Firebirds Soaring (42 page)

Forthcoming is
Val/Orson
, a short novel inspired by the legend of the noble young Valentine and his wild twin brother Orson, set among California tree-sitters, as well as stories in many anthologies, including a four-novella collection from Prime that contains “The Seven Mirrors,” a tale that begins with a teenage girl conjuring the ghost of Poe.

Marly Youmans lives in Cooperstown, New York, with her husband and their three children. Her Web site is
www.marlyyoumans.com
; she can be contacted through her blog,
www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com
.

In part, I wrote this story as a gift for my magic-loving teenage daughter, who finds that real boys often can’t compete with make-believe ones. I also wrote it out of homesickness for southern landscapes and out of memories—the pet boar at the boat shop, a tin washtub on a Georgia front porch shaded by a glossy hedge and noisy with bees, the powder puffs of mimosas cool against my cheek.

As for the intelligent, combative, sun-weary India, she sprang like armed Athena from the head of Zeus. She appeared, and she immediately had it in for little girls who weren’t as armed against danger as she. Like all small children, Clarisse and Maudie are reading the world with insufficient knowledge, though I imagine that they learned something from India and Erl Jack on that overheated summer’s day.

COURT SHIP

A
long, low, rake-masted ship drifted into Smuggler’s Cove under a single foresail. The deck was almost flush except for the jut of the aftcastle, on which an old woman sat at a little table pouring hot chocolate from a silver pot.

“That’s the
Petal
?” asked the newcomer.

“Yes,” said his guide, a young boy from the village above Smuggler’s Cove.

“It looks like a pirate ship,” ventured the newcomer.

The boy snickered, then said with the superiority of the sea expert instructing the ignorant land rat, “That’s because it was, before Granny Risa’s family got it. They were smugglers. Which is why we’re called Smuggler’s Cove.”

“Oh,” said the newcomer, peering under his hand at the old pirate ship.

The boy added, “Old Granny Risa was a pirate-fighter as well as a smuggler.”

To his surprise, the newcomer murmured, “Yes, so I was told.”

A girl of about twenty leaped from the
Petal
’s rail to the dock. With practiced movements she made the bow fast, as a crewman aft secured the stern.

“That’s Young Risa,” he said. “Talk to her or Granny Risa. They both do hiring and trading.”

The newcomer smiled down at him. His tunic and riding trousers weren’t exactly toff—like what the nobles wore when they rode in their fancy coaches to Remalna City—but they looked rich anyway, hinting at largesse. “Thank you,” he said, pressing a six-sided Sartoran silver into the boy’s hand, which sent him whooping up the trail to his mates.

On the dock, Aurisa paused at the unexpected sight of a young man coming down the narrow switchback trail, his long pale hair neatly tied back with a ribbon. She put her fists on her hips and waited. She liked what she saw. He was tall, slim, but moved with the swinging stride of someone used to being active; he was dressed plainly except for excellently made high blackweave cavalry boots.

Risa flicked a glance at the fellow’s face: square, pleasant expression that didn’t give much away. Long hands, no rings.

Altogether an interesting anomaly. Good. She liked interesting people. And hoped he would not open his mouth and promptly become a bore, or worse, a snob. She knew how to handle snobs—except that Granny Risa didn’t like her being rude to them. Bad for business, which had been all too scarce ever since the war.

He reached the bottom of the pathway and started down the dock. She watched his gaze travel down her own form, and mentally assessed what he saw: medium height, plain face, curling dark brown hair tied up in her kerchief, wide hips, castoff blue tunic-shirt, ancient deck trousers that had, in fact, belonged to her father before he returned to Fal to join his cousin’s cavalry force during the war. Bare feet.

What he saw was, in fact, quite different. He liked the strength hinted at by the set of her shoulders, the easy stance accentuated most attractively by the generous curve of her hip, her wide-set dark eyes, her generous mouth with a sardonic shadow at the corners. Her face was framed by the dark tendrils of hair that had escaped her kerchief.

She crossed her arms and waited.

“Good morning,” he said.

Yes, he had a toff accent.

“I need to hire a boat, or ship—a seagoing vessel—to take me to Send Alian—”

“There is no more Send Alian,” she interrupted.

He paused, regarding her with mild surprise. “I realize that. I ought to have said, what formerly was Send Alian. Or more exactly, I guess, the port at Al Caba, as I understand the shoreline along what was formerly Send Alian is too flat for landing.”

Risa nodded. So far, so good. “All true. Will it just be you, or are there servants lurking around with a lot of baggage?”

“Just—”

“Hai! Raec! Wait up!” a young man called from the top of the bluff.

The handsomest fellow she’d ever seen loped down the mountainside. He was tall, like the one he’d called Raec; but unlike Raec, who was slender, the newcomer was heroic in build, with curling black hair escaping most romantically from his white ribbon tie, his eyes thickly fringed with black lashes below winged brows. He gave Risa an openly appreciative up-and-down through blue eyes, startlingly light in his dark face. When she gave him the same appreciative up-and-down, he grinned. His grin was decidedly rakish.

Then, to Raec, “You can’t go off without me. If you do, my death will rest upon your head, and I swear I will haunt you at the most inopportune times for the remainder of your sorry life.”

Raec sighed. “Nad. This is one journey I could have made alone.”

“Impossible,” Nad retorted. “You need my gorgeous face along.” He bowed extravagantly to Risa, adding, “Nadav, at your service.” Then to his friend, “We have been friends too long for you to shut me out of sailing on the prettiest boat I’ve ever seen, with the prettiest captain.”

“That,” Raec said mordantly, “is the problem, not the solution.”

Nadav raised his hands. “I didn’t want to say it, but it’s your fault I can’t go home. My sister found out you’re gone, and somebody somewhere—probably that fool of a royal messenger—hinted at the reason.”

Silence, during which the only sounds were the thumps and rattles of the crew making the
Petal
fast, and the distant cry of seabirds round the bluffs.

Then Raec turned to Risa, who had been watching with undisguised interest. He said, “Two—Nadav, here, and myself. No servants. Our baggage—such as it is—is on the hill, with my—”

“Our,” Nadav put in.

“Our mounts, for which I will arrange stabling for the interim. After which we can leave whenever you wish.”

“Without even asking the price?” Risa asked. “My!”

Raec actually blushed, which intrigued her the more. Nadav laughed. “He’s not quite made of money, but he’s the next best thing.”

“Oh, yes, yap that out and watch the price double,” Raec said in Sartoran.

“It would have doubled anyway,” Risa responded in Sartoran, and hopped back to the rail of the
Petal.
Unfortunately her splendid retort was spoiled by one of those bump-and-lurches so common to moored ships. She windmilled her arms, started to topple. A pair of strong hands caught her by the shoulders and gave her a boost. So much for splendid parting shots!

She glanced back, saw in Raec’s rueful grin that he knew what she was thinking, and had to laugh as she leaped to the deck and sped aft.

Her grandmother looked up from her chocolate. “Business? Or pleasure?”

Risa snorted. “They’re toffs. Remalnan, from their accent. I told ’em I’d charge double,” she added. “We can get all the repairs done at Al Caba—”

“Who are they?”

“The dark one is Nadav, and the blond one Raec.”

To Risa’s surprise, her grandmother nodded slowly. “There will be no charge.”

“What? ” Risa squeaked, then lowered her voice as the two on the dock looked sharply her way.

“I recognize the pale-haired one,” Old Granny Risa said in her slow, mild voice. “That is, unless I am mistaken, the grandson of Prince Alaerec Renselaeus. I understand they gave this boy the modern version of the old name, which would make him Prince Alaraec Renselaeus, heir to Remalna. And I promised my dear friend Lark that he always have free board with me. He and his family.”

A crown prince! Risa’s vivid inward vision replaced a blond, smiling face with money bags surmounted by a crown.

“But they haven’t
told
us who they are,” Risa said. “They could be any Raec and Nadav—both common names—”

“But I know who they are. Nadav has to be Lord Nadav Savona. The boys’ fathers grew up together, and so, too, their sons.”

“Gran. We do need the money.”

“No.”

Risa sighed. Her grandmother never lost her temper—but she never changed her mind, either. Not if she’d given a promise. “And I was going to order the very best stores.”

“You’ll do that anyway.”

“And we’ll pay with what?”

“You leave that to me,” Granny said.

Risa made a sour face. She hated the thought of her grandmother dipping into her small savings just for some imagined debt of honor, about which she only knew the sketchiest of facts: Lark was a prince who’d talked his way onto the crew. Granny Risa’s ten-year-old brother—who died during the Pirate Wars—had run “Alaerec” into “Lark,” and the name had stuck. What Risa did not know were all the details of Lark’s heroic career. The stories she’d heard had come from other people.

But Gran was the Owner, and Gran Had Spoken.

Risa stamped back down the length of the craft, past her cousins and two of the hired hands, who were busy tying everything down on deck and lining up the goods to be shifted to the dock.

“You go free,” she said abruptly to the newcomers. And to their unmistakable surprise, she scowled at Raec. “Gran recognized you. It’s your grandfather. She knew him once, and made a promise.”

Raec whistled softly. “The Pirate Wars.” In a lower voice, “Did she say why? My grandfather has never told me that story, though he talks about everything else.”

Risa’s bad mood vanished. He didn’t act as if free passage was his due—and he was as curious as she about her grandmother’s past. “No! You think they were tragic lovers separated? That’s what my mother thinks. What have you heard? ”

“Nothing about lovers, that’s for certain.”

Nadav chuckled.

Raec gestured toward the hill. “We’ll go settle the horses and then return.”

“Don’t rush,” Risa said, her bad mood returning as she thought of the bargaining that lay ahead—and the making do, when it would have been so easy to tap this rich vein of gold, who would hardly miss the charge, from the look of him. “We won’t be sailing before dawn.”

She leaped up onto the deck and called to the crew, “Let’s get busy! We’re sailing on tomorrow’s tide!”

 

Just before dawn, Aurisa the Elder watched the young men come aboard. She watched her granddaughter take them below to show them the tiny cabin they would share. Presently they were back on deck, Risa pointing out the basics. Both listened closely, and eventually—as the sun cleared the bluffs, banishing the blue shadows and lighting the
Petal
’s sails with peach-warm light—they were brought aft to the captain’s deck.

Granny Risa braced herself to look into the young version of eyes still vivid through years of dreams; Raec’s were gray, not dark like his grandfather’s, but their shape was somewhat the same.

Raec said, “I would really rather pay for our passage.”

“No. But if you are uncomfortable at benefiting from another’s debt of honor, then you may work on crew if you like. We are shorthanded.”

There—many tests in that suggestion.

Neither young man dismissed the “debt of honor.” There were far too many fools in the world who considered that honor was the exclusive birthright of aristocrats. Even more promising were Nadav’s spontaneous grin and Raec’s unhidden relief at the suggestion of work.

“Have either of you ever been on a ship?” she asked.

“No,” Nadav said.

Raec’s smile brought Lark to mind. “My father gets sick on ships or coaches, so he arranges magic transport if any of us have to go a distance that isn’t easily ridden. I haven’t inherited that.” He added ruefully, “At least, I don’t think.”

Granny Risa laughed. “As well! Young Risa will introduce you to the mates of the watch. You’ll serve as general hands until you learn some of the skills. In the meantime, while we ride the tide out I suggest you climb to the mast-heads. Accustom yourselves to the feel of the ship as we work into actual ocean waters. They will not be as calm as this cove.”