The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Bram, that’ll make everything here worse. With Inspector Bettel, and—”

  “I’m not leaving you with all this, not in a scroll-ripping mood.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Really? You’re over it? You’ll let me take the inscriptions to the bank?”

  Her jaw set.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming. You bet your magically engineered ass I’m coming.”

  Why couldn’t Beatrice have given me a poker face instead of dimples? She was too wrung out to argue. “Fine,” she said, and stomped her way back to the parking lot.

  CHAPTER 10

  Beatrice brought them back to Stormwrack the next morning, into the heat of Annela’s clock room, which had been left to get stuffy.

  Sophie had cried off and on through the night, and now her sinuses were packed. Her whole body, from the eyelids out, felt incredibly raw, as if she’d been skinned.

  She was puffy-faced and unkempt, and it didn’t help that, when Beatrice rapped out a summons and a clerk came running, the boy’s reaction, at the sight of her, that said she looked as though she’d been run over.

  Beatrice bowled past him, into Annela’s sumptuous nest. The bed was empty. Through the portal, Sophie saw rumpled bedclothes.

  Bram raised a hand to his nose. “Someone’s been sick.”

  “Where are my cousins?” Beatrice demanded.

  The clerk, who was maybe sixteen, stammered a reply in Verdanii.

  “Use Fleetspeak,” Beatrice said, in a voice of iron, but instead of waiting for him to obey, she translated: “’Nella’s ordeal is going badly. She’s been ferried to the hospital.”

  “Bettona go with her?” Sophie asked.

  “Of course, Kir,” said the boy.

  Forget the scrolls for a minute, she thought. Get your head out of your navel and work. She made herself take a slow breath, pulling air between her teeth, forcing it out again. She bunched the muscles in her hands, arms, shoulders, then relaxed them.

  Institute business. Make a good impression. Don’t just find the truth; prove it. Make it unassailable.

  Following Beatrice into the cabin, she unslung her camera and shot the bedclothes, the walls, and floor. The cabin was filled with cushy luxuries: velvet bolsters, incense burners, ornate paper fans.

  “Bram—test tubes.”

  He began digging.

  “For what?” Beatrice said.

  Sophie sampled some ash from the incense, then began examining the carpet. A circular patch about six inches in diameter had been scrubbed so hard its dye had faded a little. She looked around for a bucket. “Maybe we can test the vomit for poison.”

  “You can’t be poisoned when you’re fasting, Kirs,” said the clerk.

  “Sure you can,” Sophie and Bram said simultaneously.

  Beatrice folded her arms. “Bettona’s high on your list of suspects, then?”

  “Process of elimination.” Sophie switched to English. “If there is an eraglider working for the pirates, and it’s not you, the London uncle, or Verena…”

  “Or you?”

  Sophie found the trash can. There was nothing in it but more ash and bits of shredded paper. “Bettona’s undervalued, and her career prospects are in the bilge.”

  “’Nella seemed to think she was beyond suspicion.”

  “If it occurred to you to ask, you wondered about her, too,” Bram said.

  “I asked,” Beatrice conceded. “But she has an alibi. They were drafting new legislation, pulling all-nighters, when Gale was stabbed. Bette couldn’t have slipped off to transport Gale’s assassins to Erstwhile.”

  Sophie tried a desk drawer. Locked.

  “Confidential papers, Kir,” the clerk said.

  “We should get a blood sample from Annela,” she said.

  Bram made a pretense of searching his pockets. “I neglected to pack a phlebotomist in here, Sofe.”

  “Beatrice? Can Wrackers take blood?”

  “I can take blood,” she said, and Sophie remembered that she worked in a hospice. “I don’t know about screening it for poisons.”

  “If we don’t have it, we can’t even try. I guess she might throw up again.”

  “Live in hope,” Beatrice said drily. “This doesn’t have to be sinister, kids. ’Nella’s stubborn and ambitious. She might have pushed the fast too far.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I’ll talk to her. If I can get over not being a spellscribe, she can get over not growing up to be God.”

  I’m not sure that follows, Sophie thought. She turned to the young clerk, who was taking in their activity with an air of astonishment. “Are Bettona’s rooms here?”

  “No, Kir. She lives aboard Breadbasket.”

  “Okay. We’ll all go to the hospital ship, and then … maybe Bram and Krispos can go look at Bettona’s place?”

  “Actually, Kir, you’re wanted most urgently.” The young clerk held out a bunch of sealed envelopes.

  “I’ll watch Annela like a hawk,” Beatrice promised. “I’ll even take one of your test tubes in case she pukes.”

  “You’re a suspect too.”

  “Do you want the disgusting body fluids or not, kid?”

  “Fine.” Exchanging the sample kit for her stack of mail, Sophie cracked open a black-bordered envelope. It was addressed to SOPHIE HANSA E LOW BANN, SYLVANNA. The designation made her skin crawl.

  “What?” Bram peered over her shoulder.

  “What the clerk said. That cranky old dude, Salk, from the Watch, wants to see me.”

  “And the rest of the paperwork?”

  She did a quick flip. “Red tape. Budget appropriation for the Forensic Institute. Payroll stuff.”

  “Payroll?” Bram said. “As in, an answer to your cash flow—”

  She interrupted. “For the fingerprinting project.”

  Before he could ask anything else—she didn’t fancy Beatrice hearing about her burgeoning credit card debt—she charged out into the maze that was Constitution’s lower decks, obliging Bram to keep pace. Soon they were in a dimly lit corridor, on the twelfth level, peering at an unmarked hatch.

  “You sure this where Annela took us before?” Bram asked.

  “Maybe. All these hatches look the same.” She raised a hand to knock, but the door opened before she reached it, yanked aside by a familiar, wizened man wearing a malevolent expression. He smelled, she noted, of vinegar.

  “You took your time, child.”

  “Something about the angle of the sun,” Sophie said. She was too depressed to be argumentative.

  “And brought your memorician,” he said.

  “Technically, I’m her autodidact,” Bram said in his accented Fleet.

  “Has the convenor died, girl? You look like overwarm butterfish.”

  “I’m pretty sure my oath covered showing up, not looking good.”

  “Fortunately for us all,” he said, gesturing to indicate his own timeworn face. “I am sorry about your cousin Gracechild.”

  “Is that why you summoned me? Because I need someone to go to Breadbasket and search Bettona Feliachild’s quarters. In case she poisoned Annela.”

  “Do you truly believe it a Verdanii domestic matter?” He looked as though the prospect delighted him. “Send your new forensic assistants … Selwig and Humbrey.”

  “I haven’t even met them.”

  “They’re up to turning over a residential berth,” he said. “Believe it or not, the Watch caught a few criminals during the Cessation without your assistance.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We have other business. Come in.”

  They trooped in and took seats in the uncomfortable desks that gave the room its schoolhouse appearance.

  “Here’s the wind, girl. This summer past you were aboard your father’s ship, Sawtooth, when she boarded a small ship run by bandits.”

  “Retrograd Incannis.” Sophie shuddered.

  “Since your return to Erstwhile, the su
rviving bandit has been put to trial and sentenced to death.”

  “So fast?” Sophie wasn’t any kind of fan of the death penalty, but Incannis had been sinking other boats and murdering their crews—nobody was disputing that.

  Sinking smugglers, she thought. There were things about that that had never made sense.

  “The trial was scheduled for next year, but the courts pushed up the date just after you left the Fleet,” Salk said. “Now then. The condemned—Kev Lidman’s his name—has invoked Fleet law to stave off his execution.”

  “Typical. Always a loophole, right?”

  The old man bared yellow teeth. “If you’re proposing to enforce the law, girl, you might pretend to respect it.”

  “What clause?” Bram said.

  “A citizen forfeits his right to life by committing capital crimes asea. But a slaver may assume possession of said individuals by intervening in their dispatch.”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “You saved Kev Lidman from a quick skewering at the hands of His Honor the duelist adjudicator. In the eyes of the law, said skewering would have had the same force as legal execution.”

  Killed a bandit, killed another bandit, got some of the third on my shoe … She fought back an inappropriate giggle that half felt like it might lead to throwing up.

  “Sophie didn’t save the guy,” Bram objected. “He put a knife to her throat.”

  Salk continued: “Lidman and the duelist adjudicator agree that she intervened in his dispatch. She, therefore, asserted primary ownership rights over his person.”

  “What?” Sophie said.

  “Sophie’s not a slaver,” Bram objected.

  “She’s Sylvanner, isn’t she?”

  “She’s Sylvanner? Wait, you’re Sylvanner now?”

  Red tape and loopholes. Was it any wonder she thought Fleet customs were stupid? “Well, I’m an oddity; I might as well be a slaver, too. What happens now, Kir Salk?”

  “You can give Lidman back to the court and we’ll pass him to another claimant, or behead him in a threeday. As he chooses.”

  “Beheading? That is horrifying.”

  “Technically, you can behead him yourself.”

  “And again, twice as hard, with the horrifying. Horrifying five.”

  “Sofe,” Bram said. “This would be the guy who attacked you.”

  “For a nanosecond!”

  “He helped kill the sailors aboard the ships they raided.”

  “Yeah, he’s a bad guy. But you’re saying let’s add a fun beheading to my list of personal accomplishments?”

  “He’s basically a pirate.”

  Ah. Pirates. A justified sore point with Bram. Still …

  “I don’t believe you’d even consider … Anyway, wait. What are my other options, Kir Salk? Give him up or…”

  “It’s illegal to keep the bonded in Fleet,” the old man said. “If you don’t surrender Lidman to the court, you must take him home.”

  “Home. Sylvanna?”

  “Certainly not to Erstwhile.” He gave her a canny look. “Well, girl?”

  “Teeth! Can I talk to him before I decide?”

  “I’d expect no less.” He handed her a sheaf of pages. “He’s on Docket. Your brother will not be permitted to accompany you.”

  “Understood.”

  “Go, then. Out of my sight.”

  They left.

  “What the eff, Sofe?”

  “Someone will be behind this,” she said. “Cly, maybe?”

  “How do you figure him?”

  She shook her head. “Either it’s revenge, because I made such a scene at that festival, or he wants me back on Sylvanna, or—I dunno. Just what we needed. Another level-five pain in our—”

  “What can I do?”

  Despite the overall trampled feeling, she felt a wave of love and gratitude. “Lots. Get us berths in the apartment block, make an appointment with Mensalohm the lawyer so we can find out how many snakes are in this fun new pit. And, remember Krispos?”

  “Mister Memory?”

  “I had him reading up on frightmaking inscriptions and Isle of Gold customs for me. See how he’s doing.”

  “What about these new forensic techs?” He flipped through the pages. “Ragan Selwig and Mel Humbrey?”

  She peered at the résumés. “Annela probably handpicked them to tell her when I break my oath.”

  “Now you’re getting paranoid.”

  “Only because everyone’s out to get me.”

  “They’re like … cop partners, it says.”

  She nodded. Humbrey apparently came from a free nation; his partner, Selwig, was from the slaveholding island Cardesh. “Wonder if there’s any way to reassign or trade in the portside guy?”

  “Seems like they’re a matched set. Cop married. Like Starsky and Hutch.”

  Heads together, they browsed the write-ups. The senior of the two, Humbrey, had suffered serious hearing loss on the job and they’d both been reassigned. Salk wrote that they were smart, hardworking, and regular in their habits. Whatever that meant.

  “Isn’t managing staff rather a lot to take on?” Bram asked.

  She shook her head. “If Annela’s been poisoned, the Age of Stupid Science needs us on our game. We solve this—”

  “It’s a feather in our cap?”

  “I was thinking more that it’d be, like, we caught a would-be assassin.”

  “Yeah. Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of bad guys, you don’t owe this Kev Lidman person anything.”

  She remembered vividly how scared he had been. How starved and afraid. She’d been avoiding the issue, pushing away every mention of Kev and his trial, promising herself she’d deal with him later.

  What she said was, “Bram, come on. Do you really truly honestly believe I should let a human being get beheaded without first talking to him?”

  Bram struggled visibly. “No. Of course not, no. Do you have messageply so we can text?”

  She opened her book of questions. “There’s the page. And—oh!”

  “What?”

  “This one says Nightjar’s on her way back with—”

  And that was when she stepped up to the main deck of Constitution, looking like day-old butterfish apparently, and walked straight into Captain Garland Parrish.

  Garland was looking ever so slightly disheveled. His black frock coat was the older and more worn of his two, and he had a goat under one arm, a long-haired and woolly beast with twisting horns. It was hanging placidly in his grip, but Sophie could see bite marks on his wrist.

  His handsome features lit up when he saw Sophie. Which was especially flattering considering her face had a puffy full-night’s bawl all over it.

  “Sophie,” he said, with every evidence of both pleasure and relief. “You wouldn’t by any chance have a rope, would you?”

  She set down her camera bag, unclipped the nylon strap from its loops, and held it out. Garland shifted the goat, which promptly sank its teeth into his arm. Ignoring it, he dug into its dreadlocks to reveal a collar.

  Sophie clipped the strap on.

  “Hold tight,” he said, before setting the creature down.

  With a clatter of hooves, the thing trotted to the yard’s worth of distance the makeshift leash allowed, yanking.

  Garland let out an unmistakably relieved sigh and reached for Sophie. Before she had time to object, she found herself enfolded against him.

  Damn, it felt good.

  He kissed her, and that felt even better.

  “Apologies,” he said. “I no doubt reek of goat.”

  “It’s fine. Why do you have her? She’s not another rescue, is she?” Garland had a tendency to liberate and rehome animals who’d been experimented on by spellscribes.

  “No, thank the Seas.” He shook his head. “The people of Glysta have declined to retire their convenor. They say there’s a spell they can work, using the goat hair, to offset—” He broke off as one of the uniformed
pages passed nearby.

  The convenor had severe mental illness, Sophie remembered. “To fix it?”

  “So they claim.”

  He didn’t smell of goat. He smelled of sandalwood and maybe a bit of linseed oil, and he was warm, and he’d been glad to see her, though she looked like a train wreck on legs.

  Yeah, and you’re magically beautified and charming. The thought came like a fire-hose blast of ice water. She extricated herself from his grip the next time the goat tugged on her.

  “Verena told me you went home,” Garland said, taking the opportunity to offer Bram a bow.

  “Is she still on Verdanii?”

  “As far as I know. But you’re back sooner than expected. Is something wrong?”

  With a huff, Sophie told him quickly about Annela. Then she handed him the sheaf of pages about Lidman, letting him read for himself.

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll see him, anyway. Then—”

  “It’s not your responsibility.”

  “That’s what I told her,” Bram said.

  “If I just let him get guillotined without at least asking why…”

  “I’d do the same,” he assured her, and again she felt that warmth. “You must allow Nightjar to take you to Sylvanna.”

  “You sure you want to—”

  “This man did threaten you,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust you with anyone else.”

  “She’ll take it,” Bram said. “Say thank you, Sofe.”

  “Thank you, Garland.” Anyway, being away from him wasn’t what she wanted. She pushed aside the swirl of interior objections, all the reasons why she shouldn’t be pursuing him or letting him pursue her.

  “Is His Honor behind this?”

  “I’ve been wondering.” It had come so fast on the heels of him sticking her with the Sylvanner passport. “Judiciary rushed him to trial as soon as I went home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Totally not your fault.”

  “Do you want me to come with you, to talk to the prisoner? You’d have to wait until…” He gestured at the goat, who had half stood on its hind legs and was trying to climb onto a stanchion.

  “No,” Sophie said. “Can you maybe go to Breadbasket and meet up with the two Watch guys who are supposed to be searching Bettona Feliachild’s quarters?” After all those years of spying with Gale, she would bet Garland knew how to poke around a place looking for clues.