Consequences

Blood and victory were hot in Betty’s mouth and the cold couldn’t touch her. The fight pits were well behind her now, but as she walked the empty streets her heart still beat twice as hard as it needed to on a quiet winter night like this. Her little girl Summer would have said it was soaring. She was poetic like that. For the hundredth time, Betty reached into her pocket just to feel the twenty gold pieces sitting real and solid there. Food, clothes, whatever they needed. Betty didn’t even have to calculate it. She knew it would be enough. 

There was her little house, snow sliding off the slanted roof. She could replace the hinges on the old door now. She swung the creaking thing open.

Hairy forearms and spit flying between yellow teeth as bloodshot eyes wilded and dirty hands wrapped around Summer’s throat. A man was shaking her as her small fingers struggled uselessly to dislodge his grip. Ingrid, the girl Betty paid to watch Summer while she fought, was sobbing around a hurt arm in a corner of the cramped room.

A roar tore itself from someplace deep in Betty’s guts, but by the time it reached her own ears she was on the man, wrenching him off Summer, holding him in a headlock right at the back of his balance and resisting as he tried to throw her off. She reached for any remaining scrap of patience she could find and pushed as much calm into her voice as possible. “Go with Ingrid to the bedroom, sweetheart,” she said to Summer. “Everything will be okay.”

Summer’s eyes streamed water and her throat showed two red marks. Breathing heavily, she managed a nod, then Ingrid grabbed her hand and fled the room, slamming the door behind them.

Betty let her patience go. The man fought back, battering her skull, ripping the fresh stitches in her side. She barely felt it. All she felt was the sight of those two red marks on Summer’s throat and she hit him, again and again, as hard as she could, even as his counters began to slow and his punches failed.

Someone grabbed her arm and she whirled around, ready to hit out, but stopped in time. It was Tommy. Her brother. “What?” she hissed at him. “He put his hands on Summer. He could have killed her.” She resisted the urge to shove Tommy off.

“Look at him, Betty. He’s nearly dead.”

The man was slumped against the side of the stove. His eyes were black lumps, his face a swollen mess. His breathing was shallow.

She turned back to Tommy. “I just told you, he-”

“Listen to me,” Tommy enunciated. He lowered his voice, even here. “I couldn’t even have a drink at the Sea Witch tonight without an Inquisitor sitting in the corner, watching me. We cannot afford a dead man.”

She shook her head. “Since when have the cops cared what happens in the Drift?”

“Probably since Nicky got his name on their lists for doing fuck knows what.”

He was right. Nicky, a black cloud where their reliable and funny and driven younger brother had been. He’d been discharged from the military and wouldn’t tell either of them why. She didn’t want to think about the price she’d paid keeping him from execution.

“Betty.” Tommy’s brown eyes looked straight into hers. “We can’t afford more trouble. We’re breathing in firedamp here, and you want to light a match.”

The sharp, hot energy that had raced through her veins seemed to dissipate, and without it she could feel every place her body had been battered. She sat down at the little round table and stared blankly at its rough wooden surface. It was true. Of course it had to be fucking true. “Alright,” she said to Tommy, hating every word. “Then we won’t let him die.”

She stood and walked a few paces to the cramped kitchen and opened a little box by the stove. A faint red glow illuminated bandages and suture string. It glinted off a needle and the metal lid of a tiny bottle of antiseptic. The light came from the most precious thing in the box.

She had only one healing potion. She’d bought two in a panic when a load of lumber had fallen from a ship and pinned Tommy’s arm to the gangway while the rest of him fell straight down towards the sea. That awful sound. She’d recognised the crack of breaking bone immediately, but it was her brother’s scream that chilled her heart. She’d run to him, jumping over rolling logs, pushed the log off and pulled him up by his good arm. She’d carried him to the side of a warehouse and laid him against it while she sprinted to a market stall and hadn’t taken the time to even consider that the shopkeep would try and sell her more than she’d need. She just took them. The arm healed after he drank the first one, and now she kept this second. She’d refused to drink it after plenty of fights when a quick and easy recovery would have been bliss. She knew there would be a time they really needed it. And now it would go to waste.

“Betty.” Tommy’s voice was wary. He was crouched next to the man, frowning. “Hurry.”

The damn thing seemed to glitter all the brighter now that she couldn’t keep it. She went and roughly lifted the man’s chin, then poured the potion down his throat. 

They waited. 

He’ll be fine. It’s just taking a moment to spread through his body. 

It didn’t take a moment for Tommy. 

Finally, she looked at her brother. His face was grim. She flipped over the man’s arm to check his pulse.

Stark black veins bulged against the white of his skin. The big vein down the centre was collapsed, roiling with lumps and twisting into spirals in all the wrong places. Just like her mother’s arms. 

“He must have known Angie,” Tommy said, “and come to steal from her.”

Betty held a finger to his wrist. If he was a junkie, his pulse could be slower, especially if he’d expected a high and not got one. She pressed harder. Tommy was silent, letting her concentrate. 

When she looked at him, the answer must have read on her face.

Tommy swore. 

Betty breathed. Options. She would think of something. She always did. 

She looked again at those ruined veins and the needle scars burrowing through his arms. Quietly, she said, “Do you know where Ma’s latest hiding place is?”

“Why?”

“Maybe he took too much.” Tommy searched her face, then went to the pink pot that sat on the bench, having lost its place on the stove. The lid was broken, and it never got used anymore, but Betty still hadn’t thrown it out, because what if the good pot broke? He pulled out a sealed glass vial and Angie’s syringe. 

Betty’s mouth twisted. She didn’t want to see that damn needle, or that dark red liquid that had stolen so much of her mama away. But she took both when Tommy handed them to her. She snapped the top off the vial and drew the cloying stuff into the syringe, then lined it up with the best vein she could find and pushed in. 

“We could dump him in the old mine,” Tommy said quietly. “It would explain the cuts and bruises.”

There had been gold under Cyren, once, long before her or Tommy’s mining days. Long before their births, even. Now, it was all wrapped around princesses’ fingers somewhere, but the mines remained. Holes dug right into the earth that you had to keep both eyes out for in the dark. Inside the mines was a popular spot for drug deals. If one more addict left after buying, but couldn’t wait to shoot up and fell down a very deep hole in his stupor, getting bruised and battered as he bounced between the walls, well, what was so suspicious about that?

Betty nodded. “Hold him with me. With one of us on each side, we can make it look like he’s drunk.” She glanced outside. With any luck, no-one would see them in the dark anyway. 

And it worked. They made it to the old mine without crossing paths with anyone. But after they’d dropped the body and stepped back, a small cough broke through their relief. Hidden from the moon by the old factory wall he leant against, a man in a heavy jacket rested one boot against the duffel bag at his feet. “Friend of yours?” he asked, nodding to the hole. He flicked open a dagger and pressed it lightly against his finger, holding it out of the shadow where the moonlight gleamed it silver. “Don’t think about doing away with me just because I saw you, now.”

Betty ground her teeth. The man smiled. “Come on,” he said cajolingly. “I could be an Inquisitor for all you know. But, you’re lucky. Only my cousin is.” The smile broadened into a grin.

Twenty gold pieces. She’d won twenty gold pieces after winning five fights in a row. They were solid and real.

Of everything that happened that night, handing them over might have been what stung the most.