I turned to Fee. “Watch for Heron Water,” I said under my breath. “Maybe we can give them the slip.”
We were close. Usually I marked the way into the marshy lake by the line of trees and the white farmhouse squatting in the fields beyond. But it was so dark I was terrified we’d miss the turn. Or had already missed it. A mistake now would mean death.
The moonlight revealed a gap in the riverbank, where the fuzzy tops of cattails made dark spots against the reeds. Cool relief trickled through me. “There!”
Fee put the tiller hard over and we turned, bubbles rushing in a whirl against the rudder. Water slapped the hull. Above us tree branches hung low over the narrow dike. I leaned out and watched the bank slide by mere inches away.
Branches scraped the top of our sail as I hurried to haul in the mainsheet, forgetting my wound in my rush to gather in those handfuls of rope. The top spar lodged among the trees, and we lurched to a stop twenty feet from the main river. Broken clumps of leaves and twigs dropped to the deck.
Fee and I exchanged fearful glances. We were stuck.
“Hush,” she whispered, releasing her grip on the tiller. She slid to the floor of the cockpit. I did the same. The trees swallowed up our black sail, drenching us in shadow.
I heard the cutter first—the creak of her boom and the rattle of rope against wooden blocks and tackle. Then I saw her high bowsprit, pointing through the air like a finger. I sucked in a panicked breath. Now her hull was in sight, moving past us for what felt like forever, though it must only have been seconds. She couldn’t have been more than eighty feet long.
As the cutter’s bulk streamed away, moonlight flashed on the letters painted across its wide transom. In blue outlined with gold, they read, VICTORIANOS, and underneath in smaller print her home port, IANTIPOROS.
The ship passed that close. It seemed the thrum of beating drums accompanied it, a threatening rhythm. After the stern of the cutter had been swallowed by the dark, I realized it was just my own heart.
I was so badly shaken my teeth chattered. I peered up into the tree branches, which were hopelessly tangled with our mast and halyards.
Fee shrugged. “Mess.”
It was that.
“Well,” I said, “at least we’re not dead.”
“All right,” whispered Fee, nudging my uninjured arm.
“I know it’s all right.” I examined the bloody hole in my sweater. “It’s just they might have killed me.”
It was only a graze. Once when I was little, I’d tried to grab the anchor rope as it dropped and it had burned the skin clean off my hand. This seemed no worse. Already the pain was fading. As my panic receded, something else was rapidly taking its place.
Anger.
Wiping blood on my pants, I caught up a lantern from the cockpit floor. My trembling hands struggled with the flint, but finally it sparked. The lamp, encased in painted glass, was meant to be a signal during foul weather. It cast an ominous pool of red light as I strode around the cabin roof. Leaves and sticks littered the deck, dislodged from the trees above when our mast and gaff had struck. I kicked them out of my way.
The crate, blanketed with canvas, loomed up in the circle of lantern light. What was in it that men would kill for? Warily I stepped closer, as if the box might suddenly pop open and monsters or Black Dogs or other nameless terrors might pour out.
“Forbidden,” Fee warned at my shoulder.
I hesitated. The blackness around us was quiet but for the chirping of crickets and frogs. The wind tickled the leaves above.
I had half a mind to throw this gods-damned crate overboard myself. We’d never asked to be involved in any of this mess—me, or Fee, or Pa, or the Singers, current carry them. The Black Dogs thought people like us were expendable, and so did that commander. Well, this was my wherry. This was my life, and I was taking control back. Now.
I ripped off the canvas tarp. It fell in a crumpled pile.
Wood scraped on wood as I tugged at the lid of the crate. It toppled over onto the discarded canvas. I lifted the lantern.
“Oh,” I breathed, because I couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say.
There was a boy in the box.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The light hit him and his eyes snapped open.
I yelped. Fumbling at my waist for Pa’s pistol, I pointed the barrel at his head.
The boy squinted up at me with light blue eyes, dazed by the glare of the lantern. Wincing, he rubbed the back of his neck as he uncurled himself from the bed of packing straw. I realized he was my age, or perhaps a little older.
He spat out a mouthful of dust. “Put that ridiculous thing down.” Brushing a clump of straw from his chest, he tossed it aside.
I glanced at Fee, whose eyes were wide as she peered down into the crate at the boy.
He had strange foreign coloring, with a bluish cast to his skin that made it seem almost translucent. His curls were black or dark brown—I couldn’t tell the difference at night. Among them something sparkled in the lamplight. A tiny garnet he wore in his earlobe, I realized. His clothing was fancy, all rich colors and swirling brocades, and he wore a loose jacket, knotted at the waist with a tasseled silk rope.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
I took an inadvertent step back. My anger had fizzled away into stunned confusion. “Caroline Oresteia,” I answered automatically, then cursed myself for it. It was my place to ask the questions. I drew myself up, trying to sound commanding. “Who are you?”
He rolled his eyes upward, as if asking the gods for patience. “I mean, who is your father? Who are his people?”
“His name is Nicandros Oresteia. This is his wherry.” What a snobbish thing to ask. Pa says only a fool looks at a man’s name before he looks at the man himself.
“A wherry?” The stranger’s lip curled. “Why have you been entrusted with this task?”
Annoyance leaked into my voice. “I was given this crate and a letter of marque by the harbor master in Hespera’s Watch.”
“Very well. And how many men do you have?”
“Men?” I echoed, beginning to think we were having two different conversations, in which neither of us understood what the other was saying.
“Men. Soldiers. Guns.” He gripped the edge of the crate and surveyed the deck, clearly unimpressed with what he saw. “It’s not just you, is it?”
“Oh, ayah, I’ve an entire company of the Margravina’s best infantrymen stuffed in the cargo hold.” I felt as if the gods were having a bit of fun with me, and I didn’t like it. I kept the pistol leveled on him. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“My name is—” He hesitated. “Tarquin,” he finished, rather grandly for someone sitting in a packing crate. “Tarquin Meridios. I have the honor of being a courier for the Akhaian Consul.”
Too much honor, if you asked me. I failed to muffle the laugh that escaped. His stiff manner of speech was so at odds with our surroundings. Who exactly did he think he was?
He glared. “Take me to your father at once.”
“He’s in the lockup in Hespera’s Watch.”
“Worse and worse,” he grumbled. “This isn’t Valonikos. Why am I awake? This looks like the middle of nowhere.”
“When people are trying to kill me, I like to know why.”
“This box,” he explained slowly, “was enchanted by a powerful shadowman to make me sleep the whole journey to Valonikos. You broke that enchantment when you opened the box … very stupidly, I might add.”
He surprised me by lunging to his feet. I took a step back. He was taller than me by nearly a foot.
“Didn’t I tell you to put that contraption away?” he demanded, glancing at the gun.
“Sorry if I’m not accustomed to having boys hatch out of packing crates,” I snapped. “Maybe it happens all the time up north, but it never happens here.”
“As if I travel like this on a regular basis,” he muttered, shaking o
ut his clothes. It didn’t do much good. They were badly rumpled and full of straw. “And don’t say ‘hatch.’ I’m not a chicken.”
“That’s what it looked like.” I felt overwhelmed by the whole situation. “Listen, can’t you just … I don’t know … get back in?”
“No, I can’t get back in.” He spoke in a sarcastic tone, with the crisp accents of a northerner. “Unless you’re a shadowman.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Of course you’re not.” He mimicked me. “Well, it can only be done by a shadowman. They should have told you to never, under any circumstances, open the box.”
I didn’t have a retort for that. He seized on my silence, narrowing his eyes. “I see that they did. Only a great fool disregards advice given by his betters.”
“I am not a fool,” I said, “and what do you mean, betters?”
Above us a tree branch creaked loudly, startling us both into silence.
A chill crawled down my neck. The night takes small noises and amplifies them. The shadows turn tiny bugs into monsters. I forced myself not to glance over my shoulder into the dark.
Fee jerked her head toward the river. “Scout,” she whispered, slipping over the side of the boat with a soft splash.
Tarquin stared after her. “I’ve never seen a frogman before.” His lip curled. “I didn’t expect it to be so … green.”
The wind stirred the branches again, making them rattle against our mast. Tarquin’s eyes met mine in the circle of lantern light, then darted away to peer intently into the night that crowded around us. Somehow I knew the noise had unsettled him too.
“Let’s talk inside,” I said in an undertone, gesturing with the lantern. I realized how unwise it was to be standing in the light. Victorianos had gone down the river, but they might come back. Even now they could be anchored outside the dike, listening to the rise and fall of our voices. Anyone raised on the river knows how sound carries across the water at night.
He nodded. We were suddenly in complete sympathy.
Which he spoiled as soon as we entered the cabin.
“Ugh, what’s that foul smell?” He covered his nose with the embroidered sleeve of his robe, shrinking back against the steps.
Billowing smoke filled the cabin. “The fish!” Grabbing a towel, I waded through the smoke.
In our clamor to escape the Black Dogs, I’d forgotten the fried fish. It was ruined now, blackened and stuck to the bottom of the pan. As I unlatched the portholes, swinging them outward on their hinges, my stomach wailed in protest.
“This is a large boat.” Tarquin’s muffled voice was scornful. “Why is the cabin so cramped?”
“This is a working wherry. Most of the space is for cargo.” I scraped sticky black crud off the frying pan and set it to soak in a bucket of water.
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t offer to help. He watched me, breathing into the collar of his robe, which had been punctured by bits of straw. It must have itched, because he absently rubbed it back and forth. Under the robe I could see a triangle of bare chest. He slouched over, shoulders hunched, trying to keep his head from hitting the swinging lantern.
“There’s a clean shirt in there, if you’d like.” I nodded at the locker. “My pa’s not as tall as you, but I guess it might fit all right.”
I halfway expected him to make a rude comment, but he only wrinkled his nose at the neatly folded clothes. They were the plain woven shirts of a wherryman.
I studied the stranger as he rummaged in the locker, wondering what message he carried, that the Black Dogs wanted him dead so badly. And why was he in a packing crate, of all things? It was a cursed peculiar way to travel—I couldn’t imagine the bruises he must have.
“Why don’t you make your frogman clean that up?” He fastened the last button, waving a hand dismissively at the frying pan. “We have things to discuss.”
“She’s not my frogman.”
“Are you sure?” Pa’s shirt hung loosely on his thinner frame, but the cuffs stopped inches above his wrists. “I’d always been told that in the riverlands they keep frog people for servants.”
“Fee’s been working this boat since I was nine years old,” I said. “Not as a servant—as part of our crew. I can’t make her do anything. She does as she wishes. I thought you said you were a courier. Haven’t you ever been out of Akhaia before?” But they had frogmen in Akhaia too, along the waterways. Hadn’t he been anywhere?
He flushed red but said nothing.
This talk of frogmen made me worry about Fee. I bit my lip, trying to remember how long it had been since she dove into the water. Surely not more than a few minutes.
“Did you know you’re bleeding?” Tarquin said in a bored voice.
“Of course I know.” I examined the hole in my sweater, where a dark bloodstain blotted the wool. In truth I had forgotten. I grabbed the bottom hem and started to pull it gingerly over my head.
“Turn round,” I ordered him.
“Excuse me?”
“I need to take my shirt off. Turn around.” The shirt I wore underneath was so threadbare, it was almost see-through. There was no way I was letting him get a peek. Of anything. And I didn’t want him smirking about how poor we were. We were working people. There was no shame in that, but I felt a rush of embarrassment anyway.
He faced the wall. “While you’re seeing to that,” he said, fiddling with the jewel in his ear, “I shall require you to tell me everything leading up to the moment you opened the crate.”
I sighed. “Can’t you talk like a normal person?”
No one I knew spoke like that, all convoluted and formal. Not even my cousins on my mother’s side, and they were city girls who lived in a fine town house.
Again he tugged at his ear.
“Why do you keep doing that?” I asked. “Touching your earring.”
He brushed it with a fingertip. “It marks me as a member of a great Akhaian house,” he said. “A house which you no doubt will not have heard of.”
I snorted. “Probably not.”
Opening Pa’s medicine chest, I removed a tin of salve and a roll of bandage. As I cleaned the bloody graze on my shoulder, I related the tale of what had happened that night, beginning with us coming around the bend into Hespera’s Watch and ending with the Black Dogs.
I tugged my sweater back on, grimacing as it snagged on the bandage.
“All right, I’m done.” I took down Pa’s brandy bottle and set two glasses on the table. My insides still felt shaky from our near escape. “You want a drink?”
Tarquin, who had been surprisingly quiet during my story, shrugged. I took that as a yes. He accepted the glass, pulling it across the table. I noticed dark smudges under his eyes, which struck me as strange. Surely an enchanted sleep would mean plenty of … well, sleep.
I swallowed the brandy down, its rich flavor burning my throat. Immediately I felt emboldened. No one gets drunk after one sip of liquor, so it was likely bravado or my own imagination. I didn’t care.
“Now it’s your turn.” I slouched sideways in the booth, kicking my feet up on the bench. “Why were you in that box? Why are the Black Dogs after you?”
“I shall tell you my story,” he said, “for although you are both rude and unladylike, it seems I’m stuck with you on this floating piece of junk. I suppose I’ll need your help.”
“Stuff it,” I said. We glared at each other in mutual dislike from opposite sides of the table.
“Very well.” He drew his finger down the glass but did not drink. “Let’s talk plainly. What do you know of Akhaia?”
“I know the capital is Trikkaia,” I said. “I know there’s a shop in the market there that sells the best fish stew in the northern riverlands.” The truth was I’d never explored beyond the docks and the market district.
“That’s almost nothing.” He twisted his hand in his hair, rumpling it up. My ignorance seemed to dismay him. “What do you know about the Akhaian succession?”
�
�Um.” I had only the vaguest idea what a succession was. Something to do with royalty. And heirs?
“It’s all so clear.” He sprang up to pace the cabin. “The pirates that attacked you must have been hired by the Theucinians.”
I failed to see what was clear about any of this. “What’s a Theucinian?”
“You don’t know?” Tarquin halted, whirling to stare at me. “I thought …” For a moment he appeared stricken, which made him look younger and more uncertain. “You said this wherry was chosen by the Margravina’s man. I assumed he told you.”
“Told me what?”
“The news I’m taking to Valonikos.” An odd look flickered across his face. “The Emparch of Akhaia has been murdered.”
CHAPTER
SIX
“Murdered,” I repeated flatly. “The Emparch of all Akhaia. Pull the other leg, why don’t you?”
Tarquin’s jaw tightened. “This is not a laughing matter.”
Akhaia was a fading empire. When the Margrave of Kynthessa had declared his province independent from the Emparchy, he’d launched a long bloody conflict now known as the Thirty Years’ War. In the two hundred years since, several other territories had broken away to form smaller republics and city-states. But despite its decline, our neighbor to the north remained formidable. As the largest country on the continent and the birthplace of our culture, Akhaia cast a long shadow.
I leaned forward. “Why do these Theucinians want you dead? What is it you’re carrying—a letter or something?”
“Yes.” He stared hard at the lantern, its wavering red light reflected in the darks of his eyes. I got the sense he was trying to decide exactly what to tell me. “After Valonikos seceded from the Emparchy to become its own city-state, certain distant members of the royal line continued to reside there. In exile, of course. The Emparch has”—he corrected himself—“had no use for them. Not until now. The message I carry is vital to the future of Akhaia.”
When he stopped, I gestured expectantly. “Well?”
“Well what?”
I ground my teeth. “What’s in the letter?”
“It’s a secret, obviously.” Tarquin drew himself up. “If I told every common river laborer my business, I wouldn’t be much of a courier, would I?”
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