A Daughter of No Nation (10 page)

“For how long? Without Gale to fight off the inevitable next assault on the Compact—”

Verena paled. She stood up suddenly, gave the faintest of bows, and stalked off.

Annela quirked her eyebrows at Sophie. “Are you going to ask what that's about, Kir Inquisitor?”

“Don't need to,” Sophie said. “It's obvious. She screwed up one of her ‘I'm the new Gale' spy assignments and now you're threatening to fire her. In the process, she cost
Nightjar
the ship's medical officer and bosun—they didn't die, but they huffed off, I'm thinking.”

Annela shot a look at Parrish.

“I told her nothing,” he said.

“I'm right, aren't I?”

“We've been delivering Gale's bequests to a number of portside island nations,” he said. “At one such stop, the bosun's family asked us to add in a sail to Zingoasis with some magical relics.”

“The musician's skeleton, in the hold?”

If Parrish was surprised that she'd had a poke through the storage crates, it didn't show. Annela's glower deepened, and Sophie remembered, belatedly, that she'd meant to try buttering her up. “Yes,” he said. “It was meant to be kept quiet, but Richler found out, and his nation made a counterclaim for the bones. Verena had already offended him, once, with a perhaps insensitive comment about advanced medicine in the outlands. He's a good man, from the—”

“She accused him of having reported the skeleton's presence aboard. Then she suggested divvying up the bones like a pools win,” Annela interrupted.

Was there something there she didn't want me to know?
Parrish had been about to say something about Richler; suddenly her cousin had switched from censorship to storytelling.

A decent theory. Test it? “Parrish, you were saying something about Richler?”

“Ah—”

“Then, having by now upset both crew members,” Annela continued, “Verena tried to convince them not to pass her offensive suggestion on to their home governments. The bequest's in court now; there'll be a duel over it. I'll be smoothing the choppy seas forever.” Annela turned a pinch of bannock over in her fingers. “How you worked out as much as you did—”

“I believe this proves that denying Sophie access to books and her recording equipment is a pointless exercise,” Parrish said. “In fact, if she were busy measuring the pull of the tides at the equinox or similar ephemera—”

“Ephemera!” Sophie objected.

“She's more interested in the natural world than she is in politics,” he said, and now he was looking right at her. Still trying to tell her something? “If we returned her equipment and allowed her to focus—”

Annela said, “I will not further empower someone who is already a menace.”

“What if I could talk Cly into dropping the charges against Beatrice altogether? Is that … legally possible? Parrish?”

He stroked his jaw. “Perhaps under the ‘no harm done' provisions of the Judicial Code. There'd need to be a ritual exchange of sword blows.”

“You believe you can do this because you don't know the man,” Annela said. “Cly Banning is a reptile, Sophie. You're neither sufficiently well placed to hold his interest for long nor experienced enough to handle him.”

“That's the difference between you and me,” Sophie said, stung. “I wouldn't
handle.
I'd ask.”

A snort. “Naivete won't help you, either.”

“Right. And it's not
naive
to expect Verena to need time to learn all the nuances of her new job.” With that, she threw her napkin down, emphatically didn't bow, and went after her sister.

She stepped out onto
Constitution
's deck, into the moonlight. The seas were slate under its pale-bone glow, and remarkably still but for the wakes of the various ships. The lanterns of the Fleet were strung out across the seacraft to their rear. Off
Constitution
's bow, the Fleet's monster flagship,
Temperance,
hulked its way through the water, leaving a track of churned-up foam behind it.

There was no sign of Verena.

“Kir Sophie Hansa?” One of the uniformed messengers, a boy of perhaps nine, held out an envelope.

“Shouldn't you be in bed?”

“Very droll, Kir,” the kid said, with an attitude that said he'd heard that one before.

She expected to find the note was from Cly or Beatrice, but it was scrawled in an almost childish hand. Westerbarge,
midnight,
it said.
Corsetta di Gatto, Tibbon's Wash.

She took one last good look around.

“What the hell.” It was time to get out into the city unassisted. She stomped up to the hang glider deck and showed a taxi pilot her note.

“
Westerbarge
has no landing platform,” he said. “I can drop you on a ferry.”

“Fine.”

The taxikites were flying rickshaws. She sat in an open cab—the pilot gave her something that wasn't quite a bear pelt to keep her warm. Sophie pulled two hairs from the pelt and tucked them into her questions journal. Her thoughts turned to the sanguarium in the market. All those blood samples, there for the buying, if only she could find a way to get them analyzed …

I won't further empower a menace,
Annela had said. Perhaps it was perversity, but Sophie rather liked the idea of being a menace.

Funny that she didn't threaten to magically wipe my memory again.…

Climbing into the apparatus of the glider, the pilot angled the kite straight at the sky. They rose into the air as smoothly as if a cable had lifted them. When they were about two hundred meters above the Fleet he threw his legs back, with a faint jerk that reverberated through the whole of the craft, and extended the glider's wings outward. A moment later, they were circling.

No updrafts at this time of day, Sophie thought. Indeed, they weren't gaining altitude—rather, they were moving in ever-widening circles, losing height with every revolution.

Air rushed through her hair, mellow and warm, and she leaned forward to take in as much of the Fleet as she could, lanternlights marking ship positions. In the dark they lined up like self-contained city blocks, islands of human activity ordered across the black of the sea.

When they were well aft of
Gatehouse,
deep in the civilian block, the kite made a bank and curve, bleeding away the last of its altitude and all of its speed. The pilot kicked himself upright, creating wind resistance through the whole frame of the kite, and came to a controlled stop on a platform on a ship the size of a biggish tugboat.

“This is the night ferry, Kir,” he said. “Four stops, maybe five, and you'll be at
Westerbarge.
Be sure to tell the purser where you want to go. That'll be fivecoin.”

Sophie had made a point of watching the vendors make change in the mall that afternoon—she handed over the nickel confidently. “Is there a charge for the ferry?”

“Public service, Kir,” he said, and began racking the kite for takeoff.

She made it to
Westerbarge
about ten minutes late for her scheduled rendezvous with Corsetta. It was part of a dive-y looking little block of cabins, all serving drinks, with seating in the middle. A bar, in other words. Raucous, beer-drinking-crowd sounds emanated from every deck.

The crowd seemed friendly enough. Sophie packed her little trove of coins away, where they would be hard to steal, and touched her can of bear spray for reassurance. Then she went looking for the girl.

She found her at a card table, with a decent pile of coin in front of her, a fawning dog trying to climb its way into her lap, and a beer in her hand.

When she saw Sophie, she announced to the group, “I'm over.” There was some amiable grumbling as she pulled her stake off the table, but she pushed one coin back—“For the next round”—and they appeared mollified.

To Sophie she said, “Buy you an ale?”

“I just had a massive meal,” Sophie said. “Thanks anyway.”

Corsetta led the way out to a relatively quiet table on the rail. “You didn't bring the whole Judiciary with you. My thanks for that.”

“For all I know they're hot on my tail,” Sophie said. “What do you want?”

“My snow vulture,” she said. “I charmed her, and she needs me.”

And you need the credit for taming her, don't you?
“I saw her today. She's unhappy.”

Corsetta nodded and handed over a heavily scrawled slip of paper. “Claim of ownership, and a note saying I relinquish no rights.”

Even the fifteen-year-olds talk like lawyers here.

She glanced at the document: it was better crafted than the short note Corsetta had sent her. She'd had someone write it on her behalf, Sophie supposed.

“How is this going to help? The bird can't read.”

Corsetta handed over a strip of what looked like goat hide. “This bears my scent—it should reassure her that I'm alive. I'd have gone to her in person, but I assume the market is lousy with Watch.”

“Why give this up?” Sophie asked, holding up the strip of leather.

“I have to back up my claim. I can't marry Rashad if the bird will not lay.”

“Because that's the Queen's quest?”

“Favor. It's the way of our people.”

Sophie said, “Have you contacted your boyfriend?”

Corsetta shook her head. “I have to get home to him. I can't think, I can't eat, I can't sleep.…”

You can evade arrest, play cards, and drink beer pretty well, though.
“This guy of yours. How old is he?”

She glowed. “Just past the first blossom of youth, Kir, with skin of porcelain and a wit so keen! He makes that pretty sea captain of yours seem old and dim.”

“Stop. Not my captain. Rashad is your age, then?”

“He writes poetry—”

“I thought his family owned a fishing fleet.”

“The alchemical union of our souls has expanded us, allowing us to rise beyond the tethers of birth and family. As an outlander, you can't be expected to understand.”

Alchemy, huh?
“No, 'course not. I'm just a lumbering cynic from the wilds.”

“Do you not believe in true love? In the perfect fusion of matched souls?” This came out loud, in a tone so horrified the girl might have been asking if Sophie drowned bunnies for fun.

“Fusion?” Parrish had just stepped into the bar, looking first concerned and then, as he took them in, relieved. Should Sophie warn her?

“Name your soul's base metal, Kir! I can help you. There will be a natural match for it out there—your true catalyst! You'll never find it if you don't look.”

“Is this like astronomy? Water signs should try to date earth signs, that kind of thing?”

“Ah, you do understand a little.” She spoke with an emphasis that suggested she'd drunk several pints already. “It's a law of the universe that we must seek to complete ourselves.”

“That's
not
a law of the universe.” She couldn't help herself; this greeting-card picture of romance annoyed her all the more now that Corsetta was throwing scientific terms into the mix. “It's a very comforting idea, but—”

“No, no.
Listen.
Think of magnetite and lodestone,” Corsetta said. She clasped her hands, mimicking magnetic forces.

“That's not an argument.”

“When I return and claim the Queen's favor, I will get permission to marry Rashad,” Corsetta said, her tone insistent. “We'll sail in Rashad's crabbing dory, to the Scattering Isles. There we will catch bauble fish and earn shells. I'll gaze upon his face as he sits on the deck and makes up verses.”

Which of you is going to fish, in that case?
“But in the meantime, you want me to deliver this note and the leather to…”

“To the Judiciary. It will show that I'm the one who tamed the bird. Montaro has claimed otherwise. He wants my favor! This proves she is mine, does it not?”

“I have no idea,” Sophie said. “I'm no Fleet lawyer.”

“I can't afford to fall into court over this. I must get home.”

“Yeah. About that. Nobody's buying that this is just about your boyfriend. The bird, the brother throwing you overboard, the fact that you were out by that derelict—their crew's missing, you know. Presumed lost?”

“You are entirely too full of wonderment, Kir. It's an acidic property of the soul.”

“Honestly, Corsetta, the nature of whatever scam you've got on right now may be the least interesting mystery I've stumbled over since I got here.”

“Will you give my notes to the Judiciary?”

“I'm probably supposed to arrest you.”

“You're outlandish, aren't you? Of no nation, No Oath, not sworn to Fleet law?”

I'm bound by Annela's whims, if nothing else.
Parrish had been sidling closer, easing his way between the obstacle course of drinkers. “The thing is—”

Corsetta saw something in Sophie's face. She leapt up, but the captain was already close enough to make flight pointless.

He took her by the arm, gently. “Make no trouble, Kir. We can say you surrendered.”

“Never!” The kid turned her big wounded eyes on Sophie.

In a movie, this would turn into a brawl, Sophie thought. Corsetta would incite her poker buddies to intervene on her behalf, and things would degenerate into bottles smashing on heads and a tinkling player-piano sound track.

But Corsetta simply said to Parrish, “You are interfering with true love, Kir. I suppose you don't believe in it, either.”

Parrish gave Sophie a surprised glance.

“I believe,” he said, “that facing your accusers is the obvious way out of your difficulties.”

“I
need
to go home.” For just a moment, she looked very young and wholly desperate. Then she mastered herself. “Bad luck to you both, Kirs. Love will avenge herself.”