In a competition of contemplative silences, against Tobias, Silver would always lose. “There was a forest here,” he said when his tongue simply could not keep still another moment. What an inane thing to say. Greasy scraps of newspaper still clung to his hands though the fish was gone; he peeled them away and threw them in the water.
“The Wood?” Tobias said.
“Yes. I suppose so.” Now Silver had brought it up, he could glimpse those islands again, hovering just beyond the edges of time; the darkness below the two of them might have been the broad waters, or it might have been the crowns of an endless expanse of trees.
“What happened to it?” Tobias said.
“It drowned,” Silver said. The last of the sunset was fading from the world behind him; the night was very dark. “It drowned.”
If Tobias answered, Silver did not hear it. A moment later he shook his head hard. The Hallow Wood asked nothing and offered nothing; it only was. Silver could contemplate the drowned forest at his leisure. Possibly he could even go for a walk in it. There were no precise rules to the way time behaved beneath the trees: softening, Tobias had called it, back when Silver had felt able to ask him questions of this sort.
But just now time did have demands to make of Silver. The likely fate of Maud Lindhurst grew darker every night she was missing. For her sake—or rather for the sake of Mrs Silver travelling overnight to ask, for Tobias with his head bowed over his knotted hands in the Lindhurst dining room—Silver would remain in this present moment, on the Rothport pier, with Tobias’s big quiet form at his shoulder, and his hands covered in the faint greasy residue of fried fish.
He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. When he’d wiped his hands, he almost turned to offer it to Tobias, only to find that the man had his own.
Of course he did.
“A moonless night,” Silver said instead, to cover the moment. “Ideal for a vampire on the prowl. Mr Finch, I fear you shall have to follow me at a distance. I doubt our hungry friend will take the bait if you are hovering over it.”
“All right,” Tobias said.
“Loath as I am to lose the pleasure of your company,” Silver said, “Miss Lindhurst must be our first concern.”
“All right.”
The conversation was as painful as picking one’s way through a patch of nettles. But Silver with increasing despair could not see a way to start a better one. He had to make the attempt. “I hope,” he said, “that any quarrels we may have had in the past can be put aside while we pursue this urgent matter.”
Tobias looked at him for a moment, and there was, after all, a crack in his reserve. Someone who did not know him might not have seen it. Silver did know him, and so he knew that look. Tobias knew perfectly well that Silver was trying to wheedle his way around him, and he did not approve. His arms were folded in the gesture Bramble still copied from him, and his expression was shuttered, and Silver understood him perfectly: Enough of that.
So, that was that. He might as well have stayed at home in his thorn-girt fortress, pitying himself. Silver glanced away, pretending to consider the shadow-town he was about to wander through. Lights at windows and from the gaslamps on the high street up to the hill picked out the outlines of it even on this dark and damp evening.
“Keep to the shadows,” said Tobias. Silver understood it for pity—no, for kindness, damn him, a kind and firm end to any foolish fantasy of repairing things. “He’ll be in one of ’em.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Silver said.
He set off into the dark alone. He did not hear Tobias follow after him. He had always been surprisingly soft-footed for such a big man.
* * *
Rothport after dark was cold and damp, and it still smelled strongly of fish. It was also not a big place. If it had not been a stopping point on the coast between the coal mines of the north and the greedy maw of the capital, it would be little more than a fishing village. Rothling Abbey was of some minor historical interest, but not nearly enough to justify the difficulty of reaching the place. Not even the most enterprising of railwaymen had troubled himself to extend the lines out this far.
Silver walked up and down its handful of streets and alleyways, forcing himself to think of nothing, to set the sting of rejection aside. Two years he’d had to recover from this; why had he started hoping? It was only the surprise of seeing Tobias Finch again. Silver would not be undone by him, not now.
He smiled mildly at the occasional figures who loomed out of the dark at him, but all of them were ordinary locals. When the public houses closed, the exodus of the drinkers resulted in several such meetings. One gentleman did show signs of wishing to lure Silver into a darker corner, but Silver quickly identified him as a mortal bent on personal amusement, rather than a nine-hundred-year-old hellbeast desirous of Silver’s lifeblood. At any rate, he turned positively green when Tobias materialised out of the shadows behind him. Silver rolled his eyes at the fellow’s stammered apologies to both of them and did not bother to correct his misapprehension. He nodded to Tobias, one professional to another, and set off into the dark again with a sigh.
It was all very dull. This was what Silver had always loathed about his mother’s approach to their one shared interest: how was it possible for the pursuit and discovery of marvels out of myth to be so thoroughly boring? Mrs Silver stripped romance and delight from everything; she looked upon the rarest and most extraordinary of beings rather as a rat-catcher looked upon rats. Perhaps she had been right all along. Perhaps Silver should have resigned himself already—resigned himself long ago—to a world that was essentially dry and unpleasant, where at the heart of every marvel there was just a skittering pest in the dark.
A little past midnight, Silver stood in the pool of light under one of Rothport’s few streetlamps, wondering if he should have just gone out in his nightshirt after all. Or perhaps the vampire’s historic tastes had changed so thoroughly that Silver was not suitable bait for it now; or perhaps it was entirely occupied with tormenting Maud Lindhurst and would not be abroad tonight.
Or perhaps after months of lurking in his thorn-girt fortress, Silver had lost his good looks on top of everything else.
He caught the peevish tone of his own thoughts and frowned at himself. He was not his mother; he would not be heartless. So Tobias Finch did not desire to repair their good relations; what had changed? Silver had not come here for him. He winced, catching his own thoughts in the obvious lie; why else had he come?
He had come, he reminded himself, because a young woman’s life was at stake. Maud Lindhurst, twenty-one years old: he tried to picture her and came up with a mental portrait of a sweet blue-eyed creature in a white dress. Possibly she wore flowers in her hair. She was of an age to be Silver’s younger sister. There, how could one fail to worry about Maud Lindhurst?
Something took hold of Silver’s sleeve. He made a sound closer to a yelp than a manly cry of surprise.
A wild-eyed old man who smelled strongly of fish—did anything in Rothport not smell of fish?—was gazing up at him in some distress. He opened his mouth and said—
Unfortunately, the old tramp’s local accent was so thick that it took several tries before Silver understood he was being given a terrible warning, and by that point he was trying not to laugh. “Thank you,” he managed.