The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “It wouldn’t take much of a dent, would it? We’d just need for one little shard to penetrate to the scroll inside the coffin. What would happen to your prize, Your Honor—”

  “You’d die too,” Bram said. “You’re closer to those grenades than we are.”

  “If I have to give my life for the cause of liberation, so be it.”

  “You’re no abolitionist,” Sophie said. “You’re forcing those Kevs to haul the coffin.”

  “Kev Lidman offered his life to the cause.”

  “You forced him,” Sophie said. “You made him write those compulsion spells on the kids. You promised you wouldn’t kill him with a thousand parasitic frights if he obeyed.”

  A half shrug. “As bounty due the doomed, we’ll give Kev’s family a handsome payment.”

  “Bakoo shine, huh? Very nice.”

  “It’s our way.”

  “Liberating the bonded isn’t truly your goal, girl,” Cly said.

  “Is there anyone who will believe that, once your capital lies in ruins and the spells in this great vault are reverted by the Institute’s destruction?”

  Okay, Cly was definitely stalling. What did he think would happen?

  Sophie didn’t have a play of her own; backing his was all she could do. “It hardly matters, Cly. If the inscription inside that sarcophagus gets nicked, the whole Institute refills with rock?”

  Cly nodded.

  “It’d be a massacre. The cream of your nation, international guests. All these Kevs and the trouble they caused, all the kids who’ve burned the scrips so their family slaves aren’t brainwashed anymore. The buildings in Hoarfrost collapsed. Boom. Your government will be out for blood.”

  “Listen to your daughter, Your Honor. She may be a savage, but she understands the situation,” Cleste said. “Why not sheath your sword so we can continue our journey to the ballroom?”

  “No,” Sophie said. To her surprise, she sounded almost pleasant. “I think if you’re going to go all weapon of mass destruction on this place, you should be standing right here at the heart of the implosion.”

  “Do you think I won’t do it? Do you think I’m afraid?”

  The Kevs were tiring as they stood there, mute and uncomplaining. Was this why Cly had been stalling?

  More time. She examined the woman. The white mask hid everything, of course—expression, eye movements. She had that band around her wrist. A watchband?

  Time to play to my strengths, Sophie thought, and spill everything. “What if I gave you an absolutely killer piece of intelligence? Something real, not all this stagey Stormwrack smoke-and-mirrors mummery? Something that would get you your crackdown on the bonded, here on Sylvanna and pretty much everywhere else on the portside?”

  Everyone stiffened … including Cly.

  Now that was interesting.

  “Crackdowns,” she said, dangling the bait. “Roundups, interrogations. Any of the freed who might be agitators, or even somewhat educated, would definitely get arrested and examined.”

  An outright glare from Cly now. Despite the danger they were in, she felt an upsurge of satisfaction. He knew she meant Pinna.

  She matters to him. He’s not faking that.

  “Your ‘killer intelligence’ hardly avails me if I’m captured,” Cleste said.

  “You have no real fears on that score, do you? You’re gonna glide, glide away, tick tick tick, with your magic wristwatch.”

  Verena shifted beside her. She got it then. Good.

  “We’re not so different, you and I,” Sophie said. “The Golders sought out your father. Was it Pharmann Feliachild, Bettona’s dad? They’d hoped he’d knock up your … mother? grandma?… and thereby allow them to get a finger onto the genetic legacy of the Verdanii.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s what the Sylvanners and Cly’s dad did. They were after a Feliachild baby who wasn’t just Verdanii, someone with a Sylvanner passport who might have access to the … what do you call them, Verena?”

  “Wild magics.”

  “Yeah, that,” Sophie said. “Just another round of magical monopoly breaking, with a baby for a prize. And it worked: you approached Bettona and talked her into helping you awaken your latent eragliding ability. She fed you bread made from the sacred Allmother flour.”

  The Kevs were trembling now. If they set the sarcophagus down, it changed things only slightly, as far as Sophie could see—Cleste could no longer just drop the iron ring and let its weight drag the grenade pins out.

  She could still yank it, couldn’t she?

  “This isn’t intelligence.”

  Wordy. Be wordy.

  “This family—our family,” Sophie stressed. “The Feliachilds. Your family and mine and Verena’s, and Cly and my brother here—we’re an ecosystem. When you add inputs to an ecosystem, there are reactions. You put the wrong plant in your garden, something from afar, soon it’s all over town, crowding out the local flora. You Wrackers understand this.”

  “So?”

  “Beatrice Feliachild and Cly Banning saw something in each other. They liked each other, at least at first, but what drew them together wasn’t infatuation. What they saw in each other was opportunity. Cly’s parents ordered him to try to acquire Verdanii genes. And Beatrice had an agenda, too.”

  “Beatrice Feliachild couldn’t manipulate a dancing doll,” the girl said scornfully.

  “Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure she was fond of Cly.”

  Cly coughed. Taking offense?

  “But she’d been told she wasn’t good enough to learn magic at home. Her little sister was this ubergifted spy, and—well, who knows what else was going on there?”

  “Do we need to psychoanalyze my mother right now?” Verena said. “Because, frankly, this is a little weird.” Her tone was mild, lacking any hint of defensiveness. Was she helping Sophie drag this out?

  “My point is, she had plenty to prove.”

  “Meaning what?” Verena said.

  “Beatrice came here, to Sylvanna, and Cly bumped her to the head of the line for magical apprenticing or whatever, because that’s what he does. Always to the head of the line—”

  “Nobody will believe that a Verdanii was given access to Spellscrip Institute secrets,” Cleste said.

  “No. They taught her little baby-blessing spells and family luck spells and veterinary inscriptions.”

  “You seem to be saying that Beatrice was using me,” Cly said. It was clear to Sophie that, unlike his ire of a moment earlier, this bit of outrage was playacting, an extension of his gambit to keep Cleste focused on them.

  “It was a two-way street, wasn’t it?” Sophie said.

  “Indeed,” Cly agreed. “Of course I saw how lonely and out of place Beatrice was. My father and the Institute had asked me to make myself agreeable to her. Their resistance to the match, when we became engaged, was part of the … you’d call it a scam, probably.”

  “My point is that when it was obvious the Institute was never going to teach her anything significant in terms of inscription, Beatrice went looking for whatever coaching she could get her hands on. She wasn’t going to be balked by a bunch of mere Sylvanners. And she found out there were other ways to work magical intentions.”

  Oh, that got them, Cly and Cleste both. They were all ears.

  “Sophie!” Garland said. “This is extremely ill-advised.”

  “Beatrice found out there were other letters in the magical alphabet.”

  “Sophie!” Garland protested again. Emphatically not playacting.

  “What letters?” Cleste demanded.

  Drag it out, keep her attention … She rounded on Garland. “What? We let her blast the Institute and half the city apart? End result’s the same, right?”

  “What you propose to reveal— The consequences for all the portside—”

  “What letters?” demanded Cleste. The excitement in her voice was unmistakable now. “Whose letters?”

  One of the Kevs buckl
ed. His knees collapsed as he folded to the floor. As he crumbled out from under the sarcophagus, it lurched, and two more of his fellows folded, too. The thing tipped like a spiny submarine.

  Time’s up, Sophie thought.

  Cleste instinctively jerked backwards, toward the grenades, taking the slack out of the chain holding the pins. Maybe she thought she was ready to die, but her survival reflex was too strong to overcome.

  Garland lunged forward, grabbing for the iron bangle.

  He got it, but not her. Cleste leaped, vaulting over the sarcophagus and the falling Kevs, landing lightly in the far corner of the room. Cly sprang after her, becoming momentarily entangled with one of the frights.

  “Here!” Bram urged the Kevs back, away from the fray, making soothing noises.

  Cly shoved the fright aside, still pursuing Cleste. She parried a swing; their swords met with a boom that sounded more like a drumbeat than any kind of metal-on-metal clash. The impact vibrated up through Sophie’s shoes.

  Cleste stretched out her free hand toward the sarcophagus.

  Wind rushed over Sophie’s face. The pulse of clocks beat in her eardrums, against her skin.

  “Verena, the coffin!”

  Verena grabbed for the spines on its outer shell. Garland worked around her, cutting the grenades free, one by one.

  Tick, tick, tick. It was deafening this time. It was more than one clock, and the stone chamber amplified the resonance. Sophie could hear the grandfather clock at Beatrice’s house, the metallic clink of tiny gears in a safe-deposit box in San Francisco, and that resonant boom boom that she suspected might be Big Ben. She heard Bettona’s timepiece.

  She heard again what must be the Worldclock, on Verdanii, a brrum, brrum, brrum, paced like a human pulse, beaten on something like a drum.

  There was one other clock, something aboard a ship. She could sense Cleste pulling toward that one, trying to bring as much as she could: Verena, a Kev or two, and of course the sarcophagus.

  She takes it with her, she can blow it up at her leisure. Or just hold it hostage, the way they were going to do with Temperance’s scroll.

  Bettona said I ended up in the wrong place, that one time when I eraglided, because I yanked away from her.

  Make her yank.

  “Her wrist,” she shouted. “The watch is on her left wrist!”

  Cly pivoted, disengaged, and brought his sword around. Cleste deflected again, trying to circle back toward the sarcophagus.

  Garland threw one of the grenades right at her free hand.

  Bram promptly hurled himself at Sophie, bearing her to the stone floor.

  The sarcophagus split in two with a snap, like the spiny conker it resembled. Cleste vanished with the top half of the thing.

  The coffin within the sarcophagus fell, rolling to the floor.

  A blast of seawater filled the room, knocking everyone across the atrium.

  Cly’s killing stroke fell on empty air.

  There was no explosion from the grenade; Garland must have thrown it with its pin still inside.

  For a minute, they all simply coughed and sputtered. Cly recovered first, crawling up and examining the inner coffin. “It’s intact,” he said. “Obviously the spell within is untouched, or we’d feel the reversion.”

  “Thank the Seas for that,” Verena said.

  They spent a second letting relief sink in. Sophie gave Bram an especially ferocious hug.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what letters you meant?” Cly asked her, wringing out his cape.

  “Sure I will,” Sophie said. “I’m all oathed up, remember? I pretty much have to. The letters are called pictals.”

  “Sophie,” Garland protested.

  “They’re how the bonded write to each other.”

  Cly’s eyebrows climbed practically to his forehead. Garland looked appalled. Bram was trying to catch up. Only Verena had her attention elsewhere, as she wrapped her hands around two of the sarcophagus spines, pulling as if into a cat stretch.

  “There’s a full dictionary at your sister Pinna’s place, Cly,” Sophie added. “Go ahead, send the goon squad over. She’s connected, I think, to whatever resistance the bonded have going locally. The Institute could be interrogating her within the hour. Let the pogrom begin.”

  “You think I won’t?” Cly said.

  “I’m hoping—trusting, I guess—that you are who you claim to be. That your oath to protect the Cessation and your family are the things you care about.”

  The silence stretched until one of the Kevs sneezed, making them flinch.

  Come on, Sophie thought. Are you going to let a bunch of meddling kids screw with your life plan? Would you send them after Pinna?

  Cly seemed to reach a decision. “As the senior Fleet officer on the scene, I’ll have to direct you all to keep this confidential while I sort through the implications and report back to the government.”

  “No problem,” Sophie said. She felt Garland, beside her, relax.

  Cly pulled off his cape, wrung it out more completely, hung it so it draped properly and hid, somewhat, the waterlogged state of his slacks. “I’ll fetch some soldiers. Wait here.”

  With that, he turned and disappeared down the corridor, leaving them in the catacombs to guard the pacified frights and the old magician’s corpse.

  CHAPTER 39

  Cly sent them ahead to the hotel in the pumpkin carriage from the Institute, into a traffic jam of celebrants and tired newlyweds bottlenecked on the switchbacks that led back to the capital city. Moon pyres burned in the streets of Hoarfrost, smudging columns of smoke skyward, filling the cold air with a smell of crisped aromatic wood and apple chips. Happy chatter and strains of music drifted up from the streets; the whole city was up, apparently, to see out the longest night.

  Cly had stayed behind to do mop-up, to consult with the Spellscrip Institute and the Sylvanna government about possible responses to the attack.

  Sophie could have been worrying that they’d embark on a hovel-by-hovel search for pictals in Innobel.

  She wasn’t worried.

  The carriage had plush, comfortable seats, and Garland had an arm around her. Verena and Bram were seated across from them. Her sister looked thoughtful; Bram seemed a little shell-shocked.

  She nudged his foot with her own boot, caught his eye. “Doing okay, Bramble?”

  “Still trying to wrap my head around Daimon doing that horrible thing. To Kev.”

  “Poor Kev.”

  Verena said, “You couldn’t have saved him.”

  Sophie shook her head. “No.”

  “You fought hard.” Garland laid his hand over hers and she snuggled closer. He was just as muddy as she was, but he smelled a little of citrus oil; one of the banquet dishes must have tipped onto him.

  Verena was watching carefully. Was she expecting a meltdown? Sophie didn’t feel like melting down.

  Instead she said, “It occurs to me that seeing people get murdered makes me super happy about having gone into hunting criminals.”

  “Even if it keeps you from diving the Nine Seas in search of new marine mollusks?” Verena said.

  “You know, if I wanted to be diving mollusks, I think I probably would be.”

  “Yeah.” Her half sister let out a little bubble of laughter. “Well, they’ll keep, right?”

  “I see Capo,” Bram said suddenly.

  They had inched around a curve in the mountain, revealing a view of the harbor. The ship Tonio had brought from Erinth was long and big—thrice masted, low in the water, with black swirls on its sails and a glint of lava-colored spellscrip around its waterline.

  “That’s what you got as a loaner?” she said. “Looks pretty posh.”

  “Erinth valued Gale highly, and it supports the Cessation,” Garland said.

  “I bet they value you, too.” Sophie scanned the water, picking out Sawtooth, sending a silent thrum of affection toward Watts and Sweet, somewhere aboard. Nightjar’s absence from the tableau
ached, like a missing tooth.

  Above the pall of smoke from the moon pyres, the sky was stunningly clear. Stars shimmered brightly, directly above and all the way to the horizon.

  The carriage bumped forward steadily for another ten minutes before getting jammed up again.

  “What a mess,” Bram said. “At least after Superman defeats the bad guys, he flies home.”

  Home, she thought. “We’ll get Nightjar raised and repaired. Prove that Daimon and Cleste were operating on orders from Tug and Isle of Gold. Make a case to prove Daimon stabbed Selwig. And then, hopefully, tie Convenor Brawn into it.”

  “Is that all?” Bram said.

  “We’re up to the task.”

  After a second, he nodded. “We are. But doesn’t all this assume Cly doesn’t decide to spill his guts to his Institute pals about the pictals? He could be launching a big old slaver crackdown right now.”

  “He won’t.” She wasn’t worried about Cly. There would be layers to his plans, things that he was yet hiding. But a slaughter didn’t fit. He didn’t want to get pulled from the Fleet and into a local war with Haversham. He didn’t want to be a big fish in a backwater, and he didn’t want his sister exposed and arrested.

  Garland had followed the direction of her thoughts. “If need be, we’ll arrange an offer to smuggle Pinna to a certain safe harbor.”

  “The aunt? She’s not a slave anymore, I thought,” Bram said.

  “Sophie may be right about her involvement with a true resistance movement,” Garland said. “It’s one reason why she might have had a full pictal dictionary in her house.”

  Sophie let out a long breath. “We need to roll things closer to calm before Isle of Gold figures out its next move or unravels what I told Cleste.”

  “You didn’t tell Cleste the whole truth.”

  “I gave her a clue. They won’t waste it.”

  A raccoon emerged from a stand of spruce along the road, saucily watching as the traffic got moving again.

  “You really think we can do it?” Bram said. “Cool things off enough to keep the Fleet from imploding?”

  “We’re one little pocket of air within a big weather system,” she said. “Maybe it’s already got too much energy. But if anyone can do it … Come on, guys, I’m not being Pollyanna here. Look what we pulled off just now. All those Kev doppelgangers would be on the rampage.”