Tempest

by Cari Z

  “Lovely.” Megg took off her apron and led the way back to her own little room, getting tea for the three of them and making Colm grab some bread and smoked rock trout on the way, since, as she put it, “I know you gave that old man most of your breakfast, and the gods know you’ve not bothered to remember lunch yet today.”

  “It’s how I keep my girlish figure,” Colm told her solemnly as they sat down in Megg’s apartment. Hers was two rooms to their one, the bedroom and a tiny sitting room with four chairs and a low table.

  “Girlish figure, indeed!” she scoffed, but settled back and poured the tea into three fine porcelain cups, much nicer than the mugs she stocked for the inn. “Go on, then, Nichol, tell us all the news.”

  Nichol broke the wax, unfolded the letter and cleared his throat dramatically.

  “My dearest brother,” he began, affecting a high, feminine voice that sounded nothing like Baylee, but made Colm laugh. “By the time you get this, I hope you are well situated in Caithmor. It must be so exciting, to live in such a tremendous place. Do take care not to let people cheat you, and make sure you keep your feet dry. I didn’t knit you all those socks just for you to forget about them and run around with damp toes.

  “Is she your sister or your mother?” Nichol broke character to ask.

  “It’s good advice,” Megg said firmly. “If you took half as much care with your own feet, my lad, you might never have been troubled by that infection that made all your nails turn green last year.”

  Nichol blushed faster than Colm had ever seen him color up before. “Moving right along,” he muttered, and continued in his own voice this time. “I hope you have many more things to tell me in your next letter. The last one you sent was far too short. Have you found Aunt Megg? Is Nichol the hellion she describes in her own letters? Oh Gran, really.”

  “I also called you a delight,” Megg assured him, sipping her tea. It was a dark citrus-and-spice blend, Megg’s favorite, and Colm enjoyed the naturally sweet flavor of it. Nichol completely ignored his own cup.

  “Between you and Colm, they’ll think I’m the Two incarnate,” Nichol muttered.

  “I told them you were immensely helpful,” Colm offered after swallowing a bite of bread.

  “Lovely. I’m a helpful hellion.”

  “Less pouting, more reading,” Megg said, and Nichol rolled his eyes but got back to it.

  “Merdith and Tellan are insufferable as usual. He can’t catch a quarter of what you used to, and claims to all who’ll listen that you left the rigging in such a state that he couldn’t unravel it for days. Wait, is that true, Colm?”

  “Possibly,” Colm allowed with a little smile.

  “Ha!” Nichol turned to his grandmother. “And you call me a hellion!”

  “All young men are hellions to some extent,” Megg said. “Although I’m sure this Tellan deserved it.”

  “She gives you the benefit of a doubt,” Nichol said with mock disgust. “You’ve stolen my gran’s affections right out from beneath me.”

  “I’ve plenty of affection to go around. Now read, lad.”

  “Merdith is expecting a child now, and she calls for Mama to help her around the house day and night. She’s barely far enough along to tell, though, and hardly sick at all. If having a child turns you into a useless lump, then I will certainly never have one myself. I will run away and join you in Caithmor before that.

  “Kels misses you almost as much as I do, I think. He sleeps in your bed now, and he is determined to master the boat. Tellan can’t exactly tell him to leave, so Kels spends much of the time that he isn’t in school driving Tellan mad. It’s great fun to watch. Oh, I like this cousin.” Nichol grinned.

  “The thought of the two of you ever meeting terrifies me,” Colm said. Nichol shook his head.

  “No, we’d have you to keep us straight. We might run you ragged, though,” Nichol warned, then kept going. “Thank you for the mask. Kels has stolen it, and I fear I’ll never get it back, so you must send me another one. And it has been two whole weeks since your last letter. You promised me one a week, don’t forget. I never do.

  “Mama misses you, but she almost never speaks of you, or Papa. Life here is busy, so I suppose she doesn’t want to dwell on sad things that might weigh her down. I don’t mind dwelling on you, though. I hope you are well and happy. Your loving sister, Baylee.”

  “Well, that’s all pretty good news,” Megg said encouragingly. “A baby on the way is always exciting.”

  “Babies are dull, Gran.”

  “Babies are anything but dull,” she said with a little shiver. “My babies were right little terrors, and you made them seem like little lambs by comparison.”

  “I live to keep your heart strong, Gran,” Nichol said earnestly. “Everything I do is designed to make you tougher, to give you the greatest longevity possible. You’ll outlive everyone at this rate.”

  Megg smiled, but it looked a bit melancholy to Colm. “I certainly hope not, love.”

  There was a knock at the door. “Mistress?” Idra called. “Young Master Windlove’s here, and he’s asking to speak with the lads. What shall I tell him?”

  “We’re coming!” Nichol answered for Megg, bounding to his feet and handing the letter over to Colm. “I reckon he’s here to apologize,” he said, throwing open the door. “And where do you get off calling me a lad?” he demanded of Idra, who looked unimpressed. “You’re only one year older than me! Not even that!”

  “You’re lucky I don’t call you a little boy,” Idra said archly before sweeping back off to the kitchen.

  “Wench,” Nichol muttered, quiet enough that Colm was sure that Megg hadn’t heard it. “Come on, Colm.” He strode out of the sitting room. After a glance at Megg, who looked lost in her thoughts, Colm followed, tucking the letter away beneath his shirt.

  It was a quiet time in the Cove, that odd time between the midday and evening meals when only the dedicated drinkers were still around. By the time Colm got to the taproom, Nichol and Jaime were sitting together at the table by the window, but Jaime noticed as soon as Colm entered and stood up. He started speaking before Colm even got to them.

  “I’m sorry for what I said about you,” Jaime said, a bit stiffly, but it sounded genuine enough. “Nichol never described you in such a fashion and neither should I.” He held out his hand. “Will you pardon my poor manners?”

  “Of course,” Colm replied automatically, taking Jaime’s hand and gripping his wrist tight for a moment before releasing him. Part of him wanted to hold on to the anger that he barely recognized, but a gesture like this on the part of Jaime deserved his acceptance, for Nichol’s sake if nothing else.

  “That sounded painful, mate,” Nichol chuckled, and Jaime glared down at him, but it was a halfhearted thing.

  “Are you over your snit now?” Jaime asked. “Will you come sailing with us tonight? I’ve got two of the cutters reserved for a race out to the pillar and back, and I’d rather have you on my team than Ollie or Blake.” He glanced over at Colm and bit his lip. “I don’t mean to deliberately exclude you,” he added. “It’s just that the coast guard’s cutters are meant to be sailed by two men at the most, and with Nichol, we’ll have just the right number.”

  “It’s fine,” Colm told him, and it really was.

  “Thank you.” Their gazes met, and in that moment, Colm knew exactly what Jaime thought of him, and what they were getting into. Nichol was the flame to which both of them fluttered, and Jaime’s confidence in being the favorite recipient of that warmth had been shaken yesterday. This was his version of sharing, a truly gracious effort, and Colm wasn’t going to spurn it just to make trouble for Jaime, no matter how much he would prefer to spend more days and nights as the sole focus of Nichol’s attentions.

  And if Nichol didn’t notice, so much the better.

  “You’d better go,” Colm e
ncouraged them. That was all it took for Jaime to be out the door.

  “Aye, but don’t think I’m going to forget that we need to write Baylee back, and soon, or she really might hunt you down,” Nichol said, standing and walking to the door, but backward so he could keep facing Colm as he went. “Get Gullfoot to give you a day off every now and then, by the Four, and then you can come sailing with us one of these days.”

  “I’ll try,” Colm said, although he really wouldn’t. In a way, the mornings he spent with Lew in a state of silence and sensation and hard labor were bright spots in his day, filled with simple activities that he could do so well by now that his mind was left delightfully adrift. “You should hurry, before Jaime gets tired of waiting and chooses Ollie or Blake after all.”

  “He won’t do that,” Nichol said confidently. “I’m his favorite.” Nevertheless, he turned and rushed out into the late-afternoon sun, and Colm watched him go and thought to himself, of course you are.

  * * * * *

  Caithmor became disgustingly hot during the months of summer. In Anneslea, summer had been the season of comfortable warmth, the time of the year when you could wear only one layer of clothes most days, and the dragonflies were so thick in the air that if you stood still for long enough, they would inevitably come to sit on your hand or hair to sunbathe. Summer was a season of celebration in Anneslea, culminating in a harvest festival and dance that often led to numerous spur-of-the-moment marriages, and a general feeling of contentment abounded despite the enormous amount of work that had to happen as well.

  Summer in Caithmor was nothing like that. The heat settled down in the city and stayed, and became a bubbling stew of stench and illness. More traders were bringing their wares in, determined to beat the colder weather they’d run into as they crawled like ants back out across the continent. The navy was powering ahead with preparations to mount an assault on the Garnet Isles before the typhoons of autumn came. That meant the docks, which had the briefest respite from the heat thanks to the sea wind, were now inundated with sailors and soldiers whose ships were being resupplied. Fights broke out over the smallest things, and even Vernon started keeping a wooden cudgel beneath the bar, which he used to subdue the more insistent brawlers in the crowd.

  Colm had never been more grateful that he had a job that took him out into the water, although even there his privacy was diminishing. Someone had spread the word about his luck with the fish, and now the Serpent’s Tail was habitually followed by other boats as it made its way out to sea, the captains trying to learn his secrets and cash in on his good fortune.

  Sometimes Colm could lose them, and when he couldn’t, he was able at least to ignore them. Occasionally it cut into their catch a bit, but as long as the other boats kept a reasonable distance, and they generally did, he didn’t care so much. Lew wasn’t nearly so sanguine about it.

  “If they’d wanted you, they should’ve taken you when they had the chance,” he grumbled one morning, staring balefully at a trawler about a hundred yards away. “You’re my luck, not theirs.”

  “You didn’t care to take me either, in the beginning,” Colm reminded him, feeling the nets quiver as a school of blue bass tried to make their way through. Blue bass were generally too big for these nets, but they usually caught a few of them, enough to make it worthwhile. The fish were prized for the hearty flavor of their meat and the brilliance of their scales, which some artisans used to make dreamspinners.

  “Aye, but I came round, didn’t I? Whatever magic method you have is none of their business.”

  “It’s not magic,” Colm reminded Lew for the hundredth time. It was tiresome, but on this point he felt he couldn’t compromise. The city was easier on the subject of magic than Anneslea had been, but not by much. One could speak of it without too much trouble, but to refer to its use nowadays outside of the church was frowned upon, and accusations still carried weight with the courts. “It’s just a knack.”

  “A knack,” Lew scoffed. “Knacks are a man predictin’ rain because of the pain in his knees, or a gambler who wins more than he loses at dice. Knacks aren’t reliable day after day after bloody day, boy, not like this. This is true Weathercliff luck, for all you deny you’re of that bloodline.” He leaned over and patted Colm’s knee. “But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. Not like I want to share you, eh?”

  Weathercliff luck? Colm had never heard of it, but he wasn’t about to ask either. “It’s really not magic,” he said again, more forcefully, but Lew just shrugged and returned to grumbling about the trawler.

  If the mornings were more stressful than they used to be, the afternoons were less so now that Colm and Jaime had made a tacit peace over Nichol. The group of young men spent almost every day on the water thanks to Jaime’s father’s influence, honing their sailing skills. Colm went out with them once, sharing a cutter with Nichol as they raced Jaime’s boat for the pillar. He had never sailed so fast in his life, the hull cutting through the water like it wasn’t even there. The boat heeled so low that Colm had cried out, convinced they were going to go in, but Nichol had just laughed and pointed to the upslope side of the boat.

  “Stand over there, counterbalance us!” he’d called, and Colm had done so. They’d won the race with almost a minute to spare, which Jaime had good-naturedly blamed on Ollie carrying too many extra pounds.

  “I’d rather be a pig’s belly than a bean stalk,” Ollie had retorted, and his words hadn’t felt like an assault. Colm had laughed with the rest of them, and the ease that grew between him and the others was obviously a great relief for Nichol.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” he asked one night, his arm dangling over the edge of his cot as his fingers drew idle patterns on the floor. Colm watched Nichol’s hand move, and felt shamefully jealous of the floorboards. “All of us as friends. I knew it would be.”

  “I’m glad to know them,” Colm replied.

  “I am too. That you know them, I mean. But what will you do when we’re gone, Colm?” Nichol’s bright eyes seem to flare in the candlelight as he looked down at Colm, tantalizing like a flash of scales in dark water. “Jaime should get his commission at the end of the summer, and I’ll go away with him to train on the Inisfadda. Ollie and Blake are both on the list to join up as regulars with the coast guard, and when they do, they’ll be sequestered for months while they learn the regulations and duties.”

  “When you’re gone,” Colm said, speaking carefully to avoid letting too many of his real feelings show through, “I’ll still have Megg, and Idra and Vernon, and perhaps even Baylee before too long.” Her last letter had been one of woe, fighting back against Honored Gherick’s contention that, at sixteen, it was time for her to marry. She had written of joining him in Caithmor, and Colm had been quick to encourage her. “I’ll miss you, of course.” Colm swallowed. “Terribly, but you’ll be back to visit us here.”

  “Perhaps I’ll go away and come back to you tied down to a wife and babe,” Nichol suggested, sounding not thrilled but rather resigned.

  “I don’t think you will,” Colm replied. He paused and considered for a moment before adding, “I don’t think that will ever be my life, and I prefer it that way.” He looked up and found Nichol staring at him. “Does that bother you?”

  Nichol’s lips split in a grin. “Not at all, mate.”

  Colm didn’t know exactly how little that bothered Nichol until one day a few weeks later, when he’d taken the boat out several hours earlier than usual to try to catch moon discs. Moon discs weren’t a fish at all, but some sort of enormous jelly that emerged from the depths for only a single week every year, coming close to the surface under the light of the full moon to breed. For moon discs, breeding meant releasing their milky seed into the shallow water, turning it completely opaque.

  Despite their strange, bulky bodies, moon discs reacted with surprising agility to disruptions, and they could sink back down into the depths
well before most fishermen came close to catching them. Additionally, they stung with agonizing precision if grabbed the wrong way, and so despite the fact that they were in very high demand, the actual catch was usually small.

  Lew hadn’t joined him on this trip. He despised the jellies, found them too dangerous and difficult, and so Colm hunted them down on his own. He rigged a net to the end of a pole and used it to scoop the jellies up from below, instead of dealing with the tentacles that projected from their tops and sides. Colm still had to leave his hand in the water to sense their locations, though, and after catching five of them, the thread-like brush of a stinging tentacle against his skin had him pulling it back fast.

  The burn spread from his fingertips through his hand and all the way down to his elbow. Colm hissed with pain, clutched his hand to his chest and rocked back and forth for a while, trying to get a handle on the agonizing sensation. It hadn’t been more than a brush, the barest whisper of contact. Surely that would make the pain diminish more quickly.

  If anything, it just got worse. Colm couldn’t even keep a hold on the tiller, he was so helpless to the tremors that racked him. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to keep breathing and ignored everything else as the boat rocked gently in the waves.

  Eventually the Serpent’s Tail drifted out of the pod of moon discs, and Colm rinsed his quivering hand in saltwater as soon as he knew it was safe. That helped enough to let him turn the boat back to Caithmor, but by the time he managed to get the thing docked again, his hand was throbbing incessantly.

  Rather than load them up himself, he sent a local boy running for Carroll Lightsail. The fishmonger and two of his helpers showed up half an hour later, all of them wearing odd outfits that completely covered them with leather and tarred canvas, from the base of their neck to the tops of their feet and all the way down their arms.

  “Oh lad, had to learn this one the hard way, did you?” he clucked as he looked from the enormous moon discs in the bottom of the boat to Colm, who stood close by clutching his injured hand. “Liam, give him the paste.”