“Hemp, huh?”
“Sylvanna does trade in rope. It’s not as fine as Ualtar’s, but we make do. And hemp’s crucial to binding spells. Tobacco’s a popular smoking herb, and you can kill crop pests with it. There’s a poison—”
“Nicotine.” She nodded.
“When I was a child, I would sometimes elude my tutors and attempt to make a big circuit of the estate. They usually caught me at the boat launch. I was often restless, and there was something about pacing out the boundaries of Low Bann that I found … calming.”
“Is there a High Bann?”
“Yes. In Winter District. It’s held by distant relations, but there’s no real family connection there.”
“You make it all sound very landed gentry. Country estates, agriculture, hunting, fishing, riding.” As she said this, she felt a hint of disquiet. Tobacco plantations, she thought. “What about cities?”
“Ah!” He leaped up, opening a chest and bringing out a huge leather-bound folio that turned out to be full of watercolor paintings. Cracking it open, he laid a picture in her lap.
It was a city viewed from a height. Its structures were largely made of red brick. A cluster of towers maybe five stories high marked the downtown core. The cityscape lacked steeples or domes. Its most prominent features were a marble turret and the double spike of a clock tower. East of that was a high ridge with what looked like giant marbles scattered across it.
“This is Autumn City,” Cly said, “capital of the harvest province, nearest city to Low Bann. The complex on the hill, with the round structures, is Autumn’s Spellscrip Institute.”
“This is an aerial view,” she said.
“You’re familiar with hot air balloons?”
“Yes.”
“The artist sketched the city from above.”
She laid a finger on the clock tower.
“The county government,” he said. “The nation is too populous to be managed by a single bureaucracy, you see. There are four districts, named for the seasons.”
The bridges over the river showed a suggestion of horse-drawn carriages, and there were riverboats on the water. How many people lived there? A hundred thousand? Two?
She turned to the next picture in the folio, finding a painting of a stone-faced boy holding a dog that might have been a whippet. He had the blank expression one saw on devil-children on the posters of horror films. “Is this you?”
“Awful, isn’t it?” Cly nodded. “Mother and I had a row over me sitting that day; she made an especially unflattering portrait as revenge.”
“These are—my grandmother painted these?”
Cly thumbed to another picture, removing the blank expression from view. She didn’t blame him. It was an unnerving image. “I thought you might be interested, since you make pictures, too, in your way.”
“In my way,” she echoed.
“You are stunningly easy to offend,” he commented, which miffed her all the more.
The next picture showed a dock extending into a swamp. The path to the dock had been carved through foliage so dense it looked like a green tube, with a little skylight cut through it for light. The brush had been cleared around the dock itself to create a work area—there were two canoes tied up in the water and a third racked between two nearby trees. The close-cropped grass was decorated with sprays of red flowers and nodding Jack in the pulpit. A cleaning hut sat back from the water—a trio of dead rabbits, dressed but not yet skinned, sat on a low shelf beside its door.
“Is this the boat launch you mentioned? Where they’d catch you?”
“On my escape attempts, yes.”
Her eye fell on a painted trunk of a dead tree at the edge of the clearing. It was covered in vine and familiar bursts of purple blooms.
“Throttlevine,” Cly said. “You reviewed the case?”
“The brief, yes. Sylvanna thinks the … you call them Havers, right?”
“The people of Haversham? Yes, they’re Havers.”
“That the Havers deliberately introduced the vine to your ecosystem. It does look like kudzu.”
“The case was part of the reason I joined the Judiciary.”
“The infestations are on Low Bann. On your estate? That’s why you’re recused from the case?”
“Exactly. It’s all over the lowlands.” He nodded. “Under control, for the most part, but ineradicable.”
“Controlled how?”
“In the Autumn District, at last count, we had corps of four hundred transformed slaves—”
Sophie got to her feet so fast she didn’t even feel her grandmother’s watercolors spilling off her lap onto the floor.
CHAPTER 11
She didn’t try to explain herself; there was no explaining, and so she just ran, out of the cabin, still clad in the super-thin green seventies dress and the jade necklace. She blew past the captain, Beck, and then froze.
Cly would just follow her to her cabin.
The talking masthead, she thought, and made her way below.
Eugenia was arranged on her post, a dangling angel. She reminded Sophie of a play she’d seen: Peter Pan, Wendy hovering from the fly loft on barely visible cables.
“Are you a slave, too?” Sophie demanded, but Eugenia remained wood.
She sank to the floor, hugged her knees, and started to bawl. “Oh, Bram, I’ve been so stupid.”
She’d known some of the island nations kept slaves; the Piracy smuggled them, and the theocracy she’d tangled with last time, Ualtar, kept people in bondage. But it wasn’t allowed in Fleet, nobody ever talked about it, and she’d assumed … what?
That it was the minor countries, the ones that used that phrase, what was it?
We’re no great nation, that was it.
Sylvanna was big and rich and she’d figured it was kind of corporate, what with all the big talk of the Spellscrip Institute and its accomplishments. And once again she’d gotten all wrapped up in vegetation and swamp ecosystems and turtles.
Asking the wrong questions.
She thought of Tonio, trying to say something and getting hushed. And Parrish, every time he’d said something about one nation or another. This country, from the port side, he’d kept saying. That one, to starboard. Euphemisms for slave and free.
To hell with obeying orders. He should have just said!
A hand on her shoulder—Eugenia.
“What is it, child?”
“Not—a—child,” Sophie managed to blurt out between sobs, and then she cried the harder.
“I feel uneasy,” Eugenia said, when she began to calm. “I wish my crew were aboard. Cly and his training cruises … the cadets yank me around so.”
“You’re the ship?” Sophie sniffled. “Does it hurt where the deck caught fire?”
“Like a healing wound now. Itches. Tell me, Sophie, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “I just realized something about…” She paused. Eugenia was probably a charter member of the Cly Banning fan club. “I don’t think I can become Sylvanner after all.”
“You’re from one of the free nations.”
She nodded. “Parrish was trying to tell me. They must have ordered him not to, Verena and Annela and Beatrice; they must have known I’d missed it.”
“Beatrice Feliachild Banning would never have agreed to deceive you about that.”
“You know her? My birth mother?”
“She had many a good weep right where you’re sitting, in the later days with Cly. And once, more recently.”
“When Cly hauled her off to face charges.”
Eugenia nodded.
“How could she do it? How could she marry someone who keeps four hundred slaves in his personal swamp?”
“It’s a difficult situation.” The carved woman tiptoed over to a barrel, one of a bunch lashed to a low shelf. It contained some kind of wood oil. She ran it up and down her arms like lotion, working it into her body until she glowed, lavishing extra attention on her toes.
“Issle Morta doesn’t have slaves, does it?” Sophie asked.
“Which one is that?”
“The monks who care for the dead. They used to be pirates.”
“Oh, flailers. Yes, but they use the slavery clauses in a rather peculiar way—to protect kidnap victims. Why?”
She colored. “No reason.”
Eugenia finished working the oil into her limbs and said, “Come. I know something that used to cheer Beatrice.”
“I’m not sure I want to be cheered.” But, despite everything, curiosity stirred. Beatrice had, so far, seemed entirely bad tempered. What could put a dent in that much sour?
Being married to a slave-owning, sociopathic, court-appointed killer might make me pissy, too.
Eugenia pulled a sheet off of a huge draped object. It looked like a double-wide harp, two strung frames like a butterfly’s wings, with a low platform between them.
“Nice,” Sophie said.
“Come, play with me.”
“I don’t know beans about the harp. I play guitar, but—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll do the tough work.”
“Won’t someone hear?”
“Do you think your father doesn’t know exactly where you are?”
Sophie’s spirits sank. Of course he did. “Okay. Show me what to do.”
Eugenia led her to the harp and stepped onto the platform, holding out a hand. Sophie joined her. They stood almost back to back, and she could easily imagine what a sight it would make in a grand hall. Two musicians, prettily dressed, framed by the spreading wings of the harp.
The wood of its frame was darker than Eugenia’s; it had gold filigree in flowered patterns.
“Pick a note, any note.”
Sophie plucked a string, sending a low, humming note through the boards of the hold.
Eugenia chose two of her own, strumming, and the note became a chord, ringing sweetly to the rafters.
The harps are tuned so they’ll play chords, she thought. She chose another string, then a third. Eugenia counterbalanced them, filling the cargo hold with music, a not-quite-tune in no style Sophie could pin down. It had the random quality of improvisational jazz, but the harp’s sound was reminiscent of Celtic music, and the flow of the notes was a bit pendular. A dance, perhaps?
Once she had the hang of it, Eugenia fell into a pattern of six notes, over and over, two sets of triplets. Thrum thrum THRUM, thrum tum TUM.
“Can you sustain this?” she asked.
“One two THREE two two THREE.” Sophie nodded. “No problem.”
Eugenia cut loose, hands flying over the harp’s strings, filling the chamber and presumably the whole of the ship with a hearty, soaring melody. It was triumphal, fit for the Queen marching into Westminster Abbey at the head of a conquering army. She threw back her head and let out a high soprano cry, bright wordless notes that raised the hair on the back of Sophie’s neck.
One two THREE two two THREE. She kept her attention focused entirely on the pattern of strings and the rhythm.
It stilled her mind, even as it scoured her—her whirling feelings fell into order. There was the music itself, a feeling, pushing through her, making her bigger, opening her soul. It clarified the terrible realization: Cly was pretty much an alien form of life. She took one steady glance at the possibility of reconciling herself to a Sylvanna that kept slaves and found certainty.
I could never, I will never.
One two three two two three. As the song wound to a sudden, gentle close, she found herself easing into a sort of chilly sangfroid, a sense of resolution.
Eugenia lay a hand on her shoulder. “I would be very grateful, Sophie, if you told Beatrice how happy I was to see her again.”
She hugged the figurehead, encountering wood instead of flesh, and felt a harrowing loneliness. “That was incredible. Thank you.”
A genial smile. “My timbers are easier now.”
“Mine, too.” It was true.
She helped Eugenia drape the harp under its sheet and then peeked out of the hatch, half-expecting Cly to be out there, waiting to pounce. But the corridor was empty. He wasn’t lurking on the passenger deck, either, or in her cabin.
She sat at the writing desk and started with Verena writing:
HE’S A SLAVER??? ZOMG, DEAL’S OFF. COME GET ME.
And then one to Bram. I’M NOT OKAY, AS IT TURNS OUT. NOT OKAY AT ALL. COMING HOME AS SOON AS I CAN GET VERENA TO FETCH ME. AT LEAST THE PARENTS WON’T HAVE TO STRESS OUT ANYMORE.
CHAPTER 12
She was surprised when Cly stayed out of her way for the remainder of the day, and all of the next one, too. She ate with Zita and and spent her hours in the lab, dissecting a rat that had turned up in the hold, and on the little portside deck, looking for things to film and longing to see Nightjar’s sail.
Krispos didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss—he sat in his accustomed place in her lab, reading and answering questions about more of the bogus sciences, sympathism and alchemy.
To keep her mind occupied, she turned to the turtle migration lawsuit. Cly had brought a number of turtle shells aboard, from the species in question, and they seemed normal enough in terms of their makeup and texture.
By day’s end, she’d written out two possible paths to pursue on the turtle case. One would require some research; the other was a reasonable experimental protocol for proving whether what Grimreef alleged was true—that the turtles returned to whatever beach they hatched on.
Zita turned up that second afternoon. “We’re a day out from Sylvanna.”
“I’m not setting foot—” Sophie checked herself. This wasn’t Zita’s fault.
The girl lifted the corners of her mouth in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “His Honor asked me to beg you for an audience.”
“Beg, huh?”
“He’s terribly upset,” she said, and now she was the one stopping herself from saying more.
What am I gonna do, avoid him forever?
She went back to her cabin and checked her notes. Bram’s reply had been: SOFE, IT WILL BE OKAY. TELL ME HOW I CAN HELP.
She missed him.
Verena had been less generous: MOM CAN’T GO HOME IF YOU BREAK CONTRACT.
So that was why Verena had bought in. She’d known Sophie wouldn’t go with Cly if she knew the truth about Sylvanna.
Wouldn’t I do the same, if it was Mom?
Maybe, but that didn’t stop her from replying: YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE LIED. ARE YOU COMING FOR ME? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE COME GET ME!
Stomach churning, she read her contract again. Then she stomped off across the hall to her so-called lab, where Krispos and Zita were holed up, not exactly hovering. She handed the contract to Krispos, who absorbed all forty pages in about fifteen minutes flat.
He handed it back. “I’m no lawyer, but the language seems clear enough.”
“So if I refuse to get off Sawtooth when we dock…”
“His Honor is no longer obliged to perform the unspecified favor mentioned in clauses four, six, and paragraph—”
“Right. He won’t let Beatrice have her bail. Are there any loopholes? Penalties I missed?” She felt a surge of remorse as she said it. Basically, she was saying, Screw Beatrice, what about me?
Beatrice. If she hadn’t whisked me off to San Francisco, I might even now own people. I might be okay with owning people.
The wave of revulsion was so great her knees buckled. Zita put out a hand to steady her.
“It’s a simple pact,” Krispos said.
“Forty pages of simple.”
He waited, no doubt hoping she’d ask an actual question.
“My take on it is the minimum I have to do is spend a couple nights in his house and review this birth registration he’s filed. And here: it says, ‘consent to be introduced to first circle of Autumn District.’ Do you know what that means?”
He shook his head. “I’m not Sylvanner, Kir.”
“Zita?”
“I think it means
meeting his neighbors. Isn’t there a festival you’re supposed to go to? You’ll have to ask His Honor.”
Subtle hint there. She went back into her cabin and glanced at the messageply again. ARE YOU COMING FOR ME? remained unanswered.
Come on, Parrish, she thought.
“Fine, I’ll talk to Cly.” She went up to the fighting deck to find him.
He was dueling with Captain Beck, the two of them dripping with sweat as they circled and hacked at each other with every appearance of deadly intent. Beck’s spectral hand was extended behind her for balance, ungloved, the bones showing through as always, and she was surprisingly light on her feet for someone who seemed so solid, so rooted to the deck of the ship.
The two of them were moving fast, and the clash of magically treated blades made a terrible racket. Each stroke beat against Sophie’s nerves, which were already strung tight after a night without sleep.
She turned her back on them, staring out across the sea, willing Nightjar to appear. But it didn’t work that way, did it? They’d been talking to people from Tibbon’s Wash, trying to find out what was up with Corsetta and the bird she’d tamed. Even if Verena was at all tempted to help Sophie out of the jam she’d gotten herself into, they’d be a week away, maybe more.
The fight behind her stopped abruptly. She turned to see Beck with her blade at Cly’s throat and an unhappy expression on her face.
“Hes, Lena.” He inclined his head, conceding graciously, and the two shook hands. As Beck walked away, she gave Sophie a scowl whose meaning was clear enough: Stop being a histrionic princess!
When they were alone, or as alone as anyone could be on the busy main deck of a big ship, Cly said, “You didn’t know Sylvanna was one of the bonded nations.”
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“If I point out that my nationality is an accident of birth—”
“You’re going to make excuses for owning people?”
He favored her with an expression she couldn’t read. It wasn’t penitent or defensive, merely watchful.
Shallow emotions, Bram had said.
“What would you have me do, Sophie? Sell them?”
“Sell? Oh my—”
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