by Geoff Rodkey
Uncle Billy—which was what Adonis and I took to calling him, because we weren’t supposed to utter the name Burn Healy for fear of scaring the townspeople, and “Commodore Longtrousers” just sounded silly—had noticed early on that Adonis wasn’t quite fitting in. So he started asking Adonis to do little jobs here and there—running messages up to the mine, carting supplies around town, that sort of thing—and Adonis really took to it.
He got paid for the work, which he liked. But I think more than that, he liked the pat on the back my uncle always gave him for a job well done. It certainly seemed to improve his attitude—after a couple of weeks of it, Adonis didn’t have to work nearly as hard at not acting like a thug.
Adonis’s transformation came as a surprise—but not nearly as big as the one that greeted us when we returned to Cloud Manor late one afternoon. Mr. Dalrymple and Makaro were there, fresh off a ship from Edgartown. They were escorting a slightly overfed teenage girl who was so sullen and quiet that it took me a moment to recognize her as my sister, Venus.
Makaro had returned to the New Lands—he got a little choked up telling us about the reunion he’d witnessed when all two hundred of the freed slaves had finally made their way back to the Okalu remnant in the Cat’s Teeth Mountains—and was settling back into tribal life when word arrived of a Moku raid at the edge of Okalu territory.
It turned out to be a rather strange sort of raid. The Moku hadn’t fired a shot, but had simply retreated after depositing my sister, bound and gagged, at the base of an Okalu lookout post. The lookout who found her reported that before running off, the Moku had announced that my sister was the Dawn Princess, and the Okalu were to obey her every command.
The Okalu were skeptical of that from the beginning, and grew even more skeptical once they ungagged Venus and she started barking orders in Rovian—which only Makaro understood, and then just barely.
Pretty quickly, the Okalu decided the whole thing was some kind of Moku ruse designed to sap their morale. After some debate, they settled on shipping Venus off to Edgartown, with Makaro as her escort. From there, she made her way back to us.
Venus wasn’t happy at all about the situation. It must have been quite a shock to go from being just Venus to the all-powerful Dawn Princess of Mata Kalun and then back to just Venus again.
We all tried to be nice to her, but it was a tall order, because she was every bit as disagreeable as Clem the monkey. She didn’t poop on things, though, so Mrs. Pembroke was endlessly patient with her, and worked almost unimaginably hard at making Venus tolerable to be around. In the end, Venus wound up spending most of her time down the road at the Wallises’, where the three younger children didn’t mind letting her play queen with them as long as they got to pretend to sacrifice her at the end of the day. Which I guess for Venus was a fair trade.
We saw Cyril again just once, and from a distance. He was shopping with his mother on Heavenly Road. We waved to him, but he pretended not to see us, and by the time we entered the shop he’d ducked into, it was mysteriously empty. But Uncle Billy had dealings with Cyril’s father, and one day he came home to report that the Whitmores had found a new boarding school in Rovia, and Cyril was on his way there to study political philosophy.
I felt a little sorry for him. There’d been no need to avoid us—we never talked about anything that had happened in the past, even among ourselves. For my part, I only felt the need to bring it up once, when I was alone with my uncle on the back porch of Cloud Manor. It was dusk, and we were watching the brilliant orange-red sunset over Mount Majestic.
“Did my mother . . . ?” I began.
Then I stopped. I wasn’t sure how to ask the question.
He gave me a kind smile. “Go on.”
“Did she . . . and Reggie Pingry . . . ?”
I didn’t have to say anything else. He knew what I was asking.
“They were engaged,” he said quietly. “And it might seem hard to believe, but at the time, I would have liked nothing more than to see them married. He was like a brother to me.”
My uncle watched my face for a reaction. I turned away and stared at the sunset.
“The thing about Reggie . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he started over.
“When you first met Roger Pembroke, what did you think of him?” he asked.
I thought back to that first day at the Peacock Inn—and the charming man who’d rescued my shabby family from a crowd of sneering rich folk and treated us to the most generous lunch I’d ever seen.
“I thought he was handsome, and clever, and kind,” I said. “And if he was a general, and I was a soldier, I would have followed him over a cliff without thinking twice.”
My uncle nodded. “That’s how most people felt when they met him. And some of them never realized the truth until they’d stepped off the cliff.”
The door to the house opened, and Mrs. Pembroke appeared. “Dinner’s ready, gentlemen,” she said with a smile.
My uncle smiled back at her as he stood up. Then he looked down at me.
“We can talk more about this—”
“That’s okay,” I said, getting up. “Let’s just eat.”
AFTER A MONTH of nearly perfect, carefree living, Mrs. Pembroke began to gently suggest that we start taking lessons from Millicent’s old tutors. When we ignored her, she began to suggest it less gently.
Then she enlisted my uncle on her side, and the game was up. Starting the next morning, lessons began promptly at eight and continued until three. Millicent and I took to it without much fuss. Kira made out all right, too. Her spelling was atrocious, but otherwise she was a keen student.
The others were varying degrees of disastrous. Venus bit the math teacher twice and eventually had to be confined to the dining room with Mrs. Pembroke on an indefinite basis. Guts was even worse. The tutors tried to institute some kind of punishment for him called a “time-out,” but since it involved sitting still, it was a complete failure. I did my best to help him study, but even I couldn’t convince him that there was any point to learning how to read, let alone add and subtract.
Adonis lasted exactly a week before deciding, after a long conference with my uncle, that it was time to put to sea. The Thrush—the ship that used to run ugly fruit for my father, and on which Guts and I had once hitched a ride to Pella Nonna—was in port at Blisstown, on its way back down to the Barkers, and my uncle arranged for Adonis to join the crew as an apprentice seaman.
There was a time when I would have bet he’d be thrown overboard by the crew before they’d lost sight of the port. But my uncle’s positive influence on Adonis was pretty solid by that point, and I figured he’d make out all right.
Clem was another story. The monkey was joining Adonis on the Thrush, but I had my doubts that he’d still be on board when they reached the Barkers.
Adonis still wasn’t exactly my favorite person on earth, but he’d grown on me. So when I saw him off down at the dock, there was a lump in my throat. Judging by the huskiness in his voice when he said good-bye, there was one in his, too.
He was the first of us to go, but it wasn’t long before I realized he wouldn’t be the last. Two days later, Guts stormed out of a math lesson, leaving a trail of curses behind him.
I went to try to settle him down. He was outside near the front door, hitting one of Cloud Manor’s big front columns with a stick.
“You okay?”
“— done with this pudda learnin’,” he spat.
“Well, you don’t have to hit that column with a stick.”
“Want me to hit the — porsamora tutor?”
“No . . . Stick with the column.”
He gave it a few more whacks, then put the stick down.
His face twitched. It didn’t usually do that anymore.
“If you hate the tutoring so much,” I said, “I bet my uncle’d let you come work wi
th him instead.”
Guts shook his head and twitched again.
“Nah . . . Gotta leave here anyway.”
He said it in a quiet voice, but the words landed like a punch in the stomach.
“And go where?”
“Pella first. Play guitar, earn some money. Then down south. Barkers and such.”
“What’s down there?”
“Family,” he said.
“You’ve got family?” The couple of times I’d tried to ask about one, he’d nearly slugged me.
“Dunno.” Guts twitched. “Gotta find out.”
“Well, take some time to think it over—”
“Done plenty of thinkin’. Past time I went. See if I can find ’em.”
“But . . .”
My throat was getting lumpy. Much worse than it had with Adonis.
“But wot?”
“Aren’t we your family now? Me, and Kira, and Millicent?”
“Course! But . . . ain’t the same.” He cursed under his breath and pressed the back of his good hand to his eye.
“Just gotta know is all,” he said. “One way or another.”
“You’re going to go look for them alone?”
He shook his head. “Kira’s gonna come with.”
His eyes peeked out from under his shaggy bangs to meet mine. “Come, too, if you want.”
I wanted to go with them. But the thought of leaving my uncle—let alone Millicent—was just too much.
Guts and I talked it over for a while, and eventually he agreed not to leave for at least a couple more days, to give me time to figure out what I was going to do.
At first, I didn’t say anything to Millicent. But right away, she guessed something was wrong, and when we got to the meadow that afternoon, she asked me about it.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then why do you look so sad?”
I told her. Guts and Kira were down the hill from us, playing fetch with Smack. He’d gotten pretty good at it for a mule. Back at Cloud Manor, he’d been spending more and more time with the dogs, and I think he’d started to believe he was one, too.
We watched them scamper around, laughing and shouting.
“How can we get them to stay here?” I asked.
“We can’t,” said Millicent.
“Don’t you want them to?”
“Of course I do. But we’ve all got to leave sooner or later.”
“You and I don’t,” I said.
A shadow crossed her face. My stomach fluttered a little.
“What is it?” I asked her. “Tell me.”
“I’m going to Winthrop. At the next term.”
The look on my face must have alarmed her, because she quickly put a comforting hand on my chest.
“You should come with me.”
I didn’t know whether to cry or yell.
“Millicent—it’s a girls’ school. Across an ocean!”
“There’s a boys’ school nearby. Kirkland or something. You could talk to your uncle. I’m sure he can get you into it.”
“I don’t want to go to a boys’ school in Rovia!”
“Well, what do you want?” she asked me.
I thought about that.
“I just want everything to be like it is now,” I said. “Forever.”
She smiled—not her usual smile, but a more wistful one, with sadness creeping in at the corners.
“That’s the one thing you can’t have,” she said. “Nothing stays the same for long. Everything changes eventually.”
I looked into her eyes. “Everything?”
The sadness left her smile for a moment.
“Not everything,” she said.
Then she kissed me, just to make sure I understood.
For a long time after that, neither of us said anything. Millicent rested her golden head on my chest, and I watched my best friends in the world play in the meadow as I tried to figure out how to keep us all together.
Millicent in Rovia . . . Guts and Kira down south . . . My uncle on Sunrise . . . The future felt like a math problem I couldn’t solve.
I never was any good at math.
“What am I going to do?” I said finally.
Millicent shrugged. “Don’t think about it,” she told me. “We’ve got today. Let’s just enjoy it.”
So that’s what we did.