Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  Hard not to smile, so she hid it in his shoulder, then nodded, serious again. ‘For the best, we really have to get up top.’

  He pulled on his damp clothes and submitted to Arden sticking some more dressings upon his cut. They would have been better served with stitches, but he was flighty under her hands, like a captured animal that could not sit still.

  ‘Right,’ he said with a breath as he slid back into his coat. ‘Let’s evade my father’s boat and it will be finished once and for all.’

  ‘About time,’ Chalice said to them when they made it to the wheelhouse. ‘Ghostie’s been gaining on us. What took you so long, anyway?’

  Arden murmured non-committal words about trying to patch up wounds which needed a second pair of hands, but Mr Riven ignored Chalice’s criticism and moved out onto the balcony with a pair of range-finding binoculars, for calculation, and a telescope, for a closer view.

  ‘She can’t be gaining, not while I’m running kraken oil under screw.’

  ‘I’m not guessing,’ Chalice said. ‘I’m very good at distances.’

  ‘Teach you that at Lion School do they?’ Mr Riven jibed. He did not wait for Chalice to respond, only put the glass to his eye. ‘Now, lets see who’s running this old girl. Maybe old friends of yours Miss Quarry.’

  ‘Well I—’

  He was barely looking five seconds before something made him startle, and put the binoculars down. His confidence had whisked away, as if with the wind.

  ‘Jonah?’ Arden asked, concerned at the sudden departure of colour from his face. ‘What do you see?’

  He did not reply, not at first, only to say to David, ‘Lad, ease back on the oil.’

  Chalice murmured in protest, but for all that, she had read the situation fast and knew when it was time to fuss, and time to commit to silence and caution. ‘She’ll definitely catch up.’

  Mr Riven turned to Arden, and whatever was on his lips, it could not be spoken of. He seized her hand.

  In the silence she felt the heartbeat in him, his palm gone slick with sweat.

  ‘Jonah?’

  ‘Arden,’ he said urgently. ‘Get Sean Ironcup. Have David help you all with unhitching the tender dinghy at the back of this ship, lower it quietly and bring the Lion with you.’

  ‘The dinghy? You said we could evade her.’

  ‘Yes, I said that.’ He pointed at a fog bank. ‘You’re all going to float as far back as you can to disappear. Then I’m going to tow you on a spider-web line, an invisible leash. Arden, listen to me. You cannot be here when they board.’

  ‘What do you mean, board? Jonah, what’s going on?’

  A thump sounded overhead.

  Mr Riven’s hand tightened upon Arden’s. His head tilted up. Said in the most grave voice, ‘They had a trebuchet on the deck and—’

  A voice said, ‘Excuse me, I hate to interrupt.’

  Chalice squeaked. However it had happened, a man was on the roof of the wheelhouse and his ruddy nose was in the open window, staring upside down at them.

  The man was squash-faced and blond, with prison tattoos on each cheek. He looked at them with a pleasant if crooked smile. ‘I’m sorry for interrupting your discussion, friends, but there are more important things you must contend with.’

  The man’s accent was strange, as if he spoke with a stone in his mouth. At his hands a small gas-powered crossbow.

  Mr Riven lunged in front of Arden, and in the scuffle all Arden could see were limbs, and Chalice’s head striking the wall, and a bronze coat snapping back as the bowman shouted, released a bolt from his crossbow.

  It struck Mr Riven in the shoulder with the sound of a mallet to wet meat. With a scream of fury Mr Riven was smashed against the opposite wall, pinned by the five inches of black dart protruding from his collarbone.

  He grabbed the bolt with both hands and pulled, and might as well have tried to draw a lance of iron from a rock.

  The wail of pain from below came from the bowman, back-broken from having been torn off the roof from the recoil.

  Arden ran to Mr Riven, afraid to touch the bolt, but in fear if she stayed. She gingerly placed her hands on the thin shaft and found no purchase there. ‘Where’s the tool box? I can pull it out.’

  ‘Run,’ Mr Riven gasped.

  ‘I can’t leave you.’

  ‘He said run,’ Chalice shouted, yanking Arden up by her collar. ‘They have a catapult and glider-men! We must get in the lifeboat before another one lands!’

  ‘But Mr Riven …’

  Chalice shoved Arden through the wheelhouse door and buffaloed her onto the ladder. ‘Move you, fool,’ Chalice wailed. ‘He’s holding them off. You’re the prize they …’

  Chalice never got to finish. With a sickening crunch, the armoured prow of a ship rammed into Saudade’s side, nearly throwing Arden from the rungs.

  A ship as ghostly as a fog, white as boiled bone, except for the glossy black square of her elaborate nameplate and the letters red as blood.

  Sehnsucht.

  32

  Mr Riven made a sound

  Mr Riven made a sound only once, and that was when the smartly dressed man, the first to board, finally snapped off the bolt that had fastened him to his wheelhouse wall. The barbs had proved difficult to prise from the black mangrove panels. Armed with a fearsome hinged tool, the man sweated through his silk shirt, his damask waistcoat and a medic’s shawl with several false starts before untying his mustard-coloured cravat and rolling up his sleeves.

  Arden, still kneeling in the corner where she had been shoved quite roughly before, watched the removal of Mr Riven’s dart with bewildered dread. The man was Lyonnian. His accent did not belong to a Fiction pirate. He was not the only one with such confusing origins. Among the several pirates who had invaded their ship, fully half of them chattered like Claysiders.

  The man put the bolt-cutter aside and nodded at the more utilitarian-dressed Sainted Island sailor who had accompanied him. ‘All yours, Mr Taufik.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Absalom,’ said the one called Mr Taufik good-humouredly. Opposite to the generous physicality of Mr Absalom, Mr Taufik had the spare, proletarian bearing of a Hillsider with a Pasifica-man’s sea-severe face. ‘There was a moment where I thought I might have to present our captive to the Queen with half the wall attached.’

  ‘One mustn’t upset the Queen.’

  ‘No, one must not.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  Now that Mr Riven was free, Arden tried to scoot towards his prone body, only to have Mr Taufik slide himself between them.

  ‘Oh no, your friend is in no condition for touchy-feelies.’

  ‘Sir, he is hurt.’

  ‘Mistress, we are all hurt in one way or another. And if he doesn’t survive a bolt to the shoulder, what good is he, as a man, or a Riven?’

  He bent down to touch the shiny end of the bolt as it protruded from Mr Riven’s shoulder. ‘My broken-backed scout downstairs tells me you can be clever when it comes to your freedom. And my Queen wishes to talk to you, sir.’ He turned back to Arden. ‘Therefore I’m not taking any chances on an upset. You understand. We are all of us beholden to our vows and orders.’

  Mr Taufik called a pair of sailors up to the wheelhouse. He pointed at Mr Riven, said some words in a tradesman’s cant that Arden vaguely found familiar – the rhythms were as familiar as a dockworker’s dialect though the consonants were all wrong – and they hauled him up to his feet.

  ‘Careful,’ she pleaded.

  Mr Taufik gave a gallant sort of bow. ‘They will be careful. The Captain does not wish him harmed. You can stand up now, girl.’

  In the midst of it all, Arden rankled. She had not been a girl for nearly a decade, and Mr Taufik was easily her age, but she was hardly in a place to quibble. She stood up on unsteady feet, feeling the weight of the shackles bear down upon her wrists.

  ‘So, you are the lighthouse keeper of Vigil.’ Mr Taufik touched the brim of his seaman’s cap to nod respect
fully. ‘The navigational coldfires of Lyonne are legendary all around the world. It is a respect that you have earned well, Guildswoman.’

  On the splintered deck, Chalice had not been granted the trial of an innocent. They’d bound her arms securely behind her back and gagged her into the bargain. Clearly these pirates had seen immediately in Chalice what had taken Arden weeks.

  Chalice kept flicking her attention to Sehnsucht’s deck, willing Arden to focus on the ghost ship.

  There was nothing on that high deck, not a person. David and Sean were missing.

  One of the crewmen approached Mr Taufik, wearing impatience on his salt-burned face. ‘Tauf,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody else on this boat.’

  ‘Have you checked everywhere?’

  ‘The head, the engine rooms, the cabin. There’s nobody.’

  Mr Taufik frowned. ‘There should have been five souls aboard.’

  ‘Aye, if the craft is properly stocked, but there’s a tender boat winch at the back of this boat. Whatever was on it, is missing.’

  ‘Hmm, she won’t like that.’ Mr Taufik considered the fog and what it meant. The day was here now, and the sunrise on a distant Island shore gave the permanent storm a jaundiced murk. ‘Hard to survive out on these waters with only a small craft. We’ll call the other two lost at sea and be done with them. We have what we came for.’

  A wretched tingle of hope made Arden perk up. The boys had escaped, though if Mr Riven heard the good news, he gave no notice of it. He looked the part of a man familiar with detention and chains. An excoriated distance overwhelmed his expression, his pale skin gone a driftwood grey. They had taken no chances with their prisoner, bonding him to a yoke-contraption that fixed his wrists on either side of his head, must have caused considerable agony to his wounded shoulder.

  She felt his pain. Felt the wound as if it were upon her own flesh.

  ‘Jonah,’ Arden whispered when Mr Taufik’s attention was averted. ‘Are you all right? What do we do?’

  Whatever fugue had caught him now slipped. He wobbled his fingers, only just realizing they had bound him in a most specific method, a position that would not allow him to draw his own blood. A way they should not have known, unless …

  His waxen face turned to her. ‘Don’t get close to me. Whatever happens, you and I, there is nothing between us …’

  Mr Taufik returned, and snatched Arden away. ‘Ah now, no talking to the merchandise. We must all get on Sehnsucht. I fear Saudade is taking on water. If anyone is hiding on her, well then. I hope they can swim.’

  Shock-numbed, Arden allowed a sailor to help her across the gangway and onto Sehnsucht.

  The moment she set foot on that bone-white wooden deck, a kick of cold jolted through Arden’s body. Dark Saudade always had an aura of warmth and intimacy about her, her rich mangrove wood echoing a holy relic. This bleached giant of a sister-ship had the smell of slaughterhouses and desecrated tombs, along with a fungal sediment of decay.

  Like criminals they were led onto Sehnsucht’s broad open forward deck, an area that could accommodate fifty people if needed be, a hundred at a crush.

  Only twelve stood here in the wind apart from them, waiting, along with Mr Absalom, insouciant upon the bow, as if an interesting stage play had come to be acted out in his presence.

  The pirates set Arden and Chalice aside, leaned them against the bridge. Mr Riven was placed upon the foredeck to stand bloodied and on display. Arden yearned towards him. If she could have taken his pain upon herself she’d have done so, twice over.

  The sound of a door opening made the entourage shuffle to attention. Someone else was on the ship who did not slot so easily into the role of Sainted Island bandit.

  A woman.

  The Pirate Queen?

  She was a girl, younger than Arden, her dark hair bound up in an abalone fork. She wore a flowing yellow sea-silk robe embroidered in black pearls that would have better befitted some royal court than the deck of a ship.

  Or at least the dress had been yellow, until the stains of dirt and blood had streaked it orange in places. Many of the pearls had fallen off in the way such decorations will do if they are worn for a very long time and not carefully maintained.

  She shared a look with Arden, distress and mortification combined, before concealing her face under a silk shawl of faded yellow.

  ‘I am Persephone Libro, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting and spoil of war. You are guests upon Sehnsucht of the Maris Island Cluster,’ the girl continued, her thin reedy voice fluting in the empty air. ‘These are the Marians from Maris Proper who have welcomed you.’

  Arden frowned. The girl spoke by rote and a harassed familiarity, but what had she seen and done to make her so desperately dishevelled?

  Spoil of war, she had said. Persephone Libro, a Sainted Isle girl and spoil of war. What political upheavals was she referring to? How in danger were they?

  Mr Riven, unable to hold himself upright, fell on his knees. The bolt was not bleeding badly, however it did something to him that made him hunch over in ashen pain.

  ‘Listen,’ Arden said urgently to the gathered men. ‘There is a code among sailors and pirates alike. You cannot leave him like that.’

  Mr Taufik winced, then hissed at a pair of bandits. ‘Get him to his feet.’

  ‘Captain on deck,’ a male voice shouted. ‘Her Majesty on deck! Queen of the Islands is present, you louts, you wretches. Bow to your damned Queen!’

  The sailor holding Mr Riven quickly snapped to attention again, and the others followed. Released, Mr Riven fell back into a kneeling crouch.

  No false alarm this time. Everyone had frozen in place.

  Then the twelve men fell to their knees. Arden shared a glance with Chalice, and at the stormbride’s nod, they both carefully bobbed.

  The dress came first, ruffles and layers of discoloured white. Stained satin slippers stepping across the white wood. Tiny hands in fingerless cream gloves, entwined piously about a wedding ring of black iron worn over the cloth. The ring was too large for her finger, and stained the glove-satin green.

  The face, sharp and Fiction-pale, was so deteriorated by an internal, seething rage it was as if she were a porcelain doll left to crackle into decay. Frayed yellow hair touched her thin, bony shoulders. The crown she wore was ship-hull nails dipped in gold. A livery collar of plesiosaur teeth bound up in wire obscured most of the tattered lace of her bodice. A train of fishing net, tangled and worn, followed her along with a brace of glass floats.

  Arden found she’d been holding her breath. Who was this woman? Not Bellis, the beautiful girl who Jonah loved.

  This had to be someone else.

  Two men swept the floor before their Queen with brooms of a bitterbush. The acrid fragrance of the brushes overwhelmed the salt in the air.

  Mr Taufik stepped forward. ‘We recovered them,’ he said. ‘One man, two women.’

  The husk Queen ignored Mr Taufik and her prisoners to gaze down at Mr Riven’s crumpled form. She shook her head. ‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘My God, husband. You shouldn’t have come.’

  33

  When he didn’t immediately reply

  When he didn’t immediately reply, Bellis grabbed the bolt-end in Mr Riven’s shoulder and twisted it terribly, forcing Mr Riven out of his daze.

  ‘I said you promised me you wouldn’t come, Jonah.’

  He groaned, said her name with a breathless wheeze. ‘Bellis, you were in danger …’

  She cut him off with an impatient gesture. ‘When am I always not in danger, in this boat of venomous snakes? I’m told Mr Absalom had to take you off the wall. Well, then. Was a time you would have torn your arm off at the root rather than remain imprisoned so.’ A sadness in her soft, fragile voice, as if she had lost something important. ‘And now you kneel in submission to pain. The years have diluted you, husband.’

  ‘Wife, this is different. The Lions know where you are, they want to control you, and use you now.’

  ‘Use me
? Why would you hold me in such low regard? The Lyonnians and their Order have wanted my labour forever.’ She looked around her, smiled benevolently at her gathered silent crew. ‘I was doing quite fine, and now you came back to me like this, ruined, by these devils, ruined.’ She grabbed the bolt again, and she was weeping as she did so, fat milky tears upon her broken-doll face, oblivious to Mr Riven’s suffering as she revelled in her own.

  ‘The man I married would have held himself above pain! What stranger wearing my beloved’s face are you? These witnesses of mine cannot be fooled by such a despicable disguise!’

  Mr Riven was transcendent with agony. A sound of strangulated surrender came from him. Beside his head, his trapped hands balled into fists. Old injuries opened, sending blood pouring down his exposed forearms.

  Arden could stand it no longer. ‘Stop it, damn you. He’s hurt, and he came on your behalf!’

  Bellis stopped testing her husband and glared at Arden for the first time.

  Mr Riven swallowed deep huffing, shuddering breaths, began urgently trying to capture her attention back.

  ‘The women have nothing to do with this …’

  Bellis waved the voices away. She was done with him. One of the Islanders shoved a bight of coir between Mr Riven’s teeth. Her attention was on Arden now.

  Chalice Quarry made murmuring sounds that could have been plea or prayer. The girl in saffron yellow wrapped her arms around her body, brought one fist to her mouth.

  Bellis was smaller, up close. A twig would have more strength. The acrid-bush smell was about her, a petrochemical aroma of heated stone and rockblood.

  ‘I know that coat of yours,’ she said to Arden.

  ‘Your wedding coat,’ Arden replied as steadily as she could. She knew she should have diplomatically added, and you may have it back, but could not, for the coat had the importance of a contested trade region. Even now, Arden was not about to give it up.

  Bellis wrinkled her nose, drawing sharp lines across her face, highlighting the deep shadows beneath her eyes. ‘The hell that ugly thing was my wedding coat.’ Tugged at the collar. ‘Was forced on me by necessity, but never mine. The Deepwater Queen does not wear the coat of her enemy.’