by Geoff Rodkey
“It really was.”
We kept walking.
“She says she’s leaving him. That she and Millicent will never see him again.”
“Can’t say I blame them.”
“Do you think it’ll hurt him? Pembroke?”
He thought about it. “Yes. I do. But probably not as much as most men. He’s got his eyes on a bigger prize, Reggie does.”
“Why do you call him Reggie?”
Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own. “Li Homaya’s had plenty of time to retake Pella by now. Do you think he’s managed it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Depends on the quality of the men he’s got with him. Most of the Cartagers we fought in Pella were fat and slack. But if that was because he’d taken all his best men with him to fight me . . . might be he’s got a shot.”
A thought occurred to me. “If he succeeded—do you think Pembroke could be dead? Even now?”
“I think . . . that a man like Roger Pembroke has a real talent for self-preservation.”
A high brick wall had appeared on our right a while back, running parallel to the road. Just ahead, a wide iron gate stood in the middle of the wall.
“Ah! Here we are.” My uncle dug in his pocket for a key, which he used to open the gate.
Beyond it, a road led up a tree-lined drive to a red brick house almost big enough to be called a mansion. Healy produced a second key and let us in the front door.
Inside, we couldn’t see a thing.
“Hang on . . . Must be a candelabra somewhere . . .”
He bumped and banged around in the dark for a while, until finally I heard the scrape of a match. My uncle’s face reappeared in the light of the flame. He was holding a five-pronged candelabra, and once he got all its candles lit, he gave me a brief tour of the place.
It was a magnificent house, full of grand rooms that were all strangely empty. Other than a small table in the entryway where the candelabra had been, and a single overstuffed chair by the fireplace in the sitting room, there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the whole place.
“I suppose I should buy some one of these days,” Healy said. “Come, see the garden. It’s what sold me on the place.”
At the back of the house, a set of glass-paneled doors opened onto a back patio that ran the length of the building. Below it stretched a lawn several acres wide, dotted with low hedges and flower beds intersected by walking paths.
We sat down on the top of the steps and looked out over the moonlit gardens.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him.
“Even nicer when the sun’s up and you can actually see it,” he told me. “I pay a man to keep the flower beds in shape. For the two afternoons a year when it occurs to me to drop by. Bit of a waste, I guess. Still, after this mess with the bank, it’s looking more and more like a wise investment.”
“You really should get some furniture,” I said.
“I know . . . I think I just hate shopping. Well, that and—I somehow got it in my head that one day I’d meet the right woman and settle down. And when I did, she’d inevitably want to redecorate, so the smart thing was to wait and let her buy the furniture.
“Trouble was, I never did find her. It’s frightfully hard to meet women in my line of work. They tend to run screaming when I approach. Not sure why. Perhaps it’s my breath.”
Something popped into my head that made me smile. I debated whether or not to say it out loud.
“No . . .” I told him. “I think it’s your face.”
He laughed. “You’ve got a keen eye, son. How are you at shopping for furniture?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it.”
“You’re lucky. It’s death.”
I decided it was as good a time as any for the question that I’d come to him to ask.
“What was my mother like?”
“I wondered when you might get around to asking that.” He leaned back, propping himself up on his elbows as he surveyed his shadowy garden.
“My sister, Jenny . . . was warm as a fire . . . funny as a court jester . . . and tough as nails. What did your father tell you about her?”
“Not much of anything,” I said. “He didn’t like to talk about her.”
“You know why, don’t you?”
“I think because it made him sad.”
“More than sad. He was heartbroken. He loved your mother to the point of madness. And when she died, he never got over it . . . They were a strange match, in a way. I’m not sure he ever got a single one of her jokes. But he didn’t love her any less for that. And I think for her part . . . his other qualities more than made up for the fact that he wasn’t the keenest of wits.”
“Like what?”
He thought for a while before he answered. “Trust. That was a big thing with her. She knew your father’s heart was good, that he’d stay by her side no matter what. And he did. Even after she was gone, he stuck by her—and that crazy plantation of hers.”
“What do you mean, ‘hers’?” I’d always thought of it as my dad’s plantation.
“That’s what it was. The whole thing was her idea.” He chuckled. “Trying to grow ugly fruit in the shadow of a volcano . . . At first, I thought it was another one of her jokes. But she was dead serious about it. She actually thought that with enough hard work and strength of will, she could build a legitimate business on an island full of pirates. And I suppose it worked, after a fashion.”
“Not sure how well it’s working out now,” I said, thinking of Adonis and the mess I’d left him in back on Deadweather.
Then I had to change the subject in a hurry, before the guilty feeling could get its hooks in me. “She was funny?”
“Very.”
“What kind of funny?”
It took him a while to answer. “The kind . . . that could make a boy who’d been taken from his parents . . . put into chains . . . and worked half to death . . . feel like life was still worth living. And there was hope for better days, if we just didn’t quit.”
He stopped to wipe his eyes. “Oh, —. Now I’ve gotten all sentimental.”
“What did she look like?” I tried to picture her, but the image wouldn’t come.
“Brown hair. Brown eyes. Sort of a . . . crooked mouth. Rather plain, to be honest. Granted, I’m her brother, so maybe there was some physical beauty there I just couldn’t see. And she had more than her share of men fall at her feet. But not because of her looks. Strangers would walk past her without a second glance. It was only if they stopped to talk that they were in trouble. That’s where the magic of her was.
“There was one boy in particular. A bit older than us, and dashing as all get out. The kind of boy that other boys wanted to be, and girls just wanted to be with. He could’ve had anyone, and he chose your mother. They were going to be married. But then he got into some ugly business, and she left him over it.”
He laughed—a short, surprised sort of laugh.
“That’s where you got it from! It was her.”
“Got what?”
“That mule-headed sense of good and evil. Your mother was shot through with it. To a fault—she spent the last five years of her life trying to get me to quit piracy, and hating me for it when I wouldn’t.”
He grimaced. “That’s how she was. All or nothing. She was my favorite person in the world—and it got so she wouldn’t even speak to me. Then she had to go and die on me without even saying good-bye.”
Healy looked up at the sky. “Well, Jenny, you finally got your wish.”
It took a moment for me to realize what he meant.
“You’re quitting piracy?”
“I have to. I’ve lost my touch. I mean, look at me—I threw over my crew, I let the Ripper slip free . . . I can’t even k
eep you in line.” He shook his head. “It’s time to hang it up. Keep that under your hat, though, will you? I haven’t told anyone else yet. Got to get my money out of that infernal bank before I make it official, or they’ll go on stiffing me to the end of my days.”
“What’ll you do? I mean, once you’re retired?”
“I don’t know.” He looked over his shoulder at the big house behind us. “Buy furniture, I suppose. Or not. It’s a slightly depressing thought—sitting around here all day, watching the flowers grow.”
We were quiet for a while.
“You could always help free some slaves,” I suggested, trying to make it sound like I was joking. Even though I wasn’t.
He chuckled. “Sorry, boy. Pirate or not, I’m nobody’s hero. I don’t go around saving people out of some overdeveloped sense of right and wrong.”
I thought about that.
“Then why did you save me?”
“I had to,” he said. “You were Jenny’s boy.”
He smiled at me, and for a moment I thought he might change his mind.
“And I owed it to her,” he added, “to give you the chance to make the same stupid mistakes she would’ve made.”
I knew then there was no changing it.
He was only going to save me once. The rest was up to me.
CHAPTER 27
Smoke
WE SPENT THE NEXT two days getting ready—buying supplies, sewing slings, lashing bundles of long oars to the deck of Cyril’s sloop—and even considering the dread and uncertainty over what we were about to do, it could have been a very pleasant two days. The work wasn’t hard, I was with my friends, we had plenty to eat, the hotel beds were top-notch . . . and the swelling in my injured wrist finally subsided, to the point where it quit hurting and I could take the splint off.
Even so, I was miserable. And all because of the mess between me, Millicent, and Cyril. Whenever I saw her speak to him, I couldn’t help pricking my ears up and going into a funk if it seemed like they were enjoying each other’s company.
And every time Millicent and I got to talking, Cyril would puff out his chest and crow like a rooster to get her attention back.
Soon enough, she must have decided she was better off avoiding us both, and she started spending all her time with Kira. They’d whisper to each other in low tones, and then one of them would sort of roll her eyes, and I was sure they were laughing at me. Or possibly Cyril. But probably me.
It was maddening, even more so because not only was it impossible to speak to Millicent alone, but I couldn’t get Kira alone, either—and I desperately wanted to, so I could grill her about Millicent’s intentions.
Guts thought we were all acting like idiots, and said so a couple of times an hour. Which just made the rest of us defensive and cranky.
Then we set sail for Sunrise, and it got even worse, because now we were all packed together with nowhere to escape, and Cyril started ordering everybody around like he was the captain. Which he kind of had to—if there weren’t any cannonball holes that needed plugging, we were all pretty much useless on a ship except for Millicent—but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
“I hate him,” I whispered to Guts on the first night as we curled up to sleep between two stacks of oars near the bow. “If he lectures me one more time about reefing a sail . . .”
“Want to shoot him? I got a gun.”
“You brought a gun?”
“Brought four of ’em,” he said. “Dunno how to use no sling.”
“You can’t use four guns, either. Not at once.”
“Got extras. Case anybody else wants one.”
“No, thanks,” I said. No matter what happened, I couldn’t imagine myself shooting anybody.
Not even Cyril.
It rained on the second night, hard enough to chase us all belowdecks to sleep. It was crowded down in the cabin, and when I woke up a little before dawn with someone’s foot in my face and no patter of raindrops overhead, I decided to relocate to the deck.
I was just about to crawl into my usual spot between the stacks of oars when I heard a voice whisper behind me.
“Good morning.”
It was Millicent. She was curled up like a cat in the cockpit.
“Hi.”
She uncurled her limbs and sat up, leaving enough room for me to sit down next to her.
I didn’t wait for an invitation. In fact, I moved so fast I tripped and almost fell into her lap.
“Careful—”
“Sorry—”
“It’s all right.”
She yawned and stretched her arms, then folded them tightly over her chest, hugging herself for warmth.
“Are you cold?”
She nodded. I put an arm around her, fully expecting that she’d brush me off. But instead, she burrowed in, so close that a few strands of her hair tickled my face.
Just being close to her made me feel peaceful and contented all the way down to my toes, like someone had covered me in a warm blanket.
It was all I ever wanted, really. Just to be close to her.
I hoped the others wouldn’t wake up too soon and ruin it.
“It won’t be long now,” she said. “Should be there by tonight.”
She tilted her head and looked up at me. “Are you scared?”
“Not really.” It was true enough. I’d had so many petrifying experiences over the past couple of months that what lay ahead didn’t even feel particularly dangerous.
“Are you?” I asked her.
“I’m terrified,” she said. It came as a surprise—I’d seen Millicent less than self-confident before, but I’d never actually heard her admit it.
“It’ll be fine. If things go wrong, we’ll just ditch the plan.” If that happened, I’d need to get off Sunrise Island in a hurry—but I wasn’t too worried about that, mostly because of my uncle. He’d hunted me down on the dock the day before we left and pressed a small sack of gold coins into my hand.
“You get in a fix, buy yourself passage back here,” he said. “Anybody gives you trouble, let them know it’ll end with me slitting their throat.”
“Think that’ll work?” I asked. “Even on Sunrise?”
He nodded. “Trust me. Your average Pembroke lackey isn’t long on courage—especially with his master off mucking around in the New Lands.”
But Millicent hadn’t gotten any promises like that, and her eyebrows were scrunched together with worry as she considered what I said.
“I don’t know. Even if things don’t go wrong . . . once we free the slaves, it’s not going to be very pleasant for me on Sunrise.”
I hadn’t thought about that. For Guts, Kira, and me, it didn’t matter—it wasn’t like we had plans to stay on Sunrise any longer than we had to. But it was Millicent’s home. Or had been.
“Aren’t you going to Rovia with your mother?” I asked her.
She sighed. “I suppose so. What about you? What’ll you do when this is over?”
I thought about it. “Guts wants to go find the Fire King’s treasure, back on Deadweather. And I promised my brother I’d go back there and help him with the plantation.”
“Is that what you want? To go back to the plantation?”
“No.”
“Then don’t. You should do what you want.”
“It doesn’t always work like that,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“Sometimes, the thing you want to do isn’t possible.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You just have to—”
“Your mother asked me to come to Rovia,” I blurted out.
She turned her head to me in a sudden jerk, then looked away almost as fast.
“Do you want me to?” I asked her.
“Well, aren’t we early risers?”
&
nbsp; It was Cyril. He practically leaped the steps from the cabin to land in front of us.
Millicent quickly slipped out from under my arm.
“Do you?” I asked her again.
She stood up. “We should start breakfast—”
“Millicent—”
“I don’t know!” Without looking back, she ducked past Cyril and headed down into the cabin.
He gave me an apologetic wince that was as fake as most of his smiles. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt?”
I WOULD HAVE BROODED over Millicent all day if something much more unsettling hadn’t appeared over the horizon that morning. The leftover haze from the previous night’s rain had burned off to reveal the blue-gray peak of Mount Majestic up ahead. A few more hours, and we’d reach the coast of Sunrise.
“Look at that strange cloud,” Kira said, squinting into the southern sky beyond the mountain.
The cloud was rising in the distance like a wind-bent tree, with a long puffy trunk that spread wide as it rose, expanding across the sky for miles. Its color was as odd as its shape—mostly white, but shot through with streaks of dark gray.
My stomach suddenly dropped as I realized what I was looking at.
“It’s not a cloud,” I said. “It’s the volcano.”
Deadweather was erupting.
Or had just erupted.
Or was about to erupt.
I didn’t know which. I’d lived on the shoulder of that volcano, watching it belch and hiss and smoke off and on for thirteen years. But I’d never seen anything like that plume. This was a whole other thing.
For the rest of the day, I fretted over my brother and the field pirates, running through all the possible scenarios in my head.
They had time to leave. They didn’t have time. They had time, but no boat. They didn’t need to leave at all.
It only looks bad. It’s as bad as it looks. It’s worse than it looks. They all died instantly. They didn’t die at all. They’d suffered unimaginable pain. They’re not suffering at all. It’s only a nuisance.
The house was destroyed. The house is buried. The house melted in a sea of lava. The house is fine.
They’re all fine.
