Chapter Text
Scrub, scour, soap or vinegar — no matter how he tried, the stain held stubborn and wouldn’t fade. Black ink blotted the edge of his left palm like a soot-dark birthmark. It flecked his forearms, speckled his fingertips, lingered in the grooves down the sides of his fingernails.
He once had a spine like a knotted rope, and muscles like matted hair. That was the legacy of the docks. It had left his arms still wiry-strong, and his palms calloused. The aches and cramps faded. His work these days stained him with ink.
Simra might have liked it better if it was his own ink. If he’d spilt and spent and quilled it out for his own reasons, in his own time — his own words. But instead it belonged to the Shattershield Shipping Company. Marked like he was, perhaps he did too.
If the ceiling had been higher, it might’ve felt like a small city, between the shelves and stacks, shadows and alleys. But the warehouse was slung low, a dark stone-cut cellar, a maze. Simra walked careful in the dark, between boxes, crates, bales, taking account.
His arm ached, but the ache was different. His left had a crook-forked pain in it, articulated round the elbow, from holding his scrivboard. His right hand was stiff and clawish from quillwork. A wooden frame that clamped open a ledger, held an inkpot, a stub of candle and its tallowy run-off; the scrivboard was the end-all and utmost of his new work. Compared with the whole living process of dockwork – song, shouting, heaving, hauling – it was strange to be confined to just one task, just one tool.
Between the ledger’s columns, Simra compared orders, prices, stock on arrival. He took note of the cargo lost at sea, or missing due to scarcity. He factored in the customary mark-up and tallied off likely profits, net losses. But most of all, he kept record of what was where. Everything named and numbered, and in its proper place.
Simra reached the end of the final row. He checked over the columns once, then once again. Arrivals, exports, absences — all in check. He blotted off his quill and turned back to walk the paths that led back through the warehouse to the entrance. He went by candlelight, squinting through the gloom.
“No magelight my arse,” he muttered to himself wearily. “‘Oh, we carry a great many goods whose profitability is bound direct to their perishability, elf, I’ll have no witchlight round delicacies of such…well, delicacy!’…What, Torbjorn? ‘Fraid a pinch of witchcraft’ll sour your cheese-wheels and bitter your honey? Fucking primitives…Rather risk setting your whole month-ledger ablaze than get a sneeze of magic in here…”
He kissed his teeth, noisy in the buried dusty quiet of the warehouse. He stowed the scrivboard, detached and shelved the ledger, siphoned off the ink back into its well. Just as he could hear the docks through the warehouse door, he could feel the cold beyond. Simra wrapped his scarf, shrugged on his goatskin mantle, huffed preemptive into the cupped palms of his hands.
“Something you forgot?”
It was Yan, the Shipping Company’s night watchman. Short for a Nord, barrel-shaped, ruddy-faced, with hair like a hedgepig’s prickles on his jaw and his head. He sat where he sat each night, by the door, jouncing an iron-tipped cudgel in the palm of one hand. He’d been asking the same question for long enough now that the suspicion had been all but sucked from it. Now there was only boredom.
“Nah. Lifted everything I meant to, covered my tracks just fine…”
At first Simra had dealt with Yan as he dealt with most Nords in this city. He’d tried to stay a stranger, slipping under his notice, easy as he could. But over time the temptation grew. Yan had a face blank and red as a clay pot, and Simra was bored enough by now that he’d love to see it crack just once.
Yan’s face was impassive as ever. He heaved up out of his chair, hooked the cudgel back onto his belt, and began to pat Simra down.
“D’you have to do this?” Simra groaned through gritted teeth. His body tensed, enduring the search. “Every time?”
“Boss’s orders,” Yan shrugged, went on without looking up.
“’Course it is. Torbjorn keeps his people on-side, doesn’t he? Makes sure even an ugly raggabrash like you gets a grope now and then, right? Just makes you wonder, how’d he know I was your type? Did you put in a special request with the boss or—?”
“You can go.”
Simra kissed his teeth. “So soon? Never would’ve pegged you for a man of moments, Yan…Don’t tell me, ‘this never usually happens!’”
“Go. Home. Simra.” Now it was Yan who spoke through gritted teeth as he turned away to fumble with the door-bolt.
Simra smiled faintly at the Nord’s back. “Till tomorrow then,” he said, and swept out the door onto the dockside.
Song so raucous it was wordless, no telling what language it was in. The lap and lap of water against piers, ship-hulls, moorings and buoys. Wind over the surface of the river, the creaking of wet-logged wood, shipmen’s tramping feet and shouting voices. This was the docks as he knew them. It was how he remembered them, ever since the night he’d bought passage across the river and stole away into the dark. The same Autumn wind blew, now as then.
Another sound came from nearer by. A warmer soft-rumbling sound. Three cats, indifferent coloured in the dark, came sidling from the shadows with tails held in high hookish curves. They were familiar too.
Simra parted his lips. There was a name on the tip of his tongue. Before he could speak it, the night spoke it for him. Gitur. She followed her cats into the brazier light. His mouth parched dry. Something prickled down his spine as the cats muzzed their heads against his knees, pawed their way up his legs with questioning purrs.
“…Shit,” he managed.
“Finish up late these days, don’t you? I’m up past bed-hours just to catch you.” Gitur’s eyebrows twitched up. She didn’t smile but she wasn’t scowling.
That was better than last he’d seen her, when he’d not dared to look at her face for fear of what he’d find. “Can only get started once the dockwork’s all done for the day.” He was glad of something dull to say — words to pour out automatic, reel as his mind might. “I get working around the time I used to be heading home…”
“Comes with a lie-in and all then, this new work of yours?” She snorted. “Shor’s balls, Sim, you’re moving up in the world, ain’t you?”
“If I am, there’s the first I’ve heard of it. Sure as dawn doesn’t pay any better. Same horseshit, different horse.”
Simra had gathered back a little of himself now. Except for the jarring run-or-fight tremor in his knees, he was almost collected. He pulled the mantle tight against the cold. When he began to walk, she followed along the dockfront. Past the drinking-houses and nooks where bedworkers plied their trade. Past heaps of refuse and piles of rope.
“How’d you come by this new stable-stinking job of yours then?”
“Reading and writing. You should try it some time.”
“Don’t play fucking coy with me, right? I know. Shattershield’s usual, Atheron, went off on some errand along the coast. He needed a scriv, and sure enough he saw you eyeing the roster-board, asked ‘You can read that?’, you said yeah you could, and he got you on for a bit as scriv in her stead, being how he’s always one to pinch a penny if he can, thinking ‘now here’s an elf I can pay a pittance and he’ll thank me all the while just for work that don’t break his back’. I know, Sim. People talk — what kind of a Pale-Shod would I be if I didn’t hear? Just tryna have a fucking gab is all. You know, like people do.”
“A gab?” Simra groaned incredulous. “Two years, Gitur. Two years. Nearly to the day, if I remember right, and I usually fucking do. No word – no hide nor hair – since you—…And you just wanna flap gums like nothing’s changed?”
“Now who’s shitting who!” Gitur yawned. “You want the selfsame thing. You missed me, Simra Hishkari. You’re just too pissy on your own pride to admit it. And so’m I, come to think of it. So…like nothing’s changed?”
Simra looked up at her. Her skin looked brazen in the torchlight, glossy-fawn and profuse with freckles. In daylight her hair was brassy too, but firelit, it burned: wild curls, spiralling twists, even tied back into a messy fishtail like it was. He met her eyes for a moment, veered off, down toward the surprise of her mouth. His gaze dropped entirely. He stopped, leant against a closed-up shopfront, and looked out over the black-lapping noise of the river.
“Like nothing’s changed,” he agreed, quiet and chary as defeat.
Gitur led after that, walking at first back the way he would’ve gone, whether alone through the night or accompanied. Up the steps that wound about to the Morayat, through the deep and verberant drydock where the ashlanders settled and tried to keep their memories safe. But when he would have headed up, climbing the Rigs homeward, she kept steering them low.
She talked all the while. About the broadening borders of Pale-Shod territory, down in the gulleybottom. About how old iron had become the dearest jewel in her clan’s rag-and-bone crown as the smithies and foundries uptown melted down and reforged all they could, feeding Windhelm’s new hunger for swordblades and shieldbosses, axe- and arrowheads. About how she’d lost two brothers this past year — one to the Summer Flux, the other when he up and joined the militia.
The Summer just-passed had been a hot one for Windhelm. The floor of the gorge was still fine-grained with dust. Every breath of wind was toothed with stinging grit. Simra fumbled his scarf up to cover his mouth and nose. Gitur didn’t seem to mind. The gorge was quiet this late in the night, except the sounds of cats, the occasional squeal of an unseen pig. Usually Simra would keep his knife close, walking through this kind of dark, this kind of quiet, this kind of place. But he was with Gitur. And hadn’t she said, this was her territory now.
“You still hungry?” she said, scuffing round on one heel to face him.
“Right now?”
“Nah, I’m talking broader than that. You and yours. Your family. Last time, you said—”
“We get by,” Simra said bluntly.
“Mm. We all try, don’t we? I was just…wondering is all.”
“Don’t tell me.” A crawling feeling started somewhere, in the small of Simra’s back. This was familiar. “You’ve got a favour to ask. Only it mightn’t be a very big favour in the end, ‘cos it might be like I’m doing myself a favour too?” His eyebrows raised, arching sharp and furrowing his forehead.
“Something like that.” She smiled a peckish smile. “You’ve stumbled into a unique opportunity, where you’re at right now. You keep track of what’s coming in when, right? For Torbjorn?”
“…Right.”
“And you keep the ledgers balanced, yeah? Incomings, outgoings, tally ‘em all and say what’s where and what’s missing?”
“…Right.”
“Winter’s on its way, Sim. How’d you like a little more coin to get you and yours through it, hey? All you’ve got to do is keep writing in that big thick book of yours…and say some things’ve gone missing…”