They left and then, laying a finger aside her nose, Kenté whisked Daria up on deck. Just like her to make herself scarce when someone else was getting in trouble.
I was alone with my mother. “Why didn’t Nereus come back with you?”
“He spoke enthusiastically of seeking out a certain tavern. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it’s been closed these many years, since I was a girl. And the building was quite falling down, even then.” She frowned. “I wonder how long it’s been since he sailed out of this harbor, that he didn’t know.”
Her piercing glinted as she wrinkled her nose. “Probably I’m meant to be giving you the woman’s side of this talk right now.” She stared into her coffee mug. “Be responsible, mind your reputation, come to me if you’ve any questions, and so on. But let’s just skip it, if you don’t mind. You’re grown, and it’s not my business.” She sighed. “I know I’ve never been very motherly.”
“You do not have to start now.” My cheeks were hot. If I had any questions about sex, she would assuredly be the second to last person in the world I would ask. “Really, it’s fine.”
“He seems nice enough. But, Caro, don’t let it get too serious. People always like to think they can overcome having different backgrounds.” She shook her head, and I sensed she wasn’t just talking about Markos and me. “It isn’t so easy.”
I didn’t want to think about that right now. “I wonder what Pa’s doing to Markos?”
“Putting the fear of the gods into him, I expect.” Ma tapped the table. “Now. This morning I suggest we visit some of the finer shops in the garment district—you’ve nothing to wear. Tychon Hypatos is a councilman, and a friend of the Archon. He and his wife are wealthy people. You can’t go up there looking like a shipwrecked scalawag.”
“I would like new clothes.” I paused. “I want a jacket with gilt trim. And more waistcoats like this one. And a pair of fine leather boots.”
“Dresses,” she said flatly, in her bargaining table voice.
“No dresses,” I countered.
She cleared her throat. “Sometimes I wish I’d been around when you were a little girl. When I might’ve bought you pretty things. Braided your hair.” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Things that mothers do.”
I saw her as if for the first time. Responsibility had put crinkled lines around her eyes, and her faith in her family made her tall and strong. Was it too late for the kind of love Pa and I had? Maybe we were both too prickly and stubborn. I could respect her though.
“All right,” I said. “Dresses. But no stays.”
She cracked a wry smile. “I suppose that’s what I get.”
“Ma,” I began. Glancing down into my coffee, I gathered my words. “I should’ve trusted you. I’m sorry.”
“All forgotten.” She waved a hand. “You’re like Nick, that’s all. Depending on no one but the river.”
“No,” I said hoarsely. “Not the river.”
“Ayah?” To my surprise she grinned. “Is that the way of it? I’d begun to suspect. You know, Jacari Bollard himself was chosen by she who lies beneath. And he discovered a trade route that changed the world. Maybe you’re more Bollard than you think, eh?”
“Oh.” Her words had reminded me. I dug in my pocket. “I forgot. You can have this back. I never did get to use it.” I laid her Bollard brooch on the table. The morning sun glinted on the raised gold stars.
She pushed it back at me. “Keep it. You never know—you might need it someday.”
Turning the brooch over in my hands, I wondered. Was I Bollard or Oresteia? Both? I rather liked to think I was something else entirely. Something new. I tucked the pin into my pocket. Maybe we can leave things behind, yet still hang on to the best parts of them. The parts that matter.
We went up to Market Street, where I commissioned a new wardrobe, paid for with the pouch of silver talents I’d discovered in Vix’s hold. I stood squirming in my underthings while the shop girls drew tapes around my breasts and hips. My best gown was to be green silk, with a black pattern. The seamstress draped the fabric around me, as Ma nodded in approval.
I didn’t see Markos again until that afternoon.
Tychon Hypatos’s house was a sprawling estate, set back off the road and surrounded by a garden of sculpted trees. I came up the shell-lined walk to see Antidoros Peregrine sweeping the front door shut behind him. He wore a wide-brimmed hat low over his face.
I bobbed my head. “Lord Peregrine.”
“Miss Oresteia,” he said with a tip of his hat as he passed me.
I did not waste any time barging into the sitting room. “What are you up to?”
Markos looked up from a book. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That was Antidoros Peregrine going out the door.” He opened his mouth to deny it, but I cut him off. “And don’t you dare say it wasn’t. I recognized him even with the hat. Why are you having meetings with notorious Akhaian rebels?”
“If you must know, he’s the one who came to Valonikos to meet with me. He wants me to see the way they do things here. Did you know their Archon and their council are all elected by the citizens?”
“So?”
“So Peregrine believes we might be able to make a new Akhaia, one founded on modern principles. He thinks I could help his cause.”
“He thinks you’re a political opportunity!”
He snapped the book shut. “Perhaps he just wants what’s best for Akhaia.” I caught a glimpse of the title printed on the cover of the thin volume. A Declaration of Principles: Being a Manifesto Concerning the Incontestable Rights of the People. “I thought this would please you.”
“You ought to be careful, is all,” I muttered. “You know he didn’t like your father.”
“He didn’t agree with my father,” he corrected me. “Did you know I was never allowed to read this?” He gestured to the book. “My father ordered all copies burned. Peregrine has some compelling arguments, particularly regarding political power consolidated in the hands of the—”
“Oh? You think this Archon doesn’t have power?” I demanded. “All men with power take advantage. Doesn’t matter if they’re born or elected.”
“You’re being protective of me.” He grinned. “It’s sweet.”
The room was open on one side. Markos crossed the tile floor, parting the gauzy curtains to walk onto the balcony. The red roofs of Valonikos spread out beneath us like a lady’s skirts. The Free City was similar in architecture to Iantiporos and Casteria and the other seaside cities that had once been part of the Akhaian Emparchy. They all shared the same white columns, square pastel-painted buildings, and roof gardens with potted trees. Beyond the city, the sea stretched to the horizon, decorated with white dots—the sails of ships going in and out of the harbor.
“I was not,” I grumbled. “It’s just you don’t even sound like yourself. You told me you don’t trust Lord Peregrine.”
“That’s not—”
“That is exactly what you said. Now you’re just going to let him come waltzing in and put all these ideas in your head. It’s not you.”
“I suppose I’m meant to have all my beliefs—my whole life—already mapped out before I’m even twenty? That’s hypocritical, isn’t it? Coming from you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I mean two weeks ago you knew you were going to be a wherryman for the rest of your life.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.” I drew my finger along the balcony railing. “I only think you should be cautious.”
“When we first met Peregrine,” he said quietly, “he called my mother by her given name. It made me angry.”
“I couldn’t tell,” I said sarcastically.
“He wasn’t being presumptuous.” He sighed. “He knew her, better than most people. Apparently they were great friends at court, many years ago, before she married. I wish I’d known. I wish—” He shook his head
. “I didn’t know enough about my family.”
I slid my hand on top of his, squeezing it. He squeezed back.
“My cousin Konto hates this city,” he said. “He wants to have it back.”
“How do you know?”
“The Theucinians are imperialists. I know how they think. Konto means to have me back too. Or dead. I don’t mean to let him take me.” His gaze took in the tiled rooftops and whitewashed balconies. “I’ve decided I don’t mean to let him take either of us.”
“Markos, what—?”
His eyes were alight with something I couldn’t name. “This is a beautiful city. I feel a peace here.” He leaned on the railing. “I feel as if I could be someone I like, in this city.”
“If Lord Peregrine gets his way—” I began.
“He doesn’t use his title anymore.”
“Just the same. If he gets his way, Akhaia mightn’t need an Emparch at all. Did you think of that? In a modern Akhaia, they wouldn’t need you.”
“No,” he said, and instead of looking angry, I thought he looked exhilarated. “They wouldn’t.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
He shrugged. “The world is always changing.”
“I didn’t think you, of all people, would want that.”
The breeze shifted his black hair. “I don’t know what I want anymore. The world is so much bigger than I thought. And, Caro, the funniest part is—” He laughed. “I think it’s a good thing.”
Hearing Markos talk like that was certainly a surprise. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why it made me so uneasy. It wasn’t that I begrudged him his excitement about Antidoros Peregrine’s ideas, but why did everything have to be changing so alarmingly fast, including Markos? I desperately wished for a moment to catch my breath.
An even greater surprise came the next day, when a wherry sailed into Valonikos harbor. She was not the newest wherry, nor the fastest. Her paint was scratched and gouged, marred with bullet holes, and her black sails much faded from the sun. A frogman stood on her cockpit seat, waving.
“Fee!” was all I could manage before my throat closed.
Pa jumped aboard, rocking the wherry. He grinned at Fee, and I saw the relief in his eyes. “Well, I reckon there’s a story here.” He ran a hand over Cormorant’s warm planks. “Caro, what have you done to my gods-bedamned paint job?”
That was all he said for a long time. He wandered up the deck, setting his hand on the boom and stroking the mast. I watched him trace a coil of rope and caress the brass portholes.
“Fee, how?” I took her slippery hands, spinning her in a circle. I couldn’t stop laughing. Or was I crying?
“Frogs fall,” she said. “Frogs swim. Webbed feet.”
“How did you escape from the Black Dogs? How’d you get Cormorant back?”
“Dark. Quiet. Water. Docks. Waited. Waited. Waited. Cormorant. Crept. Leaped. Man. Knife. Throat.” It was the most words I’d ever heard out of her at once. “Sailed.”
Fee’s eyes widened. I turned to see Nereus leaning on the boom behind me, hands in his pockets.
“Cousin.” He gave her a theatrical bow.
We sent a runner up to Tychon Hypatos’s house, and eventually Markos and Daria joined us. Markos showed his sister around the deck, regaling her with stories of our narrow escapes in the riverlands. Even Ma came down for a while. We all squeezed around the table and dined on meat pies and fresh fish from the market. Then, one by one, the others left and it was only me, Pa, and Fee. Just like always.
But not quite.
Cormorant’s cabin seemed cramped now in the homey lantern light. I trailed my hands over the shining wood of her cupboards, bunks, and shelves, lingering on the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth.
Had I really lived in her? It seemed like something that had happened years ago. An uncomfortable feeling. Swallowing hard against the lump in my throat, I climbed up to my favorite spot on the cabin roof.
“Ayah, so here we are.” The deck creaked as Pa joined me. “They all gone up to Iphis Street. I be reading your ma’s mind. She’s thinking, ‘If I get that young man a crown, then what might he do for the Bollards?’ ” He shrugged. “Don’t care for all that myself. Give me a good heavy load and a steady wind.”
He looked at me. “So then, this is where it ends for us. You and me.”
Tears burned my eyes. “Pa, don’t say that.”
“I’ve wronged you, keeping my silence.” He took a shuddering breath, staring down at his callused hands. “But now I’ve got to say my piece and hope you’ll forgive your old pa.” The sunset breeze stirred the graying hair around his face. “I knew you weren’t meant for the river.”
I dared not breathe.
“It were a long time ago. You must’ve been three or four. I was sailing up the channel when, don’t you know, the weather turned as bad as bad can get. The waves near swamped us. I took a reef, then another. Weren’t no help. I reckon that’s the closest I’ve come to being drowned. And then … she was there. With a voice like the deepest fathoms.” He shivered. “Like a wild thing.”
“Like a hundred knives,” I whispered.
Pa nodded. “Just so. ‘I ain’t one of yours,’ I said. ‘I belong to the one who lies under the river, and you well know it. Though I won’t say no to your help.’
“ ‘Know this. I’ll never harm you, Nick Oresteia,’ she said, ‘and that you have as a promise. For I owe you a debt. Keep her safe for me.’
“I looked up and my heart near dropped out of my chest. You were sitting on the lee side, wet to the knees, for we was riding that low in the water. Every time a swell came, it dunked you to the waist, but you just laughed. ’Course I panicked. I yelled at you to come down into the cockpit. Then I heard her.
“ ‘As if I would ever let her fall,’ she said. And just like that, she was gone.”
He sighed. “I never even told your ma. Guess I’m just an old fool. I reckoned maybe if I didn’t say it out loud …”
I wiped my face with my sleeve. “I thought the god in the river didn’t want me.” Now I was sobbing in earnest. “I called his name so many times and he never—he never answered me.”
“Hush, girlie.” He wrapped me in his arms. “You were never unwanted. The truth is, the sea loved you from the moment you were born.”
“But it’s all wrong.” I sniffed. “I’m supposed to be on Cormorant. This isn’t what was meant to happen.” I dug my face into his sweater. “I was supposed to be with you.”
Trailing his fingers down my cheek, he said gently, “No.” He kissed the top of my head. “I knew the minute you took that letter of marque. Knew it was your fate coming for you. That cutter is a beauty. You mind what I taught you and take good care of her now.”
“But I love Cormorant.” I pressed my palm flat on her warm cabin roof. “That ship doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He smoothed my hair. “Sometimes we have to let the past go before we can see our future sitting there in front of us.”
I closed my eyes. “She’s pretty and fast but she’s not … home. She never, ever will be.” I rested my cheek on his shoulder, breathing in the muddy, familiar scent of his clothes.
“Stop crying now.” He slung his arm around my waist. “Don’t you have more Emparchs to be rescuing?”
I laughed, even as I sniffled.
“Be careful,” he warned. “I fear she’ll ask more of you than he’s ever asked of me.”
“Thisbe Brixton said she was a fish and Nereus was a shark, come to eat her. But surely they must be friends. Surely the god of the river and the god of the sea—”
“Cousins, at most. Allies, sometimes.” He gazed out at the horizon where, beyond the city walls, the sea waited in the night. “But friends? No.”
He went belowdecks, leaving me alone. Through the open window, I heard his voice rising and falling. Pa always talked to Fee just the same as he did to everyone else. He didn’t much mind when she didn’t talk back.
&n
bsp; I sat on the cabin roof past midnight, knees curled to my chest. One last night watch, feeling everything. The noises of her tackle creaking and clacking. The swirl of water against her hull. The singing of tiny frogs under the docks. Only when I unfolded my stiff legs did I realize what I’d been doing was memorizing, because this was it.
The last time this would be home.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Three days later Tychon Hypatos and his wife threw a grand party for Markos at their house. Fortunately my new dress was finished that very morning. Pressed and wrapped in paper, it was carried down to Vix by a shopgirl who stared bug-eyed at Nereus’s tattoos.
The party was like nothing I’d seen before, even at Bollard House. The courtyard was strung with floating paper lanterns. Piles of grapes and cheese spilled down the middle of the long tables. There were even sculptures made of food, which seemed very silly to me.
I could tell Markos’s aunt—or cousin, or whatever relation she was to him—didn’t like me. As she stared at me in the receiving line, I had the distinct feeling she knew exactly what we were doing when he slipped down to Vix at night.
As if it was her business.
She nodded politely as she welcomed Nereus, Kenté, and me, though I knew she considered us a lot of rough scalawags. I discovered Daria, in a stiff pink dress, sulking by the dessert table. There was no one her age at the party, and Markos had abandoned her to discuss politics. Kenté took her for a turn on the dance floor to cheer her up, while Nereus and I hid in a dim corner behind a tower made of fruit.
“Nereus—” I hesitated. “Now that you’re done helping me, what happens to you?”
“Oh, I doubt I’m finished with that.” Long sleeves covered his tattoos, but his gap-toothed grin still made him look disreputable. “Because you ain’t finished. Not even close.”
“I would ask what you mean by that, but you won’t tell me anyway.”
“You’re learning.” He winked, downing his first glass of wine. He had four—two in his hands, two on the table.
“Will you sail with me?” I hoped he would say yes. “As first mate on Vix? Really, you should be captain. No men will want to sail under me.”
Song of the Current Page 28
