Venturess

by Betsy Cornwell

  Free of the burden of my mother, Jules flew twice as fast.

  I could hear the gathering wave behind us now, a roar that made the airships’ din seem as small and gentle as a purr. I could feel it, too, the sucking air behind us as the wave drew in volume and power, and the sheer unbridled force of the ocean bearing down on Faerie.

  I didn’t dare to look again until we were flying over jungle, Jules still plunging ahead, flying as if Hell ran behind us. I saw the wave rising like a great hand above the tree line. The huge airships in front of it were only flies to be swatted.

  When it crashed down, it shook the land, shook the trees, shook the very air we flew through. The sound of impact went on and on, drowning out any screams, any sound of screeching metal. The roar blended with its own echoes, reverberating through every bone in my body, erasing any memory of silence or stillness. I watched wave after wave of aftershock push up against the beach, felling the tall jungle trees and sending ocean hundreds of feet inland.

  Jules slowed at last and turned in the air, locking his wings into an updraft to save fuel. We hovered, watching the ocean shudder and gnaw at the shore. The sky was empty of airships, of flying cavalry, even of birds.

  I knew the merfolk had saved us, had saved Faerie. I knew that somehow Fin’s blood had called them here, and that this was something they had done for him. But how many Fey soldiers had they killed? How many automatons destroyed—​and what would happen to the Ashes? Would they float bodiless on the waves now, unable to die? What happened to Ashes in seawater that my mother seemed so afraid of?

  All I wanted in the world was for this to be over, but I knew it was not. I wanted to go see Fin in the healers’ halls, where I made myself believe that I would find him still living. I wanted Caro, to sleep with both of them in our wide bed for an entire week, month, for the rest of my life.

  But I knew that the wave that had ended the battle so suddenly would leave many dead and dying on the beach in its wake. My battle, and Jules’s, would not be over until we had brought as many of them as we could to the healers.

  We flew back to the barracks only long enough to fill Jules’s furnace with fresh coal, and then we headed for the beach again.

  WE spent the rest of that interminable day flying back and forth between the beach and the barracks, carrying two passengers with us at a time—​even three, when they could hold on to Jules themselves. The beach was strewn with tree trunks, kelp, coral . . . and bodies and metal, too, but not nearly the unconquerable numbers of soldiers that had come down from the airships. There was a slick, lacy sheen of oil on the water.

  One lone black airship was marooned in the treetops a hundred yards in from the beach, its sails and the hide of its balloon draped across the branches like funeral shrouds.

  Every time we looped back to the barracks I looked for Caro, but I never saw her. I told myself that it meant nothing, but every time a face that wasn’t hers greeted us, my heart sank a little more. The healers we saw reminded us to bring them anyone who needed help, not just Fey. But there were few soldiers left living from either army: So many who weren’t killed in the battle had drowned in the tidal wave. Every automaton had been doused in the water, and most of them were lost entirely to the sea. When I stopped to look for Ashes in the heads of those that remained, I found the boxes all empty, as clean as if they’d never been filled at all.

  The little insect souls I’d loved, all gone. Dead. I knew from the look in Jules’s eyes that he was mourning them too, just as I knew from the one shake of his head after I showed him the little empty boxes that they really were gone.

  Any body that was still moving, we picked up and took to the healers.

  I longed desperately to seek out Fin in the halls, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I lingered there to find him while others were dying on the beach.

  A few hours into my retrieval work, I saw a body I recognized drifting in the shallows, gently buffeting the shore. Fitz’s skin was puffy and white, his face bloated, his eyes open and unseeing.

  I had to force myself to touch him. I was almost sure he was dead, and when his lack of heartbeat confirmed it, I felt a surge of relief that was quickly overcome by guilt. The healers said everyone deserved our care; how dare I think Fitz was any different.

  In a few more minutes the waves would pull him into deep water again, and he’d be lost to the sea. I dragged him onto dry sand and closed his staring eyes, remembering against my will all the times he’d winked at me and flirtatiously called me Miss Nick. He hadn’t always hated me, nor I him. I could never have imagined we would end up here.

  I left him there on the beach and returned to Jules, who nickered and nosed my shoulder as I walked by to remount him.

  On our next stop at the healers’ halls, I finally saw Caro. She nodded at me, her eyes glazed and distant, her capable hands stained with antiseptic, blood on her trainee’s apron.

  Fin? I mouthed, although I dreaded hearing her answer.

  She blinked, startled, although I don’t know what else she could possibly have expected me to ask her.

  She met my eyes and nodded again. “He’ll pull through,” she said, and then one of the healers called for assistance and she hurried off, still with that blank, distant look.

  I returned to Jules and took off toward the beach, not sure what to think. Was Fin worse off than Caro had admitted, and she just didn’t want to burden me with the knowledge when I still had work to do?

  No, Caro was more honest than that, and she thought better of me than that too.

  Jules reached the shore again, and I scanned the littered landscape for more survivors. No one was left, only the broken machines and the broken trees and the limp, dead jellyfish that had been tossed up onto the shore along with the wave.

  But, there: half buried in the sand, a lean, shuddering, dark-haired figure trying futilely to pull himself up above the tide line.

  “Look, Jules,” I said, leaning forward and pointing.

  We descended, keeping well clear of the lapping waves. I dismounted and rushed to the man’s side.

  Olive skin, black hair, tall and lean. His narrow dark eyes when he looked up at me held no trace of their secret smile, but I still knew him.

  It was impossible. He’d been gone, dead, drowned, for weeks. I started to shake, and I collapsed next to him. How many resurrections would this place throw at me? How could I—​could he—​have been so lucky!

  I checked for broken bones with my trembling hands, then heaved him into a sitting position. I put my palms on his chest to keep him from collapsing forward, and I looked into his eyes.

  “Miss Lampton,” he said, his voice a salty rasp. Wincing with pain, he dipped his head formally, as much of a bow as he could make.

  “Nick,” I said automatically, then shook myself. “How—​how did you manage to live? When the ship went down . . .”

  “I . . .” He coughed, and pinkish water dribbled from his mouth. “I remember so little . . .”

  I could feel his heart drumming, fast and uneven. I looked up at Jules, who stamped his feet and shook out his wings.

  “You don’t need to tell me now,” I said quickly. “Here, I’ll take you to people who can help you.”

  I started to lift him up.

  “I can walk,” he insisted, pushing his hands weakly against the sand.

  I hooked my arms under his and we slowly stood up. “Lean against me,” I said. I half dragged Wheelock to Jules, who strained his head back to help me push him up onto the saddle, as he’d done with dozens of others already today. I pulled myself astride once more, and we took off, making a final loop over the stretch of beach to check for other survivors before we returned to the barracks.

  I kept looking back at the ocean. I didn’t trust it anymore. I thought I felt the pressure of a hidden wave behind me all the time, ready to drown me.

  We saw no one else left alive on the beach; it was as if the ocean had been waiting to give
me Wheelock until I’d saved everyone else. I tried not to think about Shim and the serpent’s spirit kingdom, tried not to picture shade blossoms.

  Wheelock leaned back against me, taking hollow-sounding breaths, his eyelids once in a while fluttering closed. The skin of his hands was clammy and wet, as if the water didn’t want to let go of him, and I covered it with my own warm hands, finally wrapping my arms all the way around him, keeping him warm however I could as we flew.

  Wheelock surrendered himself easily to the healers at the hall, giving me another weak but formal little nod as two aproned doctors lowered him onto a narrow bed.

  “Where’s Caro?” I asked another healer. Fe pointed toward the far end of the hall, and I went as quickly as I could, not quite finding the strength in my exhausted limbs to run.

  Caro was sitting at Fin’s bedside, her back to me, holding his hand as he lay unconscious. It was much like the scene she must have come in on in Fin’s palace bedroom on Exposition Day, when I stayed with him after that first wound. This was no private, sumptuous bedroom, though; it was busy and sterile and very public, and Fin was treated no differently than any of the other wounded in their beds—​except that Caro was allowed to stay with him.

  I walked up behind them and touched her shoulder.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “I’m sorry! Caro, it’s just me,” I said.

  She stared at me as if I were a stranger. That distracted look was still in her eyes. After a moment she seemed to recognize me again, but her expression grew only more perplexed, more wondering.

  “Nick . . .” she said eventually, faintly, as if she were trying out a name she’d never used before.

  “Yes, Caro, I’m here,” I said. I could see another reason why they’d allowed her this break to stay with Fin: She was clearly more spent than I was.

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “You’re here.” And finally she started to smile.

  I took a seat on a stool that another apprentice healer brought over to me. It was only then that I noticed a faint golden glow coming from inside Fin’s and Caro’s hands.

  In answer to my questioning gaze, the apprentice took my own hand and pressed it, then gestured toward my friends.

  I rested my hand on top of Caro’s. I expected to feel a spark, some sudden leap of joining or transfer of energy, but it wasn’t like that. It was only the feeling I got when I woke up in the middle of the night to find Fin and Caro next to me, that I got sometimes when we were all laughing over the same joke, the feeling that I’d had when we looked at the stars on the deck of the Imperator the very first night of our voyage. It was the most natural feeling in the world.

  I settled into the magic and closed my eyes.

  They stayed closed until I heard Mr. Candery call my name.

  “Nicolette,” he said gently. “Nicolette.”

  I opened my eyes. The healers’ halls were lit with glowing orbs, the same soft golden color that throbbed underneath our hands. It had grown dark outside the high windows, fully night, yet I’d felt no time pass at all.

  Fin was awake now. He smiled at me and at Caro, whose eyes were fluttering open and closed, as if she didn’t want to allow herself to sleep.

  “Someday I’ll save you instead,” Fin said wryly. The effort of speaking made him grimace. “I swear.”

  I wanted to tell him that he did save us, in a way, that his blood had saved Faerie after all, but I thought it would be best to wait.

  “No doubt you will,” I said. I squeezed his and Caro’s hands before releasing them.

  “I’d like to speak with you, Nicolette,” Mr. Candery continued, his eyes full of that familiar anxious sympathy I’d seen so often as a child as well as another emotion that it took me a little bit longer to name.

  Pride. That was it, deep pride . . . because of me. I remembered that look from my childhood too, and it made my breath catch.

  “All right,” I said.

  The ache in my muscles was like a sudden bite when I rose from my stool. I quickly took the arm Mr. Candery offered.

  “You two will call if you need me, right?” I asked, although I already knew they would. They both nodded, Fin with a smile, Caro still with that absent look. I frowned a little, thinking that if she carried on that way, I’d soon be more worried about her welfare than I was about Fin’s.

  But Fin saw what I was thinking and gave me an extra little nod; he’d make sure she didn’t slip too far into whatever place she had gone inside her head. The golden glow was still emanating from between their fingers, and I knew that would keep both of them anchored.

  ✷

  Leaning my head on Mr. Candery’s shoulder, I walked with him out of the healers’ hall and into a small private room.

  There was only one chair and a desk in this windowless closet, just the same as countless other Fey rooms I’d seen. The desk was covered with stacks and stacks of medical books, the wall papered with diagrams. I knew the extent of my exhaustion when I didn’t feel the least desire to examine the technical drawings.

  “Nicolette, I have to tell you something,” Mr. Candery said, helping me into the seat. I hissed out my breath at the relief that sitting again brought to the muscles in my legs. “But first I want to tell you how—​how absolutely proud—” He lifted one elegant hand to his face and swiped away tears. I noticed that his other arm held a crutch on which he supported himself, and that his left leg was in a splint. I felt such shame that I had let him support me as we walked, that I had to force myself to keep listening to his words.

  “You should rest here, Mr. Candery,” I said, rising stiffly. “I’m fine, truly.”

  “No, Nicolette,” he said. “I’d like you to be sitting down when you hear this.” His lavender-blue eyelids closed, and he took one deep breath. “I know you’ve been busy with rescues all afternoon,” he said, “and I can’t tell you how much good you have done, how many people you’ve saved. You’re a real heroine, Nicolette, and I want you to remember that, always.” He took a hobbling step forward and grasped one of my hands in his. “You weren’t the only person going back and forth to the beach after the battle, though, you know. We’ve been sending out reconnaissance people ever since the wave . . . ever since we were able. The reason you were the only one in the air is that . . .” He sighed. “It’s that every other machine in the battle was doused in the water. All the Ashes were . . . were released. They died in the salt water; Ashes always do. Your dear . . .” He squared his shoulders as if to give himself courage, and he looked into my eyes. “Margot, your mother, is gone now. She was still on the beach when the wave came; I wasn’t sure if you knew.”

  He took a deep, shaky breath. “Nicolette, I am so sorry, but your mother has passed on.”

  I touched my breast pocket, but he continued before I could interrupt him: “It may be for the best, after all, given her pain.”

  My fingers froze at the edge of my pocket. “Her pain?”

  Mr. Candery clasped my hand tighter. “It’s over. Whatever peace we find when we die, it’s hers now.”

  He was so obviously stricken with grief that I forgot my question. “It’s not, Mr. Candery. Jules and I saved her, just before the wave came. Her body was—​it was too much of a burden for Jules, we had to, to get back to the land ahead of the wave . . .” I found I couldn’t quite say it, couldn’t form the words to tell Mr. Candery how I had torn apart my mother to save my own life.

  Instead, I reached my trembling fingers into my pocket and withdrew the small, soldered-shut box.

  Mr. Candery staggered backward, nearly losing his balance on his injured leg. “Margot?” he whispered, staring at the box. He was talking to my mother rather than to me, asking her if she was still there.

  And I knew that somehow she was.

  “I can make her a new body,” I said. “It will take time, but . . .” I suddenly found the thought just funny enough to give one short, wry, lonely laugh. “I suppose I’m just returning the favor she onc
e did for me. It will take less than nine months, at least.”

  Mr. Candery was still staring at the little box in my hand. “She’s always rebuilding herself,” he said. “Always . . . she has another storeroom. It will take less time than you think.”

  He wrenched his gaze away and began to walk toward the door. “Yes,” he said, “we can start right away. We can have her back by morning. Oh, Nicolette!” He turned toward me with a wide, sweet, grateful smile, and if I had never known before how much he loved her, I would have known it just from that one look.

  But I remembered what he had said a few moments before. “Mr. Candery,” I said quietly, still cupping the box of my mother’s Ashes in my hand, “what did you mean about her pain? Was she sick still? Did she carry the illness into her new body?”

  Mr. Candery looked away. “No,” he said.

  With a sigh he turned away from the door. “She made me promise I’d never tell you, but I thought, if she was gone, it would be a comfort . . . Nicolette, it wasn’t the croup that caused her pain. It was the burning.” His gentle voice was cautious, even pleading. “I didn’t know what Ashes really were until sometime after you were born, my dear, when she’d been using them for years. When I learned, I refused to buy them for her anymore. She already had so many, and I never thought . . . I never understood quite how deep her fascination with them ran until she got sick. And even then, it was only because I loved her so much, because I so selfishly didn’t want her to die, that I helped her find a way to turn to Ashes herself.” He sighed. “It was a long time afterward, after I left you at Lampton, that we reunited. She had been living with the pain for years by then. She couldn’t ignore it, she said, but she could get used to it. She could go on working, even if the whole time . . .” He took one more breath. “Even if the whole time she felt as if she were still burning alive.”

  There his voice broke, and he couldn’t go on.

  I dropped the box of Ashes. It fell to my lap with a soft plink. The image of it blurred.

  Every second. Living every second with the kind of pain that had made that Esting soldier cry out so horribly that I could still hear his scream echoing in the back of my mind . . .