Blue Sea Burning

by Geoff Rodkey

  That stopped me short. It was one too many instructions. I was staring at my shoes, trying to remember them all, when I felt a hand on my back.

  It was Cyril. He murmured advice in my ear.

  “Here’s the trick to lying, old boy: convince yourself that what you’re saying is true.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Any way that works. If you believe Millicent and I are headed back to Sunrise, Edith will, too. Good luck.”

  He gave me another pat and then sent me into the street.

  “We’ll wait for you at Mr. Dalrymple’s!” Kira called to me as I started for the hotel.

  Millicent and Cyril are headed back to Sunrise . . .

  No, they’re not. They’re right behind me.

  This was going to be hard.

  SHE WAS STANDING at the hotel reception desk, her back to me, a uniformed servant on either side of her. Her long blond locks were done up in a complicated whorl of braids that fell just below the collar of her emerald silk dress. From a distance, she looked like a queen.

  But as I got closer, I could see all the straggles of unkempt hair that had worked their way loose from the braids, and her voice was scratchy and ragged as she argued with the hotel clerk.

  “My family has been patronizing this hotel for over a decade—”

  “Terribly sorry, madam, but the circumstances are extraordinary—”

  “It’s one room—”

  “If I may speak freely”—the poor man’s eyes darted about, making sure there weren’t any Healy men within earshot—“we’re under siege. By a crowd that, frankly, I think it best you avoid at all costs.”

  A burst of rough laughter went up from the nearby dining room. Judging by the sound of it, a few of the pirates had followed through on their plan to host a cockfighting tournament in there between meals.

  Mrs. Pembroke’s braids swished as she glanced in the direction of the dining room. But it wasn’t nearly enough to scare her off.

  “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself—”

  I was nearly on top of them now, and so shaky with nerves that I knew if I didn’t blurt it out and get it over with, I’d lose my courage.

  “Mrs. Pembroke?!” I tried to sound surprised.

  Startled, she whipped her head around to face me. In the two months that had passed since I’d last seen her, she looked like she’d aged twenty years. Her face, which had always glowed with health, was gray and hollow.

  As she stared at me, eyes wide as saucers, color began to return to her cheeks.

  Then she started toward me, moving fast, her stare freezing me in place, and I was just getting my hands up to protect myself from the smacking when she pulled me to her chest in a fierce hug.

  My whole body went stiff. It was the last thing I’d expected. I tried to wait it out, but she wouldn’t let go. She just kept hugging me.

  Then I felt her body start to tremble, and I realized she was crying. So I tried to hug her back as best I could, hoping it’d stop the tears.

  “I’m so glad . . .” Her voice was as quivery as her body. “I thought he’d . . .”

  She drew back, cupping my face in her hands and staring into my eyes.

  “But you’re all right! I’m so glad . . .” She was smiling through the tears.

  I did my best to smile back at her.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  I shut my eyes and forced myself to remember how Millicent had looked when I first saw her in the cell. Cuddled up next to Cyril.

  “She’s gone.”

  That was how I’d decided I could make the lie feel true. Because Millicent really was gone. At least to me. For a while, and maybe forever.

  Mrs. Pembroke’s smile vanished. “What do you mean?”

  “She went off. With that Cyril.” The words came out in a hiss.

  “Where did they go?” Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes burned as hot as her daughter’s ever did. I could feel her fingernails digging into the flesh on my upper arms.

  “Back to Sunrise.”

  She searched my face. “Are you sure?!”

  I nodded. “I paid someone. To get them out of jail. Thought she’d stay with me. But she didn’t. She went home with him.”

  The anger in Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes was giving way to worry.

  “They weren’t going to do anything stupid, were they?”

  “No.” Then I thought better of it, and backtracked. “I don’t know.”

  “Something to do with the silver mine? And the Natives there?”

  She knew her daughter well enough. I had to throw her off. But not too far off.

  “Nothing, um, dangerous . . . There was a book.”

  “A book?”

  “Yes. That Cyril said he had a book. And if he could get the men who run Sunrise to read it, they’d change their minds.”

  That seemed to satisfy her.

  “When did they leave?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “They left yesterday? For Sunrise? Millicent and Cyril?”

  Her eyes were boring holes into mine. She looked like she wasn’t quite convinced, and was searching me for something that would settle it one way or the other.

  I shut my eyes again and saw Millicent’s face, staring at me through the bars of the cell with that awful look of guilt.

  I took a deep, shaky breath. “I wanted her to stay with me,” I said. “But she wouldn’t. She went with him.”

  Mrs. Pembroke’s mouth turned down at the corners—but not from suspicion, or sadness, or even anger.

  It was pity.

  “I’m so sorry . . .” She hugged me again, and I realized I was a better liar than I’d thought. She believed the whole thing.

  I just wished, for my own sake, that she’d only believed most of it.

  I STAYED WITH HER for the hour or so it took the Sunrise ship to board its passengers. It seemed like the right thing to do. But it was a hard hour, because the whole time I felt like I was just one wrong word away from wrecking the whole thing.

  And the fact that she kept trying to be kind made things even more awkward. Early on, when we were first walking down to the dock, she started to ask me to come back to Sunrise with her.

  But before she’d even finished the sentence, she remembered that her husband had tried to kill me on three different occasions.

  Then her face turned bright red, and she got all flustered and upset.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s not okay.”

  “Please don’t cry. I know it’s not your fault.”

  “But the way he . . . We’re leaving, you know,” she said. “Millicent and I. We’ll never see him again.”

  I nodded. “Good.”

  “We’re going across the sea. Back to Rovia.” She slowed her pace for a moment, thinking. Then she put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Perhaps you’d like to come with us?”

  “I don’t know about that.” Which was the truth. Right then, I wasn’t sure if going to Rovia with Millicent would be the greatest thing that had ever happened to me, or some kind of excruciating nightmare.

  I didn’t even know if Millicent would end up going there herself. For all I knew, she was planning to run away again.

  Maybe she’d run away with Cyril.

  Best not to think about that.

  We were nearly to the dock now.

  “Who’s looking after you here?”

  “I have an uncle.”

  “You do . . . ? I’d like to speak to him.”

  I didn’t see how any good could come of that. “I don’t think you should,” I said. “He’s Burn Healy.”

  She sucked in her breath in surprise. “Really?”

  I nodded.
<
br />   “I don’t believe you.”

  Stick, the Grift’s one-legged cook, was hobbling up the dock about thirty feet away. I called out to him.

  “Stick! Who’s my uncle?”

  “Cap’n Healy!” he called back. “Wot of it?”

  “Never mind! Thanks!”

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Pembroke. She was quiet for a while after that.

  When we reached the pier where the Sunrise ship was docked, her servants set down her luggage trunk for us to sit on. Then she sent them off with money to buy us lunch at the bakery, insisting on paying for it even though I told her I could put it on my uncle’s tab, and warned her that flashing coins in public would get them confiscated.

  But the servants managed to get us some cheese rolls and jelly bread without getting shaken down by soldiers, and we ate the food in silence, sitting on the trunk.

  She kept watching me out of the corner of her eye. It made me uncomfortable, and I wanted to ask her to cut it out. But I didn’t want to be rude.

  Once we finished eating, the silence got even more awkward. She kept fidgeting with her fingers—there weren’t any rings on them, which was odd, because when I lived at Cloud Manor, she’d always worn a lot of them—and I could tell she was gearing up for some kind of speech.

  “I want you to know,” she finally began, “that Millicent cares for you very, very much.”

  But.

  That was how she said it. With a fat, unspoken but at the end.

  And after the but came Cyril.

  “When you’re at the age you are, feelings between boys and girls can be very—”

  “We don’t have to talk about this.” Or I will get very angry.

  “I just want you to know—”

  “No, really. Please.”

  Silence.

  “What are you planning to do now?”

  Bust the slaves out of that mine.

  I shrugged.

  “Are you going back to Deadweather? Or staying here?”

  I had no idea. I hadn’t thought about it.

  “Or will your uncle send you to school?”

  I nodded, because I knew it was what she wanted to hear. “Yes. I’m going to school. Soon as possible.”

  “Just promise me one thing: that you won’t become a pirate.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.” She put a hand on my back and rubbed it gently.

  “If you’re ever tempted, just remember—your mother wouldn’t want it.”

  I thought about that.

  “Did you know my mother?”

  “No . . .” She pulled me to her in a one-armed hug. She meant it to be comforting. But it just made me want to squirm.

  “But I’ve known enough mothers to be sure of it. She’d . . .” Mrs. Pembroke paused. Then took a deep breath and sighed it out.

  “She’d want you to be happy. And be able to just be a boy. And not have to grow up before you were ready. All these things that happened . . .”

  It sounded like she was starting to cry, but I was barely listening.

  I was too distracted by thinking about my mother. How was I supposed to know what she wanted for me? I didn’t even know what she looked like.

  “They shouldn’t have happened to you,” she said. “You’re just a child. It wasn’t right! It wasn’t fair . . .”

  She was really bawling now, gripping me like a drowning woman. I wriggled my arm loose so I could pat her on the back.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Lots of things aren’t fair. You don’t have to get all worked up about it.”

  SHE WOUND UP CRYING until the ship came and took her away. And she wouldn’t stop apologizing to me, even though I kept telling her that she hadn’t done anything wrong. I did my best to make her feel better, and tell her what she wanted to hear, but it didn’t seem to do much good.

  And it was distracting. I just wanted to be left alone so I could think, but by the time she got on the ship, I didn’t have any energy left for it.

  Once the ship got under way, I walked up the hill to Mr. Dalrymple’s to rejoin the others. Millicent was beyond grateful—she tried to hug me, but I’d had more than enough hugging for one day. And I didn’t want to talk about what had happened.

  I felt twisted and drained, like a rag that had been used to sop up a mess and then wrung out too hard.

  Mr. Dalrymple was in the middle of a lesson, which was a relief, because it meant we could slip out without answering any questions about what we were up to. We went back into town and spent the rest of the afternoon gathering supplies, then making slings in the hotel room.

  Guts couldn’t sew with just one hand, so instead he went out, hunted down a guitar, and brought it back to the room to play for the rest of us while we worked. Ordinarily, listening to his guitar would have made me happy.

  And the way Millicent was being with me—trying to make me laugh, and smiling her perfect smile at me, all while generally ignoring Cyril—should’ve put me in a good mood, too.

  But it didn’t. As the day went on, the wrung-out feeling got worse, and my friends’ attempts to cheer me up just made me feel even more wrung out, until finally around dinnertime, I had to leave them and go off by myself.

  I walked the streets for a while, wondering where this hole inside me had come from and what I needed to do to fill it up. I tried eating a meal, but I didn’t have any appetite.

  So I walked some more, until finally my feet took me to a table in a tavern where my uncle was holding court.

  He smirked when he saw me coming.

  “You’re here for the rest of your money?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just here to sit.”

  The smirk turned into a smile. He stood up.

  “In that case,” he said, “come with me. I know somewhere better.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Jenny’s Boy

  HEALY LED ME UP a winding series of streets into the hills above the fortress, where the houses were set back from the road and so far apart that it was more forest than town. If it hadn’t been for the moonlight, we would’ve needed torches to light our way.

  “So how’s the plan coming?” he asked as we walked.

  I felt a nervous flutter in my stomach. “What plan?” I said.

  “Freeing the slaves on Sunrise,” he said. “That’s what it’s all for, isn’t it? The rope, and the darning needles—you’re making slings? And the oars are for the getaway?”

  “Who told you?”

  “I guessed. I’m clever that way.” He must have guessed what I was thinking just then, too, because he quickly added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to try to stop you.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not your father. And I’m not your savior. It’s not my job to protect you from your own foolishness.”

  “You think it’s foolish?”

  “Honestly? I think it’ll be a bloodbath.”

  That got me worried enough that I laid out the whole plan for him, in as much detail as we’d worked out. Then I asked him if it still sounded like a bloodbath.

  “Hard to say,” he said. “You’ve obviously done quite a bit of thinking about how to avoid it. But one thing I’ve learned from experience—no plan ever goes off without a hitch. And I do wonder if you’ve considered whether the people you’re saving truly deserve it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the Okalu. They’re not exactly pure as Mandar linen.”

  “Nobody deserves to be a slave.”

  “No. But everybody keeps them.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Yes, unfortunately. Everybody.”

  I started to tell him that Car
tagers didn’t. But then I remembered the story he’d told—and the scarred letter C that was burned into his back.

  “It’s illegal in Rovia—”

  “And look how well that’s working out.”

  “But that’s just . . . Well, the Okalu definitely don’t keep slaves.”

  “Don’t they? When you were in the New Lands, did you happen to see any Okalu temples?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really something, aren’t they? Mountains, practically. Man-made. Think they built those with volunteers?”

  I’d never thought about that before. And it made me angry.

  “You don’t know they used slaves! You weren’t there!”

  “No. But the other Natives were. Ever ask a Moku why they hate the Okalu so much? Or a Fingu, or a Flut? Ever wonder why, when the Cartagers first showed up a hundred years ago, the other tribes fell all over themselves to help a bunch of funny-eared, pale-faced foreigners destroy the Okalu Empire? Ever wonder how it became an empire in the first place?”

  I wanted to scream. He sounded like Cyril. “So, what, then? The Okalu deserve to be slaves?!”

  “Settle down. I already said they don’t. I’m merely pointing out . . .” He sighed. “Like I seem to do every time we speak, not that it ever seems to sink in with you . . . that the world’s a great deal more complicated than good and evil. And it’s worth knowing that before you run off and risk your life to save people you’ve never even met—oh, blast.”

  We’d reached a crossroads. He stood in the middle of it, his head swiveling from one road to the next.

  “You’d think I’d remember . . . Really should get up here more often.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Finally, he chose a direction. I followed him.

  “I’m not just doing it to save the Okalu,” I said. “I’m doing it because it’s Pembroke’s silver mine.”

  “Ahhhh . . . Now, there’s a motivation I can understand.”

  “I saw his wife today.”

  “Really? How’d that happen?”

  “She came to town looking for her daughter. I had to convince her to go home.”

  “That must have been rather awkward.”