The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “If you’re sure—”

  “I’ll be okay, really. Bram and I were going to take lodgings—”

  “Come to Nightjar.”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe…” Maybe what? We can clean up and I can be magically pretty and charm you to pieces?

  “It will be all right, Sophie.”

  He leaned in to kiss her again, but she pretended not to see him coming.

  “Kaythanksbye.” She handed him the goat leash and made for the ferry launch.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dear Cousin Sophie,

  Mumma will be furious when she works out I am writing you, after that scene you caused at the Highsummer Festival. But I am often at the Institute lately, and my mentor Autumn Spell says a child my age should consult her own conscience on questions of friendship.

  Since you left Sylvanna, I have been volunteering with the group commissioned by the Spellscrip Institute to enact your study of the annual turtle migration. This has brought me into contact with our neighbors Rees and Fralienne Erminne and we have talked about their abolitionist views on bonded labor. I cannot say I am convinced by their arguments, but I am listening, and thinking a lot.

  Since you proved that the nation of Haversham was responsible for perpetuating the throttlevine infestation in the swamps, our efforts to eradicate the vine have been more successful. I thought you would want to know that cousin Clydon kept his word to you, freeing the throttlevine-eating slaves of Low Bann, tearing up the inscriptions that made them into oddities, and helping them settle in a village near Hoarfrost. Other swamplands estate owners have done less, and it has been a contentious local issue. Fralienne Erminne is therefore running for governor of the Autumn District. She would be the first anti-bondage governor in our nation’s history. If she can marry her son to someone respectable, she may win, as the current governor has lately been found to have wealthy and powerful friends on Haversham.

  Everyone is very much on edge.

  I hope this finds you well, busy, and happy. I am keeping some mail for you that has come to Low Bann. If you want me to send it on, let me know where to ship it.

  Your cousin,

  Merelda Fenn Banning, chile y Low Bann, Sylvanna

  Docket, the ship that served as a brig for the Fleet judiciary, was, to Sophie’s surprise, a galley. It had two levels of red and black oars bristling from its lower decks and a strange red-and-black exterior that made it apparent the whole craft was, like Breadbasket, as much magical organism as construct. The masthead was insectile—a millipede’s face. The crew was mostly fivers, older cadets, and many of them were heavily muscled. They were fitter and more stone-faced than most Fleet cadets.

  Jailers, Sophie thought.

  She braced herself for the prospect of seeing prisoners down in the hold, pulling oars, but her escort conducted her to an interview room divided by a panel of a fine-looking glass substitute, a lightly frosted substance with the shimmer and look of insect wings.

  Lidman was already there.

  He didn’t look as though he’d been hauling oars. He’d been sunburned, starved, and on the verge of scurvy when they caught him. Since then he had put on weight, though not muscle. His hands were encased in translucent red carapaces, the fingers and thumbs protruding.

  “Are those casts? Did someone break your hands?” Sophie demanded.

  Lidman showed his teeth and said, a bit loudly, “You have a kind heart, mistress.”

  “No! No, no, no. None of this slave-and-owner crap or I walk.”

  He lowered his voice. “My life depends on behaving correctly.”

  Sophie folded her arms tightly across her chest, hoping that she looked stern, not shaky. “Tell me about your hands.”

  “It’s to keep me from writing.”

  “Because you’re a spellscribe?” It made sense, she supposed. He could barely move his fingers.

  Kev nodded.

  He had grabbed and threatened her in a fight aboard his ship, after Cly had already skewered his buddies. Kev let her go as soon as her birth father came at him. Cly would have jammed a sword through his heart without a second thought if Sophie hadn’t intervened.

  He was harmless, not scary. What distressed her, as she searched his face and her nose caught a familiar waft of fear sweat, was the memory of Cly. Her birth father not quite smiling, leaving bloody footprints as he advanced on them, sword raised.

  “Sit down,” she said to Kev.

  “I can’t sit if you don’t.”

  “Fine,” she said, dropping into a cushy chair that seemed to have been brought just for her. “You and your pals were raiding ships.”

  “I won’t deny it.” He perched on a wooden stool.

  “You killed the crews, too. I’m no booster for the death penalty, but I don’t see why I should go out of my way to help a multiple murderer.”

  “There’s more to it.”

  “You’re gonna tell me you had an excuse?”

  “Uh…” He swallowed.

  “Maybe you were compelled?” Sophie threw this out as bait, to see how dumb he thought she was. And he paused, weighing it—weighing her—before shaking his head.

  By now she’d noticed that they’d pulled the rotten tooth he’d had when they captured him, and had stitched up a cut on his neck. The nails of his hands had been cleaned recently; he couldn’t have done that himself, not in those restraints. The Fleet cared for its prisoners.

  Kev said, “Our captain—Eame, the one His Honor shot first…” His hand drifted past his throat, where the crossbow bolt had struck. “He wrote to me a year ago about stealing Incannis. We were old friends. I’m Haver, but I studied magic on Tug Island.”

  “You’re college buddies, so what? Why’d you take it into your heads to steal the ship in the first place?”

  “You saw the sloop—she was a terrible thing. She used human corpses to make salt frights.”

  “It wasn’t you who wrote the original spell into the boat?”

  “No! My specialty is compulsions for troubled children.”

  Sophie leaned forward. “You cut the heart out of a dead body and used it to make the monsters that attacked Sawtooth.”

  “Any of us could have raised them. Incannis herself bore the frightmaking intention.”

  Frightmaking, Sophie thought. The wooden creature that had sunk Kitesharp was a fright too. Two sets of sinkings, tied to a type of magic that had supposedly been eradicated. Annela had suggested that wasn’t coincidence.

  “Tug’s slave hunters were going to launch Incannis and go looking for escapees,” Kev went on. “Eame said why not make off with her, change the quarry?”

  “Quarry. You were hunting smugglers, right? Amber shippers, drug guys.” She groped for the name of the opiate-producing plant. “Maddenflur. You were sinking maddenflur smugglers.”

  He looked puzzled. “The hard cargo provided funds to buy food. But what we were after was … All the ships came from portside nations. They weren’t just shipping goods. They were trafficking in soft cargo.”

  “Soft what?”

  “People.”

  Sophie felt a jolt. “You were sinking slavers?”

  “Didn’t you—truly, did you not know? The home ports of the ships we attacked were Isle of Gold, Ualtar, Sylvanna, Tug itself—”

  Sophie put up a hand, interrupting. “If that’s true, where’d the slaves go?”

  “I—” He faltered. “We met a ship.”

  “What ship?”

  “Allies. Friends of Eame’s.”

  There was a stink of lie coming off him now. Sophie opened her mouth to say so, but he rushed in to fill the silence. “If you knew where they were, you’d be honor-bound to report it to the Watch. The people we freed would be captured and returned to bondage.”

  She flashed briefly on Annela, her smug certainty that Sophie couldn’t go a week without oathbreaking. Still …

  “Kev,” she said. “You’re hiding something.”

  He bonked his hands to
gether, probably meaning to wring them. “We liberated far more bonded people than we—”

  “Than you slaughtered slavers?”

  “Rescuing slaves at sea is one of the few ways to truly free them. They’re shipped with the scrolls that hold their will in thrall.”

  He meant intentions that forced them to obey their owners. Sophie thought of the scrips Beatrice had written. Of their essential fragility, and of Bram demanding that she hide them.

  “We sent them away, my word on it. And whenever the ships’ crews surrendered, we sent them along with their former cargo, as prisoners. We only killed those who resisted.”

  “But you won’t tell me where to find anyone who can vouch for you.”

  He shook his head. “If you don’t take me on, I’ll have to opt to be beheaded, lest I’m claimed for bondage by Tug Island or Ualtar. They’ll wring the truth out of me; they’ll force me to expose the people we liberated. Sylvanners, you’re more humane.”

  “I’m not … Oh, forget it.”

  “You’re kind, Kir Sophie. You saved me once…”

  “So could I please do it again?”

  He gave her a weak smile. “It’s a thin wind, but it’s all my sails can catch.”

  “I have to think about this,” she said, getting up.

  He shot to his feet. “My execution’s scheduled for high sun, in a threeday.”

  Sophie closed her eyes. Then she made herself walk out without looking back.

  They didn’t give her any time to pull herself together. The guard escorted her to an office, where they laid out the procedure for claiming Lidman, if she chose. It looked about as complicated as buying a car. Finally, they patted her down, checking again for weapons or contraband, before letting her onto a ferry bound for the residential quarter.

  Exhausted to the point of numbness, she let herself deflate into a seat on the rail of the upper deck, staring across the Fleet as the crews of the government ships embarked on their afternoon shift change. Trios of uniformed cadets from the dawn shift stood just to starboard of each ship’s bow, unrolling three flags: the Fleet flag first, the ship’s national flag next, and a third designating its purpose—military, governance, or justice. On the hour, a shrill whistle blast sounded from each ship.

  “Chi hurrah, hurrah achi yeh!” The ceremonial cheer echoed faintly from each deck. Sophie had heard it was a Verdanii peace cry.

  The ferry captain tapped the last few grains out of his hourglass, then flipped it. The trio of cadets on each ship passed their flags to cadets on the evening shift, who held them in place over the port side and cheered again before rolling them up and marching off to work.

  “Another bright day in the century of peace, neh?” said the ferryman, apparently to himself.

  Sophie got comfortable in her seat, paged through her book of questions, made a couple notes, and then opened another of her letters, which turned out to be from Xianlu of Shepherd. It began:

  Kir Hansa,

  Your man Krispos asked that I write to update you on the investigation of recent sinking of Kitesharp (and, by extension, the earlier victims).

  The sailor you identified as having a missing finger is named Darel Lest of Ascro Island. He is not thirty, and was a fisher until an accident six years ago which resulted in his disfigurement. His injuries would have been fatal, but two spellscribes restored him. Afterward, having lost his nerve for sailfishing, he trained as a mechanic.

  He claims to have no involvement in or memory of an action against his ship. However, his medical history shows signs of recent magical loading.

  It seems probable that Lest may have had his name stolen by an unscrupulous scribe, and that he was used as a template, to use your term, for the wood fright. The Watch is even now tracing the scribe who cured him after the accident. They seem to believe there are some name-stealing crime rings proliferating in the western isles and on the more populous nations.

  We have recommended that ships to the rear of the Fleet perform regular inspections, seeking the mark you saw on the day of the sinking—the outline of a hand, in wax.

  If the raiders strike again, as seems likely, you would be very welcome to rejoin us aboard Shepherd. We have commended your efforts thus far to the Watch.

  She felt a bit of a glow at that. She’d been useful; she’d helped.

  “Your stop, Kir.” The ferryman handed her into a makeshift elevator, a crude platform dangling from simple pulleys, hauled up by workmen on the deck of the ship above.

  Sophie was an old hand at this now. She let them hoist her aboard, then went to check in with the ship’s purser.

  Bram had moved them into adjoining cabins across the corridor from Krispos, two narrow slots with bunks at shoulder height and small lounging areas—a chair and a half-desk, essentially—contained below. There was a vanity between them for washing up, and a sliding panel for privacy.

  He’d obviously had time to swing through one of the market ships that acted as seagoing shopping malls. A pair of ram skulls jostled together in a net bag near his pillow, and he was paging through a thick book called Compendium of Starter Spells, Fleet-Approved and Fit for Children Ages 9–16. Small satchels and paper bundles scattered near the book were probably spell components.

  “It looks like there may indeed be a ward against burglars I can work on our house,” he said.

  “Did you get food?”

  “Forgot.”

  Classic. She felt a wave of mixed affection and exasperation.

  “More mail for you.” He pointed out a crate filled with stiff brown file cards. “Oh, and Krispos dragged home a bag of spores.”

  “Club moss,” she said. “Early version of fingerprint powder.”

  “Whom are we printing?”

  “Once we’ve built a fingerprint database and identified those found bodies, we’ll practice lifting latent prints from surfaces. The folks in the Watch are basically federal cops. If we can lay out a procedure for identifying prints and convince them it’s useful, they’ll be thrilled to do the heavy lifting on developing a proper bureau.”

  “Okay, but this place is superstition central. What’s to keep some competing expert from saying a certain whorl pattern proves a criminal is guilty, or something?”

  “We lay out the procedure, claim proprietary rights, do a few cases, and then license it to the Watch … with a rule that they can’t testify unless we approve the work.”

  “Sounds like a lot of report reading and rubber-stamping.”

  “Easy enough to do that at sea, while we’re on our way to somewhere cool for a dive,” she said, hoping this would eventually prove true. So far, Stormwrack had yielded far more procedure and paperwork than time in the field. “Once we have an expert or two who buys into the whole procedure, we can set them on the rubber-stamping.”

  “Works in theory.”

  She opened his duffel, pulling out Beatrice’s scrolls. Good luck, good looks, silver tongue, intellect, grace, and—she sent up a mental flare of thanks for her birth control implant—fertility. Last came the mystery scroll, lettered in green, on birch bark.

  “You okay?”

  “No, Bram,” she said. “Five out of five no.”

  “What can I do?”

  She shook her head.

  “Want to tell me about Prison Man?”

  “Kev?” She recounted their interview.

  “You gonna take him on? You don’t owe the guy anything, Sofe.”

  She rocked back on her bed. Both options pretty much sucked. She didn’t want to let Kev get beheaded, but owning him, even temporarily, was a horrific prospect. And there was something about Kev—his smell, perhaps?—that unsettled her in some deep but hard to articulate way. She felt off balance, almost seasick. “He says Ualtar will snatch him up and torture the location of liberated slaves out of him.”

  Bram bit his lip. “You think that’s true?”

  “Well.… Obviously, he wants to live. I don’t know that I believe he’s telling
me the whole story.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling. I mean, slave escapes must be a thing, right? They must happen? Must have been happening all along? The portside nations must have put resources into stopping them. Do they really not know where the escapees go?” She thought about what Kev had told her: slaves being transported with spells that forced them to behave. They’d need some kind of legally binding name change, wouldn’t they, to be truly free of bondage? That meant government involvement. Birth certificates, citizenship papers. “The free nations have got to be helping them. But I bet that’s one of the thousands of things they never talk about openly in Fleet.”

  Bram rubbed the pearl in his thumb. “You’re saying Where are the slaves going? isn’t an interesting enough question to make it worth torturing the guy—”

  “Kev,” she said again.

  “Was it okay?” he asked. “Seeing him?”

  She experienced a surge of feeling. A sob threatened, powered by the sick feeling and leftover emotional fragility from her storm of tears the night before. Her memory served up footage of Cly, skewering Kev’s crewmates one by one.

  Instead of answering, she leaned against him, taking comfort from the heat of his shoulder against hers. “Did anything come of searching Bettona’s quarters?”

  “Yeah, actually. Parrish and your constables found two books in Bettona’s room, in a plastic bag from home. I left them in the bag, in case you want to do prints, but you can see the covers.” He waved something, at the edge of her peripheral vision, but she kept staring at the scrolls.

  “What are the titles?” she said eventually.

  “Things That Go Boom! and Domestic Terrorism for Young Patriots.”

  “Teeth,” she said. “That can’t be good.”

  “Nope. So my point is, you’ve got plenty on your plate. You don’t need to take this guy Kev on.”

  “I just keep thinking: beheaded. Whatever else is going on, I don’t have it in me to sit on my hands and—”

  “Sofe, put the scrolls away.”

  She opened his duffel, pulling out Beatrice’s scrolls and laying them on the bunk.