The Virtu (9 page)

The nearest port was a little town called Endumion. We rode there with one of the Gardens’ cooks, who was on his way to buy fresh fish.

Only Xanthippe had seen us off, very formal and gracious, with no opportunities for any unfortunate displays of personality. She had unexpectedly presented me with another gift, enough money (she said) to buy our passage to Kekropia and, if we were thrifty, engage a hotel room for a day or two until we could make unspecified “other arrangements.”

I tried to refuse, but she would have none of it, and I would have admitted, if asked, that I did not try very hard. Neither Mildmay nor I had been particularly sanguine about what we might end up doing if we had to work our passage, and it was a tremendous relief to have that weight lifted from my shoulders.

So now we stood on the docks of Endumion and surveyed our options. They were two: the
Penelope
and the
Asprophellos
, the
White Otter
. Mildmay and I agreed with a glance that we did not want to buy passage on the
Penelope
if we could help it. Penelope was a name of ill omen in Mélusine, and the ship herself looked unclean, ill-cared for.

The
White Otter
appeared more promising. Mildmay called out a greeting, a slangy-sounding phrase of Troian he must have picked up on the
Morskaiakrov
. In response, a woman appeared at the top of the gangplank. She wore trousers and a halter-top, and her red hair hung down her back in a multitude of narrow braids. She and Mildmay plunged into an elliptical, intricate exchange, out of which I understood maybe one word in five. I stood and tried to look pleasantly nonthreatening, marveling inwardly at Mildmay’s effortless grasp of gutter Troian. I was phenomenally stupid at languages and knew it, but I had somehow never expected my pathologically taciturn brother to be so comfortable in
any
language, much less a foreign one.

He turned to me and said in Marathine, “She wants to know if you’re a hocus. And she’s looking at your hands.”

I looked at them myself, the garish tattoos, the gaudy rings. “Tell her the truth. It’s not something I had any hope or intention of hiding.”

“You’ll be singing a different song once we get to Kekropia,” he said. He and the sailor-woman exchanged another burst of Troian.

There was an intermission as she vanished to fetch someone—“the captain,” Mildmay told me—and then an even more vigorous exchange between Mildmay and the captain, a weatherbeaten man of about Diokletian’s age.

When he turned back to me, Mildmay said, “They’re going to Klepsydra, and they got room for two more passengers.”

Even for Mildmay, he looked notably less than thrilled. I said, “I can feel the ‘but’ coming. What is it?”

“They got whatchamacallit—things they want.”

“Conditions?”

“Yeah. Them.”

“Well?”

“Half the money up front.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“We sleep in separate cabins.”

“Lest we plot a coup? How cautious of them. But if they
have
separate cabins, I don’t object.”

I could see him bracing himself. “You give your rings to the captain ‘til we dock in Klepsydra and at the first sign of witchery they’ll throw you overboard.”

I swallowed the first several replies that came to mind.

“They seem honest,” he said, watching my face sidelong. “The gal said as how the
Penelope
‘d take us if you were a fire-breathing dragon, but she wouldn’t lay odds on us reaching Kekropia alive. ’Sides,
Penelope
‘s heading for Aigisthos. Which we don’t want.”

“We don’t?” I rather thought we would survive a journey in the
Penelope
, regardless of her crew’s intentions.

“No. Gideon said—” He caught himself sharply, as if he was afraid that mention of the mysterious Gideon would offend or wound me.

“Go on,” I said. “What did
Gideon
say?”

“There’s Eusebians in Aigisthos. At the court. They’d recognize the tattoos.”

“I wasn’t planning on seeking an audience with the emperor.”

“We can’t risk it. And it ain’t the way we want to go.”

It took a moment for me to decipher that. “You want to go
south
? Are you mad or just suicidally stupid? We won’t survive a week in the duchies!”

“We did fine on the way out,” he said, and I hated the mulish set to his chin.

“This is neither the time nor the place to argue about it,” I said through my teeth. “And I am
not
giving up my rings.”

“It’s not like they can steal ‘em. Nowhere to fence ’em in the middle of the ocean.”

I couldn’t choke back a bark of laughter at this relentlessly pragmatic view of the problem. But still, “Do you understand what they’re asking?”

He met my eyes. “Some guarantee that you won’t hex them all into being your slaves.”

“I would
never
—!”

“No, ‘course not. But it’s the kind of thing gets said about hocuses.” He eyed me a moment. “They ain’t being unreasonable, Felix.”

“
Aren’t
,” I said like a curse.

He made no response, simply stood and waited, as patient as stone. As opaque as stone, too: I couldn’t tell if he was
expecting
me to give in, or what he would do if I did not. I looked back at the
Penelope
and could not entirely repress a shiver at how low she rode in the water, how unsavory she looked. I thought about the weeks—four at least, Mildmay said and Xanthippe confirmed—we would be at sea. I thought about spending those weeks on a vessel that look untrustworthy in the bright sunshine and innocuous surroundings of the Endumion docks. I did not remember the sinking of the
Morskaiakrov
as anything more than a few flashes of pain and fear, but I knew that to avoid that nightmare, that death, was worth even the price the
White Otter
demanded.

“We will talk about crossing Kekropia later,” I said, trying not to snarl, and waved Mildmay ahead of me up the plank.

At the top, the captain stood waiting. He was more than a little alarming at close range; his eyes, marked by crow’s feet, were a strange, dark, smoky yellow, and the grim lines of his face suggested that he was no happier about having me on board than I was about being there.

“Rings,” he said, his voice as dark and smoky as his eyes, and held out his hand.

I would not let him rush me. I set down my valise, opened it, and found the case that went with the rings. I took them off one by one, setti0ng each in its precisely fitted velvet hollow. I closed the case and cast a small locking spell on it—nothing that would even inconvenience a wizard, but it would keep the annemer out—my words deliberately audible and clear. Then I handed the case to the captain, with a glare to match his own.

He put the case in his coat pocket and said, dour but not hostile, “Welcome aboard. I am Elektros Yarth.”

“Felix Harrowgate,” I said. “And my brother Mildmay… Mildmay Foxe.” Mildmay had told me of his soubriquet, Mildmay the Fox, which suited him so well it had proved useless for me even to attempt to disassociate my brother from the animal. It made an unexceptionable Marathine surname, a marker of respectability that I had a lowering presentiment we were going to need.

“The money?” said Elektros Yarth, disdaining to waste time on social niceties. I left him and Mildmay to their haggling and made my way to the far side of the boat to look at the sea. There was no sense in hiding from it, and I hoped that if I faced it now, perhaps my fear would not be so great, perhaps I would not become paralyzed by the sea as I had been paralyzed by the Sim as a child.

But a moment later, I had turned away, my heart pounding and my mouth gone dry, my body suddenly clammy with sweat. It was… it was too much, that was all. Any attempt to stare down the Kelephanian Ocean was only going to result in an extremely public display of hysterics. I felt naked without my rings, and cold.

I did not know how long I stood there, staring desperately at the ship’s rigging, tracing the ropes in their struggle for the sky, before Mildmay said, “You okay?” He was standing to my left, careful—as he was always careful—not to come up on my bad side. How exactly he had learned my blue eye was close to blind, I did not know; doubtless it was one of the many things I had betrayed of myself in my madness. He never mentioned it, never seemed to notice. Except that he always,
always
, approached me from the left.

I turned my head, as slow and stiff as a rusted clockwork gear. “Fine,” I said.

“You look like shit.”

“Thank you. I am fine. What word from our worthy captain?”

His eyes met mine a moment longer, absinthe-green and cold as jade; then he let it go and said, “Ship sails tomorrow at the septad-day. Captain says we can sleep on board tonight. I said yes.”

“Did you now?”

He gave a half-shrug, barely enough to acknowledge the venom in my tone. “Money’s tight.” His eyes met mine again, and he said, “I ain’t going back to the Gardens.”

He meant it. I would have had to use magic on him to move him off the ship. “Am not,” I said, “not ain’t.”

He continued to stare at me, levelly, not angry or upset, simply waiting for me either to capitulate or issue an ultimatum of my own.

“All right,” I said. “Fine.” Think of it as practice, I said to myself. I couldn’t deny I was going to need it.

I could tell Felix was scared half out of his mind, but he seemed like he’d sooner kill himself than admit it, and I figured it’d be better all around if I just kept my mouth shut. ‘Cause, I mean, there wasn’t nothing we could do about it. If we wanted to get back to Mélusine—which we both did—we had to get on the other side of all this water somehow.

So I just said, like I couldn’t see his face was the color of bone or nothing, “Captain says come meet the others.”

“A delightful treat, to be sure,” he said, mostly under his breath, and walked with me down to where the captain was standing with the rest of the passengers.

There were five of them. A middle-aged Kekropian couple and their kid, who was a couple indictions short of finishing his second septad. Another kid, a Troian, somewhere in the middle of his third septad, with a look on his face like he’d been born biting into a lemon. And another guy, a couple years older than Felix, Norvenan—you could tell by the blond—tall and heavy-set. He had sharp blue eyes and big, soft, ink-stained hands, so I wasn’t surprised when he got introduced as the secretary of the middle-aged guy with the kid.

The middle-aged guy was named Leontes Gauthy. He was a merchant of some kind, trading between Troia and Kekropia, which looked like it was a pretty lucrative gig from the way him and his wife and the kid were dressed—and from the fact that apparently most of the
White Otter
‘s cargo belonged to him. The wife’s name was Theokrita, and the kid was Florian. The secretary was named Ingvard Vilker, and he stood there with a super-polite look on his face while Mr. Gauthy was pronouncing it. Kekropian don’t got the “v” and it was mostly coming out “w.”

The Troian kid said his name was Phaëthon, and then he shut his mouth and looked even more lemony. I’d‘ve laid odds he was running away from something, but it wasn’t none of my business, and I figured anything I said to him, he’d just look all lemony at me, and I didn’t need the grief.

The captain divvied up the cabins, glaring at me and Felix like he thought we were going to make a scene. Felix caught it and stood there looking as sweet and harmless and innocent as a kitten. The
White Otter
had three passenger cabins, one largish and two smallish. The largish one was going to the Gauthys, and the captain put me and the Troian kid in one of littler ones and Felix and Mr. Vilker in the other. The kid gave me a look like he could smell the dirt from where he was standing, but he swallowed whatever complaint he would’ve made. Felix and Mr. Vilker shook hands, and there was a kind of twinkle in Mr. Vilker’s eyes that said he’d picked up on the joke, even if he didn’t know what it was about Felix that had the captain’s drawers in a knot. I breathed a little easier seeing that, because it meant maybe him and Felix wouldn’t kill each other somewhere out in the middle of the ocean.

And right about then, I was figuring that was the best I could hope for.

I’d been worried about what might happen with a whole day to wait before we left. I kept having these like, I don’t know, nightmares or something—except for being wide awake—of the celebrants all showing up on the dock and convincing Felix he really wanted to stay at the Gardens after all. Or, what was more likely, Felix having too long to think about all that damn water, and running back to the Gardens like a dog on the losing end of a nasty fight. And if that happened, I was fucked. So you can understand me being a little nervous, but Ingvard Vilker turned out to be the answer to my prayers. Him and Felix hadn’t been talking but a couple minutes before they got onto the subject of Troian history, and a septad-minute after that Mr. Vilker had whipped out this book that was all dog-eared and scuffed and looked like it’d maybe fallen in the ocean a time or two, and it turned out to be a guidebook to Troia to tell you what all the places were you were supposed to see because something important had happened there or somebody important had been born there or died there or what have you. They had ‘em for Mélusine, but the way I heard it, no two books ever agreed on what the important things were. And if they did, they’d have two completely different stories about why you were supposed to give a rat’s ass. Which I wasn’t going to. Not about anything in Troia.