Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  Another thought floated by: that perhaps I might like to look at the person holding my hand, stroking it rhythmically in fact, and murmuring those soothing words.

  It was followed slightly more quickly by a third: that perhaps I did not, after all, want to look at the person holding my hand and murmuring, in case it was who I had dreamed far too many times it was.

  I lay there, the room rippling, someone rumbling, until I fell asleep again.

  I DREAMED THREE THINGS in succession:

  My mother, dancing the Lady in, in our garden at the dower house. Except that it was not our garden; this was another garden, lovelier, richer, more resplendent. It gave me an inkling of why Hal liked gardening so much. The bees were there, golden-bright circling around my mother, who was fearless moving in and through and with them.

  She danced: the bees sang: and she caught sight of me. She smiled with her whole being. She stood poised for a moment, arms lifted as if to take flight or offer thanksgiving to the Lady of the Green and White.

  “Jemis,” she said, “my love, be not afraid.”

  She danced on then, into the sunrise, and as I blinked and worked my eyes the light dazzled me and fell away into the dazzling ripples of brilliant water.

  I squinted, turned from the glare, and saw Violet sitting on the side of a large rock on the sea. She was singing, her voice contralto, a song as sad and lonely and beautiful as the waves washing up to her feet. She was dressed in pale lavender, with a green cloak pulled across her shoulders.

  The colours of the Lady of Alinor, my conscious mind said, and the dream turned before I could walk into her notice and see what she said.

  The song turned into the cries of seabirds.

  The sea here was darker, greyer, ominous, the waves great steady swells that did not break into foam. I had seen the sea on my journey into Ghilousette, but never waves like that.

  Open-ocean waves; Ariadne’s whale-road; my dream-mind was full of dark water and dark sky and brilliant white birds with black-tipped wings and heavy yellow beaks. They dove, plunged into the sea, the water fountaining up white and delicate like silver-lace embroidery.

  A ship came into sight. Long, low, lean, with a curved prow and a dozen long oars a side. Its triangular sail was black; many figures in blackened armour stood crowded under a shelter to the stern, looking over weapons well-used and cruel. Before them stood someone with a heavy drum, beating out a rhythm that cut counter across the waves.

  One large man stood behind the drum, a long carriage-whip in his hand, lashing the oarsmen to go faster, faster, faster.

  His face was cruel, a light in his eyes of sadistic enjoyment in the pain he was inflicting. I shuddered away from it, following the line of the whip as it flicked forward and landed almost delicately on the oarsmen’s knotted backs. They were half-naked, their backs lines of weals and scars, the sweat sheening as it cut runnels through grime.

  One of the men in the back shouted an alarm. The whip cracked out over the oarsmen as the drumbeat picked up urgency. I looked away from the straining ropes of tendons, the blood joining the sweat, the dumb and desperate concentration.

  There was another ship. She angled across the waves, casting up spray like the diving birds, her sails white as their feathers, as brilliantly gleaming. She was bigger than the oared galley, but not as fast; she was cutting across the waves and the wind seemed to be not fully behind her; and she did not have the oars, nor the oarsmen, nor the drum and the whip.

  In the dream suddenly I heard golden-voiced horns. Loops of light—magic—rose from the new ship. The whipster bellowed in anger and turned his whip to the sky, licking the loops out of the air before they could land on the galley. He was impressive in his defiance, in his mastery of the magic; but I was glad that he could not prevent the horn-calls from reaching the oarsmen’s ears.

  Then I saw their faces as the horns rang out again. Blank despair, blank terror, blank resignation—blank, blank, blank.

  They were slaves, ankles chained to their seats, feet sitting in vile bilge.

  They were still rowing, their tendons stranding out, their skin almost washed clean by the sweat of their exertion, their faces set, as the whip cracked above them and they rowed away from their salvation.

  The horns rang out again. They were just slightly fainter this time, slightly more distant, slightly less triumphant. As if it were a signal he’d been expecting one of the oarsmen held back his oar.

  I could see in his back, his shoulders, his arms, his neck, what strain it was, the brute force it took to break that rhythm, that pattern, that binding. Dark fired flickered around him as he swung his heavy oar into an angle that fouled the next three oars on his side.

  The galley lurched, juddered, yawed wildly as it swung broadside to the waves. The oarsmen screamed in a terror more primal than the fear of the whipster. Wait, I whispered in my dream, hold on—

  The slave-driver snapped his whip forward so the tip of the long cord lashed across the face of the man who had so thoroughly thwarted him.

  The trumpets rang out in all their brilliance.

  One of the golden loops dropped down, spitting sparks as it landed, and draped across the shoulders of the oarsmen, who no longer looked so blank in their despair.

  The whip came down again and again in frenzy on the shoulders of the one who slumped over his oar. The trumpets cried. The unchained warriors in the stern cabin shouted and brandished weapons and boiled out of their shelter, and the golden magic floated down to bind and to free.

  Chains unravelled from the oarsmen and bound the pirates. The freed slaves leaped around, and if there were injuries meted out it was a form of justice I could not deny the desire for.

  There was one still figure in the galley, one man who had not leaped to freedom when his chains fell away from him. He slumped over the misaligned end of his oar, back a mess of blood and raw flesh, face welted across his eye, dark hair black with sweat and blood and grime.

  Someone in green walked through the violence as if all the rest were ghosts and touched the still figure on the hand.

  Hers meant nothing to me: for I knew the hand that she touched.

  Even as my heart broke the dream dissolved into long slanting sunlight and my old room at the Darts’ and the sound of my breath as I woke myself sobbing.

  No one held my hand this time; but there was a chair beside my bed.

  Chapter Fifteen: The Gift

  A glance outside showed that it was already coming on to evening. The Darts kept the old hours for meals, so I did not have long to make myself fit for company.

  I had all the summer clothes to mark me out as a fine young gentleman. My stepfather had given me an allowance for Morrowlea, despite my protests that he hardly owed me anything. I had not spent it while at university, for Morrowlea prided itself on its radical egalitarianism, so that no one was to dress out of the uniforms or the clothing we made ourselves. I had actually quite liked the classes on sartorial arts; my favourites had been the ones on weaving and tapestry needlepoint, which was hardly something I felt comfortable broadcasting at large in Ragnor Bella. The only clothes of my own manufacture I had kept were my exercise wear, which was unsurprising as they were what I had put the most effort into.

  After the disastrous spring, Hal and Marcan and I had set off afoot from southwest South Erlingale up to the borders with Ronderell and Lind. We had all worn our Morrowlea clothing, until Hal and I reached Fillering Pool and Hal stepped back into his role as the Duke Imperial. I had looked at the money from Mr. Buchance and decided to spend some of it on clothes appropriate to the gentleman I felt, at the time, I was beginning to cease to be.

  I dressed now in breeches, shirt, waistcoat, coat, stockings of my own knitting, boots of my own polishing, cravat of my own tying. Not for me the wilder fashions of Stoneybridge (if I could believe Mr. Dart’s accounts of them; he himself had never shown any inkling towards the particoloured hose and slashed doublets and codpieces—codpieces!—he
swore some of the dandier set were sporting). I liked good tailoring and good colours, but I also liked the sort of clothes I could still run in, if it came to it.

  And now I was the heir to a marquisate that had no money, and my father had come home, and if I occasionally felt impoverished in comparison to Mr. Dart, for instance, that was nothing.

  I was earning enough at the bookstore to pay for the flat and my food and a few other essentials. I had enough left from what I had saved from Mr. Buchance’s allowance to pay for a few reasonable if not first-stare clothes for the winter months.

  Mr. Buchance had told me in the spring, the last time I saw him, that he would see I wouldn’t starve, but that as I had never wished to be formally adopted by him, his fortune would go to his daughters. I had agreed: I had kept my father’s name and I kept its inheritance. I had asked only that he not distinguish between his daughters by his first wife, my mother, and those by his second.

  What a curse it was on Mrs. Buchance that the reading of the will had to wait for me. The only, very minor, good thing was that it was not a full six months between the Midsomer and Winterturn Assizes, as the latter went on for the better part of three months. The reading of the will was, nevertheless, set for the very first possible day, which was the coming Thursday.

  I set aside the cravat, which I’d spoiled, and picked up another.

  Whatever riches were still in the Castle St-Noire—mostly, I believe, my grandmother’s personal jewelry—would have to go to restoring the castle and its community. A comment or two by Hal had made me realize that the villagers would have to buy in most of the winter’s food, as they had been under a curse through three growing seasons. I did not, as of yet, have any idea how they, or I, would manage. There was no honey, their main income now that the highway to Astandalas no longer went anywhere.

  My mother’s inheritance was long since spent apart from a few items more precious to me than money: her jade honey crock, the letters from my father, a few of his gifts to her.

  They’d have to go back to him, I thought distantly, watching my hands fail to make the proper creases in the cravat for the third time, and picked up a fourth.

  Usually I did not care so much about the perfection of my cravat.

  My father could have no conceivable source of income. He’d been a pirate slave; he was considered in the law not only dead but dead a suicide and a traitor. There were no army pensions for traitors, so it was not as if we could go to the court ... I did not actually know of whom we’d ask such a thing, with the Empire fallen, and perhaps there would have been nothing; I knew no other officers whom I might have asked. There were reasons so many of the highwaymen in the Forest knew my father’s name. Far too many had served with him.

  First we had to sort out the accusations of treason. Once we knew how that had come about, we might be able to figure out why—and, of course, there was always the nagging curiosity of who—and once we knew that, we might be able to counter it.

  The deadline—the word caught me up in wry appreciation of its aptness—was the seventh anniversary of my father’s apparent suicide. It fell on the day before the Assizes began, three days from today.

  I flubbed another crease and set aside the ruined cravat just as someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” I said, bracing myself.

  Mr. Dart slipped in and immediately shut the door behind him. His expression was cheerful as usual, but the faint shadow of reserve was there, where I had not noticed it until its absence. He smiled easily when he saw the pile of cravats on the back of the chair next to me.

  “I had not realized you carried so many cravats with you, Mr. Greenwing. I thought your attention given wholly to the supply of handkerchiefs.”

  Perhaps because of the audience, this time my hands made the folds faultlessly, and the Subdued Mathematical, my favourite knot, took swift form.

  “Only six; they are easier to stockpile than hats.” Not to mention far cheaper, but that was not a gentlemanly thing to discuss.

  “Very true. I find in myself a tendency to the acquisition of stockings, which I presume has much the same impetus. There is something glorious about the first wearing of a new pair.”

  “One stands upon a foundation of simple wholesome pleasure?”

  “Oh, very good!”

  He said nothing more, came to stand to look critically at himself in the mirror and the picture he made beside me, with his left hand on the back of the chair, right arm in its sling. This evening’s colours echoed my dream of Violet, deep green and purple. It was not quite a light enough purple to proclaim employ or close allegiance with Lady Jessamine, but it certainly invoked the association.

  “Did you dream also?” I asked.

  I was watching his hand in the mirror, not his face, and I saw the way his fingers dug into the chair back. His voice betrayed no tension, however.

  “Just now? I didn’t lie down. Had a bath instead.”

  He’d once told me, in jest as I’d thought, that he did his best thinking in the bath.

  And he might as well have been brandishing ‘no trespassing’ signs about his person, for all he wanted to talk to me.

  I moved to pick up the spoiled cravats, and saw how his hand relaxed. Too soon, I thought, and said: “What object called to you?”

  That did spark anger. I saw it in a flare of brightness in his eyes, in the lines of his face, in the hand digging again into the chair. “I think you mistook what you saw—I was leaning to watch your choice, Mr. Greenwing!”

  “I chose the candle—or it chose me,” I said levelly. “I was not so absorbed I did not see that you were reaching towards—what?”

  I waited. There was a brace of candles on the ledge below the mirror. I hadn’t lit them, as when I’d begun my toilet there had still been enough light coming through the window. The sun had set now behind the bulk of the stable and the wooded ridge on the other side of the grounds, and the light inside was fading.

  Or it had been: and then, without either of us saying anything, the candles lit.

  Mr. Dart’s fingernails gouged through the varnish into the wood.

  I waited. Two could play Hal’s game; and it had worked.

  “My brother doesn’t know I have magic,” he said finally, tensely, voice very quiet.

  “There seem to be many things you have not told your brother, Mr. Dart.”

  I left it there. I folded the cravats carefully, knowing that Mr. Brock would nevertheless take them away to be starched properly. He had scolded me roundly on another occasion for aspiring so high as to presume I could out-valet a man of his experience and genius. I had smoothed out the fourth, and had another moment or two to reflect on Hal’s method of insistently not asking the questions that were so obviously there, and—

  —And Mr. Dart broke. “Please will you not tell him? He’ll be so disappointed in me.”

  I found it hard to imagine anyone being particularly disappointed in Mr. Dart, let alone his brother. Then again I could see there were fissures between the brothers that I could not fully account for. If I had seen Mr. Dart occasionally during our university years, and corresponded with him often, I had not seen the Squire and Sir Hamish until my return to Ragnor Bella. In his letters Mr. Dart had rarely mentioned more of them than the occasional amusing anecdote.

  “Please,” Mr. Dart said again, and his expression was, now, genuinely pleading. “Please. I don’t want to tell him about the wild magic.”

  That, at least, made a certain amount of sense. Wild magic had once been a sentence of madness, exile, or death, and the dangers to both practitioner and community were in half the books to have come out of Astandalas and in half the warning tales told by those who had come of age during the Empire.

  Mr. Dart and I were of the generation who had been children of Astandalas but were adults of the new order. Magic of any sort was unfashionable to the point of taboo (I, as it happened, found it fascinating; others did not). Our early adolescence had disappea
red into what was euphemistically called the Interim, which equally euphemistically was held to have spanned three years. My mother and I had tried to count the days during one storm that kept us within the dower cottage; we had not even been able to tell when night fell or the day broke.

  I could comprehend the horror with which the Astandalan world had regarded wild magic. I had only to think of the Interim to know why they had feared the powers that could not be bound by Schooled magic.

  But all that was in the general and abstract. In the particular was Mr. Dart lighting candles without speaking and hearing the voices of the silent world.

  “Which item called you?” I asked again, pursuing here where I had not dared or desired to push on other areas. I did not want to talk about the dreams I had walked nightly for over a year after my father was buried at the White Cross—or not buried—and who was buried there, if he hadn’t been? There had been witnesses, surely—

  There was a story in the Legendarium, which I had been studying the past fortnight. In some places, it was said, there were such a thing called kelpies, water-spirits who often took the form of horses. Beautiful, strong, attractive horses, grazing peacefully by a river or a lake. Any traveller, seeing them, would be stricken with wonder and desire. The kelpie would prance up to the traveller, snorting and whickering and acting delighted, loving, tame. Their victim, overcome now by that wonder and desire which the sight of the horse had woken in them, would mount with ease.

  The rider would have a few minutes, maybe even a few hours, to marvel at this magnificence, at the communion between man and beast.

  But it was not, of course, any communion between man and beast, but between mortal and fairy.

  At some point off the kelpie would run, over water and under, never stopping, never resting, until the rider was dead of exhaustion and drowning and the drain of his magic.

  In my dreams, in every one of them, at some point I would give into my better judgment, and over and over again the kelpie had ridden me to death.