by Geoff Rodkey
“I ain’t no writer,” said the rat-faced man he was trying to bargain with.
I turned back around and kept listening.
“For a few extra silver, I’ll write some out for you,” cooed Percy. “Get you started.”
“You ain’t no writer neither.”
“Nonsense! I’ll have you know, I once worked as a tutor—in Roger Pembroke’s own house!”
My hands were trembling. I had to call him out. I just wasn’t sure how.
I heard Rat Face laugh. “You? A tutor?”
“Quite a fine one at that.”
Guts turned to look at me. “Wot’s the matter? Gone all pale.”
“Shh!” I said.
“. . . where you stole his seal?” Rat Face was asking.
“Course not! It was entrusted to me. As a faithful servant—”
I stood up from the bench, turned around, and leaned over Percy’s shoulder to address Rat Face.
“He’s a liar! And whatever he’s selling you, it’s a con.”
Percy made a funny gasping noise in his throat. Rat Face stared at me, confused.
“Who are you?”
“One of Percy’s victims,” I said.
“Never seen this boy in my life!” protested Percy.
“Who’s Percy?” asked Rat Face.
“He is,” I said.
Rat Face glared at Percy. “Said yer name was George.”
“It is!”
“You’re a bald liar, Percy,” I said. Then I looked at Rat Face again. “If you don’t want to get cheated, you’d best leave now.”
“Where’d this crapsack come from?” It was Guts, standing next to me and brandishing his hook over Percy’s head.
“Oh, not you!” Percy immediately regretted saying that, because it was all Rat Face needed to convince himself that it was time to go. He rose from his seat.
“No-no-no! I can explain—if you—” Percy blubbered.
Too late. Rat Face was on his way out the door.
Percy’s shoulders slumped in defeat. He tilted his head and stared up at me with a look of disgust.
“How are you even alive?”
“I managed,” I said. “No thanks to you.”
“Oughta slit yer pudda belly open,” growled Guts.
“Back off, you whelp!” Percy was quickly recovering his bluster. “That hook won’t stop the gun in my boot.”
“Better not use it,” I warned him. “My uncle’s Burn Healy.”
Percy was aghast. “Nonsense! You can’t con me, boy.”
I turned back to the others. “Kira, Mr. Dalrymple—who’s my uncle?”
“Burn Healy,” they both chimed in.
Percy hesitated. He didn’t seem to know whether to believe it. “Look . . . can’t we just agree we never saw each other?”
“You betrayed me,” I said.
“You shot me!” he yelped, flapping his right arm. “I still can’t raise this over my head.”
“I didn’t shoot you.”
“Your girlfriend, then. Call it even. I don’t want nothin’ to do with your lot.”
“What were you trying to sell that man?”
“A set of encyclopedias.”
“Didn’t sound like it. Sounded like it was something of Pembroke’s. Like an official seal or something.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I might have a business proposition for you.”
CHAPTER 22
Sprung
EVEN THOUGH I HATED Percy’s guts—as a tutor, he’d been lazy, cruel, and shockingly incompetent—he was as good a liar as anybody I knew. Even more important, he’d somehow managed to steal a metal stamp of Roger Pembroke’s that, when impressed onto a letter or a wax seal, identified a document as having officially come from Pembroke’s hand.
And Percy needed money, badly enough that for fifty-seven gold pieces (a number that took us half an hour of haggling to settle on) he agreed to show up at the jail and present an officially sealed letter to the guards ordering Millicent and that Cyril ape to be released into his custody on behalf of Pembroke and the elder Mr. Ape.
Percy even suggested some improvements of his own to the scheme, like wearing a uniform he’d kept from his days as a servant at Cloud Manor, and waiting until that morning’s ship from Sunrise had just docked before showing up at the jail, to make it look like he’d just gotten off the boat.
We agreed to meet him at the hotel the next morning at eleven, when the ship was due in. All we had to do before then was scrape together fifty-seven gold pieces, which we figured wouldn’t be too difficult. We had eighteen between us already—and as Guts pointed out, since we’d served on the Grift’s crew during the battle, we arguably had a right to some of Healy’s ten million, even if it wasn’t the full crew share of fifty thousand each.
We approached my uncle the next morning over breakfast in the hotel dining room. Like the handful of other pirates in the room, all of them green and queasy as they stared at their plates of bacon and eggs, he was badly hungover. We were a little bleary-eyed ourselves, but only because the pirates’ caterwauling had made it tough to sleep once we’d gotten back to the hotel.
We made our case for the money. Healy nodded, scratching the thick stubble on his cheek.
“Fair enough,” he yawned. “I’m a bit short on actual coin at the moment, though. Feel free to run up whatever bills you like at the local merchants, and I’ll see what I can do in a few days. Sound fair?”
We looked at one another. This wasn’t going to do. We had only eighteen gold, and we needed fifty-seven.
“The thing is,” I said, “we’ve got a, uh . . . pretty urgent need for, um, thirty-nine gold.”
“Thirty-nine?”
“Roughly.”
“Roughly? So you’d be all right with thirty?”
“Well . . . not roughly.”
“Exactly, then?”
“Could be forty,” Kira offered. “If a round number’s easier.”
Healy squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and rubbed his temples. I think that was more because of the hangover than us, but I wasn’t sure.
“This about that Pembroke girl? Are you bribing someone?”
We looked at one another. There was no point in lying. We weren’t good at it.
“Sort of.”
He sighed. “Fine. Just let me finish my battle with these eggs and I’ll put the touch on a few of the brothers for the coin. One thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t lay out the whole bribe up front. Give them a taste, but hold back as much as you can until the deal’s done.”
“Good advice, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” He forced down a bite of eggs. Then he scrunched up his nose and cocked an eyebrow.
“Fetch a bucket, will you? Not sure these eggs are going to stay put.”
They did, but just barely.
It was still two hours before we were due to meet Percy, and I spent them in a rocking chair on the hotel’s porch, staring off into space while I tried to decide how I’d act around Millicent if the plan worked and we sprang her from the jail. A night’s sleep hadn’t left me any less hurt or confused. I loved her—but at the moment, I hated her, too, which was what made it so confusing.
And she’d told me she loved me as well, back in that pit the Moku threw us into at Mata Kalun. Was she lying then? Had she changed her mind? Did it matter that she’d thought I was dead?
She’d had a thing for this Cyril fellow for a long time, I knew that. It went back years, well before she’d ever met me. She’d once said she was going to marry him. Was that true? Were they engaged now or something?
If our plan worked, he’d get sprung along with her. I’d have to figure out how to act around him as w
ell. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
Maybe I should ignore her. Freeze her out. Shun her, like the townspeople did to Geraldine, the fallen woman in A Storm Upon the Heath. But that ended badly for everybody—Geraldine took poison, and the man who loved her, Miles, wound up jumping off a cliff.
I never liked that book.
Should I issue an ultimatum, and demand that Millicent give up Cyril and return to me? That had happened in a few different books—not just A Storm Upon the Heath (early on, before everybody started killing themselves), but Behold a Stranger and Silent Came the War as well.
But the ultimatums hadn’t worked in any of those stories. Demands like that just seemed to make everybody unhappy, especially the person doing the demanding.
Then I remembered Lothar the Lone, in Throne of the Ancients. His true love, Boresia, had been captured by the Skorgards of Grumm and fed to their nightwolves. After that, Lothar had resolved to walk the earth alone (which was how he got his nickname), a pitiless warrior for justice, vanquishing evildoers like the Skorgards and righting wrongs wherever he found them, all the while refusing any earthly joy, including the civilizing touch of a woman.
He wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun to read about—it got so I’d skip the Lothar chapters whenever they cropped up so I could get back to Billicks the Brave, who had a much more positive attitude—but Lothar was definitely noble, and the various maidens he was constantly saving from peril really seemed to appreciate him.
I decided that was the way to go. It’d be tricky, since Millicent wouldn’t have been eaten by nightwolves, so I’d still have to talk to her. And I’d have to put up with that Cyril, too.
But I’d treat them both with the kind of stiff, cold formality that Lothar used on people. And when Millicent saw just how noble I was, swearing off all happiness and devoting my every waking moment to heroically good deeds like freeing the silver mine’s slaves, she’d realize she had made a terrible mistake.
But it’d be too late for her. Because by then, I’d be Egg the . . .
I couldn’t think of a good E word to go with Egg. But I didn’t need one. I just had to be cold and aloof, and a warrior for justice. If I did it right, sooner or later someone else would give me a good nickname.
My uncle came through with a sack of silver coin, then went back upstairs for a nap. Percy showed up just before eleven, a wax-sealed letter in his hand. He must have seen hard times over the past months, because his old servant’s uniform hung so loose I figured he’d lost a good twenty pounds.
He howled when we only gave him a quarter of the money up front, but Guts showed him the rest, and we swore we wouldn’t cheat him. Then we had to hang around the dock until almost eleven-thirty before the Sunrise ship came in. Once the passengers started to disembark—it was mildly amusing to see the looks of fear on the wealthy Sunrisers’ faces when the harbormaster stopped them to warn that Edgartown had been overrun by pirates—we followed Percy up the hilly streets to the jail.
While he went inside, we waited at the corner.
He was in there just long enough for us to get worried.
Finally, he reappeared, with Cyril and Millicent in tow.
They were both walking with a stiff gait, like it had been a while since they’d stretched their legs. But when Millicent saw us, she broke into a run.
I tried not to stare at her as she approached, but I couldn’t help myself.
It was annoying to realize she wasn’t looking at me. She had a big smile on her face, but it was aimed at Kira and Guts.
She hugged them both tightly.
“Thank you so much!”
I waited for her to try to hug me. But she didn’t even look my way.
“It was mostly Egg’s doing,” Kira said.
“Oh.” Finally, Millicent looked at me. Her eyes were cold. “So you decided not to let us rot?”
I tried to say, “I seek only to do what is just,” which was Lothar the Lone’s standard answer in situations like this. But I was so thrown off by the fact that Millicent had the gall to be angry herself—her? mad at ME?—that the words got all tangled up in my mouth.
What came out was “I seek the what just only . . . what to do.”
They all gave me funny looks, and I felt my face turn hot.
Just then, Percy and that Cyril ape reached us.
“Thanks for the subterfuge,” he said with a wink. “Accommodations were getting a bit tiresome.”
“The subter-wot?” asked Guts.
“Gimme the sack, you,” Percy interrupted, holding out a stubby-fingered paw.
Guts handed the bag over. Percy shoved his whole arm into it and pulled out a fistful of coins. He looked them over, then let all but one drop back into the bag, raising a racket loud enough that passersby in the street turned to look at us.
He bit down on the coin he was still holding.
“It’s real,” I assured him. “We’re not cheats like you are.”
“See about that,” said Percy, putting the coin up to his eye so he could examine it closely.
“Excuse me—”
We turned to see a pair of Rovian soldiers approaching. My heart started to beat faster. If Millicent got rearrested, we were all out of ideas for getting her out again.
But the soldiers only had eyes for Percy.
“Are those coins in that sack?”
Percy got a look on his face like a weasel that had just been caught stealing eggs from a falcon’s nest. “Just a few,” he said in a panicky voice.
“How many?” the soldier asked as his partner whipped out a piece of parchment and a charcoal pencil.
Percy clamped his jaws shut.
“Fifty-seven gold worth,” Guts piped up.
“Going to be needing that,” said the first soldier as his partner started to write up a receipt. “Governor’s orders. You’ll be reimbursed when—”
“I’ve got a wife and kids to feed!” yelped Percy. “The little one’s very sick! Got no intestine, you see, and—”
“We should be going,” I said. I turned to the soldiers. “We’d offer you our silver as well, but he’s got it all.”
“Move along, then. And mind yourselves—there’s pirates about,” said the first soldier.
The second soldier gave him a discreet kick in the foot.
“Sorry—not pirates. Rovian Irregulars.”
“We shall be very careful,” said Kira.
“Thank you, Percy!” I said.
Percy was still pleading with the soldiers when we turned the corner. A part of me felt sorry for him. But considering all the rotten things he’d done to me over the years, it wasn’t a big part.
WE HEADED BACK to the hotel so Millicent and Cyril could get a bath. Along the way, Kira filled Millicent in on everything that had happened to us since we’d seen her last. I kept waiting for Millicent to turn to me and say something like, “Nice going!” or “Wasn’t that brave of you?” or even “I can’t believe my father tried to hang you in front of a whole city.”
But she didn’t even glance in my direction.
Meanwhile, Cyril cracked jokes, using words that nobody except him understood. Guts kept asking what they meant, but half the time he didn’t know the words Cyril used to define them, either, so the whole conversation sort of went around in circles.
I was determined to sound stiff and formal like Lothar the Lone, but it wasn’t working, because no one was bothering to talk to me. So I was stuck with just walking stiffly, which made me feel like a fool.
By the time we got back to the hotel, I was so angry at everyone that I thought about getting my own room and locking myself inside it. But I couldn’t think of what I’d do inside a locked room by myself.
Instead, we got a second room for the girls so they could have some privacy. Kira asked if Millicent and Cyril needed cle
an clothes, but it turned out they’d brought plenty of their own. Cyril produced some silver coins and pressed them on one of the hotel employees, asking him to “be a good chap and fetch our bags from my sloop.”
I’d forgotten Cyril had his own boat. The thought of him and Millicent spending the whole three days’ sail from Sunrise alone on it got me even more upset.
And the way Cyril sauntered up to the hotel man and ordered him around like it was the most natural thing in the world reminded me of how rich he was, and made me want to slug him.
Then again, everything about him made me want to slug him.
Especially the way he kept trying to be nice to us.
The girls went to their room, and Guts and I took Cyril to ours. He ordered a hot bath from another one of the hotel men. Then he took off his boots—they were very fine boots, made from some kind of soft leather—and splayed himself out on one of the beds.
“Ah, that’s the ticket,” he said in a breathy voice. “It’s the little comforts you miss when you’re incarcerated.”
“In-wot-serrated?” asked Guts.
“Imprisoned, old boy,” he said.
“I ain’t old,” growled Guts.
“Figure of speech, my friend.” He gave Guts another one of his stupid winks. “But since we’re on the subject—how old are you?”
“None of yer pudda business,” said Guts.
“Ah! You speak Cartager. A man of the world. I like it.”
“How old are you?” I asked him.
“Three months shy of seventeen.” He chuckled. “Although if I don’t stop letting Millicent drag me off on these deadly crusades, it’s possible I won’t live to see the party.”
He sat up, peering at us through narrow, laughing eyes.
“Tell me—are you fellows as suicidally idealistic as she is?”
“Wot d’ye mean?” asked Guts.
“I mean, are you every bit as determined to wash away the sins of our fathers?”
The way he said it—with that stupid grin still on his face—made the back of my neck prickle.
“My father was no slaver,” I hissed.
“Don’t take offense, old boy.” He chuckled again, looking me in the eye as I stared back at him. “But come now—you’re from Deadweather? And your uncle’s Burn Healy? More than a few sins on your family’s ledger, I’m su—”
