Child of a Hidden Sea

by A. M. Dellamonica

  She nodded.

  “My condolences to all of you. She was a determined, resourceful woman, devoted to the Fleet Charter and the Cessation. We’re all the poorer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please—we’re family now. Cly will do.” He had left a hand resting loosely on Sophie’s shoulders, but addressed Verena. “You’re Gale’s child?”

  “Her heir, yes,” Parrish interrupted.

  She could almost feel the chill pass between the two men. Their faces were untroubled, their voices calm, but the frost was nevertheless so palpable that Sophie half expected to see her breath fogging between them.

  Cly seemed to reach a decision. “Sophie, will you come and see Sawtooth? We have much to discuss. I want to know everything.”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, of course, I’d like to. But—”

  A glint there. “But?”

  “Well … we’re sort of on a … mission. Solving Gale’s murder. The people involved—Goldmen, and Ualtarites—they’ve grabbed my brother.”

  “Brother?” For a second Cly jaw worked, and when he spoke his voice was breathless. “There is a son as well?”

  “No,” she said. Would he have rather had a boy? “I mean, not your son. Not Beatrice’s either.”

  “Ah.” The emotion was gone. You were fostered?”

  “I want to get to know you,” Sophie said. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve gone through—how much I’ve put others through—for this. But Bram’s in danger, and there are all these political ties to the crime. We were going off to the Fleet to report…” She watched Parrish, looking for any hint she might be heading into troublesome territory.

  “The Golden may be involved in a conspiracy to break the Cessation,” Parrish said.

  “War?” Cly was visibly jolted; his lip curled in something that might have been a snarl. “What are you doing about it?”

  “Verena has to contact Beatrice. She has information we need.”

  “She lives?” The smile on her father’s face held, but his eyes were unreadable.

  “She does,” Parrish said, with obvious reluctance.

  “You’re not bound for Verdanii.”

  “I prefer not to comment on our course, Your Honor.”

  The crinkle again. “As it happens, I too have messages for Beatrice. Perhaps, Kir Thorna, if you’re going anyway…” He snapped out an order to a flunky who’d made it across to Nightjar before Sawtooth had pulled back its makeshift gangplank. With a bow, the younger man produced an official-looking, sealed and beribboned envelope.

  “If you’ll be good enough to deliver this?”

  Verena accepted it warily. “What is it?”

  “Court business,” Cly said.

  “I imagine it’s a summons,” Parrish said.

  “Whatever family matters Gale may have divulged to you, Captain, I hardly think it’s your role to speculate or gossip.”

  If only he had gossiped, Sophie thought. “Summons?”

  “Child,” Cly said. “Forgive me. This is difficult, and the captain means to do his duty as he sees it, I’m sure. I will explain, you have my word.”

  She felt a slight impulse to defend Parrish. Then again, he’d had his chance to tell her the story, ten times over, and he’d flat-out refused.

  “Verena?” she said.

  “I have to talk to … to Beatrice, if we’re going to rescue Bram,” she said. “And this … is official. We’re duty-bound to deliver it.”

  “Do that,” Cly said. “Sophie can tell me what we need to do to throttle this rebellion in its cradle—”

  “Can I do that?”

  “Within the limits I mentioned earlier,” Parrish said.

  Meaning she couldn’t tell him about San Francisco. “Right.”

  “We can trust the Duelist-Adjudicator to act in the best interests of the Fleet.”

  “If you can’t, the Charter and a century of peace are just about sunk,” Cly said drily. “Captain, we’ll amend your instructions as necessary once I understand the situation. Sophie, please, let me show you Sawtooth.” He swept out his cape. She saw a blade—the sword—and for a second she imagined he was going to go all Errol Flynn on her: grab a rope and swing them both across to the other vessel. Instead, he was gesturing at his crew, who were once again maneuvering the ships so they could lower a makeshift bridge.

  She turned to Parrish, who gave her the faintest thread of a nod. She scrambled across, up to the deck of the larger ship. Two uniformed sailors were waiting to hand her down from the rail to the deck.

  “You were pretty short with Parrish just now,” she said, as Cly bounded down.

  “Mmm? I do apologize. Since I learned there was a child—a daughter—you! I’ve been in a bit of a state. You’ve been kept from me all this time, and I’ve no doubt that fellow was in on it.” His eye roamed back to Nightjar, and his lips pulled back from his teeth. “I’m a patient man, Sophie, extremely patient, but some things strain the temper.”

  “Parrish makes me crazy, too,” she said.

  “I also talk too much when I’m excited.”

  She laughed. “So do I.”

  “Tell me all about yourself! You were fostered, you say? Where? Beatrice didn’t raise you?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for answers a lot longer than you have. If anyone’s going to spill, it’s you.” She turned, taking in the ship. Yes, Sawtooth was what she would have called a caravel: square-rigged, with a look that said old-fashioned even by the standards of all these sailing ships. Its crew, compared to Nightjar’s, would be huge, at least a hundred sailors, probably more like two.

  The ship’s fighting deck was literally a fighting deck: It had three rings for practicing swordfighting, two for boxing or wrestling, and a row of practice dummies much like Verena’s, except that they looked hardier, more expensive.

  “Young duelists in training,” Cly said, as she looked over the various combatants clashing in the rings.

  “Lawyers who kill,” she said. “You’re all lawyers?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Do you fight?”

  “No,” she said. “Very definitely no.”

  “Well. If you ever wish to learn … or perhaps you don’t believe in it?”

  “You’re fishing for info on me again,” she said. “You were going to tell me about you.”

  “Guilty as charged—you’re very sharp, Sophie.” That bright hunter’s smile again. Despite herself, she felt a glow of gratification.

  “Where shall I start?” He offered her his arm, then led her along the fighting deck, offering an airy gesture to two combatants. The men, who’d been standing ready and apparently waiting to command his attention, were wrestlers. At Cly’s motion, they began to circle each other. “I joined the Fleet when I was younger than you are, and I’ve been its creature for almost as long as your aunt Gale was.”

  “Why?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Why’d you join?”

  “I had an aptitude for both personal combat and for book learning, so I was asked to, by—excuse me. Hold! Andre, you’re favoring the left leg. Is it still injured, or not?”

  One of the wrestlers flushed. “Merely the habit of recovery, Your Honor.”

  “I’d better not catch you feigning weakness in court, Counsellor. Continue.”

  The wrestlers resumed circling.

  “Sorry, Sophie, where was I? Ah, yes, I’d written my examinations and been made a Clerk-Adjudicator, a sorry scrap like all of these, when I met Beatrice Feliachild.”

  “What can I say about your mother at twenty? She was beautiful, of course. I imagine she still is? But where most Verdanii are so self-sufficient, so entirely … oh, cloaked, I suppose, armored in their own sense of moral rightness…” He paused, seeming to consider his words.

  In the ring, the two wrestlers had begun the head-slapping dance for position, reaching for each other by turns, twisting free, circling faster. Now the allegedly injured one, Andre
, lunged in and snagged his opponent by the ankle, flipping him—but failing to pounce and pin him before he escaped.

  “Beatrice needed someone,” Cly said. “She wasn’t at home among her people, which is always a tragedy.”

  Sophie thought briefly of her parents and Bram. Was that her problem? She didn’t fit?

  “I’ve never been so drawn to a woman,” Cly said. “I courted her, or she me, to her family’s considerable and vocal disapproval. Eventually I asked my father to approach the Allmother to beg a marriage contract.”

  “So you loved each other?”

  He frowned. “We both believed so.”

  “What the hell went wrong, then?” The wrestlers came together in a clinch, their upper bodies quivering with strain as each tried to muscle the other over. “You were young and stupid and temperamentally incompatible?”

  “Is that what your mother says?”

  She remembered the look on Beatrice’s face. Horror. It was horror. Cly seemed nice, all things considered, but— “I’m asking you.”

  “Some of it was our youth, yes,” he said. “My position was also a source of strain. An adjudicator survives within Fleet society by maintaining an impartial face to all comers. You have only two choices. One is to withdraw from society—see few, befriend nobody. The other is to throw yourself into every engagement. Accept every invitation.”

  “See everyone? And befriend—”

  “Befriend nobody.”

  “It sounds lonely either way,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you picked which path?”

  “I am a social animal, Sophie.” The smaller of the two wrestlers finally threw the other, flinging him a good three feet beyond the marked boundary of the ring, where he landed with a thud that vibrated through the deck. “I chose company and conversation, however shallow, over a life of solitude in service.”

  I’d probably do the same, Sophie thought. And then: Does he have any other family?

  “That was stunningly adequate,” Cly called to the younger judges, who both wilted. “Rematch after lunch. Come, Sophie.” They strolled on to one of the fencing rings, where a man and woman were going at swordplay with a speed that made Verena’s duel with Incindio, back on Erinth, seem pokey in comparison.

  She couldn’t win against the least of these guys, Sophie thought. If they appointed a proxy for me, I’d get the whole estate: the job, the houses, the magic purse. And Cly’s my father. Would it be up to him?

  Cly continued to reminisce: “The need to mingle socially, night after night, wore on your mother. She is emphatically not a sociable creature, as you may have observed. I wasn’t understanding. I had a vocation; she had yet to chart a course for her own life. It seemed obvious to me that if she couldn’t choose, she might at least contribute to my success.”

  “Nice,” Sophie said.

  “I was spoiled as a child, and somewhat hardhearted. Beatrice was spoiled too, of course, but more tender in spirit. In that we were—how did you put it?—temperamentally incompatible.”

  “Was it violent?”

  She had his full attention, suddenly—it was like falling under the spotlight of a police chopper. “I beg your pardon?”

  Tactful, Sofe. That was the height of rudeness. Bram’s voice, and she felt a pang. All this was just time spent not rescuing him. Worse, it was chasing this that had got him abducted.

  But there was no getting out of it now. “How unsympathetic were you? Did you hurt her? Did you threaten her? You’re pretty much a fighting machine, aren’t you? I bet lots of people find you pretty…”

  “Yes?”

  Could you have gone out on more of a limb? “Pretty terrifying.”

  Oh, and there are probably at least three people who overheard us.

  Parrish was probably watching from Nightjar. If Cly tossed her overboard …

  Stop obsessing about Parrish already!

  “Have I been made out this much of a monster?” Cly asked, reaching for her hand. “Child—”

  “I’m not a child.” She jerked back. “Answer my question.”

  “No!” He pulled himself up, almost to rigid, military attention, the way they all seemed to do here when things got argumentative. “I’ll swear any oath you care to name. I never struck, cut, or made physical threat upon your mother. I’ve never dealt violence to anyone, for that matter, without just legal cause and the full power of the Charter behind me.”

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry.”

  “I am a well born, well raised, honorable gentleman of—”

  “Really, I’m sorry! I had to ask.”

  “This what’s been said to you? Am I slandered to such a degree, to my own flesh and blood…”

  Oh, and they say Beatrice is a drama queen?

  “Cly,” Sophie said. “It wasn’t anything they told me—they told me nothing. I just assumed—”

  “You assumed?”

  From bad to worse. What could she say now? She could feel everyone eavesdropping: the crew, the junior judges. “Everyone’s made such a big deal of keeping this secret. Stay away from the Dueling Court, they said. Stay away from Storm … from the Fleet. Go home, never come back. I’m sorry I assumed the worst, I am.

  “But come on! There’s something rotten at the heart of this. There has to be something they’re afraid of. If it’s not you, what is it?”

  Like that, the tension was gone.

  “Ah, of course,” Cly said. “The obvious inference was that the rot lay with me.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “I’d have reached the same conclusion.” He shook out his hand. “The Feliachilds, that cur Parrish and the Allmother herself have conspired to hide my child from me.”

  “Cur?”

  “I cannot know their side of the argument, and I’m sure their actions seemed reasonable at the time. But from my perspective it seems apparent their reason was petty, self-serving … sordid.”

  “What reason? Why’d they hide me?” What’d I do? What’s wrong with me?

  “Beatrice and I come from very different nations. A Verdanii woman can set aside a man if he displeases her, but my people frown on divorce. Our marriage negotiations were complex. Time passed, and Beatrice wanted to leave me. I can understand her wishing to be free of our marriage. It had gone wrong, terribly wrong. She was desperately unhappy. We did have terrible arguments. But on paper, in the binding document we both signed—”

  “Yes?”

  “The possibility of divorce had been conceded, reluctantly, by my father,” Cly said. “But only until such time as the union produced children.”

  “Seriously?”

  He lay a hand on hers, peering into her eyes. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, though in truth she felt a little stunned. “Me being alive meant no breakup?”

  “She couldn’t have divorced me if it were known she was pregnant. Could never have divorced me once you’d been born. And by turning up now … your very existence makes you evidence of breach of contract. You’ve invalidated my divorce and branded Beatrice Feliachild a fraud. A bigamist too, if she’s remarried.”

  Which she has, and you’re fishing again. Instead of calling him on it, Sophie asked: “So that letter you gave Verena, for Beatrice. Captain Parrish said it was a summons?”

  “It is,” Cly said, and there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his tone. “An arrest warrant.”

  CHAPTER 21

  If you stay in Stormwrack, you’ll bring trouble to your closest kin. So Gale hadn’t been referring to some big D destiny thing at all. It wasn’t prophecies or soothsaying or fate she was afraid of.

  Just a lawsuit, Sophie thought. What a relief!

  Whatever she might have said next was interrupted by a shout from the crow’s nest: “Spell! Two points north—”

  The seas were boiling.

  “What now?” she groaned.

  Cly cast an eye on the water. “You said it was the Golden who had your brother? Th
is might be their ransom demand.”

  “I already know what they want.”

  “There’s a formal show of threat—their traditions are grandiose.”

  Something white-blue was rising from the froth, a solid form … an iceberg, Sophie realized, a gigantic jagged crag made of ice, with a face carved into it. A hundred feet high, dripping and glassy, its eyes were whitened by what looked like hammer blows that cracked and crazed the frozen water’s surface, so that it resembled a shattered windshield.

  “Holy crap,” she muttered.

  “Have you never heard of a kalassi?” Cly asked.

  She shook her head.

  “In the days after the Fleet took to sinking their ships, the Piracy resorted to other means of raiding. This was one of their more effective spells.”

  The iceman had continued to rise and grow until it towered above both ships, until it bobbed on the water, the form of a man, bare chested, submerged below the ribs. It wore the face of John Coine.

  He cast a disapproving eye over Sawtooth. “You’ve involved others in our business, Sophie Opal Hansa.”

  Before she could answer, Cly put his hands on her shoulders. “This woman is my daughter, Kir. If anyone has involved me, it is you.”

  “How’s Bram?” Sophie said. “If you’ve hurt him…”

  “The boy breathes.”

  She felt a rush of relief, so strong her knees buckled. She grabbed for the rail, steadying herself. He’s alive.

  “Will you exchange our heart’s desire for him?”

  Her voice wobbled, but she got the words out. “I’ve figured out a way to maybe get your stupid inscription. But after that stunt you pulled on Lais, with the grenade … if you’re not gonna exchange him fair and square, why should I trade with you?”

  “This is why you’ve run to Father?”

  In a movie, the iceberg’s voice would be cranked up to timber-shattering volume. But this one wasn’t even amplified. Somehow that made it scarier.

  Cly looked from the iceman back to Sophie. “If you have no honor, Kir, she cannot transact with you.”

  There was a boom as a second berg shot up out of the water, this one shaped like a hand, massive, fingers splayed, with long nails. Huge mussel shells were embedded on its fingers, like diamonds on rings. It stretched delicately, taking a grip on Nightjar’s forward hull, curving like talons.