Winter almost laughed but restrained herself. She hadn’t told Jane her story yet, and so Jane’s image of her was still the proper little girl from Mrs. Wilmore’s, who had to be painstakingly cajoled into the slightest disobedience.
“I can take care of myself,” Winter said. “Or at least manage to stay out of the way.”
Jane gave her an odd look but didn’t protest. They set off down the rambling Docks alleys at a more rapid pace, and Jane acknowledged the shouts of greeting from the people they passed with only a grunt and a wave. Their course tended generally downhill, and every now and then one of the straighter streets gave Winter a view of the river, glittering in the sunlight and aswarm with small boats. A few large cargo galleys were tied up to piers or making their way slowly upriver, like languid whales among schools of smaller fish.
When they were a few hundred yards from the waterfront, Jane turned into a narrow alley that passed between two stout brick warehouses and then into a back-lot no-man’s-land full of small wooden dwellings. Jane headed for the closest on the left-hand side, a shaky-looking two-story construction that looked as though it had grown like a mushroom rather than been built to any plan. The windows had rag curtains instead of glass, tied up in bundles to admit any passing breeze, and the door was wide open in the summer heat. Jane took advantage of this to walk right in, with Winter following somewhat diffidently behind her.
The bottom floor of the house was one large room, arranged around a firepit. A big, solid table stood beside it, smelling distinctly of fish, with a heavy carving knife embedded in it point-down as if it were a butcher’s block. A fat yellow cat, lazing in a patch of sunlight, rolled over and hissed at Jane, fur bristling.
The young man standing at the table had very nearly the same reaction. He looked to be about sixteen, thin and gangly, with a peach-fuzz mustache and a few stray wisps of beard.
“Your da upstairs?” Jane said, without preamble.
The boy puffed out his chest, though he’d retreated to put the table between himself and the intruder. “What if he is?”
“Don’t be a fool, Junior. Do I look like the fucking Armsmen to you? Go and fetch him.”
He deflated a little. After pausing for a few moments, just to show that he didn’t have to do what Jane told him, he ran to the rickety staircase at the back of the house and clomped halfway up it. “Da?”
“’M busy,” came a voice from above, like a drunken saint speaking from on high. “Tell ’im to go away.”
“Da, it’s Mad Jane!”
“Mad” Jane? Winter caught Jane’s eye with a questioning look. Jane gave her best mad smile and waggled her eyebrow conspiratorially. The shared, instantaneous understanding was so powerfully familiar that it made Winter wobble, weak at the knees. Right. She kept her hysterical giggles to herself. Mad Jane. I’m surprised we never called her that at Mrs. Wilmore’s.
The boy scurried out of the way as someone much heavier clumped down the stairs. This, presumably, was Crooked Sal, a man in his forties with only a fringe of stiff gray hair remaining around a bald, shiny pate. For once, no explanation of his sobriquet was necessary; Sal’s nose looked as though it had been broken at least a dozen times, and it zigzagged like a wandering stream. He wore a leather vest that left his arms and hairy chest bare, and smelled of old fish. Behind him, perching halfway up the staircase, was a boy of twelve or thirteen.
“You here to stick your nose in my business?” Sal roared.
“That’s right,” Jane said.
“Not a good habit,” he growled. “You keep putting that nose where it don’t belong and it’ll end up looking like mine.”
“Fortunately, nobody can bear to damage my good looks,” Jane said. “Now, what is this bullshit about you and George the Gut?”
“Fuckin’ George the pus-ridden Gut is havin’ his way with my virgin daughter!” Sal said. “I’ve got every right to show him the color of his kidneys!”
Jane scratched the side of her nose. “Iffie’s a nice girl, but you’re going a bit far there, aren’t you? The way I heard it, Iffie climbed through his window in the middle of the night.”
“She’s still my daughter,” Sal said. “An’ he shouldn’t have put his grubby hands all over her.”
“I’m hardly an expert on daughters,” Jane said. “But did you ever think this is what she wants? Getting a rise out of you? Remember what happened with Tim the Lad? Or Steve Shake Eye? Or that Hamveltai sailor you chased off?”
Sal’s face twisted. That had touched a sore point, obviously, and he fell back on good old-fashioned rage. “Get out, you stupid bitch! Take your big mouth out of my house before I break your pretty face for you!”
“Not until you promise me you’re not going to run off and try to carve up poor George.”
“I know who I’m going to carve up!”
Sal reached across the table and wrapped his hand around the handle of the carving knife. Before he could jerk it out of the wood, Jane did her knife trick again, blade flashing into her hand as though she had summoned it into being. In the same motion she reached out, lazily, and laid the edge of the blade against the apple of Sal’s throat. Sal froze.
“I would think real fucking hard before you do that,” Jane said. Her eyes moved. “And you, Junior, I would think even harder.”
The older boy had been edging toward the confrontation. He paused, and Winter passed unnoticed behind him. There was a heavy iron poker by the stairs, and she edged in that direction, ready to grab it if Jane lost control of the situation. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the younger boy fumbling with something-there was a click, menacingly familiar-
Winter reacted instinctively. She grabbed the poker in one hand, spun, and swung it around into the barrel of the pistol the kid had just cocked. He pulled the trigger just before the metallic clang of the impact, and she saw the flash of the powder in the pan, followed by the shatteringly loud report of the gun going off. By that time, her blow had knocked it well away from its intended target, and the ball pocked into a wall, throwing off splinters.
Sal was so surprised he let go of the knife and bulled forward, and Jane had to retreat hastily to keep him from cutting his own throat. He whirled to face the stairs, where the younger boy was cowering and clutching his stinging hand.
“Jim!” he roared. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“She was going to hurt you, Da!” Jim screeched. “She had a knife, and-”
“I am going to give you such a fucking thrash-”
Sal took a couple of steps toward the stairs and his cowering son, then stopped, because Jane had grabbed his arm from behind. He started to turn but halted when he felt the prick of her knife between his shoulder blades.
“You’re more of a fucking moron than I thought, Sal,” said Jane. “Were you planning to bring that thing to George’s?”
Sal had the grace to looked embarrassed. “George has got three sons. They might’ve been armed.”
“And if they had been? You’d have killed one of ’em? What for?”
“I just thought-”
“Thinking is the last thing you were doing. Now, you listen to me, Salmon Bellows. I have had enough of this, do you hear? When Iffie comes back-and she will come back, once she figures out you’re not going to pick a fight with George-I want you to have a nice long talk with her. A talk. If I hear that she’s walking around with bruises, I’m going to come back, and you and me will have a talk. You understand?” She nodded at the boy on the stairs. “That goes for him, too. It’s your own damned fault for leaving a loaded pistol lying about. You get all that?”