Sterling (23 page)

He covered his face with his hands. “It’s a terrible risk, love.”

“The Imperials honor the rights of parley and negotiation. They practically wrote the rules of international warfare; they will not go against them. The worst that could happen is that I fail and they give me free passage out of their waters. If we go to them under the white flag, we have protections.”

“International law means little in wartime.”

“House Ricknagel has a treaty with them. That means they must honor the rules of parley.”

He groaned. He knew I was right. “Fine. We’ll go to blasted Vorisipor. Captain Erran will have an apoplexy, but I’ll say it’s a secret mission for the Throne, and that should shut him up. But you listen to me, Sterling Ricknagel. You are not to take a single
step
from my side. We’re fused at the hip from this point on; do you understand? We’ll approach their harbor under a white flag for an audience with the Governor. Under no circumstances will you go anywhere without me. We’ll sleep in the same bed even if it is narrower than your shoulders.”

I thought I’d slide right down the bookshelf and melt into a puddle on the cabin floor.
Thank the gods, thank the gods, thank the gods
.

“Oh, Erich. Thank you.”

He made no answer. His handsome face remained clouded with concern.

F
avorable winds pushed
us into Vhimsantese waters in only three days. Erich had been correct; the captain had argued and fought until Erich had threatened to strip him of his command. Then he had turned the ship southeast.

One of the crewmen hoisted our white parley flag. As we continued eastward, two warships approached—arriving much sooner than I had expected. I wanted to confer with Erich about a plan for the initial contact, but the Imperials moved too quickly.

The warships dwarfed our little pleasure boat as they came alongside of us. Erich commanded our small crew of seven, including Captain Erran, to disarm and line up on the deck, following the rules of parley. We had to show good faith in the laws.

“Do you know the Imperial tongue?” Erich asked me as we stood together in front of the scant crew. A Vhimsantese captain loomed above us at the gunwale of his own ship. He gestured to his crew and then signaled that his men would board our vessel. I lifted a hand to show my agreement.

“Of course,” I replied. “My father insisted that I learn it. Don’t you?”

He did not answer as he watched the Imperial men swinging on grappling lines to our boat.

“This is all to be expected,” I said. “The Governor wrote that he would send ships to escort ours. They’ll have some of their men sail with us into their harbor as a surety.”

“But the captain isn’t coming.” Erich jutted his chin in the direction of the warship. The captain remained on his own deck.

I frowned. “That is odd.”

“Damned Amatos.” Erich puffed out the words on an exhalation, so softly I barely heard them. I followed his gaze to the men dropping onto our ship. As they landed, they reached for weapons, curved blades ringing free from sheaths and sparkling in the brisk morning light.

They were breaking the rules that should have protected us.

My ribs tightened, but I could not show my fear. Erich grabbed my wrist as if he anticipated what I might do. I shook him free with a sharp flick and strode forward. Gods, the Imperials were armed to the hilt! Each man held not only his curved
shir
but also a dagger.

“I am Lady Sterling Ricknagel,” I called in the Imperial tongue, pulling the Governor’s letter from my pocket. “I have business with the Governor, business that is protected by the international rules of parley, the white flag, and the Governor’s own word.” I gestured at the white flag we flew and then waved the letter. “Look, I hold the Governor of Vorisipor’s seal.” I pointed at the black wax still stuck on the paper.

My pronouncement was first met with silence. Then the foreign captain laughed. The sounded flitted across the water and rang in my ears. He cast a scornful look at my letter, which was trembling in my hand, and then he jerked one arm in a silent gesture to his men onboard our vessel.

They moved like a wave over our deck, blades flashing. Blood spurted as they attacked our crew. Captain Erran fell in a shower of red as an Imperial slashed his throat.

I screamed. The violence was so sudden, so wrong. We flew a white parley flag! We’d entered the Imperial waters at the Governor’s invitation—I held his official seal! And we stood unarmed! Our men were vastly outnumbered and utterly crippled by their lack of weapons. I had to do something.

Beside me, Erich ducked beneath an oncoming curved
shir
sword—the Imperial weapon of choice. He rolled on the deck and landed on his feet, moving beneath his opponent’s guard and striking the man’s wrist. The
shir
clattered to the deck. Erich snatched the weapon and lunged. The
shir
, though curved, still cut as well as Erich’s preferred rapier. He attacked the Imperial man deliberately, not to kill, but to damage, slicing the man’s wrists and hands, and final fast slashes, two nasty swipes on either side of his head. The scalp wounds bled profusely, blinding the man.

“Sterling!” In two bounds, Erich reached my side and put me at his back.

All our crew had been cut down. They lay bleeding or dead on the deck.

“Erich,” I whispered, feeling faint. It had happened so quickly.

“I won’t let them hurt you,” he growled.

The Imperial captain finally crossed to our ship, moving deftly across the lines. He fit my image of an eastern soldier, with his dark hair knotted atop his head and pulled back so tightly that his eyes narrowed. His cheekbones were as sharp as his blade. Loose white pants billowed around his hips for free motion but narrowed at his knees to tuck into black boots that laced up the side. His shirt wrapped closely around his body like a bandage, and his leather wrist gauntlets were studded with jewels and metal. I numbly recalled reading that Vhimsantese men viewed their gauntlets as symbols of wealth and status.

The captain sneered, jerking his chin at Erich. “What stupidity is this?” he demanded in his own tongue. “You think to fight? Look at your ship, man. You are done. Better to throw yourself and your lady into the waters, if you think to be a gallant savior.”

I thanked the gods Erich couldn’t understand the man’s taunts.

Even so, Erich moved as if to begin a duel.

“Wait!” I said in Lethemian, and then again, in the Imperial language, “
Saper
.” I held up my hand. “We have come under a parley flag, seeking to treat with the Governor of Vorisipor. You must take us to the Governor. We fly the white flag. Look.” I thrust the letter at the man’s face. “That is the Governor’s seal. He has summoned us.” I put extra emphasis on the words this time, but the man cared not at all.

The eastern captain made a gesture, encompassing the ocean and sky. “Do you see any Governor here? I recognize no parley flags.” He switched into heavily-accented Lethemian with a sly grin, “How you westerners say—I do what I want.”

I drew a shallow breath. I’d read that the Imperial Navy acted as more of a loose coalition than an organized force, that the captains favored taking matters into their own hands. But I hadn’t imagined they would flout international law and the commands of their Governor. Gods, what had I done, bringing us here?

“Are you a representative of the Imperial Navy?” I bit out. “Are you under the Governor’s command?” Was it possible this was not our escort, but rather some random pirate? I scanned the horizon. Perhaps the Governor’s ships would appear soon to rescue us.

The captain twirled his
shir
and curled his lip.

Rage boiled in my stomach. “The Governor will—”

The man’s laughter broke in as he gazed over me at Erich. “Tell your pretty guard dog to step down. I will have his weapon.” His eyes glittered.

“Listen to me.” I made my voice icy and strong, though the Vhimsantese syllables felt like contortions. “Sir. I am Lady Sterling Ricknagel, and I have been invited to Vorisipor under the protection of your Governor. I was promised—” I waved the letter “—free passage to the Governor to make an official parley. My ship is protected by the international—”

“Your woman blathers like a third wife,” the captain said to Erich. “Silence her or I will do it myself. And put down your weapon or I will command all my men on you at once.”

Erich’s wary gaze darted between the captain and me.

“He doesn’t speak your language,” I said helplessly.

“Even stupid men understand fear.” The horrible captain nodded to his men, who tightened their circle around us.

Terror burned in my throat. What about my letter? Why was no one interested in the Governor’s seal? I could only conclude we’d been attacked by pirates, men so far outside the law that not even fear of the Governor’s reprisals stopped them.

“We are important people in our country,” I blurted, driven by my conclusion. Pirates liked money. “You would do better to hold us for ransom than to kill us.”

“You, you are nothing but an ugly woman who talks too much.” Despite his cutting words, the man seemed to entertain my suggestion. He waved his men back and moved towards Erich on his own. “Disarm, pretty dog.”

“Erich, you must put the
shir
down.” I translated.

“The what?” Erich did not relinquish the weapon. He kept his gaze trained on the Vhimsantese pirate.

“The
shir
. The sword.”

“What about it?” He wasn’t listening.

“Put it down! Before he kills us both!”

“Godsdammit, Sterling!” Finally he moved, slowly placing the sword on the deck.

The pirate captain kicked the blade away. “Turn,” he commanded. “Hands behind your back.”

“He wants us to turn our backs,” I told Erich. “He’s going to tie us.”

“Amatos, Sterling.” I heard the distress in his voice as we turned and placed our hands behind our backs.

“Tell him to tie us together,” Erich hissed, even as the pirate’s men looped ropes around our arms.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I cast a glance over my shoulder. “He’s getting annoyed with my talking.”

“Tell them!” roared Erich, so loudly the very air shook.

“What is wrong with him?” the pirate asked me.

Panic rolled off of Erich in waves. He didn’t like to be tied, of course. He liked to be the one doing the tying.

“Please,” I begged the pirate. “Tie us together. You will do better for money if you ransom us both.”

“Fine,” the man said. “But your pretty guard dog will grow tired of having you so close. You and your ugly face.” The words hit like a slap, but he pulled my hands together with Erich’s and fixed them with his rope. Erich squeezed his fingers around mine. I squeezed back.

* * *

T
he Vhimsantese took
possession of Erich’s ship, and they brought it into Vorisipor’s harbor behind both of their own—unmolested and unsearched by any representative of the Governor, I was dismayed to see.

Erich sat silently, even though we had no gags, and no one to prevent us from speaking to each other. He was miserable, and I didn’t know what to do. This whole situation was my fault, for being so naïve, for not anticipating the danger of pirates. And yet, Papa had always said the Imperials were honorable, in their own way, that their beliefs were only different from ours. I needed to find a representative of the Governor to show him the letter—I still had it in my dress’s pocket—to salvage the situation.

Vorisipor. I’d spent my childhood hearing stories of the place, stories meant to inspire fear.
In Vorisipor
, the household maids used to say,
women are locked in their houses and can never go out. In Vorisipor there are public executions every sennight. In Vorisipor the punishment for stealing a piece of fruit from a market stall is a severed hand.

It looked like any other vast city, though larger by half than Shankar. It was dirty, too—dirty in the way of the Empire, which had never had aetherlight for fuel. A black pall hung over the buildings from coal, wood, and gas smoke. Lethemia’s cities would get as polluted with no clean aetherlight.

Erich’s silence wore on me, feeding my anxieties. The pirates lowered us, still bound together, to the dock in a basket. At first I thought they meant to walk us through the city, but we were herded to a carriage, a squat vehicle that looked like an egg slung amidst four wide wheels. Erich and I, tied together, struggled to enter the awkward conveyance. Our pirate guards slammed the door, and it clicked when they locked it.

“Where do you suppose they are taking us?” I asked to cut the heavy silence. Erich’s long legs did not seem to fit anywhere in the tiny coach. He had to spread his thighs, and one of his knees jammed into my waist.

“You would know better than I. Amatos, Sterling, we could have been safe in Talat City by now, eating bon-bons in my private salon. I don’t know how you convinced me to this madness. You did tell Costas where we were going and our mission?”

I swallowed. I had done no such thing. In all the rush and danger of that final day in Shankar, I had forgotten to send a message. Costas was going to put me in the Palace dungeons for life when I made it back to Lethemia. “They’re only pirates.” I avoided Erich’s question. “It was bad luck that they found us before the Governor’s ships did. If we can find a representative of the Governor and show him the letter we might still be able to—”

“Sterling! Please tell me you told Costas we were headed here.”

My voice was almost too low to hear. “I forgot.”

Erich closed his eyes and banged his head against the carriage seat.

“I’m sorry!” I cried. “But how much could Costas help us at the moment, anyway?”

“Then you should have let me fight them on the ship.”

“Erich, we were surrounded. You might have struck down one or two of them, but there were over twenty men. You could not have lasted.”

Erich tried to shift his legs, pulling unbearably on my arms and squashing my thigh. “This is blasted uncomfortable.”

I nodded. Every jolt of the road translated directly into our joints.

“So we’re alive,” Erich said. “Thank you. We cannot count on support from Costas since he won’t know we’ve gone missing, and a ransom will be a very long time coming—especially if Costas is too furious to pay it. My family certainly hasn’t got the funds. So we’ll have to escape.”