Free When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen

lightning.
    The wind whips her carrot tangles about her face, but she seems to barely notice. She’s skipped a few lengths ahead while I try my best to keep up, cursing my toe-pinching boots and my stubbornness and Jaxon all the way.
    “So what’s your name, little kitty-kitty?” she calls back at me, hollering through her funneled hands.
    I wait till I’ve caught up before I answer. “Firell,” I pant. It’s a common name and close enough to my own that I hopefully won’t stumble over it too often.
    “So you say you don’t work the street corners?”
    I nod.
    “Quiet type?”
    Nod.
    “There anything you good at?”
    A shrug this time. I’m good with oil paints and I have an excellent reading voice, but somehow, I don’t think these are appropriate skills for a low-Lammer. I can also make the air do what I want, mostly. If I have scriv. Definitely not appropriate for a low-Lammer. Low-Lammers are weak points in our lineage. They are the non-magical masses, the families of all the mundane and useless progeny that we forced from the Houses. We can’t have their blood tainting ours, thinning our magic.
    “Well if you’re able to stand ten hours and scrub teabowls, there’s an opening at the Crake.”
    Whatever—I don’t even know what or where she’s talking about, so I nod.
    “The Crake it is then.” She twirls on her toes, hair spinning about her. The layers of thin skirts and thinner petticoats are a whirling flurry about her skinny thighs. I wonder if she’s insane, boggert-touched. Boggerts are ghosts who don’t know they’re dead. They come into your house in the night, feed off the living, try to be part of our world again. Of course, it’s just a story. Doesn’t stop one from wondering though—especially when someone is flighty and fey and barely there—if the boggerts have been feeding off her. Boggerts are like the look-fars’ horns: warnings of worse to come. Things follow them out of the deep.
    That’s what the Hobs say, that boggerts draw out the things that should stay lost in the ocean trenches. First comes the witch-sign, then the ghosts who want to live, and finally, awake and hungry, the sea-witch. It’s the same thing Lilya was talking about back in the squat. I suppose out here in the city I’ll be forced to hear more of the Hobs’ superstitious prattle. I sigh and trot as fast as my aching feet will allow me, following Nala down the narrow lanes that serpentine through Old Town.
    The Crake turns out to be a tea shop. It’s a corner building full of awkward angles, mismatched windows, and little stone gargoyles. The unifying theme of architectural style appears to be Ugly. Someone, in an attempt to disguise this, has painted the walls yellow and put yellow-and-white-striped awnings over the wide pavement. It doesn’t help.
    A wooden sign bangs in the rising wind: THE TWICE-DROWNED CRAKE . Under the faded gold lettering is a picture of a little speckled bird paddling in a teabowl.
    Funny thing, to name a tea shop after the poet whom the infamous Mallen Gris tried to have drowned on several occasions. Gris only finally managed to kill Esker Davyt when he forced him to drink a bowl of poisoned tea. The story goes that the poet wrote a scathing epic prose poem that exposed all the secret histories of House Mallen and that in revenge Mallen Gris had him silenced.
    The truth is that Gris murdered him because he was a dreadfully bad poet and an embarrassment to all of Pelimburg. It’s said that Mallen Gris had the unfortunate poet’s body ground into patties and fed to a party of Davyt’s fellow crakes. Gris apparently held up a forkful of meat before the stunned guests and called it “the finest contribution Esker Davyt made to the world of verse.” Sounds like something the madman would do.
    A motley collection of tables and chairs covers the sidewalk outside the Crake’s entrance, and every available space is filled with morose men: some young, some old, some hard to