by David Estes
I stomp on the blackened blades of grass as I walk away, feeling them crumble beneath my trod.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Huck
Heavy. That’s the only word to describe the feeling inside me. There are so many eyes in my sleep. Mother’s. Webb’s. The bilge rat boy’s. All staring, staring, burning holes of accusation through my skin. “He’s the one!” they say. “He killed us!”
Although the Scurve seems to be under control again, Jade won’t talk to me, just clambers up the mast each morning, dead set on repairing every last tear in the sails without further assistance from me. I could go up, work alongside her, but why force something that’s not there?
As I eat alone in my cabin in a silence broken only by the intermittent creaking of the ship, I mull over what to do. More pointedly, I consider the information Jade gave me just before we stopped speaking. Fire country. The bilge rats’ home. Taken, abducted, tricked: brought to a place where they’re dogs—no, less than dogs: rats—forced to slave away, day in and day out, obeying orders from men who can barely look at them.
Was she lying, trying to gain my sympathy? In some ways I hope she was, so my father’s not a monster, so the world can become right again. But in other ways I’ll be sadder if she was lying, because that means I’m nothing to her, just a boy to be manipulated.
There’s a knock on my door and I look up, surprised. I asked not to be disturbed, choosing to take my evening meal in my cabin, rather than with the men, needing time to think.
“Yes?” I say, stabbing a potato with my fork.
Barney pushes open the door, a strange expression on his face. It’s one I’ve never seen before, a mix of what appears to be glee, embarrassment, and concern. The glee is in his eyes, wide and dancing; the embarrassment is in the extraordinarily crimson flush of his cheeks; and the concern is in his bent eyebrows and pursed lips.
“I asked not to be—”
“I apologize, sir, but I was sure you’d want to hear this.”
I raise the potato to my mouth, think better of it, and set my fork down with a clink, uneaten starch still stuck to it. “Go on.”
“You should help repair the sails tomorrow,” Barney says uncertainly.
I stare at him. “Are you giving me an order?”
“More like a message,” Barney says, turning to go.
“A message from whom...” Although the question is completed, it dies on my tongue, twitching at first, and then still. Barney closes the door softly behind him.
She talked to him?
To Barney?
No, not a question. She talked to Barney.
And I’ll be climbing the sails tomorrow.
~~~
When the red dawn creeps over the horizon, I’m high above the ship to watch it. I couldn’t sleep, so I came up here, to the crow’s nest, to wait.
(For her.)
What does she want to talk to me about? Why now? Maybe she feels bad and wants to admit everything she told me was a lie.
More likely she wants to scream at me for throwing that boy overboard.
The wind shrieks around me as I peer over the wooden sides of the lookout platform. The men are hard at work, turning the sails, catching the wind at just the right angle. The ship cuts through the choppy waters with ease, trailing the Merman’s Daughter by only the smallest of margins.
Are we really the second fastest ship in the fleet? I wonder, marveling at how quickly things can change. Below me, the ship is alive, built with wood and sweat and human strength. And somewhere…Jade.
Later today we’ll lay anchor. If what Jade told me is true, will I be able to look the admiral in the eyes, pretend like I don’t know?
I shake off the thought when I spot her. If she sees me, she doesn’t show it, her expression flat and neutral. Jade crosses the deck, greeting the other bilge as she goes, reaching the main mast in long strides. Unlike me, she ignores the crow’s nest ladder, frog-hopping up the wooden cylinder with ease.
My hands suddenly feel sweaty and I rub them on my britches.
For the first time, she looks up, meeting my gaze with thoughtful eyes that seem to say, “You came.”
Three quarters of the way up, she stops at where there’s a gaping hole in one of the main sails. A major repair. One that could take all day.
She’s not coming to me, so I’ve got to go to her. I slip over the railing, stretching to take the ladder rungs two at a time. When I reach her she’s already positioning a white patch on the sail.
“Can I help?” I ask, and when she doesn’t turn to look at me, doesn’t reply, I wonder whether Barney’s message was really from her. Had I assumed too much?
But then she says, “I asked you to come because I needed…”—her statement hovers in the air, seemingly oblivious to the swirling wind, and I find myself holding my breath—“…your help—you know, with mending the sail.”
I let out my breath in a burst. “That’s a large tear,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed it before. Is it new?”
She shrugs, pokes a needle through the patch and begins stitching it to the sail, just like I taught her, with easy, practiced fingers. “New as of yesterday,” she says.
There’ve been no storms, no unusually high winds, no projectiles in the air. Nothing that could have caused such serious damage. And the fabric around the rip doesn’t appear to be old or frayed. In fact, the gash itself appears to be almost too clean, like someone took a knife and just…
I swing around the mast as I realize Jade created a large repair so we’d have to work on it together. “Slow down,” I say, amazed at how expert her fingers have become. “At this pace we’ll be done before the lunch bell rings.” I touch her shoulder and she stiffens, but her fingers slow.
I can feel the heat of her skin beneath the thin fabric of her old shirt, and I don’t want to pull my hand away, but I must, because someone will see, someone will tell Hobbs.
What am I doing? I think as I retract my hand sharply, as if I’ve been burned.
“Huck,” she says, and my name’s never sounded so good, so real. “Sear it, Huck!” When she turns to look at me there’s fire in the brown embers of her eyes.
“What?” I say.
“This. All of this.” She waves her hands around, meaning…the ship? Me? Repairing the sails? “It’s all invented. Made up. None of it’s real. You and me? Nothing more than a dream.”
Whose dream? I wonder.
But all I say is, “I know.”
She sighs, heavier than an anchor. “Then why?”
Why are you here? Why am I here? Why do we get up every morning, play the same old game, do the same old things, and then sleep to the same old rocking of the ship? Although I imagine her simple question to be filled with all of those questions, I know it’s not. Those questions are mine, but I can’t seem to pinpoint where they came from or when they entered my subconscious, burrowing in like mice, gnawing away at everything I’ve held true since the day I was born.
But even that’s a lie, because I do know. I do.
(Since the day I met Jade.)
And I can’t help but wonder why she’s speaking to me after everything I’ve done. “I’m sorry about that boy,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “Are you?” she asks, but there’s no accusation in her voice. It’s just a question.
“Yes. I’m surprised you’re speaking to me after that.”
“You did what you had to do,” she says.
“Did I? By throwing a boy overboard? By killing Webb?” I’m surprised by my own words. I’ve barely thought about killing Webb, much less spoken of it out loud.
“You chose the lesser of the evils,” Jade says. “If you’d gone against Lieutenant Hobbs you would have been sent away and the boy would still have suffered and died. If you’d spared Webb, I’d be dead and your father would know you protected me. And trust me, Webb didn’t deserve life. He—the things he did to the bilge rats…” She trails away.
She says it
is so matter-of-factly that I can’t think of a rebuttal. I change the subject. “Is what you told me before true?” I ask, wishing I didn’t have to ask, because I know it’ll only make her angry.
To my surprise, her eyebrows don’t furrow, her lips don’t tighten. “Yes,” she says, turning back to her work.
And in that single word is the truth and it’s good enough for me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, apologizing for having to ask the question and for my father.
Jade falls silent, her fingers pushing the needle through the fabric and pulling it back out, securing a corner of the patch to the sail.
I step onto the rope bridge, moving as close to her as I dare. Pluck my own needle and thread from my pocket. Start on another corner of the large patch. “What’s fire country like?” I ask, and although she doesn’t stop working, her eyes twitch in my direction.
For a few minutes the only sounds are from below: men shouting, whistling, singing; women calling for clothes to be cleaned, offering hot morning drinks; barrels being rolled, sacks being tossed, planks being scrubbed. There’s no awkwardness in the silence, and somehow I know she’s not ignoring my question, just thinking on it, like it’s one of the wooden puzzles my mother and I used to work on together, requiring a precise solution.
Finally, she says, “It’s home,” and although it doesn’t tell me anything about what her country’s like, I can feel what she feels for it in my bones, in my thoughts, in my heart. Warmth and security and familiarity—like The Merman’s Daughter has always felt to me.
It was all taken from her. No, not taken. Ripped from her little hands. Stolen from her.
By my father.
At that moment, something is unlocked in the memory of my mother’s death. She still falls; I still can’t save her, can’t hold on. I still fail her. But she says something, something I’ve never heard her say in any of my dreams, where all I saw was her terror and my failure and my father’s disappointment.
“Not your fault,” she says.
There’s a sharp pinch on my arm and I can see again, not because I’ve opened my eyes—which were never closed—but because the memory is gone, and I’m dangling in midair, not holding the needle, not holding the ropes, not holding anything. Jade’s hand is clamped on my arm, gripping me, bruising my flesh with the strength of her fingers.
“Huck,” she says, “I can’t hold you up all day. You’re heavier than tughide.”
Astonished, I curl my empty fingers around a rope, pull myself to an upright position. “Was I…”
“Falling? Yeah. You just let go and would’ve done a bird dive onto the decks if I didn’t grab you.” There’s no pride in her voice, no praise-seeking. Just facts.
“You saved my life,” I say.
“And you lied to save mine,” she says.
(And killed. It’s in her eyes, but thankfully she doesn’t say it.)
“Thank you,” I say, but she’s already back to stitching. Though I can tell one of her eyes is still watching me, just in case I let go again.
“Fire country is hot and barren and dangerous,” she says, as if we’re just continuing our conversation from before. “And beautiful and perfect,” she adds.
“Did you have any brothers or sisters?” I ask.
“I have two sisters,” she says. “Both older. Skye and Siena. They’re…amazing.” Her voice is full of grit on the last word, like it almost didn’t make it out of her throat. “At least they were…I think. It’s hard to remember. It was six years ago and I was so young.”
I finish threading my corner and begin working my way toward her, giving her time to compose herself and her thoughts, hoping she’ll continue.
Time passes like wispy clouds, silent and thin and full of imagined images.
Our threading fingers get closer and closer and still we’re silent. The air in my lungs refuses to satisfy me, leaving me short of breath, like I’ve just run a long way. I stare at my fingers, focusing on each pass of the needle, careful not to prick myself.
Closer.
And closer.
And then her hand brushes mine and it’s like lightning against my skin.
She looks at me, but I can only stare at my fingers. She breaks the thread from her needle and hands me the end, careful not to let us touch again. When she begins working on another corner I breathe a relieved sigh and knot my thread with hers.
When I start working on the fourth and final corner, I can still feel the sensation of our hands touching, but I try to keep my fingers steady.
“What happened when you almost fell?” Jade asks, her question coming like a random yellow cloud in a perfectly red sky.
Oh…that. “I was just daydreaming,” I say, keeping my voice low, even though no one below could possibly hear us.
“About your mother?” she says and my breath catches. How could she know?
I’m still trying to figure out how to respond, when she says, “I daydream about my family all the time. I don’t know if they’re dead or alive or happy or sad, but I picture them as alive and happy. My sisters miss me something awful, of course, but they’re still happy.”
“Well, I know my mother’s dead,” I say.
“I remember,” she says, and for some reason I’m surprised, although I shouldn’t be. “It’s all anyone talked about when it happened. Some say your father pushed her over, some say it was you, some say it was an accident.” I flinch and her eyes jerk to meet mine. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t be talking about any of this.”
I shake my head. “It’s okay. I didn’t push her, but it was my fault,” I say, hearing my mother’s words—“Not your fault”—in my new memory. Is it real or did I invent it?
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“Thank you.”
We work our way from corner to corner, not stopping until we meet in the middle again. This time I’m careful not to let us touch as we approach. I tie it off and we work on the last two edges, ignoring the lunch bell in our sudden haste to finish the job.
When the patch is firmly in place, we dangle side by side on the rope bridge, our legs hanging through it, flexing our overworked fingers.
“I smuggled some extra bread from breakfast,” Jade says, reaching inside her pocket and sliding out a smallish loaf. She tears it in half and hands me the smaller piece. I offer her some water from the container hanging from my belt. We eat and drink until it’s gone.
The question that ended our conversation the last time rolls around my mouth, hot and warming my cheeks from the inside out. I won’t ask it again. I won’t. But what if she says yes? What if mending the tear was enough to mend whatever was broken when she slid down the mast and stopped speaking to me?
“Want to see the crow’s nest?” I blurt out.
She frowns. I’ve done it again. Spoiled things. Because she can’t see the crow’s nest. The bilge aren’t allowed up there. But if a lieutenant orders her to go, then surely the rules don’t apply, do they?
I rephrase. “Go to the crow’s nest.”
Her frown softens and she almost laughs. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
I smile, too. “Of course I can. I’m a lieutenant.”
“You’re a wooloo boy.”
It should sting, but it doesn’t, not when her lips are curled like that. “So you’ll disobey a direct order from this wooloo boy?” I ask.
“I could,” she says. “But I won’t. Not this time anyway. But you’ll have to lead so it’s clear from below that it’s your idea.”
I start to climb, raising my smile to the sun.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sadie
Father is asleep when I return home. His breathing is loud and rumbling, something that would normally annoy me, but which only endears him to me tonight.
I’ve made a grave mistake.
For years I’ve treated him with frustration and disrespect at best, contempt and white-hot anger at worst. And he wasn’t to blame. W
asn’t a coward at all. Oh, no, no, no, he was the exact opposite. His every action was that of a hero, albeit a failed one.
I hate to wake him but I must.
I nudge his shoulder and he stirs. “Father,” I say.
His eyes flicker open, blinking away moisture. “Sadie,” he says, his tone infused with such joy and love, despite all that I’ve done, how poorly I’ve treated him. Do I deserve him?
You needed to know. Now more than ever. What did Gard mean by that?
“Father, I know,” I say and he closes his eyes, cringes. Opens them slowly, almost mournfully.
I wait for him to speak but he just watches me. Will he withhold the truth from me even now?
“You tried to save Paw,” I say. “Don’t deny it—Gard told me.” He nods. “You tried to stop Mother from riding.” Another nod, almost imperceptible. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shakes his head. “I—I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want you to…” He bites his lip, refuses to meet my gaze.
“Father,” I say, reaching forward to pull his chin back in line with mine. “Why was I already in the tent and Paw not? I remember some things. We were playing together, Paw and I. How did I make it back and not him? Why am I alive and not him?” My voice cracks and all I want is to let the waterfall of tears out of my eyes, but I blink and force them back. Holding them back hurts, but I’m still a Rider.
“Sadie, I’m—I’m dying.” His words are so unexpected, so fierce, so wrong, that I shrink back against them.
“What? No, you’re—you’re the only one who’s not.” Does he mean dying inside because he can’t tell me the truth? Does he mean emotionally dying after losing my mother?
“Sadie…” And when he speaks my name I know it’s neither of those things. It’s not a riddle, not a vague Man-of-Wisdom prediction that requires interpretation. For his previous words were the truth, as stark and bright as lightning in the night sky.
“No, Father,” I say. And again: “No.”
“I have the Plague,” he says.