Although, thought Arden, it did not feel much like a pursuit. More like a tilt towards the Sainted Isles, and an inexorable slide towards doom.
26
I have come
‘I have come to broach the ogre’s tower.’ She stood at the door to the wheelhouse and held a tin box of biscuits liberated from her own stores. ‘And I bring food. It’s not much, but better than dried meat and coast-limes.’
Mr Riven stood at his wheel, his attention focused on the late afternoon sea. Long golden rays of sunlight came from behind them, casing the wheelhouse shadow over Saudade’s bow. Despite the kicking wind, there was not such a swell on the water when the currents veered south, and Saudade was large enough to swallow all but the deepest troughs.
‘Set it aside next to there. We’ll have them with supper.’ He pointed at a shelf below the wheelhouse port window, and a polished ironwood crate that held the echo box. The crate was open.
Arden peered in to watch the carbonized copper drum with its constantly oscillating needle. The needle scrawled a scratchy little line through the carbon upon the drum. At each revolution the line was re-carbonized, and the needle drew again.
‘I take it Miss Quarry is not being an adequate conversationalist if you have to come to me,’ he said gruffly, yet with enough welcome that Arden knew he harboured no ill will towards her.
Arden adjusted her fingerless gloves. ‘I’m not really in the mood to deal with a treasonous assistant right now. I’m feeling a little adrift.’ She gestured to her hands. ‘These. What are they even for?’
‘You didn’t know you had a shadow symmetry before today, did you?’
‘It seems so unlikely to be true.’ Arden shook her head. ‘I’m cautious about accepting anything Chalice says. The Order are well-versed in the expedient lie.’
‘I did not mean to make a dishonest woman of you, Arden.’
Ah, so he’d heard as well her accusations of harlotry. Arden felt the imps of shame poking her with their tridents. ‘I said things out of emotion. I was angry with Chalice. I regret not one second with you, Jonah.’
‘Hmm.’ Mr Riven pretended to be casual, but she could tell he was both shy and curious, and not altogether comfortable with the questions that now must be asked. ‘Has Miss Quarry said what it is you trammel?’
‘No. I won’t give her the satisfaction. They’ll find some way to exploit it! I refuse to be a tool for the Lions to use.’ She stopped, and sighed. ‘Oh, say it. I’m being irrational and stubborn.’
Mr Riven gave a questioning shrug, easy for him, who had admitted to two sanguinities but probably held more in his wild Fictish blood.
‘You’re not irrational. And don’t pay any attention to anyone on Bellis and her monstrousness. She was no fool. We all made certain to find her sanctuary, and she lives there now. She is safe. You are safe, and God willing we catch up with the Tallwaters by tonight or tomorrow and put this to rest.’
‘Jonah,’ she started. ‘What … what other talent did Bellis have? What made the Order so scared that they couldn’t bring her to Lyonne?’
‘Something very old, I think. Not seen for a long time.’ He adjusted the wheel. A muscle popped in his cheek. ‘Stefan knew first, before she did. Our Rector learned a lot sneaking around those libraries of prohibited books in Clays Church’s catacombs. Learning about the sanguinities the Society had erased from the bloodlines. I only wish he hadn’t told her what he suspected. Things only got bad after Bellis found out. Your decision to remain innocent is the right one, Arden Beacon.’
A small, shy warmth bloomed in her chest. ‘Thank you. I needed to hear your blessing.’
At the sound of the scratching beside her, Arden glanced at the drum again. The needle continued to scrawl shapes on the enamelled copper. Apart from one or two shadows that might have been whales or megalodons, there was nothing of any size that could be considered her yacht. Her worries mounted. What if they didn’t catch up with the Tallwaters? What if they were too late and Bellis was delivered six pints of sanguis blood that could …
That could do what? A small part of her regretted not asking Chalice for specifics, but at the time it had all been too much.
‘Are you still very upset with me? For my poison blood? For my putting Bellis’ mortal soul in danger?’
He glanced down, and something about her expression must have stirred his pity. Mr Riven pointed towards the horizon. ‘We’re still a way out from the main current. You should catch some sleep in the cabins.’
‘I couldn’t. Not really. It’s like a wire is plucked in my mind and keeps humming, and will only get more insistent. Until all this is over. I’m scared if we don’t find the Tallwaters, that something terrible will happen.’
‘I won’t allow it to happen.’
She wanted to kiss his rough mouth and hold him close, and have him tell her that no matter what, everything would be all right. Out there, and between them.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I need to show you something.’
He set the wheel to due east, then called David up into the wheelhouse from the engine room. When the young man arrived a minute later, Mr Riven gave him brief instructions.
‘Keep heading in that direction, lad. Keep the sun at your back and follow the compass east until you hit fast water, then let it take you south. Lightmistress, follow me.’
Although she’d been introduced to the wheelhouse on the morning after the Guild Ball, she hadn’t been down below in Saudade’s cabins before. They were decked out in the same dark wood as the hull, so that it took her eyes a while to adjust to the compact, decorative surroundings. Polished brass in an angular rococo style. Lanterns set into the walls with sconces of frosted glass.
Mr Riven gestured towards a great desk, where a huge map printed on silk was rolled out from end to end, with a great thick pane of lead crystal over it. The map looked very old.
‘Look,’ he invited her.
Not as soon as she would have expected, given her familiarity with the area, she recognized the lands on the western edge, Fiction and Lyonne. Most ocean-current maps had the Sainted Isles well off the chart, among the sporting sea-serpents and the warnings: Here be dragons.
In this map of Mr Riven’s, the two landmasses of Lyonne and Fiction only skirted the eastern edges. It was the three islands of the Sainted Isles that provided the map’s focus, with the whirling Tempestas at its centre.
One island had the outline of an animal’s head, the other was a system of archipelagos scattered like the pages falling from a book, and the third, the smallest and most southern, was like a woman’s face in profile. Equus, Libro, Maris.
Equus was the largest and closest of the islands, north of Tempestas, with permanent storms. Arden knew Equus, for the island was where the prospectors went, drawn by the siren-song of work and wealth. It was where Bellis would have gone when she first fled, and where the Tallwaters intended to go now.
‘I’ve never seen it in such detail. All the maps in Lyonne are drawn second-hand.’
‘They’ve changed since then, with the rockblood drilling.’ Mr Riven straightened it out. ‘This map came with my great-great-grandfather, in the days before the automata took over Equus.’
Arden nodded. ‘Every Hillfolk and street-rat in Clay knows the way into Equus. They talk about the path in taverns and in bedrooms. It’s their magical land, the sunset country. The Tallwaters will be expecting the northern passage.’
‘Yes, but like you said, the currents favour south this time of year. Alasdair Harrow might have found out about your blood somehow, but the land-bound fool didn’t consider the currents. They’ll flank the Tempestas storm wall the entire distance, and come south under it. Arden, now you tell me where it leads.’
She inspected the silk with a dome of optical glass.
‘It leads to … Maris Proper. The southern island.’ Arden read aloud: volcanic, deserted, uninhabitable. Grey crosshatches in the water. Barren. Poisoned water. No Fishing.
She looked
up at Mr Riven, and met his eyes. ‘It’s a desert. A sea-desert! The Tallwaters won’t come across anybody down there.’
Mr Riven leaned back, a sense of calm about him, as if the worry had drained away. ‘I trust you now, with Bellis’ whereabouts. When we knew she had to hide, Stefan and Bellis didn’t go to Equus, as one would assume. They went to one of the Libro refuge islands to the north-east. Up here. There is a secret church he’d seen on his old liturgical maps.’
‘That’s almost three hundred miles away!’
‘Three hundred miles, and safe. She lives in seclusion and solitude at an abandoned religious priory. The Lions can’t find her there, and neither can her dammed father.’ He nodded. ‘And thank the gods, no murderous Hillsiders with six pints of sanguis blood.’
‘A secret island,’ Arden said. ‘But why there instead of Equus?’
Mr Riven pushed the protective crystal and wrinkled the silk a little. ‘She burned those bridges the first time she fled. Ran into a lot of trouble with the deepwater folk on the northern shores of Equus. She could never return after our marriage, and neither could I.’
A strange little silence came up between them. A portent of deeper questions. ‘Have you thought about what we’ll do once we’ve got through this, and gone back to Vigil?’
‘You told me. You have dreams you’ve dreamt all your life, Arden. If I stay with you, I fear I might stop them from coming true.’
‘I don’t know what my dreams are, Jonah. They changed when you put me into the ocean.’
He shook his head. ‘I need to explain why I didn’t want you to come along on this journey. My motives were utterly selfish. Aequor profundum – sometimes it doesn’t work and I nearly lost you to it. I lost my family to the evil that’s inside me, I … I thought I could manage it, and then you nearly died in my arms …’ Another pause. ‘It terrifies me, Arden, these feelings I have come to experience towards you. This loss of myself. This terror. This way that I forget all but you, even Bellis becomes like a faded memory. Would be best if I let you go.’
She took his hand then, intending to tell him to quiet himself and calm down, but as soon as he slid his rope-roughened palm into hers a visceral tremor went through her, unforgiving as a hot desert wind, and Mr Riven’s blue eyes darkened in the kraken-lights.
‘Arden …’
‘Yes,’ she said, and he fell upon her raised mouth to kiss her then, a moan of effort and surrender escaping him at doing so. She accepted him with a love born of desire and sadness, marvelling how lips so hard upon his face were so soft and hot upon her own, the way his tongue met her own nervously, unsure of intimacy even now, but wanting, wanting.
She wanted him. Arden fumbled for the hem of his knitted top, pulled it up and his pale chest was flushed with this startled rush of sexual quickening. She moved her hands on, over shoulders indented with muscle, a back hard with work, the ghosts of scars upon his skin, a living map of the journey he’d taken to get back to his ocean and his monsters. There was a slight ridge to his tattoos, their patterns under her fingers suggesting a sea-snake’s scales.
She took his hands, those forearms rope-burned from salt scour and harpoon cable, stroked him into compliance and guided his hands to the waxed cotton covering her breasts. He felt her with silent wonderment, bent to nuzzle sparks of sensation through the cloth, panting with effort and surprise at the way his body had responded so powerfully without permission from his mind. With his busy thoughts preoccupied, she could leave him to unhook the button-eyes at her flanks, let the dress panels fall, the sleeves detach. At her encouragement, his hands slid inside her chemise, outlined her body with his slaughterman’s hands, pausing only to bite soft at her lips, her jaw, attend to his own heated desires with his eyes half-shut, for the taste of her skin transported him to other worlds.
Still distracted, his thumbs brushed over Arden’s nipples, causing her to murmur at the unruly shocks through her pelvis, between her legs. He pinched harder, she bit his bottom lip. She was wet. On shaking limbs they fell upon the worn carpet.
The seawater sloshed and rocked through the hull outside, growled through the black mangrove wood with the rhythm of blood through an artery. Mr Riven collected Arden up in his powerful arms and his clumsy kisses grew harder now, more confident, his ragged breath increased as the chains of his necessity pulled him so taut that his body quivered the way metal hummed in high wind.
Beyond her rush of insensate wonder, the demons in her mind still whispered. Will he change his mind and stay?
Too late to fret, not when her own need was a hunger that could not be slaked by mere gestures of affection alone. She unbuckled the belt at his breeches, tugged the leather tongue and let it fall away. He was already hard.
As she handled him, Mr Riven panted deep in his throat, before gasping aloud, ‘By the gods, by the gods.’ Wanted to thrust into her hand, gain a portion of the pleasure denied him as a husband in a convenient marriage. The urgency was up, no time for long meanders.
She pulled aside her undergarments so that the hot length of him might slide inside her.
No gentle explorations now, no murmurs of fealty and of love. Had she not been so ready his hurried, rough entry might have been uncomfortable. She gasped as he took her, as he dug his fingers into her shoulders for support, seeking relief. He was beholden to darker spirits, the ones beneath them, all around them. He surged inside Arden with the passion of his own tide, gasping each time he moved, and each time she dug her fingers into the resisting slabs of his buttocks he cried out. His crisis became too much for him to carry and his body stiffened, the contortion of a man under the lash. He spent himself with a strangled sound, then collapsed upon Arden with a sob.
With a guilty, drunken rush of pleasure Arden climaxed in joy.
The waves whispered and muttered their secret language. The side wheels beat the water. The beams creaked. The last shudders of her own culmination left Arden in fits and starts. She put her nose into the short fuzz of Mr Riven’s skull, breathing in the scent of him, sea and spice. His body still shook. Where could she put her emotions? He had not wanted to stay with her, and the devil knew how many men had been content with a roll in the hay before moving on to other lovers.
He softened inside Arden’s body and his breath lost its panting rhythm, but otherwise Mr Riven made no movement to detach himself from their embrace. His weight upon her had a comfort she did not expect. By now she’d have tipped her previous lovers off and would be stepping into her dress, one eye firmly upon the exit. Jonah Riven she could not bear to let go.
‘So, lost your bones, monster caller?’ A little levity she tried, to cover her pinching, nervous heart. She dared not move, lest he slip out entirely, and she lose this tenuous, intimate connection. The lights slipped over the sweat of his pale, flushed skin, and the moment took on a deep gravity.
He did not reply, only rose on his elbows, and his gaze scraped over Arden’s face, trying to read her for deceptions, work out why he’d been so easily compromised, why Bellis had been supplanted in his affection by Arden’s presence. If she satisfied him, he gave no sense of it.
‘What’s wrong, Jonah?’ she asked.
‘Saudade,’ he said, ‘is a word in Old Fictish. There is no equivalent in Lyonne for the feeling of saudade. To miss something, to yearn, to remember a moment that might not have existed.’
‘I have felt this, though my language could not name it.’
Mr Riven nodded. His thumb caressed her shoulder, her arm, placed a small kiss after it, the kind one might lay upon the body of a saint. She trembled at the juxtaposition there, his rough chin with two days’ growth, his lips swollen from kissing and so soft. She envisioned those lips in other places, saying words that she longed to hear.
‘If my family had not died, if I had not been sent to prison, perhaps I could have made a little fortune on the coast. Perhaps I might have gone to Clay Portside as a young man, and met the lighthouse keeper there. I hope she might have
allowed me to court her.’
Arden touched his face with tenderness, wanting to wipe away the sorrow lines so deep-set within. The people of Fiction always aged beyond their years. There was a coarseness to them, the way a leather might bleach in the sun and become hard. Was that Jonah’s fate, if he survived this journey?
‘There are many lighthouse keepers in Portside, and I was only good for signals before my uncle died. But I would have gladly allowed the mysterious and handsome man from Fiction to court me.’
Her words only drove him into a deeper despair. Arden reached to kiss him again, and this time there was a bittersweet taste to his kiss-abraded lips, a regret for what they could have shared if the world had not ridden roughshod between all the chances that might have allowed them to meet in earlier, more hopeful times.
He grew hard again within the embrace of her body, and moved with the aching tenderness of a farewell. Arden held on to him in the silent terror of their eventual parting, but she could not stay motionless, and she jerked and quivered with her second climax. He grasped her hips, her thighs, finished with a final half-dozen grunting, ragged strokes. Oh, Mr Riven, still too inexperienced to maintain those rhythms of love into that moment when desire collapses with all the force of a mountain on the Day of Judgment. He slipped out of her in his zeal and with the clumsy gaucherie of a raw youth, spent his essence in the hollow between Arden’s centre and thigh. The sudden expression of abject shame that came over him as he suffered the throes of a too-quick orgasm needed kissing away.
‘By the sea, Arden,’ he said, his breath hot and hoarse against her cheek. ‘If only …’
He never got to finish. The engines, previously a background grumble, suddenly screamed. Saudade lurched sideways.
Outside, one wheel was beating air. The hull below them screeched in metallic pain.
‘Devils!’ Mr Riven exclaimed. ‘That was a collision!’
Arden fumbled for her dress, still punch-drunk from lovemaking and her limbs decidedly uncooperative. ‘Go. I’ll be all right. You check the below deck, I’ll check what’s going on upstairs.’
Monstrous Heart Page 28