Child of a Hidden Sea (23 page)

Heart for a heart,
the voice said again. It was John Coine's voice, she was sure of it.
Are we agreed?

“I'll throw myself overboard!” She threw the words into the wind, teeth bared in a feral grin. “Where will you be then?”

A gust bowled her to the deck; she writhed, bracing herself and trying to keep the cord of lightning from doing more damage to the ship.

Metal.
The handle of the hatch had been made of iron. It had looked manufactured—Parrish or Gale must have imported it from home. And hadn't she seen…?

The ship tilted, climbing another wave, and she took the opportunity to skirt the rail, contorting in a weird limbo to try to keep the bolt of lightning over the edge, working her way toward the cutter's stern. She heard someone—Tonio?—calling her name, but she kept going, finally hurling herself in a baseball slide, hands out, reaching for the only piece of metal she could find …

… the anchor chain.

Electrical power poured through her, into the anchor mechanism. Now she felt it, waves of current, roiling, thrum, thrum and then with a last thrash the connection broke, fizzling. The cord of lightning lashed upward and then slurped back up into the angry sky.

“Burned my hand,” she said, falling to the deck. The anchor steamed.

The deck beneath her heaved as a swell pushed her to starboard. Sophie slid, stunned, coughing, as water sluiced over her.

Is it coming back?

It would be better to go into the drink than to become a tool for slicing the ship to bits. Bram, Verena, the ship's crew … if Coine was after her, he could have her.

She gathered herself to spring.

Someone caught her by the scruff of her jacket when she was halfway to the rail.

Parrish, of course.

Instead of going out in a glorious dive, her feet slipped out from beneath her and she landed on her butt.

He knelt beside her. “All right?”

Sophie sputtered like a drowned kitten, trying to draw breath to tell him to let her go.
I'm trying to do the noble thing here and I'm about to lose my nerve …

“It's all right,” he said, as if she'd voiced the thought after all. “It's over.”

It was true. With one final mumble of thunder, the clouds split, revealing a perfect circle of blue sky that spread like oil across the gray plate of clouds.

“The storm—”

“Going as fast as it came,” he said. “Magic, remember?”

She blinked. She was still seeing spots. Or, rather, that cephalopod shape again, bullet body and tentacles.

“When you put yourself at risk, the weather lightened. They don't want you dead.”

“Bluff and deterrents,” she sputtered.

“Someone's trying to scare you,” he said.

“Goody. I can't wait to see what happens if they ever get truly homicidal,” she said, extracting herself from his grip and making a vain attempt to brush herself off. Her jeans were lacquered against her legs, pulling on her skin, wrenching her knees and ankles.

“Indeed,” Parrish agreed. The seas were calming. He gave her one last, assessing glance and went to help the crew secure the runaway boom.

CHAPTER
16

She went below, peeled out of her wet clothes and dried off as quickly as she could before opening her trunk. Setting aside the ridiculous white ball gown the Conto had given her, she dug for something dry and practical from among the Erinthian contributions to her wardrobe. She came up with a set of black breeches and a pale green blouse. Bram had to help her with the buttons on the blouse—the burns on her hand were superficial, but the lightning strike had left her feeling oddly stiff.

“Where'd Verena go?” she asked as he smeared some of her first aid gel on her palms.

He shrugged. “Sofe. I've been thinking. You need to bail on all this before things get worse.”

“You want to just run home?”

He tucked the tube of gel back into her first aid kit, repacking it within the pile of equipment of her trunk, his expression neutral.

“What about Gale's murder? The whole inheritance mess?”

“What about people chasing you with frigging typhoons?”

“Us. Chasing us.” She sat on her bunk and let him see her considering it, being reasonable, weighing the options. It was a trick she'd adopted to placate their father: make a show of thinking it through, so he couldn't accuse her of grasping for an easy or shallow answer. She counted to twenty, and then said: “It's only my responsibility if I take it on, is that what you're thinking?”

“Exactly,” he said. “They can't make you do Gale's old job, and there has to be some way for Verena to win over the magic purse without you putting your neck on the line. As for all this intrigue—who's running the court of Erinth, whether anyone can sink or find or destroy this heart of
Temperance
 … how is that our concern?”

“It is a little like we're playing with someone else's international politics.”

He chuckled. “Breaking the Prime Directive.”

“Who am I to do that, right?”

“That's not what I'm saying. If anyone was going to poke her nose in, Sofe, it should be you.”

“Right.”

“Don't start with the ‘I'm stupid' stuff. You're quick, and when you take the time to look at them, you understand people really well. You're not corrupt.”

“Yet you're telling me to just cut and run.”

“Yeah! 'Cause think: What'll it do to Mom and Dad if we just vanish?”

It should have been a powerful argument, but she had struggled with this for ages, ever since she'd begged for permission to go skydiving for her sixteenth birthday, and seen her father fighting to smother his anxiety as he put her on the plane. They never said a word, Mom and Dad; they encouraged her to do exactly what she wanted. There was guilt, sure, but she lived with it.

Of course, she'd always been able to rationalize that they had Bram, safe and brainy at home with his laptop and his incomprehensible math.

“Also, you're not a cop,” Bram put in.

“These people could use a few real cops.”

“Which you aren't, no offense.”

She couldn't help feeling insulted. “Running wouldn't solve anything. That Ualtarite or whatever followed Gale to San Francisco. If they attacked us at home, what could we do?”

“But—”

“And he has my name, remember: They might not even have to follow me home to … I dunno.” She gestured at the ferret Chimera, with its snake's tail.

Bram closed the trunk. “You're rationalizing. You
want
to be here.”

“What if I do?”

“Is it worth dying for?”

“They didn't sink us, okay? They could have, but they didn't. It was just a scare tactic.”

“And you don't have the sense to be scared?”

“See, you are calling me stupid.”

“I'm not—”

“I'm staying,” she said, feeling mulish now.

“What could make it worth the risk?”

“I think this whole ‘stay-away-from-the-Dueling Court' thing has something to do with my birth parents. I think Gale knew if I went there, I'd find out…”

“What?”

“I don't know. I got into this to find out about my…” She stumbled, unwilling to say “family” or “real family.” “… my background, okay? And I know, I
know
that Gale and Parrish are hiding something. And it's to do with Beatrice and dueling.”

“You know.”

“You just said I'm good at people. When we get to the Fleet, I'm gonna find out more about my past.”

“Like what? How?”

“They're lawsuit-happy. Maybe I'm named in some other case, or Beatrice is. Or it has something to do with this slavery stuff. Beatrice is Verdanii, and you heard Verena—they're supposedly the head of the anti-slavery faction. Maybe the shameful thing she's so upset about is she helped someone escape, or had an affair with a slave.”

“That's not a theory, Sofe; it's something out of a fairy tale.”

“Hello, there's magic here.”

“That doesn't make this
Gone with the Wind
romantic. Magic aside, if we assess the situation, apply a little scientific rigor—”

“That's not my strong suit, what with being the intellectual lightweight of the family and all—”

“I'm not saying that.”

And he wasn't, but she was mad now.

So was he: “You sure you don't just like this feeling of being…”

“What?”

“Chosen.”

She laughed. “Princess dresses and magic purses? What am I, Cinderella? One day my real parents will come and whisk me off to a palace?”

He folded his arms. “Well?”

“It doesn't make any difference, Bram. In the end, they still aren't gonna want me.”

He shut one of the toppled books, looked her in the eye, and said, “Then why bother?”

“I have to know. I wish I didn't. I don't want to hurt you or Mom and Dad, or even Verena and Beatrice but—”

“You're curious, it's natural, but—”

“It's
not
curiosity,” she said, and now her voice was rising. “It's not brain stuff at all. It's a hole, a hunger, or … I can't explain it and I feel terrible about wanting it. The way Mom and Dad looked all heart-punched on my eleventh birthday when I asked about my birth family, or the time I made that crack about my real parents…”

“You were little.”

“I might as well have kicked Mom in the teeth. You think I don't remember exactly how hurt she looked? It's right here, high res.” She tapped her forehead. “It ungrateful and wrong and it feels
mean
that I can't just walk away from this and accept my wonderful, wonderful luck. But you know what? It also hurts that I had to wait for Mom and Dad to take off for Sicily to go rooting through their stuff for the truth. Something's missing, and it's not about me liking Verena better than you—”

“You know I'm not that insecure.”

“—or preferring Beatrice to the parents. I need to do this, Bram.”

“Mom and Dad deserve better than to have the two of us disappear without a trace.”

“Get Verena to take you back,” she said. “I'm not going home until I get some answers or they kick me the hell out.”

She stomped back out on deck. The storm clouds had broken into low cumulous clusters, gull-gray, dotting a shockingly blue sky. The crew was working to replace the ropes that had been cut by the strand of lightning. The wind was from the south and they were skimming along, still northbound, at a good clip.

Verena and Parrish were about twenty feet up the rigging on the mainmast, untangling a singed rope.

“Are we very far off course?” Sophie asked.

Parrish pointed at a faint scrim of land on the horizon. “They've driven us closer to Tallon. By design, I suspect.”

“Design?”

“
Temperance
—the ship that Isle of Gold is fixated on—is Tallon's representative to the Fleet. The Tall are a nation of shipbuilders. And the last time anyone saw Yacoura—”

“The Heart is lost,” Verena said, as though she was explaining, but she'd said that last time, too.

Part of a spell, maybe?

“It was last seen there,” Parrish said.

“They don't want us getting too far from the Heart.”

“Which suggests they're in a hurry.” Parrish climbed down to the deck, raising her wrist so he could look at the electrical burn on her palm, which was tingling as the ointment soaked in.

“It's not serious,” she told him.

He nodded but didn't let go. “We cannot give them what they want.”

“No negotiating with terrorists?”

“Yes. Nicely put.”

“We could let Coine
think
we're looking, couldn't we? If we had a legitimate reason to go Tallon; if there was some point?”

A gleam of something … was that approval? “Such as?”

“Well … we need to repair, right?”

“No, damage to
Nightjar
is minimal.”

“But Tallon … they're shipbuilders? Lots of international trade? Lots of people passing through? Lots of gossip?”

“Totally,” Verena said. There was a chilly edge in her voice: Sophie extricated her arm from Parrish's grip.

“We were looking for someone who'd tell us what was up with the Ualtarites. A busy port…” She faltered. Why did all of her ideas sound so much better before she gave them voice?

You're not a cop,
Bram had said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Is this stupid?”

“It's quite sound,” Parrish said. “Let them think we're concerned enough to consider seeking the Heart.”

“We are concerned,” Bram said, coming up on deck. “We're super concerned.”

Sophie pretended she hadn't heard. “Okay. We'll play-act at looking for the Heart and snoop around trying to figure out why the Ualtarites are helping John Coine.”

 

 

Where Erinth had the air of a Tuscan city in the midst of the Renaissance, Tallon was more of a navy town. Its wharf was long and businesslike; the locals were almost all in uniform. As foreigners, in civilian garb, they would be conspicuous.

The shore had weathered the same storm that blew
Nightjar
into Tallon's waters, but if anything had been blown out of place it had already been lashed back down, and possibly scrubbed for good measure. The place was all whitewash and chalky stone.

From the look of the harbor,
Nightjar
wasn't the only ship making for land in the wake of the storm: A number of sailing vessels, most of them small and many looking the worse for wear, were arriving. Sophie had a good look up and down the wharf, looking for the Isle of Gold ship,
Barabash,
that had been anchored in the Erinthian port. No sign of it. She looked up the Isle of Gold flag in Gale's protocol book—it was a gold triangle on a bloodred background—and searched again. Nothing.