“Ma, you can’t come with us,” Donny said, but it was more pleading than authoritative. “It’ll be a long journey, and you’re already unwell—”
“That’s myson, walkin’ into an ambush,” she growled. “And I’ve got quite a lot to say to your father, heaven forbid he’s breathin’ when we get there.”
Donny frowned. “Ma?”
But she was gone, her feet already pounding down the stairwell, fading into the floors below.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOURPATRICK
Nina led them to a grubby drinking hole with few patrons beyond the windows. He guessed there wasn’t much coin to spare for a pint of late. Colson & Sons had been the same in the winter before the rebellion. Tess had given people a cup of tea and a stool anyway. They stayed for hours and played cards and didn’t buy a single drink. Sometimes it was just the warmth and company they needed.
Something told Patrick this bar wouldn’t be as hospitable.
John procured some coins from his pockets and flashed them before Patrick’s and Nina’s eyes, likely pinched from some sorry Artisan’s pocket in Lavnonshire. He gave them a wink and disappeared inside the pub, only to give Patrick a nod through the window several moments later.
With their hats pulled low and noses down, they followed John inside. No music, no fire in the hearth. Just a handful of men at the bar. One other playing checkers alone by the window. The air was so full of tobacco smoke, he could hardly see their faces.
Up the rickety stairs they went, and into the first pair of rooms they came to. John gave a key to Nina, then used another on one of the doors, holding it ajar for Patrick to follow.
Patrick found himself shaking his head. “I’ll be a moment.”
John sighed knowingly, then shut the door.
Nina seemed in a trance. She tried the lock three times with no success. He had to take the key from her. “Here,” he said. “Let me.”
He let her into the room and watched as she drifted inside, her fingers already pulling at the men’s cap she wore, letting her hair out. She pulled off her coat and left it on the skinny bed, its mattress sunken in the middle, the coverings on top wrinkled.
She said nothing, did nothing more. Just stared at the coat as though she couldn’t recall whose it was.
Patrick stood at the threshold, feeling horribly unsure of himself. The cogs of his mind clanked an assault. No fix in sight. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed so audibly he thought the building sighed with him.
He had watched Nina retreat into herself incrementally from the moment she stepped off the boat, disappearing into realms of memory. Now, beneath this roof, she resembled someone much smaller than he knew her to be.
At twelve, she’d come into that courtyard ten feet fall and stolen all his bravado. In Kenton Hill, she’d come down that tunnel spitting fire at him. But somewhere between the clutter of her childhood home and this hovel of a pub, she had faded into the gray of Scurry.
A voice told Patrick to take her away from this town, to shut her eyes and not let her open them again until they were long gone. He wanted to return her to Kenton Hill and walk her among the yellow hills and show her that there were still parts of the world not all bad.
He was swelling with premonition. An omen.
“Is there something I can bring you?” he asked, almost desperate for it.
She looked up, as though just now realizing that he stood there. She shook her head. “No. No, I’m all right,” she said in a voice that barely held, each word breaking away from the last. “Really, Patrick.”
She dusted her hands together as though concluding some sort of business, nodded in a perfunctory way at the wall, then went to the waitingbasin bowl on the credenza, half filled. She took the pins out of her hair, one by one, her lovely face growing wetter with each.
There was something strange that happened to Patrick when Nina cried. Like God had grown tired of giving him chances and was demanding his toll.
How else to describe the rupture of his heart?
Or perhaps it was just evidence that she’d changed him irreparably. Made him a man possessed of something more than anger.
He went to her and took the towel from her hands. He turned her by her shoulders and gathered her in his arms until he felt her bones against his. He tried to absorb from her the pain.
There was no fix for this, but he thought he could ease something in them both, with her head beneath his chin, his fingers against her lower back. He pushed his brow into the crown of her head. Breathed in the scent of her for a moment.
He felt her cling to him. Shake.
“Just breathe, Scurry girl,” he said.
