by Geoff Rodkey
Then I noticed the silhouette of a fortress sitting atop the nearer cliff, and I felt a pang of recognition in my gut. I turned in the water to look back at the town, which was slowly coming into view as we cleared the line of ships along the dock.
There was no mistaking the familiar spread of the buildings.
As the pang turned to fear and spread through my body, I uttered one of Guts’s pirate curses.
“What?” he whispered.
“We’re on Sunrise,” I said.
NIGHT PROWLERS
Dunno why yer all in a twist.”
“Because there are people on this island who want to kill me!”
“Yeh, but yer gonna kill them.”
“I can’t kill anybody like this! I’m half naked!”
We were huddled in our underpants behind a large rock on the dark, empty beach north of Blisstown. The rest of our soggy clothes lay in a pile nearby. We’d stripped them off when we reached land, and once I realized how disgusting they still looked and smelled, I knew that was it for them.
Guts was harder to convince. “Put this lot back on.”
“It’s all covered in pig dung!”
“I’ve worn worse.” He shrugged, or maybe just twitched. It was hard to tell with him.
“It’s no good. We’ve got to find new ones.”
“Ye can take ’is clothes. Soon’s ye kill ’im.”
Once I’d told him where we were, Guts had gotten it into his head that this was a perfect opportunity to kill Roger Pembroke. Just the thought of it filled me with dread, but I couldn’t exactly tell Guts that, because it had been my idea in the first place. So I had to make do with more limited objections.
“I’d never fit in his clothes! He’s very tall. Anyway, I can’t kill someone in my underwear.”
“Course ye can. ’Appens all the time.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “I seen it. More’n once. Get to it! Which way’s his house?”
“This is crazy. Look, I don’t even have anything to kill him with.”
Guts handed me his knife, which he’d been holding because he couldn’t exactly stick it in his underpants.
“Now ye do. ’Ave at it.”
The knife felt heavy and strange in my hand. I tried to imagine using it on Pembroke, and I shivered. Partly because I was standing in wet underwear on a cool and windy beach. But only partly.
“I’m not going anywhere without clothes,” I said firmly.
“Where we gonna get ’em?”
I looked down the beach, toward Blisstown.
“We’ll have to steal them.”
WE LEFT OUR ruined clothes behind the rock and moved quickly up the beach, pausing in the weeds by the side of the shore road to let a lone rider on horseback pass before we crossed into the forest. The trees were so thick there was barely any moonlight to see by, but we didn’t have to travel far before we reached the first row of houses on the edge of Blisstown.
We crept from house to house, sticking close to the buildings and sprinting across the roads. Fortunately, it was late enough that most of the town had gone to sleep. Just a few windows showed a hint of candlelight, and the only people we saw were a pair of half-drunk men on their way home. They were easy to avoid, and I was glad for the sight of them, because to anyone looking out a window, they offered a reasonable explanation for the handful of dogs we set to barking when we passed.
I figured the big clothing shop on Heavenly Road was our best target, although I kept hoping we’d come across a line of laundry left out to dry so we could avoid breaking into the store. But I guess people don’t dry laundry overnight, because we didn’t cross paths with so much as a flapping sheet before we wound up crouched by the side of the street meat shack, staring across the street at the shop.
It was a squat, two-story building, its lower windows shuttered and latched. The second floor windows were wide open, but I guessed that was where the owner lived, so there was no point in trying to get in that way. The front door didn’t look too sturdy, but from across the street I couldn’t tell what kind of lock was on it.
Not that I knew anything about locks. I was hoping Guts did.
“Dunno,” he said when I asked him. “Let’s ’ave a look.”
At the top of Heavenly Road, there were a handful of men talking on the porch of the Peacock Inn, but they were too far away and too involved in their own conversation to notice us as we slipped across the street.
Guts was just ahead of me, and his first step up the short stairs to the shop’s porch produced a noisy creak. The sound froze us in place for a moment, but it didn’t seem to alert anyone, so after a nervous second, we continued, taking care to step on the far edge of the stairs where the creaking wouldn’t be as bad.
At the top of the steps on either side was a column supporting the porch roof. As I passed the one on the right, I noticed a foot-long sheet of thick paper tacked to it. In the moonlight, it was hard to make out what it said, and I would have kept going without a glance if a word in the three-inch headline hadn’t caught my eye.
Guts was already at the door, inspecting the lock. I paused for a closer look at the poster.
WANTED FOR MURDER.
That was the headline. Below it, in slightly smaller type, were the words S5,000 REWARD FOR CAPTURE—DEAD OR ALIVE.
Below that was a picture of me.
It was drawn in ink, and accurate enough that I recognized myself immediately. When I did, I felt the bottom of my stomach drop to somewhere around my knees.
“Guts,” I managed to croak, “look at this.”
Guts turned away from the lock, which he’d been trying to jimmy with his knife, and joined me on the edge of the step. He squinted at the poster.
“Wot’s it say?”
“Wanted for murder.”
He leaned in closer, studying the picture. “That you?”
“Yeah.”
“Five thousan’ silver?” He nodded approvingly. “Good price.”
I wanted to smack him for that, and I might have done it if a voice from behind us hadn’t suddenly made me jump out of my skin.
“You boys from the boat?”
I spun around. Two feet past the bottom step was a stout, balding man wearing the expensive linen coat of a well-to-do Sunriser. He was squinting up at us in the moonlight, looking confused.
I would’ve run for it right away, but I couldn’t get down the stairs without coming less than an arm’s length from him. As my eyes darted around the porch, looking for the best way to flee, he kept talking, in a friendly and soothing voice.
“Don’t be scared, son. You’re safe now. No pirates here. Just come ashore, did you?”
He took a step toward the stairs, a little wobbly on his feet, and as I watched him, several things occurred to me at once—that he was a bit drunk, that he didn’t mean any harm and in fact clearly wanted to be helpful, and that he must have mistaken us for passengers from the Earthly Pleasure.
“Expect you’re hungry. Need clothes, too. Whyn’t you come with me? I’ll get you set—”
Just then, something hurtled through the air, sailing from the corner of my eye straight into his skull just above the eyebrows, where it made a heavy THUNK sound, which was followed by a much heavier THUD as the man’s pear-shaped body toppled backward onto the street.
As the heavy brass porch spittoon rolled back and forth on its lip a few feet from the man’s motionless body, Guts stepped forward with a satisfied grin.
“Ace shot, wannit?”
“What’d you do that for?!” I hissed.
“Savin’ us!”
“From what? Getting fed and clothed?”
“Nuts! Woulda strung us up.” He bent over and picked up his knife, which he’d had to put down in order to hurl the spittoon. “Quick, check ’is pockets.”
I was just putting the words together to express my disgust at the idea of robbing the poor man when a shout from up the street turned both our heads.
The men at the Peacock Inn, attracted by the commotion, were all starting toward us—two of them at a run—and the cold-cocked body at our feet meant we didn’t have much in the way of options.
We both leapt from the steps and took the shortest route out of sight, pivoting sharply down the alley between the clothing shop and the building next to it. We ran flat-out, too panicked to worry about the noise we were making, and by the time we’d raced across the first street behind Heavenly Road, it sounded like every dog in town was barking.
I didn’t slow down to look back until we reached the edge of the forest a few blocks away on the far side of town. There weren’t any pursuers in sight by then, but we kept moving until the barking died away and it felt safe to stop and take stock of the situation.
“Why’d you hit him? He could’ve helped us!” I was still angry.
Guts shook his head, long tangles of hair swishing across the scowl on his face. “No man like ’im ’elps the like o’ us.”
“He would’ve! He thought we were rich folk! From the boat.”
“Yeh? ’Ow long till ’e made ye fer the murderer?”
It was a fair point. But I didn’t care for that word.
“I’m not a murderer,” I said quietly.
His face twitched. “Course ye are.”
“It’s not murder if someone tries to kill you first.”
“Yeh, it is.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“What d’ye call it, then?”
I thought about it for a moment. “It’s a gray area.”
“Wha’s a gray area?”
“It’s not black and white. It’s both. Like how people aren’t all good or all bad. They’re a little of each.”
“Not true.”
“What, everyone on earth is either completely good or completely bad? No in between?”
“Yeh.” He nodded.
“What are we, then?”
He was quiet for a while, and I thought I’d won the argument. But then he answered.
“We’re bad.”
I snorted. He wasn’t just being stupid. He was making me angry.
“If we’re bad, who’s good?”
He was quiet again for a moment.
“Nobody.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“Find somebody good, gimme a poke. Like t’ see it.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Must be. Look who I’m followin’. Wot we do now?”
I chewed over the situation for a while. We didn’t just need clothes. We needed food and water, none of which I knew how to find in Blisstown with no money, in the middle of the night, when I was wanted for murder. And that wasn’t even taking into account all the barking dogs and newly alert men on the lookout for a pair of attempted burglars.
But there was one place on Sunrise where I did know how to find all of those things, even in the dark—a place where no one locked the doors at night, and where the dogs were kept in a kennel away from the main house because they made Mrs. Pembroke sneeze.
And breaking into Cloud Manor was the last thing Roger Pembroke would expect me to do. At least, that’s what I hoped.
I told Guts my idea. He gave a little snort of disgust.
“What?”
“Whyn’t we do it in the first place? Back when I said it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, starting off in the direction of Cloud Manor.
Guts crossed his arms and stayed put. “Does to me,” he said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Say it was my idea.”
“It was your idea! Satisfied?”
He started to follow me. “Gonna kill ’im while we’re there?”
My stomach flopped a little at the thought of it. “We’ll see.”
WE FOLLOWED THE SLOPE of the hill to the shore road. It was slow and painful. The prickly shrubs that grew thick near the bottom of the hill left our arms and legs scribbled with small scratches and cuts. But once we got to the road, we made good time even though it was all uphill. We took to the trees again a little below the sentry post where the road branched off from the shore, but the forest was thinner there, and it wasn’t long before we crossed back onto the branch road to Cloud Manor.
The whole way there, I thought about Millicent. She’d almost definitely be home and just as definitely asleep. What did she think of me now? That I was a murderer? Would she be afraid of me? Or would being a wanted man make me seem dangerous and alluring, like the outlaws in books who made women swoon?
Should I wake her up?
No. It’d be too big a risk. And anyway, I was in my underwear, which made looking dangerous and alluring pretty much impossible.
But I thought maybe, while I was still up on the second floor, after I’d gotten the clothes that I hoped were still in my old bedroom, I could slip into her room and just look at her for a moment…
Or write her a note and leave it beside her pillow…
No. I’d need parchment and ink for that, which I’d have to get from Pembroke’s study, and that would take too long. But maybe I could leave her something, a sign of some sort, to let her know I’d been there and was thinking of her. Like a copy of Basingstroke, our favorite book, which I could probably find in the library downstairs…
It was all completely stupid, but fantasizing about it kept my mind off of wondering what would happen if I ran into her father—and I knew if I stopped to think about that, I was going to lose my nerve completely.
I was still thinking about Millicent when we reached the edge of the great lawn, and Guts got his first look at Cloud Manor, silhouetted against the moonlit sky.
It took a while for him to get over the idea that a family of just three people lived in that massive castle of a home.
“Got ’orses in there? Stables and such?”
“Nope. It’s just them.”
“Not cows, neither? Jus’ them? In all that space?”
“That’s how rich folk live. You ready?”
“In a minute.” As I watched him gaze up at it, slack-jawed, it occurred to me just how small and awful his life must have been. A month earlier, I’d never seen a place like Cloud Manor, either, but at least I’d read enough books to know they existed. Guts was staring at the place like it had fallen out of the sky from a whole other world.
Finally, I gave him a shake on the arm and started for the mansion. “Remember, food and water. Then clothes. Then we get out.”
“And if ye get the chance—”
“I won’t—”
“But if ye do—”
“Yes! I’ll kill him. All right?” By now, I was deeply regretting ever having said that back on Pig Island.
“Want the knife?” He held it out for me to take.
“You keep it.”
Around the side of the mansion, a single door led from the herb garden to the kitchen. As we got closer to it, I felt the fear start to rise in me. What if it was locked? What if everything had changed since I ran away, and Cloud Manor had become an armed camp? What if there were guards watching us even now, waiting for us to close the distance before they opened fire? What if Pembroke was awake and waiting inside?
The door was open. There were no guards. Whatever threat he thought I posed, Roger Pembroke clearly didn’t find it serious enough to lock his doors or post a watch.
Nothing had changed inside, either—even the leftover jelly bread was right where the pantry maid usually kept it.
We ate and drank quickly and silently. Then came the hard part. We had to get upstairs to my old bedroom and hope my clothes were still there, either the ones I’d been wearing when I arrived or the several outfits the Pembrokes had given me.
I motioned for Guts to follow me. We left the kitchen through the dining room, where moonlight from the tall windows shone off the brightly polished table. At the entrance to the main hall, I paused and looked back to see Guts gaping at the opulence of the room.
“Ever eat in �
�ere?” he whispered.
“Three times a day,” I told him. “The butlers served us.”
He answered with one of his foulest curses, packed full of amazement.
We had to step carefully in the main hall not to create an echo, and for the first time since I lost my shoes, I was glad to be barefoot. Up ahead, the door to the study was shut.
But the library door was open, and there was light coming from inside.
My heart thumped a little, remembering how Pembroke used to stay up late at night reading. I tiptoed up to the door and peeked my head around the side.
There was a small fire burning in the fireplace, and a candle flickered on a side table next to one of the big, high-backed chairs facing the fire. I couldn’t see him from where I stood, but I knew he was in that chair.
Guts nudged me from behind. I turned, and he mouthed the word what?
It’s him, I mouthed back.
His eyes lit up. He held out the knife.
My heart raced. I wasn’t ready for this.
He urged the knife on me, practically forcing it into my hand. After I took it, he leaned in, his lips practically touching my ear.
“Killed yer family,” he whispered.
My stomach went all knotty, and I wanted to throw up the food I’d just eaten. But I knew he was right.
I had to do it. And I’d never get a chance as good as this.
I took a few deep breaths, trying to slow down my thumping heart. Then I slowly crept into the library.
The firelight cast long, trembling shadows around the room. It was so quiet I could hear the flames lick at the logs.
Ten feet away… From the other side of the chair, I heard the sound of a page turning. He was awake.
But he’d be unarmed. And unsuspecting.
Was it fair, sneaking up on him like this? Should I make a noise, give him a chance to defend himself?
Did he give my family a chance?
Five feet away…
I paused to look back. Guts was halfway between me and the door, all skinny limbs and bony ribs. His eyes glowed, and he nodded gravely at me.
I turned back to the chair and stepped forward, raising the knife in my hand.
There’s no honor in this. Heroes in books don’t kill men this way.
