the harbour.
Wren's nose wrinkled before her mind caught up. Salt. Cod, probably, and something older beneath it, kelp and tar and the green rot of nets left too long in bilge water. The smell belonged to a quayside, not a country inn five miles inland.
"Mrs. Hauton," she said, already on her feet, "is your pantry meant to smell of the sea?"
Mrs. Hauton turned from the bar. Her polishing cloth slowed. Her nostrils flared once, the way a deer's ears turn.
"No," she said. "It is not."
She set down the cloth with the precise care of a woman laying a weapon on a table. Wren followed her through the kitchen door, and the smell thickened until it coated the back of her throat.
The pantry stood at the far wall behind the bread oven, a shallow closet with a warped door and a single shelf that, in Wren's memory, had held a crock of lard, a jar of dried sage, and a paper twist of cloves left over from last winter's wassail. It had been enchanted by her grandmother's grandmother, or so the family story went, a small working tied to the hearthstones so that the shelf never emptied of staples. Flour, salt, dried peas, oatmeal. The pantry took care of itself, had taken care of itself since before Wren's mother was born.
The shelf was heaped with fish.
Silver bodies, heads still attached, eyes filmed over with the grey haze of death. Mackerel and whiting and something flat and dark that might have been a plaice. They lay in a glistening pile that shifted and sighed, as if the fish were still breathing, still dreaming of the deep water they had come from.
"Oh," said Wren, softly.
Mrs. Hauton said nothing. She stood very still, her hands folded at her waist, her face gone the colour of tallow.
"The pantry," she said at last, "has gone mad."
Wren stepped closer. The fish were cold. Not the cold of a cellar, but the cold of tide pools in March, a cold that prickled the skin and left salt crystals behind. She crouched, bringing her face near the shelf, and inhaled. Beneath the brine she caught something else. A metallic thread, sharp and bright, like the taste of blood on the tongue.
Magic. Old magic. The kind that left a taste rather than a scent.
"The enchantment is still working," Wren said. "Just. Wrong."
"Wrong how?" Mrs. Hauton's voice was tight.
"It's pulling from somewhere. A source. The pantry thinks it's restocking, but it's reaching past the flour barrel and finding fish instead. Fish and whatever is tangled up with them."
Wren reached out and touched the nearest mackerel. Its scales were slick under her fingertips. A shudder ran up her arm, not unpleasant, but vast, the way a child's shiver runs through a whole house. She pulled her hand back.
"My grandmother," she said, carefully, "set this pantry. Or her grandmother did. I don't know the words. No one in the family does anymore. We just, we always had flour."
Mrs. Hauton did not look at her. She was looking at the fish, her lips pressed into a bloodless line.
"Old Tam might know," Wren said. "He remembers the old workings."
"Old Tam remembers everything," Mrs. Hauton said. "That is rather the problem."
Wren rose from her crouch. Her knees ached. The kitchen was dim, lit only by the guttering remains of the fire and a single tallow candle on the chopping block. Bess the cat sat on the windowsill, her green eyes fixed on the pantry door, her tail curled tight around her paws. She had not moved since they entered. She had not, Wren noticed, made a sound.
"Tell me what you need," Wren said.
Mrs. Hauton finally turned. The candlelight caught the lines of her face, the deep brackets around her mouth, the silver at her temples. She looked older than she had ten minutes ago.
"You want something," she said. It was not a question.
"I want a bed. The public house is full of Muckleby's men, and I have no coin for the Lion, and the Lion's ostler is a cousin of his and would sell my whereabouts for a tankard of small beer. I want a roof. I want a meal that is not, ah, not a sandwich eaten behind a hedge."
Mrs. Hauton's mouth twitched. Almost, not quite, a smile.
"And?"
"And I want to know about my grandmother. Greenberry, her name was. She worked here. Thirty years ago, maybe more. She left before my mother was old enough to remember her face, and no one in my family will say why. Old Tam might. You might. Someone in this village knows what she was, and what she did, and why she ran from it."
The kitchen clock ticked. A log shifted in the grate and sent up a shower of sparks. Outside, the rain had thinned to a grey whisper against the window.
Mrs. Hauton studied her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the way a woman nods when she has weighed a thing and found it, if not satisfactory, at least acceptable.
"You may have the room at the top of the stairs. The one with the sloping ceiling. The sheets are clean. The bed is narrow, but you are narrow, so that will suit. You will take your meals in the kitchen. You will help with the serving when the common room fills. And you will keep your questions about your grandmother to Old Tam. I have nothing to tell you. I was not here then. I am here now, and what I need now is for my pantry to stop producing fish."
"Agreed," said Wren.
"Agreed," said Mrs. Hauton. "Then let us begin."
Wren fetched Old Tam from his stool by the hearth. He came without protest, his feet in their list slippers shuffling across the flags, his hands folded over the head of his ash stick. He paused at the pantry door. He did not open it. He simply stood, head tilted, nostrils wide, breathing in.
"Salt and steam," he said, after a while.
"Yes," said Wren.
"And iron. And grief."
"Yes."
Old Tam opened the door.
The fish had multiplied. Where before there had been a heap of silver, now the shelf sagged under a cascade. Mackerel, whiting, sprats, a conger eel as thick as Wren's forearm, its head lolling, its eye like a black coin. The smell was stronger, too, a wall of brine that made Wren's eyes water.
Old Tam reached out and laid his palm flat on the shelf. He closed his eyes. His lips moved, though no sound came out.
"The working is intact," he said. "But the source has shifted. The pantry is drawing from a different well now. A deeper one. A salt one."
"Where?" said Mrs. Hauton.
"The harbour. The old harbour, the one they filled in when the new quay was built. There are workings under the water there. Old workings. Your grandmother's grandmother did not set this pantry alone, Mrs. Hauton. She tied it to something already there, something that had been in the ground since the kings of the first dynasty fished these waters. She used it because it was convenient. Because it was strong. Because she did not have to feed it."
"Feed it what?" said Wren.
"Meat," said Old Tam. "Blood. Salt. The old gods of the deep require sacrifice. Your ancestress gave them flour and thought they would not notice the difference."
The eel's tail twitched.
"They have noticed," said Old Tam. "They have noticed for some time, I think. And now they want what they are owed."
Mrs. Hauton's hand found the doorframe. She gripped it until her knuckles went white.
"Can it be undone?" she said.
"Anything can be undone," said Old Tam. "The question is always what it costs."
He turned to Wren. His eyes, in the guttering light, were the pale blue of a winter sky, and just as cold.
"You," he said. "You have the healer's touch. I felt it when you bandaged that boy's foot. You have the gift, and you have the lineage. If you want to know what your grandmother was, child, you will have to undo what she did. Or try to. The pantry will not stop until someone speaks to the deep water in the old tongue, and I no longer have the breath for that kind of work."
"What tongue?" said Wren.
"The tongue your grandmother spoke. The tongue she took with her when she left. You will have to find it, or find her, or find someone who remembers it."
Wren looked at the fish. The eel's black eye stared back at her, flat and pitiless. Bess, on the windowsill, finally spoke. A single, low meow, rough as a file on wood.
"She agrees," he said. "That is high praise from Bess. She does not give it often."
"What do I do?" said Wren.
"You go to the old harbour," he said. "You find the place where the spring comes up through the stones. You take a bowl of clean water from the kitchen, and a piece of bread, and a silver coin, and you go down at dusk, when the tide is out, and you call to the thing that lives there. You call it by the name your grandmother gave it. If you do not know the name, you describe it. The deep ones are vain. They will answer to a compliment."
"And if I do not come back?"
"Then the pantry will keep producing fish until the inn sinks under the weight of them, and Mrs. Hauton will have to explain to the magistrate why her larder smells of low tide."
Mrs. Hauton made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"I will go," said Wren.
Old Tam nodded. He reached into his pocket and produced a small fold of paper, yellowed and soft with age. He pressed it into her hand.
"Your grandmother left this," he said. "Tucked into the chimney of the room you will sleep in. I found it when I swept the flue last autumn. I have been waiting for someone to give it to."
Wren unfolded the paper. The ink had faded to brown. She could make out only a few words, in a hand she did not recognise.
The name. The first word of a name, anyway. A word that began with a capital M and ended in a sound like water closing over a head.
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket.
"Get some sleep," said Old Tam. "The harbour will keep until dusk."
He shuffled out. Bess dropped from the windowsill and followed him, her tail high, her whiskers bristling with the look of a cat who has important business elsewhere.
Wren climbed the stairs to the room at the top. The sheets were clean, as promised, and smelled of lavender and soap. The ceiling sloped so steeply over the bed that she had to duck to look out the window. Through the rain-blurred glass she could see the slope of the hill behind the inn, and beyond it, the grey smear of the coast.
She lay down. She did not expect to sleep. She slept at once, and dreamed of silver fish rising through dark water, and of a woman with her own face standing on a quay that was not there anymore, calling a name into the salt.