by Mackenzi Lee
“So this is how you cheat?” I ask. “You bring Sybille Glass’s lost map to your father, and that wins you his favor?”
“And what do two English princesses want with maps that lead to monster nests?” Sim challenges.
“What my mother wanted,” Johanna says, and her eyes are suddenly bright as new-forged bronze, the same way they used to flash when we would collect samplings of plants from the countryside in hopes of discovering an unknown new species. “Can you imagine the scientific advancements this could lead to? What else will we learn about the sea if we know about these creatures and how they live and what they eat and how they hunt and sleep and . . . everything? Why do you say ‘English’ like we’re all wicked? You’re pirates! You’re not exactly sinless.”
“But we don’t come into your countries and drive you out,” Sim says, worming her knife farther into her egg. “That’s what you do to us. You expect me to believe that just because your intentions are noble, all the English are? Or all Europeans? The Imazighen—who you would call the Berbers,” she adds, “have already fought wars over these creatures. We don’t need to fight you too.”
“So what if we don’t bring the English into it?” I ask. “Your father has ships and men at his disposal. What if you bring him the charts, and the daughter of Sybille Glass—not as a prisoner,” I say quickly, for Johanna looks like she’s ready to raise a sound protest to my phrasing, “but as a companion. Someone to work with, who wants to pick up where her mother left off in order to better understand them. Johanna wants an expedition—why not ask Sim’s pirate lord father to fund it?”
Sim frowns. “My father doesn’t want another Sybille Glass. He doesn’t want to make a study of the dragons or their nests or their scales or any of it. He just wants to keep them undisturbed. And he wants the map to make sure others do too. That’s what I went to Stuttgart for—to make certain that if it existed, it was returned to us.”
“Then we change his mind,” I say. “Protecting these creatures isn’t the same as simply not destroying them. I know it’s a risk, but we can make a case.”
“Where do you come in?” Johanna asks. I expect her to be looking at Sim, but instead she has her eyebrows raised at me.
“What about me?”
“Man-made and nonaddictive that could be used medicinally,” she parrots. “That sounds right up your street. You want to make a name for yourself in a way Platt never could? Make it yourself.”
I purse my lips against my mug, aware they’re both watching me. I think of all the doors I’ve had slammed in my face, the fact that even when Platt had dreamed up a fictitious position to lure me to Zurich with him, the most he could imagine of me doing was paperwork. And even if that had been a real offer, what would I have done after? Who would I have to fight next to be permitted to go broke sitting in on lectures at a university where I would never be allowed to matriculate? And even if I did somehow walk out of the university with a degree in hand, would any English hospital employ me? Any patients seek my advice for anything other than midwifery or herbs? How long before the men came to chase me out of whatever corner I carved for myself?
How much would I rather be in the company of this mad girl who loves creatures like Francis of Assisi, on Sim’s boat unfolding layers of scientific discovery? Finding knowledge that is not just new to me, but new to the world? It pimples the flesh along my arms to think of it. Though my heart has always been fixed to medical school like a compass point, that legitimacy necessary to prove my worth, this small shift in course may lead me somewhere entirely new, but perhaps still somewhere I want to go.
When I answer, I worry it will feel like setting a dream on fire. “I would go with you,” I say, braced for it to sting, but it doesn’t. It feels like the first step on a new continent.
I look to Sim, and she looks to Johanna, and Johanna looks at me, and I realize that, in that single moment, like a flash of heat lightning over a bare moor, all three of us are in control of our own futures. Our own lives. Where we go now. Maybe for the first time. With my side pressed to Johanna’s and Sim’s dark eyes meeting mine, I feel newer than I’ve ever been.
Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone.
Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.
16
The plan is thus: we will travel by all means available to the southern shore of France, from where we can then take a ferry to Algiers. It’s a pirate port, Sim tells us, overrun with buccaneers and smugglers and without even a European toe stuck in for a foothold, but with Sim and that crown and cleaver upon her, she’s certain no one will dare touch us. We will rally with her father’s men in the city, who collect taxes from the European shipping companies, and they can take us to his fortress.
Johanna has some coinage she digs up from her trunk at Frau Engel’s before abandoning the rest of its contents and manages to secure some funds from an account of her uncle’s. It’s enough for the three of us to travel to the coast, though not well—our journey’s closest kin is the trek Monty, Percy, and I undertook from Marseilles to Barcelona.
I expect that traveling with Johanna and Sim will be like trying to wrangle kittens into the bath, both of them with minds of their own and distrustful of each other, Johanna homesick and wanting to pet every dog we pass, Sim determined to do the opposite of any instructions given her just to aggravate me. But to my great surprise, I end up being the dead weight of the trio. I’m always the first to call halt for the day or ask to stop for a meal because I’m about to faint with hunger. The one who falls asleep in coaches and diligences and would have missed the stop had Sim or Johanna not woken me. Though even my lowest levels of competence are the equivalent of high-functioning for most, and we are by far the most proficient trio I have traveled with to date. But I’m a bit rudderless without someone to boss around at all times.
They are also both shockingly agreeable. Sim is quiet; Johanna speaks enough for all three of us. She’s friendly with everyone we meet and seems to find a way to compliment every sour-faced cook or innkeeper on exactly the thing that softens them, and in such a sincere way that we are slipped steaming pastries and mugs of beer with no charge, and once booked on a diligence we were previously told was full and that we’d have to wait three days for the next. She makes us play word games as we travel, or tells us facts about animals and makes us guess whether they’re real or if she’s made them up. Sim is better at the guessing, though when I contribute medical facts, they’re both hapless. Johanna believes me for several confusing minutes that, after my brother lost his ear, it grew back.
I wrote to Monty before we left Zurich, informing him I was safe and in, if not good, at least neutral company, and that I would not be back in London as soon as I’d planned. I did not mention that there was a good chance I might be running off to join a pirate expedition to protect sea monsters. I have a sense that would get his breeches in a twist.
We leave European soil on a creaking ferry from Nice to Algiers. The boat departs at midnight and is a far cry from even the utilitarian packet that Sim and I took from England to the Continent. It seems to be built neither for cargo nor passengers, but is determined to shove as much of both as possible on board. The three of us end up on the top deck, the benefit of which is fresh air rather than the stale haze that swells on the lower decks, but that fresh air is bitter cold and thick with the misty spray of the sea. We huddle against the rail, with Johanna’s cloak over our shoulders and mine wrapped around us from the front, tented in with as much warmth as our bodies can generate. The night is clear for the first time in days. The round belly of a not-quite-full moon sits low and bright over the water, sprinkled on all sides by stars. Every breath blazes warm and white against the night.
As I watch the other passengers, it’
s hard not to notice that Johanna and I are some of the only fair-skinned Europeans aboard, and the three of us are some of the only women I can see. I have often been the only girl in the room, but I can’t think of a time I was in the minority like this. It must be daunting for Sim to travel Europe knowing that everywhere she goes, she won’t be around people like her. Of course, I’d thought of this before—particularly while on the road with Percy—but there’s something about being here, curled up on this deck with her and Johanna, that distills the loneliness of it for the first time. In that moment, the sky feels closer than home.
Johanna falls asleep before we’ve left the port, her arms resting upon her knees and her face burrowed into them, leaving Sim and me alone with enough silence to fill the ocean. I had not realized how much space Johanna’s bright, giddy presence took up among the three of us until she was snoring at my shoulder.
Sim and I haven’t spoken alone since Zurich, the night we slept side by side in the waxworks. Now, with a moon the color of lamplight above us and her dark skin dewy with the sea spray, she looks softer than I’ve seen her. Her face seems less guarded, the hard set of her jaw swapped for parted lips. Her injured arm is still bandaged, but unslung, and curled against her stomach.
“Do you think she’s sad?” Sim asks suddenly.
“Johanna?” I ask, and Sim nods. “Seeing as she got her mother’s things and escaped Platt, I can’t see why she would be. Though I suppose she misses her dog.”
“I mean sad that she’s not going to be married.”
Since so much of our conversation lately has been about natural philosophy and sea monsters, this is not what I was expecting. A small part of me had even forgotten Johanna was engaged to begin with. This girl beside me felt worlds away from the one who had danced in her ridiculous costume the night of the Polterabend. But she’s not, I remind myself. If given the chance, Johanna would likely chase sea monsters in that same indigo dress. “I don’t think she’s bothered by it,” I say. “At least, she’s not bothered she isn’t being married to Platt.”
“But if he’d been a good man and not a prick,” Sim says. “It must be a shock, to think your whole life is about to change and then . . .” She flicks open her hand in wordless demonstration of the vanishing.
I cup my hands over my mouth and blow on them for warmth. “I think it would be a relief, actually.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be married?” she asks.
“Would you?” I counter.
“Someday.”
“Really?”
“So long as I got along with him. It would be nice to have someone to grow old with. Someone to keep you warm.”
I wrinkle my nose. “I’d rather keep myself warm.”
“What would you have instead of a husband, then?” The curl of the moon looks back at me from her dark eyes. “A giant dog like Johanna’s?”
A cold wind rises off the water and Sim presses closer to me, her cheek against my shoulder so that when I speak, I can feel the material of her headscarf against my skin. “I think I want a house of my own,” I start, the words a discovery as they leave my mouth. “Something small, so I don’t have much housework, but enough room for a proper library. I want a lot of books. And I wouldn’t mind a good old dog to walk with me. And a bakery I go to every morning where they know my name.”
“And you don’t want anyone with you?” Sim asks, raising her head. “No family?”
“I want friends,” I say. “Good friends, that make up a different kind of family.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It wouldn’t be lonely,” I reply. “I’d like to be on my own, but not alone.”
“That’s not the sort of lonely I meant.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure why I’m blushing, but I feel it swell in my cheeks. “Well, that sort of aloneness doesn’t feel lonely to me.”
Sim tips her head backward against the rail, the faint starlight reflected on her skin like seed pearls overturned from dark earth. “You only say that because you’ve never been with anyone before.”
“Have you?” I challenge.
“No, but I want to be.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“How can you know that if you’ve never had anyone?”
“How do you know you want to?” I reply. “I’ve never drunk octopus ink, but I don’t feel the need to. Or like I’m missing anything in not having tasted it.”
“But octopus ink might become your new favorite. Do not roll your eyes at me, Miss Montague.” She gives me a hard poke in the rib cage. “Have you ever kissed anyone, at least?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone you liked?”
“Not with that emphasis. I have kissed men whose company I enjoyed.”
“And . . . ?”
“And . . .” I make a gesture that looks like I’m juggling invisible balls. “It was not altogether unpleasant.”
Sim snorts. “A ringing endorsement of kissing.”
“It didn’t make me hear violins or go weak in the knees or want to do any more than that, which I think is the evolutionary point of the kiss. It’s just a thing people do.” I feel strange suddenly, the old itch of fear that I am a feral girl in a domesticated world, watched by everyone with pity and concern. There are men like Monty, with perverse desires, but they find each other and carve out small corners of the world, and likely women too who find themselves only drawn to the fairer sex. And then there’s me, an island all my own. An island that sometimes feels like a whole continent to rule, and sometimes a cramped spit of land that sailors are marooned upon and left to die.
Sim is staring at me—no pity or concern, but those enormous eyes reduce me to hand flapping and a half-apologetic, half-frantic “I don’t know. Perhaps my mouth doesn’t work.”
“Of course your mouth works.”
It’s dark enough, in only the light of the talon moon, that I almost don’t realize she’s moved until I feel her hand upon my cheek, and when I turn to meet her, she presses her lips against mine.
It is entirely different from kissing Callum. It is, for a start, significantly less wet. Less impulsive and frantic and out of control. It feels bold and shy both at once, like giving and taking. Her lips are chapped but her mouth is soft as milkweed silk and rimmed with salt water from the cold spray kicked up against the side of the boat. When they part against mine, I open my mouth in return. Her thumb skims my jawline, feather-light.
But beyond the physical observations, it’s nothing. Not wholly unpleasant, but neither something I’m anxious to repeat.
Just a thing people do.
She pulls back, her hand still upon my cheek, and looks at me. “Did that work any sort of magic?”
“Not really.”
“That’s a shame.” She settles back into our little nest of cloaks, pulling the collar higher around her face. “It worked for me.”
Algiers
17
Algiers sits upon the crook of an iridescent bay. Even in the weak sunlight as our ferry makes its slow progress against the dawn, the buildings sparkle like they’re inlaid with precious stones, the white sand beach a jewelry box to house them. The city makes a slow climb up the hillside, flat roofed and whitewashed, with the bony fingers of minarets poking out. Clouds stretch across the horizon in wispy streaks.
Johanna and I, pasty English girls in very European clothes who speak no useful languages here, stick out sorely. I’ve heard a great deal of renegades have come from Europe to seek asylum in Algiers from whatever trouble drove them off the Continent, but we look far from criminals. It is positively unfair how unrumpled Johanna manages to look after weeks upon the road. Somehow she’s kept her skirt pressed—likely something to do with the loving layout she gives it each night, no matter where we are staying, while I am more inclined to step out of mine and then let it lie in a puddle upon the floor so that I can sooner fall into bed.
The plan is to hire camels, then ride to a garrison of Sim’s father’
s men several towns from Algiers. From there, we’ll go to the Crown and Cleaver fortress. Sim leads the way through the city with a confident stride. I expected that here, we might see a different version of her, relaxed and at ease so near to her home. But instead, she seems tense. She keeps pulling on her headscarf, fiddling absently with the knot holding it in place. My own hair feels exposed in contrast to the veiled women in the city. Johanna and I aren’t the only bare-headed women, or the only ones with fair skin, but something about the concentration of both, so much lower than I’m used to, makes me feel very obvious. As well traveled and hard to shock as I pride myself on being, I realize when I meet the eyes of a woman across the road and she stares at me that I know nothing about this world.
We stop for breakfast in the medina, a market made up of tapered streets rendered smaller by vendors’ wares jutting into the footpaths. Men lead donkeys by the nose, their backs laden with woven baskets and their hooves clapping against the stones. The air is hazy with the smoke from cook fires where women roast rabbits spattered in vivid sprays of saffron. The street tips upward into long, cracked steps. Tiled mosaics and alcoves interrupt the shopfronts, studded with sea glass and scripture painted on ceramic.
Johanna is rapturous, wandering through the haze like she has been transported into a fantastical dream. If she shares any of my discomfort of being a stranger in a strange land, she doesn’t show it. The sun streams through the awnings and splinters over her face, threading her hair with gold as she lets her fingers press into the inlaid tesseracts along the walls. She stops at a stand with emerald birds lined up like soldiers, their feet knotted to their perch, and has to stroke the domed feathers of each of their heads. Sim whistles at her to get her walking again, and all the birds whistle in reply.