She had never felt more alive than when she sang. She felt unstoppable, like nothing could touch her — flame running through her veins and exploding out of her as melody. Song was her best friend, her safe place, her power, the thing that kept her fed. She couldn't explain why, but it moved people in ways that didn't quite make sense. That was how she'd ended up here, singing for tips in a tavern to survive. A job she was rather good at.
The song she was on was an old one, a sailor's lament she'd sung so many times her mouth found the words without her. That was the trick of it, really — the more her body knew a song, the freer the rest of her was to watch.
And she always watched.
She let her gaze drift out over the room as she sang, the way she did every night, sorting the tavern into its familiar shapes. There were the listeners, the real ones, leaning into her voice with their drinks forgotten and their faces gone soft and open — those were the ones she sang to, when she could. There were the tired ones, slumped and hollow-eyed, who had come from a long day to a warm room, letting the music wash the work off them; she was gentle with those. And there were the creeps, the ones whose eyes crawled instead of listened, and she'd learned long ago to hold their stares just long enough to show she wasn't afraid, then move on before they thought the look was an invitation.
It was the same room it always was. The same smoke curling under the same low beams, the same clatter of the same tin cups against wood, the same muggy warmth of too many bodies in too small a space. She knew this place the way she knew the song — well enough not to have to think about it.
Which was why she noticed him.
He was in the far corner, past the reach of the lamplight’s glow, and he was watching her the way the listeners did — but he wasn't one of them. She'd have remembered him. She remembered all of them, in the loose way she remembered furniture, and he wasn't part of the furniture. Dark hair, a stillness to him that the others didn't have; where the rest of the room shifted and drank and swayed, he sat, and watched, and did not look away when her eyes found his.
She didn't stop singing. She was too good for that. Her note held, clean and unbothered, and she let her gaze slide off him; back to the room as though he were nothing, as though her attention hadn't caught on him like wool on a nail.
But she finished the song a little more aware of the corner than she had been.
The last note faded, and for a moment the room held it — that small suspended hush she loved best, the half-second before people remembered themselves. Then it broke, the way it always did, into a scatter of applause and the thump of a mug against a table and someone's rough voice calling for another. She dipped her head, let the smile come, and reached down for the dented tin cup at the edge of the low stage.
It had a decent weight to it tonight. Not good, not bad — ordinary, like the night itself. She thumbed through the coins without seeming to, an old habit of counting while looking like she wasn't, and did the sums she always did: enough for her share of the room upstairs, with a little over. Enough. She dropped the cup into the fold of her skirt and stepped down into the noise.
"You held that last one forever," said Maren, appearing at her elbow with a tray balanced on one hand and three empty mugs hooked in the fingers of the other. "I thought you were going to pass out."
"I've got the lungs for it."
"You've got the show-off for it." But Maren was grinning, and she bumped her shoulder against Lyrwen's as she passed, and she was off to deliver the mugs and collect more. That was the whole of their friendship, mostly — passing shoulders, quick words snatched between songs and orders, but it was real, and there was little enough in her life that was.
She made her way toward the bar through the loose current of the crowd, catching the odd "well sung" and nodding her thanks, letting a broad hand clap her once on the shoulder without flinching. At the bar, the keeper already had a bowl waiting for her — stew, gone slightly grey at the edges from sitting, but hot, and hers.
"Good crowd," he said. He said it most nights, whether it was true or not.
"Ordinary crowd."
"Ordinary's what pays." He nodded at her bowl. "Eat. You sing better when you're not about to fall over. I've heard you fall over." He was already turning away to the next customer as he said it, gruff as ever, but he'd set a heel of bread beside the bowl that she hadn't asked for, and she noticed as she always noticed. It was the closest he came to kindness, and she'd learned to read it in the small things he did.
She ate standing at the end of the bar, out of the way, spooning the stew down while it was hot and tearing the bread into it. It wasn't much, but it was enough. Between mouthfuls, her eyes went, without her quite deciding to send them, back toward the corner.
He was still there.
He hadn't touched the drink in front of him, as far as she could tell — it sat full at his elbow, forgotten or ignored. He wasn't watching her now, or not obviously; his gaze was somewhere in the middle distance, unhurried, a man entirely comfortable taking up space in a room that hadn't asked him to. But something about his stillness made her think he knew exactly where she was standing, and she disliked the thought, though she couldn't say why.
She looked away first and hated a little that she had.
The night wore itself down. She sang two more sets: the late-night kind for the stragglers who wanted something slow to drink to. The crowd thinned — the tired ones the first to leave, as usual. Then the listeners, followed by the creeps, until only the truly committed drinkers were left, sat folded over their cups. Her cup had gained a few more coins. Maren waved at her from across the emptying room, mouthed something that might have been go home, and went back to her task of stacking chairs.
She finally stepped down from the stage, her voice worn soft. Her feet ached in the good, earned way she had grown to love over the years. She gathered her cup and shawl, calling goodnight to the keeper, who answered her with a tired grunt, and pushed her way out through the door into the cool dark of the night.
The corner, when she'd glanced at it on her way past, had been empty.
The night air was a relief after the fug of the room, cool against her throat and sharp with woodsmoke and the river somewhere below. She wasn't ready to climb the stairs to her room yet — the small dark box of it, the quiet that pressed too close. She wanted a moment first. She pulled her shawl up over her shoulders and breathed in the cold, letting the empty street and the end of the night settle over her.
"Your voice is like nothing I've ever heard before."
She stopped.
He was across the path, leaning against the wall opposite the tavern door. He'd been there some while, by the look of him — settled, unhurried, in no rush to be anywhere. The corner had emptied because he'd come out here. To wait.
She went still and took his measure, the way the night had taught her. But the measure came back wrong. He didn't stand like the corner-men, coiled and hungry with all their want thrust out ahead of them. His hands were loose at his sides. He watched her, calm and certain, as though he'd said something ordinary and could wait as long as it took for her to answer.
She said nothing. She'd learned that — silence made most men fill the air, and what they filled it with told you what they were.
He didn't fill it. He let it sit between them, easy, and watched her with that same unhurried attention, and she was the one who felt the quiet stretching.
He was tall. That came to her first, and then the rest of him in the lamplight: brown hair swept back from his face, gone loose over the long evening so that some of it fell across his brow; warm brown eyes; a face too kind-looking, she thought, for a man lying in wait outside a tavern at this hour. Everything about him said harmless. That, more than anything, put her on her guard. She had learned to distrust whatever worked so hard to seem gentle.
"I've heard that one before," she said finally.
"I don't doubt it." No smile, no push. He said it as though it cost him nothing to be doubted, which was not how the others said it.
She waited for the rest — the ask, the angle, the thing men like him were always circling toward. It didn't come. He only straightened from the wall, unhurried, and inclined his head to her as if their business, whatever it had been, was concluded.
"Goodnight," he said.
And he walked, unhurried, into the dark — leaving her standing outside her own door with the strange, nettled sense that something had been asked of her, though she couldn't have said what, and that she hadn't answered it.
She stood there a while after he'd gone, longer than she meant to, watching the place in the dark where he'd been until the cold worked its way through her shawl and reminded her she had a bed to get to. He'd asked her nothing. She couldn't set that part down. Every man who'd ever waited for her outside that door had wanted something, and had made sure she knew it; this one had wanted something too, she was almost certain of it, and had walked away with it unspoken, leaving her to turn it over in the dark like a coin she hadn't earned.
She shook herself, finally, and turned for the stairs.
Her room was up the outside of the building, a narrow flight of steps that groaned under her the way they always did. Inside, it was just as she'd left it: the small bed, the washstand, the one window that looked out over nothing. She lit the stub of a candle and tipped the tin cup out onto the blanket to count what the night had given her.
She counted it twice, because there was no space for her count to be wrong. It came to what she'd thought — enough, with care. Her share to the keeper for the room. A little set by for the days her voice gave out, as it did, as it always eventually did. What was left after that would feed her, if she was careful, and she was always careful. She divided the coins into their small piles with the ease of long practice and folded the largest of them away, and told herself, as she did most nights, that it was enough. It was. It always just barely was.
She unpinned her hair and let it down.
It fell past her shoulders in a spill of red, and she worked the brush through it by candlelight, slow, the one indulgence she allowed herself at the end of a night — the small ritual of it, the pull and give, the ache easing out of her scalp. In the little square of polished tin she used for a mirror, her own face looked back at her, indistinct in the low light: pale, green-eyed, tired around the edges in a way that no amount of sleep seemed to reach anymore. She held her own gaze for a moment. Then she looked away, the way she'd looked away from him, and set the brush down.
She shed her outer layers; she folded them over the chair with more care than they probably deserved, but they were the only ones she had, and climbed under her thin blanket. She pinched out the candle between her thumb and forefinger.
While she lay in the dark, she did not think about the man across the path. She did not think about the way he'd let the silence sit between them, or the walk into the dark that had felt less like a leaving than a door left open. She did not think about him, and went on not thinking about him for a long while before sleep finally came.
⁂
Morning came grey through the one window, and she rose into the cold with the reluctance of someone whose blanket was the warmest thing she owned.
She dressed quickly, because dressing slowly only let the chill in. Her day clothes were the plain ones, the worn ones — a shift and an overdress gone soft and colorless with washing, the hem let down once already and fraying toward needing it again. They were nothing to look at. That was rather the point of them; the evening clothes were the ones meant to be seen, and she guarded them as such. She pulled on her day things, bound her hair back out of her way, and went down the outside stairs into the ordinary light.
The tavern by day was a different animal from the tavern by night. Emptied of its crowd and its smoke, it was just a low, wide room with the shutters open and the morning coming in, the tables wiped and pushed back, the floor still faintly smelling of last night's spilled ale beneath the smell of something better: bread. The warm yeasted weight of it filled the whole room.
Maren was at the long table with her sleeves shoved to the elbow and flour to the wrist, working a mound of dough with the heels of both hands, rocking her whole weight into it. A stack of clean dishes dripped in the rack beside her. She'd been up for hours, by the look of it; she always was, and she glanced over her shoulder when the stairs creaked, giving Lyrwen a chin-nod without breaking the rhythm of her hands.
"There she is. The voice of the house, risen at last."
"It's not that late."
"It's late enough that I've done the washing-up, the sweeping, and half the baking, and you've done a very impressive job of sleeping." There was no bite in her words. Maren turned the dough, folded it, leaned into it again. "There's water in the bin if you want it. I filled it fresh."
That was what she'd come down hoping to hear. "You're sure? You don't need it?"
"I'm done with it. Go on."
She went to the washbin in the back, where the light was best, and fetched her evening clothes from the chair where she'd folded them the night before. In the daylight, she could see them properly — the good dress, the only truly good thing she owned, its color still deep where the day clothes had gone to nothing, but marked now at the underarms and the hem with the sweat and the floor-grime of a night's work.
She washed the dress the way she'd learned over the years to wash everything that mattered to her. She handled it carefully, washing it by hand, in cool water so that the deep red of the fabric would hold, working the cloth gently against itself rather than scrubbing, coaxing the grime loose. The work was slow, but she didn't mind. Something was comforting in the cold water and the small, ancient act of caring for the one fine thing she owned. Behind her, Maren hummed and kneaded the dough, the yeasty smell of the bread deepening as she worked. For a while, neither of them spoke, and it was the easy kind of nothing that only exists between those comfortable enough that they don't need to fill the silence.
When the dress was clean, she wrung it as gently as she could and carried it out to hang in the strip of morning sun that fell through the open back door, smoothing it straight with her hands so it would dry without creases. She stood a moment looking at it hanging there, catching the light, dripping slowly into the dirt.
When she came back in, there was a plate waiting at the end of the long table. She hadn't seen Maren set it down.
It wasn't much — the heel off yesterday's loaf, a smear of dripping, a wedge of hard cheese no bigger than her thumb. But it was food she hadn't had to count coins against, food that had appeared because someone had thought of her, and that was rare enough in her life that it caught at her a little every time.
"Eat," Maren said, not looking up from her dough, in exactly the keeper's voice, and Lyrwen wondered if the two of them had learned it from each other or if it was just the word this place used for I'm glad you're here.
She sat. She ate. The bread had gone firm overnight, but it was good with the dripping worked into it, and the morning came in through the open door, and her good dress dried in the sun, and she did not think, particularly, about the man from the night before — except once, and only briefly, and then she let it go.
Maren, for her part, was not letting much of anything go. She talked while she worked, the way she always did, an easy stream of it that asked nothing of Lyrwen but the occasional grunt — who'd come in last night, who'd left without paying, whose husband had been seen where he shouldn't. Lyrwen let it wash over her, warm and meaningless, and ate her bread.
"— and there's Bastion men all over the Sink this week," Maren was saying, thumping the dough over. "Officers, proper ones, not just the usual patrols. Some to-do or other up at the muster house. You can't walk to the well without tripping over a grey coat."
"Mm."
"You should go have a look. While they're about." Maren shot her a sidelong grin. "Some of them clean up very nicely, for men who kill things for a living. Wouldn't hurt you to be seen by one with coin."
"It would, actually." Lyrwen tore another piece off the heel. "Hurt me. Considerably."
Maren laughed. "You're no fun."
"I'm a great deal of fun. I'm simply particular about my company." She meant it lightly, and Maren took it lightly, but there was a truth under it she didn't bother to dress up. The Bastion could have the whole of the Sink for a week, for a month; it made no difference to her so long as they stayed on their side of things and she stayed on hers. Grey coats meant orders; the kind of trouble that rolled downhill onto people like her — people with no house, no name that mattered, no one to answer for them if a soldier decided a tavern singer owed him a song for free. She'd learned young that the safest place to stand, when the military came through, was well out of the way and quieter than a shadow.
"They're not all like that," Maren said, reading the shape of her thought the way she sometimes could.
"No," Lyrwen agreed. "But I can't tell which from the outside, and I'd rather not learn by guessing." She wiped the last of the dripping from the plate with the last of the bread and ate it. "Let them have their to-do. I'll be here, where it's warm and no one outranks anyone."
Maren snorted and went back to her dough, and the matter dropped, and neither of them thought of it again.
She finished the last of the bread, wiped the plate clean with her thumb out of habit more than hunger, and carried it to the wash-rack herself rather than leave it for Maren, who had enough on her hands. Then, because the morning was hers until the evening claimed it and there was no sense sitting idle in a room that always needed doing, she took up the mop from the corner and set to work on the floor.
It was honest, dull work, and she enjoyed it. The ale-sticky patches by the tables, the tracked-in grime near the door, the dark places under the benches where things she'd rather not name had dried into the boards — she worked her way across the whole of it, back and forth. The water went grey in the bucket, and the room slowly took on the clean, sharp smell of wet wood. Maren baked. Lyrwen mopped. It was a good, wordless rhythm, the kind that made the tavern feel less like a place she worked. It made it feel more like a place to which she belonged, though she was careful never to say so aloud, even to herself.
She was nearly finished when the keeper came in from the back, wiping his hands on his apron and taking in the room with the flat, assessing sweep he gave it every morning.
"Floor looks well," he said, which from him was practically a garland.
"It needed it."
He grunted. Then, as if it had only just occurred to him, though she knew it hadn't, he forgot nothing that touched coin, he said, "Your keep's due. Two days."
"I know it. I've got it set by."
"All of it?"
"All of it, and on time." She leaned on the mop and looked at him levelly, because she'd learned that meeting his eye was the only way to be believed. "Have I ever not?"
"No," he admitted. "You haven't." He held her gaze a moment longer, satisfied, and then reached into the pocket of his apron and drew out a coin and held it out to her between two thick fingers. "For the floor."
She looked at it. "The floor's part of my keep. You don't pay me for the floor."
"I pay you for a good floor. This is a good floor." He pressed it into her hand and closed her fingers over it before she could argue, already turning away, already done with the conversation. "Don't make it strange."
She didn't make it strange. She slipped the coin into the fold at her waist with the others and went back to her mopping so he wouldn't see whatever was on her face, and if the last stretch of floor got done a little more carefully than the rest, that was her business and no one else's.
When the floor was done, and the grey water tipped out the back door, she went to check the dress.
It hung where she'd left it in the strip of sun, and she pressed the back of her hand to it, then the cloth between her fingers, testing. Mostly dry. The heavy seams at the hem were still cool and faintly damp, but the rest had taken the morning's warmth, and there were hours yet before she'd need it — it would be dry to the touch by the time the lamps were lit. She took it down carefully, folding it over her arm rather than her shoulder so the damp wouldn't take to her day clothes, and carried it back up the outside stairs to her room.
She hung it on the peg by the window where what light there was could finish the work. The sun was beginning to set as the day had passed her by quickly, as she cared for the tavern alongside Maren. She stood back to look at the dress a moment — her good dress, her working skin, the one thing that turned her from a girl mopping floors into the voice of the house. It always struck her a little, seeing it hang there empty, like looking at the better version of herself, waiting to be let in.
There was nothing to do but begin.
She did the things she did every evening, in the order she always did them, because the order was its own kind of steadying. She washed at the basin, careful with the little water she had, scrubbing the day's work off her skin. She unbound her hair and worked it through again, patient with it, until the red of it lay smooth and bright down her back the way the crowd liked it — the way she liked it, if she was honest, because there was little enough about her life that got to be beautiful and this at least was hers. She saw to her voice the way another woman might see to a blade, humming low and easy up and down through her range, waking it, loosening it, coaxing it toward the shape the night would ask of it.
By the time the light in the window had gone from gold to grey to the blue of early dark, the dress was dry, and she was ready, and the sounds of the tavern filling up below had begun to rise through the floorboards — the scrape of benches, the swell of voices, the first calls for the first drinks.
She stood, shook out the dress, and stepped into her other self.
