The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (23 page)

Sawyer cleared his throat. “Don’t apologize. We came on our own accord. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

I shrugged. It felt like my heart was somewhere underneath my stomach.

“Besides,” he said, “I get the feeling we’ll be okay. I’m not much of a betting man, or a churchy kinda guy, but I don’t think this is the end.”

Noreen turned to regard me, squinting against the light. Her face was puffy and pale. “Yeah...I have faith. This is all a big misunderstanding, and these guys can’t be so hard-ass they’ll just ignore what you have to say. They’re Kingsmen, Ross: good people. A long line of good people.”

“I hope you guys are right,” I said, and leaned against the bulkhead, closing my grainy, tired eyes.

When I opened them again, I sensed that an hour or two had passed, as the hot light of the sun was no longer streaming into the brig at an angle, but falling straight down onto the windowsill above me, and onto my cold scalp. Sawyer and Noreen were fast asleep, sprawled on the mattress, Sawyer on his back and she huddled against him with her head on his stomach.

I reveled in the warm sun and relaxed, stretching my legs.

I didn’t have long to luxuriate in the sunbeam, though, because the drumbeat of bootheels came down the hallway and the unarmored man appeared in the doorway. My friends stirred, but didn’t awaken.

The man beckoned to me, and I obliged simply out of curiosity and a desire to settle what I was convinced was a misunderstanding. He showed me the handle of the sixgun in his crossdraw holster and produced the key to the cell. “I’m going to let you out,” he muttered.
Aim gwan lechu-ut.
“You try anything foolish, and you’ll be dead before you hit the floor.”

I put my hands up by my shoulders in surrender. “Hey, your wish is my command,
kemosabe.
I’m not here to cause any trouble. I’m on your side—I think.”

He unlocked the door and opened it with a faint squeal, and I stepped out, taking care to keep my hands visible at all times. With a suspicious eye, he turned away and strode down the hallway, leading me past the guard, who gave me a glare just as accusational.

We passed into a longer corridor that ran perpendicular to the hull, crossing between what turned out to be the galley kitchen and the crew’s quarters. The crew bay was a long and spacious room that fully occupied a level of the ship from starboard to port and from amidships to where I was standing.

Hammocks were tied to the support beams at regular intervals, rolled up and secured during the day. The darkness was only broken by oil lamps that swayed pendulously back and forth on chains, and sunlight that crashed down through a grate in the ceiling.

We cut to the right and went through the kitchen, where two men in kilts were standing around chatting and peeling weird vegetables that looked like potatoes with skins like apples.

As we walked into the room, they stopped talking and stared at me.

My escort said something to them in his rapid-fire accent, and they reluctantly went back to their task. We went into the pantry, a long and narrow space lined with shelves on either side. They were sparsely stocked with canned food, narrow boxes labeled with words I couldn’t decipher, pickled eggs and vegetables in glass bottles, and sacks of grain.

The unarmored man closed the door and locked it with a little hook. “Sit down,” he said, pointing at a nearby crate.
Set doon.

So I did. The man stood there, looming over me with his fists on his hips, and then shrugged out of his overcoat and let it drape down his legs from its belt. He was whip-thin outside of it. It hit me that he looked like an unkempt Middle-Eastern version of Nils Asther.

“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said. “At first, I thought you were the assassin of Lord Eddick, attempting to use the sea to flee the justice of the Kingsmen, but your manner...and your words, they confuse me. Then I decided that you
are
Lord Sardis, but you sought to disguise yourself by feigning ignorance, taking on a strange affect and style of dress.”

“I don’t even know who those people
are,
” I said.

“And the irritating thing is that I might believe you. You seem honestly without guile. Even clever Lord Sardis could not play the part of an imbecile so well.”

“Thank you for your—
what.”

“Besides, you are alarmingly pale and as soft about the middle as an infant on the teat,” he noted, much to my mortification. “So if you aren’t he, then who are you? The resemblance is uncanny, although I must admit I see less and less of it as I note the aspects of your unfortunate appearance.”

“People always tell me I remind them of somebody.”

“Perhaps,” said the man. “You
are
quite plain-faced.”

“Can you answer a question for me?” I took the man’s silence as permission and continued, “This is Ain, isn’t it? Or, the Aemev, rather.”

“What fanciful hell do you live in? Of course it is. Where else would you be? The Kingsmen have no more ships that can travel to the moons.”

“You used to have boats that went to the moon?”

“You
are
an imbecile, aren’t you, stranger? I was speaking blithely.”

I sighed as he continued to study the look of frustration on my face. “So if you are not Sardis, then what
is
your name?” he asked, sitting on one of the shelves. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and fixed me with his piercing green eyes. “And what is your business—I mean, other than being stranded on a raft in the middle of the Aemev?”

“My name is Ross. Ross Brigham. And I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.”

At that, the man stood up, visibly startled. “Brigham? Are you by any chance familiar with the name Bridger?”

The world seemed to jigger in the frame, jarred by unreality. “No...who is Bridger?”

“The King’s scribe, the late Lord Eddick Bridger.”

That had to be more than a coincidence. I got the distinct feeling that I’d found my father’s other-life. “That must be my father, the man I’ve come to mourn.”

“Strange. I was not aware that the scribe had more than one son. Are you here to take revenge, then?”

“Revenge?” I said, and the notion dazzled me. I hadn’t really even considered it, even after what Bayard had told me. I guess I was still too blown away by the whole thing to get ideas of retribution when I didn’t even have all the pieces to the puzzle. “No, I guess I figured the authorities had handled it.”

The man smiled. “It might please you to know that I am Walter Rollins,” he said, drawing the revolver in his chest rig and spinning it by the trigger-guard. This he did a dozen times, at multiple angles, reversing it, transferring it from hand to hand, tossing it over his shoulder from the back, and finally twirling it sharply back into the holster.

“The Deon of the Southern Kingsmen and son of Council Chiral Clayton Rollins—the Hero of the Widowforge, and the secondmost legendary gunslinger in the territories of Ain. And I am the leader of the investigation into your father’s disappearance.”

I rubbed my face. “I understood a couple of those words.”

“What part of it eluded you, stranger?”

“Everything but the pronouns.”

“I feel I must resist the urge to either check your skull for injuries, or give you one. Are your friends as dull-witted as you are, or have we been allotted our full contingent of water-logged simpletons?”

I wanted to punch this man, but I had the notion that he would shoot me if I tried.

“None of us are dull-witted, but my friends are more knowledgeable about your country and customs than I am,” I said, and decided to go the Clark Kent route: “I’m not from Ain. We are from an isolated, far-flung settlement deep in K-Set.”

It felt like bullshit coming out of my mouth, but Walter didn’t seem to be fazed much by my pathetic attempts at being coy.

“You say you are the son of Eddick, yet you are from the farthest reaches of the colony?”

“I am...an illegitimate child. My mother and I were exiled from Ain before my birth to spare my father the grief. I heard of his death and came to pay my respects, but on the way over, we were knocked overboard by a storm.”

“Oh, a bastard. How charming,” said Walter, ushering me back into the kitchen.

The galley sailors that were leaning against the panel trying to listen to the conversation leapt away from him and went back to peeling the odd-looking potatoes. I noticed that one of them was simply whittling a vegetable that had already been peeled.

“I believe that in light of this new information, we shall seek an audience with your fellow castaways.”

_______

Walter opened the cell door and I went back in. Sawyer and Noreen were awake. He was still lying on the bed, her head on his stomach, and he was languidly stroking her hair as I appeared.

“I have good news and I have bad news. And then I guess some good news again,” I said, sitting on the bed with them. “You were right about them. Nobody’s going to shoot us. The bad news is, this guy here, Mr. Rollins, thought I was an assassin that killed some guy named Lord Eddick, but I convinced him that I’m not. And then he assumed I was here to avenge my father. Unfortunately, I’m completely ignorant about nearly everything, and now he just thinks I’m a bastard idiot that fell out of a boat. The good news is, he doesn’t think we’re dangerous and he wants to talk to you guys.”

“Told you, you should have read the books,” said Noreen. Her voice was unusually raspy.

I turned to Walter. “Do you have a doctor on board the ship?”

He shook his head. “Most of us know how to dress wounds, but there are no seplasiaries onboard, no healers, no tussicular medicines. To your fortune, however, we will reach the shores of Ain within a few days’ time, and there your companions will be able to find succor of some measure.”

Sawyer visibly relaxed, but his face still depicted concern. He leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone. “Someone killed Lord Eddick?”

“You know who that is?” I asked.

“A member of Normand Kaliburn’s traveling party,” he explained. “He was a minor character in the last several books—a nobleman author tagging along with Normand to write his biography. It’s always been common opinion that Eddick was how your dad wrote himself into his series as wish fulfillment. Sidekick to his own protagonist.”

Walter stepped inside and nodded deferentially to us. “I must admit that...my initial assumption of your nature may have been a hasty assessment. I can see that in spite of your strange manner of speech and odd garments, you are of no consequence to the Kingsmen and you have been rescued from certain death. Consider this my—”

He almost seemed to have to force himself to utter the next part, “—Sincerest apologies. Until we reach our destination at Salt Point, please consider yourselves my guests. You may rest in the crew cabin, if you like. The accomodations in our brig are...less than hospitable.”

“Thank you, sir. My name is Sawyer Winton, and this is our friend Noreen Mears. We’re—”

“We’re grateful for your generosity, Mr. Rollins,” I said, glancing meaningfully at Sawyer. “We were just talking about how we were coming all the way from the farthest settlement on K-Set to mourn my father Eddick.”

“Yes,” said Sawyer. “It’s been a long trip. Did you say Mr. Rollins?” He looked up at the gunslinger. Even Noreen was looking up at him with a certain amount of queasy fascination.

“Aye, that’s me. Walter Rollins, Deon of the Southern Kingsmen, at your beckon.”

“Would you happen to be related to Clayton Rollins?”

“That’s my father, he is,” said Walter. “Taught me everything he knew and some things he dint.”

“Very nice to meet you, sir,” Sawyer said, and he made an odd sort of genuflective gesture that consisted of balling his left fist and bowing gently over his forearm like a French waiter. An expression of surprise flashed across Walter’s face and he echoed the salute. “This man is the son of the companion of Normand Kaliburn...and evidently the leader of the gunslingers of the South Territories.”

“I’m relieved to see at least one of you is prone to fits of intelligence,” said Walter. “Are you here to make sure the scribe’s bastard doesn’t accidentally talk his way into a grave?”

Sawyer and Noreen got up off the bed, stretching their stiff limbs, and we vacated the brig.

“Nahhh,” smirked Noreen. I sensed a faint trembling as she walked between us, and it evolved into a hard cough. “We just kinda fell in with him along the way.”

When we got to the crew cabin, we took her to the nearest hammock. The ropes were coarse—to the point of bristling with tiny prickles—but there was a narrow feather cushion wedged into the curve of the ropes, redolent with the faint scent of vinegar and age.

Noreen lay down on these, and I offered her my jacket to cover up with. She pulled it over her shoulder to where you could only see her face from the nose up, and curled into a fetal ball, hugging herself. Sawyer sat on the floor next to her, holding the rope, a worried look on his face.

I asked the Deon if there were any possibility of scoring something to eat at the galley before he left us alone, and with his assent I went and fetched what I could.