The affectations of a harbour side office amid the ruin and decay made her want to either laugh or weep. Even the formal way Mr Cleave took the other side of the desk and put the papers into a drawer seemed comical, for they lived such a rough existence she’d have expected them to continue business about the fireplace.
‘So, he could be fishing,’ Mr Cleave said evasively once he had settled into his chair. ‘With some others.’
‘Saudade’s a lot of boat to go fishing in, especially when there’s already a half-butchered sea-dragon in your possession.’
Mr Cleave would not criticize one of his own in front of a stranger but an aggrieved tic had formed in his eye. ‘The contract was a private arrangement between the pair of you,’ Mr Cleave said. ‘I would have preferred for him not to have brought a Lyonnian here, but that will be for Mr Anguis and I to discuss.’
Arden’s fingers gnawed at the arms of the chair. Rainwater fell off the corrugations of the iron roof in stripes, like prison bars. ‘I was supposed to go to Maris Island this morning.’
‘Maris Island?’ He was taken aback. ‘So that was the rescue my wife was talking about. You were to leave today.’
‘Yes!’
‘Perhaps,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I could arrange some of my men as an escort, if leaving is still required.’
Arden almost jumped at the chance, until reality intruded. ‘I needed Miah with me. He’s the only one who can control Bellis, command her to let Jonah go. That was our deal!’
A harsh reality washed over her. Miah had never forgiven Jonah. Her payment of three days had not put out the fire of his revenge, only focused it.
Oh Jonah, if Bellis was bad … what if I just delivered something worse?
‘If it is of any help,’ Mr Cleave said, ‘under contract of restitutio it is honourable for both parties to adhere to the terms of the agreement. He won’t do anything that will make him lose face among us. Sometimes a reputation is all a man can truly own.’
‘Does he have that reputation? He’s always saying how he doesn’t fit in here, how you won’t permit him to marry into the deepwater folk.’
Again Mr Cleave kept his face emotionless, but the tic in his eye almost had him winking. Under his calm appearance, he was as aggrieved as she was.
‘Well, we cannot do anything about it now. Go and eat in the meantime and don’t waste your day worrying. There’s a perfectly good reason for his absence. I will inquire when he gets back.’
Arden was being urged to leave, but when she stepped out of Mr Cleave’s damp office she did not go far. She slipped behind a rusted hull-section of a broken boat and watched in the drizzle as Mr Cleave departed his office in a near-jog. He quickly seized up a passer-by and remonstrated with him. Much pointing towards the dock, and Miah’s room.
The worry turned into a stone upon her forehead. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach turned into a chasm. Miah had not just broken a vow to her. He had escalated it to include his adopted people as well.
Saudade did not return all that day, and in the evening there were already grumbles about the town that the several fishermen who had gone with Miah were late in returning. It did not help that they were still not far past Deepwater Night, when the monsters spawned close in the shallows.
Arden spotted David and Sean near one of the sorting tables, as an older woman in a ragfish coat showed them how to unspool the bright wire mechanisms dug out from a gutted ghost ship. Arden kept her distance. Until this complication with Miah worked itself out, she would be a liability to them, and their chances of being properly accepted into their new family. Mr Cleave’s upset was clearly no small thing. She felt eyes upon her, as she paced the ship-breaking beach, the old encampments.
Night fell, and she was driven back to Miah’s room. The cordial’s effect lingered. So deeply did Arden sleep she did not hear a man’s return in the dawn of the following morning, a man stinking of blood and the sea, his arms crusted with scab. Monster-calling marks, a long journey. Became only half aware, caught up in a faceless, wordless dream, of the weight of him as he knelt upon the bed pallet, him pulling himself erect from his damp breeches with one hand and yanking up her skirt with the other.
‘Quickly,’ the voice came, hoarse and urgent.
She was still sleep-drunk when he slid himself hot between her legs, the cold buckle of his loose belt scraping the skin at her thighs.
Dazed with drunkenness, words fell: ‘Jonah, wait!’
She had not meant to invoke his name. But the kelp spirit had dragged her mind into a fog of the past and he had come upon her so quickly that she had not the wit to deny what her whole body and spirit yearned for.
Miah’s lustful exertion dashed up against the name of his hated cousin. He froze as if struck by a paralysis of reality. A Fictish curse fell out of his mouth.
Her eyes flashed open and instead of her ghost lover, the deepwater man was on top of her, and inside her. ‘What in God’s name? Where did you go? Get off me!’
‘Why do you love him still?’
Arden kicked him off the bed pallet and yanked the dress down.
‘Devilment, Miah! What sort of savagery was that? The agreement ended yesterday, and you damn fled, breaking your vow! Mr Cleave is furious! I’m furious!’
With a hiss of irritation, Miah pushed himself back into his blood-stained leathers. ‘I saw you stir in desire.’ He yanked the belt buckle tight, and final. ‘You’ve not been honest with me.’
Arden sat up. ‘Honest? You took Saudade! When we said three nights, it was three damn nights in a row, not extra days whenever you feel like it!’
His jaw worked almost imperceptibly save for the popping of muscle at his cheek. He turned around for the carafe of kelp spirit, found it nearly empty, threw it aside. He smelled of blood, of mandatum – that constant metallic undertow, but this time it was as thick and cloying as anything she might receive of the saint’s remains in Burden Town. Stronger, even.
‘Did you hope he’d come back instead? Is that why you woke so eager?’
For several seconds she was speechless. Miah was jealous?
‘Are you …’ she started to say, then stilled her tongue; for with his back to her Arden saw what she had missed. Swinging from his belt-loop at the back of his hip was a cylinder of brass and black mangrove wood, close enough for her to touch.
Saudade’s priming handle.
Urgency dashed through her. Could she grab the handle? Could she strike him over the head with it and outrun him? Get on Saudade and out of the harbour before he could come after? And then what?
‘Where did you go, Miah?’
His scowl deepened. He stood up, yanked his coat back on. The handle swung at his side. There was an unreadable expression in his heavy brow.
‘Get dressed. You need to see something.’
‘See what?’
‘I said dress.’
Arden reassembled the shreds of her dignity with her shorefolk linens and followed Miah out into the grey day. Several folk greeted him with nods. He strode on ahead, not checking to see if she followed.
On reaching the breaking yard at the beach, Arden noticed at once an odd structure there, a cage constructed from pipework and oil-rope. Something roped together quickly by the materials at hand.
Inside it, a man in a velvet coat sat lordly on an overturned barrel. He recognized her at once.
She recognized him too. After the surprise of their reunion wore off he gave a huge cat-grin.
‘Well then,’ Mr Lindsay said. ‘I never thought we would meet here. I always thought it would be Clay City at least.’
He glanced at Miah, less than confidently. His jaunty grin faded, and his eyes creased with caution. ‘And you’ve made friends since I last gave you a ticket home, I see.’
Miah folded his arms. ‘I take it this man is familiar to you, Beacon.’
‘He is a member of the Lyonne Order,’ Arden said warily. ‘Where did you find him? Maris, obviously.�
��
‘There is no Maris. Not any more. We recovered this man from a rock in between here and the island. He had quite a story to tell. A Queen captured. A town overrun by bloodworked creatures called out of the ocean. Who could do that, I wonder. Who?’
Arden held her breath. Danger loomed. Her grommets prickled through the numbness. Jonah.
‘Miah, do not trust this man.’
Without warning, Miah grabbed Arden by her arms and pushed her against the bars of the cage.
‘You lied to me.’
‘When?’
‘About everything. About your willingness to a marriage. Two nights ago. Made it seem you were all for it.’
‘Miah, all we spoke of was a fancy, what we’d do if Jonah was not alive.’
‘Is this a fancy?’ He kissed her roughly, his tongue in her mouth tasting of charsmoke and kelp spirit. She gasped at the imposition of it, struck him – a little weakly – across his face. She bit his lower lip, tasted blood. Mandatum there, as thinly bitter as anything left behind by the dead saint.
He grunted, pushed Arden away, using his weight against hers and mashing the steel into her back. He wiped the blood from his mouth with grim humour.
‘Mr Lindsay and I had an interesting talk. You can make a sanguinity stronger? Amplify what is already in a person’s blood? Evalescendi, my friend here says.’
‘Of course, I told Mr Cleave what I was,’ she started, then stopped, for she had not told him, not really. He probably still thought it sanguis ignis, or something common. And she had been cautious with Miah, not altogether trusting him.
‘Not everything came to our bargaining table, Beacon. You never told me what you could do for me, how you made your way across the badlands without getting sliced to ribbons. Our deal is not broken if one party lied about everything from the start!’
‘Miah, I cannot bargain with something I don’t fully control.’
‘Since neither Bellis nor my cousin are on Maris, and you were slippery about your assets, so our deal is forfeit.’
‘If it is forfeit, then let me go.’
‘No. I’ve decided to forge a new agreement. Mr Lindsay here tells me how truly useful a sanguis evalescendi is. I’ve also decided you will marry me and make me leader of these people. Their Deepwater King.’
‘What are you talking about? You cannot marry me without my permission.’
‘This is the Sainted Islands. A marriage is not your decision. It’s the decision of the clan and the people in it, and you’ve won me some leverage in that argument.’
‘If these clansfolk forbade the great Miah Anguis a bride before today,’ Arden hissed in her most blisteringly supercilious tone, ‘a new argument will not sway them.’
‘Says a sanguis evalescendi, who can make powerful what is weak?’ He jerked his chin towards the tussock-dunes, and gave a clenching, victorious smile, his teeth stained red from his bitten lip.
‘The old copper devil still makes these people afraid in the night. You’ll marry me in blood and body and when it’s done I’ll use your blood’s power to clear out the mechanica from this island once and for all.’
21
Don’t
‘Don’t talk to me.’
‘Please, Mx Beacon,’ Mr Lindsay called gently. ‘Mx Beacon, I hope you’re not thinking of doing something foolish like trying to escape.’
She turned her head so she would not have to look at the Lion, and pressed her coins until they hurt, and distracted her from the chill. The dreary afternoon rain had eased off, and were it not for the scrap of iron sheet over her enclosure, she would have been soaked to the bone. Miah had not taken any chances of her fleeing before the wedding. He’d made good on his promise. Locked her inside the iron-pipe cage next to Mr Lindsay and pocketed the key to an iron padlock as big as her fist.
‘Keep you out of trouble,’ were his exact words. ‘Until I can bring everyone the good news.’
Mr Lindsay continued in a wheedle, ‘He believes he’s made a very prudent decision. See, an unmarried man cannot make a case for leadership among these people, and it appears certain factions of this antediluvian community do not wish him to assume the mantle of leader. You quite fell into his lap, a Lyonnian woman not bound by deepwater strictures, and useful to boot! One cannot blame him for taking advantage of the situation.’
Some women chatted behind the half-broken ship on their way back from the sorting tables. Snatches of voice. A child’s shriek. Sometimes they cast glances her way. Arden stewed in an enraged sulk. The only bright spot in all the miserable day was Jonah’s confirmed survival, but it was all spoken of so remotely it could not be but a dent in her current predicament.
‘Also I apologize for telling the senior Riven about your potential. I thought you may have already told him, being so intimate and all.’
‘Sod off, Mr Lindsay.’ She frowned and then turned on him. ‘All right then, if you want to talk. What happened to Jonah, what did Miah mean by a Queen captured and a town overrun?’
Mr Lindsay affected an expression of sympathy. ‘He took his own freedom. The Librans made off with Bellis and me. Your fellow called a hundred monsters to shore as a diversion. Just like he did the day he killed his family. Where he went from there, I don’t know. He did not come with us.’
Beyond the shipyard, a group of men passed by, longboat oars slung over their shoulders like spear-fighters. One of them was Miah. He did not look in the direction of Arden’s cage.
Mr Lindsay noticed the frosty snub immediately. ‘You’ve waded into a pickle, dear. He desires leadership and respect from his deepwater kin far more than he desires human companionship. He’s like a shark with the scent of blood now.’
Arden scratched her gloves agitatedly. Mr Lindsay found her actions interesting.
‘Do they itch, those coins I had installed last year? They are not so far off being rejected from your body. Your time grows short and you know this.’
She knew it, but she would not let him see.
The rain fell all that morning, miserable and cold. The shelter gave anything but, and she shivered through the day, hungry and aching, pain upon her skin and in her heart.
Late past noon a pair of sea-wives came to escort her from prison to a longhouse of twisted branches and iron plates. She rushed to the fire in the iron grate, warmed her numb hands in the heat, and her toes, and her face. Sitting in a cold tub for several minutes was one thing, but a half-day wet and frozen in little but a thin knitted dress was something quite torturously else. On a nearby carpet, a large king otter the size of a sled-dog raised his grey muzzle and the wet nose moved as it sniffed the unwashed newcomer, before curling itself back to sleep.
‘Any closer to the fire and you’d be hugging the flames,’ the older woman said. ‘Stand back and let me put more briquettes on.’
Arden reluctantly sat back on a low bench, though she did not want to leave the heat, and the woman poured more coals from a black-dusted linen bag into the fire pit, before patting the otter’s great wedge of a head.
‘I am Mrs Seaworthy,’ said the woman. ‘I am a widow.’ She pointed to her younger companion, dark-haired and generous-fleshed, a beautiful face that seemed quite at odds with these simple folk. ‘This is Mrs Stone, who was only a year ago married to the young man you may have met upon the beach where we hunted the serpent. Our stormcaller, Mr Stone.’
‘Hoy,’ Mrs Stone said in her flat Islander accent, smiling with a little too much friendliness. ‘Together we sew your wedding dress! As Deepwater Bride you’ll become one of us.’
The dress turned out to be an unadorned and simple shift. As Mrs Seaworthy laid it out across the salvaged wood, Arden noted the fragility of the fabric, its frayed seams, how it might barely last a night. Still, it shimmered under their hands, a cunning weave that imitated tiny scales, a bone-ivory dress of snakeskin tending to gold in the firelight.
Once she had taken Arden’s measurements, Mrs Seaworthy brought food, a salty soda bread, c
heese and pickled melon, a prickly-pear fruit for desert, an eel-berry wine.
Mrs Seaworthy asked, gently, ‘Has it been explained, what will happen tonight?’
Arden tore her bread into small pieces. She was hungry, but her nervous stomach would not hold enough food. ‘I haven’t thought about it.’
What she had thought about, was escape. And every permutation in her mind kept ending up with her being chased into the pipelands and Miah Anguis in a jealous rage draining every pint of blood out of her.
In between the man who had fished her out of the ocean and the one who now wanted to bind her in marital captivity, a disturbing transformation had taken place.
Mrs Seaworthy spoke as she sewed. ‘There is an old legend among our people, of the first Deepwater Bride. A beautiful girl, a King’s daughter, would walk the beaches of Equus. Then one day the Deepwater King saw her and fell in love. He pursued her, made her his bride, took her into his watery kingdom.’
Arden chewed nervously on the bread. ‘… And?’
‘After the initial ceremony, the groom pursues the bride while she is barefoot,’ Mrs Seaworthy said matter-of-factly. ‘The serpent-call will be made and either it or the Deepwater King plucks the maiden off the beach and takes her to his cave—’
‘Tent, really,’ Mrs Stone interjected to Mrs Seaworthy’s tut of impatience. ‘She is ravished, and then it is done. Oh, it is not so bad at all,’ Mrs Stone finished with a giggle. ‘Mostly we run down the shore a little, trip up and roll around together.’
‘Peg, we are not talking about your common conveniences and your clumsiness,’ Mrs Seaworthy chided. ‘Go on back to minding the children dear, I need to speak to our guest on her own.’
Mrs Stone frowned. ‘But Amos said we were not supposed to leave her alone in case she—’
‘Go,’ Mrs Seaworthy said, harder.
Sulky and making faces, the younger woman left the longhouse with the huge otter at her heels. Arden sat up straight, sensing the import of the moment. Mrs Seaworthy spun a black-iron wedding ring on her finger, leaving behind a red oxide stain upon her skin.
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