Page 123 of The Salt King

45

Hreodwater, England

Twelve years ago

His grandmother had looked down at him for a long time, and then at the witch.

“He could be a bad miner,” the witch said to her, meeting her eyes steady, even though almost nobody could do that. “Or he could be a great witch.”

His grandmother sighed. She didn’t try to argue that he would be any good as a miner. They were past that. “You could die, Avelyn. Once you’re down there and that door is sealed . . . nobody is going to open it to save you if you don’t come back. Something terrible could be tearing your ribs out of your chest right on the other side, and still no one is going to open it. Is this what you want?”

“Yes, Lady Brocken,” he said, all ranweth.

“If you don’t allow him to be apprenticed here,” the witch said, “I recommend you give him to the witches of Rome. Get him away from salt light before he does something even more dangerous with it.”

“I haven’t done anything dangerous—” Avelyn began.

The witch pushed the back of his head. “You turned Gwen into a—”

“Only for half a second—”

“I would suggest,” his grandmother said drily, “that that was half a second too long.”

He twisted his nose and tried to look penitent, even though he personally felt that Gwen-as-show-pig had been much improved.

“He’s supposed to be Lord Hringen in two months,” his grandmother said to the witch. “The negotiations took all year. It was hard enough to convince Lady Hringen that unleashing him on her clan won’t be like putting a vixen in a hen house. Have you any idea how difficult it will be to get her to agree to marrying a witch?”

“I would say,” the witch said, taking that much more gracefully than Avelyn would have, “that being married to a trained witch is much better than being married to an untrained one.”

They both looked down at Avelyn.

“Did you do it on purpose?” his grandmother said slowly.

“My lady?” he asked, pouring effort into sounding as though he wasn’t sure what she was asking. Of course it hadn’t occurred to him that witches stayed witches even once they were married, and they were allowed to come and go as they liked. Even earn their own money. Go on journeys alone: even in the Outside. Of course he was a dutiful boy who wanted to devote his whole life to Lady Hringen. What?

She seemed to dismiss it, like he’d known she would. “Go, then. Though if my grandson dies,” she said to the witch, in the same mild tone, “I will gut you and feed you to my daughters’ foxes.”

It was a bright winter in the King’s Way, and the salt light was lunar on the day the witch finally took Avelyn to light-walk. Below the working shafts of all three of the mining clans’ ways, there were more tunnels; sealed off from the pit faces above with silver and vault locks. In the old days, even touching one meant the death penalty, or at least the bards claimed so. Avelyn doubted that was true. The silver doors stopped people getting through, but if the King was restless, the salt light came straight through the walls, so it wasn’t as though the tunnel on the other side would be instantly more dangerous than the one on this side. They were an arbitrary border, just placed, he suspected, more or less where the salt light might be dangerous on a bright day.

He was still fizzy at the idea of seeing beyond one, though.

The witch was his father, though that didn’t give them anything to talk about. Fathers in Hreodwater were like two-doors-down neighbours elsewhere; you sometimes knew them to nod to, but it was your mother’s brothers you went to for teaching and help and being embarrassed in front of your friends. Which was why it was odd that the man kept looking at him as if he were worried as they walked down to the witches’ tunnels.

“What?” said Avelyn, who had no patience for being looked at by strange men.

“You know half the people who go down there never come home,” the witch said quietly. It was impossible to know what witches were thinking, because they never took off the masks, but there was something like pain in his eyes. “You’re not doing this just because you don’t want to back down?”

Avelyn shook his head once. “I’m brighter than half the people I know, so. Odds are good.”

“Perhaps not. You’re too sharp for your own good.”

“Whenever people say that,” said Avelyn, amused, “it really means I’m too sharp for them.”

The witch shook his head once, a look that every single teacher Avelyn had ever had and would ever have aimed at him too. He didn’t say anything else and let his neck bend slightly, as though the weight of the mask was hurting him. Avelyn frowned and looked him over again, on the edge of telling him to get a grip. The man was his father, not his uncle. Avelyn was nobody to him. What was the matter with him? Or maybe he was just one of those people who got upset when somebody killed a spider. Probably.

Up ahead, the way narrowed. And there it was. The silver door.

“Down there is a pool the colour of brandy,” the witch told him. “Around the pool are pebbles like moonstones. Those are witch stones. You bring one back, and you give it to me . . . and I will give you a mask. Do you understand?”