A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Just for the big finish.”

  Bram caught her up on the San Francisco headlines and the state of their parents. They did a bunch of math—recalculated the circumference of the world, which was the same as Earth’s, no surprise—and worked on figuring out Stormwrack’s axial tilt. Bram thought it might be a hair steeper than their own twenty-two-to-twenty-four-degree norm, but to be sure, he wanted more astronomical data.

  Sophie borrowed an old pot from the cook and had a go at calculating the salinity of Northwater, coming up with a rough reckoning that it was below the 3.5 percent typical of the Atlantic and Pacific.

  “That may suggest there’s more water in the world overall.” Bram was becoming more comfortable at sea—less nauseated, except when it got really choppy. To her surprise, he didn’t seem homesick. In fact, he was apparently reveling in having hours on end to spend running his enormous brain around the question of how Erstwhile and Stormwrack connected. “Might fit with a comet strike.”

  “What if millions of years have passed?”

  “There wouldn’t be people anymore.”

  “There shouldn’t be,” she said, not unhappily. “But millions of years fits better with the variations in the animal species. Time for evolution, right?”

  “If we theorize that there are two separate worlds and they evolved in a similar direction, the question becomes: When did the divergence occur?”

  “It had to be after the evolution of modern humankind.”

  “What do you mean?” Bram said.

  “Remember the Convene?” Sophie said. “The people we saw when the government gathered? There were recognizable racial types: people who looked Chinese, African, North European. Parrish could pass for South Asian, and Tonio’s got all these Italian qualities. Erinthian even shares some words with Italian.”

  “So speaking very generally, the two Earths might have been very similar until the evolution of cultures and languages, like Italian.”

  “And German. We’ll need a linguist to pin down specifics, but Fleetspeak and the Sylvanner language both have a Germanic sound to them.”

  “Then there’s Noah’s Ark,” Bram reminded her. Several of the islands had stories about a time of fire and flood, when humankind took shelter in a life pod or some kind of ark. The stories varied from nation to nation: sometimes the refuge was a boat, a seed pod, a submarine. People and animals took shelter in caves or eggs. In one tale with shades of the Jonah myth, they were eaten by a big fish and then spat out, a few at a time, on the various islands.

  They were trying to fit a theory around it when, a day out from Fleet, a message came from Annela.

  “‘Well, girls,’” Verena read, “‘We have heard that His Honor is displeased and that Sophie is in breach of contract. If you were going to make things worse, I would rather you had not bothered at all.’”

  “Yeah, right,” Sophie said. “Send me off to Sylvanna without telling me they’re bonded, then blame me when I act—”

  “A bit like Beatrice?” Bram said. She poked him—hard.

  Verena waited, pointedly, until they subsided. “‘The Allmother is threatening to pull Breadbasket from the Fleet for a month. This is a major protest, and the Convene is very tense. If there is anything you might yet do to mollify Clydon Banning, I beg you to set aside your pride and petition him for mercy.’”

  Sophie groaned. “I knew I was overreacting. Knew he wasn’t crazy enough to betroth me. If I’d just kept my mouth shut—”

  “Don’t do that, Sofe,” Bram said. “Does it say anything else, Verena?”

  She scanned the page and then handed it over. “Just that Corsetta has escaped from the Watch again.”

  “How is that your problem?” Sophie said.

  “I made it my problem when I started poking into it,” Verena said. She didn’t add “at your suggestion.”

  “If there’s anything I can—”

  “You said you’d stay out of the Corsetta thing,” she said, her tone sharp. “I’ll go up to Constitution and talk to Annela about seeing Mom’s marriage papers. Maybe you and Parrish should go on to Pastoral?”

  “Uh … sure. What’s that?”

  “A residential block for retired and semi-retired Fleet bureaucrats. You want the skinny on why Cly and Beatrice got married? That’s a great place to start.”

  Before she quite knew how it had happened, Sophie found herself on a ferry, approaching the retirement home, with Parrish seated across from her.

  He had spoken to her perhaps three times on the sail from Sylvanna, all perfectly correct stuff. “Pass the peas,” that kind of thing. He wasn’t sulking or rude, but somehow he was managing to hold her at a distance, to roll away from her in a little bubble of remoteness.

  She tried to hold her peace—she needed to practice, obviously—but could only keep her lips locked until they were transferring to the ship itself. “What’s the plan here?”

  Parrish replied, “You want information regarding your parents’ courtship and the early days of His Honor’s career. We’ll talk to the people who were running the Fleet at the time. This ship is a storehouse of such knowledge.”

  Without another word he toured her through a sunroom, eventually conveying her to a chair and then settling in for a long jaw with a couple of elderly card players, all of them jabbering in some tongue Sophie didn’t speak.

  While he talked, she took a good look at the operation. The retirement home seemed to run on cooperative lines, with younger, semi-retired residents doing a lot of the caregiving for the eldest bureaucrats. There were a few nurses and medics around, though fewer than she would have guessed. Nobody seemed senile …

  … they maybe inscribe against that.

  Maybe she could learn something else, while Parrish chased the gossip. She flagged down a passing elder. “Is there a spellscribe aboard?”

  “Deck four, Kir, portside.”

  She found her way down and tapped on a door painted with the medical cross and a few letters of spellscrip.

  “Come in.” The room’s sole occupant was a bald and somehow childlike woman, sitting at a long desk, reading a book written in spellscrip.

  “Hi,” Sophie said. “I’m wondering if you can tell me the purpose of an inscription I saw not long ago.”

  The woman smiled. “I can try.”

  Sophie unshipped her camera, found the shot of the scrip—Clydon, temperament—and enlarged it so it was as readable as possible.

  “What is this device?”

  “I’m from the outlands,” she said. “Sorry about the text being so small.”

  “I can make it out.” The scribe looked at the image, lips moving slightly, then handed it back. “It’s a tempering spell for a child.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “On some nations, it’s believed that certain childish tendencies are … aberrant. Excessive emotionalism, for example, or inclination to the same sex.”

  Sophie let herself entertain, briefly, the idea that Cly might have been born gay.

  “A tempering inscription is meant to make them more mindful or obedient, especially toward tutors and teachers. The inscription can be beneficial if the student can’t settle to their studies.”

  Magical Ritalin, in other words, thought Sophie.

  “I can’t say I agree much with the philosophy,” the scribe went on. “Children are entitled to a certain amount of exuberance. But in this case—”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s meant to instill fear in a child who has been setting fires.”

  Whoa.

  “Thank you.” Disturbed, she headed back up to the lounging deck.

  Parrish was waiting. “I know who we need to talk to. He’s an old Judiciary clerk.”

  “Here on Pastoral?”

  He nodded. “Apparently he naps in the mornings. But I’ve asked if we can lunch with him. What would you like to do in the meantime?”

  Fires.

  She couldn’t think about th
at now. “Clear the air?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve been giving me the cold shoulder since Sylvanna.”

  She waited for him to deny it. Instead, he let out a long breath. “On the island where I was born, Sophie, there was a monk who sewed cloaks. He tended the goats, spun the wool, and dyed it. He wove the cloth into long, almost shapeless outer garments. They were warm and practical and hard to tell from one another—the monks used to have to mark the collars.”

  Animal hair, Sophie thought, remembering the satchel of hair she’d picked up on the bandit ship.

  “One day when I was about eleven, just before I left for the Fleet, a corpse was brought into the harbor. The monks, you probably recall, care for those who are slain by magic—someone has to watch over them, until the spell reverts and they rejoin the living.”

  She nodded.

  “It was a woman; she’d been important, widely beloved. There was a great search for the inscription that had killed her, and she would be receiving visitors. The island expected a lengthy procession of guests on her behalf. It was decided that our service to this woman would include a receiving room. We built a bier in the village of Lamentation, and Brother Sparrow was told to weave her a shroud.”

  “The shapeless-cloak guy,” she said, to show she was following.

  Parrish’s expression was faraway. “He dyed the wool a soft green, like shoots of new grass, shot through with beads made of shell, tight whirls of caramel brown and copper highlights. They wrapped her in it like a child abed and fanned out her hair around it. She looked … it made her look quite at rest. It was a beautiful garment.

  “Afterward, I looked at those shapeless cloaks, and when eventually I asked Brother Sparrow about them, he told me, ‘It’s important to know the difference between a tool and an ornament, boy.’”

  “And this is supposed to have what to do with you annoying—sorry, I mean avoiding”—oh, this isn’t going badly at all—“me?”

  He gestured back at Nightjar’s pearly sails. “The ship, and we who sail it. We’re means to your ends.”

  “That’s so not true! I’d set up house on Nightjar tomorrow if I could. I love—” She didn’t quite know why her throat was tightened. She forced the words out. “You came for me. You came, and you brought Bram, and I know it’s your boat. You don’t have to mind Verena, so…”

  “Having asked you to help with Beatrice’s situation, and having allowed you to walk into the situation unknowing, we could hardly abandon you when you ran into trouble.”

  “So you only came for me because it was the right thing to do?”

  “You’re upset.”

  “You’ve upset me.”

  “I apologize for any distress I may have caused.”

  “You’re not avoiding me because you’re a tool, Parrish.”

  “On a ship the size of Nightjar, I could hardly avoid—”

  “Even if you wanted to?”

  “I have no wish,” he said, “to exclude myself from your company.”

  She could hear her voice rising. “Then why are you?”

  “Doing your duty doesn’t always mean simply following orders.”

  “Duty and honor.” She felt as though she were outside herself, watching as for no particular reason Sophie tried to pick an argument. What was wrong with her? “You came for me because it was your duty?”

  He pulled himself upright, still as a statue, and looked into her eyes. “Are you planning to ask why Bram came for you?”

  “Bram knew I’d stick my foot in my mouth first chance I got. Bram loves me—” She ran dry for a second. “Deflecting much? Why do you keep telling me why you came for me when what I’m asking is why you’re hiding now?”

  “I sail,” he said, “where I believe I’m needed.”

  “I need some air.” She climbed up blindly, looking for an outer deck, and leaned against the ship’s mainmast, which was sticky with the lubricant that allowed the hoops of the mainsail to rise and lower easily. At home it would be machine grease; here, it had a pine scent. The seas were choppy and the Fleet was sailing on a brisk easterly wind. The hang gliders that taxied people between ships had stopped flying. She imagined them safely stowed in their berths.

  Most of the ships—the ones not propelled by magic, that is—had all but one sail reefed and tightly bound.

  It was a minute or so before Parrish followed her.

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie said, before he could speak. “Everything that happened on Sylvanna, it’s left me a little raw. Ignore me.”

  “Never.” He reached out, carefully, and laid a hand on her arm. “Sophie, I—” Then he frowned over her shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Tonio’s raised a signal cone.” He indicated a triangle, rising against the sail, hung point down. “It means there’s a—what’s your word?—situation aboard Nightjar.”

  “Do we need to go back?” He’d had a hand on her shoulder; she’d turned to look at the ship, and his arm had curved around her. His skin was distractingly warm.

  “Not if it’s just one; it means it’s under control. It’s an alert.”

  “He’s giving you a heads-up.”

  He nodded.

  “Just what we needed. A situation.”

  They watched for another minute, in case a second cone rose up on the sail. But none did, and then the shipboard bell rang.

  “Lunchtime,” Parrish said, pulling free. “Shall we?”

  It was obvious at a glance that the old court clerk was another transform—he smelled oniony and was covered in what looked like onionskin paper. Toothless, with knobby joints, he had two steaming mugs on the go. One was full of beery-smelling tea; the other of a thick creamed soup, orange in color.

  He set himself up at a table for three in the corner of the dining room and took obvious pleasure in ordering them a full spread, a meal that could be chewed. Beetroot salad, roasted cuttlefish, a dark rye bread. He insisted on pouring them each a cup of his tea, too—it smelled darkly of barley and old boot, but the flavor was nutty and distinctly bracing.

  “So you’re the new Sturma, are you?” he said, when he’d had a delicate sip of his soup and they’d tucked in. He spoke slowly; without teeth, his diction was a little soft, but he was comprehensible enough.

  “I’m who?”

  “Kir Hansa is Sturma Feliachild’s niece,” Parrish inserted, before Sophie could tell the guy no, she wasn’t planning to grow up to be a superspy at sea. “She is also the natural child of His Honor the Duelist-Advocate.”

  “Little Kir’s all the news,” he said. He pinched her chin, squinting. “Ye don’t dress as a Sylvanner.”

  “Thank heaven for small mercies,” Sophie grunted. “I grew up abroad.”

  “Outlander, then?”

  “We’re interested in His Honor’s early days in the Judiciary,” Parrish continued.

  A keen-eyed glance. “Scandal-mongering? You?”

  “Not at all,” Parrish said.

  “Totally,” Sophie said. “Lay on the dirt.”

  The old fellow laughed. Leaning back in his chair, he rolled up a sleeve, exposing a pale, fibrous, multilayered arm. He pressed his soup spoon against the forearm, a gesture disturbingly reminiscent of drawing a blade down his wrist. As he pushed, though, text flashed to the surface, dense black handwritten letters, layered one over the other, as if he were made of rolls of superthin paper. The text moved and shifted, now visible, now not, all too fast to make out words. But eventually he grunted, “Thought so,” and pinched himself. A winding strip of paper-skin came up, tearing off neatly, leaving moist glistening paper and an onion stench in its wake.

  He set the torn-off strip on the center of the table.

  Hamish Cordero. Born Junnaio 4, y. 32 of the Cessation. Died Fusto 33, y. 474.

  “I’m not saying this is the chink in His Honor’s armor. Honestly, girl, that’d be you. But it’s the only time in his career he veered toward scandal.”

/>   “Who was Cordero?”

  “Someone your father killed, long ago.”

  Killed. And as a kid he set fires.

  “Tell us,” Parrish said.

  “Eat, eat and I will.”

  Sophie put a beet in her mouth, chewing woodenly.

  “Clydon Banning came to the Fleet already something of an oddity. The Sylvanner kids who join us are married, always married. They have peculiar ideas regarding maturity there.”

  “Do they ever!” Sophie agreed.

  “He got top marks as a cadet, in book learning and martial prowess, wrote the law specialization as soon as he was allowed to declare, and graduated tops. He won the Slosh at his graduation. Like you, Parrish.”

  “Winners all round,” Sophie muttered.

  “There was no question but that he’d go to the Judiciary. He sued for custody of Sawtooth. There was a bit of a fluff over that—her masthead is a fright who babbles her full name to anyone who’ll listen, so there were plenty wanted her sunk—but he got her and began training. He passed his writtens early, and then it was all fighting—he was waiting for his first official duel.

  “The duelist-advocate in those days was a constipated old cod from Haversham, Fae Marks by name, and having to mentor a rising star from Sylvanna … oh, it jammed up her egg tubes. She set young Cly on the dueling roster obscenely early, hoping, it’s thought, he’d misstep. Or, better yet, get himself wounded.”

  “No joy?”

  “Soils don’t stick to Cly Banning,” the oldster said cannily. “You’ll want to remember that when you go digging.”

  “What happened?”

  “Marks had miscalculated: Banning won every fight she threw at him—some just by his scruff, but still. Every debate, too. And then one of her middle-ranked judges got herself fatally speared by a ringer the pirates slipped in on a duel. Ol’ Fae was suddenly looking at having to promote a twenty-year-old child up the ladder.

  “Oh, the politics were thick as that chowder! Since their two nations don’t get on, Marks couldn’t just pass him over without looking very bad indeed. She tried the ‘he’s not an adult at home’ angle, and that’s when he pulled Beatrice Feliachild out of his pocket.