Blue Sea Burning

by Geoff Rodkey

  Mr. Smith-Jones nodded, looking like he’d rather be anything on earth besides the bank president at the moment.

  “D-did I hear you correctly? That you n-need to withdraw . . .”

  “Ten million gold. Yes.”

  Mr. Smith-Jones took a deep breath. “Why d-don’t we speak in my office?”

  The private office of Mr. Smith-Jones was even more fancy than the main room. It was filled with what looked like very expensive but rather fragile furniture—the chairs and settees all creaked loudly as the big pirates settled into them, and Mr. Smith-Jones winced at every creak.

  There weren’t quite enough seats to go around. I wound up standing against a wall, while Mackie and Roy Okemu perched on either side of the desktop. Roy was so big that Mr. Smith-Jones had to crane his neck to peer around Roy’s butt at my uncle, relaxing in a plush leather chair on the other side of the desk.

  “Do we . . . ah . . . need . . . everyone . . . ?” Mr. Smith-Jones’s eyebrows wiggled in the direction of Roy Okemu’s butt.

  “Unfortunately, we do. These are, let’s see, my”—Healy pointed at each pirate in turn—“accountant, attorney, personal physician, secretary, factotum, stenographer, assistant stenographer, and . . .” He finished up with me. “Bodyguard. So! How’s business?”

  Mr. Smith-Jones looked like he might throw up. Which made sense for a lot of reasons, including the smell. There wasn’t much ventilation in the room, and the weeks-old pirate fumes made even me want to gag.

  “Ahhhh . . . not bad?”

  “Glad to hear it. I’m assuming this is just a friendly chat while your employees get the ten million together?”

  “Well . . . about that . . . um . . . ahhhh . . .”

  “Please, Mr. Smith-Jones. Speak freely. I’m not here to make trouble. I’m merely a loyal account holder who wishes to withdraw some money.”

  “Of course! But . . . well . . . you see, it’s quite a lot of money.”

  “Although not nearly as much as I have in my account.”

  “Yes! Obviously! I realize that.”

  I was glad to hear my uncle’s account had more than ten million in it, because it meant that saving me from hanging hadn’t bankrupted him.

  “You do have my money, do you not?”

  “We do! Of course! But. Ahhhh . . .”

  Mr. Smith-Jones spent some time tugging at his shirt collar.

  “Could you finish the sentence, please? The part that comes after but?”

  “Mr. Longtrousers . . . the way a bank works, you see, is, we take in deposits, and then we lend that money out, and it’s those loans that allow us to pay interest to depositors like yourself, and . . .”

  “Let’s skip to the end, shall we?”

  Mr. Smith-Jones sighed heavily. He wasn’t happy about skipping to the end.

  “Well, most of our money, you see . . . it’s lent out. So what we have on hand is just a small fraction—”

  “How small a fraction?”

  “At the moment . . .” Mr. Smith-Jones took a big gulp of air. “About two million.”

  “Two million gold?”

  “Mmmph.”

  “Let me get this straight. I have, what? Thirteen million on deposit?”

  “I’d have to look at the exact—”

  “Trust me. It’s well north of that. Closer to fourteen, last I checked. And yet, when I ask for just ten of it back . . . you tell me all you’ve got is two?”

  It was a good thing Mr. Smith-Jones was sitting down, because judging by the color of his face, there wasn’t any blood left in his head.

  “The w-way a b-bank w-works . . .”

  Healy held up a finger. The bank president clamped his mouth shut.

  “We’ve had that lesson. Here’s one for you. The way a pirate works . . . is I get what I ask for.”

  It was a good thing the door flew open just then, or I think Mr. Smith-Jones might have died of fright.

  Standing in the doorway—or as much of it as he could shove open, given the tight quarters on the other side of the door—was a barrel-chested man with a handlebar mustache. His Rovian military uniform was pinned so full of medals that he rattled when he moved.

  Like every other man we’d seen in Edgartown so far, he was flushed and sweaty.

  “Mr. Longtrousers!”

  “Oh, hello, Governor,” Healy said mildly. “It’s actually ‘Commodore’ Longtrousers now. Or have you forgotten that you promoted me?”

  “Commodore! Yes! Of course. What, um, uh . . . What is happening?”

  “Doing a spot of banking. What’s happening with you?”

  The Governor-General—at least, I assumed that was him, and if so, he was the supreme Rovian leader in the New Lands and surrounding islands, his authority second only to King Frederick—looked flustered. “I’m . . . well, wondering . . . why you, ah, chose to dock in the main harbor.”

  “Simple thing, really. My ship sustained quite a bit of damage during the conquest of Pella Nonna that you ordered. Needs to be dry-docked for repairs. During which I decided it was appropriate to give the brave marines of the Forty-Third Rovian Irregulars some shore leave.”

  “I’m not at all sure that’s appropr—”

  “But we seem to have run into a bit of a snag, banking-wise,” Healy said, in a tone of voice that, while arguably still friendly, made the Governor-General’s head and neck draw back inside his stiff-collared uniform like a frightened turtle. “You see, I need to withdraw ten million gold. And your man Smith-Jones here says he’s only got two on hand.”

  The bank president and the Governor-General exchanged looks of pure panic.

  “The thing is, Commodore . . . ,” the Governor-General began, “that the way a bank works—”

  “I’ve heard enough.” My uncle’s voice, while calm and level, was no longer friendly. He’d switched to the tone that only he knew how to use—the one that could make a man’s insides turn to water.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen.” Healy turned to the bank president. “You’re going to give me every coin in this bank, down to your last copper. And you”—he shifted his gaze to the Governor-General—“will see to it that every establishment in Edgartown opens its doors to my men, offering lines of credit for them to borrow against. We’ll take our rooms at the Four Winds Hotel. Please be so kind as to run ahead and have them prepare hot baths for a hundred and eighty-seven. And tell them to expect a bit of a crowd for lunch.”

  The Governor-General looked aghast. Healy turned back to the bank president.

  “I’ll drop by tomorrow for the other eight million. See you then.”

  He gave the banker a wink with his unbandaged eye, then stood up. As he passed the Governor-General, he gave the man’s limp hand a friendly shake.

  “If you’re not busy for lunch, drop by the Four Winds. We’ll catch up. My treat. Cheerio!”

  MOST OF THE BANK’S two million gold wasn’t actually in gold, but silver—which was about ten times as heavy to carry. In the end, we needed three pack mules just to get it all back to the ship. As Spiggs and three other pirates began to divvy it up, Healy gathered everyone together for another short speech.

  “The bad news, brothers, is that at the moment, your coin in hand is just a fifth of what you’re owed. The good news is you’ve got lines of credit all over town. If you’d rather not pay cash for something, just have them put it on Commodore Longtrousers’s bill. Please try to pace yourselves—given the amount of repairs the Grift needs, we’ll likely be here . . . what do you say, Quint? Four, five days?”

  Quint shook his head. “Could be longer, Cap.”

  “So there’s that. Rooms and hot baths will be ready in short order at the Four Winds. Please treat the townspeople with respect. And for Savior’s sake, try not to get really drunk until after sunset.”

&nb
sp; Half an hour later, the money had been doled out to the crew. Kira, Guts, and I sat on a railing at the end of the dock, eating the leftover jelly bread they’d gotten from the baker’s—it was pretty good, although it would have been better hot—and watching a steady stream of newly flush pirates head into town, their pants sagging and clinking under the weight of all that silver.

  Guts shook his head. “Pirates with money. Gonna get ugly.”

  I had to agree. I’d seen what had happened with the field pirates when they were let loose in Port Scratch with fifty silver each—and that had been a lot less money, and a much less breakable town. Healy’s men were less ragged and desperate than the field pirates. But they were still pirates. And after what they’d been through the past few days, they were primed to blow off quite a lot of steam.

  Kira hopped off the railing. “We need to find Mr. Dalrymple before things get out of hand.”

  Kira’s former tutor lived about fifteen minutes’ walk from the port, on one of the narrow side streets that snaked through the hills above the town center. As she led us up one street after another, I wondered how she knew where she was going—but then I remembered she’d lived in Edgartown for more than a year, when her father was trying to get the Governor-General’s help to stop Pembroke’s slave trade.

  Finally, she turned us up a red brick sidewalk that led through a small, well-kept garden to a little green house with white trim. As we approached the door, we heard voices through the open front window.

  “And the square root of nine is . . . ?” It was a thin, slightly musical voice, and Kira beamed when she heard it.

  “Five?” a boy’s voice answered.

  “Is it?”

  “Four?”

  “Now, Trevor, don’t go guessing willy-nilly—”

  Kira knocked on the door.

  “Just a moment!”

  “Three?”

  “Very good. But we don’t guess. We memorize. Sit still and look at your squares. Back in a sec.”

  The front door opened to reveal a man in a crisp shirt and an unbuttoned sweater who looked exactly like his voice—thin, slightly musical, with kind eyes and unkempt silver hair combed over a poorly hidden bald spot.

  Mr. Dalrymple and Kira took one look at each other and both started to cry.

  “Oh, my dear . . . !”

  There was a lot of hugging, and tears, and a whole series of oh, my dear!s from the tutor. It went on long enough that Guts and I started to feel a little awkward.

  As I watched them, I wondered what the reunion would be like if I ever ran into my own former tutor—cruel, stupid, lazy Percy, who’d betrayed me to Pembroke and wound up getting run off our plantation after Millicent shot him through the arm.

  There’d be a lot less hugging, for one thing. And there might be an oh, my dear! or two, but they’d be delivered in a very different tone of voice.

  Eventually, Kira and Mr. Dalrymple managed to pull themselves together. She introduced us, then tried to explain how we’d wound up on his doorstep. But the story was too confusing, and he quickly lost the thread of it.

  “Come in, come in!” he said. “Plenty of time for all of that.”

  The interior was remarkably tidy and smelled of fresh-brewed tea—and when the nine-year-old boy who’d just had his math lesson interrupted scrunched up his nose at our arrival, I remembered we were still overdue for a bath.

  “Come, come,” Mr. Dalrymple said. “You can wait in the kitchen and have a pot of tea, and as soon as Trevor’s finished his lesson, we’ll get caught up. Did you know Makaro is here?”

  Kira’s eyes widened. “Here in Edgartown?”

  “Yes! At the moment, he’s up in the hills collecting berries. But he’ll back shortly. He’s staying with me.”

  Kira turned to us, her eyes shining. “Makaro is Okalu. An elder. He can translate the map!”

  “What map?” asked Mr. Dalrymple.

  “We have a map that leads to the Fist of Ka,” she told him.

  Now it was Mr. Dalrymple’s eyes that widened. “You don’t say? Mercy! The gods must finally be smiling on your people. Why, just the other day—”

  He poked his head in the living room to make sure his young student wasn’t listening. Then he continued in a hushed voice. “Just the other day, two teenagers from Sunrise Island showed up demanding an audience with the Governor-General. Said they had evidence of slavery in the silver mine. Course, they got thrown in jail for their trouble, but it was—”

  “What teenagers?” I blurted out.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Who were they?” My heart was hammering against my chest.

  “I don’t know. Rumor was, they were children of some mining executives—”

  “Did you see them? What’d they look like?”

  “I didn’t. But I’m told they were quite the handsome pair.”

  “Handsome? So . . . they were boys?”

  My heart skipped a beat, then started to settle down.

  “No. A boy and a girl. He was older than her, I think.”

  Just like that, it was hammering again. “Where are they now?”

  “Still in the jail. Waiting for their fathers to—”

  “Where’s the jail?”

  “Straight down the hill.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Jail

  “EGG! WAIT!”

  I was barreling down the hill toward the middle of town. Kira and Guts were somewhere behind me.

  “Stop!”

  I wouldn’t have stopped, except it had just dawned on me that I had no idea where the jail was. I let them catch up.

  “That was very rude to Mr. Dal—”

  “Is this the right direction?”

  Kira nodded, panting for breath. “Bottom of the hill. First big street to your right. But don’t you think we should talk about how we’re going to—”

  I took off again.

  “Egg!”

  I couldn’t wait.

  Millicent’s here.

  With Cyril.

  Best not to think about that part.

  The jail was a wide, low stone building in the middle of town. There wasn’t any kind of sign on it that said JAIL, but it was the only building on the block that had iron bars on its windows, so I figured I was in the right place.

  I pushed open the heavy door and found myself inside a small entry room manned by two Rovian soldiers. One of them was seated at a large desk, filling out paperwork. The other was hunched over the far end of the desk, playing cards with himself.

  There was an iron door against the back wall.

  “Is there a girl from Sunrise Island here?”

  They both looked up at me.

  “What of it?” asked the one at the desk.

  “I need to see her. Please.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “Burn—I mean, Mr. Lo—I mean, Commodore Longtrousers.”

  The soldiers looked at each other with concern. The card-playing one shrugged.

  The one at the desk got up, pulled open the iron door, and gestured for me to go inside. As I started to pass, he stopped me and took the pistol from my hand.

  “Forgot I had that. Sorry.” I’d been holding it so it wouldn’t fall out of my pants as I ran.

  “Mmm.”

  As I walked through the inner door, I heard Kira and Guts burst into the room behind me, but I didn’t stop to wait.

  The jail was split into three iron-barred cells, side by side with a corridor running the length of the room in front of them. There was a single, wide bench in each cell, along with a wooden bucket.

  A heavyset, grimy-looking man was asleep on the bench in the first cell.

  The second cell was empty.

  I walked on to the third cell.

  As
I approached, I saw a young man sitting up on the end of the bench nearest me. He was tall and lean, with wavy brown hair that fell to his shoulders in a way that was almost pretty. Something was in his lap, and he was stroking it gently, like you would a cat.

  There was a much larger something lying across the length of the bench next to him.

  He turned his head to look at me. But I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the something that was lying beside him.

  It was another person, curled up asleep. The thing in his lap was her head.

  “Who are you?” the young man asked in a deep, husky voice. He sat up a little straighter, and the girl stirred. A lock of her golden-brown hair came loose and tumbled down over his legs.

  “I’m . . .”

  I forgot to finish the sentence, because she lifted her head just then, and I knew—even before she tucked her hair behind her ear in that certain way she had—that it was Millicent.

  Her head was in his lap.

  And my stomach was somewhere near my ankles.

  “EGG!” She got up and ran to me. “You’re alive!”

  She grabbed the bars with her hands like she might try to yank them apart. Her face was running through a whole series of emotions all at once—shocked, happy, overcome. Tears were filling her eyes.

  Her head was in his lap. Nothing else could penetrate my skull but that one thought.

  I heard the inner door open. She looked away from me.

  “Kira! Guts!”

  “Millicent!” Kira ran to her, and I sort of moved to one side so they could clasp hands through the bars.

  “I’m so, so glad to see you!” Still holding one of Kira’s hands, Millicent reached through the bars toward me with her free hand.

  The look on her face almost set my stomach right again. I reached out for her hand.

  It’s okay. She loves me. It was only a—

  Our hands had met, and she was twining her fingers in mine when I heard the deep, husky voice again.

  “Here’s a spot of luck . . .” A strong arm draped itself over Millicent’s shoulders. Its owner was grinning down at me, all big teeth and sharp cheekbones and bright blue eyes.