Child of a Hidden Sea (27 page)

Sophie's eyes stuttered off Bram's closed face, and finally she looked at Parrish. “Tell me I'm wrong. Is there a motive in there for killing Gale?”

“It's very nearly a reason to go to war,” Parrish said softly.

“Which kinda brings us back to Yacoura, right?”

He nodded. “It does.”

“Tell us the rest, Sofe,” Bram said.

She did, the words coming more easily now. She showed them her footage of Maray's rathole of an office, complete with the shot of Captain Dracy's precious lantern, and concluding with: “We need to find out if Lais is safe. If so, we need to warn him. Do you guys use homing pigeons, or smoke signals, or what?”

“Mostly or what,” Verena said.

“Meaning magic?”

“Of course.”

“The Tall have an excellent clarionhouse,” Parrish said. “Tonio, go ashore and express the query about the Tiladene, Lais. Inquire after him and indicate concern for his safety.”

“Aye, Cap'n.”

“We have to tell the Fleet about the conspiracy,” Verena said.

“Agreed,” Parrish said, “But we must compose that message with care … We can't openly accuse the Ualtarites without more evidence. We'll have to confine ourselves to knowns.”

“A fact sheet,” Verena said. “Of course.”

“In the meantime, we don't want to wait on warning the young Tiladene when he's in danger.”

“I'll go now,” Tonio said.

“It's up toward the college, isn't it?” Bram said, pushing up from the table.

“Where are you going?” Parrish asked.

“The cartographer's office turned me on to a bunch of old stories about a time before the current era. Noah's ark type stuff … floods, mass extinctions. There's an old woman who's apparently an expert and I'm having tea with her tonight.”

“What about the murder?” Parrish said.

“Sofe's got that in hand,” Bram said. “And the three of you are helping. You don't need my help.”

Sophie gave Parrish a sharp glance. “Do we?”

He threw up his hands.

“Come on, I'll walk you to the deck,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” Bram said, a little coolly, leading the way upward. “Who asked his opinion?”

“I'm guessing he thinks you're a bad brother,” she said, switching to English.

“Captain Tasty?”

“Captain full of himself.”

“You'd say if you wanted help. In fact, I assume you'd rather not have it.”

“Yeah. Sorry to be petty, but I'd rather play at being Holmes than plod along twenty steps behind as your Watson.”

“Don't do that, Sofe. You just put together a decent theory of the crime. There's no reason to think I'd have done any better.”

“Except for your having the giant brain, none at all.” But she felt a rush of relief; they were back on familiar ground. He was going to let go of being mad.

“Seriously, cut it out. You're heading up an official investigation and you're making progress despite having no experience whatsoever.”

“I've had it easy. I've bashed around gathering information from people who—up to now, anyway—seemed all too happy to basically wave their guilt in my face. Maray's a slob. She left that lantern lying out. Not exactly a feat of deductive brilliance.”

“Seeing the diplomat on Erinth, finding the lantern—that was luck. You saw the pattern,” he said. “It's more progress than I'm making on the land mass stuff and where we are. If it turns out the answer's just magic—”

“Pretty profoundly unsatisfying, that?”

“The stars prove we're located where Earth is. You figured that out your first day here without any help.”

“You're trying to make me feel better.”

“What bad brother would do that?”

“You're the bestest brother,” she said, and gave him an impulsive hug. “Look, I'll make up this fact sheet or whatever and you find out your creation myths. We'll give Verena her toys back, figure out what's up with the Dueling Court and get our asses home before the parents report us missing to the FBI.”

“You're done seeking your roots?”

“It's cool here,” she said. “I kind of love it. But homophobic religious fanatics and slavery are taking the shine off it all. And I'm in Internet withdrawal. I actually texted you this afternoon.”

“You gotta stop doing that,” he said.

“I know, right?”

“Listen, about what you said earlier, about needing to know your birth family. I didn't mean to be insensitive.”

She hugged him again. “You're my family. You.”

He pinched a little hank of her hair and tugged it, an old and familiar gesture that meant they were okay again.

“Kirs?” Tonio had been waiting, out of earshot, beside the gangplank. Bram hitched his pack and joined him.

A bell clanged twice, the sound ringing up and down the wharf, and all the rhythms of human bustle changed. Aboard the half-built ships, workers stowed their tools and prepared to make for home. Aproned clerks in the pasty shops began setting steaming, labeled parcels and pails on their counters—meals, Sophie guessed, for people with standing dinner orders. Pubs opened their doors. A few patrol officers took up posts here and there, watching the flow of people with an attitude of amiable goodwill.

Within five minutes it seemed like all of Tallon was walking home, an orderly parade of workers, clumps of uniformed men and women coalescing, chatting, breaking apart to form in other configurations.

As they passed through the crowd, Bram and Tonio stood out. They were obviously not part of the pattern.

Were there island nations where a stranger didn't stick out? Sophie thought of the cities of home, the way you could get lost in them, disappear into anonymity.

“Blackberries,” she murmured.

“Pardon?”

Parrish's voice made her startle; she hadn't realized he was there.

“Invasive species,” she said. “Himalayan blackberries. They took root in the Pacific Northwest, even though it's not their original niche. They've crowded out plants that evolved there over centuries.”

“Like bullfrogs,” he said, and when she looked at him, surprised, he said, “I've been to Erstwhile, remember?”

She was, oddly, pleased that he knew this bit of trivia about home. “Once they're established, you don't even see them. They're part of the landscape. But there must have been a time when they stuck out, when they were exotic.”

“You are extremely different from any woman I've—” As their eyes met, he coughed a little and seemed to lose track of his thought. “You were saying? About the blackberries?”

“Just noticing that Tonio and Bram are conspicuously not … was it Tallmen?”

Her brother and the first mate had climbed up the hilly main street, about two blocks, and the two of them were shaking hands and separating. Tonio was making for a smart brick building to the east.

“No, they're not Tallmen,” Parrish agreed, but he was elsewhere suddenly, his attention drawn to her brother and then—

“What is it?” The entire city had thrown a switch, out of work mode, into relaxation. The hillside, the cheery, tired people greeting each other in the street, lanterns going on in the residential districts in a spreading circle from the wharf as people made it home with their pails of dinner …

But Bram wasn't the only bullfrog. A gray-dressed shadow was following her brother.

“Verena,” Parrish called, voice sharp. He was on his way down the gangplank, moving at a flat-out run.

Three blocks, he's only three blocks ahead,
Sophie thought, hard on his heels.
Parrish is fast, and I could sprint that distance, even with the hill. If not for the crowd …

Now they were on the ground instead of up on deck, they'd lost sight of Bram.

“What is it?” Verena was catching up as they pelted toward town. Her hand was on her sword but she hadn't drawn it.

“Someone's following them.”

The Tall were a helpful people—everyone who saw Parrish coming drew aside, minimizing the jostling as he, Sophie and Verena tried to cut their way through to the uphill artery. The light was going, and the hill was steep.

Bram had reached its crest. For a second Sophie could see him clearly, as he stood tall in a shaft of sunset, his leather backpack and his glasses and around him all the uniformed Tall. He looked like an advertisement for something. It would make a decent portrait.

Sophie flashed on Gale's words.
If you stay in Stormwrack, Sophie, you may bring down worse, and onto your closest kin …

Look back,
she thought fiercely. But the sun would be in his eyes.

“Bram!” she screamed.

Parrish was a hundred yards ahead, closing on the shadow. It would be okay.

“Bram!”

Her brother turned his back on the view of the setting sun and the wharf, vanishing from view.

Parrish hurled himself at the fellow in gray, catching him by his shoulders.

He let go just as fast.

Sophie had just enough time to see that it was John Coine, from Isle of Gold, before the guy … he blurred. There was a hum and Coine was gone, just a lump or a cloud or something, airborne, surging toward and over the hill. Parrish had resumed the chase, running in the direction of Bram had taken. He too was shouting: “Bramwell! Bram!”

He had his hand tucked against his chest.

“He's hurt,” Verena said. “Seas, they've hurt Garland.”

The cloud reappeared, rising over the crest of the hill.

It was bigger, and it had something—

—man-sized something, a Bram-sized something, no, no!—

—at its heart. His leather backpack dangled from the aerial clot for a second before dropping to the street.

A hum came from the shape, and as it continued to rise into the air, Sophie realized she knew what it was. It was wasps, or bees, some kind of flying colony insect. Each of them had a little thread of silk caught in its jaws, a string bound into the bigger knot at the center and they were rising out of reach now and all the homeward-bound Tall were pointing, openmouthed, as the hum of flying insects overrode their conversations.

Parrish was right behind it. He'd leapt to a six-foot-high fence, sprinted along its length and from there bounded to the rooftop of one of the tidy bungalows. He bolted up and over its shingled peak as the cloud of insects flew past. From there, he flung himself to a window ledge on a two-story building.

He launched himself into the air, arms extended, and seemed to catch something solid inside the cloud. The whole shape wobbled, drawn down by his weight, and then he was dangling in midair, from an ankle wrapped in the silky threads.

Bram's ankle.

Sophie pelted after them as the swarm buzzed and struggled, losing altitude, dragged down by the combined weight of the two men. She snatched at Parrish's legs once, missed, leaped again and caught him by both boots, pulling him down. For one instant they all three drifted, as if aloft in a hot air balloon. Something stung the back of her hand and she held on tighter. Then her feet touched down on the cobbles.

“Pull!” she said.

“No,” Parrish said. His voice was tight—the sound of angry wasps was intense here. “Get hold of—I can't…”

She swung her other arm upward, catching his coat, but as their center of gravity shifted, Parrish's grip broke. He fell more or less right onto Sophie.

Verena made one last attempt to catch Bram's dangling foot, but the loss of drag had given the cloud upward momentum when they snapped apart; it rose to an altitude of fifty feet, clearing the highest roofs.

“A net!” Parrish shouted. He had Bram's shoe. “Does anyone have a net?”

“Too late, Kir,” shouted someone. “'E falls from that height…”

“Can't use flame neither,” someone put in.

Now the swarm was a hundred feet up, and moving fast, making for the wharf. Sophie tried to follow the cloud with her eyes, but the setting sun blinded her; she blinked hard, and when she looked again the cloud had vanished.

Parrish rolled off her. There were about twenty dead wasps on his hands, their stingers embedded in the swollen flesh. Angry welts ran from his fingertips to his forearm, criss-crossed by strands of broken silk. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry, Sophie.”

She began to sob.

CHAPTER
18

Sophie had never understood why people thought it was better or somehow more grown up to bite your lips and daub your eyes and apologize for being upset. Stiff upper lips were for the emotionally constipated, as far as she was concerned.

“That's not quite true,” Bram had pointed out once. “You don't blow like an oil well if you're on a climb or a dive and something goes wrong, do you? You chill right out and act to ensure your survival.”

Which was different—she wasn't dangerous! But there was no risk to anyone now, so she proceeded to melt down like a four-year-old with a skinned knee. She sat on the wooden sidewalk clutching Bram's leather backpack, and sobbed so hard her ribs felt like they were cracking.

After a second, Parrish sat beside her, holding his badly stung arm out from his body and struggling for breath … He'd run all the way up the hill and then, in pursuit of Bram, halfway back to the beach, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as he did.

“He's alive,” he managed. “Sophie, they won't kill him.”

“It's a snatch,” Verena agreed. “Kidnap and ransom.”

Through a scrim of tears, she could see Verena standing off to one side, dancing from foot to foot, apparently unsure as to what she should do, giving little embarrassed smiles to the Tallmen toiling up the hill after their day's work.

“I've screwed everything.” Sophie heaved out the words. “Up.”

“The situation is suboptimal,” Parrish said, having picked up the term from Bram, and she cried even harder.