Prince of Outcasts (21 page)

The skull of the saltie was clean but still raw, smelling very faintly of seawater and decay. They both recognized it instantly—anyone who spent much time at sea in this part of the world would—also anyone who hung around the banks of the big tidal rivers, where the saltwater crocodiles were wont to lurk, erupting out to grab anything even vaguely edible . . . and it wasn't uncommon for them drag full-grown water buffalo back in for a snack. The biggest ones had been getting bigger all her lifetime since the Blackout because it was so damned difficult to kill them
nowadays. She'd seen one hung up in Port Moresby about ten years ago that was twenty-four feet long, and it had weighed nearly three tons. This one though . . .

Fifi had gotten very good at estimating sizes in a long career both larcenous and commercial. This skull was about four feet, maybe four feet and a hair. Nine times that to get the total length. The hide was draped over another set of sawhorses, and it was looking a bit moth-eaten. Shark-eaten might be a better way to put it, big semicircular bites taken out of the thinner belly-skin and almost certainly done postmortem, but the overall length bore out her estimate: more than thirty-five feet, less than thirty-six.

“Glad I didn't meet this one before someone turned him into handbag meat,” Pete said, awed delight in his tone; he'd always loved marvels, the stranger and more dangerous the better.

More than ten feet longer than the one we saw in New Guinea, and the mass goes up as the cube of the increase in length, so—

“It must have weighed . . .” she said, hesitating because the deduction was perfectly logical but made the thing the same bulk as a fair-sized elephant.

“About five tons, Lady Fiona,” another voice said.

Fifi wheeled at the thump of spearbutts on wood, and JB was there by the inner doors, grinning like an ancient baboon. He wasn't the one who'd spoken, however. That was a stranger in an unfamiliar white linen uniform with a sort of naval look to it; tanned and fit, thirtyish, brown-haired and sharp-faced and unremarkable . . . except that his English was unmistakably North American, which you didn't hear every day even now with trade picking up again.

So that's who the visiting frigate was,
she thought.

It had vanished into the Capricornian naval docks when it arrived two days ago, and the security had clamped down harder than she'd ever seen before.

“Captain Richard Russ, Royal Montivallan Navy, officer commanding
Her Majesty's frigate
Stormrider
, my lady,” he said, with a slight bow and another to Pete. “Sir Peter.”

“
Her
Majesty?” Pete said sharply.

Russ looked grim. “The High King was killed this spring. High Queen Mathilda is Queen-Regent until the heir comes of age.”

He indicated the woman beside him, who wore the same getup down to the fore-and-aft cocked hat under one arm. “My executive officer, Lieutenant-Commander Annette Chong.”

She looked a bit younger, also clever and tautly fit, and as if at least one of her grandparents had been Chinese despite her blue eyes—very much like the eldest of Fifi's daughters-in-law, in fact. They were accompanied by another man, a bit younger and built like a really dangerous rugby forward. She felt her brows go up at the way
he
was dressed.

Like a playing card,
she thought.

Tight sienna-colored pants almost like panty hose, tooled ankle boots with upturned toes and golden prick spurs, a loose blue coat whose open dagged sleeves dangled past his waist, a black jerkin of suede leather with a heraldic device of a burning phoenix-like bird, and what she thought of as a pirate shirt all white billowy sleeves and fastened at cuffs and neck with black silk ties. When he swept off his hat as part of a formal-looking bow—the hat was a round blue silk cowflop with a rolled circle around the edges and a dangling tail—she saw that his head was shaved except for a long black scalplock over his right ear, bound with golden rings.

“And Sir Boleslav Pavlovitch Kedov de Vashon, of the Protector's Guard.”

She stuck out her hand. The two naval types shook it; Sir Boleslav bowed and kissed it with an authority which suggested he was used to doing it. That was an interesting experience, the more so as he took a quick look at her cleavage in passing—discreetly, but you could always tell.

Beside them JB looked like an old, disreputable devil; he'd been a heavy-boned muscular man, and now the bones were plain behind his
spotted, parchment-thin skin and the scars that knotted it. Beside him stood Prince Thomas, very obviously his son and in his fifties, with his usual colored bandana around his rather long graying blond hair. He gave the Holders a careful nod; he'd known them all his life, of course, but now that he was grown he was a little cautious of the sort of buccaneering reprobate his father had always swum with. And he'd realized most of the stories they'd told him as a kid were
true
.

“Let's get the roadkill out before it spoils dinner,” JB said cheerfully; he'd always liked a feed, even before the Blackout reputedly.

Living through that nightmare had made a lot of folks who'd managed it crazy where food was concerned, especially the ones who'd escaped the cities on foot during the collapse. Come Blackout Day not everyone was lucky enough to find themselves working on a survivalist super nerd billionaire's yacht in San Francisco Bay as a sous-chef (as she had), or safely out at sea on an old wooden sailboat beating south towards Sydney (as Pete had, on the
Diamantina
). And those who'd been in the air—well they were pretty much fucked, weren't they? Except for her friend, her comrade, her murderous soul sister Lady Julianne Balwyn, who'd survived when her flying boat came down hard on the Great Barrier Reef and crawled out on the beach already looking ahead and planning survival with style.

For that matter, making himself king and founding Capricornia wasn't much more amazing than JB's feat in simply getting himself and his young family out of Brisbane alive. There had been two million people in the city in nineteen ninety-eight, almost as many as there were on this whole continent now, and damned few had managed it. Much less getting to the seething chaos of Darwin within a year, seeing what the place needed and providing it. Hordes of suburban refugees ended up as indentured laborers on some outback station all over the shattered continent, knuckling their foreheads to the stationmasters. Only one got to be King.

The staff took the remains out, and everyone sat. Fifi hid a smile at the Montivallans who very obviously looked to her and Pete to give them the lead. They'd probably been briefed on the unusually relaxed protocols in
Capricornia but it was still doubtless a little unsettling to see the King grab a platter of barbecued Bangkok chicken thighs from a serving girl with a wink and start handing them around himself.

At that point Sir Boleslav took off his coat and tossed it to the staffer who already held his sword-belt and a severely plain sheathed hand-and-a-half longsword whose guard had the battering and filed-out nicks of serious use. Then he undid the ties at the neck of his shirt, letting it fall open to reveal more of the corded muscle there and a scar that looked as if someone had tried to slit his throat and come remarkably close to success.

“Da,” he said, in English that had a slight guttural accent. “In County Chehalis, we have a saying: among friends, wear the collar open, drink deep and speak truth.”

“In this climate, you don't need a collar at all,” JB said genially. “Get on the end of these bad boys. You got me this recipe book, didn't you, Pete? From that joint I used to like back on the old Sunshine Coast.”

Pete smiled and held up the back of hand to show off a thin, white scar; she wondered if he'd be pulling up his vest to show the one below his belly-button next.

“Got you the recipe book, samples from the herb garden, and sixteen stitches for my trouble when we ran into a scavenger band on the Noosa River coming out.”

“Pfft,” scoffed Fifi, snagging one of the bright yellow nubbins of meat. It was crisscrossed by caramelized scorch marks from the grill and dripping with sweet chili sauce. “It was barely six stitches and Julesy grabbed the herb samples because Pete's botanically illiterate. He watered a plastic fern on our boat for three months before we told him what he was doing. If you'd trusted him to salvage your barbecue herbs he'd probably have brought you back a toilet deodorizer shaped like a plastic pinecone. We have to keep him off that Station we bought because the grass goes brown if he steps on the place.”

Captain Russ and Commander Chong shared a brief uncertain exchange of glances until both Pete and JB roared with laughter; Sir Boleslav
joined in, booming as if his usual venue was under a bridge waiting for billy-goats Gruff.

“That fucking plastic fern.” Her husband chuckled. “Man, I was so proud when that thing didn't die.”

The King used a linen napkin to wipe grease from his fingers and most of the smile from his face. Only a trace remained, but it did linger for a while.

“I reckon Julianne told me that story half a dozen times, and we laughed longer and louder with each telling,” he said, sighing out the last few words.

“To absent friends,” Captain Russ said, raising his glass.

“Absent friends,” they all replied.

Pete and JB clinked their enormous beer bottles lightly together. Boleslav killed his and reached for another from the bucket of ice; it nearly disappeared in his spade-shaped paw.

“So,” Fifi said, pointing her fork at the label—it showed a crudely-drawn saltie biting a fishing smack in half. “Does this have anything to do with that monster? And anything to do with Pip?”

More staff, who were never referred to as servants in this most unusual of Realms, arrived with the main course. Silver platters—salvaged from the reliquary of Melbourne Library, again by the crew of
Diamantina
—were piled high with seafood. Enormous, bright orange lobsters, freshly shucked oysters as big as your fist (which, frankly, made Fifi want to gag), sashimi-grade tuna, beer-battered reef fish, garlic prawns, spicy mussels, long golden chains of flash-fried octopus rings and—wonder of wonders—salt and pepper Dungeness crab; this last, a small miracle performed entirely for the benefit of their visitors.

Captain Russ blinked at the crab, deftly winkled some of the meat out and ate it.

“Wonderful,” he said. “My mother used to make it like this.”

The Montivallan knight was digging in with a blissful expression, casually cracking lobster-claws in his fist.

“Like a feast on my family's estates on Vashon Island, Your Majesty!” he said to JB. “Only with new types of fish.”

Fifi had no idea how the Royal kitchens had sourced the Dungeness crab. They sure as shit hadn't Fedexed an aquarium overnight from the Pacific Northwest.

Just the King of Darwin working his mojo, isn't it?
she thought.
Keeping the world guessing.

“It
may
have something to do with your young protégé,” Russ said to Fifi and Pete. “It
certainly
has a lot to do with that . . . crocodile thing.” He looked at the crab again. “Extraordinary.”

Oh, you hazarded the cruel seas and high adventure for six months to join us? Here, have a little reminder of home.

If there was one thing that you could rely on at the Palace here in Darwin, it was a good meal and a gentle reminder that they were walking with the King.

His Majesty started in directly as he tore open a crab claw and worked out the meat, stuffing it into a freshly baked baguette slathered with avocado butter:

“Captain Russ got the saltie up in the Ceram Sea,” he said. “He was following a Montivallan ship, the
Tarshish Queen
, Moishe Feldman's boat. Feldman was being naughty.”

Fifi and Pete looked at each other. The Ceram Sea was where Pip had been heading, and had vanished off the face of the earth a length of time ago that was making them both profoundly nervous.

“We've dealt with him, and his dad too. Feldman senior was the first American . . . pardon me, Montivallan . . . in here since the Blackout. Moishe's a chip off the old block; hard enough to crack fleas on and the devil's own bargainer, but honest,” Pete said cautiously. “Likes seeing somewhere new as much as he likes a profit, and he
really likes
a profit. Bit of a blood desperado, when you come right down to it.”

JB laughed raspingly, almost coughing up a chunk of crab meat. “Takes one, eh, Pete?”

The Montivallan naval officer blinked at the exchange and went on: “We were actually chasing the two Korean warships. Who were chasing Captain Feldman,” he said. “He hadn't actually done anything illegal. Not
technically
illegal.”

“We are bloody
experts
on being not technically illegal,” Pete said; which was true and a good placeholder too. “Koreans, eh?”

The Holders exchanged another look and JB nodded soberly to it. The gaslight danced on his liver-spotted pate, which was shining with sweat in the humidity. Post-Blackout Korea was a black hole; nothing that went in came out, and sometimes it stuck out a pseudopod and absorbed passers-by. That was a major reason nobody much went that far north, not even when tempted by the prospect of salvage in Tokyo.

Also while the surviving Japanese weren't exactly utterly hostile—ships of the Darwin & East Indies Trading Company had touched there briefly a couple of times—the locals certainly didn't like
gaijin
making free with their ruins, and they and the Koreans were mixing it in all the time. The three of them had discussed a salvage run amongst themselves more than once in the old days, and always managed to talk each other out of it. Their eyes went wider as Captain Russ explained what had been happening in Montival and how the Koreans had been involved.