“If it doesn’t work and I don’t come back, you’re welcome to them.”
“In any case, I believe they should be unloaded. We can make Swan flightworthy if she is not burdened so heavily.”
“Can you?” Alice’s gaze swung back to May Lin. “But we can’t inflate the last gasbag.”
“Not with proper gas, no. But we can certainly repair the holes and fill it with ordinary air. She will not fly so high, but she will lift.”
“Your pumps will burn out before you can get enough air in those bags.”
May Lin dimpled. “Not my pumps.”
Hope swelled in Alice’s chest at the thought of Swan airborne again, heading across country as fast as her propellers would take her, to … where? Realistically, they could not moor in Santa Fe, because of the price that no doubt was still on her head. And how could they return to Philadelphia without Gloria? The crazy masquerade she was embroiled in might be discovered at any moment, and then how would she escape to freedom?
But May Lin was waiting for an answer. “I have a lot more to learn from you, I can see.” May Lin smiled again. “But oh, I wish we had some news from the Royal Kingdom! It’s been two weeks since Captain Fremont and Jake took Evan downriver to Santa Croce and the dam. He promised he’d bring word about what’s happening.”
Benny Stringfellow’s head popped up from behind the submersible’s stern, where he was testing their welds for leaks. “We could send a pigeon, couldn’t we?”
Alice shook her head. “They need a destination with a magnetic code to fly to, like an airship.”
“Are airships the only things with codes? Because the Lady sends hers to Carrick House.”
“Illegally, my lad,” Alice reminded him fondly.
“Who is this Lady?” May Lin asked. “Is that not your title among the English?”
“It is, but … he means a good friend of ours. She has shared many an adventure with us—including one in Resolution, where I met her.” Which was probably the understatement of the century. But now another memory was served up from the depths of the cogs and wheels in Alice’s brain. “She told me once that the Meriwether-Astor pigeons had basic instructions to fly to M.A.M.W. ships. Others could be added, but all the company’s pigeons have that same feature. Wouldn’t it be nice if their codes also included things like the behemoth? Then we could talk with Evan directly.”
May Lin’s gaze became fixed on the sandstone cliff opposite, as if her mind had gone into complex calculations. Then she blinked. “Do we have a Meriwether-Astor pigeon on hand?”
“Sadly, no. If we did, we could turn it loose and see if it goes to the nearest thing Gloria built.”
“There are crates of things in Swan’s hold,” Benny pointed out. “Maybe there’s one in there. I can look. I’m finished here, Captain—can’t find a single leak.”
Alice had nearly run out of things a twelve-year-old boy could do, and since Jake had gone, Benny had stuck to her and Ian like glue. For which she could hardly blame him. In a howling wilderness, you stuck with the things that made you feel safe. Checking for leaks had been just the job for him, and this was even better.
“That’s a good idea, Benny. See what you can find. We’re nearly finished with the Chaloupe. All I have to do is load her up with the explosives and then May Lin and I can attach the spider’s legs.”
He put away his tools and scampered up through the terraces to the rock chute where the stairs to the top of the mesa were concealed. He and Jake went up and down like a pair of jackrabbits, but it always made Alice a little queasy, and she avoided looking down. Opening those crates would keep him busy for a couple of days, and it wouldn’t hurt to know exactly what they had on hand if push came to shove.
Ian came out on to the sun terrace the next level up, and leaned over to see them. “How is it going?”
“Nearly done. May Lin helped me with the rudders and the vanes, and this window is in.” She sloshed over to the steps with her own tools, climbed out, and rolled her pants down. The stone was warm under her feet, but it wouldn’t last long once the sun set. “How do you feel?”
“I want to tear off this sling and throw it in the river. I am healed, Alice, no matter what Clara says. The wound has only a small scab, and I can put up with stiff muscles.”
“Keep exercising them.” She joined him with a kiss, and he lifted his left arm out of the sling and slipped it around her. “I like this kind of exercise. I advise ten repetitions daily.”
“Is that all?”
She slipped both arms around his waist.
“I don’t like this silence,” he said, echoing her earlier thoughts. “And I don’t like the fact that the Ranger ship has never returned.”
“You want me to be captured?”
“You know I don’t. But if I were in command, I would have landed to give a downed ship aid, at the very least.”
“I expect they’re nervous about the witches.”
“And with good reason. But the witches cannot prevent air surveillance. Its commander ought to have looked for signs of life.”
“Well,” Alice said, finding it very comfortable leaning against him, even if her feet were bare and beginning to get cold, “if they haven’t come back in three weeks, it’s not likely they’re going to. Maybe some air pirate has decided he wants to keep Ned Mose’s legacy alive, and is giving them trouble in Santa Fe.”
“We know nothing here, and it makes me uneasy. Communication among friends is as vital to success as communication among a fleet’s ships.”
“We’re spread so far apart,” Alice agreed softly. “With his papers and his skill with the behemoth, Evan might be relatively safe, but I’m afraid for Gloria. Something is bound to go wrong.”
“What is this about Gloria?” A new voice came from the doorway behind them, and Alice turned to see the young Viceroy. Carefully, he made his way down the steps to them.
“Felipe,” she said, slipping from Ian’s one-armed embrace to offer him a helping hand. “Are you sure you should be outside?”
“If I do not get up, I will go mad,” he said simply. “If Captain Hollys may do so, then I will, too.”
“Well said,” Ian told him. “We are not children.”
Alice bit back a comment about fractious and disobedient men delaying their own recoveries by not doing as they were told. Such an opinion was not likely to help.
“I am glad to see you outdoors,” she said instead. “Your strength must be coming back, and we want to get some color into those cheeks.”
“I feel as unsteady as a new lamb,” the young man admitted. “But do not tell Tia Clara.”
“It’s still a miracle to me that once you regained your senses, you recognized her,” Alice said. “What a memory you must have.”
“It is no great feat when in the entire course of your life, you have received kindness at the hands of only a very few,” Felipe said wistfully. “When I was young, in the palace at San Francisco de Asis, she would allow me to help her in the kitchen, making cakes and bread and all manner of delights. Those are the only happy memories I have of that place.”
Alice thought of her own childhood, fraught with peril and the uncertain temper of a brute who would as soon wallop you as look at you. The only place where she had found that kind of safety and kindness had been in the house of the desert flowers, with her mother.
Now May Lin joined them, stripping off her leather gloves. “Felipe,” she greeted him. “I am glad to see that you are going to recover. Sister Clara has not lost a patient yet, and we now know much more about ergot poisoning than ever we did.”
“I am happy to be of service,” the prince said with a smile and a bow.
Alice was glad to see a glimmer of a sense of humor. Between him and Ian, the past few weeks had been quite a trial. No one minded their tongue around the Viceroy, which to her surprise, he found refreshing. His thirst for truth after a rule marked primarily by lies and betrayal had turned into an asset. She had n
ever realized before how much she had taken for granted the honesty that was common currency among her friends and loved ones.
“May I give you any assistance?” Felipe asked. “Though I am quite certain it is treason to ask such a question of you all in connection with that little engine there.”
“A prince may not commit treason,” Ian reminded him. “He simply changes his mind.”
A shadow passed over the young man’s face. “I am quite sure Ambassador de Aragon would not agree with you. After finding the gold cached in your caverns here, this dam was his pet project.”
“I am sorry to disappoint him,” May Lin said tartly. “We were just lamenting the lack of news from beyond the mountains ourselves.”
“Had I not been in two places at once, I might have sent a message from Santa Croce and had the entire court come to brief me.”
“I still find it astonishing that you are so sanguine about our deception, sir,” Ian said. “I suspect that most men in, er, your position would have hunted out the axe first and asked questions later.”
“Ah, but I do not appear to be remotely like most men in my, er, position,” he said with a wry twist of his lips. “I am simply happy to be among the ranks of the living. And even more, to know that the woman I loved and trusted as being the next thing to a mother is alive as well. You cannot know how I felt when I opened my eyes in my right senses and recognized Tia Clara.”
“Oh, I think I can.” Ian took Alice’s hand. She squeezed back.
“Our lack of news becomes even more frustrating when we remember that at some point we must switch you back, Felipe.” May Lin leaned upon a stone wall, her gaze leaving him with reluctance and fixing itself upon the rush of the river through the canyon’s walls.
“It is something I have thought upon for many an hour during my convalescence,” he admitted, apparently not possessing Alice’s sharp eyes and the newlywed’s nose for possible romance among other people. “As soon as I am able to travel, I suppose I must return to San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, provided, of course, that Gloria and Joe—”
“Honoria,” May Lin corrected him.
“—and Honoria are still there. For all we know, they could be in San Francisco de Asis by now.”
“I would not be, were I she,” Ian said.
Alice nodded in agreement. “They’ll do everything they can to stay as close as possible to where you are. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gloria expressed a wish to see the dam herself.”
“The only question is whether it is there to be seen or not, when they come,” May Lin said. “I would prefer not, and the sooner the better. Already we have had messengers from some of the villages downriver, asking for refuge.”
“I had no idea when I agreed to the project just what it might mean,” Felipe said. “I feel as though I ought to apologize to every refugee who comes.”
“We must keep to a minimum those who know who you really are,” Ian cautioned him. “Outside of ourselves and Mother Mary, you must continue to be Joe, Evan’s translator.”
“I understand. I must also remember to keep his—my—papers upon my person, for the happy occasion when we do meet and resume our proper identities.” He sighed. “I hope he is enjoying Gloria’s company, at any rate. I should have done so, in his place.”
Alice watched as May Lin schooled her face to smoothness. Then the young woman frowned. “Ship ho,” she said suddenly. “Riverboat.”
Alice grabbed the canvas tarpaulin and flung it over the submersible. Once it was secure, she pulled on her stockings and boots. The boat had to be bringing news—to navigate this particular stretch of river took skill and a certain amount of nerve brought on by urgency.
Witches began to appear in doorways and on terraces as the sound of the paddles striking the water became audible, echoing and multiplying between the smooth canyon walls, and by the time it docked, nearly all the village had come down to welcome it. Clara joined them on what was now the bottom-most terrace as Mother Mary progressed majestically to the gangplank.
Alice didn’t recognize the captain—he was not the same man who had helped bring Ian here. But she certainly recognized Gretchen as she disembarked with another man and only one of the witches who had gone with her days ago. And then—
“Jake!” she shouted, and waved until he looked up.
With a lift of his hand, he jogged up the steps and straight into Alice’s hug.
“We’d nearly given you up,” she said breathlessly as he released her, then shook hands with Ian. “Benny will be so upset he wasn’t here to greet you. He’s up on the mesa.”
“I’ll see him at dinner. We have news. Hello, er …” After a moment, he stuck out his hand for the prince’s clasp. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m Jake, Captain Chalmers’s navigator on Swan.”
“I am happy to make your acquaintance, sir. I am …” He glanced at Alice. “Joe.”
“It’s all right, Felipe. Jake is safe as houses. I trust him with my life—and you can, too.”
Jake looked pleased, and then shook the prince’s hand a second time. “I’m very glad to see you up and about. It was touch and go for a little while.”
“I am very glad, too. I hope … we may be friends.”
Alice could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Jake had let himself go enough to smile as unabashedly as this. “I would like that … Felipe.”
“And now we must hear the news,” May Lin said. “Look, Mother Mary is coming up here with Riley and Fitz.”
Riley, Alice had been given to understand, had been with Gloria’s party when she had set off to find the Viceroy, and had gone with the man who was no longer Gloria’s husband when they had escorted Evan downriver.
“Jake,” she said quietly. “Where is Captain Fremont?”
“He’s—”
But Mother Mary had begun to speak. “We are all anxious to hear what you have to say, and then we’ll feast. That way, there will be fewer supplies we’ll have to move to the upper levels tomorrow.”
Riley spoke up so the witches ranged along the walls could hear. “Santa Croce is all but inundated. The church is on an island and most of the townsfolk have moved down to the water meadows.”
“On the bright side,” Fitz said, turning his bowler hat around in his hands, “conscription has been outlawed, so folk who moved there can pursue their own trades without fearing they’ll be seized and made to work on the dam.”
Alice nudged the Viceroy. “That’s Gloria’s work. I’d bet my ship on it.”
“Well done, Gloria,” Ian murmured.
“And that isn’t all,” Riley added. “Airships can fly into the Royal Kingdom now.”
“What?” Alice gripped Ian’s arm and made him wince. It was the one in the sling. “Sorry, darling,” she whispered. “Jake, is it true?”
“It is,” he said in a low tone. “I don’t know what good it does them, since no one knows about it outside their borders, and there’s no one to build them on the inside.”
“Still,” Ian said, “once we have Swan flightworthy again—”
“Exactly,” Jake said with satisfaction. “We can go and get her if everything goes to Hades in a hand basket.”
“Airships.” The Viceroy sounded rather pained. “I had hoped to be the one to introduce them to the country. How did she get around the missions’ objections without me, and their belief that airships fly in the face of God?”
“The Church once believed the world was flat,” Ian pointed out, “and changed their minds once they knew better.” He chuckled. “I must say that girl is much more persuasive than I ever gave her credit for.”
“I should simply have issued a command,” the prince said with dignity. “Persuasion would not have been necessary.”
May Lin shushed him, since Fitz had begun speaking again.
“All the grandees from every ranch were required to attend the Viceroy at San Luis Obispo de Tolosa and agree to these changes to the law, or be f
orced to pay a fine,” he said.
The Viceroy’s mouth opened and then closed with a click, as though he had remembered just in time that he was supposed to be Joe.
“Many of them did agree, and it’s official—the rancho troops have been sent back to farm and family, unless they want to work on the dam for the wage they would have received had they been soldiers.”
“Genius,” Ian said.
“So the war is over, then, before it began?” Sister Clara called from their terrace. “Can it be true?”
“Unless something has changed in the two days it took us to fight our way upstream, it is true,” Fitz said. “And we all know how slowly the Royal Kingdom changes.”
“Until lately,” Felipe muttered. “I cannot believe she has taken such advantage of my absence.”
May Lin leaned close enough to say with quiet ferocity, “But you knew her goal—to stop the war that both your fathers began, and to save countless lives. She made that plain to you, did she not, before you asked her to marry you?”
“Well … yes … but it does not follow that I would have granted her carte blanche to do it.”
“Then you would have deceived her and broken her heart.”
Even though he now insisted on the truth while he was among them, Alice had a feeling the young Viceroy hadn’t been prepared for that.
“You do agree that we have to destroy the dam, don’t you, Felipe?” Alice’s voice was a little sharper than she had intended it to be. “Since your recovery began and you saw what was at stake, you haven’t changed your mind?”
The Viceroy pulled himself to his full height, somewhere between that of Alice and Ian. “Would it change your plans if I had?”
“No, but we would far rather have your support than your condemnation.”
“It will be seen as an act of war by your Ambassador, unless we succeed in making it look like an accident,” Ian said. “The last thing we want is to start the war all over again, with your forces taking the field against those of the Texicans.”
“A battle my forces would almost certainly lose.” Felipe’s face, which still had not filled out, looked bleak. “I have seen the differences in the technology and the skill in spycraft which the witches possess. Somehow, book learning about historic battles and fencing lessons do not seem an adequate response.” He gazed at Mother Mary, who was deep in conversation with Riley and Fitz. “I do agree that the people along the river must be saved. But can we not simply regulate the water flow and leave the dam as it is?”
Fields of Gold: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 12) Page 12
