On Discord Isle (The Dawnhawk Trilogy)

by Burgess, Jonathon

  He closed his eyes against the dirt and rocks that rained down on him from above, hoping that none would be too large. An image of the odd monolith that he’d half-ridden down the slope came to mind, and Fengel shuddered.

  A crack sounded on the ledge, and suddenly Fengel felt his boots dangling even farther. The ledge was giving away beneath his feet. He cursed and scrabbled through the brush, but the tiny branches were springy and he made little to no progress at all.

  Then the earthquake stopped just as abruptly as it had started. An explosion sounded somewhere nearby with such force that for a second Fengel thought it a cannon shot. The peak of the volcano erupted, belching black smoke and hot ash into the sky. He watched as molten lava spewed from it, falling like liquid meteors to land in the ocean and around the isle. A stream of the stuff oozed out over the lip of the volcano top, and he watched as it trailed away toward the far side of the island from where he lay.

  After a few minutes, the eruption spent itself, and the volcano fell back into restless quiescence, with the whole of the island laying still. Even the ocean surf seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet.

  “This is all your fault,” hissed a raspy voice.

  Fengel opened his eyes and blinked away the grit. He peered ahead from where he crouched almost fetally, to see Natasha glaring at him through puffy eyes and a mask of dirt and blood. “I beg your pardon?” he said acidly.

  “If you hadn’t run up the damned dragon, it wouldn’t have woken up. We wouldn’t have fallen out that hole, down half the mountain, and gotten stuck here.”

  Fengel stared at her, outraged. “We were fleeing! You were killing my men left and right. Good, honest souls who didn’t deserve that butchery!”

  “Honest souls? They’re Perinese soldiers! They were going to hang the both of us only days ago!”

  “Regardless, you might have noticed we were doing poorly. So we fled.” Fengel looked pointedly away. “It is not my fault that an ancient alien race left their wind-up doom machines lying around for anyone to trod upon.”

  She glared at him. “You could have surrendered.”

  Fengel returned her glare. “Like that’s gotten us anywhere before,” he snarled. “The last time someone tried that with you, it almost killed them all.”

  Natasha started. She looked away, momentarily uncomfortable. “That wasn’t my fault,” she said quietly. Then she rallied. “And besides, you and your good, honest soldiers were already halfway across the isle when we found you. Coming straight for the Salmalin.” Natasha pointed an accusing finger. “You were already looking for a fight! And I damn well wasn’t going to back down.”

  “We were not,” replied Fengel. He tried to push aside the memory of the crew of the Goliath, their swords raised and shouting after he’d worked them into blood lust. “I’ll have you know that we were only interested in the Salmalin itself.”

  “Horseshit,” said Natasha. “You already had the Goliath. A little work and you’d have had it off that sand bar. The Salmalin is a shattered wreck.”

  What? Fengel decided to cover his confusion with aggression. “So that’s what you were doing in the jungle! You were coming over to steal our ship!” He pointed a finger at her, shifted dangerously, and grabbed the brush again to steady himself. “I’d expect nothing less, you horrible rogue.”

  Natasha stared at him. “You just admitted to wanting to steal the Salmalin. You hypocrite!”

  “How dare you, you ravenous, man-eating harpy!”

  “Bastard!”

  “Horse-faced trollop!”

  “Pompous arse!”

  “Fool!”

  “Incompetent!”

  Fengel drew back. “Incompetent?” he said in mock surprise. “I’m the incompetent one? But you’ve done so well for yourself, Mrs. Blackheart. You suckered a crew of desperate sailors into following after you somehow, only to lose them inside of a volcano when you were on the verge of winning. I’m sure that your father would be very—”

  A thunderbolt explosion interrupted his words. Rock chips rained down onto his head from where the cliff beside it had exploded. The ridiculous parrot flew away, squawking indignation. He peeked past his upraised arms to see Natasha holding a small pistol with one hand, its barrel smoking.

  Fengel threw up his hands. “Damn you, woman! This! This is the problem with you!” He rocked precariously and grabbed for the bushes beneath him. “You’re barmy, mad and insane! You’re a hair’s breadth away from killing a man at the slightest provocation! You’re unpredictable, and you think that’s the best way to deal with the world! You are horrible.”

  The emptied pistol flew past his head and impacted with the cliff wall. “You just keep talking, you—”

  “I’ll say what I like!” shouted Fengel. “You had your chance to take my head off, and you missed! By the Goddess, you are a terrible shot. But you daren’t do anything more for fear that you’ll pitch over this ledge to your doom, just like me. So you’re going to sit there and listen to me tell you that you are your own worst problem! And you’ll listen, because you know I’m right!”

  “You’re a terrible pirate,” growled Natasha. “You should have been a priest.”

  “Shut up!” roared Fengel in response. “Shut! Up! I’ve my own Goddess-damned flaws, but you are just the worst! Nobody likes you Natasha. And they’re never going to! You treat people like tools, toys and treats, then throw a damned tantrum when they want to be something more. And for some mad reason, you just expect them to fall back in line because of it!”

  “I’m a pirate!” she yelled back at him. “That’s how you maintain control! To the Realms Below with ‘like.’ Fear and violence are how you get things done.” Natasha pointed a shaking finger at him. “Not that I’d ever expect your great soft heart to understand that.”

  Fengel lowered his voice abruptly. “I understand far better than you do. The carrot and the stick, they’re both just two ways toward respect. Everyone but you seems to have that figured out. When that snake Mordecai was around, you could sit at a distance, and have him keep things in line. That was the closest you ever got, and that was because none of your old crew really knew you the way I do.” He narrowed his eyes. “Look how quickly the Dawnhawk crew got rid of us. Oh, yes, it was my fault too. I’ll own up to that. But only because I hid! Because I couldn’t stand dealing with you on a day-by-Goddess-damned-day basis. No one can stand to be around you, and we’ve seen the results of that firsthand. How long? Eh? How long before that Salomcani rabble would have ditched you? You grabbed ahold of them, certainly. But how long would it have lasted if my Perinese sailors weren’t around to hate?” Fengel shook his head. “I don’t know why I agreed to it, that day over Yrinium. Damn it, I still…” He faltered as he realized what he was about to say, but the words were already slipping over his tongue. “I still love you, you witch. For some unfathomable reason. But I’m done now. I’m done! Partnering with you was a mistake!”

  Silence followed his words. The wind whistled past the ledge the two of them lay upon. The waterfall splashed down into its pool below. She glared hatefully at him with beautiful golden eyes.

  Then a tear welled up and started down her cheek.

  “You love me?” she growled, voice taut with anger and emotion. “You say that now, you ass, of all possible times? After all that’s happened? Like it’s some secret word that you can use to get your way, like it’s going to change a damned thing between us?” She looked away, then glared back at him, pointing an accusing finger with a hand half-wrapped around a thorny vine. “To the Realms Below with that! I remember, you bastard. You already gave that to me. It’s mine! You swore to love me years ago. You swore to love me through everything, even if I tried to kill you!”

  Fengel looked away to cover his surprise. The rock wall of the cliff was dark, even in the morning sun. “I told you I have my flaws,” he said after a moment, voice calmer than he felt by far. “I’m weaker than you think. I can only take so much.” He glanced
out at the ocean. Though I always keep coming back to you, for some damnable reason.

  The tears were streaming down Natasha’s cheeks now. They cut channels through the volcanic dirt caked onto her skin, dripping to feed the plants on ledge below them. “Well, to the Realms Below with your flaws,” she said, voice strained. “I still love you. And I hate that. I hate how soft it makes me. How I never get around to finishing the job, when I do get the upper hand. I can never bring myself to kill you. I haven’t been even able to do it now! Instead, I do foolish things, like try to have you taken alive, or intentionally miss my shots, or leave you dangling off the prow of a derelict airship. Because I need to be hard. I need to be strong. You don’t know what it’s like. Shut up! You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. How Goddess-damned hard that makes it. I’ve got to prove myself every second of every damned day. And if not to my crew, or the scurvy-ridden lice that make up Haventown, then I’ve got to prove it to my father.”

  Natasha closed her eyes and looked away. “Who is the worst. Because he’s supportive. He’s taught me my whole damned life. I can’t help but think on what he’d say or what he’d do. He’s proud of me. Because, in the end, he wants me to be just like he is; hard and strong and cruel. And damn him, I’m a little more like him every day, because that’s what it takes to be truly great. Every little lesson he taught I usually follow, because it works. I’m never going to be my own person, because the only choices before me are spineless tramp or the nastiest, ugliest cutthroat I can be.”

  Natasha shifted to keep from sliding over her end of the ledge. “I don’t know how you do it,” she admitted. “I hate how easy you have it, compared to me. I hate how effortlessly you made yourself successful. And I haven’t the faintest idea why the way you do things works. I try and I try, and in the end it just isn’t enough. The bastards always find a way to toss me off the ship.” She shifted again.

  Fengel stared at his wife. The waterfall and the seagulls in the ocean breeze were the only sounds for long minutes. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He thought long and hard. Then Fengel shook his head. I just know I’m going to regret this. He held out one hand toward Natasha. “Take my hand,” he said.

  She glared at him. “What?”

  “We’re both going to slide off if we don’t share the ledge a bit more, and the fall will kill us. We also can’t do anything to each other, assuming you haven’t another pistol, or we’ll slide off the ledge and the fall will kill us. Now, give me your hand.”

  Natasha eyed him warily. “I’ve still got a knife.”

  “I know,” replied Fengel. “It’s in the sheath down your bodice. It’s where you always put it. Remember the one I gave you that one year, as a birthday gift?”

  His wife cracked a small, grudging smile. She grabbed his hand with her own, violently. Fengel pulled, and so did she, and the two of them slid to the center of the ledge, face to face.

  Fengel shifted until his back was up against the cliff face. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul,” he began. “And I’m only going to say it once, so shut up and listen. You know where I came up, right?”

  “Darrenway, in the Kingdom. You’re the son of a back-alley horse doctor.”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Da was called an ‘animal physician’ by the aristocrats, but he was a quack. No, his real line of work was prad-rolling.”

  Natasha blinked. “What?”

  Fengel shrugged. “It’s street slang for ‘horse thief.’ You see, the nobility in Perinault can get very, very bored. So they like to steal things from each other. Butlers and other servants are popular. But horses are good too. Except that you can’t talk a horse into leaving for a few more sovereigns a month, so they hire specialists like Da to steal them. S’not good for the little folk, when they get caught. But the aristos don’t care.”

  “Fascinating,” said Natasha, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Anyway, I came up in Darrenway, on Coal Street. Dad had a little back-alley shop where he peddled his tonics, and hid from the law. I was a skinny thing back then. Weak, too. Which meant, of course, that all the little shits in the neighborhood made my life horrible. There was one particular horse-apple that took a special pleasure in tormenting me. He was the leader of the local gang, who went by the name of Jacob Lanters. Would always corner me, no matter how hard I ran, and beat seven kinds of blue out of my hide. The only thing he loved torturing more than me were all the stray cats infesting Darrenway back then.

  “Now, I wasn’t going to take that lying down. Or, bleeding in an alley, rather. But I knew that I couldn’t match Lanters with my fists. So I cheated. The local precinct of the Guard had a training field. One wall had a loose brick, so I was able to pry it out and watch them. And watch them I did. I learned to parry and riposte, and how to cut. Just the basics, mind, but it was enough. I managed to nick an old arming sword, so that when Lanters and I next met I’d have the advantage.

  “I’ll say this for the bastard, though. He saw me with a sword and kept right on coming, sneering all the while. In fact, he didn’t stop until he was almost atop me, and that alley cat dropped onto his head from a window ledge above.” Fengel shook his head. “I’ll never know if it recognized Lanters, or it was just a particularly mean old tom. Either way, it fought like a daemon. My tormentor screamed and flailed, trying to get the thing off. He tripped and slammed his head against a rubbish bin, then toppled like a felled tree. The cat ran away, and there I stood. When the rest of the Coal Street Boys found us, they thought I’d flattened Jacob Lanters all on my own. That was my first crew, really. And they were mine until the day I joined the navy.”

  Fengel held his wife’s gaze. “I learned something important that day. If you can’t make it on your own, then pretend. Never let them see you stumble. And in the end? There isn’t any difference between that and being the hardest, meanest bastard on the Atalian Sea.”

  He fell silent and looked away. The breeze from off the ocean was warm, and salt-tinged. It carried with it a faint whiff of the volcanic ash falling down like black snow.

  “It’s more than that,” continued Natasha, after a moment. “Fraud or not, you inspire something real in Henry and the others.”

  Fengel turned to look at her again. The set of her jaw was soft, her lips missing their customary sneer. Her eyes were golden, and very large. “Faking is good enough for them.” He chuckled, and it hurt. “It’s a funny thing. People want someone who can lead them, show them the way. But I’ve found those that follow you are the ones you deserve, all the same.”

  He watched Natasha frown at the thought and look away. Food for thought, my wife. After all, Mordecai was no accident. Henry Smalls, Sarah Lome, Lucian, and even young Miss Stone are the crew that I deserve, and in turn, they deserve me. Fengel started. Goddess. How could I let this mess with Natasha get between me and them?

  Ash rained down in periodic silence, punctuated only by the mechanical roaring of the Dray Engine on some distant part of the isle. Fengel rolled the epiphany around in his head, only noting Natasha’s continued silence after the sun had climbed a hand’s width above the horizon.

  “Why do we fight?” asked Natasha.

  Fengel looked to her. His wife was observing the seabirds as they flew out over the ocean. He watched one of the filthy birds dart down to snap up a fish from the cresting waves. It made for the beach, but then another attacked it. The two squabbled over the meal. Seen from so far away, their fight seemed small, set against the backdrop of the sky and the sea.

  “Because we enjoy it,” said Fengel.

  Natasha made a grunt of agreement. “And because we both like to win.”

  Fengel nodded. There was a choice before him, he realized. He turned his head slightly, catching Natasha’s gaze out of the corner of her eye. “You know,” he said, “I see something too, in the faces of those that follow you.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “Oh?”

&nbs
p; “Fear.”

  Natasha blushed. She looked away and toyed with the flower bud growing from the bushes being slowly crushed beneath them. “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, it’s true—”

  The rest of his words were lost as Natasha grabbed the back of his head and crushed her lips to his. Fengel froze, then gave in. He returned her kiss tentatively at first, then with increasing passion. The ledge shook and the ground rumbled again. Distantly, he heard another explosion from the volcano at the center of the isle. Fengel realized that he didn’t care.

  Natasha broke away suddenly. Ash rained down between them and her face was now a picture of concern. “Wait,” she said. “I shot you with that weird Voorn musket. Why aren’t you dying?”

  He’d been ignoring the pain, but her words brought it back to the fore. “It hurts…” Fengel rolled over to reveal the injured side. His jacket was torn, and scorched where the beam had hit. Amazingly, though, his shirt underneath was barely burned through to the skin. “Huh. Something stopped the blast.”

  He gingerly fished around in the pocket on that side of his jacket. Something round and hard fell into his fingers and he pulled it out. The object was an eyepiece, bound in brass with a gold chain. The lens was brightly reflective on one side, though. And the brass ring was smoothed, half-melted almost in the shape of an eyepatch, now.

  “Oh,” said Fengel. “My spare monocle. The blast did something to it.”

  Natasha was nonplussed. “You keep a spare monocle?”

  Fengel gave her a confused look. “Of course.”

  “But you’re still wearing that cracked, messed-up thing.”

  “Well, yes. Then I wouldn’t have a spare.”

  Natasha made a snort of disgust. She snatched both eyepieces, the one he was wearing, with its now-broken chain, and the one in his hand. His wife shook her head, then threw away the old and planted the spare squarely on his face. A pang of loss shot through Fengel. He tried not to look out over the ledge after his lost monocle. Natasha climbed up onto his chest and took his head with both hands. “Shouldn’t we think about getting down, somehow?” he asked.