"Planning to steal it?"

He jumped at the unexpected voice and turned to see a short, lumpy shape blocking the entrance to the alley. Thinking of the Skimmer men with their scalloped blades he took a step back and almost fell down the stairs. "No!" he said, waving his arms for balance. "No, I was just… look¬ing. I've come to see Aislin the tanglewife."

"Ah." The figure took a few steps forward; Tinwright balled his fingers into fists but kept them behind him. "Well, that would be me."

"You?" He couldn't help sounding surprised-the voice was so low and scratchy he'd thought it a man's.

"I do surely hope so, drylander, otherwise I've been living someone else's life this last hundred years." He still couldn't see much of her face, which peered out of a deep hood. He could see the eyes, though, wide and wa¬tery, yet somehow quite daunting even in the darkened alley. "Move out the way, you young clot, so I can open the door."

"Sorry." He sprang to one side as she shuffled past him. He felt uncom¬fortable watching her mottled hand reach out with the key, so he turned his eyes up to the great horn above the door. "Is that from a unicorn?"

"What? Oh, that? No, that's the tusk from an alicorn whale taken up in the Vuttish Seas. Unless you're in the market for a unicorn's horn, that is, in which case I could be persuaded to change my story." Her laugh was halfway between a gurgle and a hacking cough, and she emphasized it by leaning into him and jabbing him with her elbow. If this really was Aislin, she smelled to the high heavens, but he found himself almost liking her.

The door open, she went gingerly down the steps. Tinwright fol¬lowed her inside and found himself beneath a ceiling so low he could not stand straight and so crowded with objects hanging from the rafters that he might have been in a hole beneath the roots of a huge tree. Dozens of bundles of dried seaweed and other more aromatic plants, sheaves of leathery kelp stems and bunches of flowers brushed his face everywhere he turned. Countless charms of wood and baked clay dan¬gled between the drying plants, spinning and swinging as he or the tan¬glewife brushed them, so that even just standing in one place made him dizzy. Many of the charms were in the shape of living things, mostly aquatic beasts and birds, seals and gulls and fish and ribbony eels. Those not hanging from the ceiling had been set out on every available surface, including most of the floor.

Tinwright had to walk carefully, but he was fascinated by the profusion

of animal shapes. Sonic even hail little glass eyeballs pressed into the clay or glued to the wood, making them seem almost alive…

"Ah, there you are, small bastard," said Aislin suddenly, to no one he could see. "There you are, my love."

The black and white gull, which had been staring back at Tinwright so raptly he had thought it only another particularly well-made object, yaw ped and shrugged its wings. Tinwright flinched back and almost fell over. "It's alive!"

"More or less," she cackled. "He's missing a leg, my Soso, and he can't fly, but the wing should heal. Still, I don't think he'll go anywhere-will you, my love?" She leaned down and offered her pursed mouth to the gull, which pecked at it in an irritated fashion."You have it too good here, don't you, small bastard?"

Aislin had taken her hood off and unwrapped her head scarf, freeing a bristling tangle of white hair. Her face showed the usual Skimmer features, eyes far apart, lips wide and mobile. Like other old Skimmer-folk he'd seen she also had a curious hard look to her skin, as though instead of sagging and growing loose as ordinary folk's flesh did when they aged, hers had begun to turn into something thick and rigid. Even the curl of inky tattoos on each cheek and at the bridge of her nose seemed to be disappearing into the horny flesh like unused roads disappearing under grass and weeds.

"Will you have something to drink, then?" she asked. "Warm yourself up?"

"Wickeril?"

"That muck?" She shook her head. "Wouldn't drink it. That's for Perikali sailors and other barbarians. Black Wrack wine, that's your drink." She slid between dangling charms toward the corner of the little house where pots and pans hung from wooden pegs-the kitchen, you'd have to call it, Tinwright supposed. She was shaped like a brewer's barrel, but with¬out the heavy cloak she moved with surprising nimbleness through the confines of her crowded nest.

"What's it made with?" he asked-"Black Wrack" didn't sound all that promising.

"What do you think? Don't you know what wrack is? Seaweed! Grandsire Egye-Var protect you, boy, what do you expect? You wanted a tanglewife- what do you think 'tangle' means? Seaweed, of course."

Tinwright didn't say anything. He hadn't known-he'd thought it was just the word for an old woman who made healing simples and… and other things.

"What do they call someone like you in a place where they don't have seaweed- or Skimmers?"

She chortled with pleasure, a sound like a joiner's rasp. "A witch, of course. Now drink this. It will take the hair right off your chest."

Aislin was frowning as she emtpied her cup. She clearly contemplated pouring herself yet another, but instead sat back in the room's only chair with a sigh. Tinwright was balanced much more precariously on his stool, especially after finishing his own cup. He couldn't remember how much of the smoky wine he'd drunk while trying to explain the difficult, frighten¬ing business that had brought him, but he had downed more than a few. The wine was almost as salty as blood but still quite refreshing, and his fear had receded into a general smear of unconcern. He stared at the old woman, trying to remember how exactly he had come to this strange place.

"It's not that I have any scruples, boy," she said. "And I'm not frightened of much of anything, which you can see by me letting you in here in the first place."

Tinwright shook his head. Soso the gull gave him a baleful look and feinted toward his ear. The bird didn't seem as fond of the poet as he was of Aislin, and he especially didn't like it when Tinwright moved-he'd given him a few painful pecks on the ankles and hands already. "What do you mean, letting me in? I wouldn't hurt you."

"Hurt me? Should say not-I'd pop you like a bulb of rockweed, boy," she said with an evil, self-satisfied chuckle. "No, because you're a drylan-der… what was your name?" She stared at him, blinking slowly. "Ah, never mind. Because you're a drylander, and your kind isn't much liked around here just now."

"Why?" There was no resisting the notion, once it had crept into his head, that Aislin the tanglewife looked and sounded like nothing so much as a huge, gray-haired frog in a shapeless dress. It made conversation tricky. That last cup of wine wasn't helping, either.

"Why? By the Grandsire's soggy cod, boy, didn't you see? Big piece of Sealer's Walk burned down? Who do you think did that?"

Tinwright stared aghast at the goggle-eyed Skimmer woman. "It wasn't me!"

"No, you fool, and be glad it wasn't, but it was drylanders from up in the town, a gang of them, young and stupid and hateful. Three of our people were killed, one of them a child. Folk around here aren't very happy."

"Why did they do it?" Suddenly he understood the way some of the Skimmers had watched him and a chill swept over him. "I hadn't heard anything about a fire."

"You wouldn't. We take care of our own, and what happens here doesn't interest the ordinary run of casde folk-not unless the whole place went up in flames and threatened the rest of the town." The tanglewife settled back again, waving her broad hands as though to waft away a foul smell. "It's been bad ever since those Qar creatures crossed the Shadowline. We folk are different-they used to call us kilpies and sea-fairies, did you know? — so things go bad for us. It happened when they came the last time, too, in my great-grandmother's day. Everyone was driven out of South-march by them, eventually, but our folk were driven out first-and by our own neighbors."