Losing Heart Among the Tall Page 2

  Ma’s treasures had been cleared off the mantel and wrapped in napkins to keep the dust off them. Beyond them, through an open door, was the garden. Matille had seen to that too. Every strip of weed was ripped out, the soil turned, and the smell told him she’d ordered manure mixed into the bed. It waited, rich and ready for planting.

  A muscled woman with a shortsword was kneading bread out there, keeping the dough out of the dust, no doubt.

  Cook and bodyguard both, Royl guessed. The government would have wanted to offer Matille a bit of security. She knew a lot of sensitive Fleet secrets. Come to that, so did he … at least for now.

  “Where’re Gale and young Pureheart?” Matille had taken Beatrice’s measure.

  “Off adventuring, where else?,” he said. “We fished up some trouble on the route.”

  “No great surprise there. Kir Feliachild, let’s make you comfortable.” She led Beatrice through the rubble to a covered couch and sent Royl upstairs to discharge the carpenters so their noise wouldn’t disturb the baby.

  He was tempted to leave them banging away. If it was uncomfortable enough, Beatrice might go spend the evening on Nightjar after all.

  But when he came downstairs she was seated on the couch with every evidence of growing roots until she got her way.

  * * *

  Gale and Parrish showed up just around dinnertime, both in the obscenely high spirits that meant whatever they’d stuck their snouts in, it stank to the skies.

  “It’s about what you guessed,” Gale said over soup. “The inscription for Temperance has been taken, and the mer detachment that was sent to retrieve it has all vanished, but for the fellow who turned up with a spear through his chest.”

  “It’s happened twice before,” Parrish added. “Both times, they managed to retrieve it. Apparently the Piracy has made it a point of pride to catch and destroy the heart.”

  “Three thefts?” Beatrice said. “Careless.”

  Nobody bothered to respond. In a sense it was true, but the lady had lived a sheltered life. She’d forgotten how many things here were only possible until someone drafted the right spell. You could protect a vault from every physical threat and ward it to the skies: make it unopenable, make it invisible. But every bolt-hole had its weaknesses. People, usually. Corruption.

  And the old refugees of the Piracy were masters of thievery.

  “Intelligence’s plan at this point would be to mislay Yacoura,” Gale said. “To stop spending all this time and energy on efforts to protect it ashore, and hide it at sea. But to lose it they have to retrieve it … and if they retrieve it, it becomes dishonorable to just dump it somewhere. It’s a mess.”

  “So the merman would have lost it on the way,” Royl said. “There’d have been a plan.”

  “What do you mean?” Beatrice asked.

  “You can’t go dropping something in the ocean and hoping for the best,” Gale said.

  “The heart couldn’t just be lost,” Parrish agreed. “It would have to become famously, magically lost.”

  “What if Gale loses it?” Royl asked.

  “Gasparin and his superiors seem unreceptive to that suggestion.” Parrish said.

  “Why?” Beatrice said.

  “Perhaps they don’t care to accept outside assistance.”

  “But ye’ll look for it, won’t ye?”

  “Oh, we’ll look,” Gale said.

  The two of them, woman and boy, gleamed at him like hounds on the hunt, and for just a second—even though he’d chosen this, even though it was right—Royl felt hurt, left out of the fun.

  * * *

  The baby screeched the night through, as babies do, and Matille made the most of their wakefulness.

  They had given Beatrice the best of the bedrooms. This left the two of them in her childhood berth, the little room where Royl and she had first made love. It was like being a kid again: fumbling in the dark, giggling, trying to keep their voices down as Beatrice, alert and no doubt ill-tempered, paced on the other side of the hall, singing unfamiliar songs to her daughter and muttering.

  Gale muttered too, Royl thought, when she was at her rope’s end. They probably picked it up from their mother.

  “Why is she here?” Matille asked, after they had exhausted themselves and she’d curled her tiny body against his chest.

  “Officially, to present the child to the Verdanii Allmother. Nightjar’s to take her after they drop me here.”

  “And in fact?”

  He kissed her palm. There was no sense lying to Matille. “To talk me out of this.”

  She pinched him again.

  “She’s afraid Gale will get killed when the guard changes from me to Parrish.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Their priestess has always said Gale would die by someone else’s hand,” he said. “Since birth, they said it. Destined, this Feliachild, for murder. I spent thirty years worrying over her safety and shooting at shadows and we’ve both gotten gray.”

  “Now you’re worried out, is that it?”

  “I’ll be to blame,” he said, “if I stay and I’m no longer fit. If I don’t pass her on, she’ll slip through my fingers. I was good for her for all those years, Matille; I kept the watch. But I’m not gonna be good, not for that life, not for much longer. She needs a younger man.”

  “So I’m getting Gale Feliachild’s dregs.” She was teasing, but under it there was probably a current; being funny-lookin’, as ’Tille put it, had always left that little niggling thorn of sensitivity.

  “I ain’t used up, woman, and I ain’t broken. Mebbe I am running from her death, a little, but I can still run.”

  “Poor Beatrice, then,” she said, with a breathy laugh that reminded him, once again, of secret sweaty nights, two adolescents screwing in a storm of fear her pa would catch them. Her hand wandered downward. “Run for me, Royl.”

  * * *

  Next day, they had a visit from the Furies.

  The five miserable and barely habitable rocks that had been the chief refuges of the Piracy had been among the last nations to join the Fleet. The question of whether to take them in—to forgive—had been the last great constitutional battle since the Compact was formed. Four of them—Isle of Fury, Isle of Gold, Passiona Libera, and The Brewpot—had barely reformed, taking to petty crime to sustain their economies. A fifth, Issle Morta, had gone the other route: eschewing slavery, becoming a nation of monks and penance, a place where the dead were serviced and the living were largely unwelcome.

  The man who turned up at the door was no penitent. An elderly gent with a bejeweled cane and dagger-sharp, blood-red fingernails, he was dressed in a black suit trimmed in back with long feathers and cut to fit snugly, to imply he carried no weapons. His eyes were bird’s eyes—cold, unforgiving, and inhuman.

  The effort of walking from his carriage to the front door left him shaky.

  “Don’t let him in,” Beatrice objected, but Matille swung the door wide and invited him to enter. Now the old pirate was sitting on a sheet-covered stool, perched between it and his cane, mastering his breathing and casting a lively eye on all Royl’s ma’s wrapped gewgaws, perhaps wondering, out of habit, if there was anything of value hidden in there.

  “My name is Gregor Avenge,” he said at length, after the cook had brought in a plate of cookies and found an excuse to busy herself at the fireplace. “I have come to appeal to your sense of justice.”

  Beatrice didn’t quite manage to hide a scoff.

  “’Peal away,” Royl said.

  The old man launched into a long and spellbinding recitation of the Piracy’s historic complaints about the Fleet: that Temperance had hunted their vessels long after the days of raiding were over—true enough, though never conceded by the government—that she had sunk an Isle of Gold ship full of wounded and widows—also true, though there were those who said Lucre had been put on the seas as bait. When she’d sunk, Isle of Gold had simultaneously shamed the Fleet and gotten rid of two hundred expe
nsive dependents.

  “The days of peace have lasted two lifetimes, and there is no call anymore for a ship-breaker,” Gregor wrapped up. “Our dead are owed some restitution.”

  “Every nation that signed the Fleet Compact agreed to let bygones be bygones,” Matille said, in her lawyerly way. “No old debts, no reparations. The past to be left in the past.”

  “With the threat of Temperance sharp and shining at our throats, what else could we have chosen?”

  “Given your history, Kir, I should think you should be grateful for the Clean Slate Provisions,” Beatrice snarled.

  “Ye gods, let’s not dive into constitutional law,” Royl said. “There’s no profit in gnawing at arguments that the government itself can’t chew. What is it you want from us, Gregor?”

  The old man grinned. “My people have vowed, over the bodies of the Lucre’s slain, to have some justice. Clean Slate be damned, the day shall come when we get our … our heart’s desire, you might say. If it should fall your way, if it has fallen your way, the old freebooting nations would be grateful. Not just my people. Isle of Gold…”

  “That dead merman got the heart of Temperance back from you,” Beatrice snapped. “You and your allies are offering to buy it and buy us, is that it?”

  “That would be a breach of Compact,” the old geezer said, rising. “I would never bribe any of you, or threaten you either, for that matter,” he said. He let his long claw stroke the eggshell-delicate head of the baby.

  To Royl’s surprise, Beatrice didn’t melt into hysterics or back down. She smiled, ever so faintly. “You haven’t the slightest idea who I am, Kir.”

  Those avian eyes showed no doubt, nothing of humanity, but the old lips pursed a little. “Nor you I, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, I know you,” she said, with that particular species of withering contempt that her people had perfected for use on incompetents, the corrupt, and people who abused the helpless.

  He inclined his head. “Then you shouldn’t underestimate my reach. Verdanii is a big nation, but every land can be crossed.” With that, he tottered, cane tapping, to the door.

  Nobody said a word until his carriage had gone off down the road.

  “Well, well,” Royl said. “Merman’s stashed the heart, all right.”

  “He’ll go after Gale now,” Beatrice said, mulishly hitting that one note again.

  “Nah,” Royl said. “He’s overlooked her.” It happened a lot; in an effort to fend off the day when she’d be murdered, their parents had Gale scripped so she was beneath notice and hard to remember. When she wasn’t right in front of you, she tended to fade from your thoughts.

  The cook folded her apron. “I should report in.”

  “Are you all right, Kir Beatrice?” Matille asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Beatrice exploded. “Pirates at the door, uttering thinly veiled threats, and you, you old bureaucrat, you think having Sloot here in your bed matters more than … can’t you see the danger to my sister?”

  “Actually,” Matille said, “I believe he threatened you.”

  * * *

  Gale and Parrish circled back their way in the dead of night, trying to slip in silently and instead making all those noises that make it comical and pointless: dropped shoes, bumping into each other in the dark, whispered, conspiratorial chuckling. Royl and Matille lay abed and listened as Beatrice confronted them, scolding her sister at length in their birth tongue, growing ever more frustrated by the unrepentant tone of Gale’s replies.

  Royl slid out of bed and found Parrish in the garden, cleaning muck off his boots. He had a black eye and seemed cheery enough; he’d been troubled when Royl first took him on, but he’d found his peace on Nightjar. It was one of those things that made Royl immensely proud, that anchored him when he doubted his course. The boy had had his heart broke, but he’d mended him, he and Gale.

  “The merman—Bertran—had the heart when he was speared,” Parrish said. “We’re pretty sure the Furies don’t have it now.”

  “Think he dropped it in the deeps?”

  Parrish shook his head. “He had a pet of some kind … a fish, maybe? It’s swimming around with it.”

  “Might take a while then, to find it.”

  “The Piracy is patient,” Parrish said. “The Tallon government’s problem is twofold. They get Yacoura back, honor demands they lock it up. Then it gets stolen again. It’s apparent the Piracy has been able to bribe someone with access.”

  “Aye. So someone has to find the pet. One fish in all the ocean … how hard can that be?”

  “They must have had some way of finding it.” Parrish said.

  “And once it’s found, ye need to lose it.”

  The boy gathered up the curls of mud he’d cut off his soles and broke them up, vanishing the clods into the garden beds rather than leaving Royl a messy pile. “Major Gasparin wants someone to do just that—they have a scribe who can cast some kind of Legend on it, to make it impossible to find. But it can’t be a Tallman who loses it.”

  “You find out why he objects to Gale doing the job?”

  “She’s out and about too much; the Furies might grab and torture her.”

  That marrow-deep fear for Gale that had been so much a part of his life speared through Royl. “Same goes for you, I suppose.”

  “More so, since I’m not inconspicuous. It is,” Parrish conceded, “a not unreasonable concern.”

  “Lady Beatrice lives in seclusion. Get her back to her home on Erstwhile and everything’s golden. They’ll never find her there. It’ll even enhance the legend, won’t it? A mysterious Verdanii princess, hidden in a far-off land.”

  Parrish nodded; obviously, he’d already thought of that. “If Gale asks her to do it, as a favor, she’ll insist on you staying as master of Nightjar. She doesn’t think much of me.”

  “We’ll have to bring her ’round,” Royl said, but his heart sank. Easier to talk the wind out of blowin’.

  * * *

  Next day, Parrish and Gale made for Nightjar, bound to head out and find the heart itself. They left Royl with the unenviable task of explaining to Beatrice that they wanted a favor from her, of finally convincing her that she had to stop campaigning against his retirement and simultaneously help them with the hiding of the Yacoura.

  He took her down to the market and put it to her as they walked.

  She refused, of course. “Parrish can’t replace you. You and Gale been together three decades. Your experience—with her, with politics, at sea—”

  “Gale don’t need experience,” Royl said. “She has plenty of that herself. She needs someone who can climb cliff faces and see without squinting, someone who don’t ache from the moment he climbs out of his berth—who bounces out of the damned bed, fer Lady’s sake.”

  “Keep him on as her bodyguard, but—”

  “Do ye honestly think I want to stand aside?”

  “You’ve got your house and your girlfriend and your garden to tend. Your damned settled life.”

  “That makes you and me the same,” he said. “Are ye sure it’s me ye’re angry at?”

  She tossed her head, bouncing the baby.

  He said to Beatrice, “You sail for a lady for thirty years. She takes you into her confidence, into her bed. You wind hooks into each others’ hearts.”

  “Don’t make some big production of how much you care. You, with all your women—”

  “Neither of us made a marriage of it, true. We aren’t either of us the type, for one thing. For another, the prophets have promised she’s gonna get slaughtered one day.”

  Beatrice’s milky skin mottled red, a sign tears were near. “You were meant to see her to that end.”

  “One day’s been long in coming, Beatrice. Time comes you start feeling old. One day another of your lovers, the girl you grew up with, she says, “Hey Royl, let’s go retire and go home. We’ll live in your mam’s old berth. I’ll hire a baker to make us fresh catchcakes and spikeweed salad every mo
rning. We’ll live on our pensions and play with my grandkids.”

  Now Beatrice was crying.

  “Truth is, woman, I was surprised when I wanted to say yes. But that don’t mean I was itching for today. I was ready to be on Nightjar for one last sail, with my lady employer and my talented young mate, none of us quite ready to say good-bye. One final cruise. And ye—” He found himself angry. Ye’re ruining it, he wanted to say.

  “Ye’re testing us,” he said. “It’s probably a good thing. I’m more certain now than I ever was.”

  “You’re being selfish,” she sobbed.

  “What’s selfish? Hanging on to a job I can’t do perfectly anymore? Staying while the dread grows, knowing it’s all gonna end in savagery and heartbreak?”

  “Everything ends in heartbreak.”

  “It eats at your judgment. It makes you timid. It won’t do.”

  “That boy—”

  “He can do it, Kir, I swear it. I trust him.”

  “I won’t agree,” she said. “I won’t lose the heart if you stay here.”

  “The Cessation of Hostilities—the peace of the Fleet--is worth more than your sister’s life.”

  “Then it’s worth more than your cozy retirement,” she shot back.

  “It’s you risking her, if you force us all onto this course,” he said, and retreated to leave her thinking it over.

  But she’d got under his skin at last, he knew it, because when he went out and looked at the garden, his interest in buying seed had waned, and when he went back inside, Matille gave him a pinch that came to the edge of bruising.

  * * *

  Two days later, with nothing resolved and everyone stirred up, they made their way to Tallon’s Teeth.

  The waters north of the island were shallow and well-jagged with the tips of sea mounts, a hazardous draft of ship-wreckers made more dangerous by the fact that the winds blew hard from the south. Unwary ships caught in those winds had found themselves flung up against the grinding knobs and outcroppings, or dashed against the shore itself.

  The Teeth were a graveyard and a training ground for Fleet cadets learning to manage dangerous waters; there was a lighthouse, but three times a year they doused it so training craft could fight the wind and dodge the many ship-breakers. The Yards used the Teeth to test shipbuilding scrips, too, spells that warned sailors to steer clear of lurking rocks elsewhere in the seas.