A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  He meant the international peace that had prevailed since the defeat of a fleet of pirates, 109 years before. “Is that so?”

  “It’s merely that you’ve fallen in with something of a specialized community.”

  “Spies and dueling judges.”

  “Speaking of your father,” he said. “You won’t have anything to fear aboard Sawtooth.”

  Somehow that rankled. “I said I was preparing, not that I was afraid.”

  But some little noise abovedecks had captured his attention—he gave her one of his obnoxious, polite, not-really-engaged-anymore bows and excused himself.

  She listened for a second, heard him mounting the ladder to the main deck, giving orders, nothing unusual. Then curiosity overcame her: she followed. “What is it?”

  “A ship,” he said, pointing.

  “Are we being shadowed?”

  “No, it’s headed away from us,” he said, handing her the spyglass.

  The craft was at the farthest edge of the spyglass’s field of vision. It was double-masted, with a strangely spherical wheel, and smaller than the derelict they’d encountered. It was also making in the opposite direction as fast as it could.

  “No name on the stern,” Sophie said, wishing for her camera. “They’re running without lamps, even though it’s not fully dawn.”

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t want to be seen.”

  “Maybe they’re being hunted or are bound on some kind of mischief.”

  “Could they be Corsetta’s attackers?”

  “No. She said they’d headed to the Fleet days ago.”

  “Pirates? I thought they’d all gone legit.”

  “There are still raiders. Desperate people of various stripes,” Parrish said.

  “Exiles, outlanders, fugitives,” Verena added.

  “They could be the ones who sunk the derelict?”

  “Perhaps,” Parrish said.

  “But we’re not chasing them?”

  “No,” said Verena, “We’ll note the sighting in the logs—position, direction, what have you. If someone’s after them, we’ll report it.”

  As the sun continued to rise, the morning stretched pleasantly: the wind was brisk, and though they were out in the open ocean there was plenty to observe aboard ship. Sophie began studying each of the ship’s two dozen crew members, taking note of everything from scars and jewelry to turns of speech and general mood. She hunted down the ferret, which was also a transform: its tail was a live snake. It seemed to like her: she fed it bits of fish and worked to transcribe the magical blue text lettered onto its abdomen.

  Corsetta was unconscious for most of the day. She appeared to be weakening; her pulse was light and irregular, her breath unsteady. No seizures yet, but her eyes were getting wandery in a way Sophie didn’t like at all.

  She and Sweet managed to get a little more broth into the girl during one of her more wakeful stretches. Afterward, she slept, and Sophie took advantage of the break to go below and see if her diving suit was still in the hold.

  The trunk looked just as she’d left it six months before, and inside, her wetsuit and dry suit were in perfect shape. Her mask was dusty but the seals were fine.

  All good, of course. As was the nylon rope and her half-dozen carabiners.

  When she had come before, the trunk had been packed with electronics: DSLR camera, video camera, waterproof housings, and a smartphone, not to mention half a dozen scientific instruments of Bram’s. Now all of that was gone except for the solar battery chargers.

  She felt a pang of melancholy she couldn’t quite account for. Neither here nor there, she thought. I don’t belong here, but I can’t just live in the real world now.

  This was frustration at being unable to explore, she told herself. Explore, study, and record. She wouldn’t be spending all this energy navel-gazing if she could just answer a few questions instead of digging up more.

  She opened the trunk next to hers. It was full of stuff that had to belong to Verena—clothes, fencing equipment, and an MP3 player.

  “Double standards,” she muttered.

  The next trunk, an old wooden box, held human bones—a single skeleton, from the pieces.

  She looked this over for a minute, trying to figure out why it was aboard. The bones had a few healed breaks: one wrist, one rib. Under the skull she found a ribbon-bound roll of filled-out donation forms, indicating the remains were the bones of a magically enhanced pipe player and had been bequeathed to a music school on the island Zingoasis.

  Music? She tapped two of the bones together experimentally, eliciting two notes, both something like what you might get with a tuning fork.

  The bioluminescent wakelights heralding their approach to the Fleet got smaller as they closed the distance between them. They grew with time, like bubbles, until they either burst or sank, so the farther away they were from having been set asea, the bigger they got.

  By afternoon there were also miniature ships, maybe five feet in length and made of wood so soft that one of them splintered when it hit the Nightjar’s prow. The models were laden with things that symbolized summer: unripened sheaves of wheat, emptied butterfly chrysalises, and hundreds of flowers.

  Next they found themselves coming upon fishing boats, first a few, then twenty, then a hundred, all abustle with activity, men and women hauling tons of protein from the water. As afternoon gave way to evening, they found themselves sailing through cold water thick with cod. Tonio and two of the other crewmen lowered a net, just for a minute, and pulled up perhaps twenty fish, great shining animals, unblemished and thrashing vigorously as they filled the air with the smell of the sea.

  They sorted through them quickly, tossing back anything that weighed less than twenty pounds, and then ran them below to the galley, presumably so the cook could salt them. Sophie claimed the net when they were done, scavenging samples of seaweed, a sea jelly, two eels, and a small ray while Verena alternately fumed and pretended not to see her.

  “Fleet of Nations, dead ahead!”

  The winking of hundreds of aft lanterns came into view, clarifying as the sun set.

  A hang glider shot overhead and a lanky teenager dropped to the ship’s main deck. “Compliments to the captain and crew!” the daredevil said, bowing. “I bear an invitation for Sophie Hansa and Verena Vanko Feliachild of the Verdanii.”

  He held out a sealed envelope to Sophie.

  “Well?”

  She tore it open. “It’s … dinner.”

  “Dinner with Annela Gracechild and Cly Banning,” Verena said, reading over her shoulder. “That’ll be fun.”

  “Like a root canal. Why not Beatrice, too?”

  “She’s under house arrest on Breadbasket.”

  “Oh, right. Why not go to Breadbasket?”

  “His Honor wouldn’t feel welcome there,” Parrish said. “And you agreed to keep your distance from the Verdanii.”

  This was a polite way of reminding Sophie that she’d repudiated Verdanii citizenship, to the point of signing a crazily long agreement promising she wouldn’t set foot on their soil or any ships of theirs unless she was specifically invited.

  Sudden curiosity itched her: Wasn’t that overkill?

  “There’s also…” Verena seemed to be debating. “We haven’t told Mom that we’re doing this.”

  “Beatrice doesn’t know I’m back?”

  Verena shook her head.

  “Why?”

  “She can’t veto the plan if she doesn’t know about it.” She flushed, seeming to dare Sophie to lecture her.

  “Well, we can bring guests,” Sophie said. “Want to come, Parrish?”

  Verena stiffened.

  Parrish scratched his head, considering.

  “Don’t jump to say yes,” Sophie said.

  “Your father dislikes me.”

  She felt an odd rush of relief. “Right. It’s not fair to ask.”

  “I’d be glad to attend you,” he said. “I’m just not sure m
y presence will aid with the task at hand.”

  “It’s not a task,” she said. “It’s getting to know all you guys who are my birth family.”

  He gave her that odd, balked look. “Technically, I’m not—”

  “Shut up, Parrish. Of course you’re part of the family,” Verena said. “Sophie’s right: you have to come. If Annela and Cly start in on each other, we may need a referee.”

  CHAPTER 4

  They sailed into the Fleet from the rear, first passing a three-masted schooner bristling with youngish sailors, all clad in the ochre breeches and sand-colored shirts that were the navy’s day uniform. The ship was laden with equipment, armed not for war but disaster: it had extra lifeboats and a range of floats, pumps for water cannons to fight fire, ladders, and a big tower with a spotlight.

  “Rescue vessel?” Sophie asked.

  “Shepherd,” Verena said. They had climbed up into the rigging for a better view. “The unofficial entry point to the city.”

  Tonio and the sailor on watch aboard Shepherd exchanged a complicated series of halloos as they sailed past. Fifteen minutes later, the reason for all the rescue equipment became obvious, as they encountered the ships at the rear of the Fleet. Some were barely more than leaky rowboats, hardly fit for scrap, let alone oceanic crossings.

  Bumboats, Sophie remembered. Tonio called them bumboats.

  The little eight- and ten-footers were crewed by thin, perpetually sunbaked people, many of whom raised wares in Nightjar’s direction as they passed.

  “Buy a cooking pot, Kir, finest metalwork from the Isle of—”

  “Mussels and clams, mussels and clams from the Tallon territorial limit.”

  “Ram husks for mining magic!”

  “Tunics and pantaloons, dyed on Gittamot!”

  “Fortune-teller! Know your futures, Kirs!”

  “Ready girls, ready boys, take your ease, ready to please—”

  “Smokes and powders!” The reek of marijuana coming off that vessel made further explanation of that one unnecessary.

  As Nightjar glided through the vast oceangoing slum, the boats became steadily bigger and, by their look, more seaworthy. People stopped hawking their wares by shouting, relying instead on placards hung port and starboard, signs with business names and pictures of whatever they had on offer. Individual shops first, but then the ships got big enough to house what were effectively apartment blocks and strip malls. In time they were passing ships as densely active as an urban street at home.

  “Gatehouse ahead!” Tonio shouted.

  “Match course and speed,” Parrish ordered. “Ready to accept pilot.”

  “This would be where the suburbs become the city,” Verena said. “If someone says between Gatehouse and Shepherd, they mean…” She gestured to their rear.

  Sophie nodded, keeping her mouth shut. She didn’t want Verena to remember she wasn’t supposed to be playing tour guide.

  They were coming abreast with another craft as obviously official as Shepherd, filled, as Shepherd was, with uniformed sailors. This ship was armed: a half-dozen sailors on her quarterdeck were built like Nightjar’s cannoneer. They stood at the ready, near barrels that, presumably, held the same sand Krezzo had used to form his magical cannonballs.

  “Run out the plank!” someone called.

  A rotund fellow trotted toward the rail of Gatehouse, looking for all the world as though he was going to run off the edge of the deck. His beard hung in a thick blue-black braid to his navel; his arm was tucked over his chest to keep it from flying off every which way.

  As he approached the Gatehouse rail he seemed to rise, as if he’d been on a ramp, and then he sprang up, bouncing on what turned out to be a small, square trampoline.

  There was a loud buh-buh-buh twang!

  Whisks of silver light enveloped him as he shot up, straight into the air. The man curled, rolling in midflight; then he landed with a sprightly bounce on Nightjar’s deck and presented himself to Parrish before taking the helm.

  It was evening, and by now the Fleet was little more than a collection of lanterns on rails and sails, stretching in every direction. Overhead, the stars were coming out, barely dimmed by the thousands of candleflames. The breeze coming off Northwater was chilly and invigorating.

  “Kir Sophie!” That was Sweet, belowdecks, her shout muffled by the length of the ship and the heavy wood floor. “Help!”

  And a shriek: Corsetta.

  She and Verena clambered down, racing to the improvised brig.

  The girl had held her own during the day—she’d slept a lot, managing to keep down the broth and some gruel. The burns on her arms had—perhaps thanks to the amoxycillin—seemed to be free of infection. But she’d been feverish and nigh delirious, and the head wound—

  As Sophie crossed the threshold into her cabin, she saw Corsetta’s skin flowing, as if it were melted wax.

  The girl wailed as the crisped parts of her hands and fingers liquefied into red and brown smears. The color diffused into the general flow of her skin, melding into her tan in a way that reminded Sophie of painters mixing pigments.

  “Magic?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Verena grasped the girl by the shoulders. “Corsetta, listen to me. Someone’s laid an intention on you.”

  “Impossible,” she gasped. “It—”

  “Does it hurt?” Sophie said. “I might have something—”

  “Tickles, just tickles.” She said it through clenched teeth. “But, no. Nobody knows my full name—ahhhhh!”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Dead.”

  Orphaned at fifteen. Poor kid. “Okay, your boyfriend?”

  Her eyes snapped open. “Rashad would never tell—”

  “So he does know your name?” Sophie demanded.

  Twisting, Corsetta groaned in a way that suggested pleasure, not pain. Sophie felt a stab of embarrassment as the girl curled in on herself.

  Even so, Sophie was braced for the worst. She had seen men scripped to death, murdered by a spell that killed them from afar.

  Corsetta took in a long, shuddering breath as her waxy skin flexed once and then seemed to snap into place, tanned, healthy, leaving her without so much as a pimple. She sat upright, catching at the sheets just in time to preserve her modesty, and felt for the injury on the back of her head.

  Up on deck, Sophie heard the fa-twang of the trampoline again, the thump of someone landing above.

  “I’ve been healed!” Corsetta said. “You’re right, Kirs. My beloved must have…”

  “Yes?”

  She shrugged, not quite pulling off the attempt to seem casual. “Someone must have told him I was in danger.”

  Still hiding something. Whether Corsetta was an orphan or not, Sophie’s sympathy evaporated.

  “I will see Rashad again.” Corsetta’s tone was thoughtful, almost surprised.

  “That’s great,” Verena said. Her enthusiasm seemed forced. “We’ll find something for you to wear, okay?”

  “To love!” She grabbed up the glass of water on the bedside table, toasting.

  “Cheers. Come on, Sophie.” Verena tugged her out. “Did that seem fishy to you?”

  Sophie nodded. “But she’s gonna live—that’s good. She even gets to keep her burned hands.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t think it was the boyfriend who had her cured?”

  “If he’s Corsetta’s age, he might be reckless. Or … I suppose his family could have beaten her name out of him.”

  “Why would they restore Corsetta if it’s his brother who tossed her overboard?”

  Verena shrugged.

  “I totally think she’s up to something. But she’s not going to drop dead. That’s a win, right?”

  “Yes.” There was a visible change as Verena let that sink in. Her shoulders came down and she smiled.

  “If the girl is healthy, I’m afraid she’s under arrest.”

  Sophie whirled, surprised.

&nb
sp; Her birth father, Clydon Banning, was standing next to Parrish.

  “Child—” he began, and then he caught himself. She’d asked him, more than once, not to call her that. “Forgive me. Dear one. May I?”

  He opened his arms—Cly was a serious hugger—and Sophie went willingly enough.

  Her birth father was a tall whip of a man, keen-eyed and lean, with an air that was both wolfish and genial. He embraced her heartily, planting a kiss on what was threatening to become his usual spot atop her head, and bowed to Verena. “Kir Feliachild,” he said. “Fair seas to you. How are you keeping?”

  Something in his tone, too much innocence, hinted that he knew the answer.

  Verena flinched, just a little. “Just fine. Thanks. Did you say Corsetta’s to be arrested?”

  He flicked a hand. “The Watch detained the crew of Waveplay, as Sophie requested. They claim your rescuee attacked their paymaster and tried to make off with their cash box. They don’t know how she ended up adrift.”

  “Do you believe them?” Sophie said.

  Cly looked surprised. “Does it matter? Once they’re all detained, the Watch will learn the truth. If she’s no longer dying, there’s no great import.”

  “It’s attempted murder.”

  “And thus a problem for the courts,” Cly said. “They can always duel it out if they’re in a hurry.”

  “You don’t care, in other words.”

  “Officially, I cannot. Well, Sophie, have you decided to see Sylvanna with me?”

  She was, irrationally, irked. “I dunno. Have you decided to stop jerking Beatrice around?”

  Awkward silence spilled from this. Cly’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline.

  “Oh, what?” Sophie said. “We were going to sit around a banquet table with Annela, eating mutton and crumpets, with all of you actively hating each other and nobody wanting to talk their way around to business? I’m not doing that.”

  Cly laughed. “Put that way, I have to say it does sound like a terrible way to spend an evening.”

  Parrish said, delicately, “I’m sure you both underestimate your charms.”

  “Yeah, right. Cly, if it happened to be the case that Beatrice could get sprung from house arrest—ship arrest?—could she be released on bail? Do you have bail?”