I lay down beside her again, biting my lip. “Sleep,” I told her uncomprehending face. “Sleep. It’ll get better, as soon as you tell me the truth.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I SLEPT BADLY after that, which made me crabby the next morning. Lynn herself seemed fine as we ate breakfast in our cabin, chatting breezily while I pushed my porridge around and around the bowl. She probably noticed my black mood, but if so, she didn’t mention it. She talked about the news that Jess had brought us, and Kilroy’s aching hip, and the watch schedule for the next seven days. Then she grimaced, as if remembering something, and tugged at one of the longer locks of her hair.
“I’m going to need it cut again soon,” she said.
I grunted over the top of my cider cup. “You don’t need to keep it that short. You’re not a convict.”
“We’ve been over this a million times. I keep it short because I like it that way.”
“Whatever. I still don’t understand it.”
I expected her to snap at me, and truth be told, I kind of wanted her to. But instead, she glanced at the wall, her expression one of fierce concentration.
“Let’s say,” she began slowly, “let’s say that hypothetically—I mean purely, totally hypothetically—let’s say that once upon a time, someone made you wear your hair long. Wouldn’t you want to cut it as soon as you got the chance?”
I pictured Lynn—Ariadne—in full court dress, with billowing skirts and hair that hung past her waist. I didn’t like the image as much as I would have expected. It didn’t seem like her, somehow.
“I guess,” I hedged. “Depends who made me wear it long before.”
What I had in mind was an overprotective father who wanted his only daughter to look like a girl. But that didn’t seem to be it, judging from the way that she was fidgeting.
“Well, let’s say,” Lynn began again, “and this is all completely hypothetical, remember . . . let’s say it was someone who liked to grab it.”
“Grab what?”
“Your hair. My hair. Long hair. Whatever.”
I can’t be sure, but I think I gawked. “Who used to grab you by your hair?”
She held her hands up defensively. “We’re talking hypothetically, remember? Purely hypothetically. You do know the meaning of the word, right?”
“Of course,” I said haughtily, hoping that she wasn’t about to ask me to define it.
“Hypothetically. As in, ‘Let’s say, hypothetically, that I was raised by baboons.’”
I was completely lost. “What does this have to do with your hair?”
She clutched her head and made a strangled noise. “If, and I say if, someone used to drag you around by the hair . . .”
“Then I guess maybe I’d wear my hair short, yeah.”
“There. You see? That’s all I was looking for.”
She took a fierce swig from her cider cup, and then fiddled with the hem of her tunic, not looking me in the face. Bewildered, I tried to sort through what she had said. If someone used to drag Lynn around—hypothetical, my arse—then the culprit was probably Gerard. Not a nice idea, but not so terribly surprising, from what I knew of the man. Nothing to be ashamed of, either, so why couldn’t she admit it out loud?
I set my own cup down with a clink. It was time.
“Lynn,” I said. “Tell me your name.”
She raised her head, and then an eyebrow. “It’s Lynn. If you don’t know that by now, then there isn’t much hope for you.”
“I mean, your real name.”
“Also Lynn.”
I hissed, frustrated. “Your birth name, then.”
Lynn set down her empty bowl, placed her empty cup in it, rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and said two words, slowly and distinctly. “Stop it.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘stop it,’ and I said it very clearly. Hopefully, this is where you give in and back off. You never used to snoop. I liked it better that way.”
“It’s been more than a year. I’ve done my best, but I’m sick of hints and hypotheticals. Let’s get it over with.”
She waved an impatient hand. “Mistress—”
“Don’t call me that when we’re arguing.”
“Dickhead, then. Why are you so obsessed with my past? Everybody has one, and mine is no more interesting than Corto’s or Regon’s. You know that Regon had a twin brother who died of five-day fever when they were nine?”
“Yes,” I lied sullenly.
“Regon had the fever too. It went straight to his balls. He can get it up, with some planning and some effort, but he can’t get a girl pregnant. Now that’s a story. Much more interesting than anything you’ll hear from me.”
It was new information, and it distracted me for a second. So that was why women fought over Regon at every brothel. But I shook my head and refocused. “Stop changing the subject. I want to know who you are.”
She sighed. “I’m yours, you dozy bint. Does anything else have to matter?”
“Yes, actually, it does. Because it matters to you. Don’t try to deny it. And I can’t help you to cope with whatever happened until I have the whole story. And helping you with it is my job. So you’re going to tell me, Lynn. Right now.”
Up until then, she had been annoyed, nothing more. At that point, her face shut down, like a door slamming shut.
“You don’t tell me what to do,” she said quietly.
“I just asked—”
“You didn’t ask, you demanded. And you don’t do that. You have no right.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, getting ruffled. “You’re the one who insists on dressing like a slave and acting like a concubine. I didn’t ask you to call me ‘Mistress’ or brand my damn mark into your arm.”
“Exactly. You didn’t ask. I decided, Darren—me. And if I want you to tell me what to do, then I’ll bloody well tell you what I want you to tell me to do.”
I flung up my hands in despair. “Argh!”
“Oh, poor baby. Does it give you a rash when I think for myself?” She stalked over to the sea chest and pulled out a fistful of maps with shaking hands. “Get out of here already. It’s past four bells, and I’ve got better things to do than listen to you sulk.”
JESS’S FACE HAD a look of faint disbelief.
“Wait, hang on, let me get this straight,” she said. “Lynn accused you of sulking . . .”
“Yes.”
“And that made you mad . . .”
“Yes.”
“So you decided to come up on deck and sulk some more?”
Grumpily, I tossed a few biscuit crumbs over the side. The water swirled as fish snapped them up. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“No, you wouldn’t, would you?”
It was three hours since our spat, and Lynn still hadn’t emerged from the cabin. I had spent the time lurking around the rest of the ship, inspecting things that didn’t need inspecting and yelling at sailors that didn’t need to be yelled at. At last, Regon told me in the nicest possible way that I was being a horse’s ass and should take a time out. Which was why I was standing by the gunwale throwing biscuit crumbs to fish and letting my old girlfriend lecture me.
All things considered, I’ve had better afternoons.
“I think she’s made it perfectly clear that she’ll tell you about herself when she’s ready. Why can’t you just wait?”
“Because it’s getting ridiculous. I already know everything that she’s going to say, more or less. What’s she waiting for? Why can’t she just trust me? Haven’t I earned that much by now?”
Jess rolled her eyes and hugged her cloak more tightly around herself. There was a chill in the wind. “Trust can be earned, Darren, but it can’t be owed. You’re just making things worse by demanding it.”
I tossed the rest of the biscuit over the side, more violently than necessary. Why did everyone in my life treat me like a moron or a child? I wanted to stomp away from Jess, but there’s only so much s
tomping away that you can do on the deck of a ship, and I would lose the few shreds of dignity I still possessed if Jess and I ended up chasing each other around and around the mast.
“I’m not asking for much here,” I said through clenched teeth. “She doesn’t have to tell me her life story. All she has to do is to admit that she’s Ariadne of Bain.”
“Has it occurred to you,” she said slowly, “you inestimably stupid person, that maybe Lynn isn’t Ariadne?”
“All the evidence supports it—”
“No, Darren.” She freed a hand from her cloak so that she could tap my chest in emphasis. “You only see the evidence that supports it. Everything else, you ignore.”
I caught the poking finger and pushed it away from me. “What do you mean, everything else?”
“Her scars, for one thing.”
You can’t live on board ship and be shy about your body. Everyone who sailed with me had seen the tracery of white marks on Lynn’s skin, mainly on her back and thighs and belly. Nobody on board paid much attention to them, probably because just about all my sailors were patterned the same way.
I shrugged. “What about her scars? They’re rope burns, old cuts, that kind of thing. I have them too. All sailors do.”
“Ariadne of Bain is not a sailor. She’s an only child, remember?”
This was true. Since Ariadne was her father’s heir, she would have spent her youth at home, studying diplomacy and economics and fiscal procedure and law, sitting on a pile of cushions with a plate of sweetmeats at her elbow. Unlike me, she hadn’t been shoved out to work on the merchant boats as soon as she turned fourteen. Lucky dog. “So she got the scars after she ran away. Gods know how long she was in that fishing town. She must have picked them up there, maybe from working on the skiffs. Or—aw hell, maybe it was her husband . . .”
At that, Jess was forced to take a couple of deep breaths. “Have you looked at those scars?”
“I’ve seen them, of course. I don’t hold a candle up to them and ogle inquisitively. Why would I want to do that?”
“To learn something, you clot. The lines of those scars are broken up.”
“So?”
“So? So? So she got them when she was still growing. Someone beat the holy hell out of her when she was a kid. How does that fit in with your precious theory?”
“Huh,” I said, and then, “Well, there must be a way to explain that.”
Jess threw up her hands. “Why? Why does there have to be a way to explain that? Because Darren of fucking Torasan likes the idea that her lover is royalty, so she won’t bloody well let it go. Drop the theory and start from the facts. She’s badly scarred. She’s scrawny—probably didn’t get enough to eat when she was little. She’s a schemer and a survivor, and has nightmares, and she pushes you around unmercifully, because she’s scared numb at the thought of someone else controlling her. Are you starting to get a picture here?”
Being told off makes me surly. I just grunted, though my stomach was beginning to sour.
“She’s no pampered little princess, Darren. Someone messed with her. I don’t know how or who or when or why, but that much is obvious. And she’s just as much a commoner as I am. You think a noblewoman knows how to take a wine stain out of a shirt? You think a noblewoman would be happy to spend her life blacking your boots and gutting your fish? I’m sorry if all this offends your aristocratic tastes, but—”
“Now that’s not fair,” I snapped. “I never thought less of you because you were a peasant. I didn’t give a damn!”
“You forgave me for it. I could see you making a physical effort to forgive me for it, every time I wiped my mouth on my sleeve or made garlic soup for supper. Now you’ve got a girl you like, you’ve convinced yourself that she’s a blueblood like you, and your inner snob quivers ecstatically every time you look at her and think, Ariadne.”
“It has nothing to do with what I want,” I floundered. “It’s about what I know. Lynn didn’t learn to read in the village where I found her, Jess. The other people who lived there had no idea that there was such a thing as writing. Or soap. Gods on high, I can still smell the place.”
“Watch it, Darren,” Jess warned me, “just watch it. Take a breath and pause before you say something that you’ll regret later. I was chatting with Lynn last night . . .”
“Were you?” I asked grimly. “Sounds cosy.”
“Stop it, you hopeless letch. We all know I’m not her type. The point is, I asked her whether she missed anything about home.”
I was bristling. “I’m sure she does. That village was terribly scenic. The piles of rotting whitebait; the dung-filled hovels; the hordes of raiders, their armour glinting faintly in the summer sun . . .”
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to hurt you. Darren, she said that she misses her sister.”
Usually, when someone gives me surprising news, I pretend that I already knew. But this particular revelation shocked me so much that I forgot to do any pretending. “But . . . Ariadne doesn’t have any siblings.”
“Finally sinking in, is it?”
It took a while. “Lynn has a sister.”
“Yes, Darren.”
A small black seabird skimmed the surface of the ocean nearby—a storm petrel, I registered absently. Its cry seemed very loud.
I ran my tongue along my teeth. “Her sister . . . her sister wasn’t one of the kids that we picked up in her village, was it? None of them looked anything like her.”
“I asked her about that. She said no, her sister was somewhere else, and then she clammed up. So I didn’t push it.”
I snorted. “Well, that was bloody inconsiderate of you, wasn’t it? It’s going to take me forever to dig the truth out of her now.”
“She was crying when she told me,” Jess said, in a frosty tone. “So I don’t think this is really the time to dig.”
“She never cries in front of me,” I muttered, parenthetically, and then my train of thought veered off in a new direction. “Hang on. Did you imply back there that Lynn is your type?”
Jess’s expression, at that second, suggested that she was about to attack me with her bare hands, but instead she just stalked away aft, making strangled noises. By the time she got back, she was more or less under control.
“Your brain,” she informed me, “is composed entirely of soft unripened cheese. So it’s in a spirit of charity that I tell you this. Every single person in Lynn’s village got killed or abducted by armed thugs—every last one of them, except for Lynn and the handful you rescued along with her. And we both know what happens to young women who get taken by soldiers. If Lynn’s sister was in that village, then she’s probably a camp whore, if she’s still alive.”
I was going limp. “But if that’s true, then why hasn’t Lynn said anything to me? Maybe I can find her, maybe I can help. Besides, why is Lynn talking about this to you and not to me?
“Because you’re so in love with your own stupid fantasy about who Lynn is and where she comes from. Do you think you’re being subtle about that? It practically radiates out of you. Lynn knows damn well that you’re not ready for the truth. You prefer your own answers.”
My brain was sparking all over with frustration. “Well, if you’re so in tune with Lynn’s emotions, why don’t you ask her? Just ask her flat out whether she’s Ariadne of Bain.”
Jess’s grey eyes burned into mine. “I did.”
Ten seconds of silence, then I found my voice. “And what did she say?”
Jess gave a tiny shrug. “She said, ‘No.’ ”
LYNN DIDN’T COOK that night. The new casks of salt beef turned out to be maggot-ridden, so the men chewed cold biscuit and looked gloomy. To make it up to them, I had a barrel of ale hauled up to the deck. Before long, they were staggering about with drink-misted eyes, restored to grinning, back-slapping cheer. It wasn’t particularly good for ship’s discipline or for my mood, but I’ll take drunken sailors over mutinous sailors most days. To keep casualties to a mi
nimum, I had a lantern lit, and seated myself on a crate by the helm to keep a watchful eye on the festivities.
As I watched, I fretted. Should I tell Lynn that I knew about her sister? Offer to go looking for her? But if that was what Lynn wanted, surely she would have said something earlier. No, the best approach was probably for me to throw myself on Lynn’s mercy and swear up and down that I wouldn’t ask more questions for the next million years. Maybe I’d have to buy her some presents as well. I wondered if peasant girls liked getting flowers.
Shell Game Page 15