The Reader (9 page)

“Our two ships against hers. If we combine forces in our search for the Trove, we can't lose.”

“I wouldn't bet on that.” Captain Reed drummed his fingers on the table. “Where is she now?”

“Oxscini.”

“The old king of Liccaro hid his treasure on another island?”

“No. I believe she's hunting down a traitor.”

Reed shook his head.
She
didn't tolerate betrayals. If she knew one of her crew had betrayed her secrets to Dimarion, it wouldn't be long before she found him. He shuddered, thinking of funeral pyres burning on the surface of the water, of red lights in the deep.

“Where's the Trove, then?”

“I don't know for sure. But I hear the first clue is in Jahara.”

Reed laughed and sat back, eyeing the gold hulk of the
Crux
. Jahara was too far north for such a slow ship like the
Crux
to get to before the
Black Beauty
, even if she was making a detour to Oxscini.

Dimarion leaned forward. “She won't be expecting me to partner with you, not with our . . . complicated history.” When Reed hesitated, he continued, “Think of what a story it will make: the three best ships in Kelanna engaged in a race for the Trove of the King! No matter who prevails, they'll continue to tell that story long after you die and your body returns to the water.”

“The Trove's most likely buried somewhere in Liccaro, though.” Captain Reed shook his head. “That means tanglin' with Serakeen, if we don't get caught in the crossfire between Oxscini and Everica first.”

“Don't you fly the flags of an Oxscinian privateer?” When Reed nodded, Dimarion continued. “I do the same for Everica. They'll let us pass unmolested, if they know what's good for them. As for Serakeen.” The captain of the
Crux
stood, and the deck seemed to bend beneath his weight as he crossed to the rail. “That man is a discredit to all our kind. How long has it
been this way? Kings and queens can squabble for land, but no self-respecting outlaw says he
owns
the sea.”

“Lack of self-respect don't make him less of a threat.”

“Pah. Even the Scourge of the East would think twice about engaging both the
Crux
and the
Current
. He might even take out the
Beauty
and rid us of the competition.”

Reed frowned. They might have been enemies, but the thought of a world without the
Beauty
in it made the seas seem a bit smaller, a little less grand.

Reed joined Dimarion at the rail. Though he was tall and tough as nails, he seemed almost fragile compared to the captain of the
Crux
.

For a moment, they both studied the stunning blue sea.

Captain Reed rubbed the sun-browned circle of skin at his wrist, the only empty patch of skin on his left arm. In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence. But one day, even his tattoos would rot away—the images of horned whales, beautiful women, disappearing islands—and nothing would be left of him but the whispered legends of things he'd done.

He looked across the ship. His crew appeared busy swabbing decks and picking oakum, but their gazes kept drifting toward the quarterdeck. Harison, Meeks, Aly. Sailors who'd stuck with him for the past five years, after . . . well, after what had happened. Men and women who depended on him to keep them alive in legend even after they were gone.

“I'll tell you where to find the clue and we'll rendezvous in Jahara as allies and equals,” Dimarion said.

Captain Reed counted to eight. He liked the number, how it cut when he said it, like biting off a piece of apple. He liked the length of time it took to count to eight, always the perfect amount of time to make a decision or take aim. He never missed when he counted to eight. It was a good number.

On the main deck, the mate waited at the rail, his dead eyes seeing everything. With his keen sense of the ship, the old man was probably listening to every word they said. Under Reed's scrutiny, he nodded, just once.

Reed played an eight-beat tattoo on the gunwale with the heels of his hands. This was what he needed. Danger. Adventure. Something to be remembered by. Because in Kelanna, if they didn't keep telling your story after you died, you might as well never have lived at all.

“For treasure and glory,” he said, extending his hand.

Dimarion took it, grinning like a predator who knows its prey has been cornered. “With a little bloodshed thrown in for interest.”

T
o Sefia's relief, they hadn't come across any more men on the way back to Hatchet's camp, but she kept them off the trail and covered their tracks all the same. They breathed quietly and didn't speak.

The men had deserted their camp, but there were plenty of signs of their passage: upturned earth, broken twigs, crushed leaves. The crate was gone, and where it had lain were the remains of a funeral pyre. White ash and charred cinders, with bits of blackened metal and chips of bone protruding from the ruin.

Sefia skirted the clearing while the boy stood beside the ashes, staring at the smoking mound as if he couldn't quite understand what it was.

“There's nothing we can use,” she said after a few minutes, “but I found their trail. Are you sure you want to do this?”

The boy nodded. The movement of his hair sent a whiff of foul odor in her direction. Sefia wrinkled her nose and tried not to cough. “Fine. But . . . look at you.” She gestured at his torn pants, the dirt and straw embedded in his sandy blond hair, the mud—or worse—that hadn't been washed away by the rain. “Get yourself together.”

He looked down at his ripped clothes, picked at one of his scabs, then looked up at her again.

She moistened a cloth with water from her canteen and tossed it to him. “I'll steal you some clothes and shoes next chance I get. Just get cleaned up, will you?”

As they walked, the boy dabbed at his cuts with the wet rag, picked bits of straw out of his hair, and ran his fingers through the tangles. He even stopped downstream at their next water crossing to rinse off in the creek.

At one point during the evening, Sefia found another, narrower trail. She lifted her face to the wind and sniffed deeply. “Get undercover,” she said, and disappeared into the brush.

By the time Sefia returned with a bundle of clothing, the boy had curled up between the roots of a banyan tree to wait. “I don't know how much of it will fit,” she said, thrusting the clothing at him, “but some of it's got to.”

She turned her back as the boy abruptly pulled off his pants. When he was done changing, she made him bury his old clothes. The boots she'd found were a little large, the pants a little short, but the shirt was broad enough for his shoulders, and at least the garments were clean and whole. He smiled, barely, and plucked tentatively at his new clothing.

Sefia looked him over critically, but he didn't look half-bad. “Could be worse,” she said grudgingly.

But when he grinned at her, she turned her back again and stalked away. After a year on her own, it was strange to be traveling with someone again, to have someone
be there
at all. Strange, and comforting, and dangerous.

She'd lost everyone she'd ever cared about. If she didn't stop herself, she'd end up caring about this boy too.

And she knew if that happened, she'd lose him.

• • •

A
fter a wary week of circling, watching for signs of an ambush, Sefia realized that the men had spent a few days rooting around the forest, leaving some trails that struck out among the trees at awkward angles only to reappear a few hundred feet away, but they hadn't mounted any real search for the boy. Maybe they'd been scared, like the rifleman and his friend, not wanting to be out in unfamiliar territory with the boy on the loose. Maybe they were afraid of retribution.

From the look of their footprints, one small group had headed west in the direction Sefia and the boy had gone. But when she saw the tracks of the group rejoin the others, she knew she'd done all right covering their trail. After that, the men had continued marching north, and Sefia and the boy followed them.

This part of Oxscini was filled with tall elegant trees with leaves the size of their fists, and there was nothing but air between the canopy and the ferns on the jungle floor. There were birds too: red- and yellow-breasted, blue-winged, with long
teardrop tails or orange feathers like lace cuffs around their necks. They dipped and flitted, chirping, making the little pointy sounds of small birds. Sometimes Sefia would stop in the middle of the path to look up and watch them flickering between the tree trunks, and the boy would pause by her side, looking too.

To keep him from being useless, she taught him the survival skills Nin had taught her: how to spot signs of prey in the undergrowth, how to stalk game, how to shoot.

The first time Sefia let him handle the bow, they used trees for targets. She showed him how to creep soundlessly forward, knees to the ground; pushing the bow out in front of her to minimize her movement, she took aim.

But she never saw trees. She saw killers. A woman in black with ugly blue eyes and a curved blade. A faceless man with a voice like ice.

Answers. Redemption. Revenge.

She released the arrow, and the tree shuddered when it struck, its metal point buried in the bark.

Sefia flexed her fingers and gave the bow to the boy.

He nodded and took it carefully, running his fingertips over the heartwood, testing the strength of the string. Then, without further coaxing, he mimicked her steps perfectly, and crouching low, nocked an arrow, drew back, fired.

He missed.

The boy looked at her and shrugged, the bow limp in his hands.

“Eh,” she said. “You'll do better next time.” Pushing her way through the saplings and fallen branches, she found the
arrow thirty yards into the trees, its red fletches bright against the mottled green understory. When she drew it out, there was a wood quail pinned to the other end, shot through the skull.

Sefia pivoted slowly. The boy stood beside her, looking shocked. “Have you done this before?” she asked.

He shook his head.

She wasn't surprised to discover he could also handle a knife with ease. He could turn anything—a stick, a handful of mud, a shred of clothing—into a weapon. He was slower with the skinning and dressing, the cooking, the fire starting, and even with the stealing, as they got him better-fitting clothes and a blanket of his own. But he used a bow like he'd been doing it for years, and soon he was throwing knives farther and more accurately than she. Any technique he could use in a fight, he absorbed like a sponge.

But Sefia wasn't afraid of him. She would watch the way his head went back with surprise when he killed something—a fly with the tip of a knife, a fish with an arrow—and how he took the greatest care when approaching his kills or retrieving his weapons. He would hang his head and cradle the fly or the fish in his long hands. If he could have said he was sorry, she was sure he would have.

Still—and it was so quick that she had to be looking for it in order to see it—just as he flung the knife or released the arrow, he smiled, and it wasn't the tender hesitant smile she had come to know, but the smile of a wild thing, starving, slack-jawed, with a desire to kill in its eyes.

As the days passed they began to develop their own way of communicating. Soon all it took was a quick gesture for him
to understand that she was searching for a place to camp. Or another few hand motions to show that the men they were tracking had stopped at this very spot the night before.

Sometimes he would mime the shooting of a bow and slip soundlessly away into the forest, and she would know he'd spotted quarry between the tree trunks. She'd continue walking, and fifteen minutes or half an hour later, he'd appear by her side again, with a quail or a pheasant dangling from his hand.

One time, as Sefia dressed a kill and set it on a spit over the fire, she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “You need a name.”

The boy looked up at her. There were dark flecks in his bronzy eyes, but they were only visible when you were close to him like this. He seemed wary, but expectant.

“I have to call you
something
.” She prodded the coals with the tip of a stick. “You can't just
not
have a name.”

Sefia examined him for a long moment. He was peering at his hands and, with the pads of his fingers, touching each one of his scars. Every so often he would frown, as if he were trying to remember how he'd gotten them. But when he looked up at her again, his expression had not changed, and she knew he hadn't remembered.

“Archer,” she said. “Your name's going to be Archer.”

Archer smiled and pointed to the scar at his neck. His sign for himself.

Sefia tried not to smile.

By the time they tracked Hatchet to the base of the Kambali Mountains in northern Oxscini, after two weeks on the trail together, they had developed an informal partnership.
Archer watched for game; Sefia watched for tracks. He hunted and fetched water; she cooked. Sefia set up camp; Archer packed it away in the morning. She spoke; he listened. The only thing they didn't share was the pack, which Sefia insisted on carrying herself, though every morning Archer offered to carry it for her.

One night, they camped inside a small cave. Formed long ago by the collapse of two rock pillars, the rubble had created a little enclosure, barely big enough for two people, hidden by a tree perched at its entrance. It was one of those high, out-of-the-way places Sefia liked, one of the few places where she felt safe enough to sleep on the ground. The other side of the cave looked out over a waterfall cutting through the forest, with the rushing and crashing of the water tumbling over the bedrock.

Neither Sefia nor Archer could sleep. The cave was so narrow they nearly brushed shoulders as they lay on their stomachs, chins propped up in their hands, staring out over the waterfall into the star-dashed sky. But they didn't touch.

“It's my birthday,” she said quietly. “I turned sixteen today.”

Archer smiled at her, but as soon as he saw her face, his expression changed. He touched his temple, asking what was wrong.

She looked away. “Did you have birthday parties, before all this?”

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He tapped his throat a few times and shrugged.

“I've never been to a party. My parents never let me have one. They didn't even let me have friends.” She paused,
thinking of their lonely house on top of the hill, her basement bedroom, her parents' insular lives. “Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, growing up normal.”

Archer shrugged again.

For a second, she closed her eyes. A real birthday party. There would be bright paper lanterns and streamers cascading from the branches of trees thick with summer fruit, and below, on picnic tables covered with colorful cloths, all her favorite things to eat: pear salads, roast duck with crispy red skin, dinner rolls with oozing pads of cinnamon butter, and little white buns with sugary decorations and sour lemon curd centers served on delicate saucers with silver forks. There would be minstrels and a band, and embarrassing stories told by her parents and her oldest friends—one story for each year of her life—and on a wooden platform there would be dancing: couples kicking up their heels and spinning 'round and 'round like dandelion fluff, people laughing and the music swirling in between them. She'd have catty friends who whispered about her at the edge of the dance floor, and baby cousins who danced on her shoes, and some boy who'd never spoken to her before would ask her to dance, his sweaty hands at the small of her back, his face tense and nervous. Maybe, since she was sixteen, there would even be a kiss.

But this was not her life. It had never been her life, and after what had happened to her father, to Nin, it never would be. Her life was solitary, carried around on her back with all that she had of the people she loved.

Answers. Redemption. Revenge.

When Sefia opened her eyes again, Archer was watching her. She unclenched her fingers. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

But Archer only smiled and handed her a long green feather. It had a magenta rachis down the center with soft green vanes that shimmered yellow and purple and blue depending on how you turned it.

She twirled the feather between her thumb and forefinger. It cut the air. “Where'd you get this?”

He flattened his hand and waved it this way and that, as if mimicking the movements of a feather falling from the sky.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded.

Sefia ran the feather across her cheek, feeling its softness. The first birthday present she had gotten in six years, since her father was killed.

She was suddenly aware of how close they were. She could feel Archer stretched out beside her, his shoulders and elbows and feet, the quiet calm of his breathing.

She sat up abruptly and wrapped her arms around her knees. “What do you think the stars mean?” she asked, babbling in her discomfort. “There's so many. I think they must mean something. Sometimes I lie here and think that if only I could understand what the stars mean, I'd understand why things happen. Why people do the things they do. I mean, what they did to you . . . What makes people so cruel? Or . . .” She was silent for a long while, looking up into the night.