The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  Krispos, the memorician Cly had hired for her as a weird sort of gift, was booked into the cabin next door to Sophie’s rented bunk. He was, as usual, nose deep in a book. Memoricians were speed-readers with perfect recall; he was as close as Stormwrack came to having something like a flash drive.

  Because half his cache was filled with obscure poetry Sophie couldn’t use, Krispos was also trying to make himself useful by acting as a sort of assistant.

  As she returned to the cabin, he handed over a slim bundle of notes—a sort of executive summary on blood feuds—lettered like a medieval manuscript, sans gold, in a coil notebook she’d brought from home. “You wrote this?” she asked.

  “I found a spellscribe to intend me for speedwriting.” He had been sitting with his feet in a small basin of foaming water; bending, he toweled each of them dry with care. The feet had no nails—it was a mutation, occurring naturally in about one fifth of the people here.

  There was nothing natural about the scars on the bottoms of his feet, furrows like the marks of enormous teeth, tracks of scar tissue that he’d flatly refused to discuss.

  Don’t stare. Instead of dwelling on his wounds, she said, “It looks like the inscription hurt.”

  He raised his head, huffing a little as he strapped his second sandal. “Does it?”

  “One of your eyes is bloodshot.” And you’re haggard, she didn’t add.

  “It wasn’t too bad.” He laid a finger over the eye. “And the notes—are they useful?”

  She looked at a page.

  3.  ACT OPENLY, CHALLENGE YOUR FOES, BUT NEVER LAY YOURSELF OPEN TO EASY DEFEAT. HANG A SWORD AT YOUR HIP SO YOUR OPPONENT KNOWS YOUR WILL BEARS A SHARPENED BLADE. IF THEY DO NOT MARK THE KNIFE IN YOUR BOOT, THE FAULT LIES IN THEIR GRASP.

  “Very useful,” she said, trying to keep her voice breezy even though the hair had come up on her arms.

  Krispos briefed her on his day’s reading: three hundred pages on the development of magic in the years before the Fleet; a history of the Sylvanna Spellscrip Institute, which controlled patents for a significant number of the world’s most important spells; and a long list of the ships reported missing or sunk by mishap in the past three or so years.

  By way of trade, she handed him the bureaucratic pile establishing them as expert witnesses within the court system.

  “Now to prove our worth,” she said. “I’m gonna go home and get what we need for the fingerprint operation. But I want to keep working on these sinkings. Can you put together a list of commonalities between the sunk vessels? Anything that’s the same for all three? Oh—and someone called the monster a wood fright. Did you learn anything about that?”

  “Frightmaking is an intentionally lost art. It’s a matter of treaty. According to the Spellscrip Institute histories, giant frog frights attacked Tug Island sixty years ago. Whatever is known might be forbidden.”

  “Get whatever you can find. You’re doing great, Krispos. Outstanding work.”

  A bright smile lit his creased, pale face. The bloodshot eye made it a little gruesome.

  * * *

  Sophie managed to meditate her way into sleep that evening, but excitement had her up well before dawn, rattling around her tiny cabin like a pea in a can. She dressed and packed her things far too early, leaving everything she wasn’t bringing with her to clutter up a corner of Krispos’s cabin. Then she went up to the main deck so she could stretch and wait for the tardy November sun to rise over the Fleet.

  Shepherd prowled to the rear, shining a spotlight on the seas and on the straggling ships chasing the bigger blocks of the city-size convoy. Gulls circled restaurant ships and fishers, calling out as the sky lightened.

  Sophie was on the first ferry to Constitution, one of a great crowd of commuters: Fleet personnel, government workers, and diplomatic officials arriving for what they called the dawn shift. A couple of cadets beside her speculated quietly about the sinking of Kitesharp and the others. Their voices held a note of tension. The taller of the two, a young octer, insisted that nobody in the government would care to find out who was responsible.

  “The bandits from this summer are dead, aren’t they?” his companion replied.

  “Was a Sylvanner saw to that, nobody starboard,” the octer said. “And they haven’t yet brought the survivor to trial—” He broke off, apparently having noticed that Sophie was listening.

  Usually, traveling between Stormwrack and the land the people here called Erstwhile was something she did with Verena. With her half sister on Verdanii, it fell to Annela’s assistant to do the honors.

  It was Bettona who had deported Sophie the first time she arrived in Stormwrack. Another of the Feliachilds, she was a delicate stick of a woman, neither as voluptuous as Beatrice nor as tough and weathered as Aunt Gale had been. The only genetic feature they all shared was the slightly enlarged brown eyes—anime eyes, Bram called them—that Sophie had inherited from her birth mother.

  A smell of baking wafted through the front rooms of Annela’s office—more anise and apricot—as Bettona bowed, bidding Sophie welcome. “I can transit you in about ten minutes.”

  “Waiting on the angle of the sun?” Sophie asked. Verena had mentioned this once.

  Bettona nodded, holding out a cup of tea. “This is a traditional libation for traveling.”

  Sophie took a sip, expecting something like chai but finding just a breath of liquor in the mix, which was otherwise all rose hips and cinnamon. “The first time I came here, it was spontaneous—no waiting, no angle.”

  “Kir Gale had been stabbed, hadn’t she?” She offered a tray of the anise and apricot biscuits; they were oven warm. “And you landed in open ocean.”

  “Admittedly, that sucked.” Sophie nibbled a biscuit, trying to hide her expression. She was excited, and she had no poker face whatsoever. Usually, Annela turned up and ended these conversations before they could properly begin.

  Play it cool, she thought. “Okay, but when you sent me back that first time, I ended up on my butt in an alley near Beatrice’s, around where I’d vanished before.”

  “You jerked away from me, as I recall.” There was no rancor in Bettona’s tone. “Nothing like that will happen again.”

  “Unless I move, presumably?”

  Bettona nodded.

  “Where is Annela?” Sophie asked.

  “The convenor is occupied.” Bettona’s inflection was neutral, giving away nothing.

  Still fasting then. “But she’s okay?”

  Another nod.

  Sophie had been expecting the usual scrutiny: search and seizure, dire warnings about secret-keeping and all her so-called spy equipment. She’d brought a bag of stuff—data chips for her camera, along with biological samples and a variety of things Bram had requested—but she’d been expecting to have to turn it all over to Annela.

  Ah, but now I’m Oath Girl, she remembered. If I spill the news about Stormwrack to anyone on Earth, I can be prosecuted.

  Annela wants me to step out of line. She said so.

  Never mind that. Things to learn.

  Sophie gave Bettona her friendliest smile. “We’re genetic cousins. You’re a Feliachild, right? You’ve got those big eyes that seem to be a family trait, and you can eraglide.”

  Slight surprise from Bettona. “Yes.”

  “You’re not another aunt, are you?”

  “No. My father and your grandmother are siblings.”

  A grandmother and a great-uncle. Sophie’s breath caught. “Are siblings? They’re alive?”

  “Neneh. Apologies.” Bettona shook her head. “Ennatrice Feliachild died by ordeal, years ago. My father, Pharmann—it was his heart. Last Febbraio.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Died of ordeal. And Annela was ordealing. “Does that mean Annela’s in real danger?”

  “The convenor is strong.” That neutrality again. “I am sure she will come through the dark and into wonders.”

  Sophie took a closer look at the woman. She was expensively clad, as
any Verdanii official would be. Healthy looking, but not an athlete. She was left-handed. Her age appeared to be midthirties. “Are they grooming you to replace Annela?”

  Bettona smiled thinly. “The convenor is irreplaceable.”

  “If she ends up Allmother, which I gather is like being president, she’ll go back to Verdanii?”

  “Of course.”

  “If not you, who gets her job here?”

  “I’m not considered any great gift to the civil service,” Bettona said. “Generally this position, convenor, goes to a Gracechild.”

  She’s been found wanting. The Verdanii do that a lot. Okay, this is awkward.… “What do you government types do here when you’re not working? Is there a book club or what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “There must be a few hundred people just like you. Young, up and coming, talented, connected, away from home, with a boss who isn’t ready to retire.”

  “The Fleet becomes home, after a time.”

  “Do you knit? Shop? Raise and trade tropical fish? I can see that you garden: you’ve got a little pollen in your hair and some dirt under your nails. But that’s kind of a cultural requirement, isn’t it? Verdanii are big on the farming.”

  Bettona let out a dry-sounding laugh. “I do my customary duty by the Breadbasket food cooperative, yes. Now you mention it, there is … I wouldn’t have called it a club, but the younger functionaries of the starboard side do gather and socialize informally.”

  “Starboard. The free-state folks have one group and the slavers drink somewhere else. That makes sense.”

  “Yes, the portside bureaucrats keep to themselves.”

  Something about that made Sophie think of the conversation she’d overheard on her commute, the young octer complaining that nobody would do anything about the sinking of Kitesharp and the other vessels.

  Bettona broke in on that thought before it was fully formed. “It’s time, Sophie. Stand here, please. And—”

  “No jerking away.” Sophie obeyed. “Could you bring me to your not-club sometime? Would that be allowed?”

  “Maybe,” Bettona said. She was concentrating now on a tiny gold pocket watch. As before, she set it on Sophie’s palm.

  Sophie felt a rush of heat, as if her heart had suddenly pumped a wash of blood directly to her face. For a second, her vision swam. The ticking of the timepiece was very loud; each stroke tapped against her temples like drumsticks. Tick, tick, tick.

  That’s what I was hearing before, she thought, and as she listened, the sound doubled. She could hear the bigger clock in Annela’s office, keeping time with the smaller one. It started here.…

  Her vision cleared and the ground steadied underfoot. She, her dive tanks, and the bundles of paperwork were in her birth mother’s basement in San Francisco. She listened as the tick tick bong of the grandfather clock striking nine replaced the sounds of Annela’s wall clock and Bettona’s timepiece.

  It’s not an earworm. I’m actually hearing all three clocks.

  She was alone in a stranger’s house. It was a weird feeling, as if she were a burglar.

  “Hello?” She stepped out into the hall, peering in through the first open door. A converted laundry room, from the look of it—she could see the space where the washer and dryer had sat, and a barely used sink. Near the door was a big cupboard labeled “Garments” in both English and, interestingly, Fleetspeak. She cracked the door. It held generic street clothes: stuff for men, stuff for women, and a bunch of unisex sweaters and rain coats.

  In case someone comes from Stormwrack dressed in a weird outfit or a Fleet uniform. The thought took her to a memory of Garland Parrish, dressed in one of Bram’s leather jackets.

  “Rowr,” she murmured.

  The rest of the room was dominated by a cabinet with seven cupboards, each with a locking door, none actually locked. Sophie opened the first door. Inside was a picture of Verena’s pewter timepiece, the one Sophie thought of as the pancake clock.

  She opened the rest, one after another. Each had a few personal-looking items, more clothes, and a sketch of a clock. One depicted the clock she’d seen Beatrice use to come home from Stormwrack. Bettona’s tiny pocket watch was there, too.

  There was a sketch of Gale’s watch, which Sophie had found and had yet to return.

  Seven cupboards. Seven eragliding Feliachilds? She thought again about John Coine and the guns he’d bought in San Francisco. She had taken the Oath now; Convenor Brawn had offered to tell her about that. She took photos of each door.

  A door slammed upstairs, startling her. She jumped, wondering if she should just try to sneak out of the house. Because, you know, she was so good at tiptoeing around. Crawl not behind the back of your antagoniste, she thought, remembering the pirate customs. As advice went, it wasn’t bad. Forcing a smile, she walked back out into the hallway. “Hello?”

  Footfalls sounded overhead. A big barrel of a man, fiftyish and fuzzy haired, clad in a white shirt and suspenders, rounded the corner and peered down at her from the top of the stairs.

  He broke into a grin. “You’d be Sophie.”

  English! A surge of feeling brought tears to her eyes. Hearing a real American accent, after weeks of speaking Fleet, seemed to do this to her every time.

  “I’m Merro Vanko, Verena’s father. This…” He turned, revealing a second man, laden with grocery bags, standing behind him. “Is my son, Shad.”

  Shad was African-American, in his early twenties, with a physique that put Sophie in mind of a baseball player. Sophie realized she had seen a picture of him once, with Gale and Verena. “Hi. Um, I have papers for Beatrice.”

  “Beebee’s not here,” Merro said.

  Beebee? “When’s she back? I need to talk to her, if it’s possible.”

  “It isn’t,” Shad said. “One of her cancer babies is dying today. She’s with the family.”

  Cancer babies. Beatrice’s Verdanii relatives thought of her as a histrionic wimp, but here in San Francisco she ran a pediatric hospice. That had to take a soul of iron.

  Merro said, “I know she’s expecting to see you. Do you want to hang around and wait? It could be a day or so. If you don’t have anywhere to go, we have a guest room.”

  “No. Thanks though. I’ll leave my number, if that works,” Sophie said. “I need to see my brother. But I’d love to get together with her. Or all of you. I don’t mean to rush off.…”

  She’d only been living among the overly mannered Fleet folk for six weeks, but apparently it had gummed up her sense of what was polite, how not to hurt any feelings. Now she floundered. What did you say?

  If finding out he had a stepdaughter he’d never known about had been difficult for Merro, he had either processed it already or was great at hiding his emotions. “It’s complicated. I know.”

  Sophie opened her notebook, pulled out her Bram page, and wrote HERE! on it. Then she tore out an ordinary scrap of paper, jotted down her mobile number, and handed it over.

  “Speaking of a phone, do you need to use our landline?” Merro asked.

  “Nope. My brother’s got a phone for me.” She waved the messageply, which was already showing a reply: I’M IN THE CAFÉ AROUND THE CORNER FROM B’S.

  “You and yours know all about us, I guess,” Shad said.

  “Shad,” Merro said. A warning?

  Plastering on a bright smile, Sophie shook hands with her … birth stepfather? And brother? “Maybe I’ll see you?”

  Merro nodded. “You’re welcome any time.”

  She all but raced to the café and flung herself into her brother’s arms.

  “Holy crap,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Five good!”

  “Well … three.”

  “Only three?” She pretended to be insulted.

  “Not every feeling can be full-on, Sofe,” he said, but he’d given her a good once-over and was beaming. “Leave room to dial it up.”

  “When has that ever worked?”

&n
bsp; Sometime in the past couple of weeks, Bram had gotten a haircut. The tan he’d picked up while sailing from Sylvanna to Issle Morta—roughly the distance from Memphis, Tennessee, to Seattle—and back again had begun to fade. He hadn’t done anything about getting the pearl removed from underneath his thumbnail, and he wasn’t wearing glasses or contacts.…

  “You get your eyes lasered?”

  He nodded.

  “And you’re hitting the gym?”

  “Running less, lifting more. Something called functional training.”

  “That’s very athletic of you.” Bram had always had a grudging attitude toward exercise. Maintenance and upkeep, he called it—a task performed out of a sense of obligation to keep his body running, without any tie-in with fun.

  “Sailing’s strenuous, Ducks. I want twenty-twenty vision and more muscle.”

  “Don’t call me Ducks,” she said happily as he handed her a coffee and a slice of lemon pound cake in a waxed paper envelope and led her out in search of the car. “You look good, Bramble.”

  “Happy, healthy, and wrestling the mysteries of the universe.”

  “Still single?”

  “No. In six months I’ve married and spawned two kids. What do you think?”

  “Just asking.” For Tonio, she didn’t add.

  “Come on, Sofe, what have you learned?”

  She decided not to lead with her glancing encounter with Verena’s father and half brother. Instead, getting into the passenger seat, she mentally rifled through her bag of camera chips. “Pick a discipline.”

  “Biology.”

  “I’ve got a list going of animal species I’m positive we haven’t got here in Erstwhile. I got to know a taxidermist and he’s going to start saving blood and hair samples for me. Supposedly to start an archive for the court, but maybe one day—”

  “Maybe one day we can get someone to run the DNA?”

  “Dare to dream, right? And I’m collecting and studying unusual feathers, because they’re light.”

  “No plants?”

  “Seeds and some more pressed leaves. It’s been tougher. The Fleet’s reviewing procedures on anything that might get loose and propagate on an island where it doesn’t belong.”