The rain came down like it had paid for the night in advance, and meant to use every drop. The Split Kettle smelled of wet wool and smoke, and the kind of stew that apologizes for itself. I had the corner table, my lute drying against the wall, and my ledger open to a clean page I couldn't afford to waste.
A knock sounded on the tavern door.
It was already open. That was the first oddity. The second was that the knock wasn't a rap so much as a delicate tap, as if the knocker was worried about bruising the wood. Conversation thinned. A few faces turned. The door swung wider on its complaining hinge and a figure stepped out of the rain, and the last of the talk folded up like paper.
He was all bone and good posture.
Not the shambling sort you cross yourself at; not a war thrall with green fire where a thought ought to be. Just a skeleton in a neat, travel-stained cloak, water beading and running off the oilskin, hands folded at the ribs as if he'd been listening to a string quartet before remembering he didn't have ears.
"Good evening," he said, and the voice came from no throat at all, but I heard it plainly in the room, like a flute at a hearth. "Is there, by chance, a poet in the residence?"
Old Edda Candlepin, who digs the graves out behind the north wall knows everyone worth knowing, tilted her head toward me. Traitor.
I shut the ledger. "On most nights," I said, "there's a poet if the stew is thick enough."
He bowed. Bones creaked softly, not unpleasantly. "I am called Ulnar," he said "I would like to commission a song or two."
Laughter tried to happen, and then didn't. The Split Kettle is kind to strangeness when strangeness comes in with manners.
"Songs take coin," I said. "Or a story truer than coin can buy."
He looked down at his hands as if they might have remembered a purse. They hadn't. "I have a story," he said. "But I cannot vouch for its truth. That is the trouble."
There it was, the hook in the river. I felt it then, the part of me that makes poor decisions so beautifully, settling itself at the forefront of my mind.
"Sit," I said, and pushed the opposite bench out with my boot. He sat without a sound. Rain stitched the doorway shut behind him.
Up close, he'd polished himself. Not to a shine, that would have been vulgar, but to a respectful clean, the way you polish a father's knife before you use it. A small, brass bell fastened the cloak into place.
"A pretty pin," I said, because small talk is safer than big talk. "Bell of Aquaria?"
"I found it in a gutter," he said. "It seemed appropriate."
"Appropriate to what?"
"To being heard," he said.
Edda came by with tea. "On the house," she told him, setting down a cup.
He looked at it like she'd handed him a swan. "Thank you," he said.
"I will admire it."
Edda glanced at me and winked, before sauntering off toward the bar. I poured a second cup and pushed it closer to his side of the table, where the steam rose and fogged the bones of his hand without clinging. He watched the fog like a man listens to rain.
"What do you want the song to do?" I asked, taking out a stub of charcoal. "Hush a child? Win a trial? Sell out a room?"
"I want it to keep me," he said simply. "Not in a jar. In words. So that when I am misplaced again, someone might be able to find me, by reading."
"Misplaced," I repeated.
"Yes," he said, and folded his hands more tightly, knuckle on knuckle. "I woke in a cart under canvas, stacked with bones that were not mine. It was dark. The road had a rhythm I did not recognize. The man driving whistled a marching tune, off-key. When the wheel hit a rut, the bones around me clacked and laughed, but I did not. I did not know how. I learned later."
I wrote as he spoke, Woke in a cart, bones like dice, no name to pay the ferryman. The charcoal left a ribbon that looked more expensive than it was.
"Where were you taken?" I asked.
Ulnar's hands stilled. "There is a hole," he said. "Not a tunnel. A hole. People keep trying to fill it for me with explanations, and the explanations slide off the edges and are embarrassed."
I let the tea burn my tongue while I thought how to ask the next thing without turning him into material. There's a line between witness and theft, and I step over it for a living if I don't watch my feet.
"What do you believe is in the hole?" I said at last.
He tilted his skull, considering. The candle on our table made a soft cathedral out of the hollow of his cheek.
"I believe," he said, "that I belonged to someone. Perhaps to several someones, over time. I believe I was useful. I believe I have learned the shape of kindness by standing near it, the way a cold stone learns sun. I do not know if the belief is true." He looked at the ledger. "I was told poets can measure such things."
"Some of us," I said. "Most of us pretend."
He nodded, satisfied at the honesty. "Then, pretend carefully," he said. " I will try to be interesting."
I laughed, surprised into it, and it felt like finding a coin under a floorboard. "All right, Ulnar. Terms, I walk with you for a month. I eat what you eat, sleep where you sleep, ask what I shouldn't ask, and write what I shouldn't write, and at the end, there's a song. If I lie, the song fails, and you have the right to throw me in a river."
Edda made a small warning noise behind me. Ulnar looked delighted. "The river would give you back," he said. "You talk like a skipping stone."
"Coin?" I said, because romance is grand and rent is grander.
He reached under his cloak and brought out a string satchel with a handful of honest bits - a brass button, a mother-of-pearl chip, a smooth piece of stormglass. The stormglass caught the candle and, the rain and made them friends.
"It is not coin," he said. "But it is what I have. Also, I know where the crabs hide at low tide."
"Done." I said, and offered my hand. He took it like a ceremony.
Outside, the rain changed its mind and began to fall down instead of sideways. The Split Kettle breathed again. Conversations unfolded. Somebody put another log on the fire and missed. Smoke braided itself into the rafters and wasn't sure whether to settle.
Ulnar lifted up the cup of tea and held it under his face as if to smell it. He had no nose. He knew this. He held it anyway.
"Steam is very gracious," he said. "It visits everything once, whether it can drink or not." I wrote that down before I could help myself.
Ulnar's Marginalia
Steam fogs up the cup. It does not fog me. I envy the cup.
I caught Edda throwing her coat over her shoulders as I lifted my gaze from the charcoal stained paper.
"Heading out?" I asked, nodding toward the window being battered with desperate drops of rain.
"Oh, you know, I couldn't let Jory start a shift on his own," she said, "It gets dreary when you work alone." Edda paused while a grin seemed to form where her lips were before she spoke again.
"How's about you two come by the cemetery at first light? I'll make sure you can hear the kettle whistlin' as you arrive."
"If the tea is as spectacular as this," Ulnar said, turning to face Edda's gaze, "I couldn't miss it." He rose the cup to Edda as she dismissed herself from the now calm tavern. The cup was painfully full.
We finished the tea, or I did. Ulnar admired his. At the door he paused, turned, and knocked again. Two gentle taps, on the door that was already open.
"Practice," he said. "For future arrivals."
We stepped into the night and the rain welcomed us with honest hands.