Blue Sea Burning

by Geoff Rodkey

  IT TOOK A FAIR AMOUNT of stumbling around before my eyes readjusted to the dark and I found my friends. Guts was lying on the foredeck, snoozing with Kira’s head on his chest. Quint was curled up next to them.

  I knelt down and nudged Quint awake.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I whispered. “But I need a favor.”

  “Wot is it?”

  “Can you build me a raft?”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Message

  FIRST, QUINT TRIED to talk me out of it. Then he refused to help. But our arguing eventually woke up Kira and Guts, and once I told them what I wanted to do, they came down on my side.

  “If you just tell me the Cartager words for what I need to say to him, I can—”

  Kira cut me off. “No. I am coming with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. I was Li Homaya’s translator for two years. He trusts me. When I speak, he will listen.”

  “Ain’t goin’ without me,” said Guts.

  “Yer all mad!” Quint yelped. “If the Short-Ears don’t kill ye, Healy will!”

  “For what?”

  “Crossin’ him!”

  “I’m not crossing him,” I said.

  “Wot else ye call it? Runnin’ a message out to his enemy?”

  “It’s . . .” I didn’t know what else to call it, either.

  Better to just do it and not think too much.

  “Please, Quint—it doesn’t have to be anything complicated,” I said. “Just something that floats. Big enough for the three of us.”

  “Fat chance,” said the carpenter. In the near darkness, I could see him cross his arms over his barrel chest. “I ain’t throwin’ in on this.”

  “You would rather we swim?” Kira asked him.

  “Oh, —!” Quint growled, borrowing one of Gut’s favorite phrases. “Ye wouldn’t!”

  “We’ll have to,” I said. “Unless you can help us make a raft.”

  He stewed for another minute or two, but then he gave in. We went below, and soon enough, we’d scavenged enough busted pieces of the hull to build a decent raft under his direction. We gathered a few long, narrow boards to serve as oars, then carried everything to the gaping hole on the gun deck that had been cut open to toss the cannon overboard.

  “Anybody asks, I didn’t help ye,” Quint muttered, looking over his shoulder at the hanging forest of hammocks behind us, filled with snoring pirates.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “And thank you.”

  I knelt down and hugged him. Kira did the same. He and Guts sort of grunted affectionately at each other.

  “Yer all fools,” he told us.

  “I know,” I said. Then we slid the raft through the hole, and I jumped out after it as fast as I could, because I knew if I stopped to think about it, I’d lose my nerve.

  WE WERE QUIET ENOUGH hitting the water that nobody poked their head over the deck rail to see what the noise was, and the fog was so thick that the lookout in the crow’s nest couldn’t see us. We got under way pretty quickly, and soon the only challenge was making sure we were paddling in the direction of the distant voices shouting at each other in Cartager.

  The raft was about eight feet long but only a few feet wide. We arranged ourselves in a row, with Kira in front and me in back. She did her rowing on alternating sides so we could keep to a straight line even with Guts and me sticking to the sides we favored—the left for Guts and the right for me, because his hook and my injured wrist made it hard to paddle any other way.

  “Good thing I busted the right wrist, or we’d be moving in circles,” I said.

  “How’d ye bust it?” Guts asked.

  I pretended not to hear him.

  “How’d ye bust the wrist?” he repeated, turning his head to look back at me.

  “Landed on it wrong.”

  “When?”

  “When the first round hit.”

  I couldn’t help lying. When I fell out of a hammock was just too embarrassing, and it had been bad enough admitting it to my uncle.

  “How did you bust yours?” Kira asked Guts.

  Then it was Guts’s turn to be silent. Which was a sign of just how special his relationship with Kira was—if anyone else had asked him about his lost hand, they would have gotten a few mouthfuls of curse words.

  “Or was it always missing?” she added.

  I saw his shoulders twitch. But he still didn’t say anything.

  “I’m only curious,” she said. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me.”

  He twitched again. Nobody spoke.

  “Was a card game,” he said finally.

  Then he twitched a couple more times and went quiet. I figured that was the end of it. But a minute later, he coughed and started again.

  “We was in port. Jonny Adder from the Frenzy come over to play poker, ’long with some of his crew. I was playin’ guitar for ’em. Jonny liked the sound of it. Kept askin’ Ripper to sell me to him. Ripper kept sayin’ I weren’t fer sale.

  “But the cards weren’t goin’ Ripper’s way, and he’d been drinkin’ hard. Late in the game, he gets a hot hand, wants to go all in. But he ain’t got the coin left for it. Short twenty gold.”

  Guts coughed some wetness from his lungs.

  “Jonny’d offered twenty-five for me. So Ripper takes five gold out o’ the pot, says, ‘Now’s yer chance. Boy’s in the pot at twenty-five.’ Time comes to show. Both Jonny and Ripper are holdin’ jack straight. So they gotta make a split.

  “Jonny says he wants me fer his half. Ripper says no. Goes back an’ forth. Both of ’em get hot. Then Ripper draws his sword. Says, ‘We’ll split him like the pot. You get the head, I keep the rest.’

  “Jonny says, ‘The head ain’t worth a copper. I just want his hands.’ Ripper says, ‘Fine. Split those, then.’ And that’s what he does. Gives my left one to Jonny, keeps the rest for himself.”

  Kira and I had both stopped paddling. For the longest time, nobody spoke.

  “Guts, I’m so sorry,” said Kira, her voice breaking as she said it.

  “Ain’t yer fault.”

  “Burn Healy’s going to kill him,” I said.

  “Hope he does,” said Guts. Then he twitched. “Keep paddlin’, you two.”

  We quit talking after that, keeping our ears trained on the voices as they slowly got louder. By the time we passed the first scattered rocks of the Fangs, we could make out other sounds besides the yelling—grunts, groans, creaking wood and rope, the splash of heavy objects plunging into the water . . .

  Out there in the fog, they were working like their lives depended on it. And from the tone of the voices floating back to us, it was clear it wasn’t going well.

  Even though we were expecting to come upon them, it was still a surprise when the first Cartager lifeboat appeared through the gloom, carrying a dozen sailors, all straining at an anchor rope that ran upward from the water, vanishing into the fog.

  Healy had been right—the man-of-war was too fat to kedge. But it hadn’t stopped Li Homaya’s men from trying.

  We weren’t nearly as surprised to see them as they were to see us. Every jaw dropped, although pretty quickly their faces went from shock to fury. If they’d been armed, we would have found ourselves looking down their gun barrels.

  Kira spoke to them, and their faces turned again, this time to confusion. Then one of them yelled something into the gloom behind him.

  As the yells echoed down the line, spreading the news that we’d arrived, one of the men in the boat suddenly sat up straight, his eyes bugging out at Guts.

  “Se Guts! Lamana moy!”

  As the rest of the men looked closer at Guts, their expressions changed yet again, this time to something strangely like pleasure—and I remembered I was traveling with the most famous one-ha
nded guitar player Pella Nonna had ever known.

  “Ay, Gussie!”

  “Sima lamana, Gussie!”

  “Booya lamai, Guts!”

  “Evenin’ to ye,” Guts replied, his shoulders twitching up a storm. His back was to me, but I’m pretty sure he was blushing. He’d never been too comfortable taking praise from strangers even under normal circumstances, and this was about as far from normal as it got.

  But it helped us. Between him and Kira—who, as one of Li Homaya’s former court translators, collected a few greetings of her own as we floated past a series of lifeboats, all deployed in various desperate efforts to get the man-of-war unstuck—I started to feel much less worried that we might get shot before we could deliver our message.

  Then the man-of-war appeared, looming over our heads. From the weather deck to the waterline, it was easily twice as tall as the Grift, and when I realized there was a cargo net hanging over the side down to the water, and we’d have to climb it if we wanted to speak with Li Homaya, I started to feel dizzy.

  Once we’d gotten close enough to grab the net, Kira called to the sailors in the nearest boat, and they helped us secure our raft and oars to the bottom of the netting so they wouldn’t float away. Then we started the climb.

  Rowing had been hard enough, but getting up that net—and the effort it took to keep the pain in my wrist from overwhelming me—drained whatever energy I had left. Once we reached the top and set foot on the deck, I spent the first couple of minutes doubled over, gasping for breath and praying I wouldn’t pass out.

  When I finally got it together to straighten up and look around, I realized Kira’s reunion with her former employer—Li Homaya, the swollen-bellied Viceroy of New Cartage, the man I hoped would bring Roger Pembroke to justice—had not only started already, but was pretty much over.

  The Cartager leader, who looked a lot less swollen and a lot more worried than he had when I’d last seen him swigging wine at a formal dinner in his palace, was in the middle of a tense conference with his purple-uniformed lieutenants.

  Guts and Kira were standing a respectful distance away from them. I joined my friends.

  “Are you all right?” Kira asked.

  “Fine,” I said. Which wasn’t really true, but it was close enough. “What’s he going to do?”

  “It is hard to tell. They are arguing over whether I am trying to trick them.”

  One of the lieutenants was making an impassioned speech to the group, complete with sweeping, melodramatic waves of his hands. He was in midwave when Li Homaya had had enough of it and grabbed the man’s hand, shoving it back into his chest.

  Then Li Homaya spat out a string of words that Kira later translated as “The girl doesn’t lie. I’m taking my city back.”

  Within seconds, orders were getting yelled left and right, and the deck of the ship—which had been a frenzy of hauling, kedging, punting, and pulling—grew twice as frenzied and three times as confused. Every man on board quit trying to save the ship and prepared to abandon it, but not before packing up everything that might be useful in a fight and hadn’t already been tossed overboard.

  We watched in a daze until it occurred to us that the ship we were standing on was going to be smashed to bits at sunrise, and the cargo net that was our only route off of it was now as crowded as Pella Nonna’s main street on a market day. So we got in the line that had formed in front of the net, and eventually managed to climb back down to the water, only to find that our raft had been commandeered to float a crate of rifles to shore.

  There was a minute of panic, followed by a few minutes of treading water and begging that got us nowhere until we lucked onto a particularly rabid guitar fan who was commanding one of the rowboats. He had his men haul us up out of the water, and we managed to wedge ourselves into the boat alongside more sailors, dried beef, and ammunition crates than should have reasonably fit in the space.

  I spent the next twenty minutes sitting on a Cartager’s lap, with someone’s elbow wedged in my ear. The man whose lap I had to sit on was even less thrilled about it than I was.

  Finally, we reached the shore. The chaos of the ship had moved to the beach, and it took us quite a while to find our discarded raft among the haphazard piles of Cartager weapons and equipment.

  By the time we found the raft, I’d realized we didn’t need it.

  “We have to go with them,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We have to go. To help stop Pembroke.”

  Guts looked at Kira. She winced.

  “Egg, we have a plan—”

  “This is better—”

  “—to find my people”—she spoke over me, her voice rising—“and recover the Fist of Ka.”

  “None of that matters if Pembroke wins!”

  She didn’t answer. She just stared at me.

  The look in her eyes said it all.

  There was one thing more important to Kira than destroying Roger Pembroke: her god, Ka.

  And Ka’s Fist, which she believed was the only thing that could truly save her people.

  Looking into those eyes, I knew it didn’t matter how much I argued with her. She had a map, and a plan, to find the Fist. And she was going to stick to it.

  I tried anyway. “We can still find the treasure,” I pleaded. “We’ll just go to Pella first. As soon as Li Homaya retakes the city, we’ll get on a ship to Edgartown—”

  “There are no ships from Pella to Edgartown,” she said. “Cartage and Rovia are enemies. They do not trade. If we go to Pella, we’ll be stuck there.”

  I looked at the preparations going on around us. Li Homaya’s men were almost ready to march. I had to go now, or not at all.

  “Then we’ll have to split up.”

  My stomach dropped as I said the words.

  “Nuts to that!” growled Guts. He was twitching up a storm. “Gotta be a pudda way to do both!”

  But there wasn’t. And there was no time left to argue.

  “You still have the map I drew?” I asked Kira.

  She nodded.

  “No!” Guts yelped, practically in tears. “— pudda glulo —! Gotta stick together!”

  “We can’t, Guts,” Kira said softly. “There’s no other way.”

  I could feel tears welling up behind my eyes. I didn’t want to split from Guts any more than he wanted to split from me.

  But after what I’d seen between him and Kira on the Grift, I knew that if there was a choice to be made, he belonged with her.

  “You stay with Kira,” I said. “I’ll be okay—”

  “— you, ye —!”

  “— you, ye — billi glulo domamora!” I shot back.

  I’d never cursed at Guts before, let alone like that, and the shock of it made him laugh.

  It made me laugh, too—which was a relief, because if I hadn’t laughed just then, I would’ve cried.

  Li Homaya was just down the beach, in the middle of a little purple swarm of his lieutenants. “Can you speak to Li Homaya for me?” I asked Kira.

  “You are sure you want to go with him?”

  I nodded. “I’m sure.”

  She walked over to Li Homaya. Guts and I followed.

  The Viceroy turned at the sound of her voice. She asked him a question in Cartager.

  He looked past her to me. His lip curled. Then he asked a question of his own.

  Kira translated for me.

  “He wants to know what good you are to him.”

  That was a tough one. “I speak Rovian. And I could . . . scout for him. I’ve been over the land before. And I’m small, so people won’t notice me.”

  Kira translated it. Li Homaya snorted. I didn’t need a translation to know he wasn’t convinced.

  “Tell him Roger Pembroke killed my father,” I said, my voice shaky with emotion.
>
  She told him. Li Homaya’s mouth split into a sour smirk. He said a couple of sentences, shaking his head. Then he turned his back on us.

  The conversation was over.

  I felt my face turn hot. “What did he say?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kira said in the soothing voice she usually reserved for calming down Guts. “He is not a kind man.”

  “Just tell me what he said!”

  She sighed. “He said all fathers die eventually. And he is leading an army, not a camp for boys.”

  The anger was boiling up inside me. I wanted to scream. Or hit something. Not something, someone: Li Homaya.

  “Nuts to him,” said Guts.

  For a while, we just stood there—me seething, and the other two not knowing what to say.

  “C’mon,” Guts said finally. “Gotta get back to the Grift ’fore the sun rises.”

  As I followed them back to our little raft, I thought about going to Pella anyway—following the Cartagers as they marched, or striking out on my own and getting there ahead of them.

  I can find the way just fine. And I’ll eat . . .

  I didn’t know what I’d eat. I didn’t have any supplies, or weapons, or anything except the shirt on my back.

  I can steal a rifle from them. And powder, and shot, and . . . and . . .

  In the end, I got on the raft. But the anger kept building, until I could feel it burn all the way to the tips of my ears. As we pushed away from the shore, I silently cursed Li Homaya and all his men with the foulest words I knew.

  And I wondered if my uncle had been right about Li Homaya after all.

  Even if he wasn’t, Healy was dead-on about one thing: there was no point in trying to divide the Blue Sea into good and bad.

  As far as I could tell, the only men on it were bad and worse.

  CHAPTER 16

  Landfall

  I SULKED FOR MOST of the next hour as we paddled back through the fog.

  Li Homaya’s refusing to take me along probably shouldn’t have upset me as much as it did. Even as I stewed over it, a part of me had to admit he was right. I wasn’t a soldier, I didn’t have any skills or knowledge that might help him . . . I didn’t even speak Cartager.