Child of a Hidden Sea (21 page)

“I've put Verena's things in Gale's cabin,” Parrish said. “You and Bram are aft, with the books.”

“Thanks,” she said. “The point here is to find out enough to get a report on Gale's murder off to—off to the Fleet?”

“The Fleet Watch, yes, and Convenor Gracechild of Verdanni.”

“And then to get Verena officially made boss of you all so the magic purse can change hands?”

“Yes.”

“None of which is going to happen until we get somewhere where we can play detective, am I right?”

“It should be about a six-day sail.”

“Perfect.” That would give her time to catch her breath, and just look around while Bram learned more of the language and sifted through books.

She pulled out the camera and took a last look at the Erinthian capital. The outlines of its black stone buildings were barely visible against the bulk of the mountain, but their windows glowed with faint lamplight, as did the lights marking out the mercato. The palazzo itself was the brightest object in the cityscape, but even it seemed a dim mote compared to the firelight coming from the mountain above, the red glow of the volcano and the stitch of red-hot lava, the fiery canal criss-crossing its way down to the sea in a series of regular, manmade switchbacks.

“Can we see our route?” she asked, once she'd taken the shot.

With a nod, Parrish took her to view the charts.

“We'll sail southwest across the Sea of Bounty,” he said, drawing a line down across one of the unfamiliar clusters of islands. “Ualtar and Tiladene are in the southern hemisphere, here and here. It's a bit of a haul, but the winds should be favorable.”

The next three days were as close as it got to Heaven.

Erinth had seemed so very Mediterranean that Sophie couldn't shake the idea that this was, somehow, a bearing for Africa. Despite the charts showing vast, un-Mediterranean distances and not the slightest hint of Crete—let alone Turkey or the North African coast—she kept expecting something along those lines to heave up, olive groves and all, shining like a mirage on the horizon.

At sea, they might as well have been on Earth; everything might be normal.

Normal, that was, you looked across the deck and saw miles of rope, sand-brown twists the width of a baby's arm, neatly bound to spars and hooks, coiled on the deck, old-fashioned sinews that held the ship upright against the wind. Normal, until they encountered a pod, thousands strong, of what she dubbed warm-water narwal—slender, pinkish, unicorn-horned mammals, with long fanning rear flukes that earned them their Fleet name: fairyfen. The ship slid past a minor island nation, Bristlemere, where men and women in longish black kilts were said to live as a tribe in a single city dug under the ground. The surface had been given over almost entirely to the ordinary-looking black sheep who grazed its slopes.

Sophie saw a dozen birds she recognized, another ten who yielded up their identities to the reference books she'd loaded into her smartphone before she left, and ten possible new species. Of the ten, she got six on video.

She hung out on deck by day, watching, photographing everything she could, examining her dried bouquet of plants and bugs, and helping Bram with his Fleetspeak. She managed to unpack her new solar battery charger without scattering too many polystyrene packing peas around her cabin—it would be criminal to leave litter in this apparently pristine ecosystem—and juiced up all of their rechargeable hardware. She backed up the videos she'd shot so far to the phone, setting up a folder that would automatically sync with her online data storage accounts whenever she made it home.

“Data loss happens,” Bram said one afternoon as she configured the folders, quoting something he and his friends liked to call Robson's Law.

“Not if we can help it,” she murmured, keeping her voice low.

She left the gadgets in their cabin, transferring images, and led him up to the foredeck. Verena was there, drilling with her sword. She practiced daily, alone or with Parrish, sometimes for hours.

“I wonder if there's one in every port,” Bram said.

“One what?”

“Some fighter she has a thing with. A duelist.”

Verena chose that moment to stab a target dummy with especial ferocity.

“She's trying to impress Captain Tasty,” Sophie said, keeping her voice careless. She didn't want Bram to think too deeply about Verena and her swordplay.

“Yes, she's got it bad.” He'd brought Gale's index of nations with him; he was combing for new vocabulary, finding words he didn't know and asking for translations. “Poor kid; I don't think he's into her, do you?”

“No?” Sophie shrugged and waited for the conversation to move on. She had a page before her too—it was crammed with questions, mysteries about Stormwrack and ideas for investigating them.

“Too young for him, maybe. She's, what … seven years younger than you? And Parrish has probably known her since the cradle.”

“You're probably right.”

She didn't stir from Bram's side for over an hour, sat there patiently translating and helping him look through the atlases for anything that might serve as a landmark—Mount Everest, Baffin Island, what have you—until there was no chance he'd follow that thought about Verena back to the same place she had. Then she sought out Parrish.

He'd put away the dress uniform as soon as they'd set sail, packing the silly bicorne hat and silver-trimmed frock coat, changing to a pair of brown breeches and a plain white shirt. None of the crew wore insignia or any sign of rank; a few, Tonio included, had pinned black rags to their belts—but Parrish wore no such overt signs of mourning. The loss was nevertheless palpable. There was no concrete sign Sophie could point to, but grief blanketed him like freshly fallen snow.

“I'm wondering something,” she said.

He waited.

“Just before Gale was killed, Verena said she wanted to duel me.”

“I remember,” he said.

“Gale said no. She said I was broke and that someone would give me a … dueling proxy?”

“That was the gist,” Parrish agreed. His demeanor was, suddenly, extremely cautious.
Walking on eggshells,
Sophie thought.
No, talking on eggshells.

“Who would do that? Give me a proxy, I mean?”

“The Fleet's various nations … they squabble, quite a bit,” he said, “It's the price of the Cessation, or so Gale liked to say.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Our court system is therefore overburdened. Trials are a cumbersome process. If Verena were to have to sue you for her inheritance—”

“Which she won't.”

“—it might take a decade, even more, for the two of you to come to resolution.”

“Effectively leaving me in possession of everything,” she said.

“Yes. And so, for anyone wishing to expedite the settlement of a dispute, there is the Dueling Court. Either party to a case may challenge the other. If the other refuses—”

“The case is lost?”

“Conceded.” A sound in the sails, burr of wind changing direction, caused him to raise his head and examine the rigging minutely. “This is unfair, obviously, if the opponents are grossly unmatched. So when a challenge is issued, the Adjudicator's office evaluates whether it is appropriate to appoint a proxy.”

“So then it's a fair fight?”

“No. It's very rare for anyone to beat an Adjudicator.”

“Appointing a proxy, or deciding not to appoint one, is basically picking the winner?”

He nodded.

“So the whole thing's another deterrent? Like threatening to sink pirate ships with
Temperance
?”

“That's right. One doesn't issue a challenge unless they are very much in earnest.”

“A court system based on threat and bluff, and who blinks first,” she said. “Very theatrical.”

“I've come to think much of what we call government is a form of performance.” He examined the surface of the sea with an intensity that reminded her of a cat. The wind had gotten brisker: It was stirring up jagged little waves, dark blue in color, and the air was cooler.

Sophie scanned the horizon: what was he looking for? There—a flash of paper-bag brown. “Is that a person?”

“Where?”

She pointed as it appeared again, an enormous arm, rising and falling in a swimming motion, a front crawl. As she squinted, she could make out more: the back of a neck, a head, a churn of something kicking, far back where feet should be.

“I don't believe it.” Parrish lit up. “You've spotted the ginger giant.”

He snapped out his spyglass, took a look, and handed it over. “It can be tricky to focus it—”

She looked. Brought closer, the figure did have a ginger-root exterior: it was a human-shaped collection of lumps, as crude as a child's clay construct. Its eyes were black spots set into gouges, its mouth a mere seam. The knobs of its fingers budded from the potato-shaped expanses of its hands. It was swimming northward, crawling through the sea at a steady pace. White dots—seabirds?—rode its shoulders and head.

She handed the glass back so he could look again. They were standing right beside each other; she felt a thrill of something primal, at the nearness of him.

Forget your hormones—you're looking at a giant!
“That is so cool. Any idea how big it is?”

“Tall as ten adults, if the stories are true,” Parrish said.

“Could something like that evolve?”

“No, he's scripped.”

“A made thing, like the mezmers and that duelist, Incindio?”

“Yes. It's supposed to be good luck to spot him,” Parrish added.

The ginger giant paused in midstroke, turning in the water, treading. It turned to face
Nightjar,
seeming to look straight into the spyglass. The huge mouth opened, revealing a nest of fibrous golden strands. It gulped air and then sank below the waves, sending its escort of white birds shooting skyward.

“Stories also have it that he's shy,” Parrish said.

“Big ol' giant, just swimming the high seas.” She found herself bouncing, and he was beaming, just as delighted as she. Despite wanting to hug him, she made herself take a step back. “Help, we got giants! This damn ocean is lousy with giants!”

Parrish let out a peal of laughter. “Remember that heron-giant?” He'd half turned, speaking as if to someone standing just at his right. “Was it—”

Then he checked himself; the smile vanished and he aimed his spyglass astern.

He forgot for a second, about Gale.
Wind ruffled Sophie's hair, a gust cold enough to take the heat off the sunshine, and she shivered. Her sense of delight froze into sorrow. An aunt she'd only just found. And then, to lose her …

Right, this is depressing. Back to business.
“If Verena challenges me and I say no way, I'm not fighting, the Dueling Court gives me a proxy and she dies?”

It took him a few breaths to answer. “Few duels are to the death. One can surrender.”

“And you can't kill someone once they've bowed out?”

“An Adjudicator can't, nor any Officer of the Fleet,” he said. “For civilians, the standards are more lax. Accidents happen. But it is something of a disgrace, to run someone through when they've surrendered.”

“So if Verena fought a proxy she'd be defeated, but she wouldn't die.”
Gale said I'd ruin the whole family if I came back here. Is this what she meant?
Sophie chewed this over. “I'm not broke now, though, am I? There's the ship, and you said there was money.”

“And the estate on Verdanii, with all the Feliachild privileges, plus your Fleet courier stipend.”

“I'm on a payroll? That's nuts.”

“They should have worked harder to properly vest your sister,” he said, sounding thoughtful.

“Tell me this, Parrish. I'm rich now, so I can't have a proxy. And I'm no fighter. Obviously I can't beat Verena—I'd have to concede. A challenge would be a slam-dunk for her, right?”

He nodded.

“So why's she up there carving strips off the practice dummy?”

“They might declare you incompetent and give you a proxy anyway.”

“Is that likely?”

A complicated series of expressions worked across his face. What he came out with was: “No, not really.”

“Then that's exactly what we'll do! Verena can challenge me, I'll cave, and the deed's done. Everything mine is hers.”

“Gale said you were to avoid the Dueling Deck.”

“But why?”

“I … couldn't say. I'm sorry.”

“That means you totally could say, but you won't.”

That infuriating arrogance again. “Yes, I'm afraid it does.”

“Aren't I technically the boss of you? Don't you
have
to tell me stuff?”

“Honor doesn't permit, in this case,” Parrish said.

“You're keeping a secret for someone.”

“I swore.”

“It's important!”

“A person who cannot keep their word has no place in this society.”

“Whose secrets? Gale's secrets?”

He turned on his heel, making his way to the stern.

She hurried to match his pace. “So—if I wanted to be legally competent, enough to make it impossible for some Adjudicator to stick me with a proxy, what would I have to do? I can't just take up swordfighting.”

Again, that expression of unhappiness. “Fulfilling the obligation to investigate Gale's murder should be argument enough that you're a competent adult.”

He was scanning the skies now. For three days, they had been crystal clear, bright sun and a fresh wind from the east, but now a layer of haze was rising off the horizon, frosted by little scallops of gray and white cloud.

“Tonio,” he called. “Change course: Make for Tallon at full sail.”