On the Isle of Sound and Wonder (5 page)

“Good evening, Your Grace,” murmured Torsione.

Bastiano bowed his head slightly. “Good night, Your Highness.”

“Good night, Father.” Ferran lowered his gaze ruefully to the empty plate before him.
Of course,
he thought.
Not a chance. I should have brought it up right away. So stupid of me!

The king was gone in a moment, and Bastiano let out his breath in a soft whistle, reaching for his nephew with one arm to hug him closer. “Don’t let it bother you, Ferr. He’s tired from the trip, that’s all.”

Ferran looked up at his uncle grimly. “I don’t know what I’ve done to make him so cross with me,” he admitted, “except that I’m just an enormous waste of his time. Now that Coralina’s married and gone, I’m the only one left, and he hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” soothed Bastiano. “He really doesn’t. He’s always loved you, you’re his son. His only son. But he’s going through something, all right. Lina is his only daughter, too. And the eldest child. He just isn’t ready to talk about it, whatever it is.”

“Much like he still isn’t ready to talk about Arthens,” growled Torsione, suddenly surly. He slouched back down into his chair and put his boots up on the empty chair beside him. Reaching into his suit jacket, he pulled out a slender, bone-carved pipe—a trophy from his travels—and set about preparing for a smoke.

“You shouldn’t smoke that awful stuff,” Bastiano frowned. “It’s terrible. I know it smells nice while you’re smoking it, but it’s really bad for your lungs.”

Torsione looked up and met the worried gaze Bastiano had fixed on him. Without blinking, he proceeded to light the pipe and give several insistent puffs, his expression challenging. Bastiano continued frowning, but said nothing.

“What about Arthens?” prompted Ferran, looking at the duke.

“The same thing, over and over again,” replied Torsione, with a shake of his head. “They’re cross about your sister, still, you know. Rightfully, too.” He blew a sleek stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “The Earl of Dolente can’t live it down that the princess refused him.”

“But she was already promised to Khalil!” Ferran liked the Tunitzan prince his sister had wed. Khalil was bright-eyed and quick to make jokes, putting everyone at ease when they’d first arrived. He’d given everyone gifts of strange and exotic birds upon their arrival, but had ordered the birds released at the end of the rehearsal dinner to signify the start of the festivities, much to Ferran’s disappointment.

“Well, we know that,” the duke went on, with a nod. “But they didn’t. And it doesn’t change the fact that the Earl’s the Arthenian golden boy, and is well-in with the Greccian king. Everyone’s quite upset. Easily insulted, the lot of them.”

“Pity they haven’t another immediate heir. Then we could patch things up,” mused Bastiano, sitting down again and reaching for his brandy.

“Already thought of that.” Torsione puffed a little plume of smoke away from the king’s brother. “Although nobody jumps to mind, I wouldn’t put it past them—any of them—to try and weasel a marriage pact out of us. Especially since Alanno’s being so . . . misanthropic.”

Ferran frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Misanthropic,” said Torsione more clearly. “It means begrudging. Antisocial. Hermetic.”

“I know what misanthropic means,” interrupted Ferran. “What do you mean about another heir?”

The duke leaned his head against the high back of the chair and bit daintily on the stem of his pipe, bemusement sneaking into the wrinkled corners of his eyes. “Why, Your Highness . . . you’re the next eligible royal bachelor, are you not?”

Ferran turned red as his uncle began to laugh heartily. “And that makes me what, pray tell?” demanded Bastiano, grinning from ear to ear.

Torsione cut his eyes sideways to Bastiano. “A hedonist,” he purred, without letting his own smile crack too wide.

Bastiano guffawed at this, burying his head in his hands and crowing with laughter. Ferran pulled a face; he’d never been in a bawdy tavern, but sometimes the way these two talked to one another was downright unseemly.

“Good night, my lords,” he muttered, sliding his chair in neatly to the table’s edge and stalking toward the door.

“Nighty night, Ferr!” giggled Bastiano, still shaking his head at Torsione, who waved his brandy snifter aloft in farewell.

We’re almost home
, the prince reminded himself, gritting his teeth as he made his way back to his room.
I won’t have to put up with them much longer. I can go back to my library and read for a whole week and ignore everyone. The whole library all to myself . . . it’ll be like a vacation on a remote island, with no Uncle Bas, no Tor, and no Father glaring at me across the dinner table. Just me and my books. And maybe in another week or two, I can get Father alone and tell him I want to go to university.

Ferran climbed into bed with the only book he’d been allowed to bring with him, a tattered copy of
Sinbad’s Roc
, and tried to forget about the disappointment in his father’s gaze. He dozed off a few chapters in, the book still propped in his hands.

He awoke to the harsh banging of the ship’s warning bell.

Ferran sat up.
What time is it?
A scattered pounding of running feet sounded down the corridor. There was a knock on his cabin door.

“Yes?” Ferran said, sliding out of bed and reaching for his dressing gown.

The door opened and his father’s advisor, Gonzo, waddled into the room, his brass and steel legs hissing and sighing on pistons unseen. “Your Highness,” he hummed, his shining head inclined, expression as blank as ever. “They have asked us to dress and descend to the lower decks for life preservers. Also, it seems they’ve prepared tea for us.”

Ferran stopped and stared at Gonzo. “What do you mean, life preservers?”

Gonzo bowed slightly. “It appears there is a very large storm heading for us rather quickly, and the captain would rather not take any chances with our safety. Upstanding sort of fellow. Shall we?”

Ferran moved to the wardrobe and began pulling on trousers, a shirt, and jacket. “We sailed through a storm on the way down to Tunitz, and they didn’t wake us up for life preservers,” he muttered.

“Yes, Your Highness, I recall that instance. However, I am led to believe that this immediate storm is a considerable threat to this aeronautical craft, and that we should prepare ourselves for an uncomfortable night.” Gonzo paused and tipped his head, his round, blank eyes glowing a soft golden-green. “But they’ve made tea. Isn’t that thoughtful?”

Ferran exhaled sharply and slid his feet into his boots. “Yes, Gonzo,” he said, “very thoughtful.” The mech had always had an unusually optimistic outlook, despite his neutral expression, and Ferran was glad that it was Gonzo who’d come to get him this time, and not Truffo again. This time of night meant Truffo was likely drinking as much wine as he could get his hands on.

The ship shuddered all around them, vibrations permeating the walls and floor of the cabin. There was a distant, groaning creak of metal and wood, and outside the porthole, a flash of lightning illuminated the rolling gray clouds beyond.

“Perhaps we should hurry, Prince Ferran,” suggested the mechanical.

“All right,” Ferran murmured, feeling the first glimmer of fear creep into his bowels. Turbulence was certainly not his favorite part of air travel. “I hope it’s not as bad as they say.”

“Indeed,” answered Gonzo, closing the door behind them as they left the room. “It may be unpleasant, but not too much so. After all, there’s tea.”

A great crash of thunder shattered the silence of sleep and jolted Mira awake. Gasping for air, she twisted against the canvas of her hammock and looked to the window. The world beyond the treehouse was still dark, but she saw a glimmer of lightning which illuminated the churning clouds above the canopy of trees. She put a hand to her chest, her heart racing, and frowned. Storms were nothing new to her—she always slept more soundly when it rained—but there was something distinctly strange about the thunder that had woken her up. Forcing herself to breathe more deeply, she swung out of the hammock and went to the door.

A cold front had swept through. The wind through the trees was harsh, like hands combing unruly hair, yanking forcefully on branches and boughs and making the treehouse shudder in spite of Mira’s careful architecture. The little pinwheel made of leaves spun wildly on its axle, and the chimes of sea glass and shells hanging from the ceiling rang and swung helplessly in the breeze. The little house shivered and creaked around her, but Mira had spent years tying it off and supporting it with extra ropes, extra beams, extra netting. It was her home, and she had built it to last.

Another heart-stopping peal of thunder thumped against her very bones, and Mira grabbed for the tree trunk which grew up through the middle of the room. She narrowed her eyes toward the patches of sky visible beyond her windows. Although the wind blew, and the thunder was quite close, the rain had not yet come.

This is no ordinary storm
.

Mira reached for the thatched grass cloak that hung by the hammock and the diver’s goggles from the basket on the floor. Then she lifted the spear from its leaning place in the corner and stepped out of the little elevated hut, putting one foot into a rope sling and wrapping her other leg around the upper part of the rope. The pulleys squeaked and the rope began to unwind, lowering her to the ground. She untangled herself from the rope and it rose upward into the tree line again, vanishing from sight in the darkness of the pre-dawn forest.

Mira adjusted the fit of the goggles against the bridge of her nose, hefted her spear, and began to run. The diver’s glasses were one of the thousand and one things she had recovered from the sea and learned to use for the better; they helped her see in the dark and underwater, depending on which knob she turned. They were her prized possession.

She ran surefooted through the trees and underbrush, heading east. The night-birds and quiet animals of the early hours were nowhere to be heard or seen—another hint that something unusual was taking place.

Lightning flashed a brilliant green through the trees ahead, and Mira slowed, crouching lower as she pressed forward through the bushes and smaller trees. Ahead, a rocky sort of cliff overlooked the lower beach of the eastern shore of the island. On the uppermost rock of that cliff stood a tall, dark shape, facing the sea.

Her father.

Mira found a sturdy young tree near the timberline and hitched herself up into the lower branches to see him better without leaving the cover of the shadows.

Mere yards away, Dante stood close to the edge of the cliff, his hands lowered at his sides, palms open toward the sea below and before him. The moon was gone, but the world seemed lit by strange glimmers of blue and green and silver that danced over the waves and through the clouds, darting like fireflies. The clouds boiled before him, churning and folding in and out of themselves. Lightning cut and splintered through the thickening thunderheads, suddenly outlining a large, dark shape within them that turned and pitched violently.

A ship!

Mira’s eyes went wide behind the diver’s glasses. She had seen drawings. She had read descriptions in her father’s books. She had seen wrecks along the ocean’s bottom, scattered along the edges of the island’s deep shorelines, but this was the first real ship she had ever seen in person.

It was incredible. And it was falling apart.

The storm clawed at the vessel like a cat shaking a bird and the ship spun and splintered, struggling to get away from the lightning, from the wind and clouds and rain. It careened lower and lower, the churning waters of the wild ocean below threatening to swallow it whole.

Dante stood, appearing focused and serene as he watched the ship struggle to keep to the air. At his feet lay the long, gnarled stick he carried with him everywhere, a staff decorated with carvings and etchings of arcane symbols. To his right, lying open on a flat rock just behind him, was the book.

Mira watched him inhale deeply, then tip his head back, exhaling slowly and raising his hands a little, like a flower reaching for the warmth of the sun. Lightning flashed again, and the ship’s mast cracked, the sails tearing, alarm lights flashing red in the storm clouds. It began to fall.

Mira’s gaze flicked from the floundering ship as it pitched downward toward the ocean to the great heavy book that lay on the rocks not far from where she crouched in the tree. She could probably get to the book before he saw her. After all this time, it was finally right there in front of her, within reach. She grasped the tree with one clammy hand and her spear with the other.

Take it.
Her own voice in her head was quiet, calm, and collected, despite the pounding of her heart and trembling of her hands.
Take the book. It’ll be easy.

The ship hit the water with a massive splash, a fountain of smoke and flame rising into the storm from the upper decks. The propellers and enormous flight panels shuddered and screeched, and the lights flickered as they met the waves. Mira could almost hear the screams and shouts of the ship’s crew and passengers.