“You can probably ditch the bar,” Scarlett said.
It took him a moment to respond. Looking down at his lap, he was surprised to see the iron railing gripped tightly in his hands.
“You think so…?” His fingers had locked in position; it actually hurt them to disengage.
“You bashed her skull in and knocked her into a raging sea. I should just about reckon she’s dead this time.”
“Dead…,” he said.
“Yeah. Goodbye, Stonemoor.” She lifted a stiff hand and scratched at her tangled hair.
Albert took a deep breath. Well, Scarlett knew about these things. He set the railing carefully on the stone beside him. It was hard to imagine Dr. Calloway not being there, hard to believe she wouldn’t rise up from the abyss, clawing hands outstretched, to pursue him as a drenched and gory phantom…. Something that had been a dark constant in his life was gone. The thought made him feel oddly disoriented, weightless, and empty. It was like the sensation you got after illness, when a fever breaks and the body begins renewal.
Scarlett was feeling in her jacket pocket. “Do you want a piece of gum?”
“Thanks.”
“Can’t vouch for the quality. Mostly tastes of sweat and seawater. But…”
“I’m up for the challenge, Scarlett. I’ll give it a try.”
He unwrapped a strip, chewed speculatively. Waves crashed far below.
Goodbye, Stonemoor…. It was true. There was nothing to pull him back there anymore.
“Aren’t you going to tell me, then?” Scarlett said.
“Tell you?” He blinked at her. “It is a bit salty, but I’m sure that’s sea rather than—”
“Not the gum, you idiot. How you did it! Jumping off, I mean.” She glared at him. “You gave me a bloody shock.”
He looked at her. He still had the memory of something he’d caught in her face, the last moment before he’d leaped. It had flared beautifully around her as she’d met his gaze….
Despite her current frown, it lingered about her still.
“I’m so sorry, Scarlett,” he said.
She brushed hair out of her eyes, shrugged her thin shoulders carelessly. “Oh, it was no big deal. But when she gave you that final choice, it was just— I thought you’d chosen the other thing.”
Albert smiled at her. “I would never do that. What I chose was to drop onto a little parapet just below the edge. You can see it now if you stretch out and look down. See? I think they use it for attaching their nets, because there are hooks and fixings on it. It’s not very wide. I nearly fell off, but I worked my way along, holding the hooks to steady me. I found a broken bit where I could climb up, then nipped over and got the iron bar. Then I did what I ought to have done years ago. With my own hands.”
“Yeah. You did surprisingly well.”
“It was point-blank range. She had her back to me.”
“Precisely. The odds were stacked against you.”
They sat there for a time. Whether it was the gum or the compliment, or the sunlight on his back, Albert felt a growing sense of contentment rising through his exhaustion.
“Well, we finished it,” he said.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“We finished it together.”
“Yep.”
The distant fiddle started up again high in the tower. A drum joined in. Joyous shouts and whistles drifted down across the water.
Scarlett glanced stiffly back at Bayswater. “What are those fools doing?”
“They’re probably dancing,” Albert said. “Johnny Fingers was telling me they do an awful lot of that. After dinner each night, and to celebrate the dawn, the phases of the moon, their monthly cycles, the harvesting of the kelp fields…Every available opportunity, really.”
“I expect being liberated from a bunch of violent invaders hits the spot as well,” Scarlett said. “You could go and join them.”
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t fancy some high kicking?”
“Not just now.”
She grinned at him. “Dancing berks aside, you’ve made it to the Free Isles, Albert. You got what you wanted. Doesn’t have to be Bayswater and Johnny Fingers, after all.” She pointed. “There they all are, look: you can pick out any one of them.”
Albert gazed across at the horizon, at the other broken buildings scattered in the sea. As he did so, he thought of the boy with the quiff, of the stories he’d been told back in Stonemoor. Of the dreams that had sustained him all this time. Curiously, he found it a little harder to visualize the boy than he had before. And his old visions of the isles were dispersing, too, like trails of ink in water….
“Yes,” he said. “I could pick another island, I suppose.”
“That stumpy mound over there looks populated,” Scarlett said. “Doesn’t look like it gets completely immersed at high tide…. Or what about that one with the cluster of seaweed huts on the top?”
“Well….”
“I don’t know what you’re hesitating for. You’ve got it made. Calloway’s dead. Her friends on the High Council won’t ever find you, even if they tried looking, which they won’t. You’re fifty miles from the nearest Faith House. No slavers…. No Tainted….” She glanced aside at him, grinning. “What’s not to like for a boy who’s running from the world? I’d say you’re nicely sorted now.”
Albert kicked his heels against the platform, staring out across the ocean. He sighed. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “The isles are safe….”
“Course they are.”
“I mean apart from the sharks, obviously, and the falling ruins and the tsunamis. And the plague—did I tell you there’s a plague island called Camberwell out there to the east? And the lightning storms. And there’s something you can get called Chelsea clap that doesn’t sound so good, but apart from all of that—”
“Apart from all that,” Scarlett interrupted, “the Free Isles are about as safe and dully predictable as it’s possible to get in the Seven Kingdoms! Say no more, Albert. You’ve got a nice little refuge here. Assuming you want to hide away.”
A nice little refuge…. Well, it was true enough. If he stayed in the isles, he’d be pretty much sheltered from everything.
Everything….
He looked across at Scarlett, who was humming lightly to herself. The last twenty-four hours had taken their toll on her—but under the bruises and the scratches, the stained and ragged clothes and the stiffness of her movements, she was as alert and nonchalant as ever. A trace of evening light, showing round the edge of Bayswater Isle, hung about her slim, spare frame. Her hair was burnished red and gold. It reminded Albert of when he’d seen her properly the first time, beside the stream in the little valley, when she’d pulled him from the bus.
A pleasant pain fizzed through him. Suddenly he needed to speak.
“Thank you for coming back for me, Scarlett,” he said. “To Bayswater, I mean. Rescuing me today. I know how hard it was for you. And I didn’t deserve it. After what happened on the raft—”
“OK, stop right there!” She raised a hand; the bandage on it was black and torn. “Forget about last night. It wasn’t your fault.”
“But of course it was! I tore it apart!”
“We were attacked. You saved us. That’s all there is to say.”
“I wish that were so, but it isn’t, Scarlett! It’s as I’ve always told you. The Fear is in me. I can’t control it, I can’t predict it. When it comes, I destroy everything—and people close to me will always suffer the worst of all.”
It was one of Scarlett’s louder snorts, rich, prolonged, contemptuously amused. “Baloney. Did you kill Joe, Ettie, or me? No. Did you kill our enemies? Yes. Point proven. I think you do have control, Albert, just not in the way you want.”
He hesitated. “You are very kin
d,” he said at last. “But I am not sure it is the truth. I’ve been thinking, Scarlett—perhaps I should take myself away, even from here. I could swim to a distant rock, far to the east, where I can become a hermit, with no friends but the local whelks and clams. The years will pass. There I shall sit, with bony legs akimbo, weathered naked as the stones, meditating on my loneliness and the cruelty of—”
“Albert.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“Really? I was trying to talk about my powers, like you said I should.”
“No, you were talking about being naked, and it’s left me with an image I’ll be taking to the grave. That’s enough! Just forget it now. It’s your power. For good or for bad, it’s part of you. Just accept it and stop worrying.”
He sat silent for a moment. “But I don’t think I’ll ever learn to—”
“Tough! I’ve got a bad temper myself! Probably I shoot more people than strictly necessary. Well, I have to live with it. It’s the same with you. Buy a cuss-box. Get a prayer mat. Move on.”
“But—”
“And don’t call it ‘the Fear,’ either. Sounds like something Calloway would name it. She’s the one who was frightened. You don’t have to be. Call it something else.”
Albert opened his mouth to protest and closed it again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“Good.”
The light was withdrawing from the sea channel, and the walls below were black. Away on the other Free Isles to the east, lanterns were coming on. Scarlett stretched her thin arms and yawned. “I need to get back to the mainland,” she said. “If I’m not careful, Joe will take the last boat. I think he’s got my bag—which means he’s got my prayer mat and all the remaining money. I’d better get moving before he pinches the lot.”
“I told him he could take his fee,” Albert said. He cleared his throat. “So…what are your plans, Scarlett? You’re heading north, I think you said.”
She was rising now, moving slowly and stiffly, cursing softly under her breath. “Yep,” she said. “Mercia, Northumbria, maybe. I’m going to stay clear of Wessex for a while, till the Brothers of the Hand forget about me. But don’t fret—I’ve a few ideas to keep me busy.”
Albert got to his feet too. Night rolled toward them across the sea. A pulsing glow on the horizon perhaps marked the Burning Regions far away. “These ideas,” he said idly. “More bank vaults, I suppose?”
She was upright now, as straight and sure as ever, with her coat flapping and the wind playing at her hair. “Well, there has to be a bank or two—I need funds to buy weapons, all that stuff. But after that, there’s something I wanted to look into. A Faith House in the old town of Warwick, meant to be the biggest and richest in Mercia. They say it’s got vaults that stretch out for miles—all manner of treasures, fabled wealth, relics from antiquity, rooms stuffed with more gold and coins than Calloway’s pals know what to do with…. Yeah, I thought I might drop by, just take a look as I was passing….”
“Sounds interesting,” Albert said.
“I think so.”
“Dangerous too, of course.”
“Very. I mean that Lechlade bank we cracked together wouldn’t compare.”
“No. Though we did a good job on that, didn’t we?”
“We did. And now I’ll be on my own, and you’ll be a happy kelp farmer, or whatever it is they do here. Did you see that they actually weave their clothes out of seaweed?” Scarlett said. “I’d have thought it would be slimy in all the wrong places, but they seem to enjoy it.”
Albert turned to look back toward the darkening lands of Britain. The sky over England was striped in yellows and pinks. A few faint lights and fires marked out the favelas of the estuary. He imagined the Seven Kingdoms stretching out under the stars in all their beauty and their strangeness, their wildness and variety. Waiting to be explored by anyone who dared….
“Look at that sunset,” he said. “It’s so beautiful….”
“Yeah,” Scarlett said. “Nice. But aren’t you looking the wrong way? Your Free Isles are over there.”
“Oh, yes. That’s right.”
She straightened her jacket, smiled at him. “Well, I’m going to find a boat.”
“I’ll come with you,” Albert said. “To the boathouse, I mean. Escort you. Make sure you find your way…. Besides, I want to see Joe and Ettie.”
“Yes.” Scarlett McCain spoke as if it surprised her. “Me too.”
He walked beside her across the platform, with night at their back and the strip of pink in the sky ahead of them dwindling to a thread. At the top of the steps, he paused.
“So what kind of dangers are you expecting at this sinister Faith House in Mercia?” he asked. “Just out of idle curiosity. A horn-beak again, you think? Wolves?”
“Well,” Scarlett said, “there’ll be beasts of some description, that’s for sure. And the word is they’ve got all manner of nasty defenses—snares, pits, concealed gas traps…Oh, and flip stones that drop you into vats of giant frogs, though I don’t pay much credence to that story. I do know the Brothers tried to rob it once, and none of their teams ever came out again…. But it’s all just rumor. Obviously I can’t be sure until I break in.”
“Sounds risky,” Albert said, “you going in blind.”
“It is. Very.”
“If only there was some other way.”
“The Mentors at the House know all the secrets, of course. But what am I going to do—read their minds?”
She grinned at him. He looked at her. For a long moment, in the last light of the day, they held each other’s gaze. Then they went on. As they pattered down the steps, the pursuing darkness enfolded the tower, but a strip of candlelight danced at the end of the bridge, where an old man and a child were waiting.
© Rolf Marriott
JONATHAN STROUD is the author of two internationally bestselling series: the award-winning Bartimaeus sequence, which has been published in thirty-six languages worldwide, and the critically acclaimed Lockwood & Co, which is currently being adapted by Netflix. His stand-alone titles include Heroes of the Valley, The Last Siege, The Leap, and Buried Fire.
Jonathan lives near London with his wife and three children.
JONATHANSTROUD.COM
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The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne Page 32
