Free When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen Page A

tell. They mutter into their tea or scribble furiously on parchments spread out and pinned down with elbows and upturned bowls.
    All of them have the same disheveled look, hair awry and clothes wrinkled, skin pale and waxy, eyes fever bright. So familiar—every House in Pelimburg has one in its employ, to write their praises, or to double as history and language tutors.
    Crakes.
    Dear Gris, if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a bad poet. And the crakes, the poets of Pelimburg, are seldom anything but. Our own House crake taught me to read and write, read to me the basics of magical control from an ancient textbook, and instilled in me a healthy dislike of anything remotely resembling verse.
    Thank Gris the old goat wouldn’t be caught dead in an Old Town teahouse like this. These must be the truly awful poets if they’re gathering here. I take a moment to contemplate the enormousness of that thought.
    Nala hears my little moan of distress. “I know,” she says. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” She pulls me up to the door. “Still, even the talentless must have tea, and where better to come for it than here. Besides,” she says as she shoves me ahead of her into the shop, “we like to think it’s the only place where you can have your crake and eat it too.”
    Mad. Obviously mad. I eye her for some sign that a boggert has been feeding off her. She’s pale … Do they drink blood like the bats do? I’ve never stopped to wonder what the stories meant by “draining the living.”
    Nala leads me through the cramped interior to where a woman is tending a huge copper urn above a fire. The woman twists the spout and measures loose-leaf tea into an assortment of mismatched pots, muttering under her breath as she fills the orders written on a chalkboard behind her.
    She holds up one finger as Nala and I approach. “Not now,” she says, and carries on muttering. “Redbush, a pinch of sweet aloe; blackbark nut, honeybush, plain; honeybush, pinch poisonink—oh Gris, as if that’s going to help stir the imagination…” When she’s caught up with the round of orders, and a quick-fingered low-Lammer youth has rushed off carrying the tray of pots and bowls above his head, she turns to us. “What’s this, then, Nala, love?”
    “Dash had word you needed a bowl-girl in the kitchens.” Nala presses one hand gently against my spine, forcing me forward. “And so I’ve brought you one.”
    The woman stares at me for a moment and frowns. Before she can turn us away, Nala says, “She’s not a kitty-girl, just has the bad taste to look like one.”
    “Bad taste, maybe. Don’t think I’ll take her just on your say-so, Nala. It’s been a long time since you worked here,” says the woman, and grabs my hands suddenly in hers. “You’re a soft sort of thing under all those scratches. Think you can wash bowls till your hands turn raw?” Her own hands are thin, papery, the joints rounded with arthritis.
    “I—yes.” I nod. It’s got to be a better option than working at the fish markets or, indeed, going on the game.
    She lets go of my hands. “I’ll start you off on a trial day. You work hard, no complaints, and you’re hired.”
    The boy shouts an order across the counter to her, and she writes it down in a seamless scribble as he does. “Nala, you show her the scullery and get her started,” she says, and with that, I am dismissed, and her attention is once again engulfed in tea making.
    I wash dishes for seven hours. Never in my life have I even rinsed out a cup and here I am, elbow deep in sudsy lukewarm water, scrubbing out teabowl after teabowl.
    My eyes sting. My hands smart. I wipe away burning tears with my sleeve. My gut wrenches, and I’m pale and shaky. Sweat films my body.
    Would it have been so bad to stay home and marry whoever my brother told me to? There would be books to read, and tea and fresh-baked sugar biscuits, still warm from the oven. My clothes would be laundered and