Child of a Hidden Sea

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Within five minutes it seemed like all of Tallon was walking home, an orderly parade of workers, clumps of uniformed men and women coalescing, chatting, breaking apart to form in other configurations.

  As they passed through the crowd, Bram and Tonio stood out. They were obviously not part of the pattern.

  Were there island nations where a stranger didn’t stick out? Sophie thought of the cities of home, the way you could get lost in them, disappear into anonymity.

  “Blackberries,” she murmured.

  “Pardon?”

  Parrish’s voice made her startle; she hadn’t realized he was there.

  “Invasive species,” she said. “Himalayan blackberries. They took root in the Pacific Northwest, even though it’s not their original niche. They’ve crowded out plants that evolved there over centuries.”

  “Like bullfrogs,” he said, and when she looked at him, surprised, he said, “I’ve been to Erstwhile, remember?”

  She was, oddly, pleased that he knew this bit of trivia about home. “Once they’re established, you don’t even see them. They’re part of the landscape. But there must have been a time when they stuck out, when they were exotic.”

  “You are extremely different from any woman I’ve—” As their eyes met, he coughed a little and seemed to lose track of his thought. “You were saying? About the blackberries?”

  “Just noticing that Tonio and Bram are conspicuously not … was it Tallmen?”

  Her brother and the first mate had climbed up the hilly main street, about two blocks, and the two of them were shaking hands and separating. Tonio was making for a smart brick building to the east.

  “No, they’re not Tallmen,” Parrish agreed, but he was elsewhere suddenly, his attention drawn to her brother and then—

  “What is it?” The entire city had thrown a switch, out of work mode, into relaxation. The hillside, the cheery, tired people greeting each other in the street, lanterns going on in the residential districts in a spreading circle from the wharf as people made it home with their pails of dinner …

  But Bram wasn’t the only bullfrog. A gray-dressed shadow was following her brother.

  “Verena,” Parrish called, voice sharp. He was on his way down the gangplank, moving at a flat-out run.

  Three blocks, he’s only three blocks ahead, Sophie thought, hard on his heels. Parrish is fast, and I could sprint that distance, even with the hill. If not for the crowd …

  Now they were on the ground instead of up on deck, they’d lost sight of Bram.

  “What is it?” Verena was catching up as they pelted toward town. Her hand was on her sword but she hadn’t drawn it.

  “Someone’s following them.”

  The Tall were a helpful people—everyone who saw Parrish coming drew aside, minimizing the jostling as he, Sophie and Verena tried to cut their way through to the uphill artery. The light was going, and the hill was steep.

  Bram had reached its crest. For a second Sophie could see him clearly, as he stood tall in a shaft of sunset, his leather backpack and his glasses and around him all the uniformed Tall. He looked like an advertisement for something. It would make a decent portrait.

  Sophie flashed on Gale’s words. If you stay in Stormwrack, Sophie, you may bring down worse, and onto your closest kin …

  Look back, she thought fiercely. But the sun would be in his eyes.

  “Bram!” she screamed.

  Parrish was a hundred yards ahead, closing on the shadow. It would be okay.

  “Bram!”

  Her brother turned his back on the view of the setting sun and the wharf, vanishing from view.

  Parrish hurled himself at the fellow in gray, catching him by his shoulders.

  He let go just as fast.

  Sophie had just enough time to see that it was John Coine, from Isle of Gold, before the guy … he blurred. There was a hum and Coine was gone, just a lump or a cloud or something, airborne, surging toward and over the hill. Parrish had resumed the chase, running in the direction of Bram had taken. He too was shouting: “Bramwell! Bram!”

  He had his hand tucked against his chest.

  “He’s hurt,” Verena said. “Seas, they’ve hurt Garland.”

  The cloud reappeared, rising over the crest of the hill.

  It was bigger, and it had something—

  —man-sized something, a Bram-sized something, no, no!—

  —at its heart. His leather backpack dangled from the aerial clot for a second before dropping to the street.

  A hum came from the shape, and as it continued to rise into the air, Sophie realized she knew what it was. It was wasps, or bees, some kind of flying colony insect. Each of them had a little thread of silk caught in its jaws, a string bound into the bigger knot at the center and they were rising out of reach now and all the homeward-bound Tall were pointing, openmouthed, as the hum of flying insects overrode their conversations.

  Parrish was right behind it. He’d leapt to a six-foot-high fence, sprinted along its length and from there bounded to the rooftop of one of the tidy bungalows. He bolted up and over its shingled peak as the cloud of insects flew past. From there, he flung himself to a window ledge on a two-story building.

  He launched himself into the air, arms extended, and seemed to catch something solid inside the cloud. The whole shape wobbled, drawn down by his weight, and then he was dangling in midair, from an ankle wrapped in the silky threads.

  Bram’s ankle.

  Sophie pelted after them as the swarm buzzed and struggled, losing altitude, dragged down by the combined weight of the two men. She snatched at Parrish’s legs once, missed, leaped again and caught him by both boots, pulling him down. For one instant they all three drifted, as if aloft in a hot air balloon. Something stung the back of her hand and she held on tighter. Then her feet touched down on the cobbles.

  “Pull!” she said.

  “No,” Parrish said. His voice was tight—the sound of angry wasps was intense here. “Get hold of—I can’t…”

  She swung her other arm upward, catching his coat, but as their center of gravity shifted, Parrish’s grip broke. He fell more or less right onto Sophie.

  Verena made one last attempt to catch Bram’s dangling foot, but the loss of drag had given the cloud upward momentum when they snapped apart; it rose to an altitude of fifty feet, clearing the highest roofs.

  “A net!” Parrish shouted. He had Bram’s shoe. “Does anyone have a net?”

  “Too late, Kir,” shouted someone. “’E falls from that height…”

  “Can’t use flame neither,” someone put in.

  Now the swarm was a hundred feet up, and moving fast, making for the wharf. Sophie tried to follow the cloud with her eyes, but the setting sun blinded her; she blinked hard, and when she looked again the cloud had vanished.

  Parrish rolled off her. There were about twenty dead wasps on his hands, their stingers embedded in the swollen flesh. Angry welts ran from his fingertips to his forearm, criss-crossed by strands of broken silk. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”

  She began to sob.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sophie had never understood why people thought it was better or somehow more grown up to bite your lips and daub your eyes and apologize for being upset. Stiff upper lips were for the emotionally constipated, as far as she was concerned.

  “That’s not quite true,” Bram had pointed out once. “You don’t blow like an oil well if you’re on a climb or a dive and something goes wrong, do you? You chill right out and act to ensure your survival.”

  Which was different—she wasn’t dangerous! But there was no risk to anyone now, so she proceeded to melt down like a four-year-old with a skinned knee. She sat on the wooden sidewalk clutching Bram’s leather backpack, and sobbed so hard her ribs felt like they were cracking.

  After a second, Parrish sat beside her, holding his badly stung arm out from his body and struggling for breath … He’d run all the way up the hill and then
, in pursuit of Bram, halfway back to the beach, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as he did.

  “He’s alive,” he managed. “Sophie, they won’t kill him.”

  “It’s a snatch,” Verena agreed. “Kidnap and ransom.”

  Through a scrim of tears, she could see Verena standing off to one side, dancing from foot to foot, apparently unsure as to what she should do, giving little embarrassed smiles to the Tallmen toiling up the hill after their day’s work.

  “I’ve screwed everything.” Sophie heaved out the words. “Up.”

  “The situation is suboptimal,” Parrish said, having picked up the term from Bram, and she cried even harder.

  “Sophie, come on,” Verena said. “We’ll get him back.”

  She ignored this.

  “Garland, you should see a doctor.”

  Parrish nodded, absently, as if this was a great idea, something he should definitely get to in the near future.

  Verena was right about that.

  “Get up!” Sophie wiped her face messily. There was something in her hand—she’d torn one of the buttons off his frock coat. Tucking it into her waistband, she hitched a hand under his arm, pulling upward like a mule. “Up, up. Get up!”

  After a few tugs he relented.

  “Where’s the nearest doctor?” Verena addressed a patrol officer who’d planted himself a little distance away, with the apparent goal of being helpful. The patrolman jerked his head—follow me, he meant—and they trooped off, single file and moving against the throng, which parted politely. People looked at them, but didn’t rubberneck. They respected authority here, Sophie thought, filing away the observation and feeling absurdly guilty that she was still observing things now, with Bram gone.

  Not gone, grabbed. By pirates and religious zealots. Homophobic, slaveholding religious zealots. What have I done?

  They arrived at a little white house that couldn’t have looked more like an old-timey military infirmary if it had been built by a Hollywood set designer: light green counters, silver instruments, smell of soap. All that was missing was a big caduceus on the wall. There was nothing electronic to be seen anywhere.

  A medical clerk ushered them into a back room, where an old man clucked over Parrish’s stings and mixed up a tub of chalky fluid that foamed like beer. “Soak those bites in this,” he said.

  Parrish slid out of his coat and began to struggle with the buttons on his cuffs.

  “Let me,” said Verena, rolling up his sleeves for him.

  “You too,” the doctor said, plunging Sophie’s left hand into the bath—she’d gotten a couple stings. After taking a second glance at her, he wadded a clean handkerchief into her right hand.

  She soaked the one hand, wiped her face with the other, and spent ten more minutes crying herself out.

  “Better?” Parrish asked when she stopped, not in an obnoxious are-you-done-yet? way, just asking.

  “Not better.” She pulled in a long breath. “We’ll have to go after the Heart of Temperance now. You see that, don’t you?”

  “The Heart’s lost,” Verena and the doctor both murmured.

  “Why does someone always say that?”

  “It’s the spell,” Parrish said.

  “I figured that much, but what’s the deal?”

  “It’s easier to demonstrate,” he said. “Verena, what do you know about the Heart of Temperance?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Gale told me it lay in a sea cave on the boundary between the land of the living and the land of the dead. No. She’d never say something so fanciful. It must’ve been someone else.”

  “Someone else is wrong, then,” the doctor said. “Yacoura beats within the chest of a lady woven of grass, who wanders the far foggy isles of the Outlands.”

  “Please, Kirs.” Tonio had pushed his way into the treatment area, over the protests of the doctor’s clerk. “It was swallowed by a giant bird. She laid it within a ruby egg in a nest atop a mountain where nothing but flamingos live.”

  “The type of inscription involved is called a Legend.” Parrish’s hand brushed Sophie’s, within the tank of bubbling remedy.

  Sophie stepped back automatically, but the doctor caught her, pushing her wrist back down with a stern “Tsk!” Her fingers tangled with Parrish’s within the bath. He had a dead wasp caught in his hair, his knees were muddy and his collar was open. The skin under his eyes was darkened, almost purple. His skin, even through the foaming water, was noticeably hot—heated by his immune response to the venom, probably.

  Sophie curled her fingers into a loose fist, claiming a little space.

  “Come to think of it,” Verena said, “I remember hearing the Heart was hidden in a chamber within the anchor of some ship Temperance sank. Lucre?”

  “You see how the inscription works?” Parrish said.

  For once, Sophie was almost grateful for his aplomb. “Everyone has their own story?”

  “It’s remarkable if you ask the question in a crowded tavern,” Parrish said. “There are a thousand stories about the Heart.”

  “But you’re not affected—why? Oh! Because you helped lose it.”

  “Sophie, it may be better if it stays lost.”

  “Not up for debate,” she said. “They have Bram, they want the thing and you, apparently, are honor-bound to do what I say.” Her voice had risen, and though he didn’t quite come to attention, something in him snapped to, stiffening into a more formal stance. “Isn’t that right?”

  “You’re in charge on paper—” Verena protested.

  “Until my brother’s not kidnapped, I am totally in charge.”

  “Very convenient,” muttered Verena. “Parrish, you’re not going along with this?”

  He met her gaze squarely. “Until Sophie can relinquish Gale’s estate, Nightjar answers to her. As do I.”

  “You could resign,” Verena said. “If you cared—”

  Oh, this is hitting the edge of nasty. “Bram,” Sophie said. “The point is Bram, Bram, Bram. Now, I’m not telling weird tales about Yacoura. Is that because I’m an outsider? Or does the spell have something to do with me?”

  “Seas! The world revolves around you, doesn’t it?”

  “Either it’s about the magic purse and Gale’s job, Verena, or it’s about Beatrice.”

  Verena’s scowl dissolved into surprise. “Mom’s not involved in this. She’s nothing to do with Stormwrack anymore.”

  Parrish wheezed, rippling the roiling, blood-tinged foam of the medical bath. Personal sheened his face.

  “Are you okay?” Sophie said.

  “A little feverish, perhaps.”

  “Doctor?” she called. “How much venom would have been in those bites?”

  He looked at them both carefully, peering into Parrish’s eyes, and went digging through his cupboards for a flask. “Drink,” he told Parrish, holding it to his lips, slapping his arm back into the tub when he reached for the glass himself.

  “Why not hide it with Beatrice?” Sophie said to Verena. “She’s out of the picture; nobody can find her. If she could disappear a whole baby, she could certainly tuck an inscription or two in her attic.”

  “Garland?”

  He was starting to droop.

  The doctor lifted Sophie’s hand out of the bath, wrapping it in a towel. “Captain Parrish needs to rest.”

  “No,” Parrish protested. “We’re in a hurry.”

  “Young fellow,” the doctor said.

  “Will he be all right?” Bram grabbed, Bram grabbed by the Ualtarites, raging homophobic zealots, Bram in danger and it’s my fault, all my fault, and now if Parrish isn’t okay, what will we do?

  “He’ll recover, don’t worry. You, young man, help me—” Tonio caught Parrish by the arm as he staggered; he and the doctor muscled him over to a starched white cot.

  “Just a few minutes,” he mumbled.

  “Parrish? Am I right?” Sophie said.

  He looked drowsy and thoroughly unhappy. “Yes. The key to finding that certa
in inscription lies with your mother. Verena will have to fetch her from your homeland.”

  “Go,” the doctor said, shooing everyone out into his waiting room. “Come back a’ morning. He’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t go far,” Parrish said. “I’ll join you—”

  The doctor shut the door in their faces, leaving the three of them gaping awkwardly at each other.

  Finally Sophie said, “I shouldn’t have pulled rank like that. I just—”

  “He’s your brother,” Verena said stiffly. “I get it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Verena stared out through the doctor’s front window, at a square where some of the Tall were seated in groups of two or three on painted white benches that had been set up around a bandstand; they were munching the things in their dinner pails and chit-chatting. “We’re going to need to fetch Mom and sail out of here before the Watch shows up. They’d order us to find some other way, to leave Yacoura alone.”

  “We might have more time than you think,” Tonio said. “Someone’s damaged all the blotting paper at the clarionhouse. I couldn’t express a warning to the Tiladene, and we’re not going to be able to contact the Fleet.”

  “Excuse me?” Sophie said. “They don’t have more paper?”

  “It’s magical … it has to be prepared,” he said. “And you won’t catch the Tall restocking until they’ve thoroughly assessed the security breach. They’re very bureaucratic here. I had a scribe copy me six versions of the dispatch on ordinary pages. We can post them on outgoing ships.”

  Verena frowned. “We’re going to have to split up, then.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone has to tell Annela what’s going on,” she said. “Whatever’s happening, it affects the Cessation. And Bram’s kidnappers are without honor.”

  “Of course they’re without honor!”

  “No, it’s—look, Sophie, it’s so serious here to break your word; you can’t guess how much of a taboo it is. Even kidnappers and blackmailers generally stick to their agreements, especially in cases like this, where their motives are political. Because they’re acting for their Island, see?”