Hope and Red

by Jon Skovron

  “Then she left?”

  “After cursing me out a bit, thanks. Then I saw her through the window talking to an imp patrol on the street. Well, yelling at them more like.”

  “Then what?”

  She shrugged. “I stopped watching. Had a customer and anyway she wasn’t my problem anymore. I figured the imps would handle her.”

  “Probably brought her down to the Hole to dry out,” said Red. “Bet she’s still there.” He leaned over the bar and called, “Hey, Bee. When you’re done with that, we’ll go down and collect your mom from the Hole.”

  She stopped scrubbing for a moment and sighed dramatically. “Again? I guess I don’t need to hurry, then.”

  * * *

  There was a saying in Paradise Circle: Every circle has a hole. Over time, it came to mean no place was perfect. But the original meaning was a specific reference to the Hole, a nickname for the large jail cell at the imperial police station in the center of Paradise Circle. Red found this sort of history fascinating. No one else he knew did, though, except Little Bee. Maybe that was why they got along, despite their many differences.

  “How do you know all this historical stuff?” she asked him as they walked to the imp station.

  “I read it in books,” said Red.

  “You read? How’d you learn to do that?”

  “My mom taught me when I was about your age.”

  “Could you teach me?”

  “Maybe. It’s not an easy thing to learn like lock picking.”

  “I’m pretty smart, though, Red.”

  He smiled. “You are at that, Little Bee.”

  The imperial police station in Paradise Circle was not a large or impressive building. Supposedly it had been both once. But it had been burned down so many times, it seemed they gave up and just put up the cheapest, most unassuming building they could. No one had tried to burn it down since.

  Red and Little Bee walked through the main entrance. The front room was small. One lone imp sat at a table, looking bored, his white-and-gold uniform unbuttoned and wrinkled.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Red said cheerfully.

  The imp eyed him suspiciously. “Don’t I know you?”

  “I doubt it,” Red said blandly. It was entirely possible they had met, and probably not under good circumstances. “We’re just here to pick up this girl’s mother from the Hole.”

  The imp reached for a piece of paper on his desk. “Name?”

  “My name is Jilly, but everyone calls me Little Bee because I’m so busy.”

  “Your mom’s name,” he said with irritation.

  “Oh, her name is Jacey.”

  The imp scanned down his list of names. When he reached the bottom, Red noticed his eyebrows gave a little jump. “You sure it’s Jacey?”

  “Of course I know my own mom’s name,” said Little Bee in a snotty tone.

  But it didn’t seem to bother the imp. All the irritation had left him, to be replaced with something that looked a lot like pity. He cleared his throat and looked fixedly at Red. “She, uh, volunteered for imperial service.”

  “She what?” asked Red.

  The imp glanced at Little Bee, but only for a moment. Then he was back to Red. “If this girl has any family anywhere, she should go live with them.” He swallowed. “Until her mom is done with her service, of course.”

  “Have you met Jacey?” demanded Red. “Do you have any idea how slippy that sounds?”

  The imp’s face was tense. “I don’t know her. That’s what the paper says. That’s all I know.”

  “Don’t give me that balls and pricks. You know more than that.”

  The imp pulled out a pistol. “That’s all I can tell you. Now you need to leave. And don’t talk about this anymore. To anyone. For your own good and hers. Do you understand?”

  Red stood there and glared at him, his fists balled up.

  “Red, he’s pointing a gun at you,” said Little Bee.

  “I know, Bee.”

  “We should go,” she said.

  “You heard her.” The imp was trying to look stern, but there was something almost pleading behind it. “Go.”

  Red took Little Bee’s hand, then turned and stalked out of the station.

  “That’s pretty weird, huh?” said Little Bee.

  “It is,” agreed Red.

  “I guess she wanted to make the empire a safer place, huh? That’s what they do when they become imp soldiers.”

  “That so?” asked Red, his expression still dark.

  “Better an imp than a stinky old drunk, right, Red?”

  Red didn’t think Jacey had enlisted in the imperial army. She would never do it and they wouldn’t have accepted her anyway. About the only thing she would be accepted for was as a test subject for some biomancer experiment. And nobody “volunteered” for that. But what good would it do telling Little Bee? Jacey was dead or worse now. Better that Bee think her mom was off marching around in a uniform somewhere. So he just said, “Right, Little Bee.”

  That’s how it was in the Circle. Now and then, someone was taken by the biomancers. He was supposed to just accept it.

  9

  The Lady’s Gambit was a midsize, two-mast brig that bought and sold cargo all over the empire. Captain Carmichael employed a crew of ten men, although Hope wasn’t sure why, since only half of them seemed to be working at any given time. The rest lounged on the deck, drinking grog and playing a game with little numbered stones.

  “It’s true that when the weather is fair, she only needs a crew of four or five,” said Carmichael when Hope asked. He held the wheel easily in his calloused hands, his dark brown eyes gazing to the horizon. “A steady breeze and a clear sky makes it look easy enough. But the sea can be fickle, and she’ll turn on you in a single breath of wind. When the weather’s foul, the extra hands at the rigging could mean the difference between life and a watery grave.”

  “Killed by the weather?” Hope asked skeptically.

  He gave her a knowing smile. “You’ll see soon enough, if my nose is right. And it usually is.”

  “You can smell a storm?”

  “There’s a certain taste to the air, and an unnatural calmness to the water. Look there.” He pointed to the dark green stippled water that stretched before them. “Can you see it there, holding its breath, like it’s ready to pounce?”

  Hope shook her head.

  “You only just came aboard. You’ll get the hang of it in time. Now go tell Ranking we best batten down. This one’s going to be bad.”

  The only clouds Hope could see were far off on the horizon. It seemed unlikely that they would reach the ship soon, if at all. But she made her way across the deck to the fore of the ship, where most of the crew was gathered. The sun was shining down hard and the wind had been faint all day, so the sailors were all stripped down to the waist, their thin, sinewy shoulders tan and gleaming with sweat. Two of them were arguing about the stones game they were playing, and the others were chiming in with their opinions. As Hope walked past them, the argument broke out into a fistfight. The two sailors punched and kicked and bit each other with brutish savagery, while the rest sat and cheered for one or the other. Ranking leaned against the rail and watched the fight with an amused smile.

  When Hope reached him, she said, “The captain said you—”

  “Leave off until they’ve finished.” Ranking waved his hand in her direction, not bothering to look away from the fight.

  Things had not improved in the few days since their first meeting. But Ranking was first mate, and his authority extended to everyone on the crew except Hope. The rest of the crew would not listen to her. She could do nothing except wait until the fight was over.

  As she watched the crude exchange, she keenly missed the quiet calm of the monastery. Racklock and Crunta had been cruel, but they had at least been predictable. She had learned how to manage or avoid them years ago. On this ship, drunken bouts of violence were liable to erupt at any time, with no purpo
se except to relieve boredom. These sailors lacked any decorum, discipline, or as far as she could tell, sobriety. At first, she had found it difficult to tell who was drunk, until she realized that they were all drunk, all the time. There was a passage in the Vinchen code that cautioned against excessive consumption of strong drink. She had never understood the concern before. The monks brewed ale, and they drank it in moderation, savoring each sip. But these sailors poured grog down their throats as if it were water, and if they remarked on the taste at all, it was only to wince at the unpleasantness. At any given time, half the crew seemed barely able to stand, much less sail a ship. She wondered how they even made it from one port to the next.

  “Well, Southie,” said Ranking as the two fighters dropped to the deck in exhaustion with no clear victor, “what was it you wanted?” He glared at Hope impatiently, as if he had been the one waiting on her.

  “The captain said to batten down. There’s a bad storm coming.”

  Ranking’s eyes went wide. “Piss’ell, why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I tried—”

  “No time to be getting into pointless arguments with the likes of you.” Ranking blew shrilly on a tin whistle he had on a string around his neck. “Listen up, you bludgeon toms! We’ve got a luffer coming down our throats before this sun sets. The captain ain’t never been wrong about a storm and I don’t expect this one will be any different. So unless you want to be bedding down with the crabs tonight, I suggest you batten down and get to your stations.”

  He blew his whistle again and the crew instantly got to their feet, looking alert and clear-headed, as if the whistle had cast a magic spell over them all. They split off into different directions, their faces full of purpose.

  Hope turned to Ranking, a little awed by the sudden change he had wrought on the men. “What can I do?”

  “Unless you Vinchen have figured out how to stab a storm in its eye, just stay the hells out of the way.”

  Hope watched as the sailors went about their work, still marveling at their transformation. They sealed all the portholes, latched the doors, secured the lines, and stowed any loose items in little wooden compartments that had been built into the deck at certain points along the ship. And then they waited.

  Under normal circumstances, waiting would have included a great deal of drinking, yelling, and violence among the sailors. But now they stood quietly at their stations, some on the deck, some up in the rigging. Their eyes remained alert, and their expressions grave. As the skies darkened, one of them began to hum in a low voice. Two others began to hum as well, a ghostly harmony carried on the strengthening wind. Then from up in the rigging, the smallest and youngest member of the crew besides Hope, a man named Mayfield, started singing in a clear tenor:

  No matter which way the wind goes,

  It never blows for me.

  A sailor’s life is never fair,

  But for the beauty of the sea.

  The clouds, which had seemed far away before, rolled in so quickly, it looked as though a giant blanket had been thrown across the sky. The dark green waters turned a choppy, white-flecked gray. Lightning snaked across the sky, followed by peals of thunder.

  No matter who I love or hate,

  Or if I married be.

  None of it can hold my heart,

  Like the freedom of the sea.

  The sailors stopped singing. The whole world seemed to hold its breath. Then the dark gray sky cracked open. The rain came down in a hissing torrent, hammering Hope’s head, shoulders, and back. She made her way across the suddenly slick deck as waves slammed into the side of the ship, sending sheets of seawater across her path. One hand for the ship, one hand for yourself. Words Carmichael had spoken to her on the day she arrived now came to her mind. They hadn’t made much sense before. But as the ankle-deep waves threatened to pull her feet out from under her and take her over the side, she understood. One hand at all times holding on to something, while the other was at the ready to fend off a line or a boom as it swung past.

  Eventually, she reached the helm, where the captain stood, his head held high despite the pounding rain.

  “Look lively, my wags! Take in the trysail!” he shouted over the storm.

  The ship rode up and down the waves. Soon they grew so high that when the ship dropped down in the valley, Hope couldn’t see the sky at all, just a wall of curling dark water. When they crested again, the wind slammed into the white sails so hard, it sounded like a drum.

  “Haul in those sails before they’re ripped to tatters!” roared Carmichael.

  Hope watched through her curtain of streaming blond hair as the sailors climbed the rigging and began to gather in the sails and tie them to the yards. The wind jerked at the wet lines they clung to, and it amazed Hope that they weren’t flung out to sea. They slowly worked sail by sail up the masts, which swayed dangerously in the gale.

  “Are the masts bending?” Hope yelled to Carmichael.

  “They have to be supple, or they’d snap like dry twigs in a storm like this,” he shouted back.

  The sailors had taken in nearly all the sails. Only the top back sail, which Hope had learned was called the main royal, remained, looking taut as a drum. Then suddenly the sail split and the wind tore at it like an eager beggar, raking through the hole and twisting the sail almost sideways. The sailors slid quickly back down to the deck just as the mast began to bow to the side so low, the top was nearly a forty-five-degree angle to the water.

  “Cut that sail loose or it’ll rip the mast clean out by the roots!” shouted Carmichael.

  Ranking, the ends of his long mustache dripping with water, nodded grimly to the captain. He pulled a knife from his belt and held it between his teeth. Then he began to climb the mainmast, as it whipped back and forth like a switch.

  “How is he even holding on?” yelled Hope.

  Carmichael laughed. “Say what you will about Ranking, he’s a true sailor, with fishhooks for fingers!”

  Ranking slowly made his way up the mainmast. Every time the ship crested a swell, a fresh blast of wind slammed into him. He held on, waiting for the ship to drop back into the valley where they were somewhat sheltered so he could continue his ascent. Finally he reached the top and cut the lines. The sail flew off into the air, then darted down into the water, where it disappeared quickly in the churning gray. The mast eased back into an upright position. Ranking slid down to the deck and into the waiting arms of the crew, who cheered and lustily sang a new tune over the roar of the waves and thunder:

  A sailor in the storm,

  Is small as Old Wrink’s prick.

  Better know,

  Which way to go,

  Or the sea will take you quick!

  The storm finally passed near sunset. The sea evened out, the wind and rain tapered off, and the clouds parted to reveal a yellow sunset that turned the water to molten gold. The sunlight filtered through the still-dripping rigging, casting small patches of rainbow through the ship. The sailors, who had been working continuously to keep everything secure, stopped and lifted their faces to the sun, their eyes closed and faces smiling.

  “How about it, Hope?” asked Carmichael. “Still scoff at the weather?”

  “Never again.” And she meant not just the weather, but these men. When it was necessary, they had shown a bold courage and reckless tenacity unlike any she had ever seen, even among the Vinchen warriors. Both the sea and the sailors earned her respect that day.

  “Hey, Southie!” called Ranking. “Thanks for not being a meddling slice and letting us get on with our jobs!”

  Even Ranking, Hope was surprised to discover, had earned a little of her respect. Although she wondered how long it would be before he squandered that away.

  * * *

  That night, the sailors got drunker than ever. They ate and drank and sang for hours. On the previous nights, Hope had kept her distance, made uneasy by their coarse, frequently lewd behavior. But that night as she watched them, she began t
o understand the camaraderie and true fondness for each other that lay beneath their rude speech and rough action. She had agreed to stay on this ship awhile, learning about the world and the people in it. It occurred to her that standing aloofly as she had these past few nights was not the way to go about that. But could she ever call such men comrades?

  “They can be filthy as sturgeons and loud as a pack of gulls.” Captain Carmichael sat next to her. “But they’re a damn fine crew in a pinch.”

  “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with them?” asked Hope.

  “A captain must maintain a certain distance. Can’t let his crew get too familiar, or they stop respecting his leadership.”

  “It sounds lonely,” said Hope.

  “I suppose it might.” Carmichael stared out at the dark water, which glittered with starlight. “But a man’s never truly alone when he has the sea.”

  “You talk about the sea as if it was a living thing.”

  “It is.”

  “But it’s just water.”

  “The sea is more than just water. It’s the plants and the weather. It’s creatures in it and on it. It’s all those things. You and me, we’re part of the sea.”

  “I don’t feel part of anything,” Hope said quietly.

  “What about that Vinchen order you come from?” asked Carmichael. “Aren’t you a part of that?”

  Hope didn’t know the answer to that question. She was not, nor could she ever be, a true Vinchen warrior. Her gender made that impossible. She knew that. Yet Hurlo had never said so, and the fact that he had made her armor said louder than any words that he considered her a warrior. The thought of him brought a mixture of fondness and pain. The world had lost a great man. She would not want to join the brothers who had murdered him, even if they were to change their minds and allow it.

  She wondered if perhaps she could be a part of the sea, and its people. Did she want that? And if she did, would they accept her?