A large hand touched my back.
"Stand up," Arramy murmured. "Keep walking."
I knew he was right. I was making a scene.
But I could only heave for air while the world clattered by around us. I reached for that awful numbness again, but it wasn't enough. Still unable to breathe, I ground my teeth and forced myself up straight. I took a step, only to narrowly miss being run over by an oncoming draft wagon. It was Arramy who pulled me out of the way, and it was Arramy's commands I followed, obeying his voice like some sort of mindless clockwork doll as he guided me across the crowded street and into the waiting horseless.
NaVarre was already in the driver's seat, his dock-boss tweed jacket and winter wool pants traded for the long, dark cape and round hat of a liveried driver.
We turned south along St. Camyrre Street, traveling parallel to the bay till we reached Quay Street. We left the horseless in the parking field off the marina and boarded a nondescript one-masted fishing goonter. Or, I should say I boarded the goonter. Arramy and NaVarre cast off, working easily together as they poled the boat out of its berth and navigated the small-craft lanes into the open harbor. Then Arramy trimmed the oval sails, and the lightweight craft leaped ahead of the wind, fairly flying through the water.
Arramy took the tiller, and NaVarre came to sit under the woven-reed canopy strung up on wooden hoops over the prow. He gave a long whistle and sat down hard on the narrow bench across from me.
I expected some sort of censure for rushing off on my own, but none came. He simply leaned forward and asked, "Did you open it?"
The letter. It was still there, crumpled in my hand, peeking out from either end of my clenched fist. I could only shake my head. "I don't want to."
"May I?"
I shook my head some more. Just because I didn't want to open it didn't mean I wanted anyone else to.
It's important. Stop dillying around and open the thing. Go on. Like tearing off a tackyplaster. Rip it open...Yes. Right now. Just... I held the letter up. I was breathing hard, as if I had run a mile, but I did it. I slid a fingernail beneath the sealing tape, found the looped end of the pull-ribbon, and yanked it through the thin layer of gum wax. Then I eased the flap upward and drew a tri-folded piece of stationery out into the dapple of sunlight coming through the canopy.
My father's blocky handwriting was scrawled across the side of the letter facing me.
My Darling Bren
I clamped my left hand over my trembling mouth and turned the paper over. Then I unfolded it and pressed it flat on my knees.
I hope you never read this.
I had to pause and look away as my vision swam. It took several deep breaths before I could make myself keep going.
I hope you're lounging on the sunny beaches of Aethscaul, and all of this was for nothing.
But if you are reading this, if I'm not the one delivering this information to those who need it, I beg of you... forgive me. Forgive a weary old man for wanting to let you remain the sweet, untroubled girl you are, to keep that smile bright as long as I could. I never thought this would be where we wound up when I started.
And now I may only be doing more harm than good, keeping this from you. I should tell you. Part of me wants to, but another, more cautious part knows that you are a target. If they can get ahold of you, they will, and the less you know the better. All I can say is that if I find the right moment, I will tell you everything... and if that moment never comes, this letter will have to do.
I could hear my father making that argument, and the tears wouldn't stop. Unbidden, they rolled down my face to drip from my chin.
This is an impossible situation. I have to plan on not making it through this alive. Anything less would be foolish, so I have set things in place that will keep this information from falling into the wrong hands, while providing for you in the only way I know how: I have made you indispensable. You're the key to all of it. That's it. That's the only way I know to keep you absolutely safe, to make sure Lexan has to find you even if I'm not there and protect you even if I cannot deliver what he wants. He is a good man, but if he has to make a choice between saving you and pursuing this mad course he is on, I am afraid I will have to force him to choose you.
I know there will be many times you find yourself wondering who to believe. Who to trust.
All I can tell you is, use your better judgment and follow your instincts. There is no other way I know to prepare you for what is coming. Keep those quick wits about you, my dear. Fight. Fight to stay alive. Fight to do what is right. This cause that I have dragged us into will mean justice and freedom for thousands of men, women and children, but more than that, it will expose something much bigger, something that threatens all of us. If you can trust anything, trust that. Trust that I would never risk everything on a mere whim.
I love you, Brenorra. I cannot say that enough. I hope you can forgive me. I hope I have not handed you a death sentence. Most of all, I hope that wherever this life takes you, you will be happy. Your happiness is all I want. Allow yourself to laugh. I love to hear you laugh.
There was no signature.
I stared at the bottom of the page, dimly registering the presence of an all too familiar poem.
Then, brave Aerion, fly!
Swift and sure as the wind
till the ocean runs dry
and vale becomes mountain.
Fly on till the night sky
burns scarlet with brimstone,
and ashen the earth lies
'neath thy red wings alone.
If anyone but me had read that letter, they would have thought he simply ended it with a strange, but personally meaningful quote. That was true, in a way. Pyo and the Redraven had been my favorite story as a child. I begged him to read it over and over and insisted that he make the flying-bird hand motions every time.
That particular passage had become a signal between the two of us, part of what I had thought was an amusing little game. Now, because of that game, I knew there would be tiny dots on many of the upward strokes in the body of the letter. They would look like they came from a shaky pen nib, when in fact they were carefully placed, as were the small marks that would be under certain words. My stomach knotted up tight, my heartache souring. Nothing was as it seemed, not even my father's farewell letter. Our secret little code wasn't just for the two of us, there had been some other hidden layer to it all along, just like that party.
But he had done all of that to keep me safe. I took a quivering breath and wiped my face. Fight, he said. I was beyond exhausted, and he wanted me to fight.
Well then.
"I need a pen and paper," I croaked.
29. Keys and Other Things
30th of Uirra, Continued
"What's the key?"
I didn't look up, concentrating on transcribing the tiny dots in the text of my father's letter onto larger lines I had drawn on a fresh sheet of paper. There hadn't been anything to write with on the goonter, so I had to wait until we were back aboard the Stryka. Now I was sitting at the table in the council room, a mug of hot, spicy cider in front of me, while Arramy lurked directly behind my chair, not bothering to hide the fact that he was reading over my shoulder.
"It's my necklace," I said after a moment. That wasn't the whole answer, but he didn't need to know everything.
A few seconds later: "How are the letters assigned to the symbols?"
"That..." I made a point of rechecking my work, searching for any dots I might have missed, "...is a secret." I moved to the next line of my father's handwriting. There had to be some things I could keep to myself.
"Uh-huh," Arramy murmured. This time he was looking at me and not the papers I was scribbling on.
"Would you mind moving? You're in my light."
Arramy grunted, then went to sit at the other end of the table, where he had been plotting things on a large map of the continents.
I glanced over at him.
There was a forest of little
color-coded pins sticking out of three ports in the Colonies, several stuck in Lordstown, but only one small group clustered on the Continental side of the Marral Sea. I didn't have to get closer to tell that they were all stuck in Garding, Warring Oceanic's home port. There wasn't any other port of origin mentioned in any of Father's documents.
Arramy's gaze collided with mine, and I had to suppress a shiver.
When I was twelve, Aunt Sapphine went on an expedition to the hidden temples in North Altyr. She found them occupied by a species of wild mountain wolfdog that the locals told fearsome stories about. These wolfdogs were crafty, incredibly fierce, and capable of taking down prey three times their size.
The sketches she drew of the creatures went up in flames along with everything else in my room, but I could still remember that lazy grin under hooded eyes, and that deceptively relaxed sprawl. Arramy had that same sort of easy stillness, his long legs crossed at the ankle in front of him, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his fingers woven together over his lean middle as if he were patiently waiting for his next meal to wander by, supremely confident in his ability to kill it.
Firming my chin, I went back to work, determined not to be intimidated.
Face it, you want the big grumpy captain to like you.
I ground my teeth. No. Not like. I want him to acknowledge that I'm not just some silly, fawning, pampered socialite. That's not the same thing.
Are you sure?
Shut up. This is important. Father wouldn't have coded it if it wasn't.
I reached the end of the letter, triple-checked everything, then made sure I had the right cyphers. There were two systems to solve. The first was my name, underlined, followed by a sentence six words long. The second was the smudge under the 'm' in 'many,' followed by a sentence three words long. I couldn't help glancing surreptitiously at Arramy again to make sure he wasn't able to see anything... which earned me a quirked eyebrow. He was still watching me, waiting for me to prove myself useful.
Annoyed, I ignored him and unfastened the clasp of my compass rose necklace. Then I placed the pendant on the table in front of me and worked the cypher, lining up South on the larger bottom ring with North on the smaller front ring, jotting down the eight individual combinations of little dots on the eight double spokes of the rose, starting with the one on North.
It took another few minutes to write out letters beneath each dot symbol, starting with the first letter of my name and skipping by sixes – as indicated by that six-word sentence – till I had used every letter in the alphabet and all eight dot symbols had distinct groups of letters beneath them. Figuring out the message was as simple as writing the groups of letters beneath their corresponding dots in the line of code I had found in the letter. It was fairly easy to 'translate' the groups of letters.
Frowning, I jotted down the solution: LIONS PERCH.
That was the first one. I moved the top wheel so West was over East, creating a whole new arrangement of dots. Sure enough, they matched the second group of dots I had culled from the text. A few minutes later I had that solved too. BUTTER CONES.
I wrinkled my nose, baffled. Those were clearly the words Father meant me to find. His cypher rarely produced pairs of words that made sense together if you got it wrong, but the two groups of words didn't seem to make any sense with each other. What, exactly had I just solved?
Arramy got to his feet and stepped around to look over my shoulder again. This time he bent closer, leaning to place one hand flat on the table next to me, effectively caging me into my chair as he studied my papers. I wouldn't have put it past him to be reverse-solving my father's little code game in his head. Knowing him, he probably could.
For all my stubborn desire to keep a secret – any secret – to myself, I didn't stop him. I sat there, my heart doing a strange tattoo in my ribs, suddenly very, very aware of how close he was. Close enough to catch a hint of that pinewood and coconut soap. In a flash of insanity, I had the insane urge to bury my nose in the hollow of his throat and taking a deep breath. What an absurd thing to think about a person. Hold still sir, you smell like safety and not-drowning.
Blushing furiously, I tore my gaze from his rugged jawline. This was business. Arramy was most certainly not caging me in to flirt with me. Why would he? It wasn't as if he enjoyed my company... Much less kissing me. That's right, I told myself. This is simply an economical position in which to view what another person happens to be viewing. There is no seduction going on. More like anti-seduction. He's probably trying to see if I'll lean sideways to avoid being crushed by his arm. Grimly, I focused on the matter at hand. "Does it make any sense to you?"
Arramy was silent, considering something. When he spoke, his voice was a rich rasp by my ear, "There's a Tetton pub in Nimkoruguithu called the Lion's Perch."
"A pub." A pub might serve butter cones. I actually had done something useful. I hated how ridiculously pleased I was that the captain knew that fact, but I smirked anyway.
Rapid footsteps sounded out in the Bridge, then, followed by more footsteps and one of the marines calling loudly, "Stop! You need permission to go in there."
Arramy straightened quickly and stepped away from me.
Then NaVarre was striding into the Council Room, two disgruntled marines trailing along behind him. They might as well have tried to stop a warship under full sail. "Please tell me you've found something," NaVarre said loudly as he slammed the door in their faces, cutting off their objections.
I twisted around to grin at him over the back of my chair. "Alright. I've found something."
NaVarre flashed a big, sparkly, stunningly gorgeous smile and came to stand next to me, bending to take a look at the proofs on my piece of paper. His smile dimmed and he shot a questioning glance at me.
"The Lion's Perch is a pub in Nimkoruguithu," I provided.
NaVarre nodded, his eyes narrowing in thought. "That makes quite a lot of sense, actually. Your father mentioned that he had a trusted contact there. An old army friend, I think." Then he turned to Arramy. "What say you, Captain? Fancy a trip to the Colonies?"
The captain crossed his arms over his chest. "Not with a ship full of civilians and wanted men," he muttered. Then he took a deep breath and let it out on a weary sigh. "But this has to end. If going to Nim K means we find enough to take down these people, I'm in."
"We're agreed then." NaVarre dipped his head, then smiled again. "Excellent work, Miss Warring."
30. The Return of the Civilians
31st of Uirra
Arramy came into the council room after breakfast this morning. He must have been standing the dawn watch; a thick, fluffy layer of fresh snow lay on his shoulders and the top of his hat, proof of the last-of-winter storm that had come skulking up on us in the night.
He stopped short in the doorway, his eyes widening as if he were surprised to find NaVarre and I sitting across from each other at the table, where we were going over all the documents again with a magnifying lens, on the hunt for any other hidden messages we might have missed.
Arramy's brows lowered into a frown. "I want the civilians brought over to the Stryka," he announced, then came all the way in and shut the door behind him, stomping slush from his boots and undoing the togs of his heavy winter longcoat.
NaVarre looked up from my father's letters.
I put down the magnifying lens.
"The women are tired of living in a floating tent." Arramy peeled off his coat and his soaking wet gloves and tossed them over the back of the chair at the other end of the table. "The children need proper shelter. Seas are quiet now, but this storm is going to get worse before it gets better... And having them gone will allow your crew to work on repairs without threat of mutiny. Or haven't you noticed the glares your men are getting?"
NaVarre pursed his lips, then nodded. "Alright. Miss Warring can come over to the Ang with me."
Arramy gave him an unimpressed stare. "That's for Miss Warring to decide."
"I'm sure she'll
agree —" NaVarre began, but I cut him off.
"I'd much rather stay here."
Arramy smirked. It was barely a twitch of his lips, but I caught it. I almost informed him that I wasn't staying because of him, but because I didn't feel like being dangled over the ocean in that swing again. That, and I wanted to see the other survivors again, but mostly the dangling.
NaVarre sighed and sat back hard in his chair. He glanced over at me, then relented. "Fine. For now, but you'll have to stay on the quarterdeck. No mingling."
Perplexed, I turned to look at him. "You're asking me to stay separated from the other women, either in my own cabin, or on a ship full of pirates? Do you know what they're going to say? They're going to say, 'Oy! There is that girl that gets all the special favors! She doesn't have to stay in the hold with the rest of us. And why did the captain take her over all by herself and set her up so nicely in a cabin of her very own?' That's what they're going to say. What do you think the answer will be?"
I fixed him with a falsely sweet grin. "I can promise you, it won't be, 'She has taken up knitting.'" I shook my head, grin fading. "Angry tongues can sink a ship. I've already caused enough trouble."
NaVarre's lips actually curled into a wry smile, but then he sighed, his shoulders sagging. "I know what it'll look like," he acknowledged. "But we don't know who sabotaged the Galvania. Until we do, I don't want you anywhere near the other civilians. If they're coming over here, and you refuse to go over to the Ang, you'll have to stay on the quarterdeck."
My jaw went slack. That thought had never crossed my mind. Not once. I was about to object, to say that I had survived alongside those people and I was sure none of them could possibly have done such a thing, but my objection fell flat. He was right, blast him. There wasn't actually any way I could be completely sure.
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