A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  The scribes, many of them foreigners, had a network of international contacts: the institute began forming agreements with some of the smaller islands to lock down acquisition of crucial supplies.

  “Suddenly you had spells as well as tobacco for sale.”

  “Exactly. And because there’d been a shortage, tobacco itself had become expensive.”

  At least a handful of those early brilliant researchers had come from the island next door, tempted away from Haversham by promises of unlimited resources for study and a pampered lifestyle.

  As Sylvanna prospered, her ships became a tempting target to raiders. The country directed some of its new wealth into building up its navy, but few nations could stand against a determined assault. The institute was in danger of having its growing intellectual treasury stolen.

  “It was around then that the Verdanii and the Tall put to sea with a few of their allies, looking to put a dent in the raiding traffic. They sent out an open invitation—expecting, you understand, that their allies would join them and the rest of us would decline. But our president sent Excelsior.”

  The history lesson was intriguing. Sophie peeled another of the red fruits and, forgeting herself, offered Cly a segment. He took it with a smile.

  “The story goes that it was Stormwrack’s quietest uproar. Uproar here in our Citizens’ Hall—what was Bellina thinking, allying herself with children of the Allmother?”

  “Another woman leader?”

  “You’re giving me a bad impression of your home nation,” he said. “I am not sure, had we been led by a man, that the Verdanii wouldn’t have found some excuse to leave Excelsior out of the convoy. But the Allmother of Verdanii liked Bellina, and the institute had just developed cannoneers—you remember our cannoneer, of course.”

  Sophie nodded. “Nightjar has one, too.”

  “Excelsior put to sea with forty cannoneers.”

  “So you had the big guns.”

  “Our other option for self-preservation would have been to take the cannoneers to the bandit fleets.”

  “Join the Piracy?”

  He shook himself. “Haversham had been covertly supporting the bandits. They had no more idea of Sylvanna joining the Fleet than anyone else—and they were furious. They made a clumsy attempt to assassinate Bellina, to see if we could be drawn into a local war. This made them look bad in the eyes of the community coalescing asea. Then they joined the Fleet themselves, to agitate against expanding it any further, before more nations like Sylvanna—”

  “Slave nations, you mean?”

  “Yes, before more slavers could join. But the winds were driving it all forward: the Piracy was defeated in the Raiders War, the Compact was written, and the Cessation of Hostilities began.

  “By then, the bitterness between Sylvanna and Haversham was set. In peace, it has festered.”

  They have such a romantic way with words here. Homesickness spiked through her. Dad would love it.

  Cly continued his tale: The first attempt to undercut Sylvanna’s position as a great nation had been in a resurgent form of the tobacco blight. Spies managed to get their hands on the inscriptions for the protected fields in Springland and destroyed them; the blight broke out, and then there had been an infestation of beetles. But the Haversham operatives got themselves caught and were tortured until they confessed.

  Tortured. Sophie swallowed.

  “There was an international outcry. The new government, terrified the Fleet might break apart underfoot, leveed a fine on Haversham. It was an outlandish sum, but by the time they realized that, all they could do was encourage our government to collect it gently.”

  Forgive the debt, in other words. “I bet that worked great.”

  “No,” Cly said, missing or electing to miss the sarcasm. “So the Havers decided to be subtler.”

  Thirty years passed. Then Sylvanna had a trio of exceptionally promising presidents who’d gotten into office and then—almost certainly due to inscription—become emotionally unstable. There’d been an economic disaster, but no evidence that proved Haversham was involved.

  “I’m taking rather a long time to get round to the point, aren’t I?” Cly said.

  “Where else are we going to go?” Sophie said. “Besides, I came here to learn about you, to learn about your culture and Stormwrack.”

  He didn’t comment on the fact that everything she’d seen so far had created a gulf between them.

  The throttlevine had first been seen in the swamps not far from Low Bann, when Cly was a boy. Nobody’d thought much of it at first; the stuff grew all over Haversham, and the ecosystems were similar—it was only twenty miles away, after all. They’d burned it and shrugged it off … the first time. And the second.

  But a decade went by, and the infestations kept resurfacing. Everyone became sure Haversham was responsible, yet nobody could figure out how they were doing it.

  “You said it’s how you came to the Judiciary?”

  Cly nodded. “I have two qualities one seeks in a Judiciary duelist—fighting spirit and a fondness for reading and writing. There were some prominent Havers in the courts; our government wanted volunteers to write the entrance exam. The hope was that some of the highly placed Havers would know about the sabotage. Having failed to surpass us economically or to gain the upper hand through dirty tricks, their leaders concentrated some resources on permeating the Fleet bureaucracy.”

  “An arms race within the civil service.”

  “A competition, at any rate. It’s a fruitless investment of energy, all this hatred.”

  Was that real regret? Or him trying to play her? “So you don’t feel it? You don’t share the animosity?”

  Cly shook his head. “Killing Havers on the dueling deck is no more and no less satisfying than killing anyone else.”

  Which was a little hair-raising, as observations went, and didn’t answer anything.

  The trail narrowed, pressed on either side by densely overgrown bamboo, then widening again just beyond a ramshackle gate, as the untended overgrowth gave way to groomed hedges of the same species.

  “This is the edge of Low Bann,” Cly said. “We’re home.”

  CHAPTER 17

  That night they had an interminable dinner with Cly’s cousins. Sophie’s relatives ate beef, greens, and roasted pears, all harvested and prepared by the bonded. She ate a protein bar, two of the red citrus fruits, and a selection of berries Cly had obliged Mervin to go and collect for her.

  “There’s a Verdanii embassy here,” he told her. “By breakfast I’ll have arranged to buy some grains from them. Mervin will pick them up.”

  If her cousin resented being turned into an errand boy, he knew better than to complain. He was a little pale and stank of smoke but otherwise there was no sign that having his leech inscription torn up had materially damaged him.

  After she finally got away from the table, Sophie smoothed out her two messageply sheets, one from Verena and one from Bram, looking for their latest answers to her notes.

  Verena had nothing new to say.

  The Bram page had Hang in there again, along with some other stuff; they were keeping the books out of his hands, too, but he’d calculated the difference between a Fleet mile and an Imperial one (a Fleet mile came to 3,502 feet, it turned out, though of course they didn’t measure things in feet or inches either). He’d confirmed their observation about the length of the days and “borrowed” a calendar from Sweet—the Stormwrack calendar had ten thirty-six-day months and a three- to four-day “new year’s interval.” They manually adjusted the start of their new year to midnight on the winter solstice. It was a big annual ritual, as it happened, on Verdanii—the setting of the World Clock.

  SUMMER IS WHEN EVERYONE ON SYLVANNA GETS ENGAGED, she wrote, following up with things she’d seen during the day: nothing heavy, just enough to let him see she was well. Saving paper was less urgent now that he was on his way.

  She sat down with the notebooks she’d bought, pagin
g through the one she was beginning to think of as her book of questions, thinking about all the things she wanted to investigate here in Stormwrack. The other book was pristine, devoid of answers or anything else of use.

  “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back,” she whispered to the pages, to all the scrawled notes, all the mysteries and unknowns. Then, despite her resolution, she turned to a blank page in the questions book and added more mysteries to the list.

  Feeling jangly and disconsolate, she took out her video camera, running through the footage gathered so far: the red birds and the soot viper, the twins and the tour through the swamp, and Zita’s accident.

  Not an accident, she thought.

  She watched Autumn Spell working to save Zita, a tiny digital record of the inscription process.

  The video was a reminder of that spell with Cly’s name on it, and the word that might, in Fleet, have meant “temperament.”

  TEMPERAMENT, she wrote in her notebook. EMOTIONAL TEMPERAMENT? TIED TO SOCIOPATHY?

  It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “I’m one party away from being done here.”

  How much could she learn in a day?

  Nothing, if she just sat around.

  She dragged her jeans off the floor and wriggled into them, tiptoeing out into the hall.

  The house was quiet.

  This was foolhardy. Cly had to be a light sleeper.

  She made her way up to the inscription room without waking anyone.

  At first glance, the cabinet full of inscriptions appeared to have vanished. Sophie circled the room, navigating by the dim moonlight shining through the windows. Then she pulled out her camera, lit up the screen, and looked again.

  It was sitting there when we came in, she thought. In front of the wall with the big tapestry.

  Could it be that easy? She tiptoed across the floor, pulled the tapestry aside, and found the cabinet tucked into an alcove.

  The padlock was back in place. She opened the unlocked drawer beneath, flipping through its contents, and finding the thick envelope she’d seen before: CLY—TEMPERAMENTE FEL MEDDIA.

  Breaking the wax seal, she opened the envelope carefully, finding within a stiff card—made of paper, as far as she could tell—bent accordion style. The spellscrip on it glimmered—all spellscrip seemed to glimmer—as she laid it on the floor.

  The magical text was beyond her ability to read, but if she could find a friendly spellscribe, she might find someone to translate it.

  “Temperament.” Is it even the same word in Fleet and Sylvanner? And, if it is, does it follow that someone made Cly sociopathic? It’d be handy, if they were trying to make a killer judge.

  She shuddered, remembering that scowling, horror-movie portrait of her birth father as a boy.

  She focused on the card and filmed every word except the top line, where Cly’s full name (his middle name looked like it might be Iblis) could be found.

  I bet name stealing’s a big ol’ crime here.

  Having finished the recording, she looked at the spell directly.

  What was interesting about the text on this one was it was sealed between the paper and some kind of clear wax. It shifted and moved beneath; in fact, it looked more like water than ink, clear, still wet, with a smattering of little seeds or particles within.

  It’s a long document—hopefully that means the whole magical alphabet’s in here.

  Returning it, she closed the cabinet and draped the tapestry over it. Then she turned her attention to the still-open book Autumn had referenced when writing the spell for Zita. The instructions were written in Fleet and read like an extremely detailed recipe:

  … inscribe text on the flesh of a calf, stillborn in the month of Maiia and the first born by its mother. Ink to use portion of blood from the leeches themselves, a drop of fine whiskey not under five years aged …

  And so on. She filmed a thirty-page sample of the book. It had spells for managing beehive infestations, something for taming and training alligators. It had instructions for creating something called a follow-box whose ingredient list was much like the package she’d bought, back in the Fleet, containing the passenger-pigeon skin. There was even a boutique section: perm your hair, straighten your hair, brighten your eyes. She flipped through the whole thing, took a shot of the title—Common Spells of the Autumn District—and looked for the transformation spell that had turned those slaves into oddities.

  Nothing; this book, at least, had no slavery-related spells.

  She flipped back to the leech cure and put the book back where she found it. Then, creeping downstairs, she went to sit with Zita for a couple of hours, using the dark and quiet to order her thoughts. This Highsummer festival was the last hoop she would have to jump. Beatrice could get her bail. As for whether she got convicted or successfully divorced Cly, that was out of Sophie’s hands now.

  Or was it? There was this throttlevine case. Cly was clearly invested. Maybe he would still go for the upsell if she learned something that would help with that.

  Wait, stop! I have to get home. I have to stop luring Bram here.

  She remembered, six months earlier, diving the floating conglomeration of wreckage and driftwood, constructed by a species of otter, and the diversity of life that raft had drawn—fish, weeds, sea worms, barnacles below the water, and plants, bugs, and birds above.

  And what about this whole wild Verdanii magic thing? If Sophie could learn to transfer back and forth between the worlds as Verena did, she wouldn’t necessarily need government permission to go diving.

  It was a defiant thought, but it lacked conviction. Was she really going to sneak in and out of Stormwrack illegally? Even if she did, how would she hire a ship to take her out to the otters?

  She’d burned her chance at Verdanii citizenship without a thought …

  … and against Cly’s advice, she remembered, a bit ruefully.

  And now she couldn’t become Sylvanner.

  Give it up, give it up, give it, oh, can I, I can’t I can’t I can’t. There has to be a way. Maybe—

  But it was late. Instead of offering up a tidy solution to her bizarre immigration woes, her mind served up an image of Parrish, half a dream, in that bomber jacket of Bram’s, smelling of leather.

  She shook the image away.

  Annela Gracechild’s the key, she thought. She’s the one handing out travel permits and ordering Verena to keep my nose out of the world’s business. Maybe Parrish can tell me how to—no, Verena, maybe Verena can help.

  It wouldn’t hurt to ask Parrish, too.

  Okay, if all she could do was default to thinking about Parrish, then she needed to turn in. She made her way back to the bedroom. Just as she got there, she heard the main doors of the house closing. Someone coming in? Going out?

  She hurried into her room and peered through the silk window, checking the yard. Nobody. From the position of the moon, which was one day short of full, it was late. Two, maybe, or three o’clock.

  She stood stock still, listening for footsteps.

  They came. Confident, quiet, neither stomping nor tiptoeing. Mervin scuttled, and Mirelda dragged her feet. The steps came right to her door, paused.

  One of the adults, then. Cly?

  Checking on me? She flashed on memories of her father, peering in through a crack in the bedroom door at night, making sure she was still breathing. Emotion tightened her chest.

  She hadn’t gotten into this for weird worlds and magic and otters who farmed, after all—she’d just wanted, in the beginning, to understand who’d made her. To lay eyes on her birth parents. To be able to say: This is where I came from.

  If he cracks the door, he’s gonna see me standing here, fully dressed, eyes wide open. He’ll wonder what I’ve been up to.

  So? What’s he doing out at this hour?

  God, I hope he didn’t go out to hunter-gather me an alligator or something.

  Oh no, now I’m gonna laugh.

  A creak—the steps resuming. Cly, if i
t was Cly, went upstairs.

  She buried her face in her leaf-shaped pillow, giggled until her ears were ringing, and then pulled off her pants and climbed into bed.

  One more day, she thought. Do a little dance, fake a little nice, get the hell out and sail somewhere sane.

  If Nightjar docks in the morning, maybe Parrish can come to the festival.

  OMG, Sophie, forget Parrish!

  It went like that for what felt like another hour before the cicadas finally drove her mind off the one track and into sleep.

  She woke early and had a long stretch in the cool of the morning. It would be another hot day.

  Throwing on her last clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, she went and tapped on Zita’s door. She called through, “How are you feeling?”

  “Better, thank you. His Honor didn’t kill the boy, did he?”

  “You are joking, right?” Sophie’s blood ran cold all the same.

  “Of course.”

  She shuddered. “Mervin was sulking his way through dinner last night. And you are a good person for caring.”

  “Maybe I just want to bloody his nose myself.” Zita stuck her head out into the hall, grinning. She had a towel wrapped around her and was covered in soap. “I’m out of water. Can you—”

  “No problem.” Sophie took the offered pitcher. It was glazed red clay and weighed a ton. She went downstairs. There’d be a pump in the kitchen, wherever that was.…

  “Probably near the dining room,” she murmured. There’d been a little door behind Fenn’s chair. Sure enough, there was a drab, low-ceilinged hallway there that led into a world of restaurant smells. Baking bread and cooking eggs—her mouth watered.

  The hall ended in a room where six women were engaged in various stages of making what looked like a mountain of pastries, all wearing the not-quite-ornamental shackle on their left wrists. They had been engaged in conversation but when Sophie came in, they fell silent.