Deadweather and Sunrise (9 page)

Mrs. Pembroke must have gotten the wrong idea, because she got up and came over to kneel beside my chair, her soft hand on my arm.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said. “Mr. Pembroke is a very resourceful man, and he’s going to do everything in his power to make sure your family comes back safely to you. All right, darling?”

I nodded. Just the mention of my family did a decent job of stopping the tears.

“Thank you,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Can we eat this now?”

I’ll say this for jelly bread: it was worth the thirteen years I’d waited to taste it. And when she saw how much I liked it, Mrs. Pembroke made sure we ate it every night, for the entire time I stayed at Cloud Manor.

IN THE END, I was there three full weeks—the happiest, most carefree weeks of my life, so different from everything that came before and after that when I look back, they almost seem to have belonged to someone else. I spent the days tagging along after Millicent like a puppy, going from lessons with her tutor to croquet games to horseback rides in the hills below Mount Majestic to long, lazy hours reading in the library.

The library was my favorite—it was enormous, lined with bookshelves so tall you needed a ladder to reach the upper rows. Early on, I found the Native books Millicent had mentioned—there were a dozen of them, up on a high shelf, and although they
were written mostly in Cartager, there were a few titles in Rovian, like
Savage Tribes and Customs
and
Across the Maw: Cartager Conquests in the New Lands.
I tried to look at them because I thought it might impress Mr. Pembroke if I could discuss one of his interests with him, but the ladder to reach the shelf had gone missing, and no matter how often I asked, the servants never could seem to find it.

I’m not quite sure where Percy went during these weeks. There were loads of servants at Cloud Manor—between the mansion, stables, grounds, and greenhouse, there must have been dozens—but they kept out of sight, scurrying around the edges of wherever we were but otherwise in their own secret world. Once my family disappeared, Pembroke must have shuffled Percy off into this world so deftly that I barely noticed he was gone.

So it came as a shock when he appeared at my elbow one afternoon in the stables. He was in a servant’s uniform, holding a currycomb and wearing a furtive look.

“Master Egbert! You look well. Food’s good, eh?”

I was too stunned to answer—not just by his sudden reappearance but by the fact that he’d called me Master. And rather than sneering, he seemed to want to impress me.

As I stared at him, one of the other servants exited a distant stall and, seeing us talking, began to stride toward us. Percy lowered his voice and quickened his speech.

“Want you to know I’ve always felt you got a bit of a raw deal with the old family, rather too hard on you, never MY idea certainly—”

“Ch-ch!” The other servant uttered something that sounded like a bird call but must have had some meaning specific to their business, because Percy broke away from me, pleading as he went.

“Don’t forget your old Percy—put in a good word—wouldn’t mind tutoring!”

Then he was gone, and within an hour, I’d managed to put him out of my mind again.

Just like, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’d mostly put my family out of my mind. And not accidentally, but intentionally—because thinking about them forced me to think about how living with the Pembrokes might only be temporary, and it was so wonderful, and life with my own family had been so lousy, that I never wanted to leave.

But sometimes the thought of Dad would creep in, and I’d get a little gnawing pang of guilt, thinking about how hard he used to work, and how he’d never had the chance to live, even for a day, as richly as I was living at the Pembrokes’.

Then I’d force myself to remember all the times he cracked me for lazing around, and how he never seemed to crack Adonis nearly as much even though Adonis was easily twice as lazy as me. Or how he never said a word or lifted a finger when Venus or Adonis went at me.

That made it easy to forget again. And when Mr. Pembroke updated me on the search, with vague but confident promises of search parties “leaving no stone unturned” or “scouring every corner of the map,” I’d nod and smile and quickly change the subject.

This seemed to be fine with the Pembrokes. Everything seemed to be fine with them—fine and rich and effortlessly happy.

Except for Millicent and her mother. They fought constantly, not in the normal way, but in their own odd style—with words that seemed pleasant on the surface, but had ugly meanings stuck to their undersides.

“I’ll be at the stables, Mother,” Millicent would say as we went out, but the way she said it made the words mean something more like
leave-me-alone-you-shrew.

“You’ve finished your lessons, then?” Edith would reply. Meaning
don’t-you-dare-leave-without-doing-your-work.

“In spec-tacular fashion,” Millicent would say, or really,
haven’t-done-a-bit-of-it-but-just-try-to-stop-me.

I couldn’t understand why they didn’t get along, because Mrs. Pembroke seemed like the nicest person I’d ever met, and even though Millicent had a wicked streak, she was smart and funny and beautiful, and what more could a mother want in a daughter?

Eventually, I got up the courage to ask Millicent about it. We were in the library reading, and Mrs. Pembroke had just paused at the entry to call out Millicent’s name, in a way that meant
don’t-sit-with-your-legs-over-the-side-of-the-chair-because-it’s-not-ladylike.
Millicent grudgingly sat up straight, but as soon as her mother was gone, she swung her legs right back over the chair again.

“How come… you and your mother…?”

“Why is she such a hectoring shrew? Is that what you’re asking?”

“She doesn’t seem like a shrew.”

“Because you’re not her daughter.”

“No, but… I mean, she doesn’t even smack you—”

“Like to see her try.” Then Millicent sat up and turned in her chair, leaning in toward me like she was telling a secret.

“Know what her problem is? She’s insanely jealous. Because I’m going to run Daddy’s business one day—he already lets me sit in on meetings, and he tells me absolutely EVERYTHING about
what’s going on. Things he’d never tell her, because she doesn’t understand business in the slightest. And it drives her mad with envy, and all she wants to do is keep me from it.

“But of course she can’t contradict Daddy, so she crosses her arms and clucks like a hen, and makes silly comments, like”—Millicent’s voice rose to a mimicking, high-pitched whine, which didn’t actually sound like her mother at all—“‘Dah-ling, you don’t know WHAT you’re getting yourself into!’ Or ‘I just want you to be happy, sweetheart.’ Like she even knows what’d make me happy! Sometimes, she even convinces Daddy to keep me out of his meetings. He has to shoo me out of his office, and when I complain, he says, ‘Love to have you, princess, but we don’t want to upset your mother.’ And then of course, when I confront her, she denies the whole thing. Pfft!” She let out a little huff of disgust.

“What WOULD make you happy?” I asked.

“Running Daddy’s empire! Certainly not skulking off to Rovia to marry some boring old twit and live in some moldy castle like SHE wants for me.”

“I thought only kingdoms had empires.”

“Oh, Egg…” Millicent looked at me with a sort of amused impatience. “Daddy IS the kingdom around here. He runs EVERYTHING.”

“Doesn’t the governor do that?”

“Who, Burns? That sorry old man? He’s just a puppet.”

“What’s a puppet?”

“You know.” She raised a hand and fluttered her fingers, like she was operating a marionette. “He moves whichever way Daddy tells him to. It’s the same way with the soldiers.”

“What, is your dad a general or something?”

“He doesn’t have to be—he pays all their salaries. Right down to the garrison commander.”

“And he runs the silver mine, too?” I’d gathered that much just from overhearing Mr. Pembroke’s conversations in the entrance hall with the men who were continually coming to visit him in his office.

“He doesn’t just run it—he
owns
it. It was all his idea, you know. The mine didn’t even exist before Daddy. And he’s got plans to expand way beyond it. In fact, he’s working on something now that he says will make the silver mine look like a street meat shack.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s business—you wouldn’t understand,” she said, more than a little haughty. Which annoyed me, because I got the impression she didn’t really understand, either. I was about to tell her as much when she lowered her voice and said, “He controls the pirates, too.”

That was so preposterous that I had to laugh. “No one controls the pirates!”

“That’s what they want people to think. But it’s not true—or anyway, Daddy’s got an understanding with them. Nothing happens on the Blue Sea without his say-so.”

She looked so sure of herself I couldn’t quite muster the confidence to tell her she was crazy.

“So that’ll be you someday—ordering pirates around, telling the governor what to do?”

I meant it as a joke, but I had to admit it was surprisingly easy to imagine Millicent at the big mahogany desk in her father’s study, yelling at the governor to do her bidding.

“Don’t tease me, Egg. I’ll have you killed. I could do it, too.”

“I’ll be sure not to beat you at croquet, then.” I’d almost won a game the day before, and she’d gotten so mad she broke a mallet and wouldn’t talk to me until dinner.

“Like to see you try,” she said with a smile, standing up and smacking my leg as she headed for the door. “Let’s have a go.”

Something about that conversation upset me badly. I had no idea why at first, but all the way through the croquet game that followed and the horseback ride after it up to the big meadow in the foothills, I was glum and snappish with Millicent.

At first, she didn’t notice. Then she noticed and teased me about it. Then, when the teasing just made me more short-tempered, she resorted to pleading.

We’d tied the horses up and were walking through the meadow when she saw a mountain gopher and took off after it, yelling for me to help her run it down. I didn’t bother, because it seemed stupid and pointless—she chased them every time we went to the meadow, and no matter how often she failed to even gain ground on one, let alone catch it, she never seemed to lose faith that she’d eventually outrun one of them.

She gave up after about fifty yards and sauntered back toward me. As I watched her approach, her eyes bright and laughing, her golden hair shining in the sun, I felt an ache building in my chest. Like my glum mood, I didn’t know what it was at first.

“Stop that infernal frowning!” she called out. “It doesn’t suit you at all! Bring back the real Egg! I don’t like this surly one! Not one bit.”

She closed the distance between us, reached out, and took my hands in hers. “Come on—tell me what I need to do to bring you back.”

The answer jumped into my head so quickly it almost slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Marry me.

There were a hundred reasons why thinking that was crazy, starting with the fact that we were only thirteen. But there it was. I couldn’t unthink it. And right away, I realized what the ache in my chest must be.

She was still holding my hands, waiting for me to answer.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” I said finally. “And I don’t want to.”

“Well, who says you have to?” she replied, her smile widening as she let go of my hands. “Come on. Race you down the mountain.”

It wasn’t until late that night, as I lay awake in the big feather bed, that I realized why Millicent’s telling me about her father’s empire—and her plans to inherit it—had put me in such a dark mood.

I’d always known Roger Pembroke was rich and powerful, but until then I hadn’t really grasped just how exceptional he was. And the moment Millicent laid it all out for me, I knew—deep down, in the place where you feel things before you understand them or even realize they’re there—that this meant I couldn’t marry Millicent.

Never mind the fact that no one got married at thirteen—King Frederick might have been paired off at twelve with the Umbergian princess who became Queen Madeleine, but for commoners, it wasn’t even a theoretical possibility until you were north of seventeen.

And never mind the fact that I had no idea if Millicent liked me that way. She did on some level, clearly—it never seemed
to bother her that I was always following her around, we never lacked for things to talk about or do together, and since that first smile out on the lawn, I’d gotten dozens more from her, both big and little.

But whether she liked me the way I liked her, with the kind of feeling that put an ache in my chest—that was a mystery. And no matter how carefully I picked over every one of her smiles, gestures, and offhand comments, rerunning them in my head for hours afterward, I couldn’t solve it one way or another.

Never mind all that—because I’d read enough novels about rich and powerful people to know it didn’t matter. If her father was that important, he’d never consent to her marrying someone like me. And as his heir, she’d be duty bound to agree.

Unless…

Unless I could prove myself somehow.

So from that point on, I spent hours every day fantasizing about how I could accomplish something so spectacular that both Millicent and her parents would realize I was worthy of her.

At first, the fantasies were grand and world-shaking—leading an army, conquering a new land, building an empire of my own.

But those all seemed to take an awfully long time and require endless levels of planning. So eventually they went out the window, replaced by feats of bravery and daring—saving Millicent from a burning building, or pulling her from raging floodwaters, or single-handedly fighting off a band of ruthless savages intent on murdering her.

At first, the savages seemed more promising than the other options. After all, I could wait around forever before a building caught fire with Millicent in it. And Cloud Manor was on awfully
high ground, so a flood seemed just as unlikely. But the Natives in the silver mine were not only foreign and mysterious, they were close at hand, and if they ever descended from the mine to Cloud Manor, they might create useful peril in all kinds of ways.