by Traci Chee
A waitress in a long dress with a patch over her right eye swayed up to them. “Welcome to the Crossbars, folks. Who do we have the pleasure of entertaining tonight?”
“I’m Reed. This is Jules and Marmalade. They’re part of my crew.”
“’Course they are.” The woman winked her good eye at him. “I’m Adeline. Good to see you again, Cap. Take a seat anywhere.”
Reed glanced back at Jules, who shrugged. Ordinarily, people shook his hand or asked for a story or laughed in disbelief when he introduced himself, but this was a stranger, despite sharing the name of an old friend, and she greeted him like they’d known each other for years.
At the largest table, six ragged men laughed and clinked glasses with old women in wrinkled dresses and faded lace.
“To wealth!” one man cried, raising his mug.
“To youth!” The old woman beside him tittered.
Reed, Jules, and Marmalade slid onto the bar stools and swiveled to survey the rest of the room. Wooden buckets and lanterns and knots of rope dangled from the ceiling.
Jules shrugged. “So much for easy findin’.”
They searched the walls for signs of the clapper, but though they found silver bells and strings of glass beads, tambourines and bunches of dried flowers, there was so much junk in the tavern that finding any one thing might take weeks. That is, if the Beauty hadn’t already gotten it. Reed cursed under his breath.
“Hey, uh . . . Cap? Ain’t that your story?” Marmalade pointed to a nearby booth, where an ordinary man with wispy blond hair and a gap in his front teeth was regaling his tablemates with the story of Lady Delune.
“The woman was mad as a bat, screechin’ and flappin’ about, her black petticoats all torn and flutterin’ around her ankles as she dashed through that big lonely house of hers.” Spittle came flying out from between his lips. “I barely caught her before she ran plumb off the balcony . . . not that the fall woulda killed her. She’d survived worse’n that in her long years . . .”
Marmalade leaned over, whispering, “That ain’t how it happened, is it?”
“No.” Reed drew two interconnected circles on the bar top. When he met the Lady, she’d been sitting in her ruined garden, still as a stone. In fact, among the overgrown shrubbery and fallen leaves, he had mistaken her for a statue, covered as she was by moss and vines. Her face was sad and her eyes were dull, and for all her perfect curves and symmetrical features the only thing that sparkled about her were the jewels in her necklace. They’d had a good long talk while the sun went down and the stars came out, all dusty white in the blue sky, and when dawn appeared pale and pink in the east, he took the diamonds off her, and with the faintest shudder she dissolved and collapsed into a pile of dust.
He started off his stool. The man was getting it wrong. The Cursed Diamonds of Lady Delune was a story about the cost of immortality, not the assault of a two-hundred-year-old woman.
Before he could say anything, Adeline sidled up to them with their mugs in hand. “Good story, huh? Sometimes we get three or four Captain Reeds in one night. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that legend. It’s never quite the same, is it?”
Reed stacked eight copper zens on the bar. “He’s gettin’ it wrong.”
“Hush your mouth!” She leaned closer, so he could see clots in her makeup. The real Adeline, the Lady of Mercy, the original owner of his legendary gun, didn’t wear makeup and wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress. “Don’t you know? Why’d you come here if you didn’t know?”
Marmalade swigged her drink. “Know what?”
Jules sipped at her own mug; over the rim of her glass, her quick observant eyes scanned the room.
“None of these folks are really who they say they are,” Adeline whispered.
“You don’t say.”
She laughed and pushed Reed playfully in the shoulder. “I mean, don’t tell anyone I said this—especially Clarian, who owns the place”—she pointed to a doughy middle-aged man pouring drinks behind the bar—“but the Crossbars is a tavern of liars. Folks come here to tell someone else’s story, pretend it’s their own, and be believed. No one contradicts anyone else. Those are the rules.”
Reed rubbed at a stain on the bar. If you didn’t like your own life, you changed it. You ran away. You did something spectacular. You didn’t steal someone else’s story and pretend it was yours.
In a corner booth, an old woman claiming to be Eduoar, the Lonely King, rambled on and on about the succulent, mouthwatering meals they served at the castle in Corabel.
Pretending to be the Old Hermit of the Szythian Mountains, a man with missing teeth exclaimed over the exquisite footwear of his neighbors and fluttered his fingers along their buckles and aglets.
Adeline drew a pair of imaginary guns from imaginary thigh holsters and posed, fingers pulling imaginary triggers, making little pew! pew! pew! sounds with her red mouth.
Reed shuddered. It was like all the good and true things he’d ever done didn’t matter, and he, who he was, the legacy he’d worked so hard for, was dissolving, frittering away with every lie they told.
“Lady,” he said, “I hate to break it to you, but—”
“Cap.” Jules turned the mug in her hands, slyly pointing to the wall behind the bar.
He swallowed his insults, grinned, and stuck out his hand to Adeline. “It’s been so long, I didn’t recognize you in this light. Good seein’ you again. You give my regards to Isabella.”
Giggling, she shook his hand and sauntered away, the fringe of her dress whispering against the floorboards.
“Left side,” Jules murmured into her drink.
Behind the bar was a mirror and a set of glass shelves cluttered with bottles, but on either side the wall was overlaid with used instruments: drumheads and covered mallets, guitars with no strings, panpipes and flutes and fiddles. But most of all there were bells: big brass bells, old tarnished handbells, little jingling bells on silver chains, with a few gongs and chimes hanging amidst the rest. And there, on a hook, was an old brass clapper, dull and green, with an engraving of a sunrise over a desert half-hidden beneath the crust of verdigris.
The mark of the Desert Gold.
All someone had to do was inch behind the bar, snatch it off the hook, and after that it was only a few steps to the door. He glanced at Marmalade, who caught his eye and nodded. She drained the rest of her beer and signaled for another.
Clarian, the owner, began filling another mug with golden ale while he spoke to the pretty young woman seated across the bar from him. “What do they sound like?”
She tilted her pink face and closed her eyes. “Well,” she said, “they sounded like trees, but also more than trees. I knew them so well I could hear one leaf rasping against another and know which of them was speaking to me. We’d spin long conversations out of nothing but the rustling leaves and clacking branches. These days, I even miss their creaking, the rough scuttle of squirrels racing over their bark.”
The bartender watched her with fascination, his gaze fixed on her lips long after he’d finished pouring Marmalade’s drink. “I like to go into the hills,” he said finally. “The woods aren’t magic, but they still speak: the branches rasping in winter, and the rustling wind. I like the creaking leaves and the birds scuttling their wings.” There was something strange about the way he reused the woman’s words, but as he spoke, he seemed to light up from the inside, as if his skin and skeleton were nothing more than a lampshade concealing his glowing heart. He slid Marmalade’s drink across the worn wooden bar top, where she caught it without spilling a drop.
Reed left another four zens on the bar. “You ever hear the one about the bell of the Desert Gold?”
When Clarian ignored him, Reed cleared his throat. It wasn’t until the young woman directed the bartender’s attention his way that he turned, fixing his light blue eyes on Reed.
“What’s that?” he said.
“The Bell of the Desert Gold.”
“No, never heard that one.” As he spoke, his gaze didn’t waver from Reed’s face.
Out of the corner of his eye, Reed saw Jules shake her head. The man hadn’t looked toward the clapper. Either he didn’t know which bell it belonged to, or he was a really good liar. In this place, both were possible.
Reed continued, watching for a flicker of recognition in Clarian’s pale face, “They tell this story ’round Liccaro, when the sun goes down in the dusty sky. When King Fieldspar’s ship sank in the middle of the Ephygian Bay, everything on board, includin’ the sailors and the officers and the secret to where he hid all his pretty treasures, was lost with it. But as legend has it, some days if you’re out on the bay, you can still hear the tollin’ of the ship’s bell from under the water. That mournful sound, like all the folks of Liccaro are cryin’ out for what happened to their kingdom. Cryin’ out for justice against the regents. Cryin’ out for the things they lost, and the poverty, and the long hot days of nothin’.”
Clarian gobbled up the description, his eyes feasting eagerly on the words, following every curve and closing of Reed’s lips with the same fascination that Sefia had while reading the book, and that’s when the captain understood: the man was deaf. His patrons pretended they were more famous or more important than they really were; Clarian pretended he could hear. And in this place, where no one pointed it out or treated him different, maybe that was another kind of spectacular. His watery eyes drank in the description of the bell, as if he could really hear the deep tolling and the voices keening in the water.
“I’m sorry, bartender,” Reed said, “for what’s about to happen here.”
“What do you mean?”
The man with the wispy hair finished his tale about the Lady Delune by wagging his tongue and thrusting his hips.
Reed spun on his stool and stood. “That ain’t how it happened!”
The man’s armpits were stained and his shirt was soaked with sweat where it curved over his belly. “That so?”
“You think assaultin’ a woman’s something to crow about? If you’d ever met the Lady Delune, you’d know she’s ten times more beautiful’n you described, and she could easily wipe the floor with a pasty little runt like you.” He caught Marmalade’s eye and winked. She guzzled her drink and filched a glass of bourbon from a nearby table. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes sparked. She was ready.
The other people at the man’s table chuckled. They tried to hide it by putting their hands over their mouths, but their laughter escaped through their fingers and fell tinkling onto the table.
“I don’t get it.” Reed laughed. “Why’re you lyin’ to yourselves like this? You ain’t special. You ain’t gonna be remembered. Why in all the blue world would you sit here makin’ up stories when you could be out there makin’ stories?”
The others stared at him. They were tense, their faces peaked, their eyes narrowed. Beside him, Jules sipped her drink and rolled her eyes at his speechifying.
“Who are you to talk to us like that?” the wispy-haired man demanded, starting forward. “You’re in here with the rest of us.”
Clarian came out from behind the bar, his arms crossed, his gaze stony.
Their anger roiled like a thundercloud. Reed could feel it rumbling inside them, threatening to burst from their clenched fists and teeth.
“I’m Captain Cannek Reed,” he drawled. He drew back the folds of his coat, exposing the revolvers holstered at his thighs: one ivory grip, one black. There was a collective gasp.
“Listen,” he continued. “We work hard for our stories. They’re what we leave behind when we’re gone. They ain’t for some nobodies in a back-alley bar to twist however they so please. So go on. Get outta here. Go do something worth tellin’ people about, instead of stealin’ from folks like me.”
He turned, and the impostor-Reed leapt forward and struck him square across the jaw.
The real Captain Reed came up grinning. “That’s right. Come on!”
The little room erupted. Marmalade kicked the chair out from one of the beggars at the big table and he toppled over. Reed laughed. Someone hit him in the head with a mug. Glass and ale poured around his ears. Jules was trading blows with the impostor-hermit. Reed laughed again. A brawl! He just needed to keep them busy. Fighting him. Fighting each other. The whole tavern was a mess of blood and curses, broken chairs and fists and faces. Clarian punched him in the gut. He doubled over, wheezing and chuckling at the same time. The old woman pretending to be the Lonely King slapped the bartender across the face when he turned around.
Out of the corner of his eye, Reed saw Marmalade wrench the clapper off the wall, tuck it into her coat, and dash for the door. She was so small and quick that no one noticed her in the melee.
Captain Reed let out a shrill whistle.
“Cap?” Jules’s voice rang across the room.
“Let’s skedaddle!”
She was at his side in an instant, grinning, a bruise coming up red and purple on her cheek. He tossed his coin purse behind the bar and they left, trading a few more blows on the way, bursting out of the door into the night.
Inside the tavern the brawl continued. Glass shattering. Tables breaking. People hollering and cheering. Their wild laughter wafted through the broken windows and steamed in the cool air.
A few docks down, Marmalade was waiting for them, perched on the rail of a houseboat and kicking her legs over the water. As they approached, she popped to her feet and brandished the clapper like a wand. “Ta-da!”
Jules clapped her warmly on the shoulder. “Fast fingers, Marmalade. I wasn’t sure you could do it, after the drinks you had.”
The ship’s girl grinned impishly. “Cap was buyin’. I couldn’t help myself.” She passed the clapper to Reed, who traced the engraving of the rising sun with his fingernail. According to legend, if they were close enough, any sound the clapper made would be echoed by the bell, still lost in the Ephygian Bay with the Desert Gold. He swung it hard into a wooden piling. The post dented, but the clapper let out a dull resounding hum.
Jules touched it with the tip of her finger, absorbing the sound into her skin. “That the right clapper?”
“Oughta be.” He tucked it inside his jacket.
They began trotting down the dock, back toward the Current, Marmalade chuckling every so often under her breath. “Did you see their faces when the Cap started whoopin’ and hollerin’ about stories?”
Reed grinned. He could smell the sea, hear it washing against the docks and the faraway shores, calling him to wilder waters, to bigger monsters, and to stories yet to be earned. He chuckled. “Guess they have somethin’ to talk about now.”
Chapter 36
Kill or Die
Sefia stood at the edge of the stone pit, still reeling from the touch of Archer’s arms on her arms, his chest on her chest. Her heart beat madly inside her like a trapped bird, feathers flying, wings breaking against the bars, but inside the ring Archer was as still as he had ever been. Waiting, ready.
The roar of the crowd swelled up to the ceiling—a terrible thunder of shouting and stomping and mad laughter—and then it broke across the room like a flood. Men and women swarmed around her, hot and sweaty and howling like animals. The bloodlust was ripe in their eyes and in their teeth. The chute doors swung open. The fighters were loose.
Archer and the boy with the spear reached each other first. Like jaguars battling in the undergrowth, all teeth and muscle and razor-sharp claws, they fought. Fists and the flashing tip of the blade, clouds of dust rising beneath their feet. They were so quick Sefia only caught glimpses of it: Archer grabbing the spear shaft; the other boy, Gregor, sprawled on the ground; craters of sawdust beneath him.
The third boy, Haku, attacked with a sword, but Archer had the spear n
ow. The sounds of metal striking wood rebounded off the stone walls. Chunks of the spear shaft sheared away beneath the sword.
Archer landed blows again and again, cracking bones, causing bruises. Gregor staggered to his feet and joined Haku’s attacks, but Archer’s movements were effortless—beautiful and awful in their efficiency. It was like he could see every dodge and feint and parry as if they were individual threads in the violent tapestry of the fight, and he could warp and weave and cut them as he pleased.
Sefia was mesmerized and horrified at the same time, because he made it look easy.
Like he had been born doing it.
Like he was born to do it.
Archer swung the spear. It whirred through the air, a noise that cut off abruptly when its wooden shaft slammed into Haku’s neck.
There was no blood. The blade had missed.
No, Archer had spared him.
Haku crumpled, groaning.
In the roar of the crowd, Lavinia muttered, “That was a perfect opportunity. Why didn’t your boy kill him?”
Sefia pressed her hands over her ears.
Grabbing Haku’s fallen sword, Gregor struck at Archer. The spear split in two, showering the floor with splinters. Archer was cut. There was cheering. Blood matted his hair, dripped down the side of his face—bright red. Gregor swung the blade back and forth, testing its weight.
Then Archer was attacking, his hands a blur, the broken ends of the spear pummeling Gregor’s long arms, his shoulders and legs and head in a broken rhythm of blows and bruises and split skin. Crack! Archer shattered the bones in the boy’s hand.
The sword dropped.
