by Geoff Rodkey
“I suppose it’s possible.”
“It must be the case! Because I love you so very much, Daddy. You’re the kindest, most honorable man in the world, and you’d never hurt an innocent person, or try to take what isn’t yours. I mean, if you’d really done any of those things, my heart would simply break! I could never speak to you again.”
Her voice wavered a little. She paused for a moment. When she started again, she was all brightness and good cheer.
“But that’s obviously not what happened. So can we all just agree, on both sides, that this was completely silly, and with the possible exception of one incompetent lawyer, no one’s done anything wrong? Egg?”
I looked at Guts. His eyes were scrunched together in a confused look, and a little disappointed, too, like he was sorry the morning might not end in a rain of bullets after all.
“Works for me,” I called out.
“Daddy? Do you agree?”
“To what, now, darling?”
“Do you agree that Egg didn’t kill Birch, he’s not your adopted son, and the plantation is his property?”
Pembroke was silent.
“Please tell me you agree, Daddy. Because I love you so.”
I saw his shoulders rise, then sag a bit. When he spoke, I could barely hear him.
“Of course, my love.”
“Oh, that’s such a relief!”
She raised her hands, addressing everyone like the director of a play. “Now, let’s all put the guns away and go about our business! Daddy, Egg, come meet me in the middle so we can shake hands and part as friends.”
It took some doing on both sides to make that happen. There was a long, muttered argument among the cluster of civilian men on Pembroke’s side that Millicent had to horn in on, and it took me almost as long to convince Guts to set down the pistol he was holding and agree not to shoot anybody.
But within a few minutes, the soldiers’ guns were strapped to their backs, they were facing downhill in formation for the march back to the port, and Pembroke and I were standing with Millicent in the middle of the lawn, near the fresh crater left by the cannonball. Pembroke’s associates watched from a safe distance over by the soldiers, as Guts, Mung, and Quint stood on the porch.
“Now, let’s shake hands so Daddy and I can sail away to Sunrise and forget this whole thing ever happened,” said Millicent.
Pembroke’s face was expressionless, but his eyes never left mine. The firm grip of his handshake stopped just short of being painful.
“Terribly sorry about all these misunderstandings,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I said.
“We certainly enjoyed having you as a houseguest those few weeks.”
“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, trying to sound sincere.
“Wouldn’t mind having you again. In fact, you’re more than welcome to come back with us now if you’d like.”
“Think I’ll stay here,” I said.
“Shame. Still, hope to you see you again soon.” He smiled when he said it, but the look in his eyes made my blood run cold.
He turned away. “Come along, Millicent.”
“Just a moment, Daddy. I need to say good-bye to Egg.”
She stepped past him toward me, with a kind of smile on her face I’d never seen before.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
“Is this a good smile to remember?” It was sweet and tender, but less confident than usual. It almost seemed shy. Like a lot of things about her, it confused me.
But I liked it. I nodded.
She stepped closer, so close our chests were almost touching, and slipped her fingers through mine.
“Remember this too,” she breathed, as her lips rose to kiss me.
I let my eyes fall shut as I leaned into her. When we finally separated and I opened my eyes again, I saw spots.
She laughed a little. I did too.
Then I saw the look on her father’s face.
Someone was going to pay for that kiss.
It might have been me, right then—I wouldn’t have been surprised if Pembroke had reached out to strangle me with his bare hands. But she tugged him on the arm, guiding him away from me.
“Good-bye, Egg!” she called.
“Good-bye,” I said.
Pembroke gave me one last cold look.
“See you soon, boy.”
Then he turned away, and they started off toward the others.
I turned around and began to walk back toward the house. I felt like I was floating, blissful and stupid.
Which was why it took me so long to register the look of alarm on Guts’s face.
He shouted a warning as he started toward me, his eyes locked onto something over my shoulder.
I turned around. One of the men in civilian clothes—big and rough-looking—was sprinting straight at me. He was almost past Millicent and Pembroke, and they were shouting at him to stop.
But they didn’t get in his way, for fear of the knife in his hand.
I might have been able to outrun him, back to the porch where I could pick up a gun and defend myself, if I’d focused on the knife and not his face. But the face froze me in place, baffled, unable to believe what I was looking at was real.
It was Birch. I was watching a ghost, risen from the dead to take his revenge on me.
I stood there like an idiot, motionless, just waiting for him to plunge the knife in my chest, until a low blur entered my line of sight and hit him at the knees just a couple of feet in front of me.
He went down hard, and Guts was on him like a wild animal, thrashing and quick, and we were all converging on them—me, Mung, Millicent, Pembroke, a few of the other men—when we heard Birch scream.
The knife fell to the ground, and I saw it first and plucked it up as Millicent reached me. Birch was still screaming, and the others were pulling Guts off him, and there was bright red blood spurting from Birch’s arm and smeared across Guts’s face, and I realized he’d bitten Birch’s arm right through the artery and down to the bone.
“Are you all right?” Millicent asked me.
I was fine. Birch’s knife was in my hand. The other men were dragging him off, trying to calm him down and tamp the spurting of his bloody arm. But I still couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
“That’s Birch.”
She nodded.
“Thought I killed him.”
“You did. That’s his brother.”
He screamed curses at me as they took him away, and I knew then Roger Pembroke wasn’t my only enemy in the world.
We stayed on the porch after that, close enough to the guns to be safe. Millicent waved one last time as she disappeared from view at the back of the procession.
I waved back. My arm was heavy as lead. I was exhausted.
Mung put a hand on my shoulder and gurgled something supportive. I smiled at him. He smiled back, then started down toward the lower orchard to help finish the harvest. The pirates who’d disappeared on me after Pembroke offered them money were slinking back into view as well, trying not to meet my eye as they limped back to work. A few of them were bold enough to pluck their abandoned guns from the porch before they left.
“Strange day,” said Quint, vaulting toward the front door on his arms. “Biscuits inside if ye want ’em.”
I turned to Guts, standing next to me. He’d tried to wipe Birch’s blood off his face, but he’d missed a couple of spots.
“Thanks for saving my life,” I said.
He looked at the knife in my hand. “Keep that. Learn to use it, maybe next time I won’t ’ave to.”
He started for the door. “Let’s eat some biscuits.”
INTO THE SUNSET
Once we’d eaten, all I wanted to do was sleep. But I couldn’t let myself nod off until I knew Pembroke and the soldiers had left the island, so Guts and I went down to the orchards to find Stumpy and ask if he’d make one more trip to town and report back to us when the ship
sailed.
The orchards were worryingly empty, the harvesting hooks leaning abandoned against tree trunks and fruit crates. Halfway to the property line, we found out why. The first trickle of giddy pirates, still armed with Burn Healy’s weapons, were hobbling up the road and jingling coins in their hands.
I stopped one of them and asked where everyone had gone.
“To get the money!” he cackled. “That richy was gonna leave without makin’ good on his promise. So we stopped him and had a confab. First, he said he didn’t owe us nothin’, ’cause there weren’t no justice to be done after all. Then the boys pointed out he got his daughter back. So we settled on half. Fifty silver for every man! Be drunk for weeks on this!”
Guts looked at me. “Might check this out.”
“Go,” I said. “You deserve it.”
He came back half an hour later with fifty silver pieces and a smile on his face. By then, I’d found Stumpy, who’d begged off another trip down the mountain. So Mung went instead, happy for the chance to ride a horse and be helpful.
Guts and I watched him trot down the road, weaving past handfuls of boisterous, newly flush pirates who kept startling the horse by firing their guns in the air.
I was starting to worry that the combination of money, guns, and pirates was going to cause problems.
Guts agreed. “Least they ain’t got rum. Yet.”
Otto the foreman was concerned, too, enough that he threatened to kill any man who left the plantation for the taverns of Port Scratch before the harvest was loaded in. For the most part, the men obeyed him, but for the rest of the day, the work seemed to go much slower and get a lot more dangerous, especially once someone discovered that stuffing a live grenade inside an ugly fruit made for a fun practical joke.
Guts and I spent the afternoon around the house, trying to ignore the gunfire and explosions coming from the orchards as we planned our journey to Pella Nonna and the New Lands.
There wasn’t much to plan. We each packed a knife and a pair of pistols from the Healy cache. Quint helped us wash our clothes, then got out his mending basket and sewed up some of the tears we’d accumulated in them. When I put it back on, I realized my itchy shirt had seen so much wear that it no longer itched, or if it did, I didn’t notice it anymore.
I practiced drawing the map a few times, on title pages I tore out of some of my least favorite books. I burned the results over the stove when I was finished. I hoped I’d remembered it right, but there was no way of knowing if I hadn’t.
There was nothing else to do except wait for Mung to come back so I could get some sleep. By the time he showed up in the late afternoon, I was pacing the house because I’d gotten so groggy I couldn’t sit down anymore without my eyes falling shut.
With a combination of hand gestures and reassuring gurgles, he managed to communicate that the ship had sailed, with the Pembrokes, the soldiers, and the rest of their party aboard. I was so grateful I hugged him. Then I dragged myself to my bed and collapsed into such a heavy sleep that even the sound of the occasional grenade detonating in the orchards didn’t disturb me.
I WOKE UP in the quiet just before morning and lay in bed for a while, thinking about Millicent. For the first time, I didn’t have to argue with myself about her. The endless, maddening does-she-or-doesn’t-she? was over. The answer was yes. She did.
Which made the next question all the more painful.
When will I see her again?
I didn’t know. All I knew was it wouldn’t be soon. I had to go to the New Lands, farther than I’d ever traveled in my life, and overcome who knew what to find a Native who could read Okalu and tell me where that map was pointing.
And then I had to follow it wherever it led. The treasure might be on Sunrise, or back here on Deadweather, or deep in the jungles of the New Lands. Or somewhere else.
Or there might not be any treasure at all.
Was that possible?
Anything was possible. The only thing I knew for sure was that Guts and I weren’t the only ones who’d be searching for it. Thanks to Millicent, Roger Pembroke and I had both walked away from our last encounter, but it seemed even more true than ever that my troubles with him wouldn’t end until one of us was dead.
And then there was Birch, the twin brother of the man I’d killed. I hadn’t seen the last of him, either.
But there was nothing to do about any of that now, and no point in worrying about it.
I got up and padded out to the front porch. It was the best time of day on Deadweather—the only good time, actually, a sliver of an hour before dawn when the temperature and the humidity were low enough to be almost tolerable. The ugly fruit harvest was finally in and loaded onto a six-wagon train, waiting near the stable for the horses to be hitched to it for the trip down to the cargo ship at the docks.
I’d made that trip with the loaded wagon train a dozen or more times, but I’d always stopped at the water’s edge and turned around again to come back home behind an empty wagon.
This time was different. I’d be following the harvest to the end of the line. And I didn’t know when I’d be back. Or if I ever would.
And my family was gone. No matter what, they weren’t coming back here. Thinking about them put a lump in my throat. I even got a little choked up over my brother—maybe not so much over Adonis himself, because he was so vile, but over the idea of a brother, and the loss of what we might have had if my mother hadn’t died having me and things had turned out differently.
I heard the creak of the front door. Guts stepped out. He smiled at me, his bad arm hidden behind his back.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Went shoppin’ last night. Bought a little somethin’ from one o’ the pirates.”
He pulled his arm out to show me. There was a steel hook strapped to his wrist over a worn leather cowl.
“Congratulations! You always wanted one of those.”
“Yeh,” he said, admiring it. “Think I’ll call her Lucy. Can’t wait to see how she does in a scrap… An’ I took a trip back up the mountain—”
He reached into his baggy pants pocket and pulled out an unwieldy clump of something that unfurled into a string of dirt-crusted gems and raggedy shafts of decomposed feathers, culminating in the three-inch firebird pendant.
“The Fire King’s necklace.”
He nodded. “Only thing up there worth hangin’ on to.”
Something about it made me uneasy. “You sure it’s okay?” I asked.
“What?”
“Taking it from a dead man.”
“He ain’t usin’ it.”
“I don’t know… I mean, what if it’s cursed or something?”
Guts snorted. “Only curse on this is the smell.” He gave it a sniff, then twitched and stuffed it back in his pocket. “’Sides, might do us good with the Natives.”
I nodded. Then I took a step back to get a good look at my house.
“Feels strange to be leaving again so soon.”
There was a distant whoop from the direction of the pirates’ barracks, followed by the boom of a grenade. Then a scream, and then a sprinkle of laughter.
“Good time for it, tho’,” said Guts.
“Yeah. At least until they’re out of grenades.”
EVERY LAST ONE of the field pirates went down the mountain with the harvest, clinging to the sides of the wagons or hobbling alongside them. The ones with two hands carried their money in one and their guns in the other, their good eyes blazing with anticipation for the hell they were about to raise.
We must have made a fearsome sight, because even the drunks on the street in Port Scratch got out of the way as we lurched through town.
Guts and I were in the lead wagon with Otto. He’d spent some time around Cartagers, and on the way down, he gave us a lesson in speaking the language.
“Tell ye all ye need to know,” he said. “Weh.”
“Weh,” I repeated.
“Means yes. Neh.”
“Neh.”
“Means no. And Perfa neha ma graw.”
“Perfa neha ma graw?”
“Means ‘please don’t kill me.’” He clapped me on the back. “Ye’ll do fine.”
THE CARGO SHIP, a creaky-looking schooner named the Thrush, was waiting at the dock. The sight of so many armed pirates, and the manic speed with which they started heaving the fruit crates into the hold, clearly spooked the captain, a lanky, weather-beaten man whom Otto introduced to us as Racker.
“These two need passage to Pella Nonna,” he said.
Captain Racker eyed me and Guts with concern. “Can’t bring you back,” he said. “Headed down to the Barkers after that.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “One way is fine.”
He shrugged. “Climb aboard, then.”
Guts checked the waterline on the dock pilings. “Tide’s fallin’. Gonna wait to ship out?”
Racker looked down the dock and across the street, where a throng of field pirates were pounding on the door of the closest tavern, yelling for the proprietor to get out of bed and open his taps.
“Think we’d better go now,” he said.
WE NEARLY RAN aground rushing out of the harbor against the tide, but Captain Racker put oars in the hands of every man on board, Guts and me included, and we managed to row out of the shallows before the field pirates got drunk enough to start real trouble.
The farther out we got, the more frequent the sound of gunfire became, and by the time we were under sail and Port Scratch was slipping out of view, I thought I saw flames rising from one of the buildings. God only knew what shape the place would be in when I got back to it.
If I ever got back.
I took one last, good look at the black lump of the volcano, smoldering in the sun. Then I turned away from Deadweather and looked ahead, to the western horizon and the New Lands beyond.