harbor like a miniature Umber, with the Arrowhead River flowing along the west and the wooded frontier encircling its borders. The city drew its name from a rare form of salt—a mineral in the bay that evaporated with the water and effloresced, like fuzzy crystal mold, anywhere the rain or mist carried it from the harbor. Drifts and pillars of the salt could be seen around the docks, trees stood gray and yet surprisingly survived, and the buildings looked far more aged than they were. Grime and patchwork were everywhere and gave the houses and the port a workmanlike appeal, as of structures roughly used and practically repaired. It was a lived-in city, now to be their home.
Despite Molly’s affection for Captain Veer and the crew, she said her goodbyes quickly—though tearfully with kind Mr. Knacker—and the siblings hurried off, eager to leave the ship’s stinking confines, the sailors’ questions about their prospects, and the pall of Mr. Fen’s unexplained death.
Nicholas’s health had largely rebounded but his strength, such as it was, had not entirely returned. Molly dragged their trunk, all they owned in the world, and scraped a trail in the clean inch of snow upon the wharf. She marveled at the firm, still planks beneath her feet, the unfamiliar gravity of ground that didn’t tip. The weather made the city beyond the docks as blurry as the ships in the white-gray harbor. The air was clean and cold, the smell of people, cod, rotten wood, and even her own unwashed body given freshness by the sea. There were tables of vegetables and fish; barrels, crates, and carts; cats and dogs and fearless gulls; drunks and raggedy children. Hawkers sized them up, some with offers of goods or greetings of dubious intent, but by and large they were no more regarded than anyone else around the dockyard.
Nicholas strode ahead and almost lost her in the crowd. Twice she said, “Nicholas,” and twice he didn’t turn. Molly dragged on, frazzled and alert, and saw her brother more than thirty paces off and never slowing. Wind razored through her cloak. The snow chilled her toes. She stamped her feet to warm them up and dropped the trunk, becoming an obstacle in the walkway and refusing to move another step, ignoring the grumbling passersby and balling up her fists.
“Jacob Smith!” she yelled.
Her brother stopped and turned. He made his way back with quick deliberate steps, a thin dark figure in the crosswind of flurries, as cool as she was hot, and maddeningly blank. Each was all the other had, and he had very nearly left her, merely to reinforce the lesson of their names.
“No one’s listening!” she said. “No one cares who we are!”
“We talked about this,” Nicholas replied.
“We’re here without a friend or anyplace to go, and you’re prepared to walk away because I called you by your name!” Her shout drew the hesitant attention of a constable, a portly man with fat silver buttons on his greatcoat. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas!” Molly yelled to prove her point. No one listened. No one cared. In fact, her overcooked dramatics turned the constable away, as she appeared to be a wife giving fire to her husband, something far too common to arouse the law’s suspicions.
Nicholas slumped and bowed his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her shoes.
The frailty of his will—an inner slump to match the outer, which she couldn’t remember seeing in her brother all his life—frostbit her hopes. They were equals now, tiny and encumbered by their freedom, as reliant on her wits as on Nicholas’s.
He tried to hide a cough. Molly’s stomach swooped and growled. She had caught a whiff of bread that made her ravenously hungry, and rather than console her brother in his doubt, she picked up the trunk and followed the aroma, keeping Nicholas behind her as she wove through the crowd.
The smell disappeared. She had possibly imagined it, but now that she was leading she was warmer, more determined, and she came upon a cart of plump frozen apples. The vendor was a man with pink protruding eyes, very like the snow-packed fruits he was selling. He stared with terrible acuity at everyone who passed, assessing whether they were customers or thieves, giving the same sharp look to well-dressed matrons as he did to wily children and a lean mongrel dog.
Molly hadn’t tasted apples since they’d sailed from Umber—only hardtack and salted meat and vegetables the likes of which she wouldn’t have fed to hogs. Nicholas stood