A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “You don’t even have to tour me around the grounds, if you don’t want.”

  The boy sighed. “Come on, Mirrie. You know we better do as he says.”

  The girl slipped out of the white shoes with a sigh of relief, picking them up and disappearing inside. The boy loosened his collar, rolled up his cuffs, and fished in his pockets for the makings of a cigarette. “So, Kir, you’re Verdanii?” His Fleet was decent, his accent faint.

  Sophie shook her head. She’d renounced any claim on Verdanii citizenship when she first came here. It was that or basically steal Verena’s life out from under her. “They tell me I’m an outlander.”

  “Marvelous! Is it true what they say about the outlands?”

  “What do they say?”

  “Petrodemons hunt the unwary by night, roaring, with glowing lamps for eyes.”

  “Petrodemons, huh? And what, exactly, would they be?”

  “They breathe fire and choking blackness—”

  Mervin was interrupted by his sister’s return; she had a pair of boots and was looking around in confusion.

  “Where’s Betta?”

  Mervin said something in Sylvanner, in an undertone and fast. Mirelda snapped Sophie a glance and struggled into her boots. It was apparent that she usually had help.

  “Come on,” Sophie said, after she’d laced them up. “Let’s have a look at the joint.”

  Neither of them seemed inclined to lead, so she headed off the veranda, into the full sun and the sauna of midsummer. She picked a direction, heading out along the boundary of the orchard, picking a leaf or two off every plant she came across, tucking them into one of her notebooks. They followed a fence that ran parallel to the estate’s driveway, climbing a low hill.

  “How much of this is Low Bann?”

  “All you see,” Mirelda huffed, “and more besides.”

  So Cly’s family had more land than the three of them could wander in a short stretch of time.

  They reached a long hedge of flowered bushes—a lagerstroemia variant, Sophie thought, as she took a leaf and a blossom. They’d be deliberately cultivating them within a convenient distance of the apiaries. Behind the hedge, hidden from the house, was the bird coop she’d spotted. It was occupied by a dozen ordinary chickens and one smallish ostrich.

  “Want to pet her?” Mervin suggested. He had lit his smoke and appeared to be enjoying the amble. Mirelda looked as though she couldn’t believe she’d made it this far. “Her feathers are very soft.”

  His sister shot him a look, sideways.

  “You first,” Sophie said, and Mervin’s smirk widened. “Yeah. Thought so.”

  “She’d have left you your fingers,” he said, with a lazy grin that probably disarmed people all the time.

  Sophie took a few photos of the ostrich and continued on.

  Nothing she saw over the course of the next hour did anything to convince her that Mervin was anything other than a mean-spirited little thug. Mirelda, she wasn’t so sure about—she was unused to walking and kept hinting they should just go back to the house.

  The air was hot and thick and there were marvels at every step: potter wasps and sawflies, and more sun-burnished, half-ripe peaches and nectarines. She saw a huge leopard frog for all of an instant before it shot off its log and into the shelter of the nearest puddle of water.

  Sophie made her way down past the built-up area the house occupied to a boardwalk that led to the increasingly lush swamp.

  Mirelda balked. “I think we’ve gone plenty far.”

  “Go back to the house … it’s fine.”

  An anguished look. “Mervin.”

  “Come on, Mirrie, it’ll be fun. Cly told us to entertain Cousin Zophie.”

  He means maybe Cousin Zophie will get herself scared by an alligator, Sophie thought.

  “Seriously, Mirelda, you don’t have to come.”

  “Look!” The girl pointed, tone falsely bright. “It’s the Autumn spellscribe!”

  Two vehicles were rolling up the drive. One was Cly’s carriage, laden with trunks, and—she assumed—carrying Krispos and Zita.

  Behind it was something that looked less like a wagon and more like a rolling teacup, chariot-size and orange in color, horseless, with a whirling base that glowed even in the midday sunlight.

  “They haven’t seen us,” Mervin said. “We can vanish into the swamp.”

  Sophie considered. It was only two hundred meters. But if Zita was in Cly’s wagon, maybe she could trade the twins in for better company … not to mention getting Mirelda out of what she clearly saw as a forced march.

  She probably got blisters from wearing Fenn’s shoes.

  “Let’s go say hello.”

  The vehicles stopped as soon as the driver saw them. Zita disembarked, wearing the same foreigner’s sash Sophie wore—black fabric, white glass bauble—and an expression of sheer amazement. Her surprise doubled when Sophie bounded up and hugged her.

  Krispos peered out at her from inside the carriage. He’d had his nose in a book, naturally. “Well met, Kir Sophie.”

  “Hi, Krispos.” To Zita she said, “I’m going to say hello to some scribe, then I’m headed off exploring. Want to come?”

  Zita grinned. Aboard ship, she’d never quite shed her air of military discipline, but now she seemed more relaxed, a bit like a college student on vacation. “I could use a decent walk on land.”

  Mervin didn’t look as though he had much idea what to do with himself amid this sudden crowd. He hung to the rear, recalculating.

  Mirelda, all smiles, led a spindle-limbed woman, with ink-smudged hands and a slight limp, toward them. “Cousin Sophie,” she said formally, “this is Autumn of the Spell.”

  Sophie matched Zita’s bow and said, “My friend, Cadet Judge Zita.”

  Zita shot her a second surprised look and Sophie suppressed a smirk. Of course I’ve picked up some Fleet etiquette.

  Autumn returned their bow.

  There was an air of expectation that suggested to Sophie that it fell to her to push the conversation along. She tried: “So, what brings you to Low Bann?”

  “I come often to visit.” She gave Mirelda a warm smile, and Sophie saw a gap in her teeth, likewise marked with ink.

  She chews her pen.

  “Mirelda hopes to join the institute once she’s married.”

  “Nice,” Sophie said, liking the girl better for having a vocation.

  “Shame she’s dumber than a Haver,” Mervin muttered, too softly for Autumn to hear. Mirelda heard, though: a shock ran through her, making her curls bounce.

  “We’re off to explore the swamp,” Sophie said. “Maybe, Mirelda, you’d like to go with Autumn here? There’s space in Cly’s carriage. Is there a library in the house? You’d really help me out if you got Krispos reading indexes, directories, anything that offers an overview of local politics or science.”

  “I’ll find him something.” Mirelda scrambled aboard with her head raised, though she was blinking back tears. Krispos patted her hand.

  Sophie looked at Mervin.

  “Oh,” he said. “I’ll stick with you.”

  “Suddenly not so sure you’re invited.”

  “Stop me,” he said, sauntering back toward the swamp.

  Autumn gave them a resigned shrug, then climbed back into her fabulous teacup, whirring up the drive. The wagon followed; Zita and Sophie started for the boardwalk.

  “Cousins of yours, the girl said,” Zita said.

  “Evil troll child, in Merv’s case. He’s hoping I’ll see a spider and faint dead away.”

  “I studied with a fellow like that.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  Zita’s eyes—they were amber, almost as yellow as a wolf’s—got wide. Sophie remembered, suddenly, that she was gay. “Not that I’m flirting.”

  “Understood.” An easier smile. “Your Fleet cutter has been sighted en route here.”

  “Nightjar?”

  “They’ll make port i
n a few days if—”

  “If winds be fair?” The thought of getting back to Nightjar was like seeing the sun after weeks of cold and rain. “What a relief. I’ve done the birth registry, I’ve seen Low Bann. Now all that’s left on that damn contract I signed is surviving this summer ball and seeing the Spellscrip Institute. Then I’m out of here.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Zita said, more formally.

  That’s right, she worships Cly.

  “Sorry,” Sophie said. “You’re in an awkward position with all this.”

  Zita waved off the expression of concern as if it were a harmless insect. It was a gesture Sophie recognized—she’d picked it up from Cly.

  The boardwalk led through a trimmed corridor of branches, carefully hedged and netted—because of the poisonous vipers, Sophie would have bet—and then out over a riparian strip leading to a circular, mirror-smooth pond. The grass ceded to muck under the boards, then to actual puddles pierced at the edges by needle-thin reeds. The water was alive with clouds of insects. No mosquitos, thankfully, but there were plenty of dragonflies darting about. The air thrummed with frogsong. Water skimmers swirled over the surface of the pond in packs, like kids skating. Sophie spotted a toad that was extinct in the wild at home and felt that ache again, that sense of having to choose between two lives.

  She should be moving through this swamp a few square feet at a time, inventorying wildlife species, taking pictures and samples.

  She thought of an otter-built raft she’d seen six month earlier, out in the ocean. Just one of who knew how many wonders waiting to be discovered.

  The trees here were of a broadleaf species; their trunks were the same ash-colored hue as a bush she’d spotted on the road. Here at the trailhead, where the boardwalk skirted the lake, the trees were widely spaced. Managed, Sophie suspected. The leaf litter on the land side of the boardwalk was thick, wet, and sludgy. But some of the puddles in the muck around the lake—a few dozen of the hundreds visible from this vantage point—had been cleared of refuse. In each of these puddles one green leaf sat, centered in the shallow water, bowed upward like a little umbrella.

  Sophie bent, carefully fishing up a sodden stick, discarding it and then finding a dry one.

  “Want my sword?” Zita said.

  “This’ll do.” Using the stick, she lifted one of the umbrella leaves. It had been floored in a delicate web that held the water as she raised it. A dark green shape, eight-legged, many-eyed, stared back at her.

  She raised the whole thing, setting it on the boardwalk, and took out her camera.

  “The structure of the web makes both a floor and a float,” Sophie said, setting the camera, too, on the boardwalk floor and crouching down until she was almost on her belly to take the shots. “It sits below the surface of the water and the bugs skate in.”

  “So, a spider?”

  “Want to see?”

  Zita smiled and bent to peer inside.

  Mervin had vanished beyond the lake, into the deeper swamp. Now he returned at the mouth of the next cut-in corridor of vegetation. “Are you coming, Kirs?”

  “Are we?”

  “Much as I’d like to show up the little troll, we don’t have provisions for a good hike,” Sophie said.

  “I’m sure His Honor didn’t mean for us to disappear for hours.”

  “Plenty to see right here.” She offered Zita a look at the camera, got an incurious head shake in return, and replaced the spider within its puddle. Then she took a closer look at the lake’s edge. The water looked to be maybe eighteen inches in depth—she pushed her stick down. It resisted when she pulled it back. “Spongy, you see? Not sandy.”

  “Who’s a coward now?” Mervin shouted.

  “Look,” Sophie said. She had the camera trained on the water—a school of green minnows was passing through. One blundered into a spider trap that had drifted out into the open water. The leaf rocked wildly.

  Rather than try to take on a fish, the spider cut the strands of its floor loose. The leaf sprung free; the minnow shot back toward its school.

  Patiently, the spider began to rebuild its home.

  “Any interest in this?” Zita had found a fire salamander on a nearby leaf. It blinked at them, unconcerned.

  Sophie grinned at the amphibian. “He’s lovely.”

  She could do this forever: sit in an abundant ecosystem, near water, and just take it in.

  Rustling across the lake drew her attention next.

  Her first reaction to the figures was excitement, a bursting, exuberant Oh!

  And then it was Fauns, wow, fauns!

  And then realization, like being plunged into ice water: Oh.

  If you couldn’t see their legs, the three slaves did look a little like mythical Greek fauns. Stubs of horn protruded from their foreheads, and their faces were elongated into goatlike muzzles, with sharp, small, close-set teeth, optimized for cropping and grinding. But their limbs were ropey, their toes long rather than hooved, the better to climb and grip the vines and tree branches.

  Goats atop, apes below, she thought.

  They made their way around the edge of a pool, taking care not to wade, half-climbing the trees to keep their legs out of the water.

  They clambered onto a big tree choked with the throttlevine Cly had mentioned, the kudzu variant. Methodically, they began stripping off the bark and munching. Dull brown manacles encircled their wrists.

  Sophie shot a look at Zita, who was trying to master her own expression of horror.

  “Oddities,” she whispered. “I had heard there was a problem with their swamps, that they’d transformed.”

  “Hundreds,” Sophie said. “Cly told me there were hundreds.”

  Zita’s lips moved … in prayer? She tried to look away from the three malformed people, perched in a tree and eating a knotty vine of, probably, limited nutritional value, but her eyes were drawn back.

  “You’ve never seen a slave before, either,” Sophie said.

  “I’m of the Tall. But…” She meant she was from one of the free nations, Tallon, one of the few Sophie had seen with her own eyes. She seemed to be forcing the words out. “The Fleet of Nations respects the concessions of all its member states.”

  Pah. You’re as freaked out as I am. “I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I know you’re pretty keen on Cly. As a mentor, I mean.”

  This time, Zita did manage to gather herself. “He’s a man of the Fleet. Truly, Sophie, it’s not the same. You must see—”

  “This is his land, Zita. He owns them.”

  Without discussing it, they walked further, rounding the curve where Mervin had been lurking, taking themselves out of sight of the tree and its occupants.

  “I’m being hypocritical, aren’t I?” The words came bursting from her. “Letting Cly shoo the household servants out of sight, telling myself I’ll do some minimal socializing and get Beatrice out of jail and run off without getting my hands dirty. But it’s all around—landowners didn’t build this boardwalk I’m walking on, or tend that fabulous horse I rode here from the dock.”

  “Sophie?”

  “I just. Don’t. Understand.” She felt like some kind of lady with the vapors, breaking down in tears here in the wilds.

  Zita had a glance down the next corridor for Mervin and then said, quietly, “Before the Compact was signed, a little over a hundred years ago, the Piracy had free rein to prey on the lesser nations. They’d sail someplace weak, like Redcap Island, and scoop up whole villages. They’d kill as they pleased and carry prisoners back through the archipelagos of the Bonded Isles, selling them at market. The free nations made attempts, now and then, to stop them, but …

  “In time they started to form up in a larger fleet. Even the bonded nations could see value in stopping the raids on their shipping and their cargo vessels. The pirates place great value on reputation—whenever one of them was trying to make a name, often as not they’d kidnap someone rich from a great nation and subject them to hor
rors before ransoming them.”

  Horrors. Bram had been grabbed by pirates. They’d used a needle to force a pearl under his thumbnail.

  “It’s what happened here—they grabbed an estate holder and her seamstress and tortured them to death in the Butcher’s Baste. It’s why Sylvanna and the Verdanii agreed to commission the building of Temperance.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You want to understand, don’t you?”

  She rubbed at her eyes and nodded.

  Zita continued, “When the preeminent nations from both sides agreed to stop the Piracy, others joined up fast. Sylvanna convinced their sister nations on the port side that the only way to truly stop the raiders was to outlaw the transport of slaves. My gran says the free nations told themselves that without shipping, without new…”

  “Bodies? Raw materials?”

  Zita didn’t argue with her word choice. “They were naive. Some thought that over time, conscience would take hold among the slavers. Others believed that if the raids on lesser nations stopped, the bonded nations would start running out of slaves. But breeding and smuggling … and even under Fleet law, if you commit a serious crime, you can choose bondage over execution. So there are as many bonded as ever.”

  Sophie stared at her dully. “You buy their goods. Ualtar … Tallon buys their spidersilk rope for shipbuilding spells.”

  “What would you have the free do, Sophie?” Zita spoke gently. “The Fleet shields the lesser nations. The Convene has spent a century trying to come to an agreement on slavery that would alter the balance and satisfy everyone, but each side has their concessions and nobody’s giving them up.”

  “You could help people escape.”

  “There are many who do so. Why do you think the Butcher’s Baste is so heavily defended?”

  “And encourage rebellions?”

  “Of course. But who do you think gets killed when there’s an uprising?”

  “The slaves.” Sophie sighed. “Naturally.”

  “My gran says it’ll come to war, maybe soon. That the free and the bonded can’t ignore their differences forever, and the Cessation will break.” Zita looked up suddenly. “What was that?”

  “That” had been a cry of sorts, a quiet one.