But never ever, not once, did they call her a fool.
A hush fell upon the subjugated hall when Wren had replied, it will never be my place to ask for anything other than to serve.
Voluntary submission fascinated Bellis. She was so used to coercion that consent came as a pleasant surprise. Bellis took this clever girl under her bone-white arm. I have need of clever girls.
In her mind Wren saw her mother and sisters weeping while Bellis’ soldiers rounded up a hundred children. Wren among them. In their eyes a terrible, wordless plea. A hundred lives in her care now. A hundred responsibilities. She remembered as if it were only hours ago, her last sight of the Libro docks from the deck of Sehnsucht, her charges huddled about her in a sea of tears.
And her mother, succumbed to orientis at last, walking into the sea.
Let me be clever tonight, Wren thought to herself.
After the seasoned workers returned to their cells upon the downing of tools, Wren slid down a rusting gutter pipe and padded through the shadows. She reached the watch-house at the last blush of sunlight. One of the foreign guards worked there tonight. A Lyonnian man.
From him she received a ring of keys in exchange for a hurried act of fellatio more marked by his terror at being caught out than by his gratification in the act.
In the end he didn’t climax so much as grow soft with anxiety, for even the few orientis-resistant northerners were caught up in the Queen’s requirement of loyalty and fidelity.
‘Don’t tell her,’ he said as he passed over the keys.
‘Honestly, Gregor,’ Wren said, wiping the vinegar of him from her mouth. ‘Do I look like I have the time to entertain such a complication as the Queen’s wrath?’
His fingers fumbled on the trouser-button. ‘I just feel like I … I can’t, any more? This. My vigour is gone. I can’t even lie with my wife when we are given that dispensation. Helena thinks my affections are elsewhere.’
Wren clucked sympathetically. ‘Your affections are elsewhere. Everyone’s are.’ She glanced meaningfully at the Queen’s tower.
‘It worries me what she does to him. It’s not natural.’
‘No, it’s not. And you know what they say, all unnatural things meet their comeuppance sooner or later. Nature abhors such abominations.’
She prepared to leave, then Gregor said, ‘Wren?’
‘Yes?’
‘Just ask for the keys next time.’
She returned to pat his face. ‘My dear Gregor Tallwater, that would mean I would owe a favour, that I am beholden. A debt is a terrible thing to carry.’ She motioned at his crotch. ‘In this way, our act is an exchange of services as clean and without obligation as possible.’
‘Just bring the keys back. Don’t run away or anything.’
‘Where else can I go? Throw myself into the volcano?’
He made a face, and Wren melted into the stone shadow, leaving the Hillsider in his awkward place.
The shift had swapped over to the night watch, those men happy to read books and talk among themselves without much thought as to what went on behind the locked doors. Wren slipped into the last of the cells, a dry room that had once been occupied by an anchorite in the early century, some reclusive holy person. Unlike the communal cells stacked high with twenty wretches each, this one held a lone man.
A lamp burned in an alcove, a perpetual flame kept alive by petralactose aromas from the deep earth. There were still crumbling frescoes on the walls, saintly faces ringed by haloes. With her breath stilled, she took her place next to the low stone bed and stood over Bellis’ husband.
Riven lay upon the thin straw mattress in a ghostweed doze, gold twilight on his skin only serving to deepen his tattoos into slashes of black. They’d close-cropped his hair and beard, left him no spare flesh to call up the leviathan.
Exhausted, his eyes moved under his lids, as he moved in a dream. How awkwardly put together his face was, deepwater folk and Northman, and something else she could not put her finger on. The long limbs did not quite fit on the short stone slab. The strength in him was undeniable even in sleep, hard-hewn, lain in by years. An uneaten tray of meat beside him. Wren snatched up a mutton-bird leg and gnawed it like a little beast, wiped the grease upon her thigh. Riven did not stir.
A curiosity took her.
‘Let’s see who ignites such dreams.’
She touched his face, said words in a passable Lyonne accent. He opened his eyes, dilated by both low light and arousal. His face soft, his eyes distant as if he were miles away. Though Wren had never had much of a yearn for anyone, male or female, she could tell that he was at his most beautiful then, a true creation of God.
Then those eyes turned to pinpricks of rage, he rolled off the stone platform in his rush to get away from her.
‘Devil!’ he cursed her, though it came out a croak. ‘Do I not do enough that you people have to assault me in my sleep?’
‘Was not me who quickened those loins,’ she retorted. ‘Bellis hasn’t taken your hunger away from you yet.’
Riven turned away to stick his head in a bucket of water, let the water slosh over his scalp and back.
‘Get to the point, Libro. I’m not in the mood for advice.’
‘I came here to give more than advice,’ she continued. ‘You think your bad luck revolves around Bellis and her violent court, but it is Mr Absalom who requires the most caution.’
With the remains of his shirt, he resignedly sopped the water from his head and shoulders. Wren had told him nothing new.
‘We have an understanding. Ozymandias Absalom knows I am no danger to him.’
She moved closer.
‘You are less than dangerous, Jonah. You are extraneous. You and I both know he is a spy. Absalom’s Order brought you back under the wing of Bellis Harrow to control her, and instead she has become even more erratic. It’s made them nervous, so you must be got rid of.’
‘Get to the point, Libro.’
‘Absalom has been instructed. Through the Queen he has to kill you. Remove, was the word, I think, but we all knew what the other spy meant.’
He shook his head wearily and discarded his shirt. ‘That was always going to happen one way or another. I shall welcome it.’
Wren scoffed at him. ‘Devilments, you give up so easily. The woman you committed adultery with, that Arden Beacon? She is alive.’
A great cold wind could have blown through the room at that very moment. He did not look at Wren as she spoke, but his senses surrounded her like a storm and they were huge and tumultuous. Shame, that she had no true desire for sex, because it would be magnificent to make love to this man upon this very moment, feel in his body the fracture of vulnerability and the chasm of despair. Almost enough to quicken her own stony little quim.
‘Alive? Talk sense, Wren.’
‘You feel her, can’t you?’ Wren continued. ‘She is alive and has returned to the islands, maybe even looking for the man she loves. Equus, I think.’
Riven shook his head, a dark panic flaring in his face. ‘No. No. Equus is the last place she should be.’
‘Well, not for much longer. Absalom is about to go out and fetch her. He’s leaving on a bloodworked boat before first light.’
He jerked to the end of his chain. ‘What, fetch Arden for Bellis?’
‘No. For his own people. To bring her home to Clay. Either way, Clay or Equus, your Lyonne girl is in a very precarious place indeed.’ Wren sighed. ‘As are we.’
Riven snatched up his chain, tugged the links, then paced the room back and forth, leaving wet footprints on the stone dust. In his self-absorbed state Wren didn’t expect him to lunge at her. Before she could stop him, Riven had his hands around Wren’s waist and reached under her skirt to tear the keys from her belt. With powerful deliberation he placed her upon his thin mattress, where she could not have easily made a dash for the door.
‘Stay there,’ he said, and thrust each key into the lock at his shackles. Each failed to turn.
Wren watched him struggle. Made a face and layered her saffron silks about her.
‘We haven’t finished our conversation.’
‘Fuck your conversation.’
‘I need a promise, Mr Jonah Riven, it’s why I stand here, and have not hidden this key in a loaf of bread, or some other anonymous gift.’
His glare would have been fearsome. By then she had taken out another key from her slipper and had balanced it on her knee.
Riven was quick to learn. He did not lunge for the key this time, and waited for Wren to hold it out to him with her conditions.
‘What promise?’
‘The children,’ she said despairingly. ‘They must be saved.’
He rolled his head back, grimacing. She had seen him in pain so often, and this was an emotion not so very far away from it. ‘No. You Librans got your children in harm’s way by inviting Bellis onto your island, not me. Don’t make them my business.’
Wren said, ‘What else kept me here, when I could have run away a thousand times over?’
‘Then do it. Give the Queen double her potion, the one that makes her sleep. Make her sleep forever.’
‘And have nearly three thousand minds go mad from seeing Death? Three thousand madmen hysterical upon this island, tearing the flesh from their bodies, and each other’s? I doubt I would do that even for you, Deepwater King.’
‘I’m not the Deepwater—’
She held the shackle key out to him and he stopped speaking. Riven eyed it, and her, suspiciously.
‘I am asking for help, Jonah. One Islander to another.’
‘I’m not an Islander.’
‘Those are Islander marks. The old blood is in your veins. Nobody else can steer a ship through these waters faster than any of Bellis’ pets. Ten men a week try to flee these islands, and ten are caught, and tortured. I know the Queen takes a special delight in making you watch.’
‘Wren …’
‘Take it, fool. Do you want to see your lover again?’
‘Damn it,’ he muttered, took the other key and returned her set. ‘I’m going to use this very soon. I can’t wait for your bloody extended family.’
‘Yes, because if the woman is on Equus, she is not safe.’ Wren nodded. ‘I know who is on that island. I know his name, and Bellis knows his name, for he once cut Bellis’ throat from ear to ear and to your woman he will undoubtedly do the same.’ She darted her head forward and mouthed. ‘Anguis.’
He paused, and swallowed. ‘Then giving me this …’ He thrust the key at her. ‘This is not helping your people. I’m already burnt with guilt for killing my own family. I cannot live with killing yours.’
‘Take the key, Jonah Riven. What have we done, every hour, every day since coming here? We have prepared ourselves for a Deepwater King to lead us off the island and home.’
A stray lance of moonlight caught his cheek and he winced. ‘The title doesn’t belong to me.’
‘It is what it is. Please wait until I come back. I’m going to ready my people. Then we take the boat Ozymandias Absalom intended for this midnight, fit as many passengers as we can on board and go.’
Wren sidled out into the nighttime. Silence, save for the cough of the sea, the hiss of the fumaroles and their sulphurous stenches. Wren had never considered herself sensitive to the eddies of fate or the whisper of her old oceanic gods, but tonight felt them intently.
I have started something, she thought. There is no stepping off this path.
The corridor lay cool and empty. Even the group prisons had their moments of quiet, in the dark when men stopped cursing and instead began to sob. In her mind she mapped out the best place to get information into town, via the Libran night-soil merchant who trundled by a certain guard and could take messages.
She had not gone five paces when a body fell out of the shadows and collided with her, scrabbled for the keys she held in her hand.
The sweat of Gregor Tallwater filled her intake of breath, for how else could he have known where she was and what she held? This time she gave them up easily, for she knew enough of his scent to know his fear.
A glance shared between them, more intimate than any other. A terrible apology. Then Gregor cried out.
‘Intruder! I have an intruder!’
She made to flee, and the leather of his glove tightened upon her wrist, hard. ‘My friend, there was no other way,’ Gregor croaked, the guilt ragged in his voice. ‘It was either this or Leyland would have told Bellis … and she’d have killed me.’
‘You told your damn father?’ she hissed back at him. Leyland Tallwater, that despicable Hillsider who had risked his family and sacrificed his grandchildren, still commanding his son to jump and jig to his awful commands?
Gregor shrugged in broken surrender. ‘He likes it here.’
Behind her, two other guards barged into Riven’s room. The sounds of a body in rough assault, the collision of flesh and the breaking – maybe – of bone. A shout, and silence followed by choking. Then they withdrew.
One held up a key in bloodied fingers as he left the room.
‘Tried to swallow it,’ one said. ‘Would have choked if he’d got it down.’
Wren turned to her betrayer, her heart hammering.
‘How did your father find out, Gregor? Who told Leyland?’
He sighed. ‘The Queen’s sergeant-at-arms. Ozymandias Absalom.’
14
The guards forced Wren
The guards forced Wren to wait the rest of the night and most of the day in the cell they’d put her in. At first she had pleaded at the cell door to the Lyonnian guard charged to her first watch. ‘I have things to tell Bellis,’ she said. ‘Important things!’
‘Shut up,’ the woman replied. ‘The Queen will see you if she wants to, and not a moment before.’
Curses of all the sea. Without the right words from Wren to mollify her anger, Bellis’ fury would overwhelm what little charity she had left in that stony heart. Absalom had fooled Wren, and she was never a fool. Given his head start, the Lyonnian spy would now be close to a day’s worth of sailing away, easily within sight of the Equus Needles, if not the city of Burden Town itself.
Don’t do anything foolish.
How could she have fallen so stupidly into his failsafe? Absalom might have believed Wren would run away with him, but he would not have discounted the possibility she would try to rescue Jonah Riven and the Libro children.
Our children. She closed her eyes. Heard the voice of her mother, crying even as the orientis took her soul away. Take care of them, Wren. Be good for the Queen. Take care of our babies.
I was barely more than a baby myself, Mother, when this promise was urged upon me.
Later that afternoon, she heard the clang of the warning bell.
‘Who’s escaped?’ she asked the second guard who came to replace the first. This time Leyland Tallwater darkened her door. Gregor Tallwater’s odious father, come to gloat. She could smell him, sour and envious through the bars of the cell. He had completely embraced his position among the servants of Bellis Harrow, wore Islander ink on his hands and cheek so new that the skin was still bruised from application.
‘Who is it that’s escaped, Leyland?’ Wren repeated, firmer now.
‘Not an escape,’ he said. ‘We’re having a lament, a funeral for a King.’
‘A lament?’
Leyland grinned meanly. ‘The Queen has seen sense. She didn’t need no King anyway. They are building the freak a pyre as we speak. He will burn up well. Those little Libran brats just the same. Then those mendicant refugees can love the Queen with their hearts unencumbered with fretting over their spawn.’
She pressed her face to the bars. Hissed the words. ‘Mr Tallwater, consider that such an execution would be unwise given that Riven is worshipped among the armada. Bellis has trained them well to believe in such things as abyssal kings. Killing one in front of them may be enough to break any enchantment.’
He studied
Wren, suspended between triumph and disgust. ‘You have been too long in these walls, harlot. Even I’m more Islander than you. Tonight is the Night of the Serpent. Tonight a King may die and they will forgive it.’
Leyland closed his eyes, already in raptures just thinking of the event. The sour smell remained even when he left the cell window.
Once footsteps had faded, Wren retreated to the corner of the stone room and wrapped her arms about her knees, suddenly trembling with an unholy chill. Leyland had not lied. This was the Deepwater season. This was the time when a death could be forgiven.
Despite her situation Wren slept, albeit fitfully, and in the late evening was roused up. This time Gregor, Leyland’s son, had come to deliver the orders. A taunt from Bellis, sending the man who’d betrayed Wren.
‘She will see you now,’ Gregor said.
Did Bellis ever sleep? Was she ever not adorned in the garb of the bride, perpetually in those final hours before the dress was torn from her upon the wedding night and her abyssal groom appeared?
Behind her the Lyonne Redeemer died naked and chained upon His rocky wall, forever waiting for the tide to drown Him and the monster who would devour Him.
The bas-relief was a remnant of the old cloister built by missionaries upon Maris before the buildings had been repurposed into an industrial dormitory. Bellis had not removed the icon from her wall, perhaps delighting in the artist’s ability to carve true suffering from the wood.
‘My father had this very same icon in his church,’ Bellis said. ‘The Redeemer would look down upon me as I said my prayers each night.’ Bellis picked up a stiletto of silver from the stone desk, pressed the tip to each finger-pad. ‘I have prayed to him tonight, for the first time in many years.’
‘And what did you pray of, my Queen?’
‘You,’ she said. ‘My darling Persephone, I asked God if you really did what Mr Tallwater accuses you of.’
‘And what is it the senior Tallwater says I did?’
‘He says you visit my husband for trysts.’
‘Leyland Tallwater is a false witness,’ Wren said. ‘He’d tryst with your husband himself if he could. You’ve seen yourself how he always volunteers to administer the beatings.’
Deepwater King Page 19