Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  Jelt gave a faint snicker.

  “What?” Jelt asked, when Hark stared at him. “Why are you looking at me like that? It’s funny, isn’t it? Whole family’s crazy.”

  Jelt had settled into the darkness at the back of the cave again and was just a shadowy outline once more. He was enjoying playing at being uncanny and frecht, Hark could tell.

  Suddenly Hark didn’t want to be in the tent anymore, with the darkness, Jelt’s snickering, and the rotten, dead-seal smell. He got up.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Jelt.

  “I’m going to see if I can help find that girl.” Hark pulled off his mask and left the tent.

  Hark clambered up to the little island’s highest point, in the hope of getting a decent view. He could see some of the smugglers below, running, clambering, or using a spyglass, but no sign of Selphin.

  How was she hoping to escape, anyway? Wildman’s Hammer was tiny, so she would be found before very long, unless she left its shores . . .

  Hark’s eye fell on the expanse of wild water between Wildman’s Hammer and the shore of Nest. It was not a great distance, but the waves jarred and crashed, maddened by the rocky ridges beneath. Foam streaked the waves and floated upward in soft clots like fat snowflakes. It was swimmable, but nobody would choose to swim it . . . unless they were desperate.

  “Oh, gullet of night!” he muttered, hoping to be wrong. He scrambled back down the slope, watching little rocks slide ahead of him.

  On one side of Wildman’s Hammer there was a stubby promontory. Someone planning to swim to Nest might jump from that point. The water was still wild there, but there was less chance of landing on rocks.

  That’s stupid, Hark told himself. She’s afraid of the sea. She won’t be there.

  She was.

  He almost missed her. She was crouched behind a boulder at the end of the promontory. He wouldn’t have spotted her at all, if he had not already guessed where she might be. As it was, he noticed the trailing end of her windblown cloth belt and then the side of her face as she peered around the boulder.

  It was a good hiding place. Nobody would expect someone afraid of the sea to tuck themselves there. But he had seen her, and she must surely know it.

  There was a small pause, and then Selphin slowly stood up. She still had the dagger in her hand, held out menacingly. There was barely ten yards between them.

  What are you going to do? signed Hark. Stab everyone until you get your own way?

  Selphin’s expression suggested that she considered this a valid option.

  Fine, said Hark, feeling exhausted. I’ll call your friends, and you can stab them. Sorry, I don’t feel like getting knifed today.

  As he backed away toward the base of the slope, he saw Selphin lower her knife and then cast a wary glance up at the headlands. She tucked her weapon into her belt, then edged toward the frothing sea, keeping her eye on Hark.

  Stop! Hark signed. Let’s talk! He didn’t know how to handle the situation, but for now he clearly had to keep her talking and not jumping. It’s not how you think it’s going to be, he told her. Your mother’s right. The healing won’t kill you.

  If I’m not me, I’m dead. Selphin’s signs were bold and clear. Still my body, but someone else. Nobody knows I’m gone, but I am.

  It’s not like that! Hark recoiled from the picture she had painted. You won’t be a different person just because you’re not afraid of the sea! People change their minds all the time! What if I talked you into not being afraid anymore? I wouldn’t be killing you and replacing you with somebody else, would I?

  That’s different, signed Selphin, and you know it.

  The healing just fixes what’s broken. Hark changed direction again. If you’re not broken, then it won’t change anything.

  Do you think I’m stupid? demanded Selphin angrily. Your lump of evil is always adding new things to people without asking! It’s always changing people so they’re how it wants them. I’ve watched it changing my friends—people I’ve known all my life!

  What about me? Hark had a moment of inspiration. I’ve been spending hours with it. Dozens of pulses going right through me. It hasn’t changed me at all.

  There was withering pity in Selphin’s glare.

  How do you know? she signed.

  Because nothing’s changed! signed Hark, feeling his stomach drop. I’d notice!

  Not if it changed your mind, answered Selphin. If it made you remember things differently, you wouldn’t know you’d died and been made into somebody new.

  “Yes, I would!” Hark protested, forgetting to sign. “I’d know!”

  How?

  There was no talking to Selphin. She came up with crazy, stupid ideas that were somehow impossible to answer or disprove.

  Suddenly Selphin started and stared up at the top of the cliff. Hark followed her gaze and spotted Coram standing up against the sky, staring down at them. Selphin took another sideways step toward the water.

  “Wait!” shouted Hark. He gestured to Coram, both hands raised, entreating him not to come down, not yet. But Coram didn’t seem to understand and began crashing down the incline, kicking rocks and startling birds.

  Selphin was at the edge now, staring hypnotized at the water, taking deep breaths, both fists clutched defensively against her chest. She seemed to be willing herself to face it, but her legs were shaking.

  She is afraid of the sea, thought Hark. It isn’t just that she’s decided to avoid it—she’s afraid of it, too. Then again, fear of such waves seemed pretty sane.

  He risked a few steps toward her. She seemed almost paralyzed, and he could see her struggling to will herself to jump.

  She can’t do it, he thought with relief.

  You’re too close to the edge! Hark signed, as soon as she looked back at him. You’ll get blown over! You don’t want a stupid death, do you? That’s what you said. Her unsteady stance on the brink made him nervous. Come back! You’re not really going to jump, are you?

  In Selphin’s gaze Hark saw desperation, terror, rage, and a will as relentless as winter. He had just enough time to see how wrong he was before she turned and jumped.

  Chapter 23

  When Coram and Hark gabbled out their report, Rigg was incandescent.

  “She jumped in the sea?” Rigg hissed.

  “Maybe she’s cured?” suggested Hark. It was worth a try.

  “Little vixen!” Rigg exploded. “Coram, get the boats out after her, find her, and drag her out of the surf! Tie her up if you need to!”

  There was something reassuring about Rigg’s anger. She at least seemed to have no doubt of Selphin’s survival. Hark hoped she was right.

  “You can’t keep doing this,” Kly said when Hark staggered in, half an hour late. “And I can’t keep covering for you. What’s wrong with you?”

  Hark had a story to explain his lateness, of course. It was a good story, involving a run-in with a visiting scavenger gang. Today he couldn’t make the tale dance, and he could see that Kly was barely listening.

  “Every time you say you’re sorry, it sounds like you mean it,” Kly said at last. “Every time I tell you that you could lose everything, I think it’s sunk in. But it hasn’t, has it? Or maybe it just keeps on sinking and vanishes into some bottomless hole in your head.”

  Hark felt a weight in the pit of his stomach. You wore people out like shoes. You didn’t mean to, but you did. This is what it felt like when the sole started getting thin.

  He had promised himself that this time would be different. He wouldn’t waste the chances offered by Vyne, Kly, and Sanctuary. It was happening again anyway, and this time he couldn’t walk away or make plans for when he was kicked out. Exhausting everyone’s patience would destroy him.

  “You’re covered in dust,” said Kly wearily. “You can’t go into the halls like that. Clean yourself up before you put your robes on.”

  In the dorm room, Hark dunked his face in a bucket of water to clear his head.

&
nbsp; “It’s not my fault,” he told the drab, empty walls.

  It wasn’t his fault if Selphin was drowned. She probably wasn’t, of course. Hadn’t Rigg said she was a good swimmer? But even if she had drowned, he wasn’t to blame. He’d tried to stop her jumping.

  It’s not my fault. And I’m not going to think about it anymore.

  But of course he did. He kept thinking of her face at the promontory’s edge. He remembered her utter terror, even as her will locked into place behind her eyes. Jelt could let go of his fear at will. Selphin clearly couldn’t, but she’d jumped anyway, right into the sea that she thought was waiting to kill her. What kind of a freak could make themselves do that?

  “She’s not just crazy,” Hark muttered under his breath. “She’s . . . frecht.”

  He was suddenly incredibly angry with her, for having no bend or compromise in her. People like that died, usually sooner rather than later.

  Hark slammed down the bucket and felt cold water slop over his feet. Somehow she had put thoughts and doubts in his head, and he couldn’t get them out. He could still remember her telling him that the god-heart was turning her friends into freaks and that changing her into someone else meant killing her and that maybe it had already done that to him . . .

  What if she’s right?

  “She isn’t,” muttered Hark.

  But what if she is?

  The very idea was silly. If he himself had changed, he knew he’d notice. Other people around him certainly would, wouldn’t they? Vyne, or Kly, or the other staff at Sanctuary . . .

  Or would they? None of them really knew him. He was playacting for them, and maybe a new version of him could play-act just as well. Even shrewd Quest hadn’t known him that long, and there were still so many walls between them.

  Jelt would know, Hark thought with relief. Jelt knows me inside and out. Then again, Jelt was already claiming that Hark had become more soft and docile during his time at Sanctuary. Would he notice another change on top of that?

  Hark splashed handfuls of water into his hair to wash the grit out of it. His fingers worked a tangle free, then faltered as they touched something jutting from his scalp. Something small, hard, and tapering, like a limpet . . .

  To his relief, it came away and sat in his palm, looking tiny and ridiculous. It was only a fragment of seedpod that must have blown into his hair.

  The scare had set Hark’s heart banging. He could not bring himself to laugh about it yet. Instead, he began a hasty inventory of himself, by touch and by the pale light from the narrow windows.

  His face still felt like his face. No new teeth seemed to be pushing through in his jaw. He searched his arms, legs, and everything else, craning over his shoulder to look at his own back. He could see nothing new, nothing weird. It was only gradually that he noticed what was missing.

  Like most kids on Lady’s Crave, Hark had earned his share of scars. A sea urchin’s spine had left a puckered white scar on the sole of his left foot. He’d pulled a hot crab out of somebody else’s pan and been left with a shiny burn on the pad of his left thumb. He’d once cut a squiggle into his upper arm on a hot, starry, drunken night because Jelt and a couple of other Shelter kids were doing the same, and since then the little white zigzag scar had always filled him with slight embarrassment but a sense of belonging. Then there were all the nicks and cuts on his knuckles, each a reminder of a chance taken or missed . . .

  They were gone. All of them. He had been too busy, harassed, and grubby to notice. He stood there staring at his unblemished knuckles and felt cold and empty. Scars weren’t useful, and of course the god-heart might have seen them as “something to be fixed,” but Hark felt as though a little record of his life had been taken from him.

  He had been changed without noticing. It wasn’t in the way Selphin had suggested, but Hark felt a sense of loss. Worse, he felt violated. He hadn’t willed the god-heart to change him. It had simply decided in its mysterious, arcane way that he needed to be improved. His own wishes had not mattered at all.

  That evening, when he reported in at the keep, Vyne let him in without a word and led him up to the study. She was so pale it startled him.

  “Doctor? Are you all right?”

  Vyne blinked, then seemed to remember who he was.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, sit down. Sorry.” The last word was one that he had never heard her utter before, and it didn’t sound right coming from her. “I’m having a very strange day.”

  “Something’s gone wrong?” asked Hark. Of course there had been some disaster. It just wasn’t clear how it would spoil his life yet.

  “No,” said Vyne. “Quite the reverse.”

  Her eyes came back into focus, and she looked at him in her usual, skewering way.

  “I am telling you this in confidence, Hark. Don’t disappoint me. You recall our wonderful archive? Well . . . I mentioned it to our Leaguer friends. They were quite rabid to see it, of course. So I sent them a little note explaining that trust could only be earned by trust. They could hardly expect me to hand over the greatest find of our generation, when they would not share any of their research with me. Sure enough, Captain Grim-Breeches came to see me this morning. I expected him to be pompous and outraged, as usual. Instead . . . he came to me with a proposal.”

  “You’re marrying him?” Hark stared at her, battling with unwanted mental images.

  “Not that kind of proposal!” Vyne snorted with laughter. “No, the proposal was from the Vigilance League. Not only were they willing to let me see their main project . . . they want me to take it over. They will put all their research and resources at my disposal. This afternoon I visited their base to see what they’ve been working on.”

  Her eyes were glassy again, hypnotized by memory.

  “What is it?” Hark was now curious. “Is it a submarine, like you thought? A war machine? What does it look like?”

  Vyne was shaking her head very slightly.

  “It’s crazy,” she said. “It’s beautiful. I can’t believe how far they’ve got with it. Already I can see how to fix some of the problems they’ve been having. Oh, there are a hundred obstacles! Maybe some will prove to be insurmountable. But . . . I need to be part of this project! For one thing, I can stop them doing anything unhinged with it!”

  “The League are unhinged, aren’t they?” Hark remembered his conversation with the captain. “There aren’t really any big continenter navies getting ready to invade us?”

  “Oh, probably not right now.” Vyne waved a dismissive hand. “In a few years, maybe, but only if we’re stupid about things.”

  “What?” This was not the reassurance Hark had hoped for. “But . . . we can defend ourselves, can’t we? We’ve got the best sailors and submarines in the world!”

  “Our submersibles could probably slow down an attack,” Vyne agreed thoughtfully. “But you need to understand the sheer size of the continents. Do you see that map over there?”

  The chart on the wall was of a sort that Hark had seen a hundred times. It showed the world, or the part of the world that mattered. Across the central expanse sprawled the Myriad’s great Y-shaped scattering of islands, each of the three “arms” hundreds of miles in length. The three continents barely peeped in at the edges, almost part of the frame. Why would you care about somewhere you couldn’t sail?

  “I’ve seen their maps,” Vyne went on. “They still have the Myriad in the center, but we look . . . small. The continents are as big as the ocean we know. The Scathian forest alone is sixteen times the size of Malpease. Think about all that timber! Imagine how many warships they could build!”

  Malpease was the largest island in the Myriad, four times the size of Lady’s Crave. Hark tried to visualize trees after trees after trees, stretching to the horizon where the water should meet the sky. His mind faltered.

  “The League are mostly idiots,” Vyne said crisply, “more likely to start a war than end one, but they’re not completely wrong. That’s why they’r
e becoming more powerful these days.”

  She gave herself a little shake.

  “Anyway, what I need you to do,” she continued, “is persuade the priests to tell you about Marks.”

  Hark jumped despite himself. It was a subject too close to the worries preying on his mind.

  “Marks?” He tried to pass off his jolt as surprise. “I thought you were just interested in gods!”

  “The subjects are related,” declared Vyne. “The Sanctuary archives have some references to Marks, and I’m already transcribing those.” She tapped a gray moleskin notebook affectionately. “But I’m sure the priests know more. They had a lot of Marks in the old days, and even managed to remove some, so they must have understood them . . . Marks are fascinating, Hark. I’ve been experimenting. Do you know what happens if you dunk squirrels neck-deep in Undersea water for three hours?”

  “They get wet?” suggested Hark, wondering how many damp, miserable squirrels he should be pitying.

  “Yes. And they get angry. And they get out, sooner or later, and start breaking things. But do you know what they don’t do? They don’t develop Marks. I’m starting to think that Marks affect only gods and humans.”

  “And that . . . helps with your project?” Hark asked, bewildered.

  “Yes,” said Vyne, firmly but cryptically. “Yes, it does. Anyway, I’ll be away a great deal over the next few weeks. Most people don’t need to know where I am. But if you get a breakthrough, or if you need to talk to me, come to the north point of the island. Find one of the sentries and give them this, so they know you’re working for me.” She scribbled on a piece of paper and signed it. “Then they’ll fetch me from the warehouse.”

  Hark took the piece of paper and stashed it in his belt pouch. It all sounded very cloak-and-dagger.

  “Are they worried about spies, then?” he ventured.

  “You have no idea,” murmured Vyne. “Whatever you do, don’t go wandering into that village unannounced. They will almost certainly shoot you.”