Saebrya

Saebrya woke to the feel of ethereal legs skittering across her arm. She opened her eyes, saw the tiny orange centipede crawling over her fingers, and muttered a curse when she remembered where she was.

That’s what she got for spending the night at Ryan’s. He was perpetually crawling with the things, and his bed was worse. She usually tried to avoid staying at the inn entirely, but after drinking herself stupid to celebrate her friend’s nineteenth birthday, she hadn’t trusted herself to walk home. Flicking the sipper away from her, she sat up.

Sunlight poured into the loft of the inn, made all the more potent by the fact that she was suffering a massive hangover from losing three games of chits to her insanely lucky friend the night before.

Stumbling to her feet, Saebrya went to the door of the bedroom and yanked it open.

The motion startled the baker’s girl in the hall, who was walking past with a bucket and a sponge. She turned with a smile. “Morning, Rya—” Upon seeing Saebrya, the girl’s eyes narrowed and her words died. “Oh.” Rudely, she glanced over Saebrya’s shoulder, into the room beyond. “He sleeping in the kitchen again?” She said the last with a sneer.

“Ain’t your business,” Saebrya said, trying to walk around her. Miysha’s girl was maybe sixteen at most, though Ryan said she’d been rolling in the hay with every boy from here to the city of Blake, about two hundred miles down the river.

“Ain’t my business?” Olea put down the bucket with surprising vehemence, slopping sudsy water onto the floor and making Saebrya back up warily. “You’re just some crazy wild girl that lives in the woods and guts fish for a living and you’ve got the richest guy in town fawning over you. What have you ever done to deserve that kind of man? You don’t even live here.”

Saebrya had to laugh uncomfortably at that. She’d never really thought of Ryan as wealthy before, because she never actually bought things in town—she handed Ryan her catch of fish every night, and Ryan brought her clothes or food or tools in exchange. Even when she took fishing bait from the butcher’s scraps bin, it was on a trade-by-trade basis. She really had no idea what anything cost, and she actually preferred it that way.

She started to step past the girl, but Olea put out her arm to stop her.

“Are you going to have his kids?” she demanded intently. “Or are you just stringing him along? He just turned nineteen. He should have three kids by now. My brother’s sixteen and he’s already got two. Mum Omstead had him at fourteen.”

“Ryan doesn’t have to have kids,” Saebrya said, though she couldn’t hide her sudden nervousness at the thought. Saebrya had never voiced her concerns to Ryan, but she was worried about what would happen if she had kids, specifically. Would they be sippers? Would they be human? Or would they be like her, trapped between the two?

Olea laughed. “He’s going to inherit an inn,” she insisted. “He’s going to need the help.”

“He can hire people,” Saebrya said, because she was sure it was true.

“What,” the girl snapped, “and you’ll just continue to live like a wild thing in the woods while he does that, keeping the only decent man in town wrapped around your little pinky while you deign to come in and fuck him on the slow days?”

“That’s not…” Saebrya stammered, not knowing how to respond. It wasn’t the first time she’d been approached about her intentions with Ryan by one of the village girls, but it was the first time it had been with such outspoken aggression. “He’s not…” She hadn’t really even thought of what Ryan intended to do with his life. In fact, she’d avoided thinking of it, because it made her nervous. Saebrya knew it was just as the girl claimed—Ryan was the town’s most eligible bachelor, and she was just the crazy girl that lived by herself out by the river—but she didn’t know what to say to ease the girl’s anger with her.

“He won’t even look at the rest of us,” the girl snarled, balling her fists. Again, the violence and venom in her words startled Saebrya. “Either marry him or let someone else have him. You’re wasting everyone’s time.” The way Olea said it, the inn was probably the most valuable building in the village. Which, considering all the merchants up and down the Idorion that stopped there on their trade routes, Saebrya assumed was probably true.

Of course, Saebrya wanted her friendship with Ryan to go further, but she could barely stomach the idea of sleeping in the same house as him, and Ryan knew that. Even then, a sipper the general shape of a spider—but more spikey and gangly, with longer, sharper legs—was dropping from the ceiling on a yellow thread of energy, mandibles still glowing silver from where it had been feeding from the old droplets that Ryan had splashed up there in the recent past.

“But if you do marry him,” the baker’s girl warned with a sneer, oblivious to the spider sipper that could have wrapped its legs around her head, “I heard my mom talking with the other help—they’re all gonna quit if you ever try to come live here. It’s bad enough having to clean the place after you visit. Who knows what kind of bugs you could be bringing with you out of the woods?”

If only you knew, Saebrya thought, watching the torso-sized, spider-like sipper draw a couple front legs across the side of the girl’s head, catching a bright red droplet from her neck under her earlobe.

“So just think about that,” Olea said, picking up her bucket again. “We’re not sharing living-space with a dead girl.”

Saebrya flinched. “What?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” The girl snorted. “The priest put you in that burned-out hut, hoping you would die. But you didn’t. Mom said you weren’t even three years old and you lived, that you had to have been living on air because there wasn’t anything else you could have been eating.” Her look was unkind. “Either that or you’re a ghost.”

Saebrya’s eyes widened. She distinctly remembered plucking sippers off the walls with her fat, chubby hands and stuffing them in her mouth out of desperation, sucking on them until they were nothing but empty husks, but she also remembered family and laughter. “What do you mean, he put me there?”

Apparently, however, that’s all Olea planned to say, because the girl hefted the bucket and turned to go.

“Wait!” Saebrya cried. “My family died in a fire.”

Olea just laughed. It was a cruel, horrible sound, and it left no question in Saebrya’s mind that her family had not, in fact, died in a fire. “Is that what they tell you,” the girl sneered. Then, without another word, she left Saebrya standing there alone in the hall.

Disturbed, Saebrya fought the sudden urge to run back to the river and the serenity she found there, leaving Ryan to catch up whenever he woke. It was what she usually did whenever the villagers made her uncomfortable, which was often. Instead, she forced herself to go down the stairs to the kitchens.

Bracing herself against the flood that she knew would come, Saebrya opened the door.

A chest-deep wave of silver ether and its accompanying vermin rushed into the hall, drenching Saebrya, the walls, and the floor under her feet, then settling at a more reasonable knee-depth as it found more rooms and exits to drain the excess. The weird mark on her chest, however, tingled at the onslaught as she waded into the room with her friend, and she tried not to look at the weird way the uppermost layer of veoh seemed to be swirling and siphoning up towards her, like an upside-down tornado aimed at her torso. She put her hand over her chest to block the flow and kept going.

The tide of silver rolling off Ryan had increased since the forest had come alive at the Auld’s cabin about six weeks before, and lately it was doubling pretty much daily. If Ryan didn’t leave windows cracked at Saebrya’s request on the days she stayed over, his veoh would fill the inn to the point it started to choke her in a matter of a few hours. It was one of the reasons he stayed on the bottom floor and she on the top.

Because the inn was full and he hated the thought of fleas from the barn, Ryan was lying in the alcove he had cleared out near the kitchen hearth, his blanket almost touching the burning coals. Miysha was off kneading bread dough in the far corner of the kitchen, and the baker gave Saebrya an unfriendly glare before turning her back to her. Saebrya, used to the hostile looks—which had increased ever since she had returned with Ryan seven weeks ago and several goodwives had begun claiming she had ‘witched’ him back—ignored Miysha and squatted beside Ryan. More of the segmented beasts had settled onto his face and arms as he slept, one of them perching half-inside his nose, plying his face with its feelers as it bobbed with Ryan’s every breath, feeding on the silver waves that rolled out of him.

Ascertaining that the baker’s back was turned, Saebrya brushed the vermin away from Ryan with a few swipes of her hand. She stomped on the ones she could catch, but the rest skittered off, parting the silver liquid with mist-like swirls as they hurried to safety. Like the amount of veoh Ryan was putting out, the sippers were multiplying, possibly even breeding.

Ryan groaned without looking at her. “They were eating me again?”

“It’s morning,” Saebrya said. “Cards day.” She was itching to get away from the inn and its profusion of sippers.

Ryan opened his eyes. Normally as deep and vibrant as the ether dripping from a healthy old cottonwood, they were now bloodshot and unfocused. He touched his temple with a big hand, splashing silver rivulets across the wall with the motion. He didn’t seem to notice that he was making more of it, but the increase was beginning to worry her.

“How much did you make me drink?” he asked, accusingly.

“Less than me,” Saebrya said. “Come on. It’s your day off and I wanna get on the river before your mom finds something for you to do.”

“I need another hour,” he said. He tugged the blanket back over his shoulder and closed his eyes again.

Saebrya waited until she heard snoring, then she kicked him.

Ryan lunged up in a startled rush, spreading silver everywhere. Saebrya brushed a line of splatter from her arm and flicked it back into the endless current that was rolling out the door.

As Ryan stared at her, his sea-green eyes beginning to focus, she yanked his blanket away and folded it, then set it on the counter behind him. “It’s cards day,” she said. “Your mom made us lunches.” She picked up the two sacks by his head, showing them to him.

Ryan rushed to cover himself, glancing over his shoulder at the baker, blushing. “I think Miysha just saw me naked.”

“Don’t care. Let’s go.”

Ryan, muttering, grabbed fresh clothes from the pile one of the girls had put beside the hearth. Saebrya turned her back as he started to change.

As she listened to him, she suddenly had an unpleasant thought and turned back. “You changed the sheets before you let me use your bed, didn’t you?”

Bent over, tugging his undergarments on, Ryan laughed. “No. Why do you ask?”

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting.”

“Sleeping with your clothes on is disgusting. You smell awful. Like you never change.” Then, suddenly, Ryan froze and stood up, his breeches not quite over his hips. He looked horrified, and his eyes dropped to her blood-spattered trousers. “You didn’t wear those dirty things in my bed, did you?”

She snorted and squished another centipede that had crawled up her side. “As if it should matter to someone who sleeps with bugs in his nose.”

Ryan looked stricken. “Saeby, you promised. You gut fish all day. And you don’t bathe.”

“I didn’t promise. I said I’d think about it.” Saebrya hated bathing. “And I can’t bathe. The river’s too cold to bathe.”

“I offer you a bath every time you come over,” Ryan said. “This place has a bath house. With a sauna. Do you even know what that is?”

She didn’t, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. Baths were cold and she hated them. She cracked her knuckles, eying the baker, who looked to be paying a little bit more attention to her and Ryan’s conversation than the old snoop should have been. “Let’s get moving. This place is crawling with sippers.” More of late, now that Ryan’s veoh was essentially turning the inn into the source of an ethereal river because the ground around it could no longer soak up the silver fast enough.

Ryan made a face. “Help me find my coat.”

She scanned the floor, not really looking. “Eww. That one’s bigger than my foot.” To accent that fact, she stomped on a sipper with a round body and dozens of long, fluttering legs that was licking the ether from her boots. “Ryan, we stay here much longer and the bigger ones are gonna find you.” She kicked the now-limp sipper’s body away, where it splashed down in one corner of the ether-filled kitchen.

He saw the motion and visibly shivered. “Okay. Let’s go.”

He threw on a shirt and rushed out the slops door, splattering the area with flashing silver ether as he did so. She heard him rattle down the steps, and heard his mother greet him in the yard outside, probably out feeding the pigs.

When the ripples from his departure faded, sippers crawled up the walls to drink of the stuff he’d left in droplets there, overwhelmed by the three feet of silver ether that had collected on the floor of the inn in Ryan’s sleep. Idly, Saebrya wondered if they would drown if the stuff got deep enough. Remembering struggling to breathe against the flood that had come from Ryan a month and a half ago, inside the Auld’s cottage, she guessed they could.

Saebrya shook herself and followed him.