Lais looked like he’d been primped to model for the cover of a romance novel: he had the Hercules hair, the whole-body tan and baby blue eyes, the tight breeches and the flowing white peasant shirt. A leather vest overtop did nothing to hide chest muscles worthy of a bodybuilding competition.
He was smart and easy-going. There was nothing dark underneath his charm, just friendliness. Lots of friendliness.
“I’m hip-deep in family conspiracies and international politics,” Sophie said.
“Same thing, in your case.”
Inspiration struck. “And apparently I’m in need of a lawyer. Can you hook me up?”
“Annela—” Verena said.
“Annela will pick someone who’s all about the government’s best interests,” Sophie said. “I need someone who’s in it for me.”
Lais beamed. “Mine’s a horse swapper, devious beyond measure. Of Tiladene and feared round the Fleet. I would love to introduce you.”
“Great. How do we go about—”
“You should come to dinner tonight, Lais,” Verena blurted.
“Should he?”
“Sure. He knows the score, right? You spilled the truth about Erstwhile to him.”
“Well, yeah. But we already invited Parrish.”
“You invited Parrish. I get a guest, too.”
Lais beamed. “I’d be honored. Verdanii hospitality is legendary. Sophie, I’ll see if I can get you an appointment with Bimisi. Who are your kin, little sword sister?”
“It’s Verena.” She dug out her invitation. “Of the Feliachilds.”
“Until later, then,” he said, saluting with it before vanishing into the crowd.
Dismayed, Sophie watched him go. “Why did you do that?”
“Do what? I thought you liked him.” A hint of smugness there.
“I do better with shipboard flings when they’re … you know, now you see him, now you don’t? Ever again?” Sophie wasn’t sure why she was so flustered. She’d blown him off, last time she’d seen him. Though not fast enough: Parrish had caught them in each other’s arms.
Verena shrugged. “Annela is extra-charming when there’s a pretty new man around. It’ll make dinner way more fun. Anyway, you were happy enough to be nice to him when you wanted a legal referral.”
This was starting to have a vibe that reminded Sophie of her rare fights with Bram.
“Right, okay, you’re right,” she said, just to head off any possible argument, and without looking took another ladder down, further into the shipboard mall, looking for another shiny science thing, as Verena would put it, to distract herself.
By the time they’d finished their big shop and made their way to Constitution for the dinner date with Annela Gracechild, Sophie was beginning to feel that Parrish might have been right about the Fleet being a reasonably safe city. They’d spent the afternoon in what was, essentially, a shopping center. Nobody had tried to kill her or anyone else. As for the whole “running into a guy you slept with” thing, it wasn’t as though that had never happened to her before.
Three cheers for less violence.
The self-defense course had, initially, been Bram’s idea. He’d pitched it as part of her overall plan to prepare for a return to Stormwrack. “You’re learning celestial navigation and working all these quick dives to make money so you can buy trade goods and animal specimens. You’re in triathlon training and you went to that meditation seminar so you could omm your way through the scary stuff.”
“Don’t make fun,” she’d said. Even if she’d wanted to seek conventional therapy after witnessing a murder and a handful of attempted killings, it was a moot point: she couldn’t tell anyone in San Francisco what she’d experienced.
“I’m just saying—wouldn’t it help if you learned to throw a proper punch?”
She’d assumed that deep down, the advice had its roots in Bram’s persistent idea that Sophie was some kind of good-hearted pushover—that she ignored every slight, said yes to every favor, and let people walk all over her.
She wasn’t entirely sure where this image of her came from. Some of it stemmed from their father and his endless picking about her intellectual rigor or lack thereof. But that was Dad: only happy when he was criticizing something. It didn’t bug her the way it bugged Bram.
As Sophie saw it, she did whatever she pleased.
Whatever Bram’s motives, he’d handed her the flyer for the class shortly after they’d gotten home from Stormwrack, just a few weeks after her aunt’s murder. She’d bought her key-chain-size blast of bear spray and signed up for the class at the community center without a second thought.
But maybe all that badness last time was exceptional, just as it would be exceptional at home if your mom’s sister was murdered and the same people came after you. It was a once-in-a-lifetime explosion of violence, not an ongoing obstacle to her physical safety and ability to explore Stormwrack.
Yes, they’d found Corsetta in the water and someone had attacked her. There was definitely something going on there. But that didn’t have anything to do with Sophie or the Nightjar crew, not anymore. They’d handed the situation over to the authorities, just as you would at home.
Call the cops and go on with life, right?
She spent the last couple of hours before dinner aboard Nightjar writing all of her observations and questions about Stormwrack into one of her new notebooks.
There was so much here to explore. What was the exact nature of the relationship between Stormwrack and Erstwhile? Was one the future of the other? Were they parallel dimensions?
Was there a way to determine the age of Stormwrack?
A year was still 365 days long. Whatever had happened, that hadn’t changed. But the length of a mean sidereal day was shorter, by about five minutes, as compared to home. Stormwrackers adjusted their calendar annually, cutting off the last day of the year at midnight on the winter solstice, starting a fresh calendar as the days began to lengthen.
Sophie hadn’t been able to check the planet’s angle of rotation, though she’d gathered a few measurements with the sextant that Bram might be able to use.
Question upon question filled the notebook: Was there a weather office? Did anyone measure the temperature of the seas from year to year? Who made the charts?
Verena had said half of the snow vulture’s young didn’t survive in the wild. That implied someone had done a study. Who did studies here? Why was almost everyone so terribly lacking in curiosity? Was it just regarded as a personality defect, or was there something more behind it?
People might just think it’s true, about the vultures’ survival rate. They could be making all sorts of unproved assertions.
And all of that was warm-up for the big questions: How was it that Stormwrackers could use magic? When did that develop? Did all magic really use writing and inscription or were there other forms? Did that mean there was no magic before the development of writing?
She wrote: The effects of magic persist when I go home. I still spoke Fleet when I was in San Francisco and was able to teach it to Bram. How is it that we haven’t discovered inscription?
Why didn’t Stormwrackers do more science and tech? Was there some kind of agreement just to give up on development when they hit the Age of Sail and go no further? Was it on record? Or did it have something to do with the idea some of them had that steel and petroleum were inherently dangerous?
And so on.
The book filled with questions: a lifetime’s worth of things to study. The problem, she thought, would be choosing. Some mysteries would yield to simple experimentation and measurement—if they could find or build the instruments. She could buy blood samples at the sanguarium and bird carcasses at the bird skin shop. Others might be researched, if she could get herself into the company of people who weren’t so damned guarded with their information.
What Bram and I need is for Annela to chill out, she thought. Which meant winning her over at dinner.
Annela had been intr
oduced to her as a cousin, though nobody had expressly told Sophie how she was related to Verena, Beatrice, and the other Feliachild women. She was in government—at home, she’d be something akin to a congresswoman. She was copper-skinned and curvy, with thick hair the color of graphite and a fondness for comfort: velvet curtains, warm rooms, lush foods.
For this particular not-quite-family gathering, she had put on a feast that had autumnal, harvesty overtones: there were fry breads, a corn dish, baked squash in abundance, ale, and slices of a red meat with a bit of a wild flavor. Venison? Buffalo?
She’d greeted them all with no sign of displeasure; she said hello to Parrish and Lais as warmly as if she’d been hoping they’d come and asked after Bram.
Politicians, Sophie thought. They can just pour it on, can’t they? She decided she preferred Annela when she was pissed off.
Since Cly had opted out and Beatrice was under house arrest, it was just the five of them.
Verena’s prediction that Annela would set herself to charming Lais proved true. They talked about horse racing—the Verdanii were horse crazy, apparently. Sophie let the conversation flow over her and picked out what information she could.
She’d already figured out that Verdanii was located about where Saskatchewan was, at home. So—the prairies. But instead of being the inner grain belt of a big continent, it was a landmass perhaps half the size of Australia.
This being a traditional Verdanii meal, she could draw other conclusions: fry bread was from a wheat harvest, and the horse talk argued that there were extensive grasslands there.
No creams, cheeses, or big dairy products. No cattle?
By the time the dessert—a custard not entirely divorced from pumpkin pie, though the crust was more in the line of an oat crumble and the glaze, atop, was a thin layer of salt caramel—had arrived, she could see that Annela had copped to what she was doing.
“Well, Sophie, if we can interrupt your examinations of us all, perhaps we can come down to business.” She gestured for the servants to pour more ale.
Sophie tried to wait her out and couldn’t. “You’re looking for a favor, right? I go visiting Cly, he lets Beatrice have bail. He’s basically agreed, so…”
“So,” Annela said.
“Look, I’m not some whiz-bang brass-knuckles negotiator. I want Beatrice bailed, I do, and of course I want to go see Sylvanna with Cly. What am I supposed to do—pretend I don’t care? That I’m gonna let Beatrice sit around pining for home aboard Breadbasket?”
Lais laughed. “That would be the usual mode, yes.”
Annela looked like she might be fighting a smile.
“I’m not that kind of person.”
“So you keep telling us,” Annela said. Sophie wondered, suddenly, if they knew she’d smuggled some bio samples and a bunch of Stormwrack footage home. If they knew about the map she and Bram had been working on …
“What if we ditch this whole quid pro quo thing and act like human beings,” she said. “I’m not out to put Stormwrack’s existence on the front page of The New York Times. Trying to censor everything I see and hear—come on, Annela, you must see it’s a waste of Verena’s time.”
“The value of Verena’s time is very much an open question.”
“Not to me, it isn’t. Give me back my camera and equipment.”
“Impossible.”
“Last time I was here,” Sophie said, “I learned stuff that was useful to you.”
“Last time,” Annela fired back, “I said your presence on Stormwrack would materially injure your kin. You returned. Now your aunt is dead and your mother under criminal charge.”
Parrish cleared his throat. “You cannot blame Sophie for Gale’s death, Convenor, not when it was so long foretold and forestalled.”
“Can’t I?” She looked at him cannily and to Sophie’s surprise, he looked abashed and turned away.
What’s that about?
“Ohhkay. Material damage to kin. Beatrice got arrested, kinda my fault for coming back, true. But you’re saying there was a … a prophecy? About Gale’s death—”
“As for Beatrice’s arrest,” Parrish interrupted, “a citizen must answer for her own actions.”
“What would you have had her do, Parrish?” Annela leaned back in her chair. “Raise Sophie on Low Bann?”
“Sophie stopped an invasion of my nation,” Lais said, surprising everyone. “Tiladene owes her a favor, and the Convene does, too. It’s not a stretch to say she preserved the Cessation of Hostilities.”
“For how long? Without Gale to fight off the inevitable next assault on the Compact—”
Verena paled. She stood up suddenly, gave the faintest of bows, and stalked off.
Annela quirked her eyebrows at Sophie. “Are you going to ask what that’s about, Kir Inquisitor?”
“Don’t need to,” Sophie said. “It’s obvious. She screwed up one of her ‘I’m the new Gale’ spy assignments and now you’re threatening to fire her. In the process, she cost Nightjar the ship’s medical officer and bosun—they didn’t die, but they huffed off, I’m thinking.”
Annela shot a look at Parrish.
“I told her nothing,” he said.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“We’ve been delivering Gale’s bequests to a number of portside island nations,” he said. “At one such stop, the bosun’s family asked us to add in a sail to Zingoasis with some magical relics.”
“The musician’s skeleton, in the hold?”
If Parrish was surprised that she’d had a poke through the storage crates, it didn’t show. Annela’s glower deepened, and Sophie remembered, belatedly, that she’d meant to try buttering her up. “Yes,” he said. “It was meant to be kept quiet, but Richler found out, and his nation made a counterclaim for the bones. Verena had already offended him, once, with a perhaps insensitive comment about advanced medicine in the outlands. He’s a good man, from the—”
“She accused him of having reported the skeleton’s presence aboard. Then she suggested divvying up the bones like a pools win,” Annela interrupted.
Was there something there she didn’t want me to know? Parrish had been about to say something about Richler; suddenly her cousin had switched from censorship to storytelling.
A decent theory. Test it? “Parrish, you were saying something about Richler?”
“Ah—”
“Then, having by now upset both crew members,” Annela continued, “Verena tried to convince them not to pass her offensive suggestion on to their home governments. The bequest’s in court now; there’ll be a duel over it. I’ll be smoothing the choppy seas forever.” Annela turned a pinch of bannock over in her fingers. “How you worked out as much as you did—”
“I believe this proves that denying Sophie access to books and her recording equipment is a pointless exercise,” Parrish said. “In fact, if she were busy measuring the pull of the tides at the equinox or similar ephemera—”
“Ephemera!” Sophie objected.
“She’s more interested in the natural world than she is in politics,” he said, and now he was looking right at her. Still trying to tell her something? “If we returned her equipment and allowed her to focus—”
Annela said, “I will not further empower someone who is already a menace.”
“What if I could talk Cly into dropping the charges against Beatrice altogether? Is that … legally possible? Parrish?”
He stroked his jaw. “Perhaps under the ‘no harm done’ provisions of the Judicial Code. There’d need to be a ritual exchange of sword blows.”
“You believe you can do this because you don’t know the man,” Annela said. “Cly Banning is a reptile, Sophie. You’re neither sufficiently well placed to hold his interest for long nor experienced enough to handle him.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” Sophie said, stung. “I wouldn’t handle. I’d ask.”
A snort. “Naivete won’t help you, either.”
“Righ
t. And it’s not naive to expect Verena to need time to learn all the nuances of her new job.” With that, she threw her napkin down, emphatically didn’t bow, and went after her sister.
She stepped out onto Constitution’s deck, into the moonlight. The seas were slate under its pale-bone glow, and remarkably still but for the wakes of the various ships. The lanterns of the Fleet were strung out across the seacraft to their rear. Off Constitution’s bow, the Fleet’s monster flagship, Temperance, hulked its way through the water, leaving a track of churned-up foam behind it.
There was no sign of Verena.
“Kir Sophie Hansa?” One of the uniformed messengers, a boy of perhaps nine, held out an envelope.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Very droll, Kir,” the kid said, with an attitude that said he’d heard that one before.
She expected to find the note was from Cly or Beatrice, but it was scrawled in an almost childish hand. Westerbarge, midnight, it said. Corsetta di Gatto, Tibbon’s Wash.
She took one last good look around.
“What the hell.” It was time to get out into the city unassisted. She stomped up to the hang glider deck and showed a taxi pilot her note.
“Westerbarge has no landing platform,” he said. “I can drop you on a ferry.”
“Fine.”
The taxikites were flying rickshaws. She sat in an open cab—the pilot gave her something that wasn’t quite a bear pelt to keep her warm. Sophie pulled two hairs from the pelt and tucked them into her questions journal. Her thoughts turned to the sanguarium in the market. All those blood samples, there for the buying, if only she could find a way to get them analyzed …
I won’t further empower a menace, Annela had said. Perhaps it was perversity, but Sophie rather liked the idea of being a menace.
Funny that she didn’t threaten to magically wipe my memory again.…
Climbing into the apparatus of the glider, the pilot angled the kite straight at the sky. They rose into the air as smoothly as if a cable had lifted them. When they were about two hundred meters above the Fleet he threw his legs back, with a faint jerk that reverberated through the whole of the craft, and extended the glider’s wings outward. A moment later, they were circling.
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