The Silver Tide (Copper Cat)

by Jen Williams

  ‘You must be jesting with me,’ she said. Next to her, Kellan was still organising the clean-up; the monstrous creature hadn’t done any serious damage, but had torn one of their smaller sails, while Augusta was doing her own rounds, tending to the injured crew. ‘You expect to take a boat and row it back up the waterway? Here, in Euriale? Across the path of the thing we just barely escaped?’

  ‘We’ve been all over this ship, and Sebastian isn’t here,’ said Wydrin. ‘He must have left the ship late last night, when no one was watching.’

  ‘Late last night, we were some distance away,’ said Devinia. ‘Your lordling here has pushed us along at a fine rate. You know how dangerous this place is, Wydrin. A skiff will not survive. You will not survive.’

  ‘I don’t have time to argue about this, Mum. I need to go back and look, and Frith is coming with me.’

  Somehow Devinia managed to look even more outraged. ‘It’s not enough that you must get yourself killed, but you have to take our only means of propulsion with you? What will happen if we should face another beast like the one that nearly sank us? Should we sit here quietly while it peels us to pieces, waiting for you to come back?’

  ‘So now we’re your sole protection too? The Devinia the Red I grew up with needed no mage for protection!’ Wydrin could feel her voice rising, and struggled to control it. She could see Kellan watching her with interest, and knew that much of the rest of the crew would be doing the same.

  Devinia was now shaking her head with disgust. ‘Always too reckless, never thinking things through. This is why your brother is the captain of a ship, and you are a grubbing sell-sword—’

  ‘Madam,’ Frith’s voice was low and stern. He stood with the staff held at his side. ‘This is Black Feather Three business. The three of us have bonds that are not so easily severed, as I’m sure you have bonds with your own crew. This is not something we will compromise on.’

  For a moment Devinia appeared to be speechless. She looked from Wydrin to Frith, and back again.

  ‘Fine. Go, then, but know, Wydrin Threefellows, fabled Copper Cat of Crosshaven and unending bane of my existence, that you carry my life, and the lives of my crew, in your pockets. And if you sink that skiff, I’ll follow you into the afterlife and tan your bloody hide myself.’

  They set out on the ship’s skiff at midday, the sun filling the narrow waterway with simmering heat. Everywhere Wydrin glanced, the water was too bright to look at, dancing and painting vivid after-images under her eyelids. Frith sat opposite her while she rowed, the staff held across his lap. He looked uneasy as they made their way out of the shadow of the Poison Chalice. Wydrin deliberately did not look up at it; it was easy to imagine Devinia glowering over the rail at them as her precious ship sat becalmed in the water. Instead she kept her eyes ahead, looking for anything unexpected in their path.

  ‘Should I not help you with the oars?’ he asked.

  Wydrin shook her head, leaning back into the pull and feeling her muscles bunch with the effort. ‘I want both your hands free should we come across any trouble.’ She tossed her head to move her hair out of her eyes. ‘Keep watching the water. We’re hoping we’re too small for that slug thing to take much notice of. The Poison Chalice probably gave it a good bump on the head on the way past.’

  Frith nodded, although he looked less than pleased with her words. ‘And how far back will we go? We cannot be sure when Sebastian left the ship.’

  Wydrin pushed, and pulled, pushed, and pulled, feeling the drag of the oars through the water. She wondered briefly what might be beneath them right now, watching their slim shadow pass overhead.

  ‘We know that he must have left between the time we were all in the cabin together, and when we set off this morning. I know roughly where we started when you took over propulsion of the ship – the cliffs grow suddenly higher there, and the way is narrower.’ She paused. Sweat was breaking out over her back. ‘Also there was a large rock standing out of the water that looked a bit like a cheerful monkey.’

  Frith raised an eyebrow. ‘If you say so.’

  They moved steadily on, and soon the Poison Chalice had dropped out of sight, lost around the sharp bends of the waterways. It grew quieter to Wydrin’s ears; the raucous birdsong and the cries of the monkeys seemed further away, and the sounds of her oars cutting through the sapphire waters felt muffled. She realised that the general noise and energy of her mother’s ship had to some extent been shielding them from the eeriness of the island.

  ‘Look at that.’

  She looked up to where Frith pointed, her heart in her mouth, but it was a flock of birds flying overhead, like black shards of glass against the sky. She blinked once. Not birds.

  ‘Bats,’ she said, and put her head down to the next stroke. The water was calm and they were moving quickly, but her heart told her it wasn’t quick enough.

  ‘We get a lot of bats in the Blackwood,’ said Frith. ‘They did not look like bats. Their heads were too long.’

  Wydrin shrugged awkwardly. ‘This whole place is weird.’

  Frith did not reply, but he held the staff a little tighter.

  It took them some time and Wydrin’s back was full of a dull, warm ache, but they reached the cliffs she had in mind. Wydrin manoeuvred the little boat around so that they did a rough circuit, moving from one side of the cliffs to the other. On one side was a pile of rocks and black sand poking out of the water. She took them over until the wooden hull scraped against the miniature shore. Frith hopped out and pulled it in further, and Wydrin got out and helped him. When they were happy the boat wasn’t about to abandon them, they looked around at their surroundings.

  ‘Well,’ said Frith, ‘it does indeed look like an overly happy monkey. Ede truly is a world of wonders.’

  Wydrin elbowed him, and they set about exploring the small space of sand and rock. It didn’t take long.

  ‘Here, look.’ She crouched on the ground and pointed. There in the wet, grey sand were clear boot prints – the prints of someone with very large feet. ‘He made it this far,’ she said, trying not to let the relief show in her voice. ‘He did not just perish in the water.’

  Frith went to the very edge of the sand and looked up. The cliff face loomed over them, black and forbidding. Here and there short wizened trees with deep purple blossoms clung on for their lives, and they themselves held birds’ nests of grey and green. Tiny birds, no bigger than the end of Wydrin’s thumb, buzzed in and out like busy gemstones. ‘And where did he go from here, then?’ he asked. ‘There is nowhere to go save back into the water.’

  Wydrin ran a hand through her hair. It was stiff with salt already and growing curlier by the day. ‘There is a way up,’ she said, after a few moments of staring at the cliff face. She pointed to a place where a section of stone had fallen away, a long time ago. It had left a series of narrow ledges; all of them quite far from each other, but not impossible to reach, if you happened to be quite tall. ‘It wouldn’t be an easy climb, that’s for bloody sure, and I wouldn’t like to do it, but if you were desperate …’ She pursed her lips, wondering just how desperate Sebastian had been. ‘If you were desperate, I reckon you could make it. And he wasn’t wearing his sword, or any of his heavy armour. Remember when we were trapped in Temerayne and we had to climb that wall of ice in a hurry? He made it then.’

  ‘I remember some of that day, yes,’ replied Frith wryly.

  A glint of something blue caught Wydrin’s eye. She stepped around a pair of jagged rocks and found a blue-glass globe nestled in the black sand there. She picked it up and showed it to Frith. He looked at her and she saw both worry and sympathy in his eyes, and somehow that made it worse.

  ‘He must have dropped it,’ she told him. ‘He wouldn’t leave this behind deliberately. It was one of his most treasured possessions.’ Along with that stupid badge of Isu, she added silently, which he most certainly had left behind – discarded on the deck like an old boot. Frith said nothing. Abruptly, Wydrin felt her ches
t fill with anger, and she closed her fingers firmly enough to make her oar-bruised hand ache. Why would he do this to them? They were the Black Feather Three. He was her sworn brother.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘When I see him next I’m going to shove this globe so far up his—’

  ‘He went up the cliff,’ said Frith. ‘He left the ship in the dead of night, swam to this sorry pile of rocks, and then hauled himself, soaking wet, up this cliff face. So now what?’

  Wydrin looked up at the towering stone wall. ‘SEBASTIAN!’

  The tiny birds in their wizened nests all fled as one, filling the air with emerald buzzing, while overhead larger birds and animals gave panicked calls.

  ‘SEBASTIAN! If you can hear me, I’ve got a bloody bone to pick with you!’

  There was no reply. Wydrin dropped her hands to her sides. She grimaced.

  ‘We could climb the wall too,’ she said, not quite looking at Frith. ‘It wouldn’t be very easy, not now that you don’t have the magic to lift us into the air, but we could do it. And then what? At the top of the cliff is a bloody great smelly jungle.’

  ‘And meanwhile, your mother’s ship languishes, stranded,’ Frith added. ‘If we made it to the top, I do not expect Sebastian to be standing there waiting for us.’

  ‘We would have to track him through the trees, and he was the only one of us that was any good at tracking.’ She looked back at Frith. ‘Unless you have a knowledge of forest lore that you’ve been holding back, growing up in the Blackwood and all.’

  He drew himself up slightly. ‘I was a lord. Or the son of a lord, at least.’

  Wydrin turned back. She felt helpless and angry. They knew he had gone this way. There was nothing they could do about it. After a moment she felt Frith’s hand rest on her shoulder. She leaned into it, and he spoke softly into her ear.

  ‘I am sorry, Wydrin. Truly.’

  She let out a long sigh. When they had passed into the main body of Euriale she had felt that cold sense of severing, and she had dismissed it. Already, one of their number was lost.

  ‘Perhaps he is heading back to Two-Birds.’ She forced herself to say the words, hoping they would bring some comfort. ‘He was never particularly keen on this adventure. Perhaps we have asked him to move on too soon after Ephemeral, and Dallen, and that whole bastard mess at Skaldshollow. He could have decided to go back, and he would have known that Devinia would not have lent him a boat.’ She swallowed. ‘It is not so far to Two-Birds from here.’

  Frith nodded, although she noticed that he didn’t voice an opinion one way or another. ‘What do we do then?’ he asked. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘We go back to the Poison Chalice,’ said Wydrin, still looking up at the cliff. She slipped the blue-glass globe into her own pocket. ‘And we hope that Sebastian can bloody well look after himself.’

  14

  Sebastian stood under the tree and listened to the storm passing overhead, the near-solid rain turning the black earth to an oily slick around his boots. He could hear nothing but the percussion of rain against leaves and the deep-throated rumble of thunder, just starting to move away now. The mineral scents of water and jungle were thick in his nose.

  Euriale was a place of wonders. In his short walk from the cliff edge he had seen many things that were new to him – a large grey cat with tufted black ears and enormous protruding incisors, slipping away between the trees, flightless birds with long legs and banded beaks, and a small crowd of reptiles about the size of chickens, all walking on their back legs, tiny forelegs held delicately before them. These last Sebastian had paused to watch. They had been bright green, their long narrow heads with eyes like chips of onyx, and when he’d taken a step towards them they had all scattered as one, only to move back into their group, watching him with beady eyes. He had felt their keen lizard minds, fragments of silver wire in his head.

  The rain stopped almost as abruptly as it had started. Sebastian stepped out from the shelter of the tree into a freshly dripping world. Now the thunder had departed he could hear bird calls all around him, and the whoops and hollers of monkeys in the canopy. He moved off, stumbling through bushes and the tangle of undergrowth, dimly aware of small creatures fleeing from his blundering.

  He walked all day, with no clear idea where he was heading or why. The sun set, turning the fragments of sky overhead molten orange, and then, when night did come, it was with a darkness so thick that it was almost suffocating. Sebastian kept moving until he could no longer be sure of his footing – it would not do to wander straight off the edge of a cliff in the dark – and finding a relatively clear patch beneath a clutch of trees he built the best fire he could with green twigs and dry leaves. The smoke was black and smelled terrible, but he felt safer with its yellow light on his hands and face. There was that big cat to think of, which even now could be approaching his makeshift camp, eyes like moons easily piercing the darkness. He shifted, missing the weight of the broadsword at his back. With sudden clarity, the foolishness of his actions loomed up to seize his heart.

  ‘What have I done?’ he said aloud. In the distance, a monkey appeared to hoot with amusement. He shook his head. ‘You’re right. That’s not the question I should be asking. I know what I’ve done. I just don’t know why.’

  Except that wasn’t entirely true. There was a mystery here, something that had seeped in around the edges of his mind, obscuring everything else. The Poison Chalice, with its crew ready to risk anything for the sake of adventure … it had all seemed to smell of death to him: deaths he wouldn’t be able to prevent, or deaths he would actively cause. He remembered the smoking slaughter of the battlefield in Relios after Y’Ruen had blessed it with dragon flame; he remembered following the brood sisters into King Aristees’ camp, watching with satisfaction as they tore to pieces the Narhl soldiers holding his lover captive. He remembered the resurrected dead of Skaldshollow, mindlessly rushing at him with sharpened bones protruding from their bodies; he remembered cutting them down, and feeling the glory of the slaughter. And then Dallen watching them leave, raising a hand in farewell – his grief for his own people driving the final wedge between them.

  Sebastian held his hands over the meagre flames. He did not need the warmth, but that small feeling reminded him he was alive. His traitorous mind called up a picture of Wydrin, who would have long since discovered he had left the ship. He imagined her scowl, and then her growing alarm as she realised he had gone. She would probably insist on looking for him, had probably already had that argument with her mother. On that count, at least, Sebastian was fairly certain: they would never find him, not in this labyrinth of a jungle. Absently, he slipped his hand into his pocket, seeking the blue-glass globe Crowleo had made for him, and his stomach dropped a little when his fingers found nothing. It must have fallen out, probably on his climb up the cliff face. His memory of Isu, and of Crowleo’s act of kindness – gone. Likely, he would never see the Secret Keeper’s apprentice again, and now he had lost the only thing that connected them. He swallowed down the wave of guilt. It was better this way. No one would have to die because of him.

  A shivering cry rent the air over his head, and Sebastian found his hand reaching automatically for the short sword that was no longer on his belt. Just a bird, he told himself, but it hadn’t sounded like a bird. It had sounded much larger. He thought of the small running lizards, of how different they had felt. It was something about this island. Perhaps it was cursed, just as Wydrin claimed.

  It was some time before he relaxed enough to lie down by his small fire, but eventually he did, curling his body around it as best he could. In the dark hours of the night he slept, and dreamed of a ship full of the scent of flowers, and an unrelenting heat.

  The next day, Sebastian had a sighting of the blue ghost, the first since he had climbed his way up the cliff face. One moment the trees were full of deep indigo shadows, the last light of the day painting bark orange and grey, and the next, everything was lined in pale blue fire. S
ebastian turned, startled, to see the eerie figure standing just a few feet away from him, almost too bright to look at.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said. His voice was thick from a day of near silence. He cleared his throat. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The ghost seemed to consider him for a moment, and then it walked on past him, disappearing into the trees ahead. Sebastian followed, stumbling to keep up, and although that ghostly figure faded into nothing, another took its place, some distance ahead. Sebastian picked his feet up and ran, determined to catch up with the ghost this time. Again, when he’d caught up with it, the figure faded into nothing, only to be replaced with another further ahead. Sebastian ran on, stomping through small bushes and weaving around trees. The light was fading swiftly and he felt sure he was being led into some sort of trap – and there could be no question that the figure was leading him – yet he could not stop. Here were the answers he was seeking. He didn’t know why yet, but he was sure of it.

  It was so dark by the time he reached his destination that he very nearly fell over it. His boots met solid stone, and a tall building loomed up ahead, lit only in moonlight. He could make out very little save for an odd steeple poking above the treeline, and just ahead of him a small courtyard paved with dark red stones. The final ghostly figure that had led him here had vanished.

  Cautiously, Sebastian stepped over the low wall that surrounded the courtyard, taking a moment to note that the red stones shone as though they were wet, and headed towards the entrance. The empty doorway was arched at the top, and in the gloom he could just about make out a carving above the lintel; it looked to be a many-legged creature of some sort. Beyond the door, there was nothing but pitch-blackness. Sebastian paused there, willing the blue ghost to appear again. The darkness beyond the door did not feel threatening – on the contrary, the urge to walk over the threshold was strong – but for all he knew there could be nothing but a great hole in the floor, or something equally hazardous. He forced himself to step away, and instead resolved to make his camp on the stony courtyard. The sticks he’d collected the night before were now dry in his belt, and the fire came much easier this time. Around him, the calls of monkeys and birds welcomed the night.