1
Wherein Dellaria Hunts About for a Wayward Relation, Is Not the Recipient of Maternal Warmth, and Is Presented with an Opportunity for Gainful Employment
Dellaria Wells had misplaced her mother.
That maybe wasn’t so accurate, to be very fair to herself, which Delly preferred to be. To be very fair to Dellaria, she didn’t have to do too much to misplace her mam. Her mam had a way of misplacing herself, like a cat who’d dart for freedom if you left the kitchen door open. But it’d been two weeks now, and even as gristly an old cat as Delly’s mam ought to have gotten hungry and come home after a fortnight of roaming. Something had gone wrong, then, and as dreadful as her mam might be, it made Delly’s stomach take disagreeable turns to think that she might be sleeping in a garbage pile somewhere. Delly, curse her eyes, was going to have to do something about it.
If you asked her mam, she’d probably say that her not having a place to stay was all her daughter’s fault. That was the way it was when you paid someone’s way: it went straight from you doing them a favor to them thinking you doling out cash was all part of nature’s plan, like a bee making honey. But Dellaria hadn’t yet discovered how to make a moneycomb, and at the moment she was so damn broke that she couldn’t cover her own rent, let alone the rent of her dreadful brigand of a mother. She’d lost the steady work she’d had as a barmaid two weeks ago, when a regular got a little too insistent about trying to kiss her and she’d used her fire witchery to set his beard on fire. Now she was down a job and forced to live off of her wits alone. Her wits, as it turned out, made for very unsatisfying dining.
She was so presently impoverished, in fact, that she’d been avoiding her landlady for a week by only entering and exiting her room via the back alley. On this particular occasion, though, Mrs. Medlow was lying in wait for her by the kitchen door. “Dellaria,” she said. “You know the rent’s been due for a regular span now, dearie.”
“Oh, might it so, ma’am, might it so,” Delly said, thinking at her fingertips a bit. “I was just going to say when I saw you next, ma’am—and me having found it very right peculiar how I haven’t seen you in some time, ma’am, right peculiar indeed—that I present you with ten sen of interest per day I’ve been late, ma’am, if that might be ensatisficating to your fine self?”
At that her landlady got a considering gleam in her eye, which she attempted to cover over with a delicate and motherly twitter. “That’ll do very nicely, dearie,” she said, “if you’ll let me put another very wee hard promise on you.”
Delly drew herself up a bit at that. Her landlady wasn’t all that much of an expert wizard—just a gutterwitch, like Delly herself—but she could cast a hard promise with the best of them. Since the Lord-Mage of Hexos had invented the parameters for the damn things ten years ago, half of the ill-intended gutterwitches and debt collectors in Leiscourt had learned to cast a hard promise—there was nothing like them for extracting money out of the recalcitrant—but Mrs. Medlow’s could have been used as examples in a course on the subject. Get your rent to her an hour late and you’d break out in throbbing pustules at best. “That ain’t needful, Mrs. Medlow,” she said. “I’ve always been as good as my word with the rent, you know that.”
“You’ve always been as good as your word because I’ve put hard promises on you when you looked likely to run off to Monsatelle, dearie,” Mrs. Medlow said, to which Delly was forced to concede a trifle. Let your landlady curse you once with an itchy rash on your haunches and you’re unlikely to cross her a second time.
Delly narrowed her eyes at her. “Maybe I ought to take my custom elsewhere, then,” she said. “To some kind personage less likely to set vile curses upon their paying guests.”
“You might,” said Mrs. Medlow, with wonderful placidity. “And pay eleven tocats a month for the privilege. That’s the going rate these days, dearie, and here I am charging you six out of kindness, even in such hard times.”
Delly sighed. Mrs. Medlow, though a dreadful old cat, had an air of plain honesty about her personage. Delly wasn’t new enough to the copper-rubbing life to not know that any new room you moved into would inevitably be more expensive than whatever room you’d just been kicked out of for not being able to pay the rent. Enough of her memories had also survived her attempts to drown them in gin for her to understand that if by some thankful gift of the gods she managed to scrape together a bit of extra money this month, she wouldn’t necessarily make the same the next. If she wanted to save herself from her own damn turnip-brained self, she knew very well what she should do: swallow her clever talk, keep the room, find some way to make some money, and pay as much rent as she could up front before she could waste her last sen on liquor and cards because she didn’t have the self-control of a dog with a lamb chop. Which was what inspired her to open wide her gin-hole and say, “The hard promise, then. I get you your money in three weeks at latest, with interest compounding the whole while, or you hit me with what you like.”
Mrs. Medlow twittered like a lark. “I would find that very agreeable, dear Miss Wells,” she said, and grasped Delly’s hand to force a hot bolt of magic through it.
Delly winced and shook her hand out. “What’s my curse to be, then?”
“Pustules,” Mrs. Medlow said, very cheerful-like. “The seeping kind. On the face, mostly.”
Delly decided not to inquire as to where the type that weren’t on the face would be. Instead she just gave Mrs. Medlow a resignated nod and headed out the door to search for her damn mother.
She knew better than to think that Mam might have managed to pay for another week’s rent on her own. Still, she hoofed it down to Crane Street to check on the old bird’s last known address—she wasn’t there, no surprise—and then took a moment to buy a cup of coffee and a withered sandwich from a dingy coffee shop, sit on a bench in a park that was more a sanitarium for wan crabgrasses, and have a bit of a restful luncheon.
Thus refreshed (or close enough to it), she rose back up onto her trotters and started to look for her mam again. The real key with her mam, she thought, was to think of places where you could sleep for free without getting your head wet or having to listen to any sermons. Delly herself would much rather nod piously along to the sermon, soup, and predawn alarm if it kept her out from under bridges, but her mam had a way of advancing on people with her hand out, spouting off exactly the kind of thing that’d make even the most even-tempered hall officiant’s ears go red, and then striking very radical and antiestablishmentary attitudes after they kicked her out of the meeting hall, by way of indicating that she hadn’t wanted any of their damn soup in the first place.
Not that Delly really had any room to criticize the way her mam chose to live, when she herself had to get herself cursed with seeping mostly-on-the-face pustules before she could be trusted to pay her damn rent.