Inside the wheelhouse, things both antique and modern. He owned both spyglass and spectrograph, but also a near-new and extremely expensive echo box, technology only the principal signallers had.
He noticed her staring at the box.
‘Echo box. Traces shoals, floating pumice, stalker ships. It is a cunning little machine. It uses electric signals, the same as a Sumerian-Congolese wireless device, and traces them upon this paper roll.’
‘I never took you for a technological fellow.’
‘I prefer pragmatic, myself,’ he said. ‘If I had the time and the necessity I could refit her in all the latest inventions.’
‘Mr Riven,’ David Modhi called up at that most inopportune time, ‘I’ve taken down the gangway!’
‘Good lad,’ he said back, throwing him a wave. ‘Say thank you to your mother for me.’
‘I will, Mr Riven!’
Arden smiled as they cast away. ‘I think he has a little crush on you.’
‘Poor devil,’ Mr Riven said, after the youth had run back to the harbour shed to once more be in thrall to his mother’s commands. ‘He deserves a better life than this.’
‘I’ve seen his test scars. At least he’s tried.’
Mr Riven nodded. ‘He’s falsified his name and gone to at least six more moots, up and down the Fiction coast. I took him each time, the optimistic whelp.’ Mr Riven shrugged. ‘Even if he was positive for something, it would be a risk if he tested for the wrong thing.’
‘What would be a wrong thing?’
She saw his jaws clench, and realized he’d not meant to speak.
Arden sighed, and nodded. ‘Well, he looks like he’s nearly of age. A sanguis shadow would have shown up long before now. The best he can hope for is that he is malorum, a late bloomer, I suppose. The Society isn’t too fussy with sanguis malorum.’
‘From your voice I’d assume you have familiarity with the condition.’
She nodded. ‘I failed my eleventh- and thirteenth-year tests, tested just positive at seventeen. The only reason I was allowed a third test was because of my father, and my name. He is Portmaster for Clay Portside, and he is a Beacon.’
‘Then you know what it is, to have a name that precedes you.’
‘When did you test?’ Arden asked. ‘Prior to your, uh, prison term? You obviously have something.’
To her alarm Mr Riven gestured for Arden to take the wheel. ‘Never tested,’ he said. With a yelp, Arden grabbed the paddle wheeler’s mechanism. Alarmingly, Mr Riven intended to show her how to drive Saudade out of the marina.
‘Never … never tested?’ she stammered, trying to navigate both a powerful steamer and her own tongue at the same time. She had served her assigned duty on slow dockside tugboats, but this craft exceeded anything in her experience.
‘Our family has always had endowments,’ Mr Riven said as she steered, half-terrified and half-exhilarated. ‘Why test for something I already know I have?’
‘But you could have left this place. Got away from everyone who wished you and your family harm … oh, a buoy, is that a buoy? Did I just run over the signal buoy?’
‘Keep going. You’re fine.’
‘My Lord, she’s a powerful craft. You could get all the way to Clay Portside in your boat.’
He walked to the window. ‘Saudade was never my boat. She belonged to my family. And kraken-calling is a fisherman’s talent. Specific to a region. It is not a talent of any importance outside of here.’ A light rain fell across the glass. ‘My blood is tied up with this ocean. The devils that live beneath the waves, the leviathan, the monstrom mare. This is what my blood trammels. If I’d left for Clay, what could I do there?’
He turned to Arden, who had committed to a grip on the wheel and relaxed into the engine’s power.
‘Was the same with Bellis. The Sainted Isles lie east, not north, not in Clay. That’s where the rockblood flows. It’s where she yearned for. When she needed to go, I let her go.’
‘I can’t say I’ve ever experienced any geographical underpinnings to my sanguinity myself.’
‘There’s fire everywhere in this world. Everywhere and in everything. Besides,’ he turned back to the rain-lashed glass, ‘even if I was not tested for endowments, they came for me in the end. Took me to the prison hulks. Tried to make sure I died. Which I did not.’
‘You must have been barely a child.’
‘I was fourteen.’
‘Fourteen! How could they have pinned a slaughter on a child?’
‘Huh, so, Vernon spared no grisly detail about my crime.’
She sighed. ‘Some nonsense about you having killed your family in a night. Everyone on the promontory.’
‘Then that is what I did.’
‘I will not believe you. I know what lies Lions are capable of.’
‘Sometimes they don’t lie.’
The side wheels ground through the slosh. Arden wondered what she could say. Words of comfort? Too late now, such things were behind him. He stared out beyond the horizon, where the cloudbank grew, undoubtedly thinking of Bellis beyond that straight edge, under that self-same cloud, needing him.
The waves slapped Saudade’s bows and sheeted across her forecastle. The forward rock became pronounced as they hit deeper water, making the brass crossbar at her feet a great necessity in keeping her upright.
‘See,’ he said once they had left Vigil harbour, ‘you’re a natural skipper.’
‘Is she the only boat your family owned?’ Arden asked, once she found her balance.
‘There were several in my grandfather’s time. And my father had two more, Sonder and Sehnsucht.’
‘What happened … after … after, you know. They died?’
‘Sonder, I’ve no idea where it went. Sehnsucht I gave to Bellis and your cousin Stefan, to pay for passage to the Sainted Isles. The penny for the Old Guy. Somebody else has her now, or she was long ago made firewood.’ Then, unexpectedly he asked, ‘Who was Mr Castile?’
She started. ‘Excuse me?’
‘When you said you had a chaperone. And to the Dowager. Nobody can lie properly when put on the spot. Ergo, there was a Castile of your acquaintance.’
‘A man of my social circle when I lived in Clay Portside.’ Then, emboldened by their newfound familiarity, ‘He was my lover.’
‘Your first?’
‘My first important one.’
‘The one the Lion bribed you with.’
‘The very one. I’m no fool, Mr Riven, he’s probably on the other side of the world by now and living quite high on the hog. I’ve not spoken to him since the day he left, a year ago.’
Mr Riven frowned, entirely confused. ‘Why would a man do something so unfathomably absurd as leave you?’
She let herself smile at his compliment. ‘It’s so political when endowments and genetics are concerned. Not everyone is as noble as you, Mr Riven. He wouldn’t run away with me, and I was quite terrified to do it myself. My cowardice, you see.’
‘I cannot see you a coward.’
‘You would be surprised.’
She must have telegraphed a need for distraction, for he pointed to a rope on top of a rivet. ‘Lash the wheel, slow the engine. Let me show you something.’
Arden did as Mr Riven requested and followed him down to the deck. He pulled off his jacket, rolled up his shirt, held out a tanned and lean arm. With a knife blade from his pocket, he put a nick in the side of his hand, where a coin might be if he were a Lyonnian sanguinem. A callus pinched there, from a hundred cuts. Once he let a few drops fly he withdrew from the railing.
‘Come see.’
She held fast to a post, for the wheels were still going at a chop. The intermittent sunlight caught the cloud of water vapour from the wheels, gave the spray a corona of rainbow colour. As she waited, the wheels slowed to a gentle turn.
‘What am I looking for?’
He gave a sly smile, and suddenly, she didn’t care, only wanted to admire Mr Riven’s face. Uns
ymmetrical, too pale, his hair too dark-dun a shade of brown to mark him as kin to the yellow-crowned longboaters of the Estotilian winterlands. Yet in all ways he was beautiful. As she surveyed him, she had a sense of coolness, for the flume of the waves had risen from the stilled wheels and surrounded her, the light refracting as in the very path of a rainbow. Down below …
Arden’s breath stilled. The water turned to moving glass.
No, not glass. A thousand moving, twisting shapes of luminescent transparency, for the colours had turned to life.
‘Are they cuttlefish?’ she shouted over the threshing waves.
‘Krakenspawn,’ Mr Riven shouted back with unconcealed delight. ‘A hen has managed to lay before dying. It’s a good sign.’
The kraken had taken up the propulsion that the wheels had abandoned, and Saudade picked up speed, moving with the slightest side-to-side yaw until they came in sight of the dark rocks of the Riven Promontory. The churning bodies of the new-hatched little monsters threw off flashes of electric brilliance. She could not tell if it were them or the running tide that caused such speed.
With a dismissive gesture, Mr Riven flung out his hand and with a rainbow flash, the krakenspawn were gone. The boat coasted on the residual momentum.
Arden stayed on the deck while he returned to the tower, to reverse the wheels and gently drift in to the pier.
The morning had taken on a delicious strangeness now, shiny-new with possibilities and responsibilities.
‘What happens from here?’ she asked when Mr Riven came down out of the cabin. ‘Because I’m obliged to report to the Lions if you decide to go anywhere.’
‘You’ll be waiting a long time to make that report.’
It was not her place to opine on his decision. But she could not help her feelings. Found herself sneaking looks in his direction, and finding herself gladdened by his sight.
‘You’re still not going back to Bellis? I know you said it last night, but feared the wine might be talking.’
He shook his head with a half-grin. ‘If the Lyonne Order has taken interest in her after all these years, they’ve left it too late. They have no influence over there. Why do you think she kept heading to the Isles?’
Mr Riven tied the boat off and helped Arden onto land. His work-roughened hand warm in hers. Making her brave. She could easily have broached the gap herself, but she appreciated the concern, and besides, a sense of safety strengthened those hands of his, an impression that he could pluck a person out of the wildest seas.
The wind roused up, and the sun came out a little, and the golden bloom on his cheeks made him seem otherworldly, an ancient idol carved from an occluded marble. She internally debated furiously about how to say goodbye, about how to steal a few more minutes with Mr Riven.
They were disturbed by a feeble yip from the pier’s landing. A brown and white terrier dog, grey at the muzzle, trotted down the wooden jetty.
‘Ah, Lightmistress, the boss has arrived. Come and meet Chief.’
‘Hello, Chief,’ Arden said to the little dog. She squatted down to scratch him under his salty jaw and patted his wiry back. ‘Hello, old pup.’
The dog gazed up at her with eyes blued from cataracts, then put his paw on her knee. Mr Riven’s critical attention was upon her. The dog’s opinion was a great test.
‘Dogs are keen judges of human character,’ Arden said, standing up with bony, scruffy Chief in her arms. He licked her under her chin, tasting krakensalt from their journey.
‘They are indeed.’ Mr Riven stroked Chief’s head. ‘I’d only owned him a year when my family was … when I was …’ He stopped. ‘Did you know Jorgen Beacon looked after him when I was gone? Took care of the two boats as well. Saudade and Sehnsucht.’
‘Mr Harris never told me. I thought you were at odds, because of Stefan.’
‘No, it was not Stefan that made us distant. Well, maybe a little. My uncle Zachariah had quite a friendship with Jorgen. They were stuck on the same promontory, like us.’
He turned to walk away, before stopping to say, ‘Well, are you coming? I can’t have you stumbling back in those heeled slippers. If you fall off a cliff, Mr Harrow will accuse me of having given you a shove.’
‘We can’t have that.’
‘There should be some boots that might fit you.’
Arden put Chief down and followed Mr Riven up the pier path to the factory sheds.
A selection of wind chimes, some bright, and some ancient with salt-rust, made a symphony as they entered the small quadrangle afforded by the building shells. A cormorant on a roof watched them, one of the compound’s constant birds. Mr Riven disappeared inside the first of the warehouses, came out dragging a shipping trunk banded in iron. The locks were broken, and the hinges almost rusted solid. Inside, under old portside uniforms and shipbuilder’s diagrams, the trunk was filled to the brim with boots, some of them barely worn. From the variation of sizes, more than one person had owned the contents.
Arden picked out a pair of general-purpose low heels, brushed off the dust and knocked them out for spiders.
An odd smell wafted out of another open barn door, hot metal and salt water.
‘It is the hen,’ Mr Riven said at Arden’s unspoken question. ‘Mother of the spawn you saw earlier.’
‘You caught her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I see?’
He nodded. ‘But say a prayer on entry, Lightmistress. She has made a hard sacrifice and deserves respect.’
The factory hunkered down low and dim, with a row of lanterns set about a long, broad table that was more a giant chapel altar than a butcher’s block. At first, the creature seemed entirely eye, a golden disc wider than the reach of Arden’s arms, shining in the lamplight. The pupil gleamed wise and cold, having beheld all the mysteries of the devil’s abyss with a form beloved only by God. A luminescence was inside her sizable cranium, which Arden figured roomy enough to hold three Clydesdales in an embrace. Yet the kraken turned out smaller than Arden had previously thought. This was not to say the creature was not massive, but of a conservative heft that might destroy only the Breeze or Saudade. Certainly not to tangle up an entire clipper ship as in the woodblock paintings of her old books, or an armada as the old stories suggested.
The hen’s long legs were pale, and in the low light had the softness of a child’s arms. The chain and canvas harness Mr Riven had used to haul her onto the sacrificial altar from his boat still cradled the head the way fingers might hold a giant egg.
Reverence here, no violence. A lying-in-state, not a slaughter.
Mr Riven watched Arden examine the kraken hen in silence until she had finished her worship.
‘I took her yesterday,’ he said at last. ‘She had laid the last of her eggs. A monstrom mare in its natural habitat will prefer to die upon a pontoon of black mangroves, part of the ecology of the creature’s natural environment. My boat was the nearest vessel to achieve that end, so she came to me in consent.’ He reached out and touched the hen’s rubbery flesh. ‘Now we wait for her to die so she can be harvested. For the oil in her head, the fabric of her skin.’
‘It sounds quite a process.’
‘Yes, and there is not much of a window to do either. After she breathes her last, the decay is quick. They bleed ichor, not blood. The mortification is absolute. If she is not prepared, there will be nothing left of her except seawater tomorrow morning.’
Suddenly the creature’s siphon, big enough for Arden to have wedged herself in up to her waist, let out a miserable puff of air with a seawater plume. Arden yelped, caught the misty brunt of that last exhale.
‘Oh! She’s still alive,’ Arden said, wiping her face and arms. ‘And now I smell of salt-rust.’
Mr Riven grinned and pulled a pony-plant chamois off a rail, held it out. ‘I’m sorry, I should have warned you not to get too close.’
‘Getting too close is the ultimate warning for all things,’ she replied, meaning to say it in grudging hu
mour, but as she took the fine vegetable leather, her hand met Mr Riven’s own, and a shock of longing went through her, a feeling beyond desire, for the ground had opened beneath her and all she could do was flail and fall.
He dropped the towel and Arden reached up for him as a vine in darkness might reach for sun. On tip-toes she pressed her mouth to his chapped lips and thought for a moment he would resist her, that she had made a terrible mistake, that she only intended to crash and burn this nascent friendship with an unwanted kiss.
Then he let out a moan so soft it could have been a sigh and wrapped his arms about her, a grip both tight and trembling, and crushed his mouth against her own with such untaught carelessness it could have been the kiss of a child.
What was this? Was it love, or anger, or exultation at stealing this wretched left-behind lover who had been made monstrous to protect a golden queen?
Or was it her own obsession grown beyond its bounds? His entire body stood rigid and humming in her arms, a human tuning fork struck and held, and the raw newness of him when she’d spent so long without made the furious stabs of desire in her belly as painful as glass shards. She kissed him greedy as a thief. He was an illicit feast she’d stumbled on when all her life she’d been content with scraps, wanted to taste the dark mysteries of his mouth, the salt of him, hear his gasp of pleasure when he—
Without warning he pulled away, leaving Arden gasping.
‘Bellis,’ he said through a tight, hoarse throat. His breath came fast and shallow.
Bellis. Bellis, her shadow, the Woman Who Fled and Lived.
‘Jonah.’ Arden stepped to him again, not yet ready to relinquish him. He took her shoulders and held her away. His expression was more akin to grieving than passion.
‘It’s too risky for her, Arden. Her safety depends on our marriage being true.’
‘A safety imposed upon you by a marriage you had no choice but to comply with! She should never have gone out there if she knew the deepwater people would be so upset.’
He backed off as if she was spitting poison instead of truth, and Arden pursued him no more. Only sat by the table as he shook his head.
‘She is still my responsibility.’
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