by Geoff Rodkey
And the way she smelled…I don’t know if it was perfume, or something the servants in Cloud Manor used to wash her clothes, but she always smelled like flowers. And not the sickly sweet ones they sold in the shops in Blisstown, but the wildflowers, up on Mount Majestic, clean and crisp and—
The horse stopped moving. I heard the shriek of a bird, practically on top of us. Then an identical shriek, somewhere in the distance.
Then another one, close by, only this time I realized it wasn’t a bird but a human imitating one.
For a while after that, there was no movement except the horse swatting bugs with its tail and occasionally shifting position, stirring the water.
Then there was splashing up ahead, followed by muttered voices. I could’ve sworn one of them sounded Rovian. But that was impossible.
I felt arms pick me up and hand me down from the horse. Then someone was carrying me, splashing through the water, and they set me down—on my rear, with my head up, which was a huge relief after all those hours upside down—on something hard and dry.
I was still trussed up, and my legs felt dead and useless. I was starting to worry I might tip over when a voice barked, “Sit up! Hold still!”
I felt swoony and off-balance, but I did my best to sit up straight. A moment later, something heavy came down next to me, and I felt everything lurch downward, then pop back up again, and I realized I was in a boat, bobbing in the water.
I heard the voice again. “Sit up!”
It didn’t make any sense. Why were the Okalu putting me in a boat?
And why did they sound so much like Rovians?
The boat bobbed again as someone got into it. I heard the creak of wood against metal, followed by the sound of oars pushing through the water.
“’Bout time,” a voice grumbled. “Sick o’ this bog. Skeeters eatin’ me alive.”
“Dunno we’re leavin’,” said another.
“Ain’t this the lot of ’em?”
“Reckon. Lotta work afoot, tho’.”
“Not fer us. Fer the soldiers. I ain’t stormin’ no—”
“Shhh! Ain’t s’posed to jaw ’bout it.”
After that, it was quiet for a while. The numbness slowly left my legs, but when it did, they started to feel like they were getting stabbed with a thousand needles.
Then there were more voices, from somewhere above us. The boat knocked hard against something, and I almost fell over.
Then I was getting picked up again, and turned and prodded, and suddenly I was jerked up off my feet, squeezed tight across the chest by whatever I was tied up in, yanked higher and higher into the air—and then in an instant all the pressure released and I fell in a heap onto a wooden deck.
“Get that sack off ’im. See wot we got.”
What felt like several pairs of hands picked me up and shook me out of whatever I’d been stuffed inside. Then they dropped me back to the deck, my arms and legs still tied.
It took a moment for the starbursts in my eyes to clear, and when they did, I wished they hadn’t.
I was staring up at four Rovian men, large and rough-looking. Three of them I’d never seen before.
The fourth was Birch.
Birch, who worked for Roger Pembroke.
Birch, whose twin brother had pushed me halfway off a cliff, only to wind up at the bottom instead of me.
Birch, who’d tried to kill me with a knife the last time I’d seen him.
He cocked his head to one side as he peered down at me. A smile slowly crept across his thick lips.
“Been waitin’ fer you,” he said.
Then he kicked me in the belly with his boot, so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I gagged on the rag in my mouth, and my nose started to run and my eyes teared up and it was hard to breathe and I thought I might puke but I tried to hold it down because with the rag stuffed in me there was no place for it to go.
I was curled up on my side, fighting to breathe, when I felt something go thud on the deck next to me and start thrashing every which way, and somewhere in the back of my head I felt a pang of relief, because I knew it was Guts and he was still alive.
“Even better,” I heard Birch say. Then he kicked Guts like he’d kicked me. Only he didn’t stop at just one.
When he was finished, I heard him growl an order.
“Put ’em below. On the plank.”
MOST SHIPS’ HOLDS smell awful. Even the cleanest ones carry a tang of puke, along with some undercurrents of rotting food and bilgewater. But the hold of this ship was beyond foul, and not just from the usual filth. There was something worse in the air.
It smelled like death. And as I lifted my head from the plank where they’d chained me, my neck straining against a steel collar to see through the dim light of a small oil lamp hanging from an overhead beam, I understood why.
We were in a long compartment made up of two wide rows of low planking with an aisle running between them. The planks were big enough for several dozen men to lie side by side across them. Three sets of chains ran the length of each row. The first held manacles for the feet; the second, manacles for the wrists; and the third, steel collars for the neck.
There was no question the hold had been built for human cargo. We were on a slave ship.
At the moment, the only slaves were me and Guts.
Birch’s three henchmen had cut me free so they could properly chain me to the end of one plank. With the steel collar on my neck, I was able to raise my head just far enough to watch them chain Guts to the end of the plank opposite me.
They’d taken his hook away, and his stump was giving them trouble—without a left hand, they couldn’t chain him by the wrist. In the end, they had to get a longer chain and clamp it on his arm above the elbow. As they did, Birch watched impatiently, arms crossed, leaning against the ladder that led to the upper deck.
Guts didn’t give them much of a fight, which made me think he was either waiting for the right chance, or he was hurt pretty bad.
Once they’d chained us up tight, Birch pocketed the keys to the locks and ordered the others upstairs to prep the ship for sailing.
Left alone with us, Birch took a seat on the edge of the plank by my feet and looked back and forth at me and Guts with a satisfied grin.
“Ye stupid — —s,” he cursed us, slowly shaking his head. “Coulda been clean away by now. Halfway to the Continent, all the time ye had. And wot ye do? Set up in Pella, make a spectacle o’ yerselves.”
He leaned across the aisle and smacked Guts on the bottom of his feet. “Ay! Ye like bein’ toast o’ the town? Was it worth it? My boys didn’t even need to ask round! Says they walked in the square, saw ye struttin’ the palace steps like a peacock!”
“It wasn’t her who helped you?” I asked, meaning Kira. I don’t know why I thought he’d answer the question. Or why I thought it mattered.
Birch looked at me quizzically.
“Wot, yer girlie friend? Won’t see her no more. Daddy put her on a ship to Rovia. Some fancy boardin’ school. Ye’ll be long dead ’fore she comes back.”
By the time I realized he was talking about Millicent, he’d stood up and walked around to the side of the plank so his face loomed directly over mine, staring down at me with his yellow eyes.
“Speakin’ o’ Daddy…” Up close, I saw his face was pitted with tiny scars. It was hard to tell whether they were from the kind of craggy pimples my brother, Adonis, used to get, or a blast of grapeshot Birch had caught in the face. “Boss got plans fer you. Special-like. Shame of it is, I ain’t s’posed to lay a hand on ye.”
Birch’s mouth split into a grin, showing two crooked lines of gray teeth. “Course, he’ll never know long’s I don’t leave no mark.”
He brought his fist down like a hammer in the soft middle of my belly, right where he’d kicked me.
This time, the pain was bad enough that I went fuzzy for a while. When things finally came back into focus, Birch was on the other side of the hold, sneering down
at Guts.
“…’Member when ye bit me?” Birch pushed back the sleeve on his right forearm to reveal a deep, ugly wound, still unhealed and sewn together with ragged black stitches. It was the bite Guts had given him to stop Birch from killing me back on Deadweather.
“Like a dog, ye was. Gonna show ye wot I do to dogs. ’Cause the boss don’t care a whit fer you—I can do whatever I like to yer dirty carcass.”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out Guts’s hook. He waved it over Guts’s face.
“Maybe I’ll use this. How ye like that? Pluck yer eyes, fer starters…”
I turned my head away, sick with horror. Guts was going to be ripped apart, just a few feet from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Soon enough, they’d kill me, too. Roger Pembroke would get what he wanted. And I’d never see Millicent again.
When you added all that to the pain in my gut and the lack of food, water, and sleep, it’s no wonder I started to hallucinate, seeing things I knew weren’t really there.
It started with a flicker of movement in the gloom beyond the ladder that led to the upper deck. Then it slowly grew until it entered the dim circle of light cast by the overhead lamp and hardened into the ghost of a man, short and skinny and dressed in sailor’s leggings and a baggy shirt.
It lurched slightly as it moved, hands pressed together to hold a tightly knotted burlap sack, swollen with something bulbous and heavy-looking.
As it passed under the lamp, it rotated its head toward me, and I nearly gasped when I saw it had Millicent’s face—only pale and wraithlike, with terrible dark circles under its eyes. What would have been her long golden hair was matted and dull, bunched up in a straggly ponytail.
The ghost stared at me with hollow eyes. Then it slowly shifted the sack to one hand and raised a finger to its lips.
I couldn’t have made a peep even if I’d wanted to.
It started moving again, through the pool of lamplight toward Birch. It was still lurching, like the sack it held was a chore to carry.
Birch was bent low over Guts, still taunting him with Lucy.
“…Nah! Not yer eyes! Then ye can’t watch the fun! How ’bout I start lower down? Carve me name in yer belly? Then when ye die…”
The ghost came to a stop just behind Birch and slowly hoisted the sack up over its head.
“…an’ ye go to the devil, he’ll know it was me wot sent ye! How ye like—”
In one swift, violent motion, the ghost swung the sack down against the back of Birch’s head. To my surprise—heavy as it seemed, I figured it was a phantom sack that would pass right through him—it collided against his skull with a crunchy thud.
Birch staggered to one side. The ghost followed, raising the sack to hit him again.
The second blow brought him to his knees. Then there was a third, and a fourth—I imagined I was hearing the ghost utter a fierce little grunt with every swing—and with the fifth strike, the phantom sack seemed to burst, dissolving into a shower of tinkling shards that clattered to the floor around Birch’s unconscious body.
I could’ve sworn I heard the ghost mutter “Oh, blast!” but I knew that wasn’t possible, because ghosts couldn’t talk any more than they could grunt.
It crouched down over Birch’s body, facing away from me. I couldn’t see what it was doing, but I figured it was sucking the everlasting soul from his body, because I’d read a story once about ghosts, and I knew they did that kind of thing.
“Where the blun did you come from?” I heard Guts sputter. I was about to call to him when suddenly the ghost rose up in the air and began to lurch toward me.
As haggard and hollow-eyed and sallow-skinned as it was, it looked so much like the real Millicent that for an instant, I thought it actually was her—and that she was leaning over me, lowering her head toward mine, so she could kiss me.
But when it got close, its breath was so rancid and sour I knew it must be some kind of unearthly demon, because the real Millicent never could’ve smelled that bad.
It pressed a clammy palm against my head, pushing it to one side, and I recoiled in horror, certain the demon was about to suck my soul out through my ear.
Then I heard jingling, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ring of keys it was holding, taken from Birch’s pocket.
And when the demon barked, “Savior’s sake, Egg, move your fat head so I can unlock this stupid collar!” I realized I hadn’t been seeing things at all.
WATER AND FIRE
It took Millicent some doing to get the chains off me—she kept fumbling the keys, and when she finally got my neck free and moved on to my wrists, she tried the same key over and over, even though it clearly didn’t fit in the lock and there were two more on the ring.
“Maybe try the others,” I suggested.
“What do you think I’m doing?” she snapped. She wasn’t herself—the surly attitude wasn’t all that unusual, but the horrid breath and ragged appearance definitely were. Worse, she was woozy and unfocused—even though I knew it was her in the flesh, her normally sharp eyes still looked ghostlike and vacant.
“Hurry!” hissed Guts. “He’s gonna come to!”
I couldn’t tell if Birch was stirring, but even if he wasn’t, there was no telling how much time we had before someone came down the ladder and found us. So when Millicent finally got my wrists free, I asked her for the keys.
“Why don’t I do the rest?”
“Ugh! Fine.” She handed them to me, then wandered off toward Birch’s body. I unshackled my ankles and sprang up to free Guts. I had to step around Millicent to get to him—she was kneeling on the floor by Birch’s legs, stuffing her pockets with the scattered contents of the burst sack.
They turned out to be hundreds of newly minted silver pieces, although just then I was too frantic to appreciate that Millicent had just saved us by coldcocking Birch with a sack of her father’s money.
As I went to work on the lock for Guts’s neck collar, I heard what sounded like voices of alarm somewhere far above us.
We had to find a way off the ship, and fast.
The instant I unshackled Guts, he jumped up from the plank and started to stomp on Birch’s head with his bare foot.
“Cut it out!” I hissed. “You’ll break your foot!”
As I looked around the deck for portholes, I felt a smack on the back of my leg. It was Millicent, still kneeling on the floor and stuffing her pockets full of coins.
“Help pick these up!” she demanded.
“There’s no time!” I told her. “And we don’t need it!”
“Course you do! You’re poor as pantry mice!”
She reached up and shoved a fistful of coins into my pocket.
Guts was still stomping on Birch’s head. I couldn’t blame him for it, but it was as big a waste of time as picking up the coins.
“Come on!” I slugged him on the arm, then moved to the lantern, taking it off its hook so I could explore the rest of the deck.
I started forward with the lantern, and I heard Millicent curse behind me as she lost the light she needed to gather the coins. Guts followed me, strapping on his hook, which he’d plucked from the floor where Birch dropped it.
Beyond the ladder were two more lengths of planking with chains for slaves. Past those, the ship began to narrow, tapering toward the bow. Small, floor-to-ceiling storage compartments ran along both sides. I opened one and found nothing but a pile of stone blocks with steel rings embedded in them. Some of the rings had manacles attached on short chains.
I kept going. Two compartments from the bow, I found a little cabin with a short bed and a hinged table. There was still no porthole, but it gave me hope that I’d find something else—and when I opened the final compartment, there it was.
I’d found the head. It was a cramped space, half of it filled by a boxlike structure just the right height for sitting, with a round hole in the middle about a foot across.
I peered dow
n through the head. Since it was night, I didn’t expect to see anything except blackness—but to my surprise, the water was clearly visible about ten feet down, light dancing on its surface.
It was flowing past the hull at a good clip, foam spraying up off the prow. That was bad.
“We’re moving out to sea,” I told Guts.
“Wot!?” He looked past me down the head, then cursed.
“Can’t fit through that,” he warned me. “Too narrow.”
“I’ll bust out the seat. You get Millicent.”
We both started back toward the middle of the deck. As Guts continued on, I stopped at the storage compartment where I’d seen the heavy stone blocks. I’d just picked one up when I heard Millicent’s voice.
“Let go, you sod!”
I found them near the ladder. Guts had Millicent by the waist and was trying to drag her backward as she struggled, spitting venom.
“Get your hands off me!”
“Yer outta yer tree!” he said.
“Quiet! Both of you!” I could hear an increasingly loud commotion somewhere on an upper deck, and I was terrified someone from the crew would hear us yelling and come down to investigate.
“She was halfway up the ladder!” Guts exclaimed. “Had to pull her off!”
“I’m just going to the galley,” Millicent said, as if it was the most reasonable thing on earth.
“Are you out of your mind?!”
“I’m starving! And I’m sooooo parched!” she said, with an exaggerated roll of her head that only made her seem more crazy.
“Yer mad!”
It was worse than mad. It was suicidal. And yet Millicent was looking at us like we were the crazy ones.
“I won’t take much. They’ll never miss it.”
Her eyes fluttered just then, like she might faint, and I suddenly realized what was wrong. She must have been hiding on the ship for days, and she’d gone batty from lack of food and water.
As I reached out to steady her, I heard footsteps on the deck above us. We were running out of time.
“So if you don’t mind—” she started to say, lunging for the ladder.