Shell Game
Page 20
A wise plan. But my chance hadn’t surfaced. In no more than two hours, I would be back on Bero. Back with her. And as soon as I saw the fortress on the cliff, my brain leapt straight out of my skull and started to shriek. Screw what was sensible, I was leaving!
I didn’t give myself any time to think about it. I pivoted, braced my back against the rail, and drove my heel into Timor’s knee. The blow wasn’t dead centre so I didn’t break the cap, but still he folded, howling, and that gave me the time to deal out two more kicks, one to his other knee and one to the crotch. He howled good and proper that time, but I barely heard him. I was trying to use the momentum to hurl myself backwards over the ship’s side, into the bay waters.
On an ordinary day, I could have managed it. But my muscles were rubbery, my vision blurry, my stomach shrivelled—they hadn’t been feeding me much. I couldn’t get the height. My spine rammed into the rail, and all the breath whooshed out of me, the pain so piercing that I saw red sparks. Then there were hands on me, sailors’ hands, callused and rough, pulling me back onto the deck. They lowered me with a kind of gentleness, but at Timor’s snarl, they let me drop.
Gasping, I sprawled on the sun-hot boards. Timor’s face loomed above me, a shadow in the burning white sky.
“What?” I panted. “You thought I was going to make this easy?”
His eyes narrowed; that was all the warning I got, but at least I had the chance to tense. His boot crashed into my stomach. I rolled to soften the impact, but he kicked again, this time at my back. The red sparks in my vision exploded into blood-red blooms of fire.
I screamed. Not much else to do in that situation.
Timor stood above me, his fists flexing as he got himself under control. Then with a quick lunge, he grabbed the front of my tunic and lifted me from the deck. “You are damn lucky that your father wants you alive.”
“Yeah,” I managed to wheeze. “Lucky me.”
Timor let go, and I slumped. He shook his fingers, as if cleansing them of something filthy, then snapped them. The hood dropped over my head again.
“Take her below,” I heard him say. “Make sure she can’t go anywhere.”
DOWN IN THE dark mugginess of the storeroom, I tried to cudgel my brain into coming up with a decent plan. That did not work. My thoughts went around and around in a tight, unhappy spiral—the pain in my back, the saltiness of my bleeding lip, the tightness of the hood’s drawstring around my throat, the shackles rasping on wrists and ankles. The hood kept in the air, so my lungs were taking in nothing but my own stale, warm breath. But somehow, the cloth still let in all of the smells—musty wood, rotten meat.
None of that really mattered, though. What mattered was that, with every minute that passed, I was getting carried ever more swiftly back to her.
Escape, I reminded myself. Escape. I’d done it before. My chances had to be better this time around. This time—who knew?—I might even have some help from outside.
Just as soon as the thought occurred, I dismissed it. Darren had come a long way, but there was only one person who had a chance of taking on mighty Bero and surviving the experiment.
The pirate queen. I couldn’t help it; I let out a weary sort of laugh. The pirate queen, whose fleets spanned entire seas, who commanded the love and the fear of noble and commoner alike. The pirate queen, who would rip whole cities apart to reclaim a woman who bore her mark. (I let my fingers explore the storm-petrel tattoo on my shoulder.) Problem was, that wasn’t Darren. Not yet. Not quite. I hadn’t had enough time.
Damn it, but I’d come so close. I’d already molded Darren into roughly the right shape; all she needed was some polish. A couple of years would have done it. Just two little years, and I would have made her a legend. Even the white warships of Bero would have hurried in another direction as soon as they saw her flag, pretending that they’d just remembered something very important which they had to do immediately on the other side of the world.
If I had only had a little more time . . .
It was no use thinking about it. Darren might try to come after me and she might not, but either way, I couldn’t afford to wait and hope. I knew what was in store for me on Bero, and once it happened, I wasn’t going to be running anywhere fast.
So, no waiting around for the pirate queen. That was fine. I had escaped before without any piratical intervention. And it had only taken me ten years.
Oh gods . . .
An invisible hand hoisted me to my feet.
“TIMOR,” I SAID. “Timor, Timor, Timor, listen.”
The hood was still tightly in place as he dragged me through the streets. The chain had been left on my legs so that I could only hobble, and I stumbled every other step. Before we left the ship, he had made me pull on a long, respectable woollen tunic over the shredded remains of my linen one. The weight and the length were both awkward and confining.
From the sounds and smells, I guessed that we were in the lower city, the part sloping down to the harbour. It was a long, uphill trip to the fortress. It couldn’t be long enough for me. This was my last chance to make the man see sense.
“Timor . . .” I began again, through the thick cloth, but he caught me by the scruff of the neck and gave me a quick shake.
“Just keep your mouth shut, girl. You’re not going to be my problem for much longer.”
A fold of cloth was wedged between my teeth. I pushed it loose with my tongue. “Nothing’s going to be your problem for much longer. Do you think I’m joking about that? You think you know Iason better than I do?”
There was no answer. Maybe he couldn’t even hear me through the hood. Maybe that was why he’d put it on me in the first place.
“Timor,” I tried once more, but then my toe drove into a cobblestone and I tripped headlong. Timor grabbed me by the neck again and hauled me along a few paces until I could get my feet back under me.
We came to a halt in a place that smelled of straw, dung, and cattle. Timor grabbed me around the waist and, with a grunt, boosted me up onto something. The bed of a wagon, I guessed, because I felt grain sacks underneath me. My wrist fetters clinked, and then there was tension, pulling my arms taut in front of me. He’d tied me to the wagon rail.
Wooden wheels groaned. The wagon was moving, and the bed beneath me tilted, as we started to go uphill.
My throat closed up, and I stopped even trying to talk.
HIGHER AND HIGHER and higher. It took hours. The fortress at Bero had six concentric walls, and to get past each, you needed a fistful of pass tokens and a headful of passwords and countersigns. Timor nearly went hoarse, answering the questions of all the guards. Interestingly, nobody asked why Timor had a bound-and-hooded woman on his ox-cart. Which made sense, when I thought about it. My father was always arresting people, so bound-and-hooded people had to be a fairly common sight around these parts.
Higher and higher and higher, and still I kept quiet, but my heart jolted painfully each time another gate slammed shut behind us.
When we were through the inner wall of the castle, Timor pulled me down from the ox-cart, and we went the last hundred yards on foot, trudging up to the door at the base of the keep. There, he finally unlocked the shackles and pulled the hood off my head.
He squinted at my sweat-soaked hair and bloodied lip. “You’re not much to look at. But it’s not your face that they care about, is it?”
I swallowed bile.
“Up,” he said, his voice going ugly. “Now.”
This was it, and my head was swimming. This was the last leg of the trip. We headed up the spiral staircase, around and around and around. Wild thoughts swarmed around my brain—I would hurl Timor down the steps, I would bite through the walls, I would throw myself out a window screaming—but something inside me had gone very cold and weak. Another step. Another step.
Then there was a door on our right, the sight of it familiar as my own skin. Stained cherry-wood, with a gilt knocker in the shape of a ram’s head.
Timor
knocked with his right hand, gripped my arm with his left.
“Enter,” came the voice from inside. And that voice was familiar, too.
The room beyond, I didn’t know as well. I wasn’t invited into the map room very often while I was growing up. I did know it well enough to see that it had changed since the war began. The walls were papered from floor to ceiling with charts, figures, and diagrams—army rosters, fortifications, pay schedules. The great sand-table, with its model of the islands, was dotted with little brass boats and figures of men, used for plotting troop movements. Almost fifty ships marked with white paper flags were clustered around Bero. I winced. He’d always been paranoid about the castle’s defences, but it looked like he was getting worse.
And there he was—Iason of Bain, lord of Bero, standing by the sand table, slowly revolving a tiny brass ship between his fingers as if he found it fascinating. He wore a dressing gown of violet silk, and his hair stood up in pale unruly tufts. Apparently, he wouldn’t be holding court today. She wasn’t there, so the pressure in my chest eased the smallest degree, but there was someone else waiting with Iason.
A young woman. Slightly older than me, slightly taller. Her face, I knew, looked something like mine when it was bare, but today, as usual, it was caked with powder and rouge, and her blonde hair was teased into a mass of ringlets. With all the frills and flounces on her gown, she reminded me of a giant meringue sitting in a puddle of cream. She was slouched at Iason’s desk, and her drumming fingers made his quill pens bounce in their cherry-wood cup.
Timor bowed; I didn’t. “I brought her, my lord,” he said unnecessarily.
Iason’s milky blue eyes came up to me. His expression, as always, was part fond, part wounded, part disappointed. It irritated me, and irritation, for the moment, overcame fear. I spoke as if I was calm as a glacier.
“Hello, father,” I told him. Then I glanced at the girl. “Hello, Ariadne.”
CHAPTER TWO
Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)
Afternoon, Day III
Pirates may not be what you would call masterminds, but they ain’t exactly stupid. And the crew of the Banshee knew me well. So after Timor disappeared over the horizon with my woman, it didn’t take them long to figure out that the mere mention of his name was enough to provoke me into a howling, stamping fury. Some of them, I think, thought about repeating the name as often as possible just to see how far I’d go, but cooler heads prevailed. So it became routine to refer to Timor as “That Goat-Testicled, Slave-Stealing Sack of Shit.” “Goat-boy” for short.
It was three days after Goat-boy’s escape that we met up with the Badger. This is what they tell me. I wasn’t in a state to notice details. I hadn’t slept since the night before Lynn was kidnapped, and a ninety-six-hour stretch of sleep deprivation, coupled with wracking, ball-shattering worry, doesn’t leave you at your most alert.
By the end of it, I couldn’t do much but twitch and curse. Regon humanely propped me up against the mast so I could snarl at crewmen who weren’t moving fast enough, but that was about the limit of my powers.
So I was leaning on the mast, snarling and cursing and doing my best not to fall over, when he all of a sudden swung over the rail and onto the deck. Grizzled and grey and stern-faced and ugly, half of his right ear missing and a scar crossing his face from chin to brow . . . it was my old helmsman, now captain of the Badger. Teek.
The sight of him made thirty pounds of lead roll off my shoulders. I commanded my first merchant boat when I was fourteen, so green that I didn’t know the difference between my own ass and a marlinespike. It was Teek who saved me from disaster on that voyage, Teek who quietly ignored my shrill commands as I tried to ram us into every rock in the southern sea. He was the first person I knew who took my problems onto his own back, guided me from triumph to triumph, and then pretended that I’d done everything myself. Lynn was the second.
“You old bastard,” I said, blinking at him through a fog of exhaustion. “Where were you a few days back?”
He shrugged. “I’d have been here if I’d known, captain.”
“You don’t call me captain, you’re a captain now. And we’ll see how you like it. Did Regon bring you up to speed?”
“Got the gist of it. You need to get your girl out of trouble. As usual.”
Which was bullshit and he knew it (it was normally the other way around) but my pride appreciated the little white lie.
“And you’re heading straight for Bero,” he continued. “Best defended island in Kila, circled by ships that could take on a kraken, and you’re charging straight at it, banners flying. Ambitious of you, captain, but that was always your style.”
“I’m not charging straight at it,” I said defensively. “I’m heading for it rapidly, that’s all. Obviously, we can’t just waltz into their harbour. We’ll need another plan.”
“We’ll need another plan soon, captain,” he said, gentle but insistent. “The white ships keep a wide patrol around the island. We’re almost at their waters. Lucky as I met up with you first. Won’t do your girl any good if you end up ten fathoms deep.”
“Mmph,” I grunted.
“Teek’s right,” Regon said, stepping forward. “We can’t put it off any longer.”
I glared. “If it’s so goddamn urgent, why haven’t you brought this up before?”
“I did, captain,” he said tactfully. “You threw a chunk of cheese at me, turned your pockets inside out, and then lay down on the deck and gurgled. You’ve been a bit funny the past day or so.”
“I am having,” I said, with an effort at dignity, “a very bad week.”
With a sigh, I looked off the starboard bow. The Badger was pulled up alongside us, balky and battered as ever. A lot like Teek himself, in fact. It made me think of old times, of Teek’s sure hand on the helm as he piloted us through the ship’s graveyard to the secret harbour. That thought sparked another, and another, and another. My fingers began to drum along my arm.
“Only real option is to turn the ships around,” Teek was saying. “Go to the harbour, like, or to Freemarket, and think it out. Men been trying for years to break Bero without any luck. Can’t expect the captain to come up with a plan in five minutes.”
“And that, Teek,” I said, rousing myself, “that is where you are wrong.”
I peeled myself off of the mast, staggered to the nearest fresh-water barrel, stuck my whole head in, burbled for a minute or two, and pulled out, gasping and revived. “Get Jess and Latoya and Spinner, meet in my cabin. Broach a new cask of ale and pour me a tankard big enough to fell a buffalo. I know exactly what we’re going to do.”
CHAPTER THREE
Lynn
Late Afternoon, Day III
“Hello, father. Hello, Ariadne.”
There was silence for a few seconds, broken only by the tap-tap-tapping of Ariadne’s nails.
Lord Iason pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned forward. As though he had a nosebleed, or a terrible headache. All he said was, “Gwyneth . . .”
What he meant was that it just wasn’t done for a bastard child to address her father as “Father.” But saying that out loud would kind of defeat the point.
He waved his fingers at Timor without looking at him. “You, man. Report to my steward; he’ll give you what you’re owed.”
Timor bowed hastily and went out with quick, impatient steps. I watched him go, knowing that I’d never see him again. There are many entrances to the dungeons on Bero, but the only exits are below the tide line. Now and then, the bodies wash up on shore, the corners of their burlap shrouds flapping. What can I say? I tried to warn him.
I had been doing my utmost not to think about her, but all at once the image flashed before me: Darren sewn into one of those burlap bags, a long lanky bundle among the other corpses. The horror of the picture hit my brain like a flood of ice water, washed it clear and clean. Whatever happened, whatever happened, I had to keep Darren out of this.
I snorted. “Is it?”
He sighed. “Things have been rocky between the two of us sometimes, Gwyn. But you need to know that I care what happens to you.”
My father’s helpless-nice-bloke act was harder to take than his rages. I trained my gaze through the map room’s narrow window. We were about halfway up the tower, high enough to make out a patch of ocean. It was glassy green that day.