“I-” Sal began, but Jane did something to his arm, and he moaned. “I get it. I get it!”
“Good.” Jane backed off a step and made the knife disappear again. “Hell, tell Iffie that if she really likes George so much, she ought to marry him. That ought to bring her running back right away.”
Sal, to Winter’s amazement, laughed and shook his head. His sons laughed with him, timidly, and at this reminder he turned on them with another roar.
“And as for you, Jim, I’m-”
Jane cleared her throat pointedly, and Sal paused.
“I’m going to have a talk with you,” he finished. “A long talk. Now go to your room and stay there.”
Jane took her leave, and Winter followed her back out into the alley. They said nothing until they’d gone round a bend and out of sight of the little shack. Jane sighed and rubbed her temples.
“Goddamn that kid. Scared the piss out of me.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath, then looked up at Winter. “Are you all right?”
Winter flexed her hand, which still tingled from the transmitted impact of the poker. “Nothing serious. I’ll be fine.”
“Fucking kid. Could have killed someone.”
“I think he wanted to kill you, actually.”
Jane chuckled. “I gathered that. Nice swing with the poker, by the way. Have I thanked you yet?”
“Not as such.”
“Thanks.” Jane ran a hand through her hair, mussing it further. “Sorry. It’s not every day a kid a head shorter than me tries to fucking shoot me in the back.”
“You could have fooled me,” Winter said, honestly. “I figured this was all in a day’s work for Mad Jane.”
“Don’t you start,” Jane muttered. “It’s bad enough that Sal and the rest started calling me that.” Catching Winter’s smirk, she changed the subject. “What about you, anyway? What happened to the girl who was too afraid to throw a bucket of shit at Mary Ellen Todd? Did you take lessons in swinging a poker?”
“Not. . exactly,” Winter said.
“You said it was a long story.”
“It is.”
“Well,” Jane said, “we’ve got a ways to go yet.”
By the time they made it back to Jane’s building, late in the afternoon, Winter had gone through most of the last three years. It had been a halting narrative, punctuated by Jane’s conversations with various merchants, fishwives, and other Dockside inhabitants along her route. A few times she’d had to stop while Jane was called on to solve some minor issue, such as one house’s tendency to lean onto another’s property and what that should mean for rents, or the matter of some rancid fish that somehow got packed into a shipment. Each time, the participants seemed to look to Jane for judgment as a matter of course, and accepted her ruling with more grace than Sal had done.
These gaps helped Winter keep her story straight. She told the truth, more or less, but left her personal involvement in events deliberately vague, and omitted any mention of Feor, Bobby’s healing, or that last awful night in the temple under the Great Desol. After a short internal struggle, she also decided to say nothing about what Janus had sent her to do. I still need to figure that out myself. I can always fill Jane in later.
Jane listened, her eyes going wider and wider, until by the end of the trip she was ignoring the friendly greetings that met her at every corner to concentrate entirely on Winter. When they stopped outside the barred gate of her building, she stopped and glared.
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Jane said. “You ran away from Mrs. Wilmore’s and joined the army, like some girl out of a ballad?”
Winter nodded.
“And then you served in fucking Khandar with Vhalnich?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Winter said. “I went to Khandar because I thought it would be a good place to hide. It’s not my fault they decided to have a revolution right after I got there.”
“You really did it,” Jane said. “I do not fucking believe it!”
With a happy shout, she grabbed Winter and hugged her roughly, and after a stunned moment Winter hugged her back.
“God,” Jane said, “and here I was pretending I was the tough one, when you’ve been marching around fucking Khandar and eating monkey brains.”
“No monkeys in Khandar,” Winter said, a bit muffled. “Beetles, though. They like to eat beetles. And there’s these sort of snakes that live in the canals. They pack them in mud and bake them-”
“Please stop,” Jane said. “I’ve just worked up a healthy appetite and I’d hate to ruin it. Does your diet still extend to cows and pigs?”
“Not often enough,” Winter said. “Mostly we ate mutton. I never want to see another sheep as long as I live, alive or boiled.”
“Come on, then. You can sample the unique Vordanai delicacy I call ‘pork roast pretty rare on one side and fucking black on the other,’ because Nellie in the kitchen is still learning and tries her best.” Jane shook her head. “I can’t wait to tell the girls you were in Khandar. They’re going to have fits.”
“No!”
The word came out of Winter with such force that it surprised both of them. Jane went quiet.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Winter said, only now becoming aware of the risk she was taking. If word gets out that there’s a girl-in-boy’s-clothing in the Colonials, I’ll never be able to go back. The thought of wearing dresses for the rest of her life brought her close to the edge of panic, and her collar suddenly felt tight and hot. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might not be able to trust Jane. “Please.” The word was all she could manage.
There was another strained silence. Jane coughed.
“Well,” she said. “It’s your story.”
“Thank you.” Winter felt her throat unclench. “I’m sorry. I should have. . said something. I’ll explain-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jane said. “In here we don’t ask about what happened to anybody if they don’t want to talk about it. Saves a lot of tears.” She smiled. “I guess we’ll have to entertain the girls with the story of how you saved my life from little Jim Bellows.”
Winter’s smile was weak, but grateful. “I don’t know if he could have hit you, to be honest. Except maybe by accident.”
“You’re probably right,” Jane said. “But we don’t have to tell them that.”
Supper was a drawn-out affair in Jane’s- Apartments? Barracks? Commune? Winter wasn’t really sure what to call it. The knocked-together kitchen and dining room weren’t big enough to hold all the girls at once, so they turned up in shifts, while a relay of cooks came and went in the kitchen under the uncertain supervision of Nellie-who-tries-her-best.
The dining room-fashioned from several adjacent offices by knocking down any inconvenient walls-was a churning flock of eating, talking, laughing young women, dressed in a bewildering variety of clothes that had all come from the bottom of someone’s ragbag. They ate off a menagerie of clay and wooden crockery, with flatware gathered from a thousand junk shops and rubbish bins. As far as Winter could tell, small groups turned up whenever they liked and ate their fill, then left to make room for others.
Jane presided over it all like a medieval baron, sitting at an especially tall table with a small group of the older girls. Winter had a seat to one side of her, which got her a few uncomfortable looks from some of the others, but Jane immediately launched into the story of what had happened at Crooked Sal’s, and that broke the ice. Abby, who seemed to serve as a kind of second-in-command, sat on Jane’s other side. Among the others, Winter recognized Becca and Chris from when she’d been captured, and was introduced to a short, soft-spoken girl named Min and a ramrod-thin woman closer to her own age called Winnie. These four, with Abby, seemed to serve as Jane’s lieutenants, and Winter’s presence at the high table apparently meant that she’d been added to their number.