The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  This woman is going to be out to get me until the day I die.

  “So, what? Can I do this now? I raise my hand and solemnly swear to—”

  “Your lawyer must read the documents. We need assurance that you understand what you’re agreeing to. After that, there’s a swearing in every two days.”

  “Fine.”

  A hint of concern etched itself on Annela’s face. “You shouldn’t do this.”

  “You shouldn’t have promised me I’d fail.”

  “Striving to prove me wrong is a childish reason to take an oath. But I won’t stop you. Do you want to interview that bandit about frights?”

  Reluctance rose again, but Sophie quashed it. “Yes.”

  “I’ll file an application. Is there anything else?”

  “We talked about me checking out one of those mermaid training drills.” Ever since she’d come to Stormwrack, she’d been diving without a proper partner … emphatically not a trend she wished to continue.

  There was an expression, back home: Dive alone, die alone. Sophie liked an adventure as much as anyone, but she didn’t want to become an object lesson in the truth of catchy safety slogans.

  “Bette, go find that note of introduction for the diving captain.”

  “At once, Convenor.” Bettona disappeared, taking the thumbprinted letter opener with her.

  “Well, Sophie? Are we done?”

  “Why are you fasting?”

  Annela’s head came up, barely showing surprise. “It is,” she said, “an ordeal set by the Verdanii people.”

  Religion, then? “Oh. Um. Thanks for telling me.”

  “It’s common knowledge, or I wouldn’t.”

  “The cookies and nut sticks were all for me?”

  “Take them with you. I’m not sure why Bettona made so many, but I’d prefer they didn’t go to waste. Calm seas, girl.”

  “’Bye,” she said, bowing herself out.

  * * *

  Constitution was a ship of bureaucrats, which meant that to her fore there was a law library. It was a bright room, filled with small desks and plush velvet chairs. Half of these were pointed at the smoky obsidian portals of the lounge, revealing a tinted view of the ocean. Two ships were visible to Constitution’s fore. Temperance was the flagship and iron fist of the Fleet, a sharkskinned behemoth with smokestacks rather than sails and almost no glass at all. She was an important symbol of the peace that had reigned between the two hundred and fifty island nations for more than a century. Her captain could sink any ship afloat, simply by speaking its full name aloud.

  Step out of line, start a war with your neighbor, and glug, doomed, sunk. A deterrent.

  The second ship was Breadbasket.

  Each nation had one official Fleet ship, and Breadbasket was Verdanii, the representative ship of Annela’s people. Sophie’s birth mother and half sister were Verdanii. She might be, too, if she hadn’t repudiated citizenship in a weird government hearing eight months earlier. She was officially persona non grata on her birth mother’s home island.

  As for her birth father …

  No. She wouldn’t think about Cly.

  Where Temperance was sharky, Breadbasket was a whale ship of sorts—she had a baleen and a tail. Her masts were live trees, red-trunked palms skirted in sails of woven corn silk and inhabited by jewel-toned insects that served some kind of pollinating function for the crops growing on every available deck of the ship.

  She was a great oceangoing farm, in other words—a floating cornucopia, a symbol of her nation’s great wealth. Verdanii was the nation with the most landmass, the agricultural giant of the world.

  Rooting in her satchel, Sophie started, as she often did, with the notebook filled with questions about Stormwrack and Earth.

  Opening it, she paged through, scanning the endless list of mysteries before adding a couple new thoughts: HOW DO YOU ID UTERINE TISSUE IN AS? AS, her abbreviation for Age of Sail, was an imperfect description of Stormwrack’s technological state—except when it meant Age of Superstition or Age of Just Plain Stupid.

  ARE THE BUGS IN Breadbasket’s SAILS ACRIDIDAE OR NEUROPTERA? WHAT’S A VERDANII ORDEAL? WHAT’S THE VERDANII BELIEF SYSTEM?

  IS IT AN EARWORM, OR AM I STILL HEARING THAT DAMNED TICKING CLOCK FROM ANNELA’S OFFICE?

  When she ran out of things to wonder, she pulled out the letter she had already begun to Bram.

  The note was written on messageply. As soon as she had written the words, an hour ago, they’d turned up on a twin sheet in San Francisco, where her brother was. He had obviously read them in the meantime; there was an answering message right below the spot where she’d stopped.

  GOOD IDEA RE THE ARCHAEOLOGIST. WILL LOOK OVER THE MAP AND READ UP ON EGYPTIAN SITES. BTW: 5.

  BTW: “I miss you.” With a number, five out of five. To save messageply, they’d stopped putting the words in.

  Sophie found herself smiling. Like him, she skipped the “I miss you” and started with:

  5 TO YOU TOO. I S/B VISITING SOON IF ALL GOES WELL. AG AGREES I NEED FINGERPRINTING INFO.

  A shadow fell between her and the tinted view of the sea.

  Looking up, Sophie found herself staring at the official government representative of Isle of Gold.

  Convenor Brawn looked ancient: he was bald, with skin cured to leather by years under a hot sun. His longcoat was made of red velvet, embroidered in gold and, today, belted with a chain of dangling gold skulls. His seven-foot frame was balanced on high boots and a cane that looked like ivory. His fingernails were four inches long—that seemed to be an Isle of Gold thing—and had been artificially straightened to resemble knife blades. Opals were embedded in the nails.

  OMG, what do you want? Sophie managed to strangle the impulse to say this.

  Take that, Annela. I can be discreet.

  Had Annela arranged this? She’d thrown Bram’s kidnapping in Sophie’s face only half an hour before. Now here was the man who’d almost certainly ordered it.

  They’d shoved a black pearl under Bram’s thumbnail with a needle.

  Rage gnawed at her resolve to keep quiet. To gather herself, she looked past Brawn, taking in the Fleet page attending him. She seemed to be Golder, too. She had extravagantly long red hair, curly and colored black just at its fringes, and enormous brown eyes. She was about Sophie’s age, which seemed old for a page. Maybe she’d failed her exams.

  Sophie turned on her camera, out of habit, taking a few shots of them both. Neither of them showed the least curiosity about what she was doing.

  “Kir Hansa,” Brawn purred into the silence. “We haven’t met formally. I am Convenor Brawn from Isle of Gold.”

  “Uh-huh.” She slapped her notebook shut and stood. If I knew all the nuances of bowing, I could give him some kind of snooty “screw you” half-bob. Out of perversity, she curtsied.

  As he was bowing himself, he missed it, or affected to. “May I offer you a glass of wine? Perhaps you prefer Verdanii beer?”

  “I’m—um—full.”

  “Straight to business then, oui?”

  “We have business?”

  He pointed a claw at a chair and the girl moved, sliding the seat under Brawn’s bony backside as he perched on its cushion. “I am following your career. This forensic practice, and the court cases you’ve been grooming.”

  “Uh … thank you?”

  “Isle of Gold is a great nation, and we are fastidious about certain cultural practices. One such is self-reflection. I’ve concluded that you bested me in the Convene eight months ago.”

  “I certainly kept you from getting what you wanted,” she said. There had been a plot to disenchant Temperance, to destroy the spell that made it such a lethal ship-killing weapon.

  “Indeed. You threw my plans to dry dock.”

  She had mixed feelings about having preserved the government’s big military deterrent. But back in the day, when Temperance first set sail, she had driven Brawn’s people out of the piracy racket. The ship had b
een the instrument by which hundreds of lives were saved.

  “It is our tradition to offer someone who has bested us a boon.”

  Sophie laughed. “You want to do me a favor?”

  “Best me one time, I reward you. A measure of respect. Best me twice, and we are enemies toutta demonde … forever.”

  “You kidnapped my brother.”

  “Careful. Openly declaring me a foe would be unwise.”

  She clenched her fists under the table, taking him in, looking for hints of secrets, of weakness, anything that might tell her what he wanted, or how she could … how had he put it? Best him again.

  Brawn’s eye had fallen on Sophie’s book of questions. She fought the urge to close or hide it. He almost certainly couldn’t read English, and there were no secrets there anyway.

  Instead of snatching it away, she said, “This is a ritual way of saying … what? ‘No hard feelings’?”

  “Yes, nicely put. No hard feelings.” He rolled that around, as if tasting it. “It is an opportunity for both parties to sail away from bloody feud.”

  “What if I never collect on the favor but I cross you again?”

  “Then, in the moment before your destruction, I shall offer you a kindness. The traditional choice offered is between painless death or payment to your kin. It’s a matter of honor—a concept, I’m given to understand, that you don’t cherish.”

  Maybe he was trying to provoke her so they could go straight to the feuding. “What could you possibly have that I’d want?”

  “A Golder spouse and citizen’s papers?”

  “You want to marry me into the Piracy?” She couldn’t help it—she began to laugh. “OMG.”

  “It’s rumored, Kir Sophie, that cased in that self-righteous exterior of yours is the heart of a rogue. It’s said you take after ye perre … your father.”

  “My father the Supreme Court judge?”

  “Your father the killer.”

  You are trying to pick a fight. Sophie’s gaze dropped to the book of questions. She should send the guy packing.

  But if he knows stuff …

  “How about this? I first came here after John Coine traveled to the … outlands to buy grenades and assassinate my aunt.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  She leaned forward. “What if I wanted to know how he got there? The Verdanii seem to think they’re the only ones who—” She wasn’t allowed to talk about Earth explicitly. But Brawn was involved. He had to know. “Who know the route to the grenade store.”

  “You’re asking for information.”

  “Yep.”

  “If I cut you, girl, will you bleed knowledge?”

  Gooseflesh rose on her arms. “Do you know?”

  He got up, sweeping his lace sleeves over the table as he levered himself upward. “I will do as you ask, soon as you’ve taken the Oath.”

  That didn’t go how you thought it would, did it? Sophie thought. She knew why, too: suddenly everyone’s big predictions about what she would or wouldn’t do had fallen into place. Annela figured she’d break her oath because Annela assumed Sophie would think like a Verdanii. Or, perhaps, like a savage outlander.

  Brawn had expected her to go into some kind of emo fit, insulting him sufficiently that he could move forward with his vendetta. Now, instead …

  He uttered a few words in yet another new language, one with a few tantalizingly French-sounding cadences, and then said, “Sophie Hansa, child of outland, daughter of Sylvanna, I hereby commit. Once this boon is delivered, the two of us may sit in comfort and declare a peace.” With that, he caned himself away, drawing in his wake the curly-haired page—who shot Sophie a glare as she went.

  Heart pounding, Sophie collapsed back into the reading room chair. Now she needed more legal advice: if Brawn was willing to tell her something after she got herself oathed up, it might mean she couldn’t legally act on it.

  I should just learn the Fleet laws.

  When she had first arrived on Stormwrack, it had been by accident. She’d washed up on an island of poverty-stricken fishers, with her half-dead aunt in tow. The island spellscribe had written an inscription to teach her the language of the Fleet.

  The spell made her perfectly fluent. She spoke the language without a trace of an accent; she spoke it better than many lifetime residents of the oceangoing city, most of whom had learned it as a second language. All it had cost her was a ripping headache.

  She added LEARN THE LAW? to a new page in her notebook and began to consider routes that would take her in the direction of her lawyer. In a city where every block was a ship on the move, even the simplest errands were a series of hops, complex exercises in logistics. If you took an airborne taxi here, you could catch lunch while waiting on a ferry to somewhere else. Residents called it footwork: if you could do ten errands in three transits, you were “light on your feet.”

  Bram had jotted another note onto the messageply: CAN U C A STICK FIGURE?

  She replied, NO. WHY?

  Him: TRYING TO PROJECT TEXT ONTO MESSAGEPLY WITHOUT WRITING.

  Her: NOTHING THERE.

  Should she tell him about her encounter with Brawn?

  What about now?

  She scratched the word STILL in front of the “Nothing there” from earlier.

  Then, instead of making for the legal quarter, she packaged up Annela’s paperwork, took up a page of cheap, unmagical paper, and wrote to her lawyer, Mensalohm, explaining about the offered deal and her idea of learning the law. She flagged a page and asked him to have it delivered.

  She sent a second note to Krispos—her “pet memorician,” as Annela had called him:

  GOOD NEWS—YOU’RE OFFICIALLY ON THE JUDICIARY PAYROLL. PLEASE READ UP ON ISLE OF GOLD TRADITIONS ABOUT BLOOD FEUDS, FAVORS, AND CHALLENGES. ALSO, SEE WHAT YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT FRIGHTMAKING.

  She took a moment to savor that. Krispos was a magically enhanced speed-reader with perfect recall. He had been foundering in a state of impoverished semi-unemployment for about five years. Even the prospect of having a real job within Fleet made the old fellow tear up.

  She’d done all she could aboard Constitution. Taking her note of introduction from Annela, she caught a ferry to Vaddle, the diving vessel.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dear Sophie:

  Bram says he can forward you the occasional short message. I can’t say either Dad or I understands why you can’t use e-mail. It makes me imagine you’re on a compound, somewhere remote like Bora Bora, diving the Great Barrier Reef. Still … no access to Internet? Is mail truly coming in bundles by boat or something whenever someone putt-putts out to civilization?

  If this seems preposterous, you’ll have to send a few facts to sharpen up my imaginings. Surely we could be permitted to know which hemisphere you’re in?

  You know, when I left home to go to university in Oxford, I did this all the time—wrote paper letters home to Grandma and Grandpa. I don’t remember it being this difficult. Well. All’s fine here. The main thing is, I suppose, that Dad and I are thinking of going to Peru in late August. If there’s any chance you’ll be back then, let us know so we can make different plans. We don’t want to miss you.

  Love,

  Mom

  PS from B—Sorry this is dull, Sofe—I told her no guilt and no questions or I wouldn’t send it.

  * * *

  Mermaid training turned out to be rather horrifying.

  The Fleet used a leaky-looking sailing vessel called Vaddle (which apparently meant “hatchery,” in one of the Fleet’s many tongues) for its undersea soldiering detachment.

  It was a ship of swimming pools. One was square, divided into lanes, where ordinary two-legged cadets swam lengths, practiced rescues, and worked on their endurance. There was also a resistance pool in which senior cadets worked on becoming even stronger swimmers.

  Belowdecks were the transforms.

  The training master was a sunburned veteran with a desiccated fish tail, Sollo Mykander. Out
of the water, she seemed to live in a peculiar hammock chair, carried wherever she wished by a strapping six-foot sailor. The remains of her tail were a mix of silver and rust; the tattered scales put Sophie in mind of an old pat of steel wool. A damp silk tank top clung to her sagging breasts and belly.

  “The great ’Nella Gracechild says I’m to tour you about,” Sollo said. As she talked, she sponged salt water onto the salmon gills under her chin. The skin was spotted and unhealthy looking.

  Keeping her eyes on Sollo’s face, Sophie explained, “I’m a diver from the outlands. I want to see how it’s done here.”

  “We’ve a treat for you, then. We’re making a new mer today, if you’re interested.”

  New? “Totally interested!”

  “You—Octer Weld—show this curiosity to the birth tank. I’ll be down momentarily.”

  The cadet led Sophie down through the stench of rotting timbers and dying fish to a candlelit room where a complicated spellwriting operation was ramping up. A flaxen-haired six-year-old—Sophie wasn’t sure whether it was a girl or a boy—was waiting on a beige couch. Nearby, a pair of individuals who looked to be a spellscribe and his apprentice were prepping a writing table. The material for the inscription was a yard-square sheet of sedimentary shale. Sophie saw a small coelacanth fossil within it.

  Fossils! She added a note to her book of questions. ARE THERE FOSSIL VENDORS? WHERE DO THEY DIG? WHAT ELSE HAVE THEY FOUND?

  Was there a way to use the fossil record to better understand the link between Stormwrack and Earth?

  The cadet spoke to the scribe, clarifying Sophie’s observer status.

  He offered her a gap-toothed smile. “Best view’s over there, Kir.”

  “Thank you.” Before retreating to the designated viewing spot, she took a few photos of the spellwriting space. It contained an assortment of materials—picks, brushes, inks, and paints.

  As she came around the sheet of shale, she saw that the remainder of the chamber was dominated by a pair of deep, cylindrical tanks, one of which held a healthy merman.

  Merman!

  Pick your jaw up off the floor, Sofe. She’d seen stranger things, but how could anyone tire of the miraculous? She raised the camera again.