The Stars Over Bittergate Bay

Chapter 4

4

S idney only ever had a head for celestial problems, so he spent the next half hour unpacking four months’ worth of star charts, explaining what he’d seen in the sky, and what had happened with Rookwood’s telescope. When he finished, he took a deep breath and finally dared to look up from his charts.

Jonas Rookwood sat on a stool in front of the wide table. The last rays of the setting sun set off a deep reddish hue in Rookwood’s dark hair and lit his irises a shockingly bright amber. Sidney tried not to ogle him, but Rookwood was massive, standing easily eight or nine inches higher than Sidney’s five foot eleven. The height would have been intriguing enough, but Rookwood was broader than two Holyworth fullbacks put together. His shoulders were an intimidating square wall, as he hunched forward over the charts, peering through a pair of small gold wire frames that sat incongruously on the wide bridge of his nose.

Rookwood had asked him no questions for the length of his tale, which Sidney appreciated. Relaying the chronological sequence of events was the only thing keeping him from falling into an absolute panic at the very idea that the young woman standing on the other side of the table from him, partially in the window sill, was a ghost.

She seemed perfectly nice, and only incorporeal if he squinted slightly. The edges of her, like the places where her red hair frizzed out of its updo, were differing measures of transparent. At one point during Sidney’s tale telling, she moved one of his charts across the table to get a better look at it, and Sidney had to swallow a sharp gasp that left an uncomfortable bubble of air in his chest.

“When did you first see the star cluster?” Rookwood asked, shifting the charts around, looking apparently for the first one in the sequence. Sidney leaned across him and tugged the paper out from beneath several others.

“Here. That’s… June fourteenth.”

“But that’s not the first day you were stargazing in Menelaus,” Rookwood posited. Sidney frowned.

“That’s true,” Sidney said. He hadn’t thought of that.

“So, something happened in the first two weeks you were there,” Delilah said. Her elbow was propped on the table and her hand held her chin, all of which required her to have some physical structure. Or she was just very accomplished at pretending to have physical structure. Sidney would have asked, but he didn’t want to be rude.

“Nothing happened while I was in Menelaus. At all,” Sidney said. “I worked. I was studying. I told Karolina?—”

“No dalliances in the evening? No moonlit strolls along the Aegean?”

“Menelaus isn’t on the Aegean,” Rookwood corrected. Delilah sniffed.

“Well, I don’t know. I never went anywhere but Athens, and I only read the Iliad once for school. Still,” she looked back at Sidney, her gaze piercing. “There wasn’t anyone ?”

“Is witch sight granted exclusively by sexual congress or something?” Sidney stammered, irritated more by his embarrassment than by the concept itself. He wasn’t a prude, but these were total strangers.

“Sex is the easiest way for it to occur by accident.” A small smile curled at the corner of Rookwood’s handsome mouth, like he might have some suspicion he was making Sidney uncomfortable. Ass. “Humans only gain sight by taking in component fluids of an entity from another realm. Blood, for example, in a blood oath or a pact. Though I imagine you’d know if you’d made one of those. Then, of course, there’s the other sort of component fluid,” Rookwood blinked at Sidney and then skated his eyes downward toward Sidney’s hips in a way that Sidney did not appreciate. He could feel the heat stain his cheeks as he blushed again, which was also very irritating.

“I didn’t have any relations with anyone between the time I got to Menelaus and June fourteenth,” Sidney said. “I’m quite sure of it.” Rookwood shrugged.

“Well, then it must be something else. A bit of fae trickery, perhaps?”

“Did you eat food you found on the ground? A delicious candy, or something? Turkish delight?” Delilah asked. “God, I used to love Turkish delight.”

“No,” Sidney shook his head. “I really didn’t. And I wouldn’t. And anyway, I don’t feel like I’m tied to anyone, so is it really that big of a deal?”

“You don’t feel like you’re tied to anyone right now,” Rookwood said. “But if someone comes around to collect on a bargain you’ve accidentally made, you’re going to be bound to it, whether you remember it or not.”

Sidney pursed his lips. That did not sound good. And he really had other things to be doing, and part of him felt like this was a load of nonsense and he was very eager to wash his hands of all of it. How did Karolina even know this man?

But if he walked away now he would always wonder. And he would be stuck awaiting the return of what or whoever had granted him witch sight. Possibly forever. Which sounded miserable. Sidney groaned and dropped his head into his hands, trying to think.

“Maybe we ought to stop for supper,” Rookwood suggested. Sidney could feel the looks Rookwood and Delilah were exchanging over his head. Sympathy from Delilah, exasperation from Rookwood. Sidney sighed. And then something occurred to him.

“What about a kiss?” he asked, straightening up. Delilah’s eyebrows shot up and Rookwood’s lips remained in a thin, skeptical line. “Is saliva a component material? Sealing a deal with a kiss? That’s a thing, isn’t it?”

“Only with humans, I think,” Delilah said.

“Merfolk,” Rookwood said. Sidney’s eyebrows shot up.

“Merfolk? Mermaids?”

“Any gender,” Rookwood said. “Water is a component element for merfolk. So, kissing is a sort of marking for them, I think. Not a permanent one, like some of the others. Draws you to the…” he slowed, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Sidney. “Draws you to the sea. I don’t suppose you swim much?”

“I never learned,” Sidney said.

“You didn’t go into the water at all in Menelaus?” Rookwood asked. Sidney shook his head.

“But then how would he have met a merfolk?” Delilah asked. Sidney frowned.

“The best place to see the stars was on the north shore of the island. There was a little group of locals,” Sidney bit his bottom lip, trying to remember if he’d ever seen which direction they arrived from. He would be watching the stars, and he’d look up from his eyepiece and there they’d be. That was how it happened. “One of them kissed me,” he said, his hand coming to the corner of his mouth, remembering her cool skin on his cheek, when she’d pressed soft lips to the corner of his smile. It hadn’t been romantic, just friendly. He assumed it was a local custom of some sort and hadn’t questioned that he never saw anyone else do it.

“Hoping you’d come into the water so she could drown you and eat you, most likely,” Rookwood scoffed, shaking his head. “Well, that’s that then.”

“What do you mean, that’s that?” Sidney demanded. “That’s nothing. What does it mean? Do I never go into a body of water again? Should I be careful in the tub? What am I?—?”

“I think we can remove it,” Rookwood said, his voice calm though his mouth twisted in a smirk of amusement that lit his amber eyes. It made him even more attractive in a way Sidney deeply resented. “Marks are curses, of a sort.”

“Well,” Delilah interjected, and Sidney glanced at her in time to see a skeptical purse of her lips. “‘Curse’ is a little strong, isn’t it?” Rookwood rolled his eyes, sweeping his glasses off his face before he continued.

“We just have to meet its conditions and, luckily, I think that mostly involves getting you into the water and then back out without letting merfolk kill you. We can manage that, surely.”

“Can we?” Sidney asked weakly. The way his day was going, he’d be lucky if he made it two feet without stumbling headlong into a cosmic wormhole filled with interstellar creatures who wanted to eat him. “Are you sure there isn’t a less wet way?” Rookwood looked at him with an arched eyebrow, and Sidney tried to be reasonable. “I can’t swim,” he repeated. Rookwood sighed.

“I’ll do a bit of reading after dinner.”

“We could go up to Bittergate Chapel in the morning, and talk to Father Michaels,” Delilah said. Rookwood nodded as he stood.

“We could, though I think he’ll say the same thing as me.”

“I’m not opposed to a second opinion,” Sidney said. Rookwood snorted.

“Fine.” He started into the kitchen. “We’ll go tomorrow morning. If you feel the irascible call of the sea before then, do your best to ignore it. In the meantime, we ought to eat. We can talk about your charts over dinner if you like.”

With that topic of conversation proposed, Delilah excused herself, assuring Sidney that she didn’t eat anyway, and so it was no trouble for her to find something to do elsewhere. Rookwood ladled them each a large earthenware bowl of stew and retrieved two bottles of beer from the icebox. He handed one to Sidney before taking a seat at the end of the table. Sidney sat opposite him and tried to swallow down a million questions.

The tattoos at the base of Rookwood’s neck were visible and shifting as he swallowed. It reminded Sidney suddenly and severely of Mark Heaney. Not that Mark was even half as muscular as this man. It was a testament to Sidney’s foolishness that he found Rookwood handsome even amidst all this weirdness. He blushed, taking a large bite of stew and staring down into his bowl. When he’d first opened the door, Sidney had felt his knees go a bit weak. As though he hadn’t learned anything from Mark’s deceptive appearance.

He needed to focus on something else. Sidney took another bite of stew and began to sift through his numerous questions. He wanted to know about the symbols tattooed along the tops of Rookwood’s fingers. About this house, and its ghostly denizen, and how Rookwood had been granted his own witch sight. What other creatures that Sidney had assumed were firmly in the realm of fiction were actually real? For the first time in many years, Sidney’s charts felt like the absolute least interesting thing he could talk about.

“Why don’t you live up at the big house?” Sidney finally asked. Not chart related at all. “It’s empty, isn’t it?”

“Too large for just me,” Rookwood straightened up, like he’d just remembered he wasn’t eating alone.

“Can Delilah not join you?”

“She could,” Rookwood said. “But she prefers the garden cottage. Besides, I’ve been here for a while. I’m quite settled in.” The house was cozy, if a little worn around the edges. There were places where the paint had chipped, and cabinets hung slightly loose on their hinges. But it was warm and comfortable, the breeze off the water kept out by well-maintained windows and walls.

“Are you an astronomer?” Sidney asked.

“Only accidentally,” Rookwood’s smile curled toward mischievous again. Now that Sidney’s stomach wasn’t angry with hunger, it swooped at the sight of Rookwood’s clever smirk. Embarrassing. Keep it together, Quince.

“How is one accidentally an astronomer?”

“It was a subject I ended up studying in pursuit of better understanding something else.”

“What else?” Sidney asked. Rookwood snorted.

“My turn to ask a question.” Sidney could hardly deny it. “Does it mean anything to you when I tell you that your purple star cluster is in a different celestial sky?”

“No,” Sidney said. Rookwood nodded at his bowl, apparently satisfied by this. “What is a different celestial sky?”

“The creatures Delilah and I mentioned to you earlier, faeries and demons, and even some merfolk…. They don’t live in this dimension. What your witch sight has allowed you to do, along with my telescope, is to see the cosmos of different dimensions. They usually call them ‘realms.’” Sidney lowered his spoon into his bowl and considered the implications of this.

“So, the purple star cluster is actually a planetary cluster from a different realm, drawing close enough to this one to be seen?” Sidney asked. Rookwood nodded.

“I believe so.”

“Do gravitational forces operate across realms?” Sidney asked. Rookwood chuckled, a deep, warm sound that made Sidney smile.

“And you’ve already struck on a topic beyond the scope of my knowledge,” Rookwood said. “They could, I suppose. Interdimensional planetary alignments do generate other phenomena.”

“Like what?” Sidney asked.

“There are literal books on the topic, Mr. Quince. I own several of them.”

“Can I borrow them?” Sidney asked. Rookwood shrugged.

“Be my guest.”