Page 49 of The Salt King

Jericho looked as though Avelyn had just slashed him across the chest with a knife.

Annunciata pushed the door open and then closed it quickly behind her. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, looking between them. Even to her, new to body language and expressions, the way they were staring at each other must have looked as though they were about to either have a huge fight or begin confession. Avelyn swallowed, honestly not sure which it would have been.

“No, come in,” said Jericho.

“Um. Small request.” She looked worried. “I was hoping Avelyn would be available to bite the people who keep following me around.”

“Following you around?” Avelyn echoed, going to the window. Jericho came too. He was silent on the flagstones, but Avelyn could feel the cool of that void in the salt light close on his left side.

It was true. In the courtyard, a knot of people were talking excitably. They were all watching the Lodge door, clearly waiting for Annunciata to come out again.

“They want to know what kind of prayers I did,” she said awkwardly. “And whether I pray the rosary, and what I read, and . . . I can’t get them to go away. I might need a bit more firepower?”

Avelyn wasn’t sure he had ever been more relieved not to have to finish a conversation. “It would be my pleasure to bite some people for you,” he said, not looking at Jericho.

Word of Annunciata’s cure must have reached the stranded tourists too, because dozens of them had come down to An El. As soon as Avelyn and Annunciata came out, camera flashes went off everywhere, and the silver-clad Polaroids made their old-fashioned chucking sound as they rolled out the photographs.

“Come on, pack it in, you’ll blind her all over again,” Avelyn said. “What are you doing? Leave her alone.”

“Something strange is happening in the pictures,” Fabian protested.

“See? It isn’t just a lens flare, it follows her around!” someone else said excitedly. “It’s like a halo—a real halo!”

Avelyn dove on the chance. “Yes, there’s about ten of you with it.”

Instant clamour.

“Ten! Which ten? Do I have it?”

“Do I?”

Suddenly everyone was much more interested in him than in Annunciata, who crept along the wall and towards the passageway that led to the bridge.

“You’ll see, if you take pictures of each other,” he said, and hurried after Annunciata as quickly as the stitches would allow. He caught up in the passage. Her halo lit the way brighter than any lamp.

“A halo?” she said to him, voice echoing.

“It’s salt light,” he said. “It clings to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.” He felt freshly exhausted at the prospect of an entire conversation in Hreod. He wanted to turn back and claim to be too hurt and tired to do anything but curl up on the couch and be read to, but then Jericho would ask him what he had meant about his grandmother, and . . . Oh God, he was up and walking in the right direction. And it was true that suffering was character-building. His least favourite humans were the ones who had never known an iota of unpleasantness or difficulty. Suffering made you appreciate the times when you were all right, instead of becoming righteous and vengeful about being asked to come into the office instead of working from home. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to find some of the miners, see if they know. What time is it—half seven? We might catch someone from the Balen coming up from the deep.”

“Well, I’ll tell you now, maybe I have a halo but I’m no saint,” she said. “I eat popcorn during Mass to aggravate Sister Michael.”

“Annunciata, if that isn’t saint material, I don’t know what is,” Avelyn said. “But Reyes has it too, and he seems like a narcissistic pervert.”

“Anyone can be redeemed,” she pointed out.

“Well, he’ll be redeemed with a much higher voice if he tries anything here.”

She laughed, but not as much as he’d hoped. “I just wonder . . .”

“What?” he said.

“It’s just—I always thought of my blindness as a kind of—I don’t know, my burden to carry. I was glad of it. It made my faith stronger, and it gave me so many opportunities for patience and perseverance and all the rest, and now it’s gone, I just—well, I think it’s going to take me further from God, not closer. I’m a goldfish person, Avelyn. I’ll forget what it’s like to struggle, I’ll forget what it was like for Christ—”

Avelyn kicked her ankle. “All right, Saint Sebastian.”16