The Highest Tide

by Marian Perera

  “Wait a moment,” Lera said. “How far below the surface are they?”

  The first officer frowned. “That near an island, the sea can’t be much more than two hundred feet deep, Captain. Three hundred, at the most.”

  “Are you trying to tell me Alth has a fuse three hundred feet long?” She supposed stranger things had happened. Hell, she’d seen one herself the night before, but it was easier to believe in a sentient sea than in this. “I’ve been on a Dagran warship and I know how fuses work. If you lit one from the surface, how would it stay dry all the way to the seabed?”

  “Believe me, Captain, we’ve been thinking about it ourselves. All I can conclude is that the fuse must be contained and dry in some sort of tubing that will keep a flame burning all the way down until it reaches the explosives.”

  Lera fought an urge to get up and pace, because she’d always resorted to physical activity when she was frustrated. Except it would be rude to do so in someone else’s cabin, and it certainly wouldn’t change Garser’s mind about this ridiculous claim.

  She supposed it was possible—barely possible—that Richard Alth might have set up such a convoluted mechanism, but Unity, there were so many ways it could go wrong. He had to find a precise point on the seabed where the detonation would cause a quake, and then he had to drop the explosives from above, making certain they landed there. She didn’t think the Dagrans had trained sharks to help in that regard. On top of that, he had to maintain a way to detonate the explosives with a piece of string a hundred yards long. One mackerel could ruin it all by chewing through the fuse.

  “Captain, are you certain this isn’t a bluff?” she said bluntly.

  “Would you take that risk, Captain Vanze?” Garser shot back. “If the lives of thousands of Denalaits were in a pirate’s hands?” She didn’t have an answer, and he continued. “Besides, an inarguable fact is that nearly two tons of explosives are missing. I doubt Alth is considerately storing those on Princeps, where one good cannon-shot could send the ship sky-high and him in the opposite direction.”

  Lera had nothing more to say, so she looked at Kovir in a way that hopefully conveyed it was up to him. He had to decide whether he’d hare off on this caper, but she’d back him up, whatever he chose to do. Though she rather hoped he would refuse, especially since the Dagrans hadn’t told the truth back in Sandcliff Harbor. Liars to the core, all of them. In the future, if a Dagran told her the sun was shining, she’d break out the oilskins.

  “I could always look for a fuse,” Kovir said finally. “If we don’t find one, that would confirm it.”

  “Good man.” Garser’s face broke into a smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners. She felt irritated, because any captain could give orders, but not many of them had enough charisma to urge others to jump off a cliff, and Garser did. “We’ll leave in two hours’ time to gam with him.”

  “Gam with him?” Lera repeated. This grew more and more farfetched. “What, like you were paying a social call?”

  “Certainly.” He grinned at her. “This is Dagre. We like to handle matters in a civilized way.”

  “Before we blast the bastard to hell,” the first officer added. “Excuse my language, ma’am.”

  Garser laughed. “You can always go from talking to firing, Captain Vanze, but it’s difficult to reverse the two actions unless you’ve won the firing part, in which case there’s little need to talk. So I plan to drop anchor, row across and see if anything has changed aboard Princeps. You never know. The Benevolent Ones could have had mercy on us and given his crew cholera or made them mutiny.”

  Lera had to admit that made sense, but even with the lives of thousands of Denalait citizens at stake, she would never have risked her own safety by going so near an enemy ship in a rowboat. She was beginning to feel uneasy about Garser, especially since her and Kovir’s safety depended on his actions.

  “You’ll hand over the gold then?” she said.

  “Yes. We can make noises about gaining some concession from him as a sign of good faith before we release his betrothed, but the reason for this rendezvous will be to establish that he is indeed on Princeps, because the Council wants him brought back to face justice.”

  “What if they take you prisoner?”

  “Unlikely, with his woman’s safety at stake. Anyway, if Alth is still master on board and seems to have his ship under control, I’ll hand over the gold and discuss how the Council will meet his other terms. By then it will be evening, and Kovir will take over from there. But until then, I want you and Kovir to stay well out of sight, so no one on Princeps suspects we have Denalaits on board and realizes there’s a shark nearby.”

  That made sense, but when Lera watched from a corner of her window later as a boat was lowered, she saw Jason climb down into it too. He was dressed as a sailor for some reason. Obviously his clothes weren’t yet dry, but she didn’t understand why he was being forced to accompany Garser. Unless he was being held responsible for letting her know about the prisoner, and paying for it by being turned over as a hostage.

  She bit her lip. It couldn’t be for any other reason, like Garser finding out that after refusing him, she’d gone willingly into Jason’s arms, could it? No, surely not. It had better not be.

  The boat was soon out of sight, and she couldn’t see anything more from that angle. Kovir lay in his hammock with his eyes half-lidded and his hands clasped over his belly—not relaxing, exactly, but getting himself into the state of mind he would need for the night journey. Wishing she had a pocket watch, she waited for what felt like hours until the boat reappeared, oarsmen sculling in paired strokes while Garser stood at the prow. Jason was seated behind him. She rolled the tension out of her shoulders and went to Garser’s cabin.

  He was in good spirits, tossing his cap to the desk and shrugging out of his coat. “He’s there, all right,” he said to her. “Richard Alth, in the flesh. I told him we’d open negotiations tomorrow regarding our prisoner and his explosives. Hah. By tomorrow he’ll be as toothless as he is treacherous, and then you’ll see how Dagran warships do battle.”

  I can hardly wait. That will be such a change from Denalaits running all the risks for you. She managed to thank Garser for giving her the news and went back to her cabin. The cook was serving an early dinner, but Kovir refused any food. Safest not to eat if you had to swim, he told her, and besides, Seawatch operatives were used to missing meals occasionally.

  Lera found herself unable to eat. She pushed the fried salt pork around on her tin plate, forced herself to chew a few mouthfuls and gave up. She wasn’t the kind of person who went by feelings and fears, but she felt as though she had to make a long journey over alien seas with thunderclouds looming overhead.

  It was because she’d found out about the tidal wave, she told herself. Anyone’s appetite would be taken away by that. And while Seawatch operatives, exquisitely sensitive to their sharks’ moods, were usually oblivious to what other people thought and felt, she didn’t want Kovir to pick up on her apprehension before his mission, so she went topside to dispose of her meal and retrieve her washed clothes.

  The time seemed to crawl by and yet night fell too soon. No singing on the deck; instead lanterns were lighted and lookouts posted. In the cabin, Kovir pulled on his watersuit and once he was topside, Charlotte arrived with the rebreather.

  “D’you need a weapon?” Garser said to him.

  Kovir touched the hilt of the knife all operatives carried. “This, and her.”

  Lera could tell Garser would have preferred something more than a knife, but he certainly couldn’t argue with the hundreds of blades studding the shark’s mouth. “Off you go, then,” he said. Nemesis had dropped anchor with her port side facing Princeps, so a rope ladder was unrolled down the starboard side and Kovir climbed down. Lera watched as he disappeared below the surface with hardly a ripple.

  “That’s that.” Beside her
, Garser gripped the rail tightly—the only indication, she thought, of how much on edge he was, because his confident voice gave nothing away. All they could do now was wait.

  Chapter Seven

  No Return

  Since none of them would be sleeping until Kovir came back, the cook passed out cocoa mixed with hefty slugs of rum, but Lera told him to hold the cocoa on hers. She sipped, welcoming the scorch of the liquor down her throat and its warm spread through her belly, but that was as far as the comforting heat went. She didn’t want to be near any of the sailors, not after what she’d found in her hammock, and she didn’t feel as though she had anything in common with the officers either.

  Much as she loved being on the deck of a ship, with the wind in her hair and the stars looking down at her, maybe she’d be better off in her cabin. She turned to leave.

  Jason leaned against the gunwale on the opposite side of the hatch. He was in his usual clothes again, with the brown jacket over his shoulders, and his head was turned enough so he could both glance back at Princeps and be aware of what was happening on the deck. His eyes caught hers, and after a moment’s pause, she inclined her head towards the hatch. Nothing anyone would notice if they weren’t watching closely—or so she hoped as she went down the ladder, taking it easily one-handed with her drink in her other hand.

  No sound on deck except for the ninth bell tolling. Then she heard his footsteps above her.

  Good. He wouldn’t make it obvious that he’d followed her. She strolled back to her cabin and fished out her key—with Kovir gone, she could keep the door locked and she felt safer that way.

  Inside, a single candle burned on the windowsill. The room smelled of soap, clean linen and a faint underlying scent given off by the lye-scrubbed floorboards. Lera sat on the iron-banded chest and looked at her mug, moving it in her cupped hands to watch the liquid swirl.

  There was a light knock and Jason came in. He shut the door but stayed close to it, as if he wasn’t sure she really wanted him there—for which she couldn’t blame him. Though she didn’t mind at all if he was a bit off-balance for once. It was far too easy for him to play games with her otherwise.

  “Sit down.” She tilted her chin at the single chair. He still didn’t look too comfortable, but he sat, flattening his hands on his knees and clearly waiting to hear what she wanted.

  “Why did Captain Garser have you go with him to Princeps?” she said.

  Jason blinked. “He doesn’t know what Richard looks like and wanted someone to identify him.”

  That made sense. Lera supposed if Garser had been telling the truth and Alth really did pose such a threat to Dagre, the Council would need to be certain he was dead, even if they’d moved beyond the practice of heads on spiked walls.

  “What did you do?” She had always been blunt and to-the-point, because that approach didn’t waste any time. “To him, I mean.” Jason looked as though he was weighing whether or not to answer, and she shrugged. “You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to. I just need something to distract myself, that’s all.”

  He glanced at the bare floorboards between them as if following a line in the woodgrain, then looked back up at her. “I told you I was invited to join him for lessons.”

  Lera nodded, taking a sip of her rum.

  “It was made clear to me from the start that this favor shouldn’t give me ideas above my station.” He spoke as though he was on a witness stand, flatly and carefully. “I was the son of a common laborer. Richard’s tutor, Master Daukain, was concerned that my being educated along with the lord’s son would make me either resent my own background or aspire to his. Or both.”

  As if there was something wrong about wanting a better life than the one you’d been born into, Lera thought. A man who had spine as well as shrewdness should have been welcomed into whatever upper class the Dagrans had, because he would be much more useful to them as one of their own, rather than ending up their enemy because they’d always treated him as lesser. No wonder the Dagrans didn’t have a king any longer.

  “But Lord Alth…” He paused. “Lord Jason, actually, but because I’d been named after him I always thought of him as Lord Alth. He wanted me educated there so I would inspire Richard to work harder.”

  “Which you did?”

  “Which I did, but not in a good way. We competed against each other. And I’m sorry to admit that the more time I spent in the manor house, the more I…well, liked it there.”

  “What was wrong with that?” Lera had never wanted to live in a grand manor house with a crowd of servants—she liked being able to take care of herself—but at the same time, she didn’t want a one-roomed cottage either.

  Especially if she didn’t even own the land that cottage was built on. That way lay a lifetime of grinding serfdom—and for what? It was one thing to labor all day in fields you owned, but when the land would always belong to someone else…

  Jason’s jaw tightened, and harsh lines cut their way into his face. “The manor house wasn’t my place and Richard’s family wasn’t my kind.”

  “That is so backward. Why should you be left out of something all your life just because you weren’t born into it?”

  He leaned back slowly in the chair, relaxing fraction by deliberate fraction as if he was willing himself to do so, but his voice didn’t sound flat and drained any longer, and a faint smile touched the corners of his mouth. “You may be fortunate enough to live in a meritocracy, but I’m afraid we don’t.”

  “Go on,” Lera said, wondering what the long word meant but not wanting the story interrupted to ask. She wasn’t usually curious about other people, let alone Dagrans—and after the debacle on the deck, she would have been even less likely to ask anyone about their past—but this felt more like talking to someone she knew than intruding on a stranger’s privacy.

  “Lord Alth was everything my father wasn’t—rich and sophisticated and clever. He could talk about the political situation in Lunacy. My father usually came home too tired from the day’s work to talk, and when he did, it sure as hell wasn’t about politics. I loved him, but sometimes I used to dream about what life would have been like if I’d been Lord Alth’s ward.”

  “What was Lady Alth like?” That was another difference between their lands. In Denalay, no one got such titles for being born or getting married—only for joining the Council of Eyes and Voices.

  “Lady Lorna?” His brief frown disappeared. “Oh, I remember. She died of smallpox when Richard was seven or eight.”

  “And how did you get along with him? Other than competing with him, I mean.”

  “We didn’t like each other. Maybe because we were always trying to outdo each other in our studies. He did better than me at the start, although we were the same age.”

  “Because he’d had more of an education than you did.”

  “But then I started catching up with him, and it intensified. Once he had his desk moved across the schoolroom because he said I stank of cowflops. My father reminded me to treat the young lord respectfully—that’s how he always spoke of Richard, as the young lord—and never try to show him up. He told me to remember my place. But by then I couldn’t abide Richard, even if I didn’t dare show it, and when I spent so much time in the manor house…the dividing lines got blurred.”

  “What happened?” Lera asked eagerly.

  “It was Lord Alth’s fiftieth birthday and a big celebration was planned. Richard was making a special gift for his father. He was very secretive—never said a word about it when I was there—but I knew the servants and so I found out about it. One day I asked a parlormaid who was my mother’s cousin to show me the gift, so when the family was at church she let me into Richard’s room.” He raised a brow. “Want to speculate on what I did?”

  She knew he wouldn’t have damaged the gift, because he wasn’t malicious, but he did have a calculating streak a mile
long. “You made something better.”

  Jason nodded. “He’d painted part of the estate—the trellis with the arch-of-roses. It was…” He paused, and she could tell he was searching for the best word. “It was clear he’d worked very hard on it. So I did a painting too. Lord Alth’s favorite horses in the pasture, galloping as if they were about to leap out of the picture. You could almost see their legs in flight.”

  Ohh. Lera didn’t say anything, because there was nothing that could be said. Jason had related the story as steadily and factually as he’d spoken all along, as though he was determined not to spare himself by omitting any detail, but she wanted to cringe on his behalf.

  “I convinced Master Daukain to let me be in the room when Richard presented his painting to his father.” His voice took on the sarcastic edge she recognized, though it wasn’t directed at her. “Then I unveiled my masterpiece.”

  The ship shifted minutely beneath them, the muted rumble of the machinery vibrating gently up through the floorboards. Lera realized she was leaning forward a little, and tried to settle back.

  Jason had never looked away from her, and the hardness beneath the words was more than just an edge now. “The room was so quiet you could have heard the strand of a cobweb break. Lord Alth was too well-bred to do anything except thank me for the gift and praise the quality of the paintwork, but Master Daukain—well, it was obvious he wished he had never laid eyes on me. I knew I’d made the worst mistake of my life, but it was too late to do anything about it. I didn’t dare look at Richard.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Lord Alth died the next day.”

  “What?”

  For the first time since he’d started telling her the story, it wasn’t a recital of events, and there was an old, remembered sorrow behind the steadiness in his voice. “He drank too much at the grand dinner party. Or after it, no one could be sure. Then he fell down the main staircase in the middle of the night and broke his neck. Richard became the lord of the land, and one of the first things he did was require payment of all remaining rent on my father’s cottage. We didn’t have that kind of money, so we had to leave.”