Chapter 6

Genevieve

I didn't fall. I want credit for that. I felt myself start to go, and I reached out on pure instinct for the nearest stable thing, which happened to be the back of the chair directly to my right.

The chair belonged to the elf merchant. Rorik's best customer. Six years of nightly patronage. More silver per visit than most people earned in a week. Impeccably dressed, currently leaning forward over his accounts, a plate of roasted fowl and root vegetables steaming beside his mug.

I grabbed the chairback to steady myself.

The wood splintered in my hand like dry kindling.

Not cracked. Not bent. Splintered — one entire vertical support shearing clean off in my grip with a sound like a small tree snapping. The chair folded backward with the decisive commitment of furniture that had decided it was done. The merchant went with it: one moment upright, pen in hand, the next flat on his back with the chair in pieces beneath him.

He grabbed the table on his way down in a doomed attempt to save himself. The table tipped. The plate slid. The mug went over. The leather-bound ledger — opened to a page dense with calculations — sailed into the air in a graceful arc and landed directly in the spreading pool of gravy now soaking into the floorboards. The fowl landed on his chest. The ale landed on his face.

The crash took out the neighboring table as well. The couple seated there lurched backward, knocking their own bench into the wall. Broken crockery skittered across the floor. Someone near the fire yelped and pulled their feet up. A full corner of the room had gone from a profitable evening to a disaster site in approximately three seconds.

The room went silent.

I stood there, one mug still hooked against my palm, the other somehow upright on the edge of the nearest table where I'd shoved it without thinking, the sheared-off piece of chairback in my right hand where my grip had locked around it and apparently refused to let go.

I stared down at the wreckage. The merchant stared up at me from the floor, blinking ale out of his eyes, a piece of roasted carrot slowly sliding off his collar.

The cat, having successfully cornered the rat under a completely different table, looked over at us with the satisfied expression of a job well done.

Rorik appeared.

I don't know where he came from. One moment the room was frozen in the collective pause of thirty people trying to process what they'd just witnessed, and the next he was standing beside me, looking down at his best customer, at the destroyed chair, at the spreading lake of ale and gravy and broken crockery that had once been a profitable corner of his establishment.

He looked at me.

I looked at the piece of wood in my hand.

"I can explain," I said.

"Can you." His voice was very flat.

"The cat—"

"My cat," Rorik said, with the careful enunciation of a man who has just watched an entire corner of his establishment demolished by an employee who has been there four days — counting the first night she'd worked for supper — "has been here for nine years and has never broken a single chair."

I looked down at the merchant, who was now attempting to sit up, dripping, furious, making the sort of quiet controlled breathing that meant he was composing something scathing and would deliver it the moment he had wiped enough gravy off his face to see clearly.

"He grabbed the table when he fell," I tried.

"He grabbed the table," Rorik repeated, with the tone of a man who has decided that continuing this conversation will only make things worse, "because you broke his chair."

"I was trying not to fall—"

"Your apron. On the bar. Now."

I set both mugs down on the nearest intact surface — carefully, very carefully — and untied my apron. I pulled the copper coins from the pocket, because I was not leaving those behind, and laid the apron on the bar.

Rorik didn't look at me. He was already crouching beside the merchant, helping him upright, apologizing in the low professional tone of a man doing damage control on a relationship worth considerably more than my four days of wages.

I walked to the door.

Behind me, I heard the merchant say something about replacement costs and the nine-year safety record of the establishment and staff who were clearly unqualified for basic table service.

The cat, from under its table, purred.

Outside, the alley was cold and wet and completely indifferent to what had just happened. I stood on the pavement with the piece of chairback still in my hand — my grip had stayed locked around it through the whole sequence, through Rorik's dismissal, through the walk to the door, and I hadn't noticed until now. Shock had a way of freezing the hands. I stared at it for a moment, then dropped it in a rain barrel and started walking.

I didn't think about the merchant. I didn't think about the chair, or the ledger soaking in gravy, or the particular quality of Rorik's voice when he'd said nine years. I didn't think about any of it, because if I started I would have to think about the porter job three days before this, where I'd bent a load-bearing bracket carrying a crate that two grown men had struggled to lift.

And the errand work before that, where I'd snapped a door latch clean off its housing just by turning it too hard. And the cleaning shift before that, where a mop handle had simply come apart in my hands while I was wringing it out, which should not have been physically possible and yet demonstrably was.

Five jobs in four days, and a pattern that was starting to look considerably less like bad luck and more like something I was doing, though I had no coherent explanation for what or why or how to make it stop.

The rain had picked up. I turned my collar up and kept walking, not toward anything, just away from the light still spilling out of Rorik's windows onto the wet cobblestones behind me.

Rorik's establishment was three streets from Cobblestone Alley.

I'd walked past the alley twice already this week, cutting through it on the way back from the market, and both times something about the particular angle of the buildings overhead had made me slow down without quite knowing why. Tonight, with the rain in my face and nowhere specific to be, my feet simply turned that direction without waiting for instruction.

I was standing in front of the building before I'd made any conscious decision to be there.

It wasn't home. I knew that. Home was sealed behind a wall that no longer opened, in a world I couldn't get back to, and I had stopped letting myself pretend otherwise because pretending didn't help and I had too many other things to figure out.

But this building was the impossible copy of my parents' shop — the same door, the same windows, the same iron bracket above the entrance where a sign had once hung. The door handle at the exact height my father had installed ours, two inches lower than standard, because he had never seen the point of making himself reach.

I sat down on the step.

I didn't mean to. My legs simply made the decision without consulting me, and then I was sitting on cold stone in the rain with my back against a door that wasn't mine and my hands in my lap, and for a long moment I didn't do anything at all.

I pressed my hand flat against the door.

I let myself, just for a moment, feel the full weight of how much I missed them. Not the managed version I'd been carrying since I arrived here — the compressed, functional grief I'd been keeping at arm's length because there was too much else to figure out and falling apart was not something I could afford.

The real version. The one that had nothing to do with broken chairs or copper coins or the arithmetic of survival. The one that simply hurt.

My eyes did something involuntary and inconvenient. I was not crying. I was sitting in the rain outside a building that looked like my father had measured the door handle against his own hand, and my eyes were reacting to the rain, which was falling directly into my face, which was a perfectly adequate explanation I was prepared to defend to anyone who asked.

No one asked. The alley was empty and dark and entirely uninterested in my situation.

I sat there until the cold had worked its way through my coat and into my shoulders, and then I sat there a little longer, because getting up meant deciding what to do next and I wasn't ready for that yet.

The door to the bakery next door opened.

The man who stepped out was enormous — bear-shaped, bear-sized, wearing a flour-dusted apron and carrying a small tray with a covered dish and a cup of something steaming.