The Nature of a Pirate Read online

  Beatrice shook her head. “Bram’s the first true Erstwhiler who’s been allowed to return.”

  “Someone took John Coine gun shopping.” A memory of her credit troubles surfaced, and Sophie added, “And paid.”

  “Maybe there’s another way to eraglide. If it’s not just the Feliachilds, all bets are off.”

  “I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to prove negatives: ‘Can anyone else eraglide?’ ‘Probably not, Kir.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Well, nobody’s been caught at it.’”

  “There’s always you.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I can be arrested for helping someone terrorize my parents.”

  “You’re in the clear. There are ceremonies tied to eragliding. You haven’t been blessed, or trained.”

  “Would blessing give you a ticking watch earworm? Or does that come with the watch?”

  Beatrice’s mouth dropped open. “What did you say?”

  “I can hear your clock downstairs—actually, if I listen, I can pick up Gale’s watch now. Or maybe I’m just imagining that because I know how it sounds. I started hearing your clock when I was halfway here…” Sophie held up her phone, displaying map coordinates. “I marked it at a mile and a half distance.”

  “Mile and a half.” Beatrice opened a locked wooden wardrobe, rummaging around for a silver-plated cone lined with what looked like lacquered birch leaves. She laid her hand on Sophie’s and said, “Hold this up to your ear.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an ear trumpet. Go ahead.”

  Sophie raised the cone. Gale’s pocket watch came through at once. Hadn’t it wound down yet? The clock downstairs bonged, deafening, and Sophie jerked her head away. “Ow!”

  “I’ll stop ours. Stay here.” Beatrice went downstairs and the bonging stopped. “Try again.”

  “Bossy Verdanii matriarchs,” Sophie groused, obeying.

  “Well?” Beatrice called from the stairwell.

  “I hear Gale’s pocket watch.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No-o-o…” Sophie started to say, but it wasn’t true. There was a thrum, more a heartbeat than anything mechanical. Brrum, brrum, brrum. A sense of time passing, a great weight of years reverberating across a yawning distance, calling to her with a voice made of millions of days and nights, of electrical current and crashing waves.

  Beatrice took the horn, gently, and the call dissipated.

  Sophie had turned, without realizing it, to face the northeast corner of the room. Her shadow fell in that direction and sun warmed her back, even though they were indoors, even though San Francisco was foggy and overcast.

  “You can. You can hear the Worldclock. It should be impossible!”

  Sophie steadied herself on the counter. “So I can get arrested for treason after all?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Beatrice said. “But you could potentially learn to eraglide.”

  Sophie led her down to the room with the lockers and started opening doors, exposing the clocks and watches etched inside each door. “This is basically a locker room for Feliachilds who can go back and forth to Stormwrack?”

  “Did I say that?”

  Sophie decided to take that as permission to go on. “This one’s yours—I’ve seen your clock. Here’s Gale’s, here’s Verena’s, and this belongs to Bettona.”

  Beatrice nodded.

  “Who are the other three?”

  “Why?”

  “Pirates and religious maniacs came here to buy guns, remember? If they have their own way here, we’ll never catch them. But the other possibility is—”

  “One of the seven brought them?” Beatrice frowned. “My mother was one.”

  “Ennatrice. She died by ordeal,” Sophie remembered. “And there’s Pharmann—dead too. Who got his?”

  “They’re accounted for … They’re waiting for Verena and Bettona to have children, basically.” She tapped a sketch of a wristwatch. “This belongs to Bettona’s great-uncle; he maintains our mailhouse in London.”

  “That cousin’s above suspicion?”

  “He can’t eraglide with anything but himself. He keeps a house and clock. We can go to him, but when he wants to come here, either he takes a commercial flight or I fetch him. Otherwise, he shows up buck naked.”

  Sophie wondered if that was something a person could fake. “If someone from Verdanii brought John Coine and the other guy here, it can only be one of these seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t anyone can use one of the watches? I mean, if someone’s trying to steal Gale’s from me—”

  “Supposedly it’s just a Feliachild.”

  “As defined by…”

  Beatrice said. “The customary answer probably isn’t scientific enough for you.”

  “I’ll take superstition if that’s all you’ve got,” Sophie said. “Nobody else is going to tell me this stuff.”

  “Indeed.” Beatrice laid out the rules briskly. Eragliding was supposedly limited to members of her genetic family, which was one of nine family lines directly descended from the original Allmother’s direct descendants. Family membership depended on who was married to whom, the theory being that if someone strayed too far from that gene pool, they’d have to marry another person from the right family to maintain their status.

  “I’m feeling an inbreeding joke coming on,” Sophie said.

  “Believe me, I’ve heard them all. Even if you are a true Feliachild, you’re supposed to break bread with the Allmother before you can hear the Worldclock.” Beatrice frowned. “You seem to have skipped that step.”

  Maybe this was why Annela had jumped all over the chance to have Sophie repudiate Verdanii citizenship. In promising to stay away from Verdanii, Sophie limited her chances of learning to eraglide. “If it’s genetic, and I’m only half Verdanii, maybe I won’t be very good at it?”

  “Verena’s an amazingly talented eraglider, and her father—You met Merro?—is from Oakland. Some have the knack, some don’t.”

  There was so much here to unpack. She thought of her Sylvanner passport. The Verdanii wouldn’t want a portside eraglider. No, Annela wouldn’t like that one bit.

  Now you’re thinking like a Wracker, Sofe. Bring it back to the here and now. “In the meantime, people are breaking into my parents’ house.”

  “If it helps, they’re probably not in danger,” Beatrice said. “I scribed them against casual misfortune when I gave you to them.”

  “Casual what?”

  “Please,” Beatrice said. “I’ve been in a car with your mother.”

  Sophie opened her mouth to defend Mom, thought of all the times she’d come within a hair of whiplash, and shut up.

  “It’s a light intention. No car wrecks, no house fires, no swindlers—”

  “They just got broken into!”

  “That was targeted, not casual. And they were out of the house when it happened, both times?”

  “Hold on. You? You scribed? Or you paid?”

  Beatrice’s cheeks pinkened. “I’d taken up inscription when I was married to Clydon. It was another reason why marrying him seemed like a good idea. Mother wouldn’t let me apprentice.”

  “He got you into the Spellscrip Institute?”

  “Bumped me to the head of the registration list.”

  “Of course he did. Were you any good?”

  “Has your mother wrecked her car? Which reminds me … If they’re asking a lot of questions and you want me to take the edge off their curiosity—”

  “No! Teeth—they’re academics! Are you nuts? You can’t go playing around with my parents’ heads.”

  “It was just a suggestion.”

  “What about me?” Sophie demanded. “Did you do anything to me?”

  Beatrice’s expression froze a little.

  “You totally did! What was it?”

  With a sigh, Beatrice crossed to an abandoned and rickety-looking baby-changing table propped up against the wall, looking for all the worl
d like it hadn’t been moved in two decades. She pushed it aside, then levered up a panel on the floor, revealing a safe.

  “Now I know why you don’t bother locking the lockers,” Sophie said. She felt as if she’d been given Novocain. Her pulse, slamming in her ears, had that whoosh of waves and the Worldclock again. Brrum, brrum, brrum.

  “It’d be an expression of mistrust,” Beatrice said. “We’re family, remember?”

  A chunk as the lock opened. Beatrice started pulling scrolls out of the safe.

  One. Two. Three.

  “You have to understand,” she said. “I was never going to see you again. And you were living here…”

  Four. Five. Six.

  “You were never going to be enchanted by anyone else. It didn’t matter if I laid on a bit of a magical load. You were never going to find yourself getting into the pain.”

  Into the pain. Sophie remembered the headache she’d gotten when they taught her Fleetspeak—flawless, accent-free Fleetspeak, in an hour.

  Seven.

  Paper, parchment, a knitted scarf, all of them glowing with spellscrip. Sophie stared at them, cotton-mouthed.

  “What are they?”

  “This one’s the same ward against misfortune I worked on your parents,” Beatrice said. She unrolled another. “Oh—physical vitality. And this one’s charm—persuasiveness.” Sophie held out her hands for the first three and was staring, jaw slack, as her birth mother glanced over more crumbly looking pages. “Brains, looks, fertility—”

  “What? Oh my God!”

  “That one’s traditional. They teach it in motherschool.”

  “So I can plan on busting out Feliachild triplets one day, because—” She ran aground as her thoughts turned, inevitably, to Garland. Garland Parrish and babies. Bzzt. Before she could completely short-circuit, Sophie said, “What’s the seventh?”

  Beatrice unrolled it—a fine, crisp sheet of birch bark the color of cream, covered in bright-green calligraphy. “A friend taught it to me before I left Sylvanna. I meant it to bond you with the Hansas. To keep you—”

  “From looking for you?”

  “I never fit well with my own kin,” Beatrice said. There was an apology in her tone. Defensiveness, too. “I wanted you to fit.”

  Sophie looked at the seven scrips. “Without all this, what? I’d have been an unlucky, clumsy, stupid, butt-ugly pig baby with no social skills?”

  “No! You were a beautiful—”

  “Don’t.” She felt the raw edge in her voice. “Don’t do that.”

  “Sophie, they’re small intentions. Tiny little—”

  “If I go to a spellscribe with all these, plus I was taught Fleet overnight eight months ago, and now I want to learn the legal system upside and downside so I stop falling afoul of Annela and the Fleet’s arbitrary dinky picky stupid rules, he’ll say no problem?”

  Beatrice balked a little. “You’re studying law? Law?”

  “This isn’t about Cly, Beatrice. And it’s so not the point.”

  “Fine. I’ve screwed everything up, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I want the truth.”

  “You’re too loaded to absorb the code of law. You shouldn’t have been loaded for Fleet. These backlands inscribers…”

  “Oh, go blame the foreign guy?” Sophie was horrifically, deeply, intensely upset. Snatching up the scrolls, she stuffed them in the first thing she found, a plastic grocery bag that had been sitting on the clothes dryer. “You don’t even understand how the last one works!”

  “Those should stay in the safe.”

  “I’ll be back in fifteen hours to catch that ride to Stormwrack,” Sophie said, not even sure it was true, before she stormed out.

  CHAPTER 9

  She ended up crying in some nameless park on the waterfront, twisting and stretching the handles of the grocery bag that held the inscriptions, and watching a bunch of gulls worrying the body of a desiccated fish on the edge of a litter-encrusted stretch of tidal flat.

  It was everything. How she looked. The way people tended to let her talk them around to what she wanted. She’d been in tight spots on climbs and dives and had always believed it was a clear head and resourcefulness that had brought her through.

  She pulled out the ward against random misfortune. It was stitched on the red scarf, and though the letters were in black thread, they had the glimmer of active magic. The seventh scroll, the one whose purpose Beatrice apparently didn’t even understand, had been lettered with a fine brush in green.

  She couldn’t read anything on them but her own name.

  She had been weeping for more than an hour when Bram showed, easing his car into the narrow half space beside hers and joining her on the bench. He glanced over the scrolls, one after another, and said, finally, “Whatcha doing, Ducks?”

  “Trying to work up the courage to toss ’em?”

  “That would be deeply—”

  “Idiotic? Impulsive?”

  “Unwise. Why don’t you let me lock them in that shiny new safe-deposit box with Gale’s watch and—”

  “Oh, no. No way.”

  “Sofe.” His voice was infuriatingly careful. “I get that you’re upset—”

  “Do you get why?”

  He opened his mouth.

  “I don’t want to hear what your therapist would say.”

  “Just…” Bram took a breath. “Tell me.”

  She jumped to her feet, wiping an already sodden tissue over her cheeks. “All this. I’m barely a real person. I’m a made thing. A windup doll—or, who was that statue? Galatea? I’m the image of what Beatrice wanted. A designer baby.”

  “At most, you’re a transform.” He used the Fleet word; it meant someone with job-specific magical enhancements.

  “Not an oddity?”

  “Technically…”

  “Beatrice did the spells herself—did she tell you that? She was on the run here in Erstwhile. She barely knew what she was doing. Dabbling out of a spell book—”

  “She told you this?”

  She waved the birch scroll. “She doesn’t even understand what this one does!”

  He took it, his grip unusually firm as he pried it from between her fingers. “We should work that out, then, before you go pitching it in the shredder.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Copy them, Sofe. I’ll write out the scrips so we can study them and safely lock up the originals.”

  “No, no, no.” What was most upsetting was that he was looking at the text—running a parallel baby-genius-think about spellscribing—even as he tried to calm her down.

  “Sofe, you’re not thinking clearly.”

  “She gave me good luck and brains. Did I tell you the brains part? Mom and Dad could’ve been stuck with some klutzy, hideous, learning-challenged—”

  “Do you honestly want to test that? Tear up the brain scroll and hit Mensa for a new IQ test?”

  “The looks could go, couldn’t they? Stupid, cosmetic, frivolous—I’m all loaded up with magic. What if I’m chasing pirates and I break my leg?”

  “We bring you back here for X-rays and a cast,” he said. “You know you don’t get the load back by tearing up previous spells. And adding to the parents’ trauma by doing something that might change your appearance—”

  She laughed. “When we first got to Stormwrack and I learned about magic, I thought Garland had gotten his face done. I was all Wow, how vain! There’s irony for you.”

  “Did Beatrice give you your curiosity?”

  “Smart people are curious,” she said.

  “What about the generosity? Don’t huff, Sofe, you are—”

  “Maybe the tendency to freak out is all me. Wait, no—Beatrice is a drama queen.”

  “Or your interest in nature?”

  “I’m just a construct.”

  Bram had bagged the spells by now, packing them in his own duffel. Even as he talked to her, he’d pulled out his phone and was typing with one finger.
/>   “I’ve been mooching off the parents,” she said.

  “Now you’re casting around for sticks to beat yourself with.”

  She wrenched the bag from his grasp. “I hunted down Cly and Beatrice to sort out my origin. My nature, I guess. And he’s probably sociopathic and she fine-tuned herself a designer spawn, only to dump it on—”

  “Sofe, you know Mom and Dad love you.”

  “Then she made them lucky, and—whoop!—previously infertile couple gets pregnant. With a baby supergenius.”

  Bram’s thumb froze midtext.

  “See. Prospect’s not as comfy when you’re the changeling monster pixie baby in question.” She’d wound herself up enough to power another storm of tears, so she strode away, arms wrapped around the duffel, sobbing as angrily as some toddler who’d gotten her ice cream stolen.

  The gulls didn’t so much as glance at her.

  A small, cool, inner part of her was standing back from all of it.

  He’s not saying so, but I’m being ridiculous. So Beatrice gave me some gifts as she sent me on my way out of her life. Wouldn’t I have done the same? I should be grateful, but damn it, I should’ve been the one to choose. And now I can’t shortcut my way to law—which was maybe lazy, or a bad use of magical loading anyway.…

  She cried harder. She didn’t want to be rational. “This sucks.”

  Bram had followed her. “She’s not wrong about Mom’s driving.”

  She couldn’t even rouse a smile.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s some big deal brewing in Fleet, right? You have to go?”

  “I’m all oathed up and bound to obey. Besides, if I stay here, that banker will probably drag me off in chains to debtors’ prison.”

  “Debtors’ prison’s not a thing anymore.”

  “That cop who thinks I’m a smuggler could have a go at incarcerating me.”

  “Beatrice is leaving in twelve hours?”

  She nodded.

  “So we go home, finish turning your room into a guest suite, plant a few webcams, drop your remaining stuff at my place…”

  She sniffled. “Get Dad a pit bull puppy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the rush? You could do that anytime.” She rubbed her eyes. “Oh. You’re coming along.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone, Sofe.”