Song of the Current

by Sarah Tolcser

  “Looking for you, of course. You didn’t answer when I called down the stairs.”

  We found Nereus leaning casually against the wall, picking his teeth with his knife. Philemon’s wrists were bound with strips of what had once been his own trousers. He looked very much like he wished to be elsewhere.

  Removing a piece of seaweed from my hair, Nereus twirled it between his fingers. “Crowned, I see.”

  “Oh, you know about that little display, do you?” I raised my eyebrows. “You might have told me.”

  “You speak as if it were a secret.”

  “It was to me, since certain of my allies are most irritatingly given to talking in riddles.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s who you meant when you said you were sent. She sent you. The god.”

  “She who lies beneath.”

  I stared him down. “And who are you, that you can be called up by a god? Tell me the truth. Are you a shade? Are you … dead?”

  He winked at me. “Not today.”

  “Are you Nemros the Marauder?” I demanded.

  The edges of his eyes crinkled. “I have been many men and gone by many names.”

  “How many lives have you served her?”

  “One. A thousand.”

  “Do you mean one or do you mean a thousand?”

  “Yes.” He grinned.

  “That’s not an answer. Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked. “Don’t you want to be free?”

  “If I wasn’t serving her, where would I be? Dead, that’s where. Free or dead’s no choice at all. I like the smell of the sea on a fine day. The feel of the spray. The taste of the rum.” He shuddered. “I’ll do whatever she asks of me, if it’ll keep me out of the bottom of the ocean, or worse—gods forbid—under the ground. Now.” He inhaled. “I smell a fight.”

  Markos stepped up. “Wait.” He eyed Philemon, then punched him hard on the jaw. The pirate collapsed on the floor.

  “Ow.” Markos winced, shaking out his hand.

  I raised my eyebrows. “That wasn’t very honorable.”

  “Yes, well, let’s just say I’ve come around to your point of view,” he said. Leaning over the man, he drew himself up regally. “Also, I would like my coat back.”

  Nereus slashed the ties at the pirate’s wrists, shoving the knife against his throat. “You heard your Emparch.”

  Philemon struggled out of the coat, muttering curses under his breath.

  Markos sniffed it before putting it on, his nose wrinkling. “This has been a very trying week for my clothes.” He straightened the collar. “Let’s go.”

  As we burst into the great room, we discovered the battle had been won without us. Holding my breath, I took a frantic accounting of the men and women still standing—Pa, Ma, Captain Krantor, Captain Brixton and her mate, and many more, including Antelope’s captain.

  I exhaled in shaky relief.

  Pa and Captain Krantor stared down at something on the floor, hats clutched in their hands. It was the body of the wherryman Hathor, lying beside three other wherrymen and two more from Antelope’s crew. I swallowed. He was the one who had not wanted to come because he had a family.

  “Current carry you,” I whispered. For the first time in my life, I felt strange saying the words. It was a riverlands expression. I wasn’t certain it belonged to me anymore.

  Pa’s shirt was missing a sleeve. I realized it was tied around Ma’s arm in a makeshift sling. She seemed all right, despite the smudge of blood on her cheek. Certainly she was bossing people around with great energy.

  “I’ll worry about that,” Ma shouted to one of the Antelope’s crewmen, gesturing with her good hand. “You worry about clearing that gods-damned cellar. You might as well carry up anything valuable while you’re at it, for they won’t get much use out of it where they’re going, will they?”

  Behind me, Markos laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “All this time I was thinking you got it from your father,” he said.

  I shot him a dirty look, but my lips couldn’t help twitching into a smile.

  It was late afternoon when the Bollards and wherrymen rounded up the remnants of the Black Dogs and brought them down to the beach, placing them in a makeshift pen by the stockade. Never one to let a profit slip by her, Ma had found several items she liked among the pirates’ stash. Those were stacked on what was left of the dock. By the time the last beams of sunset slanted over the harbor, lighting up the bobbing wreckage with an orange glow, every corner of the fort had been swept. All the pirates were accounted for.

  Except one.

  The shadowman Cleandros had disappeared. Pa hauled Diric Melanos out by the neck and flung him down. “Reckon I know three different harbor masters and a magistrate who’d like to get their hands on this filth.”

  I stood over him with my pistol. “Where’s the shadowman?”

  “Fat lot of help he were to us.” Melanos spat on the sand. His fine coat was torn and his hat missing. “Buggered off during the battle, didn’t he? The bloody coward. Told him we was going to kill the boy, just after we got the money, is all. He still wouldn’t shut up about it. Good riddance, says I. You can’t trust a shadowman.”

  Myself, I was surprised Captain Melanos hadn’t ended up with a bullet hole in him during the battle. I suppose the wherrymen were content to watch him hang.

  As we waited on the beach for Nereus and the wherrymen to bring Vix around, Ma reeled off instructions.

  “Make for our offices in Iantiporos,” she said to me, spelling the name of the street so I would remember it. “Send a message to Bolaji. Tell him to have two ships meet us here in full haste.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m staying with my crew. We’ll try to salvage what we can of the ship. Reckon your pa will stick around too.” She gestured to her injured arm. “He’s got some misguided notion that I need taking care of. Anyway it seems to me you’ve proved yourself on that cutter.”

  “They don’t know me in Iantiporos,” I said, suddenly uncertain. “What if—?”

  She unpinned the brooch from her doublet, pressing it into my hand. “Bring Kenté with you. And show them this.”

  Pa stood alone on the beach, fumbling with an alchemical match. I waded through the sand to stand beside him, curling my arm through his. His worn overcoat smelled like home.

  Leaning on his shoulder, I took in the beach, the bobbing shipwrecks, and the sunset. Out there the sea rose and fell in a lulling rhythm. Farther down the sand, Thisbe Brixton was passing a flask among the other wherrymen. Their straggling voices rose in the chorus of a very rude song.

  Seeing her struck a memory. She had recognized Nereus. Sure, and doesn’t a fish know when a shark comes to eat him? An even more chilling thought followed on its heels.

  Pa knew him too.

  You, he had whispered, back when they came face-to-face on Vix. Cold suspicion trickled through me.

  “Pa,” I began cautiously. “You said the day my fate came for me, I would know.”

  He turned toward the sea, puffing on his pipe. “Ayah,” he said slowly. His eyes looked troubled. “So I did.”

  “Is it true that all the Oresteias were favored of the god in the river? There weren’t any of them who”—I braced myself—“who were, I don’t know, something else? Something different?”

  Markos ambled up the beach, shading his eyes into the setting sun. Vix was coming around the point, her sails billowing white against the sky. At the sight of her, something struggled to rise within me.

  “Listen, Caro,” Pa said, a thickness in his voice, and my heart wanted to shatter. His throat bobbed. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to hear it. Not yet. I pulled free, shoving my hands in my pockets, and ran to catch up with Markos.

  Halfway down the beach, I paused to look back at Pa. His shoulders drooped, and I was acutely aware of the lines on his face. He’d known the trut
h all along. I was certain of it. Emotion clawed at me, but I shoved it bitterly away. I didn’t want to listen to him. How many lies had he told me?

  We rowed out to Vix, where Daria leaned over the rail, waving frantically while one of the wherrymen’s wives struggled to keep her from falling overboard.

  “Markos!” she shrieked as he climbed the ladder, in a manner completely unbefitting an Emparch’s daughter.

  “Little badger!” He dropped to his knees on the deck, gathering her up. She buried her face in his chest.

  Some things are not what you expect, like the most arrogant boy in the world crying into the shoulder of his eight-year-old sister’s nightgown. Kenté and I exchanged glances, turning away to give them privacy.

  Descending into the darkness of Vix’s cabin, I unbuckled my heavy belt and dropped it in a heap on the bench. Now that everything was quiet again, I didn’t know what to do. I wished Vix had a cozy red-checkered tablecloth and a familiar bunk heaped with blankets. I wished Fee was there making tea.

  My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t recognize my life anymore.

  The hatch creaked. “It’s much bigger than Cormorant, isn’t it?”

  I closed my eyes against his voice.

  Boots scuffed on the floor as Markos stepped down from the last rung of the ladder. With only the lone lantern, I couldn’t see his face. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot—”

  I swallowed. “It’s fine.”

  “Like hell it is. You told me she was your home,” he said. “You told me when a sailor loves a ship, it hits you so hard you can’t breathe.”

  For once he had called the wherry “she” and not “it.” Somehow that made the lump in my throat more painful.

  “It’s done.” I whirled away from him.

  “Caroline, I’m sorry.” He followed me, holding himself stiffly. “I’m ever so sorry. It’s my fault. You let her go for me.”

  “For Daria,” I corrected, biting my lip. A hot tear seared my cheek. “You jumped into the middle of a bunch of pirates all by yourself,” I said to the wall. “I thought you were dead.”

  I felt him standing behind me. “Caro, Fee won’t let anything happen to Cormorant.”

  “If she’s alive,” I whispered. Hope warred with despair inside my chest.

  “I choose to believe that she is,” he said. “And that Cormorant is still tied up at the Casteria docks. But I don’t know. I … was unconscious when they carried me down to Alektor. When I woke, we were at sea.” He set a tentative hand on my waist.

  “What do you mean, unconscious?” I turned, almost whacking my forehead on his chin. My heart reeled with alarm and something else as I examined his face. “What did they do to you? Did they torture you?”

  He didn’t say yes or no.

  “But why?” I asked, taking his silence as a stupidly gallant attempt to protect me. “Did they want to know something?”

  “No. They just … thought it was fun.”

  I grabbed his chin, turning his face toward the light. Besides the black eye, he had a mottled purple bruise along his jawline, crested by a long scab. But his left ear was the worst of it.

  “Markos.” I stared in horror. “I think part of your ear is missing.”

  “Can we go back to a minute ago?” he rasped. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Sit down.” I shoved him into a chair.

  “I admit I was thinking about kissing you.” He sighed. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  I fetched a bowl of water and the cleanest piece of cloth I could find. Dipping the rag in the bowl, I lifted it to his earlobe.

  “Ow!” He flinched away.

  “I haven’t even touched you yet. Stop being a baby.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t touch me at all. Please don’t take offense, but I don’t really see you as the gentle, nursing kind of girl.”

  “I can be if I want to be.” I swiped the rag down his neck more roughly than I meant to.

  “Again, ouch. No, you can’t.” He gritted his teeth. “You’re the throwing-knives-and-shooting-pistols kind.”

  I dipped the cloth in the water. Even in the dim light, his ear looked infected. He’d have to see a physician when we got to Iantiporos. As I cleaned the wounds on his face and neck, he dug his fingernails into his palms.

  “Take off your shirt,” I ordered, half-afraid to see how badly he was hurt.

  He smiled, tipping the chair back. “Are you flirting with me?”

  “I admit I was thinking about it,” I said saucily, lifting my eyebrows. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

  I reached across him to drop the rag into the bowl of bloody water. He put his hand over mine, trapping me.

  We looked at each other.

  Then Kenté dropped from the last rung of the ladder and said, “Caro, don’t move. The shadowman’s right behind you. With a pistol pointed at your head.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The lantern whisked out, as if a shadow had detached itself from the ceiling and fallen upon it.

  Without my pistols, I was helpless. A shot whistled over my head, and I hit the deck. Above me a locker exploded in a storm of splinters. Markos swore.

  The light flickered back to life.

  “You continue to be nothing but an aggravation, Miss Bollard.” Cleandros stood a few feet away, the barrel of a long flintlock aimed straight at Kenté. “You aren’t strong enough to overcome me.”

  She flung a broken locket to the floor. “Well, I’m going to keep trying.”

  He turned the pistol on me.

  Of course, Markos immediately dove out of the chair and threw himself between the shadowman and me. Because he was an idiot.

  “Very chivalrous, my Lord,” Cleandros said. “You know you can’t stop me from killing her if I wish it.”

  Markos glared at him. “I think you mean Your Excellency.” I suspected he was madder about being called the wrong title than getting shot at.

  “I have half a mind to kill you too,” Cleandros said. “But I think I’ll take you to Valonikos for the reward after all, now that I don’t have to split it with Melanos and his imbecile crew.” He gestured to us all with the pistol. “Up on deck. Now.”

  I saw no choice but to obey. “Where’d he come from?” I whispered to Kenté as we climbed the ladder.

  “He must have snuck on board during the battle. Saw him slinking around the deck in a mantle of shadows, so I followed him.”

  “Cease that chatter,” Cleandros ordered, stepping through the hatch. He bowed to our borrowed crew. “Weapons down, if you please! Keep sailing. Just don’t interfere.”

  Nereus set his knife on the deck. Daria’s little hands trembled so hard that she dropped the rope ends she was holding, her eyes never leaving Markos. Nereus had been teaching her knots.

  A pang of emotion hit me. She wasn’t afraid for herself, but for her brother.

  Markos threw an agonized glance over his shoulder at her. His hand barely moved, but Cleandros saw anyway.

  He dug the muzzle of the pistol into Markos’s back. “If you touch that sword, your sister dies while you watch. Remove the belt.”

  “No.”

  Cleandros pointed the pistol at Daria. “Come, child. Over by your brother.”

  She obeyed, slipping her hand into Markos’s. Bruises and cuts standing out on his pale face, he dropped his sword belt in a heap with the other weapons.

  The shadowman waved us toward the bow of the cutter, past the forward hatch and the barrels stacked there. Glancing at the purple-clouded sky, I realized with dismay the sun had slipped below the horizon. He would only continue to gain in power.

  “Since you are ignorant,” Cleandros said, “I shall tell you about the children of the night. Some of us take strongly to the practice of lurking and hiding.” He nodded at Kenté. “Others use the darkness to draw out men’s deepest fears. But I have a great talent for the art of sleep and dreams. That’s why His Excellency the Emparch prized me above
all men in his inner circle.”

  As he spoke, my limbs grew slack. It would be so easy, I thought, to just give up.

  “You may find yourself growing tired,” Cleandros said. “Your mind becomes dim. In this state, the Emparch found, a mind becomes suggestive. Easily influenced.” He smirked. “In a room with me, a whole council of men might find themselves agreeing with everything the Emparch said.”

  I struggled not to yawn. Even Kenté’s eyelids fluttered.

  Markos pinched his own arm. “My father trusted you. And you betrayed him.”

  “Your father didn’t care for anyone who was beneath him. You of all people ought to know that. Not tired yet?”

  Markos glared. Though he knew his father hadn’t loved him, I could tell it angered him that Cleandros knew it too.

  “Now,” the shadowman said, “sit down on the deck.”

  I swayed on my feet. His tone was so friendly and reasonable.

  “Markos,” Kenté said. “Do not.”

  He blinked. “Isn’t—that’s—I know him. We’re safe.” He touched a hand to his forehead in bewilderment.

  “He killed your mother.” Kenté’s glance darted between Markos and the shadowman. “He betrayed your family.”

  “I remember.” Sounding unconvinced, he yawned. “I do.”

  It made me yawn too. I wondered why Kenté looked so overwrought. Myself, I felt quite at ease.

  The shadowman waved a hand. “It won’t work, you know.” He gave Kenté an indulgent smile, like a parent amused by the antics of a small child. “Your power is but a flicker compared to mine.”

  “Markos!” she tried again. “Your brother. Cleandros killed him. Remember? Your brother.”

  “Loukas.” His head dipped. “I—I’m just going to sit for a moment.”

  “No! You are going to stay standing.” The words tumbled frantically out of her mouth. I wished she would slow down. “And you are going to remember why you want to fight this man!”

  Markos’s legs buckled under him, and he dropped to his knees. Distantly someone laughed.

  I thought he had the right idea. “Got to rest,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “Only for a minute.”