Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  Arden clung to the deck in a wreckage of terror and exhaustion, and a pair of arms – a man’s arms, not monster’s this time – picked her up with infinite tenderness and against the rocking boat helped her below decks. She collapsed upon warm leather, as her lungs expelled an ocean.

  He could not stay long. His rope-callused hand caressed her cheek once, making certain she was not mortally injured, before he was gone back into the storm. The snapping doors belonged to the passage of Chalice, limping down the stairs in an overhand shuffle with the formerly dead Sean Ironcup.

  ‘So we have an unsinkable,’ Arden said with some effort. She sat up and peered at the Hillsider. ‘You’ve survived your second capsizing.’

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Sean replied, still feisty despite his partially maundered state.

  Chalice dumped their revenant in one of the upholstered chairs, then put her hands on her hips, glowered down at him. ‘No nonsense, young man. You’ve caused us a fair bit of trouble. Attempted murder of a Guildswoman, and a sanguinem at that? Stealing a boat? Consider yourself formally under arrest by the authority of the Lyonne Investigatory Order and Nomenclatures.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It means you’re stuck with us until we can take you to a decent Magistrate who isn’t leading you into iniquity like Mr Harrow. You have a right to be kept alive, but that is quite about the limit of it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I won’t try to run away,’ he said, both wretched and defiant at the same time. The chill and sudden dunking had aggravated his palsy. Both sides of him curled up with spasms. ‘I know what I did was wrong.’

  Chalice clicked her tongue and fetched Arden a blanket from the camphorwood chest. Arden shook her head at the offering. ‘I’ll change into a dry dress. Give it to the lad before he ties himself into a knot. Maybe get one for yourself too, Chalice.’

  ‘I’m quite all right,’ Chalice said, and with a gentleness that belied her mood, she tucked the blanket around Sean’s thin shoulders. He watched them both warily through swollen, red-rimmed eyes, but did not complain.

  Behind a brass divider all rococo with weed-fronds and clam shells, Arden slid out of her sopping blue uniform and into her spare dress, a dark linseed and wax wet-work garment hardened from the cold. The kraken eye still played behind the curtain of her mind. Jonah had summoned it, that creature. Had given a monster instructions, compelled the thing to save her. Was for a moment, the monster’s master.

  The aequor profundum in her blood moved hot through the chambers of her heart. Every moment that passed, every event that confronted her with her own mortality, she was becoming more tied to Jonah Riven. She had not yet the time to think of it before now, but in this dark panelled room with its moving shadows and winking brass, a future began to congeal. A possible future, with her half-Islander lover, and her coins gone, and the city of her birth forgotten.

  I want that.

  The thought filled her with triumph and panic. The Lyonne Order would not let her go so easily, but if Bellis had achieved it, then she could too. Maybe there would be room on the secret island for all of them.

  ‘What a performance!’ Chalice continued on the other side of the room divider. ‘The menfolk are up in the wheelhouse effecting emergency repairs. We’re lucky our hull is intact. The side wheels are completely shot to smithereens, but the screw is still working.’

  As she spoke, thunder grumbled outside, and the boat lifted on a great wave before sinking again.

  Arden shook her head, dismayed Chalice could court fate so blatantly. One did not count lucky stars until broad daylight, and they were still in the night-time of their crisis.

  ‘Don’t thank any deity just yet. We’re still not past the Wall, I assume.’

  ‘No.’ Chalice steadied herself against a support beam and snorted. ‘Anyway, what’s the chances of our captain keeping at least a whiskey in this office, hmm? A dram of spirit to ease our conditions, and then we could go about drying our clothes.’

  While Chalice went on a hunt for liquor, Arden returned to Sean Ironcup.

  ‘Some gratitude is in order on my behalf,’ Arden said to him. ‘You grabbed me as I was sliding off the deck.’

  ‘I wasn’t much help, my stronger side doesn’t feel much different from my leeward. We still fell in.’ He gasped then, remembering. ‘What manner of monster seized us?’

  ‘Blood-called kraken bull.’

  ‘He was big.’

  ‘He was big. Angry too. Same I was angry when you bound me and bled me, no more than an animal. What moral failing had you think hurting another fellow human was worth profit?’

  Sean’s face crumbled. He was not so guilty, she decided, had been dragged on this malarkey out of sheer familial duty, but if he considered himself a man, then he had to take a man’s responsibility, whether he was nineteen or ninety.

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Leyland said that there was no way onto the Islands without payment. He wanted to sell the girl, my sister’s child! Tried to auction her off to the highest bidder in the Black Rosette when a man arrived.’ He made motions of his hands. ‘The Magistrate, Gregor’s employer. Approached Gregor’s father and said he would give all three children a home if he were to do a task on his behalf …’ Sean heaved a breath, close to tears.

  ‘And your sister did not protest?’

  Whatever bulwarks the boy had put up against his family’s disintegration, they were swept away on Helena’s mention. Sean began to weep. Blubbered some things. Arden caught the gist of his crisis. After the transaction in the Black Rosette turned ugly, Helena had closed down, gradually, like a great house might do for the night. She still had a modicum of function about her when they had come to steal Arden’s blood, but that was the last time she had spoken. The children were gone. Her work was ended. Best she die in fractions.

  ‘Leyland, I think, would have been happier for her to die as well. She had the blue fever last year, can bear no more children. Her family had no money and her blood …’

  ‘She carries sanguine traits?’

  ‘No traits. Not in the Ironcup line. Leyland never liked her, or me. If Gregor had married well there could have been the chance of sanguinity. It might have meant a reversal in our fortunes, and we would never have needed to come out here.’

  The strength sapped from Sean, he fumbled for the blanket’s end, curled up in speechless horror at what had been done in the name of Leyland Tallwater’s ambition.

  The ship lurched again. The sound of shouting, footsteps. A heavy piece of equipment lost balance, slammed into a supporting structure above. Someone cried out in pain. Mr Riven, at battle with the weather.

  ‘Hold on,’ Chalice called from the rear of the ship. ‘We’re back in heavy water again.’

  Arden fell onto the floor and clutched the carpet, suffering Saudade’s sway on all her axes.

  Then, the way a curtain can fall upon a stage play of destruction, the storm abruptly subsided into a desultory scatter of wind and did not resume. The ship’s sways eased into a rhythmic bob. Arden waited for another minute before chancing an upright position.

  Chalice let go the brass post she’d been clinging to and regarded the black wood ceiling beams as if she could see the sky through them. ‘Looks like we are fully out of the wall-storm at last,’ she said, with no small measure of relief.

  ‘Yes, but on what side?’

  The deckside door slammed again.

  Mr Riven was a mess. The tattered remains of his shirt had turned pink from the alarming wound that ran diagonally across his chest, bigger than the ones he’d opened to save Arden with aequor profundum. The wound still bled. But his face was alight with indignation, his mouth a grimace, his pupils dilated in rage.

  ‘You,’ he said, pointing to Sean Ironcup. ‘Explain yourself.’

  Sean Ironcup stared at Mr Riven, his eyes bulging with terror. ‘I was dead, now I am alive, and the Redeemer provided me with a breath so I can walk the world.’

&n
bsp; Sean pulled his knees up. His palsy wrapped him in painful iron bands, for the entire situation had wounded him. Ah, thought Arden, he’s going to lose himself.

  Swallowing her antipathy towards Sean Ironcup, Arden sat down next to the young man and tried to remember how her father talked to people in distress. Lucian Beacon had been gifted with words as well as fire. He could rouse a fellow to great achievements, talk down an angry fighter, console a grieving widower.

  The latter Lucian did best, having been one himself, once.

  ‘Mr Ironcup, breathe in and out, there’s a dear. Take that air in like it’s a fine liquor. And when you exhale … yes. Now, begin at the moment you realized the current was taking you south, and not north of the permanent storm.’

  Mr Riven remained silent and glaring as Sean did as Arden commanded. His jaw trembled, then steadied.

  Shakily, he began to speak.

  ‘We … we knew the current would take us south, not north. Mr Harrow said it would. He said someone needed ignis blood and they would be prepared to pay passage.’

  Arden exchanged a concerned glance with Mr Riven. There was a sense of too much planning going on here, more than the opportunity of some Hillside folks about to be killed in a tavern.

  ‘Why would the Magistrate send you south of the storm? There’s nothing here, not even people.’

  Not even Bellis, Arden heard him add silently.

  ‘I don’t know. It was a different route than the ones they sing of back home. I didn’t want to go that way but Leyland said it was what Mr Harrow wanted. We went south until full morning. Leyland let off a signal as he approached the Tempest. A craft approached to meet us.’

  ‘What sort of craft?’ Mr Riven pressed. ‘Describe it.’

  Sean Ironcup blinked. ‘Why, it would have been like this one, sir. Ghostwood, though, not black mangrove. It burned rockblood. I remember the smell, it is on my fingers and in my head. As noxious as ash and a trillion dead things turned to rot and slurry.’

  A cold finger of warning traced Arden’s spine. Mr Riven had asked such a specific question, knowing what the answer would be.

  ‘Did it have a name? Across the bow, carved in red like a wound?’

  Sean shook his head. ‘I remember only a difficult word. Not in Lyonnese. Sen … something.’

  ‘Sehnsucht.’

  ‘Yes, that was it.’

  Before Arden could stop him, Mr Riven grabbed Sean and hauled him up. ‘Who were the people on that boat? Was there a woman there?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ Sean cried. ‘I don’t know! They took Leyland off, Helena and Gregor. Beat them up a bit, sir, this I recall. I thought I would be next. Then a man, he boarded first and he broke the jars. He told me … play dead, he said to me. Pretend you are dead. So dark … I couldn’t see him, but he spoke with a Lyonne accent. Shoved me into the rope box with the last jar and then … and then … and there was crashing and yelling I don’t remember what happened after that. Not until I woke up here.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’

  ‘I cannot say. It was dark, the salt water was everywhere, it blinded me.’ A gasp. Stared at Chalice. ‘The man had a coin about his neck, like yours. Made me look at it. Told me it was his coin of instruction.’

  Chalice clasped her medallion tight. ‘There was a Lion aboard?’

  No sooner had she spoken, Chalice gasped, as if having spoken out of turn.

  Mr Riven dropped Sean Ironcup back on the chair, where he once again folded up in a rumple of limbs and anxious terror. Turned on Chalice ‘A Lion there as well? Where are you people not?’

  Chalice effected a stubborn look. ‘He couldn’t have been one of ours. If he was, he was under deep cover. Despite our efforts, we have next to no influence in the Sainted Isles.’

  ‘Please Chalice …’ Arden warned. ‘Tell him the truth. We’re all on our own out here.’

  The duplicitous stormbride could have been a criminal in a courtroom under questioning, for all her eyes were wide with truth and horror.

  ‘Mr Ironcup must have misread this coin-wielding fellow’s intentions. Lots of people wear coin pendants. It could have been a mutiny, an argument that had him hide you in the closet. Nothing to do with us.’

  Mr Riven huffed a breath, went pale. ‘The lad told the truth. If there was an Order man on board that ship, then he was there because of Bellis.’

  30

  So it’s true

  ‘So it’s true? You really gave her Sehnsucht, Jonah Riven?’ Chalice scolded.

  ‘Only to get to safety. Only to get away from you. She was meant to get rid of it after reaching sanctuary …’

  He staggered. Arden went to catch him but it was a blank-faced stranger who shrugged her off.

  ‘I can’t think. My mind … If I don’t get rest, I will pass out on the floor and be useless to anyone. Fix this, Lightmistress. You and David Modhi. Get us away from that boat and out of this storm.’

  He blood-drunkenly made his way to the private berth. The door slammed. If it had had a lock, he would have slid it shut.

  ‘What happened?’ Sean asked in the blistering silence that followed. ‘Um, are we going home now?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Chalice shot back. ‘You’ve caused nothing but trouble, boy.’

  ‘But how can the Captain sleep? Right in the hour of our need!’

  ‘Because he sliced himself open to call that kraken bull to save our lives.’ Arden squeezed the last of seawater from her braid, feeling herself as exhausted as Jonah had been. ‘You give blood to the sea like that, it pulls strength out of you. Do they not teach the conservation of energy and mass in Hillsider schools? When he wakes up, then he can help, but at this minute we are on our own.’

  Sean wisely did not reply. Still irritated, Arden bound up the damp locks of hair that had escaped her hairpins and readied herself to go outside again. If they were on the wrong side of the storm wall and floating about in the Tempest’s eye, the combined experience of David and herself would not make the crossing without Mr Riven behind the wheel.

  They’d barely managed it the first time.

  ‘What was that last little exchange about?’ Chalice asked. ‘Who did she give the boat to?’

  Arden shrugged, felt the bite of anger. ‘Not the slightest clue.’

  Chalice’s eyes narrowed. ‘Did he actually think anyone would purposefully give away a damned monster-hunting boat? God and devils, I once saw daguerreotypes of Sehnsucht in Mr Lindsay’s briefing notes. It’s grotesque. More than twice the size of this one.’

  ‘You should be the one to answer who owns Sehnsucht now, Miss Quarry. Your being a Lion and all, and your man aboard her.’

  Arden’s tartness made Chalice huff. ‘I told you, if Sean’s benefactor was Lyonne Order, he was under the deepest cover.’

  ‘And he will remain that way, Chalice. When Jonah wakes up, we’re going back to Vigil.’

  Chalice put her palm on the map glass, stroked the Libro island archipelago with her thumb. One of those the secret islands, where Bellis and Stefan had taken refuge. Telling Arden without words that she knew more than she was letting on.

  ‘But will he want to go back, Arden? Mr Riven might be curious to know what became of his first love, and of the people who still bear his name.’

  A quick stab of covetous jealousy went through Arden. A jealousy tinged with guilt, for she was indirectly the cause of his troubles, and he would not love her for that.

  ‘He is not at all curious. His work for you is done, Chalice Quarry. And so is mine.’

  31

  The Harbourmistress’ boy yelped at her

  The Harbourmistress’ boy yelped at her when Arden turned up unannounced at the wheelhouse.

  ‘Lightmistress, you took me by surprise.’

  ‘Sorry. I was taking advantage of the reprieve with a nap. How long before the current turns?’

  ‘By the map, the daylight should have us turning west and back to Fiction,’ David said w
ith a nod of certainty.

  She didn’t have the words to express her relief, but hugged his shoulders. ‘I will be happy to see even Fiction again.’

  This was followed by a yawn, for Arden had only managed a brief but unsatisfying doze in the cabin earlier, but the aches and pains and anxieties of their return made her restless, and she finally surrendered to waking.

  The moon shone through the clouds. A small kraken-oil lantern cast a cold blue glow over the instruments.

  ‘Where’s Mr Riven?’

  ‘Still sleeping off a blood-hangover, as they would say in my home country. It will keep him unavailable for a while.’

  ‘Is that all? He didn’t look well before, and I worried.’

  She patted his arm gently. The boy was hopelessly in love with Mr Riven, and in that respect she and David were kin; both bound to the wrong man by troubled emotions and unable to effect any true response from him one way or the other.

  ‘I’m sure he will come out of this syncope by the current’s turn, and we can go home, and forget this day like a bad dream.’

  ‘And yourself, Lightmistress?’

  ‘Only a few bruises and scrapes, nothing to measure a casket over,’ she said. ‘I have tangled with a monstrom mare and lived to tell the tale.’

  At first he smiled, and then the smile faded, and he slipped back behind the wheel.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mr Modhi?’

  He pointed ahead of them, over the damaged bow. She tried to peer out of the wheelhouse and failed, for the night and fog were so absolute. ‘It’s back.’

  ‘The boat’s back? I thought it moved on after the monster came.’

  Relying on her Beacon-born darksight, Arden scanned the gloom. Through the marbled wisps of fog and sea-plume, there was an outcropping of rock that to call an island would be far too generous. Almost as a mere optical illusion, such was the faintness, a column of boiler-lit smoke seemingly rose from one corner.

  ‘Devils!’ Arden took the wheel from David. ‘Very sneaky of them. Top observation, Mr Modhi.’