by Leyland, L J
Despite the intense dislike I felt towards the Duchess, the hour spent planning was relatively enjoyable. It reminded me of the times that Matthias and I had spent planning attacks on the Parrots and made me feel happy. Noah slotted right in to our routine. It was like he was already familiar with our culture, our language, and the way we operated. It felt good to have another pair of sympathetic hands. The only disagreeable aspect was that I could feel Grimmy’s eyes boring into me when I wasn’t looking. I caught him staring at me many times, only for him to drop his look of loathing just a fraction too late and adopt a simpering, false smile. I’d already decided to watch him closely in order to keep him in line with the plan but I realised that perhaps I would have to watch him closely for my own safety. Something about him struck me as dangerous. He was a loose cannon.
At eight o clock, we said our goodbyes. We were hoping to get an early night in order to sail at 7 a.m. sharp the next morning. Earlier in the day, I had visited Matthias’s grandmother and asked her if Edie, Aiden, and Wolf could stay with her whilst we were away. They loved staying with her; her cooking was much better than mine. But I had noticed how much her hands had shook when she lifted the kettle; how her eyes unfocused as I talked; how she grimaced with pain at every movement. She was deteriorating, quickly. I tried to kid myself that I was doing her a favour: Evie and Aiden would not allow her to be lonely. But in reality, I had decided to leave them behind so that they would be out of harm’s way. I wasn’t going to trick myself into thinking that this would be an easy trip. It wasn’t going to be a jaunt on the high seas like we were pirates in a children’s book. There would be hunger, dangerous weather, and possible dehydration not to mention a confrontation with some of the most notoriously warrior-like people in all of the Empire – the Highlanders.
They were a race that didn’t take kindly to outsiders. But we might also have to face something even worse than danger, hunger, and dehydration – disappointment. What if we got there and couldn’t find Iris? What if she was dead and all our hopes of exposing the Mayor died with her? I didn’t think that I could go back to living in Brigadus knowing what I knew. I didn’t think that I could live with the disappointment of failure or defeat. We would have to succeed.
The Farringdons stood up to cordially shake our hands as we made for the door. Noah gave me a quick but soft-as-a-feather embrace when his parents weren’t watching and whispered, ‘Get some sleep. We’ll need all our strength tomorrow.’
The warm, cradling glow of a shared secret enveloped me. I lit up at how he bunched us together as ‘we’ as though we were a team, singled out from the others, preserving our strength, together. My dreamlike glow was extinguished as I approached the Duchess on the way to the door. She didn’t shake our hands but simply held hers out for us to touch reverentially. Or perhaps we were meant to kiss her gnarled fingers. I did neither.
Instead, I stalked past her with as much insolence as I could muster. However, distracted by trying to affect casual distain, I didn’t see the Duke slowly doddering into my path until it was too late. I crashed into him and sent him careering onto the marble floor. He was as easy to push over as a child, no weight and no balance. His bald head bounced off the hard surface with a sickening crack like an egg being broken. I imagined a fracture appearing and the runny insides spilling out, all yellow with mould and age, unused for decades. The image made me gag. I ran to his side and burbled frantic apologies. But it was as though the bang to his head had caused him to revert back into a grotesque imitation of a child.
He curled his legs up to his chest in a foetal position and began to wail, loud and piercing. His face was scrunched up and blood red. Man becoming baby, shrinking back into himself, becoming small and weak. It was unnerving and made me feel totally embarrassed that I had acted with such a bullish attitude. Noah looked horrified and I apologised madly to him. I didn’t want him to think I had attacked his grandfather on purpose. I didn’t want him to think that I was the type of person who would be so cruel as to attack a helpless old man. Surely he knew that?
The Duchess lowered herself on to the ground and began to cradle her husband. She rocked him gently, whispering things like ‘there, there,’ and ‘she can’t hurt you.’ The look of hatred in her eyes burned in my direction. The Duke’s pitiful mewls began to peter out and he turned his face upwards to look into his wife’s eyes. It was apparent that their relationship was one of master and pet.
‘We’ll be back where we belong soon?’ he asked in a thin, tremulous voice, looking for the reassurance children seek in the empty coos and platitudes of their mothers.
‘Yes, my dear little man. We’ll be back to our rightful place soon. Noah will take care of that. Not long now,’ the Duchess replied.
The Duke nodded, calmed by her soothing words, ‘Not long … back at the top. Back where we belong,’ he said to himself.
A rush of realisation hit me. We’ll be back to our rightful place soon? As the heavy weight of their words registered, a pool of icy dread began to trickle into my stomach. It drowned all the glowing optimism and excitement I had been gently nursing inside of me.
Noah will take care of that? I felt myself refusing, just refusing, to believe what was suddenly becoming apparent. I began desperately trying to convince myself it wasn’t true but it was like the wildly flailing legs of someone on the gallows whose ground had been whipped from underneath them but still madly groped for the surface which they knew wasn’t there. It was hoping, desperately, desperately wishing, against the inevitable.
I had dared to let that little seed of hope, of desire and longing, grow and now I was beginning to feel that the roots had no anchor, no depth. I saw Matthias stiffen in anger next to me and I knew he had interpreted their words in the same way I had. A Blueblood coup. What else could her words mean? To them, we were nothing but mercenaries, hired to kill one tyrant and put another on the throne. They had no intention of letting us have our own freedom, ever.
‘Noah?’ I asked in a slightly panicked voice, desperate for him to reassure me. I was desperate to prove to Matthias that we had heard wrong and that Noah was an ally, not an enemy. He must be, surely, surely, surely.
‘Noah?’ I prompted again, more strongly this time. He remained mute, eyes downcast. ‘No, Noah. Not that. You wouldn’t. I thought you were with us.’
The Duchess began a small hissing laugh, like a rattlesnake unfolding itself and slinking towards me. ‘Oh, dear.’ she spoke softly – softly, as though she was tenderly caressing each word that came from her mouth, knowing that each word she spoke did a landmine’s worth of damage to my heart. A little gift-wrapped bomb from her to me. She was enjoying it.
‘It seems like we’ve had a little misunderstanding. Whatever did you think we were doing this for, dear? Equality?’ she spat, as though the word were poisonous. ‘Freedom?’ She switched to a high, mean, mocking tone. ‘Little Miss Martyr wants to save the world and make everyone free! Don’t be absurd. How could you, a commoner, ever think that you could rule this place? You need intelligence, courage, moral fibre, and the guts to do what’s best regardless of whether it takes a few necessary sacrifices. That’s what makes a leader. That’s what we’re born to be. Inherently, irrevocably, forever and always. And that’s why you commoners plough the fields, and clean the houses, and wait our tables and always will do, forever and always. It’s in the blood.’
The rushing in my ears was so loud that I almost didn’t hear when Matthias commanded, ‘Move’ and grabbed the top of my arm. ‘Out of the door, now,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Perhaps he was afraid I would do something stupid, deserved, but stupid. Or perhaps he knew he could no longer control his own fists and needed to remove himself from the situation as quickly as his feet could manage. I caught a last glimpse of Noah’s stony face as I was pushed through the front door, flanked on either side by Matthias and Grimmy, who was gnashing his teeth and making strange guttural rasps in the back of his throat. We were
marching down the drive in silence when I became aware that footsteps were following us quickly.
‘Maida. Matthias,’ called Noah. ‘Maida, wait! Please. I won’t run after you, so you better stop before you ruin this. This is your last chance to turn around before I go back and all this falls apart because of a misunderstanding.’
‘Misunderstanding?’ Matthias asked calmly, but I could feel him starting to pull himself up to his full, considerable height, trying to look imposing. ‘I think we understood perfectly well.’
Noah overtook us and stopped directly in front of us. We would have to barge past him if we wanted to continue.
I had expected Grimmy to love this. He was the type of weasely coward who relished a good fight between two others of a more superior nature. He was like a rodent scavenger, skirting the bear pit where two grizzlies fought, enjoying the fact that one predator was being eliminated by the other and that he would reap the rewards of the scraps left after the fight. But I was wrong. His expression was just as dangerous as Matthias’s and he was lunging forward slightly, towards Noah, as though poised to attack. ‘I knew it, never trust a Blueblood. Sly as the foxes they hunt,’ he spat.
‘It’s not what it seems,’ started Noah. ‘They’re old. They want the old days back. I just go along with it to placate them but I’m on your side.’
Grimmy’s laugh started small, incredulously, but then grew and grew until it became a hearty belly laugh which caused his eyes to water. It made me nervous to see him so crazed. The laugh crumbled into a hacking cough and the air of lunacy subsided slightly but didn’t disappear completely. It never disappeared completely where Grimmy was concerned.
Noah looked upset and slightly desperate. ‘I’m telling the truth! Even my parents don’t see us going back to the old days now. They know democracy is coming just as much as you do. As I do. I promise. When we defeat the Mayor and get rid of the Metropole, the nobles won’t come back to power. On my word. That’s not what I’m planning on doing, even if my grandmother is.’
Matthias’s face was as hard and unmoveable as granite. Despite his coarseness, Matthias had always been the idealistic one out of us both. He had a vision for the future – of equality, of a happy society. But that was beginning to slip from his grasp because of Noah and his family. But I knew Matthias well enough to know that he wouldn’t let go of the thread that tethered his ideas to the ground that easily. He would hang on for dear life. He was scrappy like that and I admired him.
‘If you betray us, there’ll be nowhere to hide,’ he said. ‘We’re not putting our lives at risk only to be passed from one slave master to another. We find Iris, we find the tapes, we kill the Mayor, we become free. That’s all. There’s no place for Bluebloods in our new society. They’ll be gone and we’ll be equal. Everyone, equal. And your grandmother will have to face up to that or join the Mayor in his grave.’
‘Matthias, enough,’ I warned, uneasy about his threat.
‘No Maida, we need to find out now what we’re walking into. If Noah is going to stab us in the back the minute we get those tapes, we need to walk away now and never look back.’
Noah’s eyes were unreadable. He ran his fingers through his hair and pulled at it slightly. It was a gesture I’d seen him use before when he was agitated. ‘Can I tell you something? Promise you’ll listen and not interrupt until the end? Please? I just want five minutes to explain.’
Matthias rolled his eyes. I shrugged, acting casual, but secretly I was longing to know. Longing to know anything about him, longing to hear him speak and longing to gather facts about him. I tried to tell myself it was just normal curiosity, a desire to learn about things I hadn’t experienced before but, deep down, I knew better. I knew my desire to know about him was greedy.
‘I used to watch you two at the docks, haggling with the merchants, helping the other poor families. You were trying to get the best deal out of a bad situation usually but sometimes … I saw you for who you really were.’
Unease tensed my shoulders and neck. I felt frightened by his words. I instantly assumed that he somehow had seen through my mask and had been exposed to the unworthy, petulant girl that I so vehemently tried to shove down behind my façade of cool, calm capability. I saw you for who you really were. How could he see who I really was when I didn’t even know who I was myself? I didn’t know where I came from; I didn’t know my past and I couldn’t see much in my future. The pendulum of my personality swung from indifferent outsider, to terrifying monster capable of stabbing a man, to lovesick teenager within a heartbeat and I had no idea which character would spring up one minute to the next. He saw the confusion and hurt on my face and hastened to explain.
‘Maida, I once saw you trade a whole salmon with some shack children for a tiny bunch of dried herbs. Why did you do that? I thought about it for days. You puzzled me. I thought maybe you considered the herbs medicinal and they really were worth an entire salmon. But somehow, that didn’t ring true. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, so one day I decided to follow you home. I followed you to your house. To the boat. I just followed you, it was easy. And I saw that you had the same herbs growing on your top deck. Boxes full of herbs. Whole rows of them, unprotected as though they were worthless. Then I realised; they were worthless. They weren’t medicinal or even that valuable. You were just being kind. Nothing but kindness, helping those children out. You were just being essentially good. I’d never seen that before. It was intriguing.’
It was like the ground under my feet had begun to shift. It was tipping me forwards, pulling the solid ground from under me, leaving me floundering – he followed me, he watched me, he thought about me. All before I even knew he existed. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was the watcher, looking on at others and forming plans, making notes, judging people, using my binoculars to spy. But all the while, I had been completely unaware that I was the subject being studied. It made me feel vulnerable; that I had been beaten at my own game. The electric thrill of fear but also sudden, tickly pleasure rippled up my spine and along the hairs on my neck.
‘I saw you starve. I saw you struggle and fight. But despite it all, you looked like you were content. Not content with your situation but content within yourselves. You looked at home in your world. You looked free and you had people that cared about you. You were liked and respected. You can’t imagine how many times I wished that I was like you. Everyone hates me and my family. Everyone was scared when I tried to talk to them. They called me ‘sir’ even when I was a child and didn’t smile or joke or show a shred of kindness. Not even my parents. You don’t know how many times I sat there watching you, loathing myself, loathing my position, my family, my money, and wished that I could join you. Just give everything up and live with you both in the marshes. You think I have everything. I don’t. I have nothing. My family doesn’t care about each other. None of them care about me. Look what they did to Iris. Look how they left Flora in the Mayor’s house. They care about nothing but appearances and position. I can’t live my life like that. That’s why I need to do this. That’s why I’m not going to betray you and help my family get back in control. You can believe me or not, it’s your choice, but either way, I’m doing it, with or without your help. I just can’t go on anymore like this.’
He turned and walked dejectedly back towards his mansion, as though it was the last place on earth he wanted to go. Matthias and I looked at each other.
‘Don’t do it, he’s lying,’ growled Grimmy.
But I could tell Matthias was waning. Noah’s speech had convinced him just as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this was a fatal weakness with us both – we were always prepared to give people a chance to prove themselves, whereas the Bluebloods and the Mayor were utterly unforgiving. One strike and you were out. Or dead. Perhaps it was stupid of us to place so much faith in someone we hardly knew, whose family had a proven track record of being brutish and heartless towards townspeople. But that was who we were. I heard Grimmy groan
as he realised that Matthias had been convinced.
‘Be at the jetty at seven,’ called Matthias at Noah’s retreating figure.
Noah looked back at us and nodded. I saw a small, sad smile cross his lips. I returned it and hoped that he knew I was on his side.
I walked back to my houseboat by myself, wondering how Noah could think it preferable to a mansion. All his rooms, so much space, so much beauty, so quiet and permanent. But then it hit me that Noah’s mansion was just a house to him, whereas my boat was a home. It was more than just a boat. It was memories, freedom, hope, our future, and a testament to our strength and determination. Noah’s mansion was nothing but cold, unwelcoming stone. I knew instinctively I could trust him because I knew then that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
But I felt nervous, as though I was trapped in a web, holding off many dangerous foes all at once: the Metropolites and the Mayor on one side, Grimmy and his mad plan on another, and the threat of a Blueblood coup on another. Might as well throw the Highlanders in there too, since I would soon face them and who knew what other dangers along the way. There were so many strings pulling at me. So many dangers. It would be a tricky balancing act and I wasn’t sure whether I felt up to the job.
Chapter Fifteen
The sea air was bracing and wild. It blew away the fear that had settled heavily on my chest over the past few days. I felt lifted and free and wild and brave. Our boat had finally been untethered and soared through the ocean. I felt like I could jump off the boat and fly alongside it, like a dolphin riding the bow-waves, dashing and dancing for no other reason than that it was fun. The fine mist of saltwater was refreshing and I stuck out my tongue to catch the scent and taste of the sea. I knew I was alive, finally. Our journey had begun.