Water & Storm Country (4 page)

Clang!

I whip my own sword from the sand and
narrowly manage to deflect hers away. Not that she would’ve hit me.
But she would’ve pressed the point tight against my skin and
lectured me on always being prepared, never letting my guard down,
or any number of her favorite “Rider Lessons.”

For a while we forget about the Soaker ships,
forget about the cheers erupting from them as they passed, forget
about everything but our own bodies, moving, slashing, blocking,
fighting, preparing for…
for what?

Finally, my mother puts down her blade.

“A storm is coming,” she says, but I don’t
think she means rain and lightning and thunder.

Though we both know we should run for
shelter, for the camp, we sit on the sand for a while, just
watching the gulls play on the gusting wind. Seems the storm isn’t
close enough to scare them yet, and the birds are usually
right.

“I hate them,” I say to the ocean.

“Who? The birds?” my mother says, and I can
feel her smile on my face. She can be intense during training, but
when she’s just my mother again she’s different.

“The Soakers,” I say, looking at her quickly,
matching her brown stare.

She knows why, so she doesn’t ask, doesn’t
say anything, just throws an arm around me and pulls me into her
chest. Her heart beats firmly against my face.

“Don’t be so quick to grow up,” she finally
says.

I pull away, embarrassed that I gave myself
the comfort of my mother’s tenderness. I’m not a child anymore.
“I’ll be a Rider soon,” I say, frowning. “Is Father trying to delay
it?”

“Your father loves you,” she says, “it would
do you well to remember that.”

“Father’s a coward,” I say before I can stop
myself. But why should I stop myself? The words are on my tongue
most of the time, why shouldn’t I speak them? They’re the truth,
after all.

“Your father’s a hero,” Mother says.

Something red and hot and sizzling with
energy tears through me, like lightning striking a lonely tree. I
shudder, breathing heavy, trying to control my anger like Mother
has taught me. I want to swallow the words in my mouth, if only
because I love my father, despite his weaknesses, despite all his
wise words and no action, despite the coward that he is. But I
can’t, because of Sorrow. Because of Sadness. Because of Loss.

Because of Paw. My brother. My lost
brother.

“He let him die,” I say through tight
lips.

“He tried to save him,” Mother says.

“He was too weak.” My jaw aches from grinding
my teeth.

“No, you don’t remember. You were too
little.”

I slam my eyes shut, squeeze them so hard,
like maybe if I push enough, I can force my head to remember. I
want to ask her to tell me, to tell me what happened that day, the
cold, hard truth, but I won’t. I can’t. I have to remember it on my
own so I know it’s real. Plus, I’ve asked before, and she wouldn’t
talk about it. Why won’t she talk about it?

Faint images flash in the darkness behind my
eyelids. A cold, rainy night. From the little my mother
has
told me, I was three, Paw was four.

I remember. I remember.

We are playing together, Paw and me. Some
silly game with stones and sticks. He tosses a stone, clapping and
laughing when it bounces and rests on the stick. I frown, stamp my
little foot. “No fair,” I say, even though I know it was perfectly
fair.

I throw my own stone, but it clatters away
from the stick. “I win again!” Paw yells, his arms over his head in
victory.

I cross my arms and refuse to look at him,
but then he’s there, with an arm around my shoulders, saying,
“You’ll win the next one,” and I can’t stop the smile, because Paw
is the best big brother I could ever ask for, and because I love
him, and want to be just like him, and because we’re both going to
be Riders one day…

Screams in the distance. Angry screams.
Scared screams. Violent screams.

Torches surround us, flying through the air,
carried by dark bodies. Riders, rushing to arms, to get their
horses.

But it’s too late. Too late.

The Soakers are upon us with swords and
knives and clubs, somehow managing to sneak in, already in the
camp, slashing, cutting, killing…

The memory starts to fade, like it always
does at this point, but I squeeze my eyes shut tighter still, smack
the heel of my hand against my forehead, forcing it to show me—

—Paw’s death.

I have to know why I survived and he
didn’t.

Thunder crashes, heavy and loud and
close.

“We have to go,” Mother says and my eyes
flash open. When I look up, the gulls are gone.

~~~

We’re drenched by the time we reach our tent.
I duck inside first, with Mother right behind me. Father looks up
from a piece of wood bark, where he’s writing something with a
piece of chalkstone. We’ve startled him.

Thunder booms overhead and his eyes flick
upward, as if the tent might cave in on top of us. As if he’s just
realized there’s a massive storm.

I know what that means. He’s been gone. Not
physically, like how Mother and I were down at the edge of the
ocean, but mentally, spiritually—
gone
. Off in his own world,
doing his Wisdom Man thing, discovering our fates by studying
grains of sand in a water skin or herbs in a clay teapot. In other
words, doing nothing, wasting time—while we trained for the next
battle with the Soakers.

“A bad one?” Father says when we sit next to
each other on a blanket, drying off.

Mother shrugs. “No worse than the last
one.”

As the name suggests, storm country is a
place where nature fights against itself constantly, warring in the
skies—not with swords and shields and horses and ships, but with
lightning and dark clouds and—

Boom!

Another heavy clap of thunder shatters the
brief silence, momentarily drowning out the drum of the rainfall on
the tent. Father twitches slightly. Mother and I stay as still as
stones.

“What are you doing, Father?” I ask,
motioning to the marked tree bark.

His eyes meet mine and I see the fear in them
as they widen. “I had a vision,” he says, and it’s all I can do not
to laugh out loud. He’s always having visions, but none of them
ever seem to make any sense. Just because one Man of Wisdom said he
would become a Man of Wisdom when he was a baby doesn’t mean it’s
true.

“Tell us,” Mother says seriously. I shoot her
a frown, which she returns with a clear warning on her parted lips:
don’t
.

I turn back to my father, sigh, say, “Yes,
tell us, Father.”

“It involves the Soakers,” he says, which
isn’t at all what I expected, and suddenly I find myself inching
forward, lifting my head, interested—actually interested—in what my
father has to say.

“Are we going to fight them? Are we going to
kill them?” I ask eagerly, forgetting that his visions don’t mean a
damn thing.

Now it’s his turn to frown, turning our happy
family gathering into a frown party. “Sadie,” he says, and I can
feel the lecture in the way he speaks my name. “Our existence is
not all about killing Soakers. Sometimes the more important choice
is not when to take a life, but when to spare one.”

Spare one?
Is he talking about the
Soakers? Because I refuse to offer any of the wave riders my pity.
“Is that the choice they made when they killed Paw?” I say, my
voice rising.

“Sadie, I—”

“When you
let
them kill Paw?” I
practically shriek. Bright lights flash through our tent as
lightning bursts all around us.

“Sadie!” my mother snaps, but I’m not
listening to her, not seeing the lightning, not caring about the
way my father’s face has drooped like the wax on a melting
candle.

Wet or not, storm or not, I don’t care. I
bash through the tent flaps and out into the thunder and
lightning.

“M
y son!” my father
bellows, his face beaming with something I’ve never seen before.
Excitement? Sort of. Happiness? Definitely. Pride? Aye! There it
is. My father’s face is full of pride. And I think it’s for me.

The crowd cheers, but my father, Admiral
Jones, waves his hands to silence them. “Thank you all for coming.
This is an important day for me, for my family, for my son.” More
cheers. “Today my son, Huck Jones, becomes a man!”

The roars are deafening but I barely hear
them because I’m basking under the glow of my father’s pride. But
then I have a thought that makes me go numb:

Is it real?

My father once taught me that part of being a
leader is being what people expect you to be. “Isn’t that lying?” I
had asked, remembering how my mother always told me never to lie,
no matter what the circumstances. “No,” Father had said, smiling
broadly, “it’s leadership.”

Is that what he’s doing now? Pretending to be
proud of his son because that’s what’s expected of him on my
fourteenth birthday?

But still.

It’s wonderful seeing him like this—the best
feeling in the world. The numbness fades because I don’t care
whether he’s lying, or just being a leader, or whatever. For right
now, he’s proud of me.

“May I present to you…my son…Lieutenant
Jones!” He pulls his sword out, hilt branded with the mark of The
Merman’s Daughter, and I do the same, my sword matching his

(Except I lost the fight with the bilge
rat.)

(And my father never loses.)

and we raise our swords above our heads, and
I feel full of power and strength, and for the first time in my
life I’m fearless, and I can do anything, conquer anything, and I’m
ready,

(I think.)

ready to become a man.

No, I
am
a man. Lieutenant Jones.

Someone starts singing…

“
Yo, ho, on land or at sea; yo, ho, get
down on your knees…”

…and soon we’re all singing, me and my father
included, his proud arm around me—only no…no, it’s just me and
Cain.

“
Yo, ho, we’ll fight to the end; yo, ho,
we’ll fight cuz we’re men!”

My father’s gone.

But I don’t care because he was proud of me
tonight and he’s a busy, important man and I can’t expect him to
stick around for a silly party that’s all for me. So I keep singing
and smiling and my friends come up and shake my hand like I’m
something, someone bigger than them, because I am.

I’m a man.

And then the grog starts flowing and I’m
allowed to have a few burning—and if I’m being honest, quite
disgusting—sips this time, because I’m of age and I’m a lieutenant
now, so who would stop me anyway?

But father’s not here.

But I don’t care because the grog has sent
warmth through my belly and the stars are shining even though
there’s lightning flashing off yonder in storm country. And the
white sails are full and it’s a perfect night for sailing.
And—and—

—father’s not here.

I take another sip of grog and force it
down.

Someone picks me up, Cain I think, and throws
me off onto the lower decks where eager hands await to catch me, to
hold me up, to pass me around like a hero’s welcome. And I’m
laughing and my friends are fighting through the crowd alongside
me, laughing with me. Suddenly I realize: one of the worst days of
my life has become one of the best nights of my life. Maybe even
the
best night.

A night to remember.

~~~

“Uhhh,” I moan the next morning, blinking in
the dark of my cabin.

Why is someone hammering on my head?

I reach up, swat at whichever friend is
playing the trick on me, waking me up with repeated knocks on my
skull. But no one’s there and my hands whoosh through the empty
air.

I feel around for the dark drapes covering my
cabin window, pull them aside, squint when the circular beam of
light hits me full in the face. The sun is way above the horizon
and I’m late. Very late. Not a good start for my first day as a
man.

And my head—oh, my aching head. I drank way
too much grog, stayed up way too late. “Just one more song,” the
men kept saying and I wasn’t about to deny them. Not on my night.
Not when the jokes about me and the bilge rat had ended hours
earlier.

Someone knocks on the door. “Lieutenant
Jones?” a voice says.

They’re looking for my father, but he’s not a
lieutenant. “Admiral Jones,” I correct, pulling my pillow over my
head to drown out the continued knocking by the confused
sailor.

“That’s your father’s name,” the voice says,
and I realize it’s Cain and he’s talking about me, because

(Aye, I’m a lieutenant now, aren’t I?)

“Come in,” I say, my voice raspy.

I hear the cabin door swing open and I peek
out from beneath my pillow to see Cain, dressed in his dirty blue
uniform, smiling like he’s the one who just became a man. “You
alive?” he asks.

“Barely,” I say. “But I’ve got a headache the
size of the ship’s hull.”

“I bet,” Cain says. “I think you might’ve
overdone it a little.” He’s still smiling like my headache is the
funniest joke of the yar.

I groan in response. Then ask, “Why are you
here anyway?”

With those five words, his smile vanishes as
if it was never there in the first place. He runs a hand through
his long, dark hair. “It’s time,” he says.

“Time for what?” I mutter.

“Time to go.”

A shudder passes through me and I have to
clutch my stomach because something’s roiling in there, threatening
to come back up. Still wearing my clothes from the night before, I
stagger to my feet, stomp past Cain, climb the stairs three at a
time, smashing my shoulder into the wooden wall when the ship
lurches and my stomach along with it.