The Nature of a Pirate Page 28

  He wasn’t a fighter by nature.

  Stress made him hungry.

  Her scrutiny was making him nervous.

  “It’s fatalism,” she said. “Suddenly it’s like you don’t want to live. You could’ve stayed in Fleet and gotten beheaded, if that was where this was going to take you.”

  “I thought my friends would rescue me, remember?”

  “Yeah, and they were the bad guys. Sucks to be you. My offer still stands. I’ll pacify you so I can free you. And if I can protect you, I will.”

  “And in exchange?”

  “The truth would be nice. Do you have info they want? Or did they have some other reason for grabbing you?”

  He fiddled with the scrub brush. “My friend Eame, he knew things. Knew people. I don’t know where Nysa is or anyone who does, and nobody’s coming for me. You say Pree and Smitt were spies for Isle of Gold, looking to destroy us. Well, we’re destroyed now. All dead.”

  “Why did Selwig tell us to behead you?”

  “I’d got him killed—reason enough.”

  Liar, she thought. “Clearly, they still want something. Why won’t you let me help you?”

  “Mistress, nobody can.”

  “Incannis got caught. The attempt to sink Constitution failed. What’s next?”

  He shook his head.

  “Fine. Tell me about Pree and Smitt.”

  He shook his head.

  “I could make you.”

  He looked her up and down. “You won’t, Kir. You haven’t got it in you to subjugate a man, however depraved you may think him.”

  “No,” Cly’s voice made them both jump. “Sophie is a generous and uncommonly forgiving individual.” Kev began to bow, but Cly caught him under the chin, just with a finger. “The bonded don’t bow.”

  Kev straightened. His eyes fell on Cly’s sword.

  “As long as Sophie is here on Sylvanna, she will obey the law to the letter,” Cly said. “Perhaps reluctantly, perhaps in a fury.”

  “Cly, don’t terrorize him.”

  He ignored her. “You’ve endangered her twice. It would please me to wring every drop of blood that she shed when they inscribed her, every drop, slave, from your still-beating heart.”

  “Cly.”

  “Whatever scheme she hopes to engage in on your behalf, to salve her conscience, it depends on her not putting a foot out of place. If she does misstep—when—I shall swoop in, accuse her of fraud, and assume custody of you.”

  There was that assumption again, that she’d break the law or that damned oath the first chance she got.

  “Your Honor, I beg—”

  “The law requires Sophie to register you,” Cly said, in a pleasant tone. “I’m taking her to the office now, where she will do precisely that. You will be licensed and, apparently, pacified.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you may enjoy her gentle semblance of ownership for as long as it takes me to find a legal pretext for wresting custody of you from her unwilling grip.” He gave Kev a smile that would have frozen the sun. “Unless, perhaps, you’d like to give us the particulars of your colleagues’ scheme against Sylvanna?”

  Kev was visibly terrified. Yet, with an effort, he shook his head.

  “So be it.” With that, Cly summoned the hotel supervisor to once again take charge of Kev, before escorting Sophie back through the opulent lobby of the Black Fox and into the courtyard. The paving stones had been heavily salted against ice, creating a pocked expanse of stone, salt, and meltwater.

  “You’re right about him. I have seen men with that same look,” he remarked. “They believe they will die, that there’s no way out.”

  “Where to now?” she asked.

  “Over there…” A carriage draped in Fleet and judiciary livery was waiting for them. Its driver was a cheery-looking woman, ample-bottomed and dressed in a sports jacket and top hat. The horses were bays, tall geldings whose manes had been artificially dyed with a single streak of spruce blue.

  Garland was waiting in the carriage.

  Sophie looked at Cly in surprise.

  “Two affianced make one adult, remember? Your betrothed must also sign Lidman’s various papers.”

  Oh, crap. Now I’ve really gotten Garland into slave ownership.

  They rode in suffocating silence through the blue marble streets.

  There’s no getting out of this, Sophie told herself. I don’t do the paperwork, Cly will just take over. Kev’s a convicted criminal, and he chose this sentence. It’s just a prisoner transfer … just a transfer.

  What does Garland think of all this, of me?

  The carriage paused at the edge of the city, waiting on a uniformed gatekeeper, who opened ornately carved wooden panels that hid the entrance to a hundred-foot archway of stone. Within, Sophie saw an enormous cylindrical compound, cut like a giant core sample from the stone of the mountain. Its rim was limned in icicles, huge stalactites that dripped water down the edges of the cylinder and fed a series of lakes and streams about five hundred feet below.

  Buildings rose from the ground, some of them more than a dozen stories high. Clad in blue-white wood—more spruce, she assumed—they tapered to points at the top, like icicles.

  “This is the heart of the Winter capital, Hoarfrost,” Cly said.

  “And, I’m guessing, the Spellscrip Institute?” Sophie asked.

  Cly nodded.

  Their driver left them near the top, at a walkway that yawned over the chasm, connecting the outer rim of the cut-stone cylinder to the tallest of the buildings. An ordinary-enough elevator carried them down and Cly led them into the compound, threading his way over bridges and paths to a comparatively nondescript building—the bondage registry.

  Even at home, the registry’s decor would have screamed government office—blue spruce shakes on its walls, plain waiting room within. As was his way, Cly sashayed past twenty or so Sylvanners waiting to transact their business and demanded an immediate audience with a registration clerk. He got it, too. Within a minute they were in a private office, with a bureaucrat at their beck and call.

  “It is traditional to name convicts after their victims,” Cly said, proffering a page.

  Sophie took the pen and wrote KEV EAME LIDMAN.

  The clerk whipped through the rest of the document. Then, to her surprise, he slid an entirely different page under her nose.

  “The Spellscrip Institute would like to purchase the aforementioned bonded individual.”

  It was another big number; she was familiar enough with the Sylvanner currency, the akro, that she didn’t have to ask anyone to confirm it. She pushed it away with a shake of her head and a smile that she hoped was polite.

  The clerk did not react. “Will you scrip him fully compliant?”

  “Fully what? Like, my every wish is his command?”

  “He has been withholding information from you,” Cly pointed out.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Except for the violence thing, we’re leaving him with free will.”

  “Very well,” the clerk said. “A pacification spell?”

  She looked to Garland and spoke in English. “Can you see any other way?”

  If he minded being rude by excluding Cly, it didn’t show. “He gave permission, did he not?”

  “Twice.”

  “If he is incapable of provoking violence, it might actually make him safer. A landholder might attack him here, then claim he started the fight.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sophie, we are responsible for him,” he said. “He may yet hurt someone. There’s a chance he killed Daimon and Selwig. There’s no legal possibility of release if he’s not rendered harmless, and whether he’s an idealist or not, Kev’s predicament is of his own making. You and I cannot continue in perpetual ownership over a murderer.”

  “Agreed.” She nodded at the clerk. “Okay, do it.”

  Once the notes were made for that, she asked, “Is there a form to fill out for freeing someone
?”

  The clerk looked as though he was prepared for this, and handed over a big envelope. She glanced inside: six pages of dense handwriting in Sylvanner.

  “Is there a version written in Fleet?”

  “No,” Cly purred.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to help translate.”

  “Would you trust me to steer you aright?”

  “I might.”

  “It would please me to think so, daughter.”

  More games. Annoyed, she pocketed the pages.

  Cly gave the hotel address to the clerk, demanded a big carved key of blue-tinged stonewood, and led them out across another walkway, through a tunnel to the surface of the mountain. He unlocked a gate, using the key, and led them into a gated park.

  “There’s a bit of a walk here, Captain,” he said. “How are your feet?”

  “The medics’ salves are effective, Your Honor,” Garland said. “I can walk on flat terrain without much discomfort.”

  Cly’s estate on the southeast coast of Sylvanna had been a mixture of orchard and swamp: lowlands, apiaries, peaches, crocodiles, and a particularly toxic species of leech. Here, the microclimate was alpine forest: drier, with abundant evergreen trees, hardy stock adapted to lower temperatures and a bit of altitude.

  At home, these would be the Great Smoky Mountains, Sophie thought. There should be lungless salamanders in these forests … But no; the air seemed too dry.

  The trees were busy as a preschool. She saw young adult owls in a number of the trees, sleeping off the night’s hunt while lazily watching the forest floor for rodents. Songbirds squabbled in the understory.

  They passed the picked-over carcass of an elk and a limestone stalagmite that had been embedded just off the path, in the shade of a pair of spruce. It was covered in sluggish blue butterflies. Sophie reached automatically for her camera, remembered it had sunk with Nightjar, and felt a stab of grief.

  The butterflies were dying. The spruce above were dotted with eggs, and the butterflies, their laying finished, were waiting for the cold to finish them off. A woven basket below hinted at the purpose for the stalagmite that had lured them—the Spellscrip Institute was collecting the bodies.

  Farther up the trail was another collector of sorts: a massive wooden platform, towering skyward.

  “Bat roost?” Garland asked.

  “They migrate,” Cly confirmed. “And pause here. Some few are too weak to continue the journey. Those, we capture and tame.”

  One of Sylvanna’s major industries was writing and discovering spells … and, when they could, acquiring species that weren’t quite native to their microclimate.

  “We’re being sued over the platforms,” Cly said. “The people of Murdocco say the bats wouldn’t pause here if they weren’t encouraged. They’d have us tear the platforms down and pretend the bats aren’t perfectly capable of roosting in the trees and caves.”

  Sophie didn’t take the bait. It might be possible to prove whether the bats were or weren’t behaving naturally, but she wasn’t going to get involved in another Sylvanner lawsuit.

  “Captain, the ground becomes difficult here, but there’s a bench ahead,” Cly said.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  The trail forked back on itself, revealing the base of a cut-stone staircase so steep it would have daunted Frodo and Sam. A wrought-iron bench was set in place to offer a view of the core-sample layout of the Institute, with its icicle-shaped buildings.

  “Parrish?” Cly gestured to the bench.

  Garland sat without arguing.

  “Cly, why are we here?”

  “For the renaming.”

  She had assumed that would require another government office.

  He produced a wrinkled page. “Some old family names.”

  She scanned it. “Eugenia. Pels. Kalotte, Merina, Stayz, Clyonna, Ammonna, Harlot—Harlot?”

  “It means ‘nurturer.’ Why?”

  “No reason. Do I have to choose one of these?”

  He shook his head. “Of course not. Choose anything you like. It’s who you are, after all.”

  Who I am. The thought felt heavy and cold, like a wet towel after a chilly swim. Lucky-fertile-cute. Clever-persuasive and … and something to do with a fox that adopts raccoons. “I threatened to name Kev Bambi. Maybe I should call myself Thumper.”

  “Don’t martyr yourself to that odious man.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I know he threatened you and seeks to start a war.”

  You stuck me with him. Cly would just play innocent if she accused him. “What’s this name—Melia?”

  “It means ‘contrary,’” he said.

  “Contrary.” That at least captured their relationship. “Melia it is.”

  Cly inclined his head, handing the page to Garland. “We will be an hour or more.”

  “Understood.” Garland caught Sophie’s hand, looking straight into her eyes in that way that made her weak at the knees. Keeping up the pretense that they were engaged?

  No, he wasn’t that kind of a person.

  “We will sail through this storm,” he said. She felt a rush of heat to her face. Here he was, consoling her, when she was the one who got his ship sunk and his feet burned.

  Contrary, she thought. Calamity.

  “Daughter?” Cly said. “After you?”

  They began to climb.

  The vertical climb was about two hundred feet, and just steep enough to excuse her from trying to converse. It required concentration, but the stone was dry and the steps well maintained; in good weather, they weren’t truly dangerous.

  They came out on bare blue stone. Sophie glanced around, hoping to sample a loose fragment of the shale, but saw nothing nearby. They were on the edge of a cliff overlooking the city and, beyond and below, the sea. The cylindrical bore of the Spellscrip Institute was invisible from here, folded into the crags.

  The rocks were smooth and had a scrubbed look. There was no moss in the cracks, no little profusions of wildflowers, no discarded insect casings or spruce needles. The distance between the cliff’s drop-off and the beginning of the trees was about ten feet—a generous stretch of path. The trees themselves were close-planted into a hedge; spruce branches matted together into a solid wall of needles, an impenetrable barrier. Their trunks were wound around with a thorny vine studded with white berries and pale yellow flowers.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “It’s a temple. Children are named here.”

  “Temple. There’s a religious element to it?”

  He showed his teeth, forcing his face into an approximation of his usual, open expression, and nodded.

  Religion, she thought. Another Stormwrack thing that varied from nation to nation. Another interesting line of inquiry she hadn’t been able to dig into. If your people could work magic, what did you worship?

  What constitutes a miracle on a world where you make mermaids out of broken-backed children?

  They ran out of cliff, and the stone trail curved inland, the wall of trees clearing into a corridor, the trunks rising up soldier-straight to a height of about thirty feet, then bending to meet in a peak like a cathedral window. About every ten feet there was one tree that didn’t bend; it left a gap in the roof, a skylight through which she could see a glimpse of blue.

  It got colder as they walked. By the time they came out of the corridor, they were leaving prints in a three-inch fall of powdery snow.

  They were descending now, Sophie noted, through an ever-frostier corridor of trees. The forest was unusually quiet, but for their steps and breath and one steady, pulsing—

  Oh.

  Cly’s hair-trigger senses went off as the recognition gelled within her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. At least, I hope it’s nothing.

  “Lying is beneath you,” he said, and the strain in his voice was obvious.

  “It’s just … I’ve been having this w
eird symptom. Sounds, or like having someone tap me behind the ear. Tap, tap, tap. Or … like shocks in the air, very faint, that I’m feeling on my skin.” She stopped there. Everything she’d said was true, and she didn’t want to get into eragliding and her newfound ability to hear the Worldclock.

  “Since when?”

  Since Bettona fed me those anise biscuits. “It’s a long story, Cly. But it might mean someone—this woman Pree, possibly—is nearby. She’s involved with Gale’s murder, and everything that’s happened since.”

  His face grew serious. “Let’s hurry.”

  They picked up the pace, stepping out, ten minutes later, into a bowl of moss and pine needles, and soft furze, developing, over time, into a carpet of soil laid over the unyielding stone. The cleared circle was walled with trees, but these were divided into four quadrants, with corridors between them, and two streams—one steaming, one filled with chunks of ice—flowing to the bottom and vanishing into the leaf litter.

  There was a stand of willows just breaking into spring leaves to the right of the ice-limned spruce, and then, moving clockwise from that, an orchard whose trees were laden with fruit at peak season, peaches so ripe she could smell them. Last was a stand of maples in full, glorious autumn red and yellow.

  Winter, spring, summer, and autumn, she thought.

  Four people came out of the trees to meet them. A naked, knobby-kneed boy of about eleven years slipped between two willows, pushing them aside like curtains as a woman Sophie’s age ambled out of the peach orchard. A man in his forties or fifties, just going to gray and resembling Cly himself, stepped around the autumn maples. Crossing the ice of the stream, meanwhile, was a crone in black, so aged she looked like a mummy.

  “Calle Izt?” the crone rasped.

  Of course. They wouldn’t speak Fleet.

  Cly, to her surprise, dropped to his knees. He uttered a short phrase, the only word of which she caught was patter.

  Father.

  Should she kneel? He didn’t seem to think so.

  Tick, tick, tick. She shuddered. How far had she been from the pocket watch in San Francisco when the ticking stopped? Two miles?

  The crone made her bone-clicky way to Cly, letting her skeletal fingers trickle through his hair and then over his face. Her expression was haughty, disdainful. She made a sepulchral clicking noise—tsk, tsk—and began to shake her head.