A Daughter of No Nation (26 page)

“Must I?”

“I'm not honoring our agreement if you make a scene,” he said.

“Beatrice—”

“Beatrice can rot,” he said, wearily.

“I'll do the minimum.”

Handing her the net full of fruits, he rode on.

This was unbearable. As always, she couldn't leave a silence alone. “Tell me about the throttlevine.”

“You read the case logs.”

“What's it to you? Erminne suggested it's important to you. Personal. How?”

He eyed her, lizardlike. Weighing whether it was worth it? “All right. Some you'll have gleaned from the brief?”

“Some.”

Throttlevine was native to Haversham, the island northwest of Sylvanna. They lay nestled against each other, like yin and yang on the map, and Haversham was a free nation.

“We fought many bloody wars before the Cessation.” Cly told her that Sylvanna had been the early loser, subjugated for many years to its neighbor. Then in a relatively short space of time, it had liberated itself and gotten wealthy. Once the scales tipped, Sylvanna repaid Haversham in blood, raiding her coasts and taking her people into bondage.

“When people talk of war breaking out between the port and starboard sides of Stormwrack, they look to the two of us, snarling at each other across the Butcher's Baste, and feel nervous. We are,” he said, “the logical tearing point for the Fleet Constitution.”

“Sylvanna got wealthy,” Sophie said. “How did that come about?”

It had been one of those crucial intersections of necessity, good leadership, and the right resources: Sylvanna had been struck by a tobacco blight, Cly said, and her government had taken a risk, going deep into debt so it could attract spellscribes to the island, soliciting anyone who might be able to cure the big cash crop. The institute had been the result; the cluster of researchers had in time managed to find a way to inscribe a tobacco field that resisted the blight. Along the way, they developed an inscription that made transforms who could find castaways from wrecks, then a spell to help maddenflur addicts. Next came an inscription that increased the reach of lighthouses.

The scribes, many of them foreigners, had a network of international contacts: the institute began forming agreements with some of the smaller islands to lock down acquisition of crucial supplies.

“Suddenly you had spells as well as tobacco for sale.”

“Exactly. And because there'd been a shortage, tobacco itself had become expensive.”

At least a handful of those early brilliant researchers had come from the island next door, tempted away from Haversham by promises of unlimited resources for study and a pampered lifestyle.

As Sylvanna prospered, her ships became a tempting target to raiders. The country directed some of its new wealth into building up its navy, but few nations could stand against a determined assault. The institute was in danger of having its growing intellectual treasury stolen.

“It was around then that the Verdanii and the Tall put to sea with a few of their allies, looking to put a dent in the raiding traffic. They sent out an open invitation—expecting, you understand, that their allies would join them and the rest of us would decline. But our president sent
Excelsior.
”

The history lesson was intriguing. Sophie peeled another of the red fruits and, forgeting herself, offered Cly a segment. He took it with a smile.

“The story goes that it was Stormwrack's quietest uproar. Uproar here in our Citizens' Hall—what was Bellina thinking, allying herself with children of the Allmother?”

“Another woman leader?”

“You're giving me a bad impression of your home nation,” he said. “I am not sure, had we been led by a man, that the Verdanii wouldn't have found some excuse to leave
Excelsior
out of the convoy. But the Allmother of Verdanii liked Bellina, and the institute had just developed cannoneers—you remember our cannoneer, of course.”

Sophie nodded. “
Nightjar
has one, too.”

“
Excelsior
put to sea with forty cannoneers.”

“So you had the big guns.”

“Our other option for self-preservation would have been to take the cannoneers to the bandit fleets.”

“Join the Piracy?”

He shook himself. “Haversham had been covertly supporting the bandits. They had no more idea of Sylvanna joining the Fleet than anyone else—and they were furious. They made a clumsy attempt to assassinate Bellina, to see if we could be drawn into a local war. This made them look bad in the eyes of the community coalescing asea. Then they joined the Fleet themselves, to agitate against expanding it any further, before more nations like Sylvanna—”

“Slave nations, you mean?”

“Yes, before more slavers could join. But the winds were driving it all forward: the Piracy was defeated in the Raiders War, the Compact was written, and the Cessation of Hostilities began.

“By then, the bitterness between Sylvanna and Haversham was set. In peace, it has festered.”

They have such a romantic way with words here.
Homesickness spiked through her.
Dad would love it.

Cly continued his tale: The first attempt to undercut Sylvanna's position as a great nation had been in a resurgent form of the tobacco blight. Spies managed to get their hands on the inscriptions for the protected fields in Springland and destroyed them; the blight broke out, and then there had been an infestation of beetles. But the Haversham operatives got themselves caught and were tortured until they confessed.

Tortured.
Sophie swallowed.

“There was an international outcry. The new government, terrified the Fleet might break apart underfoot, leveed a fine on Haversham. It was an outlandish sum, but by the time they realized that, all they could do was encourage our government to collect it gently.”

Forgive the debt, in other words.
“I bet that worked great.”

“No,” Cly said, missing or electing to miss the sarcasm. “So the Havers decided to be subtler.”

Thirty years passed. Then Sylvanna had a trio of exceptionally promising presidents who'd gotten into office and then—almost certainly due to inscription—become emotionally unstable. There'd been an economic disaster, but no evidence that proved Haversham was involved.

“I'm taking rather a long time to get round to the point, aren't I?” Cly said.

“Where else are we going to go?” Sophie said. “Besides, I came here to learn about you, to learn about your culture and Stormwrack.”

He didn't comment on the fact that everything she'd seen so far had created a gulf between them.

The throttlevine had first been seen in the swamps not far from Low Bann, when Cly was a boy. Nobody'd thought much of it at first; the stuff grew all over Haversham, and the ecosystems were similar—it was only twenty miles away, after all. They'd burned it and shrugged it off … the first time. And the second.

But a decade went by, and the infestations kept resurfacing. Everyone became sure Haversham was responsible, yet nobody could figure out how they were doing it.

“You said it's how you came to the Judiciary?”

Cly nodded. “I have two qualities one seeks in a Judiciary duelist—fighting spirit and a fondness for reading and writing. There were some prominent Havers in the courts; our government wanted volunteers to write the entrance exam. The hope was that some of the highly placed Havers would know about the sabotage. Having failed to surpass us economically or to gain the upper hand through dirty tricks, their leaders concentrated some resources on permeating the Fleet bureaucracy.”

“An arms race within the civil service.”

“A competition, at any rate. It's a fruitless investment of energy, all this hatred.”

Was that real regret? Or him trying to play her? “So you don't feel it? You don't share the animosity?”

Cly shook his head. “Killing Havers on the dueling deck is no more and no less satisfying than killing anyone else.”

Which was a little hair-raising, as observations went, and didn't answer anything.

The trail narrowed, pressed on either side by densely overgrown bamboo, then widening again just beyond a ramshackle gate, as the untended overgrowth gave way to groomed hedges of the same species.

“This is the edge of Low Bann,” Cly said. “We're home.”

 

CHAPTER    
17

That night they had an interminable dinner with Cly's cousins. Sophie's relatives ate beef, greens, and roasted pears, all harvested and prepared by the bonded. She ate a protein bar, two of the red citrus fruits, and a selection of berries Cly had obliged Mervin to go and collect for her.

“There's a Verdanii embassy here,” he told her. “By breakfast I'll have arranged to buy some grains from them. Mervin will pick them up.”

If her cousin resented being turned into an errand boy, he knew better than to complain. He was a little pale and stank of smoke but otherwise there was no sign that having his leech inscription torn up had materially damaged him.

After she finally got away from the table, Sophie smoothed out her two messageply sheets, one from Verena and one from Bram, looking for their latest answers to her notes.

Verena had nothing new to say.

The Bram page had
Hang in there
again, along with some other stuff; they were keeping the books out of his hands, too, but he'd calculated the difference between a Fleet mile and an Imperial one (a Fleet mile came to 3,502 feet, it turned out, though of course they didn't measure things in feet or inches either). He'd confirmed their observation about the length of the days and “borrowed” a calendar from Sweet—the Stormwrack calendar had ten thirty-six-day months and a three- to four-day “new year's interval.” They manually adjusted the start of their new year to midnight on the winter solstice. It was a big annual ritual, as it happened, on Verdanii—the setting of the World Clock.

SUMMER IS WHEN EVERYONE ON SYLVANNA GETS ENGAGED,
she wrote, following up with things she'd seen during the day: nothing heavy, just enough to let him see she was well. Saving paper was less urgent now that he was on his way.

She sat down with the notebooks she'd bought, paging through the one she was beginning to think of as her book of questions, thinking about all the things she wanted to investigate here in Stormwrack. The other book was pristine, devoid of answers or anything else of use.

“I'm leaving and I'm not coming back,” she whispered to the pages, to all the scrawled notes, all the mysteries and unknowns. Then, despite her resolution, she turned to a blank page in the questions book and added more mysteries to the list.

Feeling jangly and disconsolate, she took out her video camera, running through the footage gathered so far: the red birds and the soot viper, the twins and the tour through the swamp, and Zita's accident.

Not an accident, she thought.

She watched Autumn Spell working to save Zita, a tiny digital record of the inscription process.

The video was a reminder of that spell with Cly's name on it, and the word that might, in Fleet, have meant “temperament.”

TEMPERAMENT
, she wrote in her notebook.
EMOTIONAL TEMPERAMENT? TIED TO SOCIOPATHY?

It doesn't matter,” she whispered. “I'm one party away from being done here.”

How much could she learn in a day?

Nothing, if she just sat around.

She dragged her jeans off the floor and wriggled into them, tiptoeing out into the hall.

The house was quiet.

This was foolhardy. Cly had to be a light sleeper.

She made her way up to the inscription room without waking anyone.

At first glance, the cabinet full of inscriptions appeared to have vanished. Sophie circled the room, navigating by the dim moonlight shining through the windows. Then she pulled out her camera, lit up the screen, and looked again.

It was sitting there when we came in
,
she thought. In front of the wall with the big tapestry.

Could it be that easy? She tiptoed across the floor, pulled the tapestry aside, and found the cabinet tucked into an alcove.

The padlock was back in place. She opened the unlocked drawer beneath, flipping through its contents, and finding the thick envelope she'd seen before:
CLY—
TEMPERAMENTE FEL MEDDIA
.

Breaking the wax seal, she opened the envelope carefully, finding within a stiff card—made of paper, as far as she could tell—bent accordion style. The spellscrip on it glimmered—all spellscrip seemed to glimmer—as she laid it on the floor.

The magical text was beyond her ability to read, but if she could find a friendly spellscribe, she might find someone to translate it.

“Temperament.” Is it even the same word in Fleet and Sylvanner? And, if it is, does it follow that someone made Cly sociopathic? It'd be handy, if they were trying to make a killer judge.

She shuddered, remembering that scowling, horror-movie portrait of her birth father as a boy.

She focused on the card and filmed every word except the top line, where Cly's full name (his middle name looked like it might be Iblis) could be found.

I bet name stealing's a big ol' crime here.

Having finished the recording, she looked at the spell directly.

What was interesting about the text on this one was it was sealed between the paper and some kind of clear wax. It shifted and moved beneath; in fact, it looked more like water than ink, clear, still wet, with a smattering of little seeds or particles within.

It's a long document—hopefully that means the whole magical alphabet's in here.

Returning it, she closed the cabinet and draped the tapestry over it. Then she turned her attention to the still-open book Autumn had referenced when writing the spell for Zita. The instructions were written in Fleet and read like an extremely detailed recipe: