The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  “You want to build a firebreak? You, Cly? Why?”

  “Imagine the Cessation breaking tomorrow,” Cly said. “I would be called home. I would be tasked, probably, with leading the invasion of Haversham.”

  “But what? You’d rather not?”

  “I do not believe the portside can survive, no matter how much damage it inflicts in a war.”

  “Don’t pick fights you can’t win, in other words?”

  “You’d rather I was an idealist than a pragmatist.” It wasn’t a question.

  I’d settle for trustworthy. If any part of it could be believed … but before she could speak, the coach jerked to a halt.

  They had been traveling through ever-scabbier neighborhoods, and now they were parked before a low hut on the edge of what was clearly a poverty-stricken little village.

  “Innobel, Kirs,” the driver called.

  “Why are we here?” Sophie asked.

  “I want you to meet someone.”

  “Who?” She stepped down, letting Cly walk her to the house.

  He knocked quietly. “Pinna, sella Cly.”

  A rustle, and the door creaked open.

  Inside was a woman of about fifty years, fair-haired and blue-eyed, bearing the scar of a bangle that had been burned off. Beaming, she hugged Cly, letting out a flood of Sylvanner.

  He replied, “Fas Sophie, ella dottar per ne Beatrice.”

  The woman cried out in delight, seizing Sophie’s hands.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Sophie,” Cly said, “this is your aunt, Pinna.”

  Sophie let out a long rush of air, goggling from one to the other. “Aunt? Aunt?”

  The woman urged her to sit.

  An aunt who’d been a slave. Sophie had accused Cly of raping his slaves, but … “Your father?”

  “It is a source of considerable shame and embarrassment. I’d wanted to wait, before burdening you.”

  Her stomach burned. So it’s Grandpa who was the rapist. This finding out about your heritage thing gets more fun by the minute.

  Pinna still had her by the hands.

  Sophie tried out a smile. “Do you speak … Fleet?”

  “Little.”

  She turned to Cly. “Ask her—”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I shan’t have you bursting in on me in court in six months’ time, accusing me of deliberately botching the translation and thereby influencing your conversation.” With that he walked off, head high, all but whistling.

  Smug bastard. But … aunt. Freed slave aunt! She’d been trying to speak to one of the bonded since she learned Sylvanna was a slave nation.

  She looked at Pinna. She was younger than Cly, by perhaps as much as a decade.

  “May I?” She indicated the room and got a go-ahead.

  The shack had nothing to mark its exterior or make it a target—unlike freeborn Sylvanners, these people didn’t emblazon their status on their doors. The outside had been shingled in drab brown wood, but within the house itself everything was in first-rate repair and there were plenty of creature comforts. Pinna’s kitchen table was made of a plain-looking hardwood that Sophie recognized as quite fine, and her fireplace was compact and well made. The table was piled with accounting ledgers—she had paying work, then—and there was a pot of herbs from a doctor.

  Medicine … I bet the freed don’t all get that.

  Pinna was waiting for Sophie to complete her inspection of the place, murmuring “Zophie, Zsssophie,” to herself.

  Sophie was about to turn back to her when her eye lit on a page, tucked under some of the other papers, marked with symbols like hieroglyphs.

  “I’ve seen these before.”

  “In my kindling bin?” Garland had taken a seat near the window, taking the weight off his feet and fiddling with the cuff of his shirt.

  He didn’t add When you were rifling through my quarters?, but she blushed anyway.

  “Yes. But also on—”

  He glanced out the window, seeming to assess how far away Cly had gotten, then spoke so quietly she almost found herself straining to hear. “They’re called pictals. Pictal is the written language of the bonded.”

  “Why were you writing in it?”

  “I hoped to ask a friend if Kev and his friends were truly acting as their allies.”

  “A Nysa friend? Why?”

  “If it’s true … well, it makes a difference, doesn’t it? If Kev is with them?”

  She nodded.

  But for raising her brows at the mention of Nysa, Pinna had waited silently throughout this exchange. Sophie tried out a bow on her, getting a grin in response. “Um. Me. Cly,” she said. “Dottar, patter.”

  The woman nodded and imitated her moves. “Pinna, Cly, litteren, y patter.”

  “Brother and sister, right. Same dad?”

  Pinna gestured at two spice shakers on table, indicating they were on same plane, then held a bowl above them. “Patter.”

  “Same dad.”

  A nod.

  With gestures and simple words, and occasional resort to Garland’s partial knowledge of pictal writing—his familiarity with the symbols seemed to disturb Pinna, but she went with it—they pieced together the story.

  Cly had apparently freed Pinna, upon his marriage to Beatrice, to his elderly father’s considerable displeasure. He’d set her up here and got her into some kind of bookkeeping racket.

  Pinna shifted one of her ledgers, laying it none too subtly over the pictals. It appeared to be a list of names, jobs, and cash amounts.

  “She does accounting for the freed when they find paying work, looks like.”

  Garland agreed. “These are records of invoices.”

  “Beatrice,” Pinna said, tapping the page. “Beatrice, Beatrice.”

  “Beatrice taught you to write and do figures?” She mimed the question and got an excited “Yehyeh!”

  Sophie took a deep breath. “You talk for a sec, Garland.”

  She left him to query her, using a mix of Sylvanner and Verdanii vocabulary.

  So Cly has at least one sister because his father—my grandfather—was a slave-raping—

  There were no words.

  Cly was horrified by it. He claimed.

  He did free Pinna.

  She was starting to want, badly, to believe in him.

  Garland was showing interest in Pinna’s pot of medicine and was getting assurances that her aunt was getting over some minor cold. Cly—sainted Cly, according to her—had ensured that this whole village got regular visits from a physician.

  Sophie shivered. This is Cly’s go-to strategy. Find a woman who adores him, and have them try to bring me around. Like this summer, when he asked Tenner Zita to befriend me.

  The thought felt small, maybe unworthy.

  On the heels of it, she remembered Annela saying One can only fight nature for so long. It was true that people had deep-set behavior patterns. Loops they kept running. Behavioral fingerprints?

  This is an opportunity that may never come again, she reminded herself. We have to ask Pinna the right questions.

  Which were?

  Beatrice married Cly? Why?

  She wanted to study at the Institute.

  Oh.

  She dug out her book of questions, unfolding from its pages Bram’s printed copy of the last Beatrice spell.

  She spread it on the table, finding the symbols in the middle, the ones that weren’t spellscrip letters. The black fox, the eye with chain links, all written on birch bark in bright green.

  Pinna’s reaction was a horrified gasp. Round-eyed, she glanced at the door.

  So she doesn’t trust Cly wholeheartedly, Sophie thought.

  “Beatrice?” Pinna rasped.

  “Beatrice. Beatrice, this spell, on me. Sophie.” She circled the symbols again. “Pictals?”

  The woman closed the ledger book, her hands shaking, pushing the spell at Sophie and gesturing—Put it away. Get it out of my sight. She paced, fingers to her face, f
ighting for calm, obviously thinking.

  Finally she barred the door, closed her curtains, opened an old-looking umbrella, and withdrew a scroll. Unrolled on the table, it revealed a series of pictals, perhaps five hundred of them, crammed into a table-size space. She laid bowls on its corners to hold it flat, and thought again.

  Garland drew in a shocked breath. “This could be a dictionary of all the pictals commonly used by the bonded. It mustn’t fall into slaver hands.”

  Pinna had clearly decided the risk was worth the ability to communicate more efficiently.

  “Beatrice,” she said. She began pointing at pictals, one after another. Point. Point. Point.

  Garland said. “Beatrice knowledge books to … I don’t recognize … oh. Beatrice taught her to read and write in Sylvanner.”

  Then: “Beatrice.” Point, point, point.

  “Open gift … discovered inscription bonded. I’m not—”

  “Beatrice learned that pictals could be used in inscriptions,” Sophie said.

  Garland looked profoundly uneasy now. “If the bonded were found to be writing any spells—never mind if they were able to write intentions unknown to Fleet mages or the Spellscrip Institute … Seas, the portside nations would…”

  “Overreact. Freak out?”

  “There would be slaughters.”

  Pinna was picking out words at a feverish pace.

  Back in the day, Beatrice had wanted to study inscription, but the Verdanii hadn’t thought her talented enough. She’d gotten engaged to Cly, defying her family, and had come to study at the Sylvanna Spellscrip Institute.

  At some point, another of the bonded women on Cly’s estate had offered her a straight-up swap: the slave got to learn the same things Beatrice was learning at the Institute, and Beatrice learned pictal inscription techniques.

  Pinna had found out.

  Pinna understood what that other, younger slave had not: if it came out that the bonded had any access to magic, let alone to spells the Institute didn’t understand or control, there would be executions and purges.

  “She was terrified,” Garland said, following along as Pinna continued to point out pictals. “Beatrice vowed quiet—she promised to keep the secret. Then…”

  He frowned, then touched a series of pictals, essentially repeating what Pinna had just said, asking her something.

  She nodded vehemently, and he pointed at Sophie’s book of questions, at the scroll. “Yehyeh!” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “There was nothing Pinna could do about Beatrice having learned that the bonded were practicing inscription. They had to trust that she would keep the secret. But she had the other girl—”

  “The one who spilled the beans?”

  He nodded. “Pinna had her teach Beatrice an inscription. The one…”

  “The one she worked on me.”

  “They told her it would strengthen their bond, hers and His Honor’s. She appears to have sold Beatrice on the spell by indicating that it would give your father the strength to free Pinna before the wedding.”

  “Right!” she said. “So Beatrice misunderstood what the spell did because Pinna lied.”

  “Yes,” Garland said.

  “What does it actually do?” She raised the notebook, giving Pinna a pleading look.

  “Cly,” Pinna said, and took up the spice shakers she’d used earlier to represent him and his father. She put Grandpa’s shaker atop Cly’s, pressing, then tapped her scar, where the bangle had been.

  “Cly had been under his father’s thumb?”

  Pinna seemed to understand that she’d got this. She held out her hands at the same height and said, “We balance. Inscription balance. Cly bound fire fear, Cly bound obey rules. We—Beatrice, make Cly to follow nature inside rules. No worries patter feeling.”

  She tapped a pictal that looked like a Möbius strip.

  “It means twisting, reversal,” Garland said.

  “I see it. The spell without the pictal makes you love your family unreservedly—you consider your parents’ every whim and wish. You put them first. It’s a guilt trip on steroids. Reversed, you do exactly as you please, without regard to what anyone else wants?”

  “He sails his own wind, wherever it’s inclined,” Garland said. “He’s like you.”

  “What?”

  “In that you follow your own nature.”

  She swallowed. This had a ring of truth. She’d spent her life diving, swimming, caving, putting herself at risk, and never quite giving in to her parents’ distress over it all. Hard-hearted, Dad had called her once, when he thought she couldn’t overhear.

  It had hurt, but she hadn’t changed.

  “It frees you,” Garland said. “Breaks the bonds of obligation, guilt, national pride. Sets you asea with nothing but your own judgment for breeze.”

  “Yeah, okay, but Cly wasn’t cut free of anything at the time when Sicko Grandpa sent him to the Fleet. Sent him single, against Sylvanner custom. He came back with a Verdanii fiancée and everyone pretended to be unhappy with the arrangement.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If his will was still shackled when he married Beatrice, it means the Bannings ordered him to marry into the Nine Families.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason as the pirates. To get an eragliding daughter.”

  Which he did, but then Beatrice extricated him from Daddy’s influence. He freed Pinna—

  That would have been his own choice, then, she thought.

  “Beatrice, Clydon…” Pinna still had something to say. She pointed at crossed swords.

  “They kept fighting,” Sophie said. Magically altering Cly hadn’t kept him and Beatrice from clashing. Pregnant, with no option for divorce, Beatrice had run off to Erstwhile.

  “His Honor’s coming,” Garland said.

  Pinna rolled up her Ouija board dictionary, stashed it in the umbrella again, and unbarred the door, busying herself making tea and creating the illusion of a nice visit.

  “One more question, please.”

  An agonized glance.

  “His Honor is returning. We have, perhaps, a minute,” said Garland.

  “Cly,” Sophie said. “As a kid—” She held her hand low. “Little Cly. He set fires.”

  Dammit, what to say? “Cly, Cly,” she repeated, and then stuck a piece of kindling in the blaze.

  “Ah!” Pinna’s face cleared. She glanced at the door, then handed Sophie a wafer of coarse brown paper and a bit of brown rope. “Cly—” She mimed tossing them in the fire. “Patter—” Now a mime of fury. Last, she touched her bangle scar.

  “Hemp,” Garland said. “Bonding inscriptions. He was burning bonding inscriptions. Perhaps looking for Pinna’s?”

  “They scribed him to make him stop?”

  He’d been rebelling, and they’d made him pyrophobic. Later, they’d scribed him again, made him obedient, gave him his marching orders, and sent him to Fleet.

  A rap at the door. “May I come in? Pinna?”

  “Yehyeh.”

  He stuck his head inside. “If you’re done, child, we should get back to the rooms before it’s light.”

  Sneak into the slum while it’s dark; get out before you’re seen.

  But there was nothing more they could ask Pinna with Cly present. Sophie glanced at Garland. He was smiling at her in a keen-eyed and appreciative way that felt immensely flattering.

  She gave Pinna a hug, and Pinna returned it wholeheartedly; her aunt’s grip was strong. Then Sophie followed Garland back out to their creaky jalopy of a carriage, with its pudgy, exhausted-looking team and a driver whose expression said he wanted to be anywhere else.

  CHAPTER 31

  Cly lagged for a second to say a few last words to Pinna, to hand her a few gifts, all of which left Sophie free to cuddle in beside Garland on the rear-facing seats. His cuff had popped its button again; she refastened it, a tricky task. It was a nice excuse to touch him, to fuss a little and take in his skin,
the graceful proportions of his hand. To stop thinking about the political ecosystem of Stormwrack and just feel a little lovestruck.

  “I know you,” she whispered, and she felt a jolt in him, an intake of breath, like a gasp or chuckle.

  A cough: Cly’s way of warning them before he swung in, ducking hard to avoid the roof, and settled with a scowl equally intended, she thought, for the carriage’s overall scruffiness and for her indecent daughter behavior.

  Just for that, she declined to let go of Garland’s hand.

  They got under way with a jerk.

  “Well?” He sounded tired.

  Was he? Or was it a ruse? She took him in, boots to crown. Not a hair out of place, sash with its status signifiers glimmering and perfect.

  “Does this change anything?” he said.

  “I’m thinking.” She wanted it to, wanted it to very badly indeed.

  The city was above them, up the long, winding road. She could see the lights, and the blue-edged shadows of the mountains. Somewhere east of them, dawn was breaking.

  The carriage jolted over a bump. She heard the driver trying to soothe the horses with a murmur.

  She began, “Seems like you’re asking me to believe you’re against slavery. Not just cocktail-chatter, Ooh, I’m such a dangerous liberal, ha-ha, give me another shrimp against, but working against.”

  “I would never say that,” Cly said.

  “Why?”

  “My position, within Fleet and out, would be precarious if I were to take a formal position against bondage.” He frowned as they lurched again. “Without my privileges as a landowner, I cannot be effective.”

  “You do like your privileges.”

  “Show me someone who doesn’t.” Cly steepled his fingers. “You know Fralienne Erminne has entered politics. She is an abolitionist. If Sylvanna’s laws were to change, we would take other nations with us. Other votes within the Convene.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Over the years, we have cultivated certain international relationships. There are nations in the Convene who owe us favors. Their votes would travel with us.”

  “You have an international voting bloc?”

  Garland nodded, confirming this. “What truly matters is the military imbalance. As Annela Gracechild has recently reminded me, no alliance of pirates and rabble can stand against Verdanii and Sylvanna united.”