At sunset, they had rowed out to a pair of curved, riblike rocks known as the Fangs—they jutted up like the teeth of a snake, and at low tide they were joined at the bottom by a short tongue of barnacle-crusted rock just big enough to hold a small house, had anyone wished to build one. The Fangs were scarred, at their tips, by the hulls of ships they’d torn to shreds.
One of them moved as they climbed out of the rowboat, a shadow that Royl made out, after a bit of a jolt, as an old vulture. Oily, black, and apparently amused, it paced on the tip of the Fang, watching them tie up, unload a long fishing net, and set up an inscribing table for the magician Major Gasparin had sent along.
The baby was back in town: ’Tille had agreed, grudgingly, to watch her.
Nothing was settled. Beatrice still insisted that if she were going to be Yacoura’s keeper, the price was Royl remaining aboard Nightjar.
Still, they had to retrieve the heart before they could truly blow themselves up to fighting over what to do with it. Gale and Parrish had retrieved the dead merman’s flute: Now Beatrice stood out on the edge of the tongue and blew a few notes on it.
Water churned. A tentacle emerged from the dusk-shadowed water, delicately resting on the pitted black rock. Octopus eyes followed. Then, without so much as a splash, the entire animal rose, stretching up on its legs and turning from red to milk-white.
A shaft of moonlight shone through it and Royl saw the heart of Temperance embedded in its cap. A beam of oak, wrapped round with steel, not at all heart-shaped, but covered with dense magical lettering, the smallest spellscrip he’d ever seen, letters of the magical alphabet, inked in deep blue.
“What’s meant to happen now?” Gale asked the spellscribe.
“The octopus can hide Yacoura … concealment and creeping are what its kind does best.”
“You’re going to trust this thing to an animal?”
“It’s incorruptible, unlike us. It will live, undisturbed, and guard the heart, unless summoned by the flute. Whoever owns it … she’s the only one who can summon it. But—”
“But?”
“One might still find her, of course, and the flute.”
“She lives pretty far off the beaten path,” Gale said drily.
“The major’s proposal is to cast a second spell, to wrap the Lady Beatrice in mystery.”
“How?” Beatrice asked.
“My inscriptions are rumor-builders. If I inscribe you, Kir, it would muddy any tracks the Piracy might use to follow you home. When people speak of Yacoura, they’ll say: ‘The heart is lost.’ They’ll say a beautiful woman carried it away to a far-off land and gave it to her newborn babe. They’ll say you are the spirit of Temperance, or that you were the heart and you were dragged to sea by a giant squid. The harder people look, the more the stories will pile up. There would be stories of failed expeditions, ruined ships, men gone mad. The truth will slide ever further away, leaving vapor and lies.”
“It sounds a little like the spell that makes you unmemorable,” Beatrice remarked to Gale.
Her sister grinned. “It’s gonna make you interesting, ’Trice. Mine just makes me forgettable.”
“So Yacoura vanishes,” Beatrice said. “But only until I come again and summon this beast.”
“Or your child does. Or her child does. That day will come,” the spellscribe said. “It always does. But it’s clear that if we leave Yacoura here, the Piracy will have it soon. They’re set on claiming it.”
“Well, ’Trice? Are you ready to become the stuff of legend?”
Beatrice turned to Royl and his heart sank. She hadn’t softened. The demand was coming.
If you sign up for another hitch on Nightjar because of that woman’s bullying, don’t ye plan to come back, Matille had said to him just this morning. I love you, Royl, but I came home to settle. I won’t wait, or pine; I’ll have someone in my bed within the year.
Before he could speak, Parrish moved.
He’d been playing with the fishing net all this time, and now he flung it upward, into the air between the five of them and the open sea.
There was a surge in the water … the octopus, dropping below the surface, jetting around the Fangs and down, vanishing from view as something nearby boiled up from the ocean.
It was the old pirate, Gregor Avenge—at least, it wore his guise. The thing that rose from the water was shaped like a man, but its skin was translucent. Royl could see human bones within its skin. There was nothing else: no eyes, no muscle, just the outline of a man and the shadow of the skeleton inside him. Jellyfish tentacles formed its hair and beard, and dangled from its hands and feet … the streamers, long drapes of them, also extended into the waters around the Fangs.
It had already thrown a harpoon.
Royl had been so wrapped up in Beatrice he hadn’t sensed anyone coming. But Parrish had been sitting back, watchful as one of the man-eating specters from the terrible island of his birth. Waiting to have his fate determined by the others, or so Royl had imagined, but really that was just the boy’s way. Royl had thought he had the coil of net because of some half-baked idea that they might need to catch the octopus. Instead, the ball of it, airborne, caught the harpoon point, tangling it and dropping the weapon harmlessly to the beach.
It’s the flute he’ll be wantin’. Beatrice looked to be working up a scream; Royl caught her hand, slipping as he scrambled ’round to the far side of one stony Fang. Gale, meanwhile, had pulled out her little one-shot pistol …
Seas, woman, he thought out of habit. When will ye stop carrying that little outlander popgun?
Gale stepped in front of the spellscribe, protecting him.
Standoff: They all stopped to look for advantage. Avenge drew another harpoon up from under the water. Parrish faced him empty-handed. Gale covered the scribe.
Beatrice turned, horror on her face. She opened her mouth to yell, to protest. To harry her sister off the field.
Royl covered her mouth. “He ain’t even looking at Gale!” he whispered.
It was true. It was Parrish who had flung down the harpoon, and Parrish who had drawn Gregor’s attention. The boy was so very eye-catching, after all, unnaturally so, and he was young, strong—the obvious threat.
He was standing between the monster and the wisp of a Fang where Royl was hiding Beatrice. Beatrice was clutching the flute. And Gregor was moving, gliding over the water, bringing the tip of the spear’s point to the throat of the undefended kid Royl meant to replace him.
None of them—not he, not Parrish, not Gale—were afraid.
This was what he would miss the most, Royl thought, as Avenge lunged at Parrish and the revolver let out a pop—these little moments of perfect understanding. Parrish standing as bait and Gale, unnoticed, going in for blood. This sense of already having won, knowing they were going to pull it off yet again.
Rather than waste a bullet on the apparition in the water, Gale had shot the vulture sitting quietly on the Fang, watching them all.
A ripple went through Avenge, his bones wobbling as if set in gelatin, as the bird fell unceremoniously at their feet. Feathers hung in the air; the vulture gasped and croaked, flapping in a few inches of water. Weakening, Avenge nevertheless attempted to thrust the harpoon into Parrish’s throat. Parrish sidestepped, neatly avoiding the jellyfish tentacles, and picked it out of his hand. He turned the point on the bird, apparently thinking to put it out of its misery, and glanced at Gale, checking.
“Crossed! Cursed!” the bird croaked with Avenge’s voice, and then died. The skeleton wobbled again, collapsing into the sea, leaving a froth of blood-colored foam on the surface as the bones within sank to the bottom.
Gale reholstered her pistol. “Can we write this scrip now and get out of here? ’Trice? Please?”
Royl realized he still had his hand on Beatrice’s mouth.
He stepped back. “Apologies, Kir.”
“You are all of you stupid reckless foolhardy troublemaking children,” she sputtered.
“Understood, Kir,” Parrish said. It was nearly the first thing he’d said to her since she’d shown up and started pecking at him. “But the two of us can be foolhardy and reckless without Captain Sloot’s assistance.”
“I’ve taught him well in that regard,” Royl said.
“If you’d be so kind as to release him from his promise, I give you my word I’ll—”
“You can’t promise to protect Gale. She’s going to die horribly; it’s foretold, and you all know it!”
“Mortality is non-negotiable. And with respect to your prophets,” Parrish said, “your sister has already outlived virtually every other spy in the Fleet.”
Beatrice raised the little flute, looking for all the world like she was going to jam it into Parrish’s chest like a dagger. Then she let out a long breath and threw the pipe at the scribe. “All right, then. Start writing. I’ve got to get back to Royl’s place and feed my baby.”
* * *
Royl would have thought the inscription winding Beatrice’s fate into that of Yacoura’s would need to be written on her skin, but the scribe had taken a long veil of fine white silk and draped her in it before beginning to paint the lettering on its fabric, surprisingly big and drippy letters in an ink as clear as water, letters that vanished as the fluid dried.
Parrish sat nearby as he worked, watching in case Avenge reappeared. The octopus frisked and squirted from the edges of the Fangs, occasionally extending a tentacle to caress Beatrice’s ankle.
“What’ll it do when Beatrice returns home?” Royl asked. “Will it pine for her, do you think?”
“It’ll do octopus things,” Gale said. “Fish, hunt, play hide-and-go-seek with the heart. Maybe even find a nice octopus boy so it can settle down and raise heirs.”
“Ye think it’ll miss her?”
“Now and then, maybe. Then it’ll forget. Yacoura will be safe in its keeping, Royl.”
“For how long?”
“Until it’s time for it to be found, I suppose.”
“Until its time runs out.” Sloot’s chest tightened.
“Don’t go mourning what’s not yet gone.” She surprised him by kissing his cheek. “Listen, Royl, I’ve gotten you something. It’s—well…”
She handed him a heavy satchel, embroidered with Verdanii markings: leaves, vines, and flowers in heavy green thread.
“Seeds?” he guessed. “From Verdanii?”
She might as well have given him gold.
“If you’re going to garden, I’d have you be the envy of your neighbors,” Gale said. “Besides … they’ll help you remember. Now and then. Only as much as you like.”
He reached across and took her hand, one last time, and there was a second where he wanted to throw away honor, give Beatrice her wish after all, give up on this retirement madness. Stay on the course of his youth. Sail away, sail hard, until together they foundered.
“Finished,” the scribe announced. The letters on Beatrice’s veil shifted, roiling bright red, flame orange, bone white, and the gray of rock, mottling like coral before shifting so they once again took on the gossamer of the scarf itself, and were thus made invisible.
Beatrice tootled a few notes on the flute from under the veil. The octopus splashed one last time and vanished.
Rumors and half-truths whispered through the muggy air: Royl could almost hear himself, in a tavern, spinning tales: A veiled lady, betrayed by her first love, gave the heart to a monster. A lost princess of Verdanii, gone into hiding after pirates threatened to tear Yacoura from her chest, where it was keeping her alive after she’d been speared by her first love, that bloody duelist. A young mother, forming a baby out of clay with the heart of Temperance within, and raising it as her child in a faraway land …
They would spread, those rumors, multiplying and confusing the issue, a pall of sound and vapor to fog the truth.
Parrish rose from his seat beside the Fangs and helped first Beatrice and then the scribe into the rowboat. He and Gale took the oars. “Coming, Kirs?”
“Aye, Cap’n Parrish,” Royl said. He slung the bag of seeds over his shoulder and stepped into the boat, ready to return to town, just another old mariner with a store of tall tales about the past, with a good woman waiting at home and vegetables to sow.
About the Author
A.M. DELLAMONICA is the author of Indigo Springs, which won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Sci-Fiction and Strange Horizons, and in numerous anthologies; her 2005 alternate-history Joan of Arc story, “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic,” was shortlisted for the Sideways Award and the Nebula Award. Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by A. M. Dellamonica
Art copyright © 2017 by Richard Anderson
Losing Heart Among the Tall Page 3