Gilded in gold leaf was Stefan’s crooked little island. It lay off the coast of Equus, the last crumb of land before the immense and endless void that was the Darkling Sea, and the abyssal lands beneath the waves.
Arden ate until she could not manage another bite. Stefan smiled, and his expression was so much like her father Lucian’s, it made her twinge with homesickness.
‘It is good to see family again,’ he said.
‘If you are family, Stefan, why did you not visit us more? I would have liked to have known my full cousin more than some stranger who slipped in and out of my life.’
‘There was work to do.’
‘God kept you so busy, John Stefan?’
‘At first I thought it was God’s work, but then I came to realize it was something greater. I was to look after a very special girl trammelled in sanguis orientis. I was to keep her here safe while she overcame the becoming of her talents.’
Arden mentally counted the years since Bellis had fled Vigil. Four years. ‘Jonah told me once you brought Bellis to this place for sanctuary and reflection.’
‘Yes.’
‘And to hide her from the Order.’
‘Yes too.’
‘Why? She should have been delivered to the Lions! Jonah was practically an outcast. The entire town thought he’d murdered the both of you.’
Stefan gave a regretful nod over his stew. ‘Back then we still believed we could prove the Eugenics Society and the Lyonne Order wrong about orientis. We thought, all we need is time. The time and seclusion worked for the Saint of the Isles when they were coming into their power, why could it not work for Bellis?’
Too exhausted to be polite, Arden let out a sharp laugh. ‘I’m certain she reflected on her power well enough.’
Stefan lined up the beads on his worry-bracelet, counted them and his head jerked forward. ‘To no avail. Orientis became too much for her. It is like a waking dream. She could not sleep. Days. Weeks. The call of her blood … I prayed day and night. Once an entire fortnight passed and in that time neither of us laid down our heads, not even once. But ultimately a man must sleep, otherwise he dies, and when fatigue overcame me, Bellis fled my church and took Sehnsucht with her. She never returned.’
‘Have you been alone since?’
He shook his head. ‘I was not always alone. The Librans came each month to pay fealty and ask for blessings. Every moon-day, bringing their songs and tithings. I didn’t think too much about Bellis after she left. I believed her bones at the bottom of the ocean and her poor tongue stilled. It is no easy burden to bear, orientis. It asks so much of you.
‘Then there came a month when the Librans didn’t show. Two months I counted without a single boat at the eastern pier. Fortunately I had my goats, my wild honey, otherwise I’d have starved.’
‘Because she had found Libro.’
‘Yes. After a year of no word from them, a coracle washes ashore. The sailor wore a scar across his teeth and a stone in his mouth. Tells me Bellis came out to their island with a dreaming army. Killed their leader. Stole their children. She had stopped fighting her true nature. All this was my fault, the man said, because I’d helped Bellis come here, because like Jonah I thought I was doing the right thing.’
‘Oh Stefan. You foolish boys. It was the Society’s business to manage Bellis from the beginning!’
‘And how would they have managed my dear friend? We all saw what happened to the Rivens when even the whisper of mandatum made its way to northern ears.’
She swallowed the guilty, knowing lump in her throat. The ring on her finger felt as heavy as an iron shackle. Miah had called his mandatum a secret.
‘The Lions never confirmed mandatum among the Rivens. They only suspected.’
‘You think, cousin? I too thought that Jonah killed his people because Bellis had told him to. Then I realized differently.’
At her cousin’s words a chill went through Arden’s belly.
They knew.
The Lions knew, from the beginning, when she had read Harbourmistress Modhi’s letters on board Saudade, the ones Bellis had painstakingly copied.
‘They used Bellis to give the orientine instruction,’ Stefan continued. ‘There were a lot of merchants from Lyonne that year. Strangers. Men with deep pockets and golden coins. I think the Lions knew by then. Orientis is all about the dream and the direction, but only mandatum moves the metal. It was the mandatum the Society and Order worried about most. Harbourmistress Modhi was in communication with the Lyonne Order. She was not sent to keep eyes and ears upon my Lightkeeper father alone. Oh not at all. The Order suspected a mandatum carrier on Vigil’s promontory shore. Effected the death of everyone living in that compound. We couldn’t have the same happen to Bellis.’
‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Stefan. Bringing Bellis out here cost so many lives!’
‘How many people in Vigil are related to the Harrow family? What would the Society do to get rid of those bloodlines? They wouldn’t have removed Bellis alone. They’d have done exactly what they did to the Rivens, they’d have razed the entire town and every living soul off the map. A thousand innocents.’
Arden heaved her breath and choked on a piece of soft cheese. A thousand. How about two thousand? How about the entire island of Maris, driven into the sea? When she was done with her sputtering she gasped air like a landed fish.
‘What’s wrong?’ Stefan asked.
Her crisis over, Arden tried to explain. ‘The Lions couldn’t get all of the Rivens, could they?’ She pointed to her neck.
‘Jeremiah Riven calls himself Miah Anguis now, he’s sanguis mandatum and my damn Deepwater husband.’
26
Jonah did not return
Jonah did not return that day. Arden gave up on waiting. She fell into a salty, chafed doze upon a narrow wooden bed in one of the retreats.
She woke at noon. She was rested enough to go into the washhouse for her first proper bath in weeks, soaked in a tub of cedar wood until her fingers wrinkled and a layer of skin was scrubbed away.
Stefan had found Arden spare clothes to wear – a linen top, drawstring trousers, the creases sharp as they must have been decades ago when first stored away by the remnant clergy. While she had slept he had set the sea-silk dress to hang along with her boots in an airing closet over a dry, hot volcanic vent that had the smell of burnt stone about it. She fetched her boots, and the leather warmed her toes.
The largest structure apart from the temple was a chapterhouse that housed a library’s worth of books. Of those remaining from a century of pilfering, there were volumes too frayed and worn to touch. Her coins hurt even as her hands lost feeling. Stefan came with a salve of lanolin and honey.
‘Rub the salve into your hands,’ he said. ‘Don’t put the gloves on. Give them air. Let’s see if it can ease the pain.’
She took the salve and rubbed it in as best she could. Her palms had gone mottled as if a blue lace had woven beneath them. The numbness had already crept past her wrists. He watched as she turned her palms over and back, inspecting the damage.
‘The coins will need to come out before the end of the month. Maybe sooner.’
‘Are there instruments here that could do it?’
Stefan shook his head. ‘Needs a phlebotomist, perhaps the one who put them in. Sometimes they can be found in Fiction. This leads to the question, how can we get you to one in time?’ He dropped his gaze and lifted her hands. ‘Would your husband take you somewhere?’
‘No!’ Arden jumped to her feet. ‘No! I’m not going back to him. God and devils, Stefan, I’ve completely proven myself untrustworthy. He’ll only want revenge now.’
A shadow crossed Stefan’s face. He’d had experience enough of people losing their way under his care.
‘One would not be particularly in the best of minds, if one’s wife ran off with one’s cousin. May I assume your relationship with Jonah Riven went beyond good neighbours?’
‘I do not have to
justify my feelings for Jonah to anyone but myself,’ she retorted. ‘But when is he coming back? I must speak with him.’
Stefan made the sign of the serpent upon his chest. ‘I cannot say. Jonah came here on a boat which barely survived the journey. Since then he has never stayed in the church premises. He won’t sleep on holy ground. The deepwater people have a strange relationship with guilt and sanctity and following strict moral laws.’
Arden rolled her eyes. ‘It has not escaped my notice.’
‘Then wait. If his love is strong, then he will come back.’
Stefan fetched some Libro-knitted socks for her boots, so she might walk beyond the priory grounds. Even though in the sullen afternoon light it looked very much different, Arden’s direction-sense quickly found the trail that she had taken from the cliff face the night before.
The compound was built on a high basalt plateau. If not for the pine and cedar trees, there would have been views in all directions, as if they were on the mast of a great ship.
In broad daylight the lift-cage seemed especially fragile. She would not have so willingly climbed into the rusted bucket had she not been so desperately distracted by Jonah Riven climbing in with her.
The coming twilight had brought a mist, but not enough to obscure the waters. Far below, a familiar boat anchored off-shore, kraken-oil sparkles visible from its spout. A pair of shoreboats moved from the boat to the pier.
Miah had brought back reinforcements, and Saudade. Arden winced from the anxious wrench in her belly.
‘So,’ Stefan said when he came to join her at the cliff-side. ‘Your husband is tenacious. Definitely a Riven. Shall I winch you down?’
‘No.’ She turned to Stefan. ‘Miah’s doing it on purpose. He’s trying to taunt Jonah out.’
‘I would expect he’s more doing all this for his Deepwater Wife.’
‘I’m not his Deepwater anything. We never consummated the marriage.’
‘The tattoo on the back of your neck says otherwise.’
Arden pushed past him. ‘You’re so infuriating, cousin. I’m not giving up on Jonah.’
She left him on the cliff edge. It was still light enough to go to the other side of the islet. She would not stop looking for Jonah’s hiding place until it was absolutely too dark to see.
Beyond the compound to the island’s north, there were old basalt quarry-ruins slumped alongside newer abandonments. A small community had at one time flourished, then faded. The inhabitants had been wealthy, whoever they were, for the ruins of a house still nestled in the basin. The square, stern style reminded her of Vernon’s decaying Manse in Vigil. She wondered if Jonah might take shelter there, but most of its side had caved away, and the empty rooms faced the sea.
She went to the opposite cliff-side, and looked out across the cold waters beyond the archipelago. Rubbed her lanolin-sticky hands together. If she went back to Miah, he might still kill her. Consummated wedding night or not, the tattoo on her neck made him Deepwater King, and gave him that right. Then again maybe the promises of sex and the words of love might give Arden power over him in a way Henrietta Cleave and the others could not imagine. He would need a more permanent source of evalescendi if he intended to work mandatum on more than just a strip of swampy coast. He wouldn’t kill her straight away.
Stefan barely took notice of her arrival when Arden returned in the gloaming, violet hour. He’d taken to the contemplative garden, balancing flat stones upon a rock so they made a tower, ten stones high.
‘Have you exhausted your curiosity about our island?’ he asked, not looking at her.
‘Some of it,’ she said, feeling grumpy at his air of unconcern. ‘Who owned the mansion house on the north side?’
Stefan shook his head. ‘Rich Lyonnian farmers, from the days before the Equus automata set in. Most of the communities took flight after the saint’s machines caused Equus to become functionally uninhabitable. Only a few stayed.’
‘It reminded me of the Justinian estate, a little bit.’
Stefan gave a smile that was nostalgia and benevolence combined. He balanced another flat pebble. ‘It does, doesn’t it? The old Baron owned a lot of properties around the islands. He even convinced the deepwater people to work for him.’
‘Rather than starve in poison waters.’
‘They never had much of a choice.’
She sat on the broad flat stone next to his rock tower. The wind blew cold, rustled the tall trees.
‘I don’t think I have much of a choice either, Stefan. What do I do? Do I stay with Miah Anguis, or do I try and find Jonah, and a way off this rock?’
‘Well,’ Stefan said as he stood up. ‘I think one always needs to make important decisions after supper, and a sleep.’
27
The two siblings
‘… the two siblings and the eldest grandchild were each given a boat by Jacobin Riven,’ Stefan explained over their evening meal. ‘To Zachariah the ghost ship Sehnsucht, to Thalie the black mangrove Saudade, and Miah got the golden Sonder.’
‘Miah said Zachariah owned Saudade.’
‘His memory is not correct. Yes, Zach used Saudade more, but the boat was not his. Thalie would not go out to sea. She distrusted it, which made it hard for her as a shorefolk woman.’
Two sunsets had now passed since the wedding. Arden had hoped that Jonah might be drawn out by the smell of food, but he made no appearance. Only Saudade still waited in the half-moon light of the ocean, her smokestacks glowing with blue sparkles.
Miah would be in there, stewing on her absence. Whatever malign influence had motivated him to turn from the uninterested man of their first meeting to this infatuated devil, perhaps having her gone for a few days might make him reconsider what he really wanted.
Stefan remained gently genial around Arden’s preoccupied absence, treating her with a patient kindness. Over supper he told her about his time in Vigil, about the Rivens as he remembered them, the kraken hunts, the leviathans, the boats they owned.
‘What happened to Sonder? I never saw another large ship among Miah’s people,’ Arden said. ‘And if Sonder was Miah’s, how did he lose it?’
‘Some say Sonder burned the day the Rivens died. Others say that the Lyonne Order took it, or fishermen stole it. My father – your uncle Jorgen – kept the other two boats in a remaining seaworthy condition. Had he known Jonah would return for those boats, he’d have torched them into ashes as soon as he could. He had no love for Thalie’s son.’
‘They were lovers, your father and Jonah’s uncle?’
Stefan coughed mead-foam. ‘I … I never really thought about it.’
She squeezed her hands into fists and released them. ‘I’m certain of it. It burns hot in our family, that all-or-nothing kind of love.’
‘I have never fallen in love,’ Stefan admitted. ‘I am aware of it intellectually, of course. And I have seen its casualties. God has been kind to keep such a torment from me.’
‘He has been kind to keep such a terrible fire from you. Only I fear that portion has been given doubly to others.’
They finished eating in an almost funereal silence. Stefan took his leave to go to bed. He still had the early morning prayers to attend to.
Arden stayed awhile at the supper table. When the light extinguished in Stefan’s room she lit the foxfire in her numb palm and headed towards the main chapel.
Like the northern counterpart, this Clay Church outpost required no prayers between midnight and dawn. Stefan slept those hours and Arden was left alone with the great pale statue within the vaulting apse. The Deepwater King regarded her approach with His black-pearl eyes, and His confronting figure seemed to hold back both the giant serpent and the monstrous kraken until she had said what she had come to say.
‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘It seems we have reached an impasse. I’m renouncing my marriage to Miah Anguis. I hope you don’t mind.’
The flickering of fire gave motion to His face. The shadow under His lips move
d, as if He had opened his mouth to speak. The stuffy incense still burning in the censer from the evening rite cast a certain dizzy, soporific effect. She could feel Jonah here, close, close.
Then she saw the footprint.
A votive had spilled perhaps not more than a few moments before. A reflection shone across the waxed wood. Oil puddles, one the shape of a man’s bare foot, gold in the lamplight.
A thrill went through Arden as if she’d wrapped her hand about a sparking electrified coil. A man thinking about death on a lonely rock would not skulk about the priory.
‘Oh Jonah, you’ll not escape not so easily,’ she breathed. ‘Bellis isn’t going to win this one, orientis or not.’
The silver footsteps moved out past the eastern side of the compound, where the salt-stone moss poked through the flagstones and swallowed the ruins.
She poked one glowing stain with her toe. Not water. It had an unearthly luminescence, the way phosphor might glow in a glass bell. A glow leading her down a path she had not before seen in broad daylight. Crumbs of light, leading her away from her reality and into a fairy-tale underworld.
The land began to cant down and into terraces, each one punctuated by a stone cell. Mausoleums by the look of them, part of the extensive cemetery grounds. Human skulls were carved above each lintel. An anatomical heart upon the doors. At the lowest internment, the drops of silver faded.
One door hung open. She blinked in the darkness as best she could, saw the disturbed dirt, the clear impression of a human foot.
Arden had imagined taking him by stealthy surprise as he’d done to her. Instead the dark and the gravesite mist made her courage fail. ‘Jonah,’ she said as loudly as her trembling voice would go. ‘Jonah, I want to talk to you.’
The door creaked on broken hinges.
‘I know you needed to do things to survive. I know I did too, to get back to you. Please don’t be angry at me.’
No word from the mausoleum entrance. Was he waiting in there? Listening?
‘If you won’t come out, I’ll come in.’
Deepwater King Page 28