Page 125 of The Salt King

Avelyn climbed onto the rocks. When he put his hands down onto them, the salt leached all the moisture from his hands, and he had to sit and rub them until they felt normal again. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just came for a witch stone.”

“Dangerous,” the man remarked, not looking away from him.

“I know, but I’m all right in salt light.”

For some reason, the man laughed. It wasn’t humour exactly. It was the kind of laugh Avelyn’s uncles did when his English teacher said he was “a little bit tricky” when he didn’t see the point of learning something.

Avelyn looked him over, but he didn’t seem ill or hurt. That was a good start. With any luck, he wasn’t mad either. Maybe, if Avelyn was careful, he could gentle him back up to the surface. He picked up a flat pebble and skimmed it, then scrunched his nose when he only managed two skips. He gave the man another one. The man smiled—it was a very sane smile—and got four. Avelyn made a disgusted noise that echoed; and when the man laughed, that echoed too, beautifully, a whole choir laughing.

Very gently, the man took his hand and guided his arm to show him the angle he needed. His own hand was cool and steady, stronger than Avelyn’s, but he only just grazed him with his fingertips. Avelyn flickered a glance up at him and felt a sudden sharp despair, because no one was going to be this careful with him again. He was going to be married to Lady Hringen, and from the way Hagan and Hengest talked about being married, it sounded more like a perfunctory medical process than anything remotely like this.

When the man guided his hand close to his chest and then straightened his arm, he tried to hold the feeling close so that he could take it out later, when he would need it.

He tried again that way: four. The man mimed clapping so the noise wouldn’t deafen them both. Avelyn did a little bow, sad and happy at the same time.

It was so strange, but later, he couldn’t have said what the man looked like. What he felt like, though, was vivid. He felt like waking up on the day the Yule festival began, knowing they were going to light the fires soon, and the bards would sing and the witches would dance, and there would be games and his uncles would secretly get drunk and make him swear not to tell his grandmother.

“Do you not get bored down here?” Avelyn asked him.

Bored down here, down here, here, here, said the echoes, sounding very young. Did he really sound like that?

The man gave it some thought. He was taller than Avelyn, but he was sitting tilted forward like a swan to listen to him. “No.”

“What do you do all day?”

Do you do, do you do, do . . .

The man studied him, and Avelyn thought he was going to say what everyone said, which was, You ask a lot of questions, don’t you, in the way that meant You’re exhausting. He looked away, down at the brandy-coloured water. Usually he liked it when he could provoke people to that point—it was a point of pride that if Hagan and Hengest truly hated someone, they sent Avelyn round for dinner—but the idea of annoying this strange man just made him feel ashamed. This place was so still, and so peaceful. Why did he have to ruin it? He always did.

“Why do you want to be a witch?”

“Because . . .” If five people asked him the same question, he always gave five different answers, because words were like keys and people were locks, and you just had to find the right keys to make people do what you wanted. But this man wasn’t a lock. “I’ve got a pretty good mind, and I want to see how well it can run. I know that makes me sound like a prick.” He paused. “But if I don’t let it run . . . it’s going to start dying. My family, they want me to go and be Lord Hringen, which is lucky, I know, and I’m grateful, but it’s still too small. Everything is too small, because everywhere is full of other people, and they all need me to not run, they need me to sit still, and be small. There isn’t enough space to run or even to stand, and eventually . . . it will make me small.” He lifted his eyes. “Witches don’t have to be small. They can come here, where there’s no one, and run.”

The man smiled. “That’s a good answer.”

Avelyn smiled too, pleased and embarrassed. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “Why do you like it so much down here?”

Down here, down here.

The man pointed upwards. He meant the echo. “That. If you sing to it, it sings to you too.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Avelyn, because he was used to his uncles teasing him. “It’s just the echo.”

Echo, echo, echo.

The man let that fade away, then smiled too and sang a few words in another language to the cool air. He could sing like no one Avelyn had heard before; it made the bards sound hollow. He could draw power up from somewhere much deeper than they did. Avelyn went still, hypnotised.

The echo sang back, and when it did, the man gave Avelyn a playful look and sang back to it again, over it, layering into his own voice until there was a harmony. While the second echo began, the first was still singing, and he did it again, and then again, until there was a choir singing around the brandy-coloured pool, voices weaving in and out and striking chords together, to a rhythm like nothing in Hreod, and behind it all somewhere . . . there were impossible drums, and far more voices than there should have been, and in the salt light, ghosts of dancers.

When the man held his hand out, Avelyn took it, because it would have been a kind of blasphemy not to dance. The ghost dancers spun around them, and the man spun him, catching him when it was too fast and he was too dizzy. It made them both laugh. Other hands and other boots, not real, crashed that bones-of-the-earth beat until he could feel it through the ground. It was full of joy, like a reel, but there was something in it that was the same as the hymns for the King; sacred.

Magic.

Avelyn had known that given the right salt light, witches could do magic. He knew the story about the witch in the time of the mammoth when the Bone People had stolen Hreod children, and she had tricked them into believing that they were only ravens dreaming of being people . . . and so they were. He knew that uncontrolled magic was why catching sight of something frightening in the mine made it real. But he had never known there could be anything like this.

It faded at last, and when it did, the dance had turned him so that he bumped back against the man’s chest. The man bent forward over him like a question mark, so that Avelyn could feel him still laughing through the muscles across his belly, fitted just against the small of his back. It was such a good feeling. Avelyn let himself go still and looked back.

“Come up to the surface for a little while? You could always come back again, if you don’t like it.”