Apart from the external damage, Mr Riven had secured everything well from the storm. Perhaps some glassware fallen across the map-room floor, doors flung open. There was little evidence of heavy seas.
Then she came to his cabin.
She only meant to glance inside, but the pull was too much. She stumbled inside and lay face-down upon his narrow bed, still rumpled from their lovemaking and blotted with the blood spots from the injuries he took to save her life. She did not cry, only allowed herself the fall into a deep, terrible abyss.
The lightless reality of Jonah’s loss bore upon her with all the horror of being smothered, and when her third and fourth breaths did not come, she had to tear herself from the room and run to the deck, and dry-retch. Someone suffers in your stead. Forever, until the end of your days.
She had no life to go back to, only deceptions, only Mr Richard Castile compelled by Lions – by blackmail no doubt – to be the prize for their new sanguis evalescendi. The brief hope she’d shared with Jonah – to be free, to love without chains – had risen and died within the span of a day. Now she was wounded and could not heal.
The crisis only passed when she caught herself, for David and Sean Ironcup were on the newly restored harbour with a third man she did not know.
‘Excuse me, Mx Beacon. I hope we weren’t interrupting.’ The man spoke up, taking off his fisherman’s hat and wringing it in his big hands. He wore a huge felted coat of black wool, with epaulets winking silver, and a waistcoat of old Lyonne fashion. Across his chest he wore a sash of a minor craft Guild.
Arden wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and resumed her composure. ‘I’m sorry. You had me in a moment of weakness.’ She stood up tall and took deep breaths before joining them on the floating dock. ‘It’s been a great trial, you see, to lose a friend.’
‘We could return later,’ the stranger said politely. ‘If that would best enable our conversation.’
‘No, get on with it,’ Arden replied. ‘State your business.’
He stepped forward and shook her hand. ‘I am Mr Zander Fulsome. I understand you have both a boat in need of repair and cryptozoological trophies. I was hoping we could come to an arrangement in terms of sale and trade.’
Would not have just been Arden to notice the kraken oil containers were all mostly full, and the cured krakenskin segments, as sweet-smelling as crocus stems, were laid out ready for the sale that Mr Riven had planned. David Modhi had seen them with a trader’s eye, and known exactly where to procure a buyer.
‘David Modhi, your mother was quite adamant,’ she said to him warily. ‘You can’t have this boat.’
David stood tall. ‘My mother might have forbidden me to do anything with Saudade, but that caveat does not extend to you.’
Mr Fulsome continued, ‘For the krakenskin I could install a new axle upon your craft. I am the best boat merchant in all of Morningvale, and I can supply addresses of commendation, here and in the entire Fiction region.’
David was practically hopping out of his skin by Mr Fulsom’s side. Arden did not have the heart to deny him.
‘Sounds like it’s a fair trade,’ she said, wrapping herself back up with her Lyonne sanguine aloofness. It was not at all a fair trade. She could have purchased another boat for the hide. Two boats even, sleek and fast. Maybe a small balloon-craft. She added, if only for her guilty benefit, ‘Mr Riven would wish Saudade fixed.’
A date was agreed upon. Two full days, and a team of men who could do in those hours what would take a regular shipwright a month. Pleased, the boat-builder Zander Fulsome went on his way.
At a nod from David, Sean followed Mr Fulsome to complete the terms of business.
Arden prepared to walk back to her apartment, and found the young man following her at a close distance.
‘So then,’ Arden said. ‘Out with it. I know you have a vested interest in seeing Saudade fixed soon and made the worst bargain in doing it.’
‘There is a Eugenics Society testmoot in Garfish Point coming.’
Arden nodded, and remembered Mr Lindsay’s confident words. He knew the sanguinem that would replace her.
‘There is. Though if you had the slightest sense, David, you would keep your distance from anything to do with them.’
Her advice might have been stolen away by the wind. He pulled out some Fiction coins from a fish-bladder purse.
‘Please take me there. In Saudade.’
‘Oh, put them away, David. My employers won’t let me leave this town until they come calling. Besides, would you not want to stay with Sean in these last days? He has not long yet before the Lyonne Constables come calling for him too. I can see you’ve formed quite a friendship.’
‘He can come with us. Mx Beacon, I studied Lyonne law. If he stays on a Vigil-registered boat, he is still in Vigil. On a technicality.’
‘Technicalities are not law, David.’
‘You could technically still be in Vigil, too.’
She met his hopeful eyes and felt a small rebellion stir in her heart.
‘Then I suppose … Well. I suppose I could make it up and back to Garfish Point. A newly repaired boat does need settling in.’
39
So, to the testmoot
So, to the testmoot, one last trip on Saudade.
Along with David Modhi and Sean, Saudade beat a fast course along the inner transit stream to Garfish Point, that busy promontory at Fiction’s almost-civilized northern shore. From there, it would be less than six hours to Morningvale, and south Lyonne.
And home.
So strange to think of Lyonne as home, Arden thought, as she looked out over the choppy waters beyond the black boat’s bow. She had changed so much. Would her friends even recognize her, after their long lazy summers on cool alpine meadows, a woman carved raw by the sea?
Every time Arden was in danger of feeling gladness at her upcoming return, the undertow of regret and guilt would come to pull her back in. She would go home having left pain and destruction in her wake. Not even the sight of small silver porpoises for much of the journey, and the wheeling gulls, drawn by the stirring of fish shoals, could lighten her mood. There was a Deepwater winter coming, she could smell the strange chill in the air.
Mr Castile’s letter stayed in her pocket like a killer’s confession.
Try as she might, the thought of reading the contents only made her tip into a greater despair. She feared the effect the words would have on her. Feared falling in love again, a diminished, rotten kind of love, decayed by betrayal and time. A love belittled by what she’d felt with Jonah.
She did not want to see Mr Castile. She knew that now. Anything she’d felt for him was gone, leaving only an ugly lesion of experience.
Devilments, she fretted. There is nothing I want less than to be loved under instruction.
Garfish Point lay ahead of them, Fiction’s largest town. The sails and shadows of a thousand crafts chequered the port waters.
‘Is that the Order’s boat out there?’ David called from the wheelhouse, holding out the spyglass. ‘It has a rose upon its sails.’
She needed no instrument. She had already caught the unmistakable silhouette of a Clay-class clipper against the orange of the sinking sun. ‘Yes. They will have seen me leave. Doubtless the Order will collect me as I reach the shore, and take me to Lyonne. Hang on, David, I’ll have the wheel now.’
He offered to stay on the wheel, having more experience at navigating the Point’s demanding harbour. She shook her head.
‘I’d rather make them come aboard and take me. One must strike a certain difficult tone of rebellion for the rest of my golden incarceration.’
But David Modhi, normally so tractable, made a face and would not relinquish his position. He appeared to have aged in these last few weeks. A man’s face was upon him, not a boy’s.
‘I want to take the wheel,’ he said again.
She let it go, and peered at him. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’ve be
en talking with Sean Ironcup.’
‘Yes, among the other things you two have been doing,’ she said with a regretful exhale. She knew a burgeoning romance when she saw one. With Jonah gone, his grieving eye had settled on the next best thing. ‘He’s a good lad after all. He has a great affection for you, I can see that much. It will be difficult when he must leave. Perhaps the Order will be lenient in his sentencing. Mr Harrow was the true sinner.’
Her words didn’t make David nod in agreement. Instead, he jutted out his lower jaw with an odd stubbornness.
‘Lightmistress, if I were to test positive this time around—’
‘It’s very unlikely, David. This final test is merely ceremonial. They already know who their sanguinem is.’
‘But if I was, I would have to leave Sean and go to Clay Capital. I will go into seclusion. We might lose each other.’
She shrugged. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. This time tomorrow, the pair of you will be steaming back to Vigil.’
And I will be locked in a cabin with iron on my wrists.
So preoccupied was she with her fate, it took her several seconds before she became aware of the light in the wheelhouse. ‘Devils, David, cover that lantern—’
She stopped. That was no light from one of the oil lamps. David Modhi clutched a coldfire lantern, one of the little storm-lights Jorgen had kept in the lighthouse – a miniature version of the lighthouse flame, kept for emergencies. The flame burned without heat. David’s face was split by tear tracks in the bright yellow glow. His hand was bleeding.
With a gasp she struck the light out of his grip. The lantern smashed. They were plunged back into a colourless dusk.
‘You tested yourself?’
‘Yes, I know it’s forbidden,’ he said. ‘No need to scold me. But I wanted to see for myself because I knew. I knew what I was. And last year, this happened.’ He picked up the lantern. ‘Mr Riven said I’d probably expressed the trait earlier. I don’t know why I wasn’t told.’
‘The Eugenics Society is careful with Fiction bloodlines,’ Arden said, feeling a cold sense of purpose growing in her. ‘They know what might come out of such wild genes.’
Bellis. Jonah.
‘I didn’t come for the test,’ David said. ‘I came to get us away.’
In the harbour beyond, the clipper unfurled its sails. The Order boat had seen them. The mainsail was the last to hoist itself up. There would be an engine on board the ship as well, something fast, maybe.
She pressed her hands against the wheel spokes. ‘David, this is not a choice. You have to go to the test and on to Lyonne. You can’t have wild ignis endowments. The Order wouldn’t let you.’ Her breath escaped her as she saw the ship prepare to give chase. ‘They won’t let you live.’
Arden thought of Bellis, allowed to stay. Unless they want to use you.
‘I don’t want to lose Sean. I want to choose who I love. So drop us in the ocean here. It cannot be more than a mile to shore. We’ll find our own way. Find somewhere to go. Just … don’t tell the Order.’
Their conversation wasn’t unwatched. Sean Ironcup stood on the deck with the replacement crutches David had painstakingly carved for him, his face marbled in hope and dread. She understood how David and Sean must have discussed a life on the run. Understood that they had already made up their minds what they were going to do.
All this had happened while she had been too busy with her own preoccupations to notice.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, ‘I dreamt of such a thing. Running away.’
‘What happened?’ David asked, knowing instinctively that her answer was wrapped up in her decision from this point forward.
She cut the throttle to the engines. A cloud of blue-sparkling kraken-oil smoke wafted over the forecastle. She pulled out Mr Castile’s letter. Brandished it like a warrant of judgment.
‘The one I loved was too scared to go through with it. That’s what happened. And so our love withered like a flame unfed. But I shall not hold him to an old promise. His life is his own, just the same as mine.’
With a flourish she ripped up the envelope and tossed it out of the side window. Goodbye, Richard Castile, she thought. You were a young girl’s fleeting lesson, but now lessons are over.
David blinked, as it dawned on him what Arden intended to do. She throttled forward on one wheel. Saudade started to turn.
‘You’re not letting us off here?’
‘I’m taking you somewhere the Order can’t touch you,’ Arden said. ‘And I’m going to set things right. I’m either going to rescue a man, or pay homage to a dead one, but whatever I do, the decision is mine. Are you coming with me?’
A huge grin spread across David’s face. ‘Certainly am, Lightmistress!’
The clipper was in full sail now, but against the current, the waters were far too quick for the large ceremonial ship to reach full speed. Within minutes of turning, Saudade had lost their three-mast pursuer. The kraken oil bloomed blue from the smokestacks, and Arden’s coat shone in the half-light of the wheelhouse. One could fancy she had taken on the luminescence of the beast herself.
David Modhi went to tell Sean the development, and they embraced upon the forecastle in between bobs and heaves. Well then, she thought. The Order had certainly chosen her well. Wasn’t she primed by experience to help lovers find one another? To increase a flame, a fire, a rebellion?
And now she was on her own journey, something not proscribed or ordered or necessary. Nobody pulled her invisible strings.
I’ll find you, Jonah.
Maybe she would. Maybe she would not. Maybe Bellis had eviscerated him and replaced him with cogs and machine parts, like they did with the lich-ships on their eternal sea-road. Maybe he believed Arden had forgotten her fisherman from Vigil, thought her returned home with her old lover. But still. She would look. If he was alive she would find him, and if Bellis had transformed him into either corpse or monster, she would remember him in the Deepwater midwinter, and say a prayer so he might enter the cathedral of the King.
I’ll find you.
The sun set upon the eastern horizon and the indigo sky spilled with stars. She still felt him: in her blood, and in the hide of the monster’s skin she wore, and in the vast, lightless depths of the sea.
Fin
Acknowledgements
A million thank-yous to the usual suspects: my agent Sam Morgan, my editor Vicky Leech, to my family for putting up with all this, particularly Mum and Dad, Linda and Kerry and especially Eric and Xavier. Thanks to all those patient coffee-shop and café staff who kept me hydrated during the entire process.
Shout-out to my friends online, at work and in real life, both the Liminal and Clarion South crews, Axe Creekers, assorted drongos, my Nemesis, the Good Locust and Papa Bear.
And to Paul Haines, never forgotten.
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