“Can you do anything else?”
He paused, studied her in the darkness. “Like what?”
“Like anything.”
He shook his head. “No. Just the dustwork.”
“Does it hurt you?”
“It’s cold, especially in my wrists. That hurts.”
She seemed to think about that. “How did you learn to control it?”
He wrapped his arms around himself, leaned back to study the humid night sky. There were no stars. “On my own, at first,” he said softly. “Like you. But when I got to Cairndale, they taught me things about it there too. Ways to use it safely.”
“Cairndale. That’s where you’re from?”
“In Scotland. Yes.”
“That is in Europe?”
“Yes.”
“You traveled halfway across the world.” Her voice was hushed.
He nodded.
But she didn’t seem pleased by this. She started winding the linen bandages back up, around her hands, in quick deft movements. “You traveled halfway across the world … for me? Because I can do what you can do. Why? What is it you want from me, Jacob Marber?”
It sounded strange, hearing his name from her like that. She didn’t talk like a child, that was the thing. He looked at her. “I want to bring you back with us. To Cairndale.”
She laughed a sharp, angry laugh.
“Why not?” he said. “What’s here for you? Who can do what you can do? Who would understand it, even, if they saw it?”
She bit her lip, looked away. “I know nothing about you. You could be anyone.”
But he knew she was thinking of her little sister, what would become of her. He turned the hat in his fingers. “You know one thing about me. Is that not enough?”
The girl’s eyes flickered to his hands, away.
“You can’t live here unprotected, Komako-chan, not forever. Our kind, we don’t do well on our own. People fear us.”
“Are there no people in Scotland?”
He smiled slowly. “Some. But the Scottish, they’re very … practical.” He looked at her and winked. He started to talk then, gently, about his childhood. He told her a little of how he’d survived as a boy in the alleys of Vienna, scared, hungry, until a man had come seeking him out, too. A doctor. The very man who’d written them in Kyoto about her. They’d been in Japan over a month now, he and his partner, and only sheer chance had brought her to them now. Chance, or fate. She could decide. He told her dustwork was not the only talent in the world and that his companion, Mr. Coulton, could make himself very strong. It was, he said, something to see. She listened in silence and never took her eyes from his face as he spoke and he didn’t know how much she believed. He said to her that he’d had a brother, a twin, who died when they were maybe Komako’s very age. That death had broken him and he’d never got over it and he never would. Lastly he told her about the glyphic, a man as old as the oldest tree, who lived in the ruins of an ancient monastery at Cairndale. They called him the Spider, because of what he did, because of his talent. He was, said Jacob, a finder.
“It is he who led us to you,” he explained. “In his dreaming, he waits at the center of a kind of web, and every time a talent is used somewhere, he feels its vibrations and tries to locate it.” The girl was watching his lips, as if fascinated by the words, and all at once he fell quiet, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m nothing like you, Komako-chan, it’s true,” he said. “I don’t know your life, what you’ve been through. But somehow, you and I, we’re the same. That must mean something.”
He raked his hands through his beard. She was maybe the very age he’d been when Henry found him in Vienna. Her eyes were dark and sad. Her hands were wrapped in linen, as if burned.
“Your brother,” she said. “He was sick?”
Jacob shook his head. “It was an accident.”
“The doctor who found you. He did not save him?”
“It was before that. He was … too late.”
“You would have done anything.”
Jacob breathed quietly in the night air. “I still would,” he said softly. And saying it out loud like that, hearing it said, suddenly he knew it was true, and he thought of the shadow woman and the orsine and what she’d said.
Komako took a long, slow breath.
“My sister is sick,” she said. “No one knows what is wrong with her.”
He nodded.
“I don’t know what to do.”