DWC June 2026 Day 6: Heat
Boralus stank in the heat.
This wasn't its usual salt and tar smell on a particularly muggy day, but something thicker and spoiled. Fish guts baking on the docks mixed with the sour funk of low tide pooling in the canals and the misery of too many bodies crammed into too little shade. There was no wind off the water and no mercy from the clouds, just a white, hammering sun that turned the cobblestones into griddles and sent dogs crawling under carts to pant in whatever shade they could thieve. Even the gulls had gone quiet, too lazy to scream, hunched on wherever they could perch with their breaks cracked open. Ridley had stripped his coat that morning. His sleeves were shoved past his elbows, his collar open, and still the sweat crawled down his spine. He stood in the doorway of the room they had above Chuck’s, watching Pebbles fan himself with a bent bit of cardboard while Oliver sat cross-legged on the floor, methodically pulling apart a bread roll into pieces small enough for Aggie to chew. The toddler was red-cheeked and fussy, her copper curls plastered to her forehead, whimpering every few minutes without committing to a proper cry. Sybil sat by the window, braiding dried lavender into a cord with the slow, dreamy patience of someone who did not appear to register that the room was roughly the temperature of a kiln. Her lips moved faintly, murmuring something. A prayer, maybe, or a rhyme. It was hard to tell with her. Agatha had toddled away from Oliver and was now tugging at Ridley's trouser leg with one sticky hand, her round face flushed pink. "'M hot," she announced, with the grave authority only a three-year-old could muster.
"Yeah, darlin', we're all 'ot." Ridley scooped her up and settled her on his hip. She grabbed a fistful of his collar and leaned her damp forehead against his jaw. "Right," Ridley said, and pushed off the doorframe. "We're goin' out."
Pebbles looked up, instantly suspicious. "Out where?"
"Swimmin'," Pebbles repeated, flatly. "In what? The canal? I ain't puttin' my feet in that, there was a dead dog floatin' in it Tuesday—"
"Not the bleedin' canal." Ridley was already pulling his satchel off the hook, adjusting Agatha as he checked the waterskin before tossing a threadbare towel over his free shoulder. "There's a spot out past Hatherford where me an' Merrick used to go when we was lads. Trees come down thick n'the water's cold even in the summer, fed by snowmelt off th'ridge."
Oliver's eyes lit up with interest. "Can Aggie go in?"
"Shallow bit near the rocks, yeah. She'll be fine if someone's got 'er." Ridley's gaze drifted past the boy to where Sybil sat as the boys scrambled to their feet. "Oi," he called, not unkindly. "You comin' or what?"
Sybil's mouth twitched into something that was not quite a smile, yet not quite a frown. She rose from the window with the careful, light-footed grace of a creature used to stepping over roots and uneven ground, gathering her skirts in one hand. "Aye," she said softly. "The stones are bakin'. Even the shadows have gone warm."
The walk there took the better part of an hour, which meant the better part of an hour of Pebbles complaining, Oliver silently enduring, and Aggie riding Ridley's hip because her fat little legs gave out before they'd cleared the last warehouse district. Ridley carried her without comment, one arm hooked beneath her, his jaw set against the heat while the toddler grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and babbled at passing seagulls. Sybil walked beside him, barefoot, she'd taken her shoes off within ten minutes of leaving Boralus, claiming the road wanted to be felt, and her skirts were hiked above her ankles, dusty and sun-warm. She hummed as she walked, some formless tune that rose and fell like breathing. "'Ow much further?" Pebbles groaned, dragging his feet. “I can’t go on much longer!”
"You asked me that five minutes ago," Ridley said without turning. "Answer's the same. Shut it."
"Then walk on your 'ands."
Oliver, quiet as a church mouse, tugged Pebbles' sleeve and pointed. Through a break in the scrub oak and tall grass, the land dipped into a hollow—a natural basin carved out by some old creek that had pooled and widened over centuries, fed by a thin waterfall that trickled down a mossy rock face. The water was clear and green-dark where the shade hit it, dappled gold where the sun broke through the canopy of twisted oaks. Flat stones lined the edges like crooked teeth, warm enough to sit on, and smooth enough for bare feet. An old rope still hung from a crooked branch that overhung the deep end, frayed and sun-bleached but sturdy enough. "Used t’swing off that," Ridley said, nodding toward the rope. Something flickered in his face, a memory, maybe. The ghost of a boy who hadn't yet learned to be this hard. "'Merrick'd go first, e’always 'ad to go first. Shoutin' the whole way down like a bleedin' lunatic."
Pebbles had already stripped off his shirt, his ribs sticking out like a washboard, dirt-tanned skin stretched tight over a body that ate too little and ran too much. "Last one in's a naga!" he hollered, and launched himself off the nearest boulder with a whoop that sent a small cluster of birds fleeing into the sky from the overhanging branches.
The splash was enormous for such a scrawny boy. Oliver hesitated, looked at Ridley, then looked at the water before he pulled off his shoes with a quiet determination and waded in from the shallow end, gasping at the cold. "Ahhh—'s freezing!"
"That's the point, innit?" Ridley called back.
Agatha's head came up, and her eyes went enormous. "Wa-wa!"
"Yeah, sweetheart, water." He crouched down beside the water's edge, guiding Agatha’s small feet into the shallows where the stream barely covered her ankles. "You stay right 'ere by the edge, yeah? Shallow bit only. No goin' deep." Agatha was already squirming toward the deeper end of the water with the single-minded determination of a toddler who had identified the one thing in the world she wanted and intended to have it wholly. Ridley caught her by the back of her little shirt before she could pitch herself headlong off the ledge. "Oi. Oi. What'd I just say?"
"Wa-wa," Agatha repeated firmly, as though this constituted a complete counterargument. She squealed then, a bright, clean sound, the kind only very small children make, and stomped, sending up little fans of spray. Ridley's hand stayed firm at her back, steadying her without thinking about it.
In the meantime, Sybil hadn't moved. She stood a few paces from the water's edge with her arms folded beneath her shawl, watching the others with an expression that sat somewhere between longing and quiet dread. Ridley, of course, noticed because he always noticed. It was the worst thing about him, or the best, depending on who was asking. "Oi." He tipped his head toward the pool. "You comin' in or what?"
Sybil's jaw tightened. She looked at the cascade, at Pebbles splashing Oliver, and at the dark water where the bottom disappeared. Her fingers dug into her own elbows. "I'll...sit a while first. Get me bearings."
Something about the way she said it—the careful lightness, the way her gaze stayed fixed on the surface rather than the depth, made Ridley pause. He narrowed his pale eyes and studied her the way he did that made most people squirm. “Sybil.”
"'Tis a lovely spot, really." she said brightly. "'Tis grand, so it is. The trees are talkin' to each other, d'you hear them? The oaks, they're old, older than—"
The silence that followed was answer enough. She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug that tried to be careless and landed somewhere closer to embarrassed. "Sure the streams in Drustvar weren't built for swimmin'. Sharp stones and cold enough to stop your heart, they were. We'd wade, is all. Ankle-deep for the washin'."
Ridley stared at her, blinking twice as he processed this. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. "'Ang on. You—you can't swim."
"Y’didn’t say y’could." He looked genuinely thrown, the way another man might look if told the sun rose in the west. In Kul Tiras, swimming was not a skill, it was an assumption. Babies born learned to float before they learned to walk. Dockworkers who couldn't swim were dead dockworkers. Even the Dampwick gutter rats, especially the Dampwick gutter rats, could tread water in the harbor before they had all their adult teeth. Ridley ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair and stared at her as though she'd just confessed to having a second head tucked under her shawl.
“I'll thank ye not to look at me like I've told ye the sky is purple."
"'Twasn't...there wasn't cause for it, where I come from," she said, quiet and clipped. "The water in Drustvar's not the sort ye go splashin' about in for a grand time. 'Tis dark and cold and full of things that'd as soon pull ye under as look at ye. The rivers run fast and the loughs are deep and dark, and me da always said there were things in the deep water that remembered before we did. Ná téigh san uisce dorcha—don't go into the dark water. So we didn't."
Pebbles, treading water in the middle of the pool, let out a bark of laughter. "You're 'avin a laugh! A Kul Tiran what can't swim? That's like a dwarf what can't drink!"
Sybil's eyes flashed. "I can drink, ye wee—"
"Nah, nah, makes sense though, dunnit?" Pebbles grinned wide, slicking wet hair out of his face. "Backwoods Drustvar lot, all that witch business—bet you could turn yourself into a fish though if you tried, couldn't ya? Just do a bit of the ol'—" He waggled his fingers in a mocking pantomime of spellcasting. "Go on then, give it a go! Flop about a bit, see if somethin' happens—" Ridley's hand connected with the back of Pebbles' wet head with a sharp clap. The boy yelped, ducking, and Ridley fixed him with a look that could've curdled milk at forty paces. "Ow! What—"
"I said button it." The second look was worse than the first, and Pebbles, who had survived the streets of Boralus long enough to know when adults meant their threats, sank lower in the water until only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible, sulking like a bony crocodile. Ridley turned back to Sybil. She had her arms wrapped tighter now, her chin tucked as the flush spread down her neck. One bare foot was drawing a slow circle on the stone. He softened then, loosening his jaw and dropping his shoulders; his usual gruffness pulling back just far enough to let something gentler breathe underneath. "Oi. Look at me." She did, reluctantly so, her lavender and brown eyes bright with embarrassment. "There's nothin' to it," he said, quieter now, dipping his voice low enough to keep the words somewhat private between the two of them. "It's instinct, yeah? Your body knows. Th’water’ll hold you up if you let it. Y’just got t’not fight it."
Sybil chewed her lip. "That sounds like somethin' a person says right before another person sinks like a millstone.”
"I'm right 'ere. Ain't gonna let nothin' happen. Water's calm 'ere, no current, no undertow an it’s shallow enough to stand near the edge. Ain't no dark water, ain't no monsters in the deep. Just a swim 'ole where two manky Dampwick boys used to come t’wash the gutter off 'emselves in summer." Something passed behind his eyes—a flicker, there and gone, and he looked away toward the water where the light broke into shards on the surface. "'E'd bring whatever 'e'd pinched from the market and we'd eat stolen pears and float about till the sun went down. Most o’the good memories I got of bein' small are 'ere."
Sybil looked at the water once more before lifting her gaze to his. Her fingers twisted in the hem of her shawl, and then she asked. “How did Merrick teach you, then? When you were small?"
Ridley's mouth twitched. "Well," he said. "It went somefin like this." He put both hands on her shoulders and shoved her straight off the ledge. Sybil hit the water with a shriek that scattered birds from the oak tree and made Agatha freeze mid-splash, her mouth a perfect little 'o' of astonishment. Pebbles choked on his own laughter and Oliver clapped both hands over his mouth as she vanished beneath the surface in a cloud of sandy hair and flailing skirts. Ridley stood on the bank with his arms crossed, counting.
Sybil erupted from the water like a furious, sputtering otter, hair plastered flat over her face, both arms wheeling, coughing and gasping and mad. "Ridley!" She coughed up a mouthful of water, treading clumsily but treading nonetheless. "Ye gobshite! Ye absolute—a Mháthair na dTonnta, I'll—"
"You're swimmin'," Ridley said.
Sybil stopped mid-curse. She looked down at herself, taking in the sight of her arms moving through the water, at her legs churning beneath her, at the fact that she was, demonstrably and undeniably, not sinking. "I'm..." She blinked and pushed the hair from her eyes with a shaking hand. "I'm swimmin'."
"Told ya. Ain't nuffin but instinct."
"Ye pushed me off a cliff!"
"Ledge, barely four feet." He dropped in beside her with an easy splash, surfacing with a grin he couldn't quite suppress. "Merrick shoved me off worse. Reckon there was rocks involved."
"That's not—that isn't teachin', that's assault, you brutish—"
"Aggie, you watchin'?" Ridley scooped the toddler up and pointed. "Sybil's swimmin'. See?"
"Sib!" Aggie shrieked, clapping her fat hands together. "Sib swi'!"
Sybil's fury cracked. It was impossible, Ridley had seen her try, to stay angry with Aggie beaming at her like that. "...Aye," she said, quieter, and something wondering crept into her voice despite herself. She moved her arms experimentally, turned in a slow circle as she felt the water slide around her. "Aye, I suppose I am. Tá mé ag snámh. Would you look at that." She then splashed water at Ridley with both hands, sending up a wild arc that caught him across the chest and chin. He didn't flinch, but he did finally smile. "Ye could've warned me!" Sybil huffed.
"Merrick didn't warn me neither," he retorted. In the meantime, Oliver had found the shallow ledge near the waterfall and was sitting with the thin stream pouring over his bony shoulders, eyes half-closed. Pebbles, incapable of stillness for more than thirty seconds, had discovered a rope of old vine dangling from an oak branch and was attempting to swing from it into the deeper water with the reckless confidence of someone who had not considered the concept of physics. "Pebbles, if you crack your 'ead open, I ain't carryin' you back," Ridley called.
"You won't 'ave to, I'll be dead, so it won't matter!" Pebbles launched, and miraculously the vine held. He dropped into the pool with a whoop and a cannonball splash that sent a wave crashing over Oliver's head. Oliver surfaced, spat water, and said nothing, but his look could have peeled paint.
Sybil drifted closer to Ridley. She'd found her rhythm now, it wasn’t graceful or strong, but it was steady, her legs working in slow kicks beneath the surface, her chin tipped up to keep her face clear. Water beaded on her freckles and her hair floated around her shoulders like pale weed. "You're an awful man, Ridley Laamb," she said, but her eyes were warm.
"Yeah, well." He shifted Aggie higher on his hip. The toddler had gotten a fistful of his wet hair and was attempting to eat it. "You're swimmin', so I reckon awful works."
