The rain is still falling as we leave the healing house, and all the water makes the streets curving down to the tide look as if they’re coated in glass.
Carrying Melily downhill isn’t as hard on Cressit, and we reach the trade inlet quickly. Soon we’re standing on a slim walkway, looking down at the dark, rain-puckered waves.
Cressit turns to face me. “The sirens… they’ll make us stay in the tide.”
“Will there be any nearby?” I ask.
He nods. “I hope so. Will you be all right?”
I nod, although I’m not sure. And then I kiss Melily's raindrop spattered cheeks and stroke her hair, and I tell her, “Cressit's going to take care of you. He will.” I wish she was awake so I could say a proper goodbye.
“I love you,” Cressit tells me.
“And I love you,” I say.
We kiss briefly and unhappily, and then he climbs over the rail with Melily in his arms and jumps. For a moment they seem frozen, hanging over the water; a blur of white healing-gown, dark clothes, pale skin, and red blood. Then with a splash that seems too small and insignificant, they’re gone, and there’s nothing left but the tide.
I watch the water for a long time, feeling stunned and disconnected from everything that just happened. I’m hardly even aware of the cold rain still streaming over my shoulders and soaking my hair.
I’m sure I’ll be arrested for Douglen and Jeck’s death, and the trial will be complicated. No one will believe a girl with a hidden gunnerife is innocent. Ellevah’s shore controllers will also want to know where Cressit and Melily are, and they won’t like it when I don’t have an answer.
The more I think about my situation, the more danger I realize I’m in, and for a reckless moment, I wonder if it would be best if I disappeared into the tidewater too.
But maybe there’s still someone who can help me.
Blood-soaked and shivering, I walk along Ellevah’s curved shoreline. I cross brick walkways and kelpwood docks, and I also follow several dirt pathways that skirt the drybark forest reserved for tide-trapped landrunners. Eventually I arrive at the stone pier where larger ships dock. The Trident is definitely the biggest ship in port, tall and massive; with familiar red and black funnels, a bright white anchor, and a trident emblem on her side.
The shipsman standing guard won’t let me up the gangway though, and considering my bloody nightclothes and bare feet, I don’t blame him.
“I’m Vores—Nerene Keel,” I say, not used to using my real name. “I used to work for Lord Osperacy. Can I speak with Shara, please?”
“Nerene? We lost that girl ages ago,” the man says, but he gives me a closer look, and I can tell by the way his eyes move across my face that he recognizes me.
“Douglen and Jeck are dead,” I say, taking a risk. He could be one of their friends. “Please, can I speak with Shara?”
“Dead? Really?” The man says, sounding surprised. “How?”
I hesitate. “Someone shot them.” My voice cracks. It’s not really a lie, but it doesn’t feel like the truth either.
“Huh.” He nods silently for a moment, surely thinking. “Well, Captain Gedwick will need to know. Follow me.”
“Would you take me to Shara first, please?” I ask, hurrying up the gangway after him. “She should know before anyone else.”
He glances back at me uncertainly, but thankfully says, “All right.”
The Trident looks different. I see stains and wispy smears of dust on the carpets that used to be so clean, and at least a third of the electric lights are dark.
It takes a long while for Shara to appear at her cabin door, and when she does, she looks different. She was always thin, but now her joints seem too obvious. She also has dark circles beneath her eyes, and some of the pearl buttons on her nightgown have been replaced with simpler, glass ones. She cries “Nerene!” and although she looks at my bloodstained clothes with concern, she doesn’t hesitate to hug me. “I must be dreaming!”
If I’m dreaming, this is a nightmare. I was happy in Ellevah. Losing Cressit and Melily all in one day feels like one of Jeck’s mechbombs has exploded inside of me. If I didn’t need to act quickly to save myself, I’d curl up somewhere and cry.
“Where did you come from?” Shara asks as she releases me.
I swallow back the threat of tears. “I was living here in Ellevah with Melily and another friend.”
“Melily was here too?” She looks surprised and happy, so I'm guessing she never received Melily’s letter. I suppose it makes grim sense that Douglen would read or steal Shara's mail. She frowns as she looks at the blood on my clothes again. “What’s happened? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, and I have a lot to tell you, but first…” I hesitate, yet there’s no point delaying the most important news. “Douglen and Jeck are dead.”
“Dead?” she echoes.
“Yes.”
“Have you seen their bodies?”
I nod.
“How did they die?”
I glance at the listening shipsman, who stands only a few paces behind me. “They were shot.”
Shara starts to cry, leaning against the doorframe.
Now I’m worried. Did a part of Shara love Douglen? Maybe it was wrong to come here.
But then she smiles at me, and I understand—she’s crying in relief. “Now I know I'm dreaming,” she whispers.
She encourages the shipsman to speak with the captain and beckons me into her cabin. I’m shocked by how empty it is. She used to have two bookshelves with latched glass doors, as well as a lovely writing desk. Sitting down on the end of her bed, the only piece of large furniture left, I quickly tell her about my evening because I don’t have much time. The longer I stay in Ellevah, the greater the chance that I’ll be arrested by shore control and, most likely, charged with murder.
The stickiest, most complicated part of my story is when I try to explain what happened to Melily. Yet Shara seems to already know about the siren’s tidewater home. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Douglen surely knew—he mentioned that Melily survived the Wanderlea wreck by swimming—and Shara lived with the Osperacys for far longer than I did.
“Will Melily survive, do you think?” Shara asks.
“I hope so,” I say. “If anything, she can breathe differently down there.”
Shara dabs her eyes with a foamsilk handkerchief. “It’s probably best that we tell everyone else on the Trident she’s dead.”
I nod, grateful that Shara wants to keep the Osperacy’s true nature a secret. It protects Cressit too.
Thinking about him makes my throat tighten. “So are you really Douglen’s balance?” I ask.
“I am,” she says, “I always thought Jeck was too—but I’m not surprised that Douglen found a way around Lord Osperacy's control.” She then tells me everything that’s happened on the Trident since I last saw her. Lord Osperacy, she confirms, is most definitely dead. “Douglen said he died of a fever, but I knew it was poison.” She folds her hands in her lap and looks frail. “Douglen always wanted to be in charge of the ship. But with his power about to leave him and Timsy not old enough to help, he got desperate. He sold all of Lord Osperacy’s treasures. He used wavurl to cheat at gambling in sloppy ways, and he made a lot of enemies. We aren’t welcome in many of the major cities anymore. I thought that was why we came here—because we had no other port options in this part of the tide—but I suppose Douglen had other reasons.” She sighs. “Well, how about you clean yourself up in my washing room? I’ll get you some clean clothes, and I’ll talk to Captain Gedwick as well. And please don’t worry about the crew. Douglen and Jeck treated everyone terribly, especially after Lord Osperacy died. You’re surrounded by friends.”
Thankfully Shara seems to be right, and hardly three hours after Cressit and Melily disappeared into the tide, I’m sailing safely away from Ellevah on the Trident.
Marthes, my old servegirl, helps me settle into my old cabin, and I’m so glad to see her agai
n. I do find myself wondering why Douglen and Jeck didn’t dismiss her like they did so many others, and I hate to think that the scars on her neck and wrists are the unsettling answer.
She greets me warmly though. “So you were in Ellevah all this time! I was so worried about you. You know, it was good that you left when you did.”
“But that’s when everything went wrong.”
Marthes nods. “Exactly. If you’d stayed, you would have just suffered along with the rest of us.”
Almost all of my belongings are gone, except for a few simple dresses and a pair of shoes. Blushing, Marthes admits that she and the other servegirls took my things when it was clear I wasn’t coming back. They either sold or altered them.
“I can return what I still have,” she assures me.
“No, please don’t bother.” I cross the cabin and pull aside the curtains covering the windows. White moonlight shines in, and both moons are in the sky tonight. It’s strange to be back on the Trident after so long. Could I have somehow stopped Douglen from poisoning Lord Osperacy? Probably not, but it’s odd to think that as harsh as Lord Osperacy was, he was keeping another monster caged.
“I tried running away once,” Marthes says softly. “Me and a few other girls. It didn’t go well. Douglen and Jeck caught us and hurt us and after that, they took our passbooks.”
Fathoms! I left my passbook in the cottage. And then I realize something that pains me even more—I also left the herb manuscript behind.
At least Shara is able to sort out the passbook situation. Douglen had locked the crew’s passbooks up in Lord Osperacy’s old cabins—which he’d taken over—and Shara is able to find them. And as for me, when Captain Gedwick begs his way into one of the bigger port cities, Shara shows me that passbooks can be purchased with enough money.
Captain Gedwick, who I hardly knew while I was traveling on the Trident before, turns out to be a gruff but friendly man. He gives the crew generous shore leave, and he also encourages Shara and me to think about what we want to do now that the Osperacys are gone. He says he’d like to buy the Trident and make her more of a passenger ship. He reasons her current owner is Shara, for she was Douglen’s wife, and he offers to pay for the Trident in installments through the equatorial banks.
Shara is more than happy to sell the ship, and she decides to return to her childhood home.
“I’ll take Timsy and Dorla too,” she tells me. “Timsy and I get along well enough, so I think I can manage his wavurl. And you’re welcome to come with us. You’d like Kell Theer. It’s well outside of the trade routes, like Ellevah, and the people there are kind to deeplanders, at least that’s how it was when I left.”
I thank her and tell her I’ll think about it, but I’m not sure it’s what I should do.
The next few months are quiet, and for me, they feel melancholy and aimless as we sail from mountain city to mountain city. Captain Gedwick hires new crew members and employs guild workers whenever we’re in port to make repairs and upgrades. He also renames the ship to help shake off its poor reputation, and so we soon travel in the Lady Alonia—she’s apparently a famous warrior from Captain Gedwick’s home city. Because he’s eager to take on more paying passengers, Shara and I move our things into the smaller cabins in the bow. We also take the remainder of Lord Osperacy’s treasures, and there isn’t much left—mostly just jewelry that, for whatever reason, Douglen hadn’t sold yet.
Shara and I spend most of our time either walking Timsy and Dorla around the upper decks or letting them run through the cavernous hold, depending on the weather. The children are five tides old now, and Shara says she’s learned, following several ugly, siren temper-tantrums, that it’s easiest to care for Timsy when he has plenty of opportunity to roam.
“Why did you marry Douglen?” I finally find the courage to ask her one morning.
She pulls her shawl close as she watches Timsy and Dorla chase each other around a funnel. “Lord Osperacy made me. He wanted Douglen to have a wife. He thought it would make him seem more trustworthy. Lord Osperacy also threatened to stop sending money to my family if I refused, and…” She gives a little shrug. “I’m a lower city girl. My family needed the money.”
Shara reaches for Dorla’s hand, steadying the child as she climbs over a deck chair. “The worst part is, I don’t even know if Lord Osperacy ever sent my family money. He never let me visit them, and they never responded to the letters I sent—or, at least, I never received their replies.”
She frowns, surely thinking about how Douglen took Melily’s letter about Ellevah.
Timsy and Dorla go to bed early each evening, and once they're settled, I organize what’s left of Lord Osperacy’s treasures while Shara sorts through his papers. We hope she’ll find information about Dorla’s family, but in the end, I make the most interesting discovery. Opening a plain drybark box, I find brilliant white gems—the arctic stones Melily and I stole in Beth. I pick up one of the sparkling rocks. It seems as if it should feel ice cold, yet it isn’t. I watch the shifting, soft inner light reflect onto my fingertips, and I think I finally know what to do.
We eventually pass Varasay, and I long to go ashore. Yet considering how I left, it probably still wouldn’t be safe. Shara bravely visits the deeplander barracks, though, to see if she can learn anything for me. Some of her news is sad; Gren Tya passed away during the past summer, and Giron rebuilt his terrible factory. But some of her news is good; Carnos married a girl from Pirock and they already have twin baby girls, and twins are a sign of blessing from the Water Goddess.
Shara also brings me a package of cinniflower tea from Parsita’s shop. “She’s an interesting person, isn’t she? She wrapped this up nicely and said it was for you—like it was a present—but then she made me pay for it.”
The seas beyond Varasay are calm, and I feel calm as we arrive in Beth. With Shara’s blessing and some of her money too, I hire an automotor and travel to the high city. Apparently there aren’t any automotors on the Trident anymore because Douglen sold them.
I feel particularly anxious as I pass through the long, dark tunnel that cuts up through the countertide mountain. I squeeze the fabric seat coverings and drum my shoes on the floor. I’m not sure what’s bothering me the most—that this is where I first met Cressit or that the museum will want to know why I have the arctic stones.
The tide always passes Beth in winter, and so the city looks a lot like it did the last time I visited. Snowflakes even dance down from a white sky as I climb the museum steps.
I hug the box of arctic stones to my middle. If the museum accuses me of stealing them, I have no siren here to save me.
“Welcome to the Royal Museum of Beth.” A man wearing dark clothing greets me in the museum’s entrance hall. “It costs fifteen shells to visit the museum today.”
I rummage through my handbag for the uppy money Shara gave me. Nearby, other museum visitors stand in groups, shedding fur coats and speaking softly.
“May I see Sir Mauricen?” I ask the greeter, handing him the folded paper shells.
He looks mildly surprised. “Is Sir Mauricen expecting you? He’s a very busy man.”
“No, but I found something I think belongs to him.” I don’t want to give this man any more details than I have to, but I also don’t want him to send me away, so I add, “It’s very valuable.”
The man inspects me with raised eyebrows, but my steady gaze seems to satisfy him. “Very well, follow me.”
He leads me to Sir Mauricen’s office, but the door is locked, and no one’s there. I try not to let my disappointment show. I want to return the stones personally. Thankfully my guide says that there are a few more places the museum director might be, and after we wander through several exhibits, another museum guide suggests that we look for Sir Mauricen in the “glass house.”
The glass house turns out to be a large hall made of windows, sheltering what looks like a patch of deepland jungle. For a one heartsick moment, I feel as if I’m home in Sa
ltpool. The air is humid with the tangy, citrus smell of kelp and brinewood trees. I can even hear a few familiar bird calls. Yet there’s no seagrass or smooth, mossy rocks at my feet, only pebbles and tiled pathways.
Sir Mauricen stands in the center of the hall with drawings and plans strewn around him. As we approach, he looks from diagram to diagram, tapping his mouth thoughtfully with a ringed finger. He looks just like he did when I last saw him, wearing a suit and a few elegant accessories—this time a deep green necktie and gold eyeglasses. He’s also combed his white hair back, and he has his cane, the one topped with the starfish trapped in glass, tucked beneath an arm.
“Pardon me, Sir Mauricen,” says my guide. “This girl insisted she speak with you.”
I frown because saying that I insisted makes me seem so rude. And when Sir Mauricen looks at me expectantly, there’s no spark of recognition in his eyes. Melily truly made him forget us.
“I don’t mean to bother you,” I say. “I just… may I speak with you privately?”
“Of course. Garby, do you mind?” Sir Mauricen waves the guide away.
Garby leaves, but not before giving me a suspicious look.
I search my thoughts for the right words. I should have planned what I was going to say. Instead I awkwardly hold out the box. “I believe these are yours.”
Sir Mauricen uses his walking stick to steady himself as he steps over the diagrams, crosses the room, and takes the box.
Opening the hinged lid, he draws back in surprise and blinks several times. He then looks at me. “Why yes, these are mine.”
There’s an awful silence. He’s waiting for an explanation, and I can’t give one. “I’m sorry,” I finally spit out. “I can’t tell you why I have them, it would… I just… The thing is, I knew they belonged to you, and that it was right to return them.”
Currently Page 29