The Underwater Ballroom Society

by Y. S. Lee

  “A king’s man in the tunnels!” Merryn splutters, overturns her ink, and spends the next two watch bells rewriting the day’s correspondence, swearing at Pen every minute of the time. The ship in harbour—Caernarfon, for once going about her legitimate business—puts out on the evening ebb and Penhallow sets out towards the cove.

  Deveraux and his men arrive promptly on their hour and waste no time in unloading their bundle. Whatever precious magical artefact it may be, it’s unremarkable in its sailcloth wrapping, about the size of a fisherman’s trail net and secured by long ties. They handle it with ruthless care, not letting it touch the rock walls of the tunnels and stepping on Pen’s feet if they must to avoid it. Pen’s uncomfortable enough already. A king’s man in the tunnels. Merryn wasn’t wrong to spit piss and vinegar, and Pen’s father is like to be spinning in his grave.

  (A taciturn, rigorous man, Pen’s father, who went out by nights as Pen does, and accorded the smuggler’s trade its due solemnity. He would have made the same promises to Goody Nanskevel. Pen is comforted by the thought.)

  After ten minutes of shuffling through the tunnels, with Deveraux bringing up the rear, they come to the parting of the ways. One passage leads through to the sea-caves beneath the cove, where the crates are brought in and stowed. The other is the left-hand path, the one Pen’s girls and boys never take. It leads deeper underground, the route marked only in glimmers of phosphorescence.

  Pen leads the way leftwards without hesitation. Deveraux’s two men are unaffected, concentrating on their bundle; they’re pleasing to the eye but they weren’t brought along for any surfeit of acumen. But Deveraux can feel the strange wind rising; he can hear the whispers in the dark. “Something built these tunnels,” he says.

  “Someone,” Pen says, as the walls narrow around them, and then they emerge into the sea’s gemstone depths, beneath great arches of light and glass.

  (An underwater ballroom, Pen’s family have always called it, as though it were for the fairy folk to hold their solstice balls, or for the selkies to dance their unaccustomed reels. But this is a real place, a human place. Built by the old powers, in the days when magic might still be wielded beneath fathoms of saltwater, but built by the people of Kernow.

  Still and all, you couldn’t stow crates here, not with the strange breeze and the echoes of things past. Pen has been here three times in twenty years. The later visits were in discharge of the duty; she checked all was well and scurried back through the dark. But the first time was on the occasion of her majority, guided by her father as his mother had guided him. Penhallow, her father said, as she put away childish things: This, too, is yours. To care for, as she does the people and the town, until those who might claim it call for its return.)

  “Quite something,” Deveraux says, shakily. “Who built it?”

  “We did,” Pen says. “And whatever your piece is”—she points at the package, being laid down carefully by the two men on the dry dusty floor—“it’ll come to no harm here.”

  And nor will anything else, if what’s in the bundle itself seeks to cause harm. The men investigate the perfect circle of the walls, finding no seals or seams, no doors or hatches. One may enter by the tunnel at low tide and leave the same way, and that is all; the glass is a single piece. Pen waits and looks up at the sea’s green underside, obscene in its way, as though one were peering at a great lady in her smalls.

  “I’m obliged,” Deveraux says, as the two men finish their inspection, and come to stand by their bundle. “Now, if you’ll excuse us.”

  Pen sets off along the tunnel without demur; they would rather she were not here when they open the bundle, and if the king’s men wish to get themselves lost in the tunnels it’s no business of hers.

  But it seems that Deveraux and his men are officious but not entirely without gumption. They emerge on the beach only a short while after Pen, though water is splashing their boots and glossing the pebbles. Pen is looking to the path around the headland when a familiar voice says: “Cutting it fine, aren’t you?”

  “Trevelyan!”

  It’s an instinctive panic. But Deveraux gives Pen a pitying look as he steps out onto the beach. “The Revenue take their orders from the King, Miss Penhallow. We shall not be trespassing further upon your time.”

  “You’ll be wanting a guide tomorrow night,” Pen says.

  “I fancy I have committed the path to memory,” Deveraux says. “But I thank you for your invaluable assistance. It has not gone unappreciated.”

  He tips his hat to her and offers a bow to Trevelyan, who scarcely nods in return. And then the king’s men are gone, their hoofbeats receding into the sodden evening, leaving Penhallow in the grey murk to consider the topsy-turviness of everything.

  “About your boy, Nanskevel,” Trevelyan says abruptly. “The circuit Assizes isn’t travelling through until Michaelmas at the earliest. Send his mother to him. She might take in a blanket and a basket, if she cared to.”

  “Thank you,” Pen says, and Trevelyan shrugs as though it were nothing to do with her. “You’re riding tonight?”

  Trevelyan nods again, gesturing towards the sweep of coastline. A hard life, Penhallow realises for the first time—patrolling night after night, through scorn and pitiless weather.

  (King’s men in the tunnels, sympathy for the Revenue. This is certainly her father’s night for spinning in his grave.)

  But they’re going the same way, and all at once Pen’s tired, tired of her responsibilities, tired of mysterious folk from London and the lost powers of long ago. When they’ve cleared the curve of the headland she settles on the harbour wall, out of the wind, and pulls out a hip flask.

  “Drink?” she says. According to Deveraux they’re in this together, whatever it is, and Trevelyan’s guarded look is suddenly plain exasperating. “For God’s sake, Trevelyan. You’ve a hard ride ahead of you and you’re chilled to the bone.”

  Trevelyan hesitates, then sits down on the wall next to Pen. She takes a swig of the raw spirit and hands it back. “Duty paid,” Pen says, impish despite herself, and that might be a flicker in Trevelyan’s expression. A sense of humour, if there’s still scope for wonders in this world.

  Although—perhaps there is such scope, at that. “Do you know what’s in the bundle?” she asks.

  “Some great new magic for a modern age.” Trevelyan shrugs. “Or so they said, when they told me I wasn’t to interfere.”

  Pen wondered about that; she supposes the king’s men can prevail over the Revenue if they see fit. Trevelyan reaches into her pockets and lights a rolled-up strand of tobacco, which startles Pen; she’d never have ascribed Trevelyan any vices. And she does it with no need for matches, which is more startling altogether.

  “Well, there’s a thing,” Penhallow says. She’s seen magic cast, even in Kernow, but it’s vanishing rare, an arresting strangeness.

  Trevelyan’s hand drops, though the flame stays at her fingers. “Party tricks.”

  “Still,” Penhallow says, uncertain. It suggests that there’s something under Trevelyan’s skin that isn’t just saltwater. Something of the places far from the sea.

  “My mother came from London,” Trevelyan says crisply, reading Pen’s mind. “Washed ashore here and never went back. She had the knack. But it won’t breed true.”

  Pen thinks about that. It likely won’t, even if Pen could imagine Trevelyan with a babe in arms. It’s too late for such things.

  Still, there remain the dissenters. “Merryn thinks it will come back some day,” Pen says, hesitantly. “This is just a shadow, a passing-off time. It will come back to us when we need it. For whatever we come to be.”

  Trevelyan nods. “My mother thinks the same.”

  Penhallow wonders if Trevelyan believes it herself, and if she minds the loss. “Your mother,” she says, surprised at the present tense; Trevelyan does have a home and hearth fire, after all. “Where does she stay?”

  “Plymouth.” Trevelyan shrugs again. “My br
others went to sea.”

  So did Pen’s, once. “Trevelyan,” she says, and then stops; in the lamplight, in the wind’s lee, she had thought to say something unwise. Without realising it until now, she’s been staring all this time at Trevelyan’s delicate, lovely hands, cupped around roses of flame.

  No further need to trespass on your time, the king’s men said to Pen, and that ought to be all there is to it. But Pen is nervous, up and pacing, listening for the watchbells, driving Merryn to distraction.

  “Have you a thistle up your arse, Pen?” she snaps finally, laying down the treatise she has spent the whole afternoon trying to read. It’s a loan from another Hindustani scholar, passing through the village on his way to take ship from Penzance, and in whose arse Merryn is also interested.

  “Strangers,” Pen says. “They don’t always know the tides. Half-an-hour—it makes such a difference…”

  “Not that it’d make any odds if they drowned,” Merryn says, “but go and see they don’t, if you must.”

  On her way up to the cove Pen spots a cocked hat and wool coat, and finds it both comforting and unsettling that Trevelyan, too, was worried.

  “There are naval men of many years’ service,” Trevelyan remarks, without greeting, “who might expound to you all day long of the great accuracy of their timepieces, and never think to change from London time.”

  Pen smiles. The tiny beach is deserted, though a fishing boat sits ready for use, tied up just in the lee of the cove. Penhallow watches the movement of water. Trevelyan is impassive, but tapping her foot. They do not speak.

  When at last the men emerge, it’s just in time, the sea a short man’s height from the roof of the tunnels. They’re damp, stained by the green-glimmer of the cave phosphorescence, rattled in their demeanour—but out of the tunnels, and this time for sure no longer Pen’s business. She starts off towards the path to the town, and only turns back because of Trevelyan’s sharp intake of breath.

  The package is no longer neatly wrapped, and the men are struggling with it. It shifts in their grip, the ties unravelling. As Pen watches, the rest of the binding comes loose, and a body flops to the ground.

  “God almighty,” Pen says, starts off down the beach with no notion of what she intends to do next, viscerally conscious that Trevelyan has mirrored her movement, is close by her side.

  But she’s brought short, all the wind knocked out of her. Pen thuds into Trevelyan and the two of them hit the ground together, buffeted by a massive, unseen force.

  The body in the wrapping is not, after all, dead. It belongs to a young man with large, dark eyes, from which a drugged fog is clearing. As he sits up, Deveraux stumbles backwards, trying to get out of the way. His men—frightened and confused, the most animation Pen’s ever seen in them—are backing away. A shimmering ripple passes through the air from the boy’s hands.

  “Not party tricks,” Trevelyan mutters.

  “Oh,” Pen says; it’s the lens she needed to see this clearly. Whoever he is, this boy who was being smuggled out of the country by the king’s agents, he has enough magic in him to hold Pen and Trevelyan flat on the beach, and to keep Deveraux and his men at a distance. The tide laps out away from him, in the wrong direction, against all laws of nature. With her head pressed against the sand, Pen thinks with sucking horror about the underwater ballroom—of power that can withstand the sea.

  “Get away from me,” the boy says to Deveraux, in a London accent. Deveraux tries to get up again and staggers backwards, his hands to his mouth with blood showing between his fingers.

  They kept the boy prisoner in the ballroom overnight, Pen understands suddenly. They will have kept him drugged all the long journey to this coast. To keep him a secret—not to be seen, not to be heard; to be smuggled in the dead of night with the Revenue’s cooperation—and to protect themselves from precisely what’s happening now. Pen imagines him waking up in the dark of the tunnels, seeing only the phosphorescence through sailcloth, and feeling himself carried like a sack of cargo.

  But whatever power he has, it’s not enough. With urging from his master, one of the king’s men manages to throw something small at the boy, who doesn’t see it coming. His expression goes slack, his head tipping onto his shoulder. A poisoned dart, Pen realises. The boy slumps to the ground again and she and Trevelyan find they can stand up. Deveraux, too, is getting to his feet, apoplectic with fury. “You incompetent bumbling fools,” he’s saying to his men, “which part of unimaginably dangerous was in any respect unclear to you?”

  Pen has had enough of this.

  “Deveraux!” she says, the word a whip-crack so all three men turn. “What evil is this?”

  Trevelyan has a hand on her arm: caution, not restraint. Pen is suddenly comforted by her presence. But she strides forwards anyway, not willing to remain a bystander.

  “Miss Penhallow,” Deveraux says, oily and serene. “As I believe I stated, this is the confidential business of the Crown. It has happened to fall within your area of expertise, but the need for that expertise is finished.”

  “I don’t smuggle flesh,” Pen says. Peacocks and rum bottles are a different affair. There are some things neither she nor Trevelyan will tolerate, and they are the authorities here.

  “Stand aside,” Deveraux says. Pen ignores him. She kneels down by the boy, her fingers going for a pulse. She finds one, thready; she supposes the poison on the dart must have been calibrated precisely, rather than risk his life.

  When Pen doesn’t move, Deveraux draws steel. With head down Pen can feel the presence of the blade at the back of her neck, and breathes calmly, deeply: she hasn’t been a smuggler for twenty years without getting herself out of scrapes like this. But there’s no need. Another shriek of metal, the stamp of a boot on Deveraux’s foot, and Trevelyan is by Pen’s side again.

  “Sir,” she says, “I would not have violence within my riding.”

  She pulls Pen back with her, out of reach of the blade. The boy is still slumped on the sand and Deveraux has the same contemptuous, pitying look that Pen saw before.

  “Up until now there hadn’t been any need for it,” he says. “This is necessary work for a greater good, and I’d be grateful if the pair of you would cease being troublesome. I’d have expected better from the Revenue, for God’s sake.”

  He’s holding them off now just by his lofty righteousness of purpose, and the menace in his stance. Behind him the men start loading the drugged boy into the boat, wrapping him up again in the bundle of blankets and sailcloth.

  “This is not what I do,” Trevelyan says softly, and Deveraux ignores her as he ignored Pen, turning to the boy. Trevelyan’s dagger is still in her hand and Pen is tough, her shoulders broad enough for all the weights that she carries, but she knows they couldn’t hold their ground here for long. Not two against three.

  Pen lunges forwards anyway, tries to get to the boat before they loose the ropes. Trevelyan has read her mind, mirroring her movements exactly, and Pen is comforted again by her presence.

  “Trevelyan, stand down,” Deveraux says. “Whom do you serve?”

  Pen looks across in alarm. Trevelyan has halted in her tracks, her hand going to the insignia on her collar.

  “You were apprised as a professional courtesy,” Deveraux said. “Now stand aside.”

  Trevelyan steps away, and Deveraux looks triumphant. Pen wants to kill him. She wants to deliver his carcass to the sea’s embrace, for it to scour his flesh from his bones. She darts towards the boat again, and jerks as Deveraux tries to drag her away bodily. Every instinct in Pen’s body comes into alignment. She breaks his nose.

  “Fuck!” Deveraux says thickly, and now he’s spitting blood, ready for a killing blow of his own. “Will you return to Goodwife Nanskevel tonight? Will you tell her you condemned her boy, for the sake of another who was nothing to you? Will you tell her that?

  “And you, Trevelyan”—this is said over Pen’s head—“will you break the oaths you swore in the King’s ser
vice? Will you refuse your orders?”

  There’s no answer. Trevelyan doesn’t move. Deveraux lets go and Pen stumbles, her ears ringing, and doesn’t fall because Trevelyan steadies her. Pen barely registers it, thinking about Goody Nanskevel and her son who’s the apple of her eye, and damn him, anyway, and damn all this mess. The men finish loading the boat and settle at the oars.

  “Now,” Deveraux says. The boy is deeply unconscious again, the sailcloth hiding his face. The oars dip, and Penhallow and Trevelyan are silent in the cove as the boat sets out. There’s a dark shape in the distance, a ship standing immediately offshore. In half a minute the sloshing sound is almost inaudible in the wind. The boat makes its way out towards the waiting ship, and by the way the shadows move across the lights, Pen can even make out the lowering of the ropes, the unloading of the cargo.

  Her hands are still twitching with the desire to do violence. And then it drains from her, as it already has from Trevelyan, and the two of them set out still in silence, back up the headland.

  I don’t smuggle flesh. To be foresworn in such a thing, Pen thinks, is not a mere venial sin. It’s only as the town’s lanterns are close that she can find it within herself to ask, “Where might they be taking him?”

  “To the New World,” Trevelyan says dispassionately. “There are places there that are a thousand miles from the sea.”

  “You knew all about it,” Pen says, this more shocking than anything else has been in these strange few days. “You knew, damn your eyes, Trevelyan!”

  “No!” Trevelyan says, panicked, and Pen’s heart hurts. “I didn’t. I didn’t know enough to stop it.”

  She’s gripping her cuffs, and Pen knows it’s just as Deveraux said. Trevelyan serves at the pleasure of those who may use her as they will.

  “But I’ve heard of such things,” Trevelyan says, after a minute. Calm again, though still waters run deep in her. “Those with true magic”—in which Trevelyan does not include herself, Pen understands—“are not entirely gone. Some are still born with it, but they’re not enough to be more powerful than the sum of their parts. Not enough to hold off the sea, nor to return magic to Kernow. So when they are found, a different use is found for them. Money changes hands in considerable sums, and…well. The Crown needs revenue.”