A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  No updrafts at this time of day, Sophie thought. Indeed, they weren’t gaining altitude—rather, they were moving in ever-widening circles, losing height with every revolution.

  Air rushed through her hair, mellow and warm, and she leaned forward to take in as much of the Fleet as she could, lanternlights marking ship positions. In the dark they lined up like self-contained city blocks, islands of human activity ordered across the black of the sea.

  When they were well aft of Gatehouse, deep in the civilian block, the kite made a bank and curve, bleeding away the last of its altitude and all of its speed. The pilot kicked himself upright, creating wind resistance through the whole frame of the kite, and came to a controlled stop on a platform on a ship the size of a biggish tugboat.

  “This is the night ferry, Kir,” he said. “Four stops, maybe five, and you’ll be at Westerbarge. Be sure to tell the purser where you want to go. That’ll be fivecoin.”

  Sophie had made a point of watching the vendors make change in the mall that afternoon—she handed over the nickel confidently. “Is there a charge for the ferry?”

  “Public service, Kir,” he said, and began racking the kite for takeoff.

  She made it to Westerbarge about ten minutes late for her scheduled rendezvous with Corsetta. It was part of a dive-y looking little block of cabins, all serving drinks, with seating in the middle. A bar, in other words. Raucous, beer-drinking-crowd sounds emanated from every deck.

  The crowd seemed friendly enough. Sophie packed her little trove of coins away, where they would be hard to steal, and touched her can of bear spray for reassurance. Then she went looking for the girl.

  She found her at a card table, with a decent pile of coin in front of her, a fawning dog trying to climb its way into her lap, and a beer in her hand.

  When she saw Sophie, she announced to the group, “I’m over.” There was some amiable grumbling as she pulled her stake off the table, but she pushed one coin back—“For the next round”—and they appeared mollified.

  To Sophie she said, “Buy you an ale?”

  “I just had a massive meal,” Sophie said. “Thanks anyway.”

  Corsetta led the way out to a relatively quiet table on the rail. “You didn’t bring the whole Judiciary with you. My thanks for that.”

  “For all I know they’re hot on my tail,” Sophie said. “What do you want?”

  “My snow vulture,” she said. “I charmed her, and she needs me.”

  And you need the credit for taming her, don’t you? “I saw her today. She’s unhappy.”

  Corsetta nodded and handed over a heavily scrawled slip of paper. “Claim of ownership, and a note saying I relinquish no rights.”

  Even the fifteen-year-olds talk like lawyers here.

  She glanced at the document: it was better crafted than the short note Corsetta had sent her. She’d had someone write it on her behalf, Sophie supposed.

  “How is this going to help? The bird can’t read.”

  Corsetta handed over a strip of what looked like goat hide. “This bears my scent—it should reassure her that I’m alive. I’d have gone to her in person, but I assume the market is lousy with Watch.”

  “Why give this up?” Sophie asked, holding up the strip of leather.

  “I have to back up my claim. I can’t marry Rashad if the bird will not lay.”

  “Because that’s the Queen’s quest?”

  “Favor. It’s the way of our people.”

  Sophie said, “Have you contacted your boyfriend?”

  Corsetta shook her head. “I have to get home to him. I can’t think, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep.…”

  You can evade arrest, play cards, and drink beer pretty well, though. “This guy of yours. How old is he?”

  She glowed. “Just past the first blossom of youth, Kir, with skin of porcelain and a wit so keen! He makes that pretty sea captain of yours seem old and dim.”

  “Stop. Not my captain. Rashad is your age, then?”

  “He writes poetry—”

  “I thought his family owned a fishing fleet.”

  “The alchemical union of our souls has expanded us, allowing us to rise beyond the tethers of birth and family. As an outlander, you can’t be expected to understand.”

  Alchemy, huh? “No, ’course not. I’m just a lumbering cynic from the wilds.”

  “Do you not believe in true love? In the perfect fusion of matched souls?” This came out loud, in a tone so horrified the girl might have been asking if Sophie drowned bunnies for fun.

  “Fusion?” Parrish had just stepped into the bar, looking first concerned and then, as he took them in, relieved. Should Sophie warn her?

  “Name your soul’s base metal, Kir! I can help you. There will be a natural match for it out there—your true catalyst! You’ll never find it if you don’t look.”

  “Is this like astronomy? Water signs should try to date earth signs, that kind of thing?”

  “Ah, you do understand a little.” She spoke with an emphasis that suggested she’d drunk several pints already. “It’s a law of the universe that we must seek to complete ourselves.”

  “That’s not a law of the universe.” She couldn’t help herself; this greeting-card picture of romance annoyed her all the more now that Corsetta was throwing scientific terms into the mix. “It’s a very comforting idea, but—”

  “No, no. Listen. Think of magnetite and lodestone,” Corsetta said. She clasped her hands, mimicking magnetic forces.

  “That’s not an argument.”

  “When I return and claim the Queen’s favor, I will get permission to marry Rashad,” Corsetta said, her tone insistent. “We’ll sail in Rashad’s crabbing dory, to the Scattering Isles. There we will catch bauble fish and earn shells. I’ll gaze upon his face as he sits on the deck and makes up verses.”

  Which of you is going to fish, in that case? “But in the meantime, you want me to deliver this note and the leather to…”

  “To the Judiciary. It will show that I’m the one who tamed the bird. Montaro has claimed otherwise. He wants my favor! This proves she is mine, does it not?”

  “I have no idea,” Sophie said. “I’m no Fleet lawyer.”

  “I can’t afford to fall into court over this. I must get home.”

  “Yeah. About that. Nobody’s buying that this is just about your boyfriend. The bird, the brother throwing you overboard, the fact that you were out by that derelict—their crew’s missing, you know. Presumed lost?”

  “You are entirely too full of wonderment, Kir. It’s an acidic property of the soul.”

  “Honestly, Corsetta, the nature of whatever scam you’ve got on right now may be the least interesting mystery I’ve stumbled over since I got here.”

  “Will you give my notes to the Judiciary?”

  “I’m probably supposed to arrest you.”

  “You’re outlandish, aren’t you? Of no nation, No Oath, not sworn to Fleet law?”

  I’m bound by Annela’s whims, if nothing else. Parrish had been sidling closer, easing his way between the obstacle course of drinkers. “The thing is—”

  Corsetta saw something in Sophie’s face. She leapt up, but the captain was already close enough to make flight pointless.

  He took her by the arm, gently. “Make no trouble, Kir. We can say you surrendered.”

  “Never!” The kid turned her big wounded eyes on Sophie.

  In a movie, this would turn into a brawl, Sophie thought. Corsetta would incite her poker buddies to intervene on her behalf, and things would degenerate into bottles smashing on heads and a tinkling player-piano sound track.

  But Corsetta simply said to Parrish, “You are interfering with true love, Kir. I suppose you don’t believe in it, either.”

  Parrish gave Sophie a surprised glance.

  “I believe,” he said, “that facing your accusers is the obvious way out of your difficulties.”

  “I need to go home.” For just a moment, she looked very young and
wholly desperate. Then she mastered herself. “Bad luck to you both, Kirs. Love will avenge herself.”

  “Flinging curses is poor form,” he told her.

  “What do you expect?” Corsetta told him, bitterly. “I’m just a goatherd.”

  They caught a ferry to Gatehouse, left her there with the Watch, and went on to Nightjar.

  “True love’s gonna get you,” Sophie said, making a joke of it.

  “Corsetta is very young,” Parrish replied. His expression was closed, guarded.

  “Curses like that don’t work, do they?”

  “As with anything, my name would be required for a curse.”

  “She’s pretty devious. Maybe she slipped it off Nightjar.”

  “My middle name is lost—even I don’t know it.”

  “Oh, I’d forgotten that.”

  He frowned. “I didn’t know you knew.”

  Why does this feel awkward? “Did you by any chance find Verena?”

  “She went to Breadbasket to see her mother.” He shook his head. “Your mother, that is.”

  Beatrice. Stuck under house arrest, with no idea there was a scheme afoot to bail her. “There’s something about this that you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”

  “My orders are very specific,” he said. “And recently, bracingly, reclarified.”

  “Meaning yes.”

  “There’s nothing you couldn’t work out for yourself, if you directed your attention to the matter.”

  “Directed my…” She remembered what he’d said at dinner. “Politics, not nature. I will work it out, whatever it is.”

  He nodded, agreeing, somehow very sober.

  “What happens with you guys while I’m off with Cly?”

  “Unknown. Annela is unlikely to offer Verena a proper assignment. We may be at loose ends until there’s a package to be taken to Erstwhile.”

  “She couldn’t interest herself in this whole Tibbon’s Wash situation, could she?”

  “Verena?” Parrish gave her a considering look.

  “Come on. Corsetta talks the big talk about being base to the poet boy’s catalyst, but there’s a reason she wants to get home before the brother does. She’s desperate. Plus, we don’t know yet who healed her or why she was aboard that derelict.”

  He said, “You don’t lend any credence to her feelings?”

  “That romantic stuff plays better in stories than in real life, doesn’t it? Come on, she’s fifteen? Once the hormone rush abates a little, they’ll both move on.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That girl’s got bigger ambitions than some crab boat can hold.”

  “So if she’s ambitious—”

  “Ambitious and a liar. Definitely playing us, probably playing the elder brother, possibly even playing her alleged one true love.”

  “Then she’s incapable of love? Or unworthy?”

  “Oh, she can feel whatever she likes. They both can. That doesn’t make them pair-bonded for life, whatever they may think now.”

  “I see,” he said, words clipped.

  She decided to ignore the tone. “Anyway, in what world does a family of fishers care if one of the farmgirls takes a useless young dreamer off their hands?”

  “Tibbon’s Wash is a stratified kingdom from the port side of the government,” he said. “The Queen’s favor allows people to attempt to earn boons from the crown. It builds in a little flexibility.”

  “A safety valve,” she said. “I got that much.”

  He didn’t look as though he knew what that meant. “They’ve been unfortunately stuck for a number of years. Nobody’s been able to bring in a quiescent snow vulture. The appointed quest proved too difficult; there haven’t been any boons for over a decade.”

  “Bad luck for them. But Gale used to do this, didn’t she? Just decide to poke her nose into things? She didn’t always wait for Annela to give her orders.”

  “I’ll suggest to Verena that ‘we poke into it,’ as you say,” he said. “Thank you, Sophie. It’s kind of you to think of her.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Some of the biggest ships in the civilian quarter of the Fleet were jammed from bilge to gunwales with law offices, and Mensalom Bimisi had a suite of cabins within one such enormous sailing ship in the civilian quarter.

  He was a slow-moving Tiladene man, mushroom pale, with bedroom eyes and an odd, drawling Fleet accent. He laid the terms of the deal out for Sophie in pokey, exhausting detail.

  The gist was that Cly would perform an unspecified “personal service” for Sophie (nowhere in the forty pages of “why” and “wherefore” did he admit to having influence over Beatrice’s bail process) and Sophie, in return, would accompany him to Sylvanna. She would tour his lowlands estate, register at the birth office, present herself to the head of his family and—apparently this was key—attend some big summer festival at the Spellscrip Institute.

  Neither of them was obliged to do anything after that. Cly could, if he wished, make her his heir. Sylvanna would, as a matter of course, automatically issue her a birth certificate.

  It seemed crazy that she needed what was practically an international treaty just to go visit her birth father’s home. But despite Cly’s being a judge, it was obvious the Verdanii side of the family simply didn’t trust him.

  “At some point in this process, after you’re documented Sylvanner, Kir Banning could give you an additional name,” Mensalom said.

  “A Sylvanner name?”

  “As I understand it, yours has fallen into common knowing. Properly altering your identity would protect you from malicious enchantment.”

  “Okay, good.” Her thoughts skipped over the memory of the two men she’d seen being killed by inscription.

  Mensalom gave such an impression of overall sleepiness that she was tempted to assume he wasn’t all that good at what he did, but she’d seen the looks on both Annela and Cly’s faces when he’d been named as her lawyer in the action. At the very least, he had a fearsome reputation.

  The lawyer glanced at a timepiece on his desk. “Your father should be here by now. Is there anything you’d like to discuss before I invite him in to review the amendments and sign the documents?”

  She shook her head and her birth father swept in, kissed the spot atop her head, threw Mensalom a halfhearted bow, then draped himself in a chair.

  “Is this it?” He picked the document off the table and began skimming, just looking for the places where Mensalom had tweaked the original text.

  “Did you see you may bring companions?” Cly asked.

  Sophie nodded. “I’d ask Bram, but he’s you-know-where.”

  “Your half-sister?”

  “She has business.” And she’d be obliged to cramp my research style.

  “Do you remember that cadet from graduation? She came in second in the Slosh?”

  “Zita?”

  “You have an excellent memory. She will be aboard Sawtooth; she’s about your sister’s age. Since you’re too old for a governess and too well schooled to bother with a tutor, I have also engaged a memorician.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Sophie said, and saw Mensalom’s eyebrows quirk upward in surprise.

  “He reads,” Cly said. “And has perfect recall.”

  “A walking library, in other words?” She almost clapped.

  “His shelf’s a little empty at the moment, but you can stack him.” Cly beamed. “Is there anything else you need? Any possessions you wish transferred to my ship?”

  “Nightjar’s got my diving kit,” she said. “Annela’s confiscated my cameras and all our instruments, mine and Bram’s. I don’t expect you to perform miracles, but—”

  “Watch me.” Cly handed over a card embossed with the Judiciary seal. “If you need anything else, charge it to Sawtooth.”

  “An allowance, huh?”

  “Traveling expenses,” Mensalom said. “Provided for in the agreement.”

  “Right, right. I did listen, sorry.” />
  “Sign here,” he said, offering her a pen. “Kir Sophie, all my best. Your Honor, I’ll have these read to the contracts registrar this afternoon.”

  To her surprise, Lais was lounging in the outer parlor when she and Cly emerged with their respective copies of the signed documents.

  The two men exchanged perfunctory bows.

  “How’s your head?” Cly said. Lais had been badly injured six months ago in an assassination attempt. Like Corsetta, he was alive only because someone had written an inscription to magically restore him.

  “Works about as well as it did before,” Lais said. “I only use it to reckon racing odds, in any case.”

  “You underrate yourself,” Cly said. “You’ve done my daughter a service here, in Bimisi.”

  “Mensalom? He only takes clients who interest him,” Lais said. “Sophie’s merits on that score have nothing to do with me.”

  “True enough. Well, I’m sure you have good-byes. Sophie, will you be all right if I leave you?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Sawtooth awaits your pleasure.” With that, Cly left.

  “How’d you like Mensalom?” Lais asked.

  “He’s sharp,” she said. “So. Verena and I left you to fend for yourself the other night, when we stormed out.”

  “It was all to the good. Convenor Gracechild is a thoroughly charming hostess.”

  She looked at him askance. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  “Unless you lack imagination. Verdanii matriarchs like a bit of young chaw. Didn’t you know? It’s one of that nation’s more attractive qualities, as far as I’m concerned. Far outweighs the storied merits of their beer.”

  “Annela’s got to be—”

  “She’s intelligent, self-aware, powerful.…” He waggled his eyebrows. “Physically fit—”

  “Stop. That’s way too much info.”

  “Now, Sophie, it’s not as though she’s actually an elder to you. You’ve met a handful of times. And I know you’re not a prude.”

  “Still!”

  “And you’re done with me, aren’t you?”