The Demon’s Surrender (6 page)
Read The Demon’s Surrender Online
Authors: Sarah Rees Brennan
He didn’t smile back, but the compliment was enough to keep Sin smiling, side by side in the shadow of a tree.
“It never happens to me,” Sin told him, her eyes sliding back to Mae and Alan.
Unlike a demon, she could lie.
She’d only glanced over, in time to see Alan reach up to fetch down a scroll for Mae from a high shelf, but when she looked back Nick was gone, silently, as if direct light had hit a shadow.
She did a swift scan of the crowd, used to picking out one face in an audience, and of course saw Nick beside Alan and Mae. Mae scowled up at him, and Nick leaned against the stall and in toward Mae, whispering something in her ear.
Mae’s face turned thoughtful as he spoke. After a moment she nodded briefly and slipped out from between the stall and Nick’s body, setting off purposefully through the Market. Alan stayed behind, a book open in his hand.
He did not look after Mae and Nick, but everybody else did.
Everybody saw Nick at Mae’s back like a shadow that could not be dispersed, a dark sentinel, like the bodyguard to a queen.
Everybody saw Mae moving through the Market. With every step she took the lights nearest her flared into brilliance, the difference as great as if stars were blooming into suns above her head. The light around her hair spread and shone, as if every moment a new golden crown was being placed on her head, a succession of hundreds and hundreds of crowns.
Sin had taken the night off from dancing to make herself seem like the leader of the Market.
The demon had thrown his support behind her rival, undone all her efforts, let Mae shine, and let everyone know his power was at her command.
Sin had no idea how to match this.
The Market was winding down, Sin on the ground directing the people unwinding the wires that held up their lanterns and curtains from around the trees.
“Careful with that,” she called up to one of her dancers. “Break a beacon lamp and we’ll never hear the end of it. Coil up the wire: We’ve got to stow all this away.”
She slid her hands to the base of her spine and arched, feeling her back pop and crack a little in a way that said she would be feeling all this tomorrow. She was going to get only a couple of hours’ sleep, and then it would be time to wake the kids and bring them to school.
“Hi,” Mae’s voice said behind her, and Sin straightened her shoulders despite her back hurting. “Haven’t seen you around a lot tonight.”
“Hope your fourth Market was a good one,” Sin said, keeping her voice warm and the fact that Sin herself had been part of more than a hundred Markets implicit.
Mae’s eyebrows rose, obviously taking Sin’s meaning. She always stood a little combatively, short but filling as much space as she could. Currently her arms were crossed and her elbows sticking out.
“It was, thanks,” she said, her voice slightly stiff. Then she uncrossed her arms and reached out, putting one hand on Sin’s arm. Sin looked down at Mae’s hand, very pale on Sin’s skin, her nails painted bright turquoise. “Look, Sin. I don’t want Merris to succeed in setting us at each other’s throats.”
Sin remembered that Mae’s mother was gone, and as far as she could see Mae’s father and brother were out of the picture as well. She was staying with her aunt Edith in London to be near all of them.
“I don’t want that either,” Sin answered slowly, the words sticking in her throat. “I would have welcomed you to the Goblin Market. You know that. But I can’t—I won’t welcome you into my place.”
“I can’t stop trying for it,” Mae said. “This thing, with Celeste’s pearl. I want it.” She swallowed and continued. “But if you get it before me, I swear I’ll do everything I can to help you. You’ll be my leader too.”
Sin couldn’t say Mae would be her leader. She couldn’t even contemplate that happening. But Mae’s hand was gripping her arm tight, and she’d liked Mae from almost the first moment.
“Thanks,” she said awkwardly. “I appreciate that.”
She usually felt energized by the Market, glowing with all the small victories of the night and filled with new purpose. Not tonight. She summoned up a wicked smile for Mae anyway.
“I like the pigtails you’re working tonight,” she told her, and thought of Mae laughing at the book stall with Alan. “Anyone interesting around?”
Mae shrugged. “My pigtails are not the irresistible mantraps you might think.” She let her hand drop from Sin’s arm, but grinned up at her. “It must be kind of awesome. Being—well, you know.”
“No, tell me,” Sin coaxed, amused.
“Well, being completely gorgeous,” Mae said, and went a bit pink. “You could have anyone you wanted. You wouldn’t even have to try.”
Sin thought about the boys at school and the guys on the street who bothered her because they thought black girls were exotic and easy and not to be taken seriously. It wasn’t something she could turn off, not entirely, so it was something she’d learned to use.
She thought about getting up at six in the morning to stand outside in the raw air, mist lying clammy on the grass, and shave her legs using a basin and some cold water. She’d fixed her hair, hung the lanterns, planned the dancers’ performances and costumes, and now the Market was being packed up and all her success was fading away with the morning. She had tried everything she knew, and she had not even been able to charm Alan Ryves.
Not that she cared about that.
“It’s awesome,” she said. “But it’s not easy.”
Mae rubbed at her face, the only sign she’d given to show she might be just as tired as Sin was. “What is?”
“You’ve got a point,” Sin told her, and felt relaxed enough with Mae to give her a sideways hug before she made for her wagon, already thinking of the luxury of crawling in between soft sheets, the kids breathing slow and steady on either side of her.
She found Matthias the piper sitting on her front step, turning his pipe over and over between his hands.
“Sin,” he said, rising gracefully to meet her. “You did well tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“Not your fault you were outdone.”
Sin refused to lose ground in front of a pied piper, so she made herself smile. “You say the sweetest things.”
“She’s a clever girl, that Mae,” Matthias said. “Maybe a bit too clever. You know she’s been murmuring about a possible spy at the Goblin Market.”
Sin made a face. It was just another of Mae’s hundreds of ideas, like that of making profit and loss sheets, or the crazy suggestion she kept floating about inviting necromancers and pied pipers to travel with the Market.
“Maybe she’s looking for an excuse if the magicians seem like they know too much, and someone wonders where they got the information,” Matthias said. “I heard from a little bird that she’s been seen talking to people from the Aventurine Circle.”
The sleepiness cleared from Sin’s mind suddenly. She was very aware of Matthias’s watchful dark eyes, waiting for her reaction, of the cold grass around her ankles, and of the familiar weight of her knives against her back.
“Do you have any proof?”
“If I had any proof, I’d have brought it,” Matthias said. “You Market people may not think much of the pipers, and we may think you’re a little set in your ways, but neither of us wants a leader beholden to magicians, do we?”
Sin’s mouth shaped the word
No
, though she did not say it, simply watching Matthias. She’d trusted Mae. She didn’t know if she could trust the piper. They were all mercurial and strange, valuing singing more than speaking, music more than the faces of those they loved.
But if there was any possibility this was true, she could not afford to ignore it.
“Imagine the advantage she has, if the magicians are helping her,” Matthias said. “She could beat you. Imagine what would happen to the Market then.”
Sin licked her lips. “Any ideas on what I should do?”
“We saw the magicians down by the river near Southwark Cathedral,” Matthias said. “Maybe you should go check the place out for yourself.”
Sin nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
“One more thing?”
Matthias walked lightly as all the pipers did, noiseless and barely stirring the grass with his passage. He brushed by her on his way down the hill, and his voice hit her ear like the music of the Market, beautiful and sinister.
“Watch your back.”
4
Anchor Point
N
ICK WAS CLEARLY MISERABLE.
At first Sin found it kind of amusing. He’d done what she would have predicted he would if she’d thought about it, and approached the guys who generally hung around the handyman’s shed and smoked while sitting on old buckets of paint.
That had not gone so well. Nobody was sure what had happened in the handyman’s shed at break time, but everyone was talking about it anyway. By lunchtime Sin had heard quite a few compelling theories, and she saw people leaning away from Nick as he prowled sullenly through the playground and made a couple of phone calls to someone who did not pick up.
Sin found herself chewing vengefully on a peanut butter sandwich and thinking perhaps this would teach certain people that demons did not actually belong in school, which was about the time it occurred to her that she was wishing punishment on Nick not only because he’d decided to support Mae, but because she was angry with his brother.
That made her angry enough with herself to get up, murmuring excuses to the girls from the lacrosse team, and go over to him.
“So I heard you tried to kill a guy with a paintbrush.”
“Don’t try to stifle my artistic self-expression,” Nick said. Sin laughed. She saw a few heads on the playground turn, and realized with a sinking sensation that they would remember this, when her goal was always to avoid too much attention, any questions about the Market, any focus on her or the kids.
She remembered Alan’s maddening voice in a sunlit summer kitchen, asking her to stick around and hang out with Nick. He’d offered her a translation worth a month of groceries to do it. She’d taken it, and she’d played nice with Nick.
She didn’t regret it. Those groceries had come in extremely handy.
But she did feel like she owed Nick more than a dismissal now.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about the way I acted before. I was just surprised to see you here. At school.”
Nick shrugged.
“It wouldn’t have killed your brother to have given us a heads-up,” Sin added.
Nick stared at her with even more murderous coldness than usual.
There was a sudden chill wind in the air, striking Sin’s face and sending cold fingers crawling tip by freezing tip down her back. She looked into Nick’s blank face and thought:
possessed
, and did not know why she hadn’t seen it years ago, why everyone didn’t see it when they looked at him. There was no human being behind that face, only a creature who owned but could not animate it.
Alan had lived with this for most of his life, knowing exactly what it was. The wave of sympathy that washed over Sin at the thought shocked her with its intensity.
She couldn’t work out what kind of man he was, good or evil, terrifying or terrifyingly misguided. She couldn’t imagine what it would take to bring up a demon.
All she knew was that she’d had him all wrong.
“Shut up about my brother,” Nick said at last. “I know you’ve always hated him, but I don’t need to hear about it.” His lip curled. “He doesn’t think much of you either.”
If Nick had decided to support Mae’s bid to be leader, who was likely to be behind that decision?
Sin picked up her peanut butter sandwich again and bit in.
“I got that,” she said. “Thanks.”
She was in a hurry when she left school, and she didn’t need to be distracted by the surprise appearance of Alan Ryves, at the wheel of an ancient blue car and with his head bent over a book.
It was therefore a complete mystery to her why she took a detour through the side gate, went over, and tapped on the car window.
Alan used one hand to subtly go for his gun and the other to keep his page, then actually looked at her and sent the window whirring down.
“What are you doing here?” Sin demanded, and was horrified by the words coming out of her mouth.
“Picking my baby brother up from school,” Alan told her, sounding faintly puzzled that she would ask something so obvious.
“Well, he’s in detention,” Sin said in what she hoped was a more reasonable voice. “Word is he tried to kill someone with a paintbrush.”
“Little scamp,” Alan said. “Well, boys will be boys. Can I give you a lift anywhere?”
Offended dignity said not in a million years, but Sin had a lot more practicality than pride.
“If you could drive me to my sister’s school, that’d be great,” she said, going around the car and climbing into the passenger seat.
“Happy to,” said Alan, and started the car engine.
She gave him directions, and he turned a corner through the estate by her school and toward Acton town without comment, obviously already familiar enough with the geography of this part of London. Market people always had to know where they were going, and be able to get there fast when they had to.
Sin was not planning on reaching out and being turned down again, so she turned her face away from Alan and watched the buildings go by, gray towers changing to tan-colored Victorian buildings and back again.
“I wanted to talk to you about last night,” said Alan.
Horror and embarrassment sent a burning-hot flash flood through Sin’s veins. But it would be absolutely unacceptable for Alan to know he had inspired those feelings, and since she was a performer, goddamn it, Sin laughed and said lightly, “Really? You have to know it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Yes, I know that,” Alan said, his voice very mild. “But we’re going to be working together for some time. I’d like for us to get on better than we have done in the past. God knows that wouldn’t be hard.”
He doesn’t think much of you.
“Sounds good!” Sin responded, forcing herself to sound a bit incredulous about all the fuss Alan was making instead of desperate for the conversation to be over.
“I had fun at the Market last night,” Alan continued. “A lot more fun than I usually have.”
Until Sin had thrown herself at him. Yes, she understood perfectly. What she didn’t understand was why Alan had to
talk
so much.
“I just wanted to let you know that I understand,” Alan told her. “And I don’t want you to be embarrassed, or to think I took anything in a different way than it was meant.”
“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Sin said. “I don’t care enough about your opinion of me to be embarrassed.”
“All right.”
There was silence for a moment, during which Sin tried to work out if Alan’s response had sounded faintly incredulous or simply indifferent. It was too hot in the car, the air-conditioning obviously not working right, autumnal sunlight flooding through the windows and filling the car with trapped heat. Sin sent a swift glance toward Alan, not under her eyelashes, because guys noticed that and she always meant them to, but sidelong and carefully casual.
He was wearing two shirts, which was ridiculous considering the sun but which he always did, and looking at the road ahead, lashes bright fringes over his dark blue eyes. She looked away almost immediately.
“Just so we’re clear,” Alan said. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Okay, Alan,
I get it
,” Sin snapped.
“As long as you’re still planning to teach me how to shoot a bow and arrow,” he continued calmly. “I mean, I do feel you kind of owe me that.”
“What?” Sin asked, and was so startled she found herself laughing.
“Well, I sang at the Market and everything,” Alan reminded her. “I’m a diffident guy. I had terrible stage fright.”
“I’m not familiar with the concept of ‘stage fright.’”
“It’s pretty awful,” Alan said solemnly. “You end up having to picture the entire audience in their underwear. Phyllis was in that audience, you know.”
“Why, Alan, I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”
“Phyllis is a very nice lady,” he said. “And I do not consider her so much aged as matured, like a fine wine. But I still think you owe me an archery lesson.”
These brothers were her allies, were the Market’s allies, and Alan was right: It would be better for them all to get along. She’d had more fun with Alan than she would’ve expected last night, before being turned down flat.
She wasn’t about to ruin any chance of them reaching an understanding because of being rejected. Lots of people weren’t attracted to her. Merris, obviously. Phyllis, with any luck. If she ever went insane and assaulted Matthias in a frenzy of lust, he would probably run away, shrieking,
Your singing voice is nasal! Unclean, unclean!
Alan had saved her brother. She’d judged him wrongly on more occasions than she cared to count at this point, but she felt pretty confident she was right about this judgment: He was worth knowing.
And he was right. It wasn’t like getting along better than they had before would be much of a challenge.
“Drive me and Lydie back to the hill,” Sin said at last. “And you can have your lesson.” She looked at him under her eyelashes and he noticed, as he was meant to; then she grinned. “Plus, Phyllis will be there. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to see you.”
Lydie’s new school was in a nice part of Acton, far enough away from the Market and Sin’s school to make Sin’s life difficult, but there were trees lining the street where it stood and when Sin peeped through the classroom door before going in she saw Lydie’s fair head tipped to another girl’s, engaged in close and happy conversation.
She had not asked or particularly wanted Alan to accompany her into the school, but he had done so anyway. Sin was making an effort not to be annoyed at him for being interfering. She was sure he meant well.
“I’m Cynthia Davies, Lydia’s sister,” she told the teacher, shaking her hand firmly so there would be no comments about thinking Sin was older on the phone.
There was the usual look that meant the teacher had thought Sin was white on the phone, but people hardly ever said that.
Sin went around to Lydie’s table and tossed her braid over her shoulder, trying for a slight air of glamour. It never hurt a kid to have a cool older sister.
“Having fun?” she asked.
“Sure,” said Lydie, stowing away books and pencil case. Sin put a hand flat against her thin little back in case a hug would be going too far, and Lydie leaned into it a tiny bit. “Alan’s here,” she added in a tone of inquiry but with bright eyes. Sin was instantly very glad Alan had come in.
“Well, he was going up to the hill anyway, and when he heard I was picking you up, obviously he wanted to come along.”
Lydie went off to grab her coat from the cloakroom, and Sin went back to the teacher, who was standing with Alan, apparently deep in conversation.
“… mother and stepfather died in a car accident a while ago,” she heard him say in a confidential tone, and heard the teacher murmur sympathetically. “Their guardian’s a little elderly. It’s a challenge, of course, but Cynthia picks up a lot of the slack.”
“I do what?” Sin asked brightly, deciding that she had not heard anything else he’d said.
Alan gave her a slightly wary look, and she took his arm and squeezed it to show that she was impressed. It was a good lie: The teacher won over to Lydie’s side, the adroit mention of a stepfather meaning that there would never be a question of how she and Lydie were related, and neither parents nor guardian would ever be expected. Sin planned to remember exactly how he’d said it, but she doubted it would have quite the same effect.
“And you’re…” the teacher began inquiringly.
“Alan,” he said, and he shook her hand. “Friend of the family.”
There were not so many hillwalkers on a weekday afternoon in October, but Sin took Alan out to a field near where the Market wagons were assembled anyway, where people would be discouraged by all the don’t-notice-us charms and inclined to overlook whatever was going on without exactly knowing why.
Unfortunately, this meant that when she was setting up targets and Alan was trying out different bows the rest of the Market decided to wander by and take an interest. Jonas started to shoot in order to impress Chiara. Phyllis came and told Alan she hoped he was eating right, and Sin had to hide her smile behind her quiverful of arrows.
“Can I borrow him for a moment, Phyllis?” she asked after she was done grinning like a fool. “I promise I’ll return him. I know he’d be devastated if I didn’t.”
