Deadweather and Sunrise (2 page)

“My dear young lady,” he said—and kindly, too, not at all sarcastic, because it was still his first day and Venus hadn’t bitten him yet—“how can you expect to grow up and marry a Rovian prince if you’re not capable of speaking like a princess?”

Looking back, I do wish he hadn’t put the idea in Venus’s head that all she had to do to marry a prince was start saying “you” instead of “ye,” because once it got lodged in between her ears, there was no getting it out, and for years afterward, we had to listen to her natter on about it. But I guess it was effective, because unlike Adonis, she actually did manage to stop talking like a pirate.

The rest of the tutoring she hated almost as much as Adonis did. As for me, I loved it—not so much for its own sake, but because Mr. Sutch was the first person I’d ever met who didn’t seem likely to slug me at any second, so spending time with him was a real treat. I did my best to speak properly for him, and to read, and add and subtract and even multiply things, although the multiplying could get pretty tricky.

And when Venus and Adonis complained to Dad, I kept my mouth shut. Fortunately, they didn’t get anywhere with their complaints.

“What we ’ave to learn things fer?” Adonis would gripe. “It’s stupid!”

“Nah, got it backwards. Need learnin’ ’CAUSE yer stupid.”

“Wha’s the point?”

“Good for ye!”

“Why?”

“Just is.”

“Why?”

“’Cause yer mum wanted it!”

There was no arguing with that. So my brother and sister just glared daggers at me and went back to their primers, and whenever Dad was off in the orchards—which was most of the time—they made life as miserable as they could for Mr. Sutch. Not that he needed much help to be miserable on Deadweather.

I was almost through the last of his primers and starting to like reading for its own sake when he suddenly disappeared. Venus and Adonis liked to say he was murdered by a field pirate, but the fact that he vanished right around the time a cargo ship lifted anchor for the Fish Islands probably wasn’t a coincidence.

Dad would have sent out another flyer, but then the Barker War got going, and for the next year or two, nothing sailed on the Blue Sea unless it had at least twenty guns on it. It was hard times—for the last few months of the war, we had nothing left to eat but ugly fruit, which gave everybody the trots.

The war was named for the Barker Islands, way down south where most of the fighting was. Like all the shooting wars in the New Lands, it was between Cartage and Rovia. They were the only two Continental powers with colonies on this side of the Great Maw, and the only kinds of people around at all except for Natives, who didn’t have any guns or ships and who’d been cleared out of the islands so completely that I’d never even seen one up close. There were still tribes of them on the mainland—that’s where the gold on the Cartager treasure ships came from—but that was several days’ sail from us, and there was no reason to ever go there,
since it was all wilderness except for a few Cartager ports like Pella Nonna.

The actual shooting only came near us once. It started as a distant rumble in the darkness, off and on, sort of like thunder but not quite, and at first it hardly seemed threatening. But Dad rousted everybody out of bed, loaded us down with all the food we could carry from the pantry, and started marching us up the hill without telling us why.

He had his pistol belt on, and he carried his rifle, along with a big rucksack stuffed with supplies. Dawn was breaking, but the fog made it hard to see.

“Where are we going?” Venus whined.

“Time fer questions later. Just haul that pack.”

“I can’t! It’s too heavy!”

“Then make Egbert carry it.”

After Dad said that, Venus and Adonis both dumped their loads on me, which weighed me down so much that my legs were shaking when I finally caught up with them at Rotting Bluff. Dad kept a single cannon there on a rough stone parapet overlooking the sea to the northwest. We helped him load it—I don’t know why, because from the sound of the battle raging out in the fog, there were a lot more ships than one cannon could ever stop. But Dad wanted it loaded anyway. Then we sat and waited, as the battle got steadily louder and more frightening.

“’Oo’s fightin’?” For the first time I could remember, Adonis was curious about something.

Dad was hunched over the parapet, his elbows resting on it to hold his beat-up brass spyglass steady as he squinted through the lens into the fog. “Dunno. Cartager Navy, that’s certain. Not sure
who’s takin’ ’em on, though. Might be Rovians proper… but I think it’s the pirates.”

“The Cartagers comin’ ’ere?”

“’Ere or Sunrise. Could be both.”

“Why ’ere? Sunrise got all the silver.”

“Yeh. But them rich folks on Sunrise don’t steal Cartager gold. Pirates on Deadweather been doin’ that longer’n you been alive. Reckon the Short-Ears got a mind to put an end to it. Wipe out the Scratch fer good.”

Ordinarily, Dad wasn’t much for talking, other than to order us around—and the fact that he was bothering to explain things to us was almost as unsettling as what he was saying. Venus, for one, looked like she might cry. “Wouldn’t wipe
us
out, would they?”

“Dunno why not,” said Dad.

“I don’t want to get eaten!” she cried. I don’t know where she got the idea that Cartagers were cannibals.

Dad didn’t, either. He took his eye from the spyglass to cock an eyebrow at her. “Nah, won’t eat ye. Just slit yer throat.”

Around midmorning, the fog lifted, and we finally got a glimpse of the battle on the horizon—two massive Cartager men-of-war and five two-decker galleons were slugging it out against just four single-deck pirate sloops, muzzle flashes blinking through the smoke that hung around their sides.

“Don’t much like them numbers,” muttered Dad, his face knitting into an even darker scowl than usual.

But as the hours passed, it was clear the pirates were giving better than they got. All but two of the Cartager galleons had gone under before any of the pirate sloops sank, and when the first of the big men-of-war keeled over around midafternoon,
Dad—who hadn’t lowered the spyglass from his eye for hours—gave a sharp huff of surprise that almost sounded like a laugh.

By sunset, it was over. The men-of-war had burned or sunk, and the last remaining Cartager galleon had been boarded and captured and was creeping back toward Port Scratch behind the two surviving pirate sloops. As he led us back down to the house, Dad’s mood was so chipper that I heard him whistling to himself.

We were all headed for bed when we started hearing gunfire from the direction of Port Scratch. Venus got panicky and ran out to the porch, where Dad had settled in with a bottle of rum.

“Is it Cartagers?! Are they coming to eat us after all?”

Dad cocked his head and listened. “Nah. No invasion, that—it’s a party.”

“A party? For true? Can we go?”

“Nah, girlie. Pirate party’s no fun for them’s not pirates.”

For a week afterward, several times a day Venus would stop whatever she was doing, let out a happy little sigh, and declare, “I’m sooooo glad the Short-Ears didn’t come and eat us.”

“Wouldn’t a’ minded feedin’ ’em Egbert,” Adonis would chime in. Then he’d cackle—no matter how many times he said it, it never stopped being funny to him—and take another swing at me.

BY THE TIME the war ended, we were half starved—and in my case, it wasn’t just for food. I’d worked up a taste for reading from Mr. Sutch’s primers, but they’d all disappeared with him, and
Principles of Citrus Cultivation
was starting to get pretty tiresome, especially considering that it didn’t have much of a story, and I’d read it so many times I could recite big chunks with my eyes closed.

“What ye always readin’ that book fer?” Dad asked me once.

“It’s the only one we’ve got,” I said.

He just scowled at that, but it must have stuck with him, because when the cargo ships started running again and he sent out a flyer for a new tutor, he wrote “MUST ONE BOOKS” in big block letters at the bottom of it. I secretly fretted over his spelling, but I didn’t dare correct it—and I guess it got the point across, because when Percy finally showed up, he brought almost a wagonload of books with him.

I can still remember the first time I saw Percy and his books lurching up toward the house on top of one of the fruit wagons, the horses all lathered from the effort and Percy’s massive belly jiggling at every bump. I practically fainted with joy—I’d never seen so many books, and I instantly knew the man who’d brought them to us was going to be the most important person in my life: a teacher, friend, and savior all rolled into one big, fat, sweaty package.

It turned out I was dead wrong about Percy, except for the fat and sweaty part. As horrible people go, he was miles ahead of Venus and could practically outdo Adonis.

When he first arrived, though, we all thought he was some kind of genius. Not just because he had so many books (which we assumed he must have read), but because he acted like a genius would—all scornful and disgusted with how ignorant we were, and capable of tossing around all manner of facts, seemingly off the top of his head.

Percy could tell you everything from where the wind came from (a giant hole in the sky, somewhere west of the New Lands), to why seawater was salty (fish poop), to whether you could multiply fractions together (you couldn’t, and if you tried, they’d
break). And he spouted his knowledge constantly—that is, during the half hour a day when Dad was within earshot. The rest of the time, he napped. Unless he was eating, which he did so often that Quint took to hiding our pantry food in sacks out behind the woodpile. Sometimes, the rats got into them, but even when they did, they left more for us than Percy.

Percy sussed out pretty quickly how things stood in our house—that Dad wanted us educated but wasn’t too clear himself on what that meant—so he struck a deal with Venus and Adonis that they’d pretend to learn while he pretended to teach them, and whatever else they did with their time was fine by him, so long as they left him alone.

At first, he ignored me and could’ve cared less whether I read his books. So I dug into them, and it didn’t take long before I learned enough to realize Percy was a complete fraud, and none of his facts made a lick of sense.

After that, he did his best to keep me away from the books for a while—mostly with a stick, which he could swing pretty fast considering how lazy he was—but the situation was no good for either of us, because it meant I couldn’t read and he couldn’t nap. So eventually, we struck a deal of our own: he’d let me read the books as long as I kept my mouth shut about what was in them and didn’t let on to Dad that Percy was a fake.

It was fine by me, because even though I hated Percy’s guts, I figured if he left, he’d take his books with him. And I really loved his books. There were a hundred and thirty-seven of them, and eventually I read them all at least once, even the terrible ones.

The things I learned from them staggered me—and not just the immediately helpful stuff, like the eating habits of horses (no meat,
especially human meat, even if it’s ground up) or the real reason seawater is salty (I forget, but it’s definitely not fish poop). For the first time in my life, I realized there were whole other worlds beyond mine. On the Continent alone, there were cities, and countries, and kings, and castles, all going back a thousand years or more.

And not only did Deadweather turn out to be just a ragged little flyspeck in the Blue Sea a couple hundred miles east of the vast wilderness of the New Lands, but even Sunrise Island—a place that had always seemed, during the twice-yearly trips we took there for holidays and shopping, like the rich and bustling center of the universe—only appeared in
Geography of the World
as an afterthought at the very bottom edge of the Fish Islands map, and wasn’t mentioned at all in
A New History of the Rovian Kingdom and Territories.

Once I started to learn about the larger world, I’d lie awake at night in my little windowless room off the kitchen, and imagine what it would be like to be part of it somehow—to live a life that mattered, to be and to do things worth reading about in books.

But I never thought for a moment it was possible. I wasn’t highborn, or rich, or brave, or strong, or even smart—none of those things that made the characters in the novels and the people in the history books so special.

I knew the world was out there. I just didn’t see a place for myself in it. And even if there might be, I had no idea how to go about finding it.

It never occurred to me that the world might come find me—and that without my lifting a finger to make it happen, one day my life would change, completely and forever.

But it did. And this is the story of it.

I
t started with the look on Dad’s face. I was in the backyard, reading a book in the little sliver of afternoon shade behind the woodpile. I’d just finished splitting logs for Quint’s cooking fire, and I wanted to steal a few minutes of quiet before taking the firewood back to the house.

Dad had gone up the hill to clean the cannon on Rotting Bluff, and I didn’t expect him back until evening. So when I looked up and saw him coming, I got a quick jolt of fear that he was going to crack me one for slacking off.