The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Sophie gave Kev what she hoped was an easy smile. “You and Eame and your four college buddies were liberating people for years?”

  He nodded.

  “And Pree and Smitt were new friends?”

  He had been about to take a sip of water, but instead he snorted it, coughing hard, turning red.

  “Were there six people aboard Incannis when we encountered you, or eight?”

  Kev continued to choke, less convincingly as time went on. Sitting next to him, Selwig was wearing an expression of surprise that was almost insulting.

  “Cly killed one woman,” Sophie said. “We should be able to find out if she was called Pree.”

  “None of us used our real—”

  Kev was interrupted by the arrival of Bram and the law clerk Daimon.

  She’d thought the shine Bram had taken to her fake fiancé was one-sided, visible only to her and—sadly—to Tonio. Now she wondered: were they arriving together, or were they together?

  “Just getting to know my future brother-in-law,” Bram said, answering her unspoken question with a smirk. She nudged his ankle with her boot, not quite kicking.

  Garland had tightened up upon Daimon’s arrival, becoming more rigid and proper. He said, “Might the Golders be hoping you’ll expose these crewmates?”

  “What crewmates?” Daimon asked.

  But the pendulum of Kev’s mood was on the backswing to panic. “I don’t know! I don’t! An oath on it!”

  “It’s not me you have to convince, Kir Lidman.” Bad cop was back. “Where will you go once Sophie pacifies and releases you? Your enemies may yet track you down.”

  “Pacifies?” Daimon said.

  “Keep me on Sylvanna. Protect me!”

  Sophie shook her head. “I can’t, Kev, if you’re lying.”

  For a moment his masks dropped and he looked hopeless and terribly afraid. “Until such time as you do in fact strip me of my will and pour my secrets out like water from a cup, you’ll have to wonder.” He gathered a few more buns and a spoonful of the potatoes. “May I go back to my cell?”

  Selwig looked to Sophie, who nodded. He took him out.

  “Little hard on him, were we?” Bram asked.

  “He is endangering the slaves he supposedly freed.” Garland, clearly, wasn’t in a mood to coddle. “His allies, too, if Pree and … what was it?”

  “Smitt. Pree and Smitt.” She was jotting it down. Buddies of the Sainted Eame, but not from the original cell of abolitionists. Recent additions to the crew. This is promising!

  “I understand Kev’s reluctance to take the blade, but why not give us a chance to protect his allies?”

  “Reluctance?” Bram said. “Did you say reluctance to be beheaded?”

  “Shush, all of you,” Sophie said. She could feel an idea coming together. “They stole a magical ship with creepy attack spells on it, and they attacked portside ships smuggling…”

  “People,” Bram said.

  “And spell components. Amber, and maddenflur,” Daimon said.

  “And the names of Sylvanner children. That was Kev’s role. He was meant to compel the children to burn the family inscriptions,” Garland said.

  “I thought he created salt frights,” Daimon said.

  “Shush, dear,” Bram said.

  Sophie shook her head. “The ship, Incannis, had been enchanted so that it made frights when it got human hearts to eat. When they attacked Sawtooth, Kev’s buddy Eame had to hit him to get him to actually cut up a corpse. He looked revolted when I accused him of being the … what was the word?”

  “Frightmaker,” Garland agreed. “He did, didn’t he?”

  “I believed that,” she said to him.

  “Yes. Yes, so did I.”

  This shouldn’t be sexy. Don’t think about kissing him—

  “Revulsion proves nothing,” Daimon said.

  Sophie paced away from Garland, over to the coffeepot. “Why invite Kev at all?”

  “What do you mean?” Garland said.

  “She’s right,” Bram said. “They could have mailed him the stolen kids’ names and left him to do the compulsion spells at a prearranged time, from the comfort of his living room in Haversham.”

  Daimon said, “He told you so much of their plan?”

  “Sophie’s very persuasive,” Bram said.

  Magically persuasive. An accompanying roil of confused emotion derailed her thoughts. Had she cheated somehow—forced Kev to offer up the information? She must have looked stricken; she could see Bram was sorry he’d brought it up.

  “He’s started to talk,” he said, his tone just a hair too hearty. “Good start, guys. You’ll get more out of him next time.”

  She nodded, clapping the book shut and heading forward, toward her cabin.

  Daimon rushed to follow. “Kir Sophie?”

  “Yeah?” She was, suddenly, drained. Did magically persuading people to do things take more energy than normal persuading?

  “I wonder: must we truly render Kir Lidman helpless?”

  “It’s the only legal option if I want to free him. Unless you know of another?”

  “Ah.” His peaches-and-cream complexion pinkened.

  “I’m guessing you haven’t been planning to specialize in slaving law,” she said drily.

  “I hope to study mercantile regulations,” he apologized.

  “Well, feel free to read up on any useful loopholes that might apply here,” she said. “But Kev’s a criminal. Just because I don’t think he deserves beheading doesn’t mean he gets a Get out of Jail Free card.”

  Daimon’s cupid-bow mouth dropped open. “Where does one find such a thing?”

  “Ask Bram to explain the expression,” she said, giving him a little arm squeeze to indicate the conversation was over, and heading into her cabin.

  Solitude was impossible to come by, as usual. Krispos was installed at her desk, scratching out paperwork at high speed. “I had to come in here,” he said. “Bram and Daimon were…”

  “I gathered.” She kicked off her boots, flopping on her bunk. “Should I write Mensalohm a note telling him his boy apprentice is no big study nerd?”

  “If you’re actively disappointed in Daimon…”

  “No. I mean, all he has to do for me is come along for the ride and claim to want to marry me, right? He doesn’t need to graduate summa cum laude for that.”

  “No,” Krispos agreed.

  She flipped open her book of questions and wrote, KRISPOS UNDERSTANDS LATIN???

  “If he makes Bram happy…” She closed her eyes. If Bram was into Daimon, she should try to like him better. Make more of an effort.

  Poor Tonio, she thought. I’ll totally have to stop shipping them.

  The scritch-scritch of Krispos’s pen on paper was soothing. She let her mind wander, turning over the conversation with Kev, getting nowhere.

  After about fifteen minutes, Krispos said, “I almost forgot. Tonio said they’d found one of those purple crabs in a net. Dead, so it’s inedible. If you want to…” She could almost hear him shudder.

  Imagine how he’ll react when I manage to get people doing autopsies for the courts. It was a good idea, though; a little dissection, a change of pace. She took the fore ladder up to the deck.

  A half dozen crew were working on the Sisyphean task of ship maintenance: checking ropes and sails for faults, polishing the wood, oiling the stonewood hinges on the hatches that led belowdecks. Watts was splayed in a hammock chair with the cat, Banana, in his lap and a mortar and pestle, for making drugs, abandoned just out of reach. He wouldn’t move until the cat found business elsewhere, even if it meant risking sunstroke. Sophie paused to carefully arrange a scrap of sail over him and got a loud, quite convincing purr in response. Bram was alternating between reading up on magical inscription and staring off into space.

  She interrupted long enough to throw an arm around him, offering up a quick squeeze. “Your birthday’s coming,” she murmured.

  “Buy me
a pony.” Half smile; he was far away.

  Sophie found the crab in a bucket and claimed a space on a waist-high equipment locker, laying a cotton sheet over the surface and then setting her camera to record video as she examined the animal’s exoskeleton, eyestalks, and swimming legs. Except for its color, a royal purple with black mottling, it didn’t seem very different from a blue crab. It had the wide abdomen of an adult female, and a few hundred roe clung to it, a sight she found a little forlorn.

  Tonio peered over her shoulder whenever he passed by, moving between the crews he and Sweet were supervising, but he didn’t speak as she opened the crab’s shell, revealing muscle and brain, gills and heart. There were no organs she didn’t recognize, nothing but its largish size and unusual color to suggest it might be a creature that didn’t exist on Earth.

  When she had done and her mind was calm once more, she checked the video file, plugged the camera into her solar charger, and then flung the remains of the crab overboard to the waiting, eager gulls.

  CHAPTER 21

  My dearest Kir Sophie:

  Does Garland know you’ve contacted me? I suppose he would have to say he didn’t mind: quailing at the thought of having his current amita corresponding with his former lover is exactly the sort of undisciplined emotional behavior he doesn’t brush into his mind’s self-portrait. Do give him my love, if you dare.

  I should say I feel a strange kinship with you, with your strange predilection for asking questions. Fleet folk are so averse to questioners, a reporter has a rough go of it. I am often threatened with arrest for spying, and was once dumped overboard from a bar ship.

  I shall start by answering your query about whether I know much about what will happen with the Verdanii succession, now that Annela Gracechild is out of the running. I am not surprised you seek outside counsel on the matter; anything your family tells you is sure to be laced with half-truths and bloody barbs.

  The general wisdom runs that a Verdanii matriarch from the Gorsedotter line, one with nine children and a good deal of influence, will be the next Allmother. But she’s got great-grandchildren, and the Gorse, though they are of the Nine Families, have never been considered either wise or emotionally stable. Their gift is prophecy, and some consider the Gorsedotters out-and-out frauds. (Though they did predict Gale Feliachild’s murder, in the end, did they not?)

  For my part, I have laid bakoo shine with a reputable bookmaker on Beatrice Feliachild. She will protest and rail, but despite her notable reputation for histrionics, what I see in her is pure stonewood. She took the reins of Convenor Gracechild’s office, while she was poisoned, and never seemed to notice the weight of responsibility. Now she has whipped one of the hospital ships out of a lamentable habit of uncleanliness and drug theft. I believe she did it merely for the fun of seeing the rats scatter. This is the sort of thing the Verdanii consider presidential.

  Finally, Beatrice has daughters by two different men. The Verdanii can talk about holy fasts and horse-race winners and virtuous self-denial until the skies turn green, but there has never in their history been an Allmother who hasn’t displayed the particular type of strength that is showcased by powering, more than once, through that horrific experience (I am blessed that I may merely imagine it horrific) known as childbirth.

  Write again and ask me other things, dear Sophie. I will be of so much use to you that we shall become great friends, and Garland will be maddened by it, in all the best ways.

  Langda Pike

  The corridor outside Kev’s cabin was a narrow dead end, a stub of a space at the aft of the ship, directly across from Watts’s infirmary and—except when she had the hatch open and the fingerprinting operation in full swing—crowded by the chair set outside it for whoever was guarding the prisoner at any given time.

  Sophie had sent Selwig off to get some sleep and was working her way through the mountains of correspondence—despite her many adjustments to Fleetspeak, she still thought of letters as snail mail—generated by her barely nascent Forensic Institute.

  She had sent out about thirty notes when they were aboard Sledge, requests for information, drafted by Krispos and shipped to just about everyone she knew, both in and out of Fleet. She didn’t understand the postal system at sea at all: Nightjar had met up with a mail ship this morning, barely ten days after their stop at Ylle, and half a dozen responses to her queries had been in the bag. Given their distance from Fleet, this seemed incredibly fast.

  She folded the pages from the reporter. Beatrice as Allmother was an idea she could barely encompass. It would mean she’d have to move back here. With her husband and stepson from San Francisco? She’d also have to live on Verdanii, presumably, and Sophie was persona non grata there. It would make seeing each other difficult. Which might suit Beatrice.

  How it would affect Verena, Sophie couldn’t even imagine.

  Putting the pages away, she opened her book of questions. A few things, finally, were starting to be crossed off the list, though she was adding mysteries to the book at a rate of three per day.

  She looked at the newest notes on Kev. WHAT IS HIS VALUE? IS HE A PARTICULARLY GOOD SPELLSCRIBE? was circled.

  To find out, they’d have to test him. Which was definitely Bram’s department.

  Bram himself chose that moment to appear. “What are you doing?”

  Kev was, of course, just a hatch away. Rather than speaking aloud, she showed Bram the question.

  He switched to English. “He’s okay as a teacher. And if he did create a brand-new spell … that’s supposed to be a rare gift.”

  “Where did you put my Beatrice scrolls?”

  “You threatened to destroy them.”

  “So? I’m fine now.”

  “Yeah, Sofe, your identity crisis is totally over.”

  “I want you to show them to Kev. Assess his expertise.”

  He nodded. “I’ll show him the copies that don’t have your name on them.”

  This made sense, but the refusal nonetheless irked her. “I have your middle name, too, buster.”

  “Don’t even fake threaten that, Ducks.” He seemed untroubled by the threat, or by much of anything. Was it the euphoria of his new relationship with Daimon?

  “What?” he said as she scrutinized him.

  “Sylvanner expression. You’re thriving like throttlevine.”

  “We’re unlocking the mysteries of the universe,” he said, with unmistakable satisfaction. “That’s a birthday gift you’ll never top.”

  “Where are my scrolls, Bram?”

  “I’ll get the copies and jaw them over with Kev.”

  Selwig returned shortly after that, leaving her free to huff off to the main deck. When that, too, seemed to offer little in the way of space or privacy, she adopted a trick from Verena’s playbook and climbed the rigging behind the mainsail.

  Two hundred and fifty nations to see, and I’m going to Sylvanna again.

  They were days from port. A fishing fleet was visible to the east; big ships, with flags from about two dozen nations, all working in tandem in an area roughly where the Grand Banks of Newfoundland should be. The charts placed a couple island nations there, but Garland showed no inclination to stop. They all wanted to be free of the obligation represented by Kev, even if they weren’t quite sure how to pull it off.

  Headache, she thought, meaning both the thrum in her temples and the problem of their prisoner. “If I can’t convince him that I’ll revert to Sylvanner type and treat him like property, he’ll walk all over me.”

  Her musings were interrupted by the appearance on the western horizon of a mirage shimmer, at water level, with an emanating trail of steam.

  “Thing,” she called. “Unknown thing to starboard.”

  “It’s a Jocelynchild courier,” Garland said, from his position almost directly beneath her, at the base of the mainmast. “Verdanii steamhorse. Very expensive.”

  “Steamhorse” conjured something out of a fan convention—brass goggles and clockworks
—but when she had climbed down, retrieved her camera, and zoomed in, what she saw had more of a look of the pony express, on water. A horse and rider were coming straight at them, bathed in an intense steam that rose from the horse’s hooves. The ocean frothed and bubbled at every contact as if it were boiling. Together they trotted over the waves, as sure-footed as if they were crossing rolling prairie hills.

  “Correct course to intercept,” Garland ordered, and Nightjar swung round, spilling wind from her mainsail.

  Sophie paged through her book, checking her various sheets of messageply. The page she’d left with Verena was all but full, but her half sister had crammed in two words: SENDING PHONE.

  As they came around, the rider coaxed her mount into a full gallop. A sound of hot pans being plunged into cold water intensified, and every hoofbeat kicked up salt crystals. The horse’s progress was leaving a wake, a furrow of twenty-foot waves spreading backwards to the edge of sight, widening foam lines that marked her speedy progress.

  When they were maybe eighty feet away, it gathered itself to jump, bunching, flying through the air and over Nightjar’s prow. The horse dispersed into steam, leaving the courier, a woman made of cloud, standing on the deck. She removed a leather satchel from her hip, lowered it to the boards, and, with a bow, misted away to nothing.

  Garland bent to open the valise. Nestled within was a medium-size blue egg, spattered with dark-gray spots.

  “Phone,” Sophie said. “Verena says phone.”

  Garland looked to Tonio. “We’ll need a cage.”

  “You’d cage it, Garland? Verro?”

  “To keep the cat and ferret off it, yes.” He raised it, cradling it to his ear. “Once we feed it up, you can talk to Verena.”

  “Pairs of birds,” Sophie said. A market vendor had told her about this. “Connected, like the messageply.”

  “Yes,” Tonio said.

  “Quantum entanglements,” murmured Bram.

  “Verena must have something important to say.”

  “Yes.” Garland frowned. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, though in fact the headache was worse and she felt a little dull. “I’ll grab some aspirin.”