“It wasn’t Gideon,” he repeated. “On my honor as Captain, and Palatine First, I can promise it.”
“But can you prove it?” Pryor wondered, spreading his empty hands. “I’m sorry, Captain, but you do understand that I cannot permit you or your ship to depart until the matter of the missing anai has been resolved?”
Reece braced his hands against the desk and leaned down to be at eye level with the king. It wasn’t much of a reach. Even sitting down, Pryor towered like a grim, forbidding tree, weathered and crooked but solid as stone. “That could be weeks. I don’t have that kind of time.”
Pryor quirked an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware casual travelers such as yourselves cared much for deadlines.” He held Reece’s eyes for a long moment as Reece tried to think up something to say that wouldn’t sound like an excuse, but Pryor had him trapped, pinned under those shrewd, knowing eyes. He straightened behind his desk, pulled out a quill, and began scrawling on a sheet of parchment marked with a blot of wax. “An official notice,” he explained, “alerting my watchers you’re not to leave Neserus until I send the word. If you are in such a rush, perhaps you will assist me in solving this mystery. No ferries have left for Haldon, Lumiel, or Faldon since the theft occurred—I’ll make certain they stay put, at least for now. Our thief is most assuredly nearby.”
A frustrated growl burst out of Reece as he threw up his hands, alarming the guards, who started and touched their clubs. How was he supposed to help him find his thief when he didn’t even understand what an anai was, other than a bleeding pain in the—
The door to the study slammed open, and Reece twisted as Hannick marched in, expression indignant. “You must be joking,” he scoffed, striding right up the desk and crossing his arms. “You know I was mostly being ironic about you frightening off visitors, right? You really think they flew into port, paused for a nap, and then proceeded to steal an anai without further ado? I know what they say about Honorans, but that seems a little daft, even for them.”
He tossed Reece a short, apologetic look as Reece eyed him sideways. Reece wasn’t insulted so much as curious. What did Oceanuns say about Honorans, now?
“Hannick,” Pryor began in a longsuffering voice, but then the door, which a guard had just carefully closed, banged open again, and this time it was Talfryn who hurried in and anxiously rushed the desk.
“Father, it wasn’t them, I know it! It can’t be—they didn’t even know of the anai before I spoke with Hayden!”
“Yes,” Pryor interrupted, leveling her with a stern look. “I am keenly aware of that, Talfryn, thank you.”
“But she’s right.” Hannick held up his two pointer fingers. “You can’t blame Reece and his crew for her impropriety.”
Talfryn’s mouth opened and closed, expression wavering between agreement and insult. Reece used the pause to speak for himself. “Look, if it’s proof you want, it’s proof you’ll get. But you can’t limit my crew’s movements if you want us to turn up evidence for you.”
Hannick nodded and added, “If you have to keep them at port in Neserus, so be it. But putting them under house arrest will serve no one.”
Reece shot him a questioning look that was ignored. He didn’t want to be kept at port, and Pryor had no right to ground him like the duke or Abigail had occasionally tried to do without great success. There had always been ways out of Emathia, back gates and fire escapes or servants’ tunnels. But there was only one way off Oceanus. Aurelia. And so long as she was stabled in the king’s city, Pryor more or less held her keys.
Massaging his temple with two fingers, King Pryor let out a huff of breath through his nostrils, eyes closed. “Oh, very well,” he growled. When he reopened his eyes to find Reece, Hannick, and Talfryn standing there like a trio of numpties, blank-faced with surprise at having won him over, he curtly added, “You may go. For now.”
The conversation hardly felt over to Reece, but he let Talfryn and Hannick draw him towards the door, holding either of his arms like he couldn’t be trusted to walk on his own. There were worst places to be detained than Oceanus, but—
“Captain?” Pryor called.
Reece glanced back.
Pryor ticked the nib of his pen in his ink well without looking up. “It would be prudent of you to keep your Pantedan comrade close while the investigation is underway.”
Forcing a smile, Reece nodded, spread his hands in a mocking bow, and backed out into the corridor to join Hannick and his sister. The door slammed in his face a half-second later. His last glimpse of the guards made him wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter to forgo sleeping the rest of the night…if that was even an option, any more.
“Well,” Hannick said cheerfully. “That wasn’t so bad.”
Reece snorted. “Yeah, but a far cry from fun. Does one of you want to tell me what the bleeding bogrosh an anai is?”
The siblings answered him in turns as they walked him back to the guest chambers. Talfryn handled the scientific jargon while Hannick threw in theatrics to take the edge of dullness off her explanation. Hayden would have found it all fascinating—he apparently already had—but Reece was just too tired to feel more than impatient when Talfryn used words like ablation and faculae. A power-giving rock had been stolen right out from under the Oceanuns’ noses, and they wanted to blame him or his crew for it. That about summed it up, in Reece’s estimation.
“You do have to admit, Reece, the timing is a bit uncanny,” said Hannick.
“I never said it wasn’t. But we’re innocent. And we can’t afford to sit and twiddle our thumbs while your father nurses his prejudice against Pans.”
“Pans?” Talfryn wondered.
“Pantedans,” Hannick told her with a dismissive wave. He frowned at Reece. “You’re certain there’s no chance one of your…friends might have been involved?”
Reece shook his head. “Don’t read into this, but I’m pretty sure if Gideon wanted to steal something, he wouldn’t be so blatantly obvious about it.”
Despite his request, he could see Hannick was reading into it as he peered down the corridor to where Gideon was waiting inside the arches to the guest chambers with his arms crossed. When they were Elevens, Reece had dared Gid to sneak into the girls’ dormitory and steal Molly Brewer’s chocolate birthday egg, which she’d bragged about in class till Reece had wanted to stick his fingers in his ears. In less than ten minutes, Gid had crossed campus, scaled the brick building to an open window, skillfully navigated shark infested waters (or as good as), and snatched Molly’s egg without so much as letting his shadow be seen. Ten years and who knew how many Mordecai-led-heists later…grabbing the anai without being seen would have been a cinch.
“Father will see reason,” Talfryn reassured Reece. “It’s obvious it couldn’t have been any of your crew.”
“Is it?” Reece said, surprised.
She nodded. “The timing is uncanny. Too uncanny. Whoever stole the anai must have been planning on doing so for quite some time, and saw your crew’s arrival as the perfect opportunity.”
“So we’re being framed.”
“Don’t you think so?”
Scratching the back of his head with a grimace, Reece shrugged, at a loss. It made sense. But something about it just smelled…off. Too contrived, maybe.
Hannick elbowed him with a smirk. “At least there’s a bright side to this mess.” He laughed when Reece stared uncomprehendingly. “The fencing tourney! You can compete now!”
“What tourney?” Gideon interrupted, straightening. His sharp blue eyes cut back and forth between Hannick and Reece, narrowing with every pass. Behind him, the door creaked open, and Scarlet peeked out the crack, her hair fanning golden about her shoulders.
Rather than answering Gideon, Hannick homed in on Scarlet with interest. “Oceanus’s biannual fencing tournament is just a few days away. I was telling your captain he ought to compete, now that his plans for departure have changed.”
Gideon and Scarlet’s glares were unpleasant enou
gh on their own, but getting hit with both at once, Reece couldn’t decide whose bad side he least wanted to be on—the grumpy gunsmith’s or the politician sister-figure’s. He decided to play it safe and keep his back to the wall as he turned to Hannick and Talfryn, who seemed not to notice that his friends were trying to melt him with their eyes.
“Could you excuse us? I need to have a word with my crew.”
Hannick nodded as Talfryn said quickly, “Of course.” She nodded goodbye, and as she turned to go, rose to her toes and strained to see past Scarlet, probably not realizing how terribly obvious she was being. Scarlet pulled the door closed a little tighter around her with a challenging look, and blushing, Talfryn dipped an Oceanun curtsy and fled. Hannick was slower in going, strolling after his sister with his hands in his pockets.
“Think about what I said, Reece,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “Honora hasn’t faced Oceanus in a tourney in well on twenty years. I’d like to see what they teach you at that academy of yours.”
Reece knew he was being baited, but still, he snorted, jerking his chin curtly in farewell. Hannick was supposedly the best fencer in his club, if not in the city. He was good, but if he hadn’t posted to manage that last point in their match, Reece would have had him.
“Reece,” Scarlet hissed, watching Hannick’s retreating back, “what does he mean? What change in plans?”
Reece looked away with his jaw set. Captainhood was calling, though he would’ve happily gone on planning his strategy for putting Hannick back in his place in the tournament. Not because he preferred fencing to being captain—the helm was all he’d ever wanted, and dirt if he was going to be ungrateful for it just because it was growing ever more demanding—but because it was just…simpler. A refreshing kind of simple. Like leaving behind the busy city with its perpetual buzz of commotion for a ride through the countryside, where it was cheerfully quiet and quaint and by city people’s standards, boring. Boredom started to sound awfully appealing after a few months of being too busy to take your shoes off before bed at night.
“Something’s been stolen. One of the city’s power sources,” Reece explained quietly. “Pryor’s ordered us to stay put until they recover what was taken.”
Scarlet looked scandalized. “He implied we stole it?”
“More or less.” Reece angled his head towards Gideon. Her green eyes narrowed as she scowled. For Scarlet, that was as good as jumping to Gid’s defense. “Let the others know, will you? We’ll be in in a minute.”
With a nod, Scarlet withdrew and quietly closed the door. Gideon looked at Reece in question. Nodding for Gid to follow him, Reece wandered over to the glass wall, staring down into the gully. In the dull blue light of night, it was little more than a craggy black blotch. Shapes and faint figures swam just beyond the edge of the shadows, dim and ghostly. Anything could have been out there. Anything.
“What’s goin’ on?” Gideon asked, as direct as ever, for which Reece was grateful. There was no good way to broach the subject, and if Gid was going to punch him in the face, Reece would rather he got it out of his system now. He hated the suspense.
He rubbed the back of his neck tiredly. “Where were you earlier tonight, Gid?”
Gideon went very still, dark eyebrows scrunching together. It was impossible not to take him seriously, even with his hair in messy, matted waves where they’d pressed into his pillow. “Here, mostly,” he grumbled. “Went out for a while to look around.”
“Where did you go?”
After a beat, Gideon’s perplexed scowl clicked into something fiercer, something defensive. His arms dropped from over his chest. His hands were in fists. “You askin’ me if I stole whatever’s missin’?”
“I’m asking you where you went,” Reece said firmly, hands on his hips as he turned to face him. “Come on. Don’t do this now. I’m not trying to pick a fight with you. I’m trying to help you. Pryor has witnesses who saw you walking around just before the theft. We need to find you an alibi, someone who can…what?” Gid had started shaking his head.
“No one saw me.”
“What?”
“I was bein’ careful. I steered away from people, and besides, there wasn’t no one out to be witnesses in the first place. No one saw me. I’m sure’a it.”
“You realize how that sounds, right?”
“Yeah, I get it,” Gideon snapped. “I’m a suspect. That all?” He brushed past Reece without waiting on an answer, stomping with hunched shoulders towards the archways.
“Gideon!” Reece growled, and Gid actually jerked to a stop and blinked back at him in surprise. Which made Reece feel like a mother who’d resorted to using her child’s full name to get his attention. “I can do this as your friend, or I can do it as your captain. But we need to talk about this.”
Blowing out a huff of breath, Gid grumbled, “Ain’t nothin’ to talk about.” He saw Reece’s flat look and amended with a glare, “Nothin’ worth wastin’ breath on, anyways. You gonna let me go to bed now?” He roughly shouldered open the door to their quarters, and with an exasperated sigh, Reece followed him into the dark, blinking to force his eyes to adjust.
Scarlet was nowhere to be seen, but Reece could hear her low, urgent whispers from the other room, telling the others what had happened. Surprisingly, Hayden hadn’t waited up, or if he had, his tiredness had eventually won out. It looked like he had face-planted into bed with his glasses still on. On the foot of the bed beside him—Reece’s bed—Po was curled into a tight, barefooted bundle. He paused in the door and frowned at the sight, thinking back to Sterling Eve dinner and feeling himself grow awkward just looking at her. Bogrosh! Why had she had to go and try to kiss him? He had enough complications on his plate without Po making him feel like a self-conscious Thirteen. He’d never been a self-conscious Thirteen. The experience was totally new to him. No wonder it had been a traumatic year for Hayden.
It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the things about Po that were likable. She was fun and bright, and she made him laugh, but she also made him think. She was definitely pretty—he wasn’t completely blind, just…nearsighted, to not have seen this coming—but he didn’t think of her that way. Maybe he could, if he tried, but it wasn’t just Po he was hesitant to get involved with. Being captain didn’t leave a lot of room for extraneous emotion. His emotions were always stretched so thin nowadays; he had to think if he tried siphoning any more of them off, the taut lines would snap, recoil, and take out someone’s eye.
Sighing, Reece walked to the bed and shook Po by her shoulder. She stirred, mumbling, and swatted at him.
“Po,” he whispered, smirking in spite of himself. “Po.”
Po dazedly opened her eyes, looked at him, and yawned. “Sorry, Cap’n. Guess I fell asleep.”
“Yeah, that was my guess, too.”
“What did the king want?”
Reece hesitated, then sat on the edge of the bed. Across the room, Gideon violently fluffed his pillows with his fists and then slammed his head down, his broad back to them. “Something’s been stolen from the city. He’s grounded us until it’s recovered, in case we took it.”
With a frown, Po forced herself upright only to drop her back against one of the bed’s four posters. “So we’re stuck?” Reece nodded. “What are you gonna do?”
“Try to help them recover it as soon as possible. Figure out how to get us out of here in case…”
“In case…?”
Gideon’s back was rigid; he hardly seemed to be breathing. Reece tried to block him out with difficulty, looking instead into Po’s toffee brown eyes, wide and fixed on his face. The intensity of the look made him want to lean back. He’d been in tough spots like this before, when a girl had gotten it in her head that maybe he felt something he actually didn’t, but this was Po. He didn’t know what he felt for her, but that in itself should be a pretty big indicator something was missing.
“Are we ever gonna talk about this?” Po asked quietly.
Reece
rolled his shoulders uncomfortably and like a true gentleman, tried taking the coward’s way out. “About what?” Then Po blushed, looking down at her hands in her lap, and he could see her trying to figure out how to recover from her forwardness. He hated himself. Shooting a glance at Hayden’s bed to make sure he was asleep and deciding no one could fake that melting-off-the-pillow, exhausted face, Reece sighed and said in an undertone, “You mean what happened on Sterling Eve.”
Blinking, Po looked up at him, studying his face before nodding uncertainly. “I guess…it’s more about what didn’t happen.” Her dimples deepened as she smiled. “Not that it still couldn’t. If you’re feelin’ at all inclined.”
“Po…” At a loss, Reece spread his hands helplessly, which was a mistake. Po caught and stilled them, her fingers coiling around his. He stared stupidly at her for a moment before clearing his throat and trying to gently pull them back. “It’s not that I don’t…”
“Yes?”
“…don’t like you…”
“Do you?”
With a small jerk, Reece reclaimed his hands, holding them up to forestall Po as she leaned in towards him, her smile a whole lot less shy than it had been a half minute ago. “I just don’t think that’s in the cards for us,” he croaked.
For a second, Po frowned, hesitating as she considered him. But of course, it couldn’t be that easy. “How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know it ain’t in the cards without givin’ it a try?”
This time when she reached for him, he scrambled sideways off the bed and stood, taking a generous step backward. “Po!” he exclaimed, exasperated now, and Hayden gave a great, ungraceful snort in his sleep. Composing himself—or trying to, anyways—Reece went on in a quieter voice, “It just isn’t, alright?”
The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) Page 26