Child of a Hidden Sea (22 page)

“Those clouds are miles off and in the rearview,” Sophie objected.

“Stele Island moths migrate on calm nights, remember?”

“Oh.” She took a second look at the clouds, feeling cotton-mouthed. They didn't look like anything special to her. “Magic?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Did I just hear you talking moths?” Bram had joined them.

Sophie swallowed and spoke in English. “The storm, that first night with Gale. They said it was created by magic.”
All those fishers died. And it was my fault.
She'd managed to fold that particular guilt to the back of her mind, but now it rose up, fresh and smothering.

Around them, sailors leapt to unfurl
Nightjar
's sails. There was a creak as the ship heeled starboard, taking a new course, due north.

Verena strode up, whisking her shortsword into its sheath. “We're under attack?”

Parrish didn't equivocate. “Yes.”

“They're after Sophie?”

“We can hope that they merely wish to alarm us. There seems little point in sinking us if they want her to find the Heart.”

Bram glowered.

“Hey,” Sophie said. “It's not my fault.”

Isn't it? Gale said I shouldn't come back. Now Gale's dead. If we sink, that's Verena too.

Poor Beatrice, back in San Francisco, I wonder if she even knows her sister's died and now to lose a daughter, both daughters, in fact … oh!

“Beatrice!”

Parrish microflinched.

Ha, Captain—I'm not the only one with a terrible poker face
. “All this ‘Stay away from the Dueling Deck' stuff is to do with Beatrice's secrets, isn't it?”

“I couldn't say, Kir.”

“Excuse me—dueling?” Bram said.

“What about Mom?” Verena said in the same instant.

“I think you should all get below,” Parrish said.

Changing the subject. Got it in one, this all has something to do with me and the past and Beatrice. I wonder if it goes far back enough that she was still with my biological father?

“We only just saw that fog bank.” But the mist was closer, rising in little ribbons off the water around them, and the clouds she could barely see a minute ago had grown to thunderheads.

“Come on, Sofe,” Bram said.

Sophie balked. “Look, Parrish, I've sailed. A lot. I've been in storms. I can help.”

“Sailed,” he said. “In mummer ships.”

“Sorry?”

“Petroleum-fueled vessels from Erstwhile.”

“Okay, yes, they weren't all rigs and sails and belay the afterburners, but—”

“I can't have an unrated sailor on deck,” he said, in that clipped tone. “I'll check you, once we've survived this.”

“More hands make lighter work—”

“No.”

“I thought I was in charge here.”

He drew himself up. “Go below now, Kirs, with all due respect, or I'll have Sweet haul you down and guard you.”

With a scowl, Sophie followed Bram down the narrow staircase.

Verena seemed to consider arguing too, but then she brought up the rear.

Nightjar
was, by now, riding swells big enough to make walking an exercise in lurching from one side of the corridor to the other.

“He is
so
infuriating! Verena, how do you stand him?”

Verena ignored this outburst, instead speaking to Bram. “Don't worry. She's a good ship, and he's a brilliant sailor.”

“I'm not afraid,” he said. “I'm deciding whether it'll save time if I throw up now.”

“You are a little green,” Sophie said.

“There's no magic spell for preventing seasickness, is there?”

“Of course,” Verena said. “But we don't have a scribe on
Nightjar
. Anyway, none of the crew's prone to the heaves.”

“Worth asking, right?” Bram led the way to the cabin he and Sophie had been assigned. It held a pair of bunks and a tiny dressing table between them. Their things were lashed below the bunks. Bram perched on one. Then he started as a blue streak, furred and long, darted out from under the blankets.

It was a ferret, Sophie saw, or something like it. It had the basic weasel shape, the length, but running through the thin blueish fur of its coat was an intermittent glow, a glimmer like yellow light. Its tail was long and reptilian and terminated in a snake's head. It darted to the middle of the meager floor space, looking from one of them to the other, and then clawed its way up Sophie's jeans, curling against her belly.

“It's harmless,” Verena said. “Parrish has a thing for rescuing animals who've been experimented on. The snake isn't venomous.”

“Looks like a mud snake.” Sophie ran a finger through the fur. The glimmer was spellscrip, magical lettering that had somehow been imprinted on its flesh. The join, at the tail, between mammalian skin and scales was gradual, a speckling pattern that might have been freckles, that grew and roughened into small and eventually bigger scales.

Bram didn't spare the animal more than a glance; the flash and shimmer of lightning, coming through the volcanic glass of the portal, had drawn his attention. “Do we need to board up the window?”

“No,” Verena said. “
Nightjar
's seals are sound.”

Magical experiments,
Sophie thought,
spellscrip on flesh.
“Was Parrish ever experimented on?”

“Parrish just likes animals,” Verena said. “He can't be enchanted.”

“Can't be enchanted?” Bram was breathing in and out with forced regularity—in through the nose, out through the lips. “How's that work?”

“One of his names is lost,” Verena said.

“I'd figured him for having had one of those Erinthian beauty spells, at least,” Sophie said.

“Born that way,” Verena said, her tone wistful. “Gale used to call him monstrous. Overly blessed by nature.”

They were heaving up and down, ever more briskly. As the bunk lurched beneath them Sophie was reminded of the time she'd tried bull-riding.

Shouts and running feet rumbled above. It was easy to imagine the crew running to and fro, tying off rigging and hauling sails as the fabric rent, to imagine people being washed overboard, drowning, and wouldn't that be her fault too?

There was a groan—beams straining.

“Sitting this out seems so wrong,” Sophie said.

“Parrish can't know you won't get blown off deck,” Verena said.

“I suppose not.”
Arrogant bastard,
she thought.

“He should know I would be fine,” her sister added.

“Guys,” Bram said. “How is bitching about it helping?”

He was right, of course, but sitting around like little kids, waiting to drown, or hopefully not …

“Sent to our room.” She sighed again.

“Ducks here would offer to fly the plane if we were on a bumpy flight overseas,” Bram said to Verena.

“Don't call me Ducks. You're just trying to start a scrap to distract yourself from the nausea,” she said.

“I wouldn't have to distract myself if you'd pitch in,” he said. “Make yourself useful.”

“Useful how?” she echoed. “We can't solve the murder from here. Not enough info.”

“We don't have enough to sort out the Earth–not-Earth thing either,” he said.

She unfolded her page of questions, passing it across the bunk to him.

“You Hansa kids have a dull idea of fun,” Verena said.

“This is
interesting
,” they replied simultaneously, and she laughed.

“Tell us about you,” Sophie said.

Verena's smile vanished; she was, suddenly, as alert and wary as the mutated ferret clinging to Sophie's lap. “Me?”

“Yeah. Were you born in San Francisco? Or, you know, here?”

“Why?”

“We're sisters. Do I need a better reason to ask?”

She sucked at her teeth, considering. “I was born in San Francisco. But, on paper, here too. Mom took me to her childhood home when I was young and presented me to the Allmother. Officially, that makes me a true child of Verdanii.”

“Like Gale and our mother and Annela Gracechild?” Sophie asked.

Verena nodded.

“Allmother,” Bram said. “Women run the show on Verdanni? It's matriarchal?”

“A person's status there is largely dependent on their genetic relationship to the Allmother.”

“Who is what? The Queen?”

“Basically. She's head of the Consensus of Mothers—the national government.”

“So,” Sophie said. “Do they own slaves?”

“Actually—” A little tartness now. “Verdanni is considered the voice of the Free faction. They—we—are against bondage.”

“Peace, love, and motherhood, then,” Sophie said.

“Don't oversimplify. We're not saints,” Verena said.

“And what about men?” Bram asked.

“Guys have been allowed to sit in the Consensus for a couple generations. I think there's maybe four out of the ninety-nine.”

We've drifted off the topic of Verena herself,
Sophie thought.
She dangled cultural bait and we took it.

“What about you?” she said. “You had that Berkelium shirt. Are you in college already?”

“I'm graduating high school in the spring,” she said. Sure enough, they were back to the short answers as soon as they started talking about her. “I had applied for early admission to Berkeley, but—”

“To study what?”

“Economics and international development.”

“But what?” Bram's words came out a yelp: There had been another blast of thunder, near enough to send a shock of impact through the air. Sophie's ears rang.

“What?” Verena said.

The ship was lurching now, up and down, side to side. They were hanging onto the bunks to stay in place. The ferret's little claws were dug into Sophie's jeans.

“You were applying to Berkeley, but…” Bram managed.

“I'll have to give that up,” she said. “To take Gale's position.”

“Just like that—your life in San Francisco's over? You're here in the Age of Sail forever?” Bram looked aghast. Maybe it was just the nausea.

Verena shrugged. “It was always the plan.”

“Oh crap,” Bram groaned. “This needs to stop.”

Sophie swapped bunks—the ferret clung to her jeans like dead weight—and wrapped her arms around him; he wouldn't need her to tell him the storm might go on for days. “It's okay,” she said. “We'll be all right, promise. Solid ship, good sailors.”

She peered out through the portal at the monstrous black swells. The clouds, above, rolled like great crushing boulders, illuminated by a steady fusillade of electrical flashes.

The electricity seemed to pool where her vision had settled, becoming ever more dense, and then a bolt of lightning poured down from the sky, connecting with the ocean like a whickering, jittering cable. Instead of flashing out, it thickened and maintained, sweeping closer, its color changing from electrical white to the pale rose of grapefruit flesh. The ship rolled, rising at the bow and throwing Sophie against the portal. She steadied herself by slapping her palm against the obsidian window … and as they peaked, high on the crest of an enormous wave, she thought she saw the silhouette of a ship, far off, the shape of a hull and a weird, splayed mast, shaped like a
Y
with lightning flickering within.

As her skin made contact with the volcanic glass, the whip of ropy lightning out on the water sought out Sophie's hand.

She recoiled. The power followed her through the bulkhead, flickering coolly against her palm.

She felt her hair shifting and moving as static electricity raised it.

“There's a pull, like a kite string,” she said, marveling at the bright jolts. Lightning, in the palm of her hand …

“Sofe—” Bram said. The starched white curtain had burst into flame, and the bulkhead, where the cord of power cut through it, was smoking.

She had to get up on deck before the whole ship burst into flame.

“Ferret!” She turned halfway so Verena could pry the panicked animal free, then made for the upper decks at a run. The bolt of power came along with her, like a string dangling from the sky. It spread down her hand to her wrist, a jagged, flickering sleeve. The skin of her arm tingled, heating up. The muscles of her forearm prickled, as though they'd been asleep.

Find us
Temperance,
Outlander,
a voice crisped into her ear.
We'll give thee thy heart's desire.

“Shut up!” She made it to the upper hatch without cutting the ship in half. As she reached for the handle of the hatch, there was a surge of white sparks; the boards blew to splinters.

She burst onto the deck into a torrent of chilly rain. The sleeve of electrical energy jolted on her skin, fizzing against the raindrops. The power snaked down to her elbow, stretching up beyond her fingertips into the sky. It reminded her, again, of a kite string. One of the ship's booms passed through the bolt and it sliced the ropes and sails as neatly as a saw, leaving a burn mark on the spar itself.

Sophie ducked as the boom swung. The ship heaved violently and the sail flapped, untethered, slack and useless, its bottom edge crisping and sparking before rain doused it. Her electrified hand set the water on the deck rail to steaming.

Despite the chaos of the storm, she heard shouts of dismay from the crew. Above that, Parrish shouted orders.

She hurled herself at the port rail, holding her arm up, trying to keep the lightning clear of the rigging.

The greatest boom yet of thunder accompanied a strobe-burst of electrical activity from above. Spots swam in front of her, coalescing into a shape: an octopus?

Okay,
she thought,
what are my options?
She couldn't work her way aft without cutting more ropes, more sails. What if this unnatural bolt of energy hit a crew member?