Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (35 page)

Unlike the hut in which I had resided since my wedding, this one had closed walls, which made the air within decidedly stuffy. Despite that, the interior was reasonably well appointed by Keongan standards, with soft mats for the floor. Another woman waited there, likewise with a look about her that said she was well-born but somewhat battered by her recent trials. I judged this Hannah to be perhaps a few years older than her companion—though still younger than I—but when the stranger raised a hand to silence her questions, Hannah complied without hesitation.

Which did not mean I was to be spared questions at all. The stranger faced me and said, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“My name is Isabella Camherst,” I said.

Her brow furrowed delicately. “Camherst. Where have I heard that name?”

“I am a dragon naturalist—”

“Ah,” she said, her expression clearing. “Yes. You were involved with that business in Bayembe.”

The business to which she referred had been bruited about in the gossip-sheets, but I doubted that was where she had heard of me. I wondered: should I speak, or hold my tongue?

I have never been terribly good at holding my tongue.

“Yes, I was,” I said. “Your Highness.”

Hannah came forward a quick step, but was stopped by the other woman’s hand. They both studied me as if I were a new species of insect, which might yet prove to be poisonous. “How did you know?” the princess asked.

“You look rather like your uncle,” I said. “And the Keongans avoided your shadow.”

Princess Miriam: niece to the king, envoy on a diplomatic journey around the world, following an itinerary that included Yelang. It did not begin to explain what she was doing in the Keongan Islands, living as an honoured prisoner, with Yelangese soldiers hunting her in secret … but she, not I, was the one they were searching for. (We did not look so very much alike, but the Yelangese had no reason to expect
two
Scirling women to be running about where there should not even be one. And they had not gotten a terribly good look at me.)

Sighing, she gestured for me to sit. “Forgive me, but I hoped you had been sent by Admiral Longstead. He is no doubt searching for me.”

“I’m afraid I do not know the admiral, Your Highness.” I spread my hands helplessly. “I truly am a natural historian, travelling the Broken Sea to study dragons. I did not even know you had … gone astray.” I hesitated, then added, “I fear I may have made quite a hash of things. The Yelangese came in the caeliger you saw on the beach. Without it, I am not certain they have any way to send word that you have been found.”

I expected her to chastise me for it, or at best to magnanimously forgive me my error. Instead her jaw set in a firm line. “It is just as well. I should prefer not to be ‘rescued’ by the Yelangese, if I can possibly avoid it.”

The irony scarring that word was unmistakable. “Do you not want their aid?” I asked, astonished. “I know they are not our friends, but if the Keongans are holding you prisoner…”

The princess looked to Hannah, who shook her head as if to say,
the choice is yours.
I did not keep abreast of Society’s doings; I could not for the life of me remember who Hannah might be, as I knew only people’s titles, not their given names. Some peeress, undoubtedly, serving as companion to the princess. (I later learned she was the Countess of Astonby.)

“It has all gone rather sideways,” the princess said at last. “We are, as you say, not friends with Yelang, and one of my duties on this voyage was to gather information that would assist my uncle and his ministers in determining how eager we should be to mend that.”

“You are a spy!” I exclaimed—which is yet another demonstration of why I have refused all offers of a diplomatic post, no matter where it is the Crown offers to send me.

Her eyebrows rose. “Not a spy, Mrs. Camherst. But I had made arrangements to call at a few ports that were not on my official itinerary. One of these was Lu’aka, on the island of Raengaui.”

“To meet with Waikango,” I said, beginning to understand. “Are we intending to ally with him? No, that is a foolish question; he has been captured.”

“A fact we did not discover until we reached the Broken Sea,” the princess said. “After some debate with Captain Emery, I settled on visiting Raengaui regardless. He is by far the strongest candidate in the region for opposing Yelangese expansion, but that does not mean he is the only one. At the very least, it would be worth our while to know who might lead the islanders in his absence—or whether the coalition he has built will collapse, now that he is a prisoner. As for an alliance…”

She trailed off, studying me. I did not know what she was looking for; all I could do was sit quietly, attempting to seem intelligent and trustworthy.

“I cannot say whether the Scirling crown will involve itself or not,” she said at last. “That decision has not been made.”

But it was clearly a possibility. Would we offer diplomatic recognition, I wondered, or military aid? We had tried the latter in Bayembe, and while my actions had inadvertently scuttled our plans there, that did not mean we would not try it elsewhere. An outpost like Point Miriam—named for the very princess now seated across from me—would be a nice foothold for Scirling dominance of trade through the Broken Sea, blocking the Yelangese and potentially even challenging the Heuvaarse.

I had the wit not to say
that
out loud, at least. “So that is why you do not want the Yelangese to rescue you. It would give them a good deal of bargaining power in their dealings with Scirland. But why did the islanders take you prisoner?”

Hannah made a noise that suggested she had not forgiven that outrage, and never would. The princess only sighed. “They saw an opportunity, and seized it. When I said Scirland might consider offering aid, they asked for us to raid Houtiong and free Waikango. I refused, naturally—though I did say that we might eventually be able to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on the matter. Such distant promises were hardly persuasive, I’m afraid … and so they took all of us prisoner, in the hopes that they might be able to trade me to the Yelangese in exchange for their captured leader.”

A princess in the hand was worth two promises of diplomatic aid in the bush, I supposed. There was no guarantee she could have convinced her uncle and his ministers—let alone the Synedrion—to intervene on Waikango’s behalf. And even if she had, it would have taken a year, two years, five. Such things rarely moved quickly, when it was some other land’s dignitary languishing in prison. “I suppose they hid you here because they knew the Yelangese would look for you in the Raengaui Islands.”

“Yelang and Scirland both,” she said. “I cannot imagine that Admiral Longstead sat idly by when Captain Emery’s ship failed to return to the fleet as expected.”

It was inevitable, then, that the search would eventually reach even the relatively inaccessible waters of Keonga. I supposed the only reason they had not done so sooner was that they did not want to advertise to the world that Princess Miriam had gone missing. But it was a race to see who could find her first, Yelang or Scirland … and at the moment, Yelang had the edge.

Her thoughts tended in the same direction as mine. “What of you? Is there any way you could get a message out to the fleet?”

“I fear not, Your Highness,” I said glumly, and told her of the
Basilisk
’s injured state. Aekinitos was likely mad enough to steal a Keongan canoe and attempt sailing it back to more familiar waters, but he was not a Scirling subject. I did not think he would be eager to risk himself in that fashion—at least, not without a sizable reward. Before I could decide whether to mention that to the princess, however, another possibility came to me, this one even madder than the last.

She arrived at the same thought even as I did. “The caeliger,” we said in unison.

“Suhail and I did not have very much luck with it,” I warned her. “Perhaps if he had more time to study the controls … but time is not a luxury we are likely to have.”

“Who is this Suhail?” she asked me. “An Akhian, clearly—but how did he come to be here?”

I gave her a
précis
of my dealings with Suhail, from our partnership in Namiquitlan to our chance encounter in Seungdal, and all that had followed after. “Do you trust him?” the princess asked when I was done.

“Yes,” I said. The word came forth without any need for my brain to approve it first. “I do not know his lineage, but he is a gentleman in every other sense of the word, and very brave. I am certain he will help us if he can.”

Hannah looked unconvinced. “Miriam, to reveal your identity to a foreigner…”

“The alternative is to remain a prisoner, or to risk the Yelangese using me as political leverage. But it is a moot point if escape is impossible regardless.” Miriam focused her attention on me once more. “Tell me what you can of this caeliger.”

Under other circumstances—when I was rested, perhaps, or at least had not been subjected to one of the more harrowing days of my life—I might have been able to make a more considered decision as to what I should communicate to the princess, and what might best be retained as a secret. But I was not rested, and my day had been harrowing; and so I sat there in that small, airless room and told her very nearly everything.

The only reason “very nearly” did not become “all” was because the princess remained attentive enough to draw us back to the purpose when I strayed too far into digression. She did not hear the tale of how Jacob and I had discovered the secret of natural dragonbone preservation, nor much of what had transpired in Vystrana. But I told her of Frederick Kemble, the chemist I had hired to continue Gaetano Rossi’s research; of the break-in, which I believed to have been orchestrated by the Marquess of Canlan; of the Va Ren Shipping Assocation, which was now profiting from that research. And I told her of the recent interest in the hunting of dragons, which seemed to have military backing.

“Then they likely have more than one of these,” she said. I knew from her quiet tone that I had just added another few kilograms to the burden of her worries. “It seems, Mrs. Camherst, that you also have a pressing need to speak with the admiral. He must know of this at once.”

I did not contradict her, but neither did I share her enthusiasm for the notion. While it was true that Scirland needed to be apprised of this Yelangese innovation, I did not much relish the prospect of explaining dragonbone preservation to men who were likely to immediately begin planning how to exploit it for their own benefit.

Regardless, it was true that escape needed to happen, for the princess’ sake if not my own. And limited although its range must be, the caeliger seemed our best prospect for doing that.

If escape were to happen at all, it must happen soon. The Scirling delegation had been kept in friendly captivity, insofar as such a thing is possible; the Keongans felt no animosity toward the princess or her people. They only held her because she was their best bargaining chip for getting Waikango back. House arrest had been imposed when the warriors saw the caeliger approaching, because they did not know what it portended, and it continued now because of the Yelangese. “They were reluctant to lay hands directly on me,” Miriam said, when I asked how she had gotten free earlier. The rest of the time, the Scirlings were permitted to move about in small groups—albeit under guard to ensure that no one attempted to slip away into the interior of Lahana.

“There has been no need to keep us under closer watch,” Hannah said. “What good would it do for the men to overpower the guards? They put us on this side of the island because there are so few settlements here, and what few are nearby have had their canoes taken away. We could escape this location, but we would still have no way off the island. They would find and stop us well before we could steal long-distance vessels from anywhere else.”

The caeliger, of course, changed that. Our bad landing would not have inspired the Keongans to believe it was capable of travelling very far, but even if they did not think that craft a danger, the Yelangese most certainly were. Messengers had been sent; soon additional warriors would come and take the princess to a more secure location.

It could not spirit us all to safety, though. Only a few could go; the question was which few those should be.

From the start of her captivity, the princess had insisted upon sharing meals with the rest of her crew. This violated the
tapu
which said men and women should eat separately, but Miriam had thought it wise to preserve opportunities for conversation with Captain Emery, precisely for eventualities such as this one. The Keongans permitted no fire that evening, but did allow us out of our huts to share a cold meal of cocoanut meat, bananas, and taro paste, which gave us a chance to speak.

The men had spent their time questioning Suhail, much as Miriam had questioned me, and had unsurprisingly lit upon a very similar notion. Under the guise of asking one another to pass platters of food, Hannah and the captain arranged the plan. Four would go in the caeliger: Suhail, for his previous experience and knowledge of hot air balloons; one Lieutenant Handeson, who knew balloons and engines both; the princess; and myself.

I would have argued this last point if I could have. The full range of the caeliger was unknown, but would certainly be improved the less weight it carried. My presence might mean the difference between Princess Miriam reaching Kapa Hoa (which was the closest island outside the archipelago) and Her Highness drowning in the sea. But she considered it vital that my knowledge of the Yelangese caeligers be shared as soon as possible; and so I must go. I could not dispute it too strenuously, not without the Keongans noticing something amiss. They did not speak Scirling, but they could recognize the sound of an argument.

“They are good people,” the princess said to me quietly, as we waited for the moment to strike. It must come soon; the island was falling into dusk, and soon there would not be enough light to see the caeliger’s controls. “I do not applaud their actions, of course—they should not have taken me prisoner. But I have a good deal of sympathy for their position. By all accounts, Waikango is not only a gifted war-leader—a gifted
king
—but a just and decent man. I would rather have him for an ally than the Yelangese emperor.”