Beggar's Flip Page 8

  “No. But fuck me running, you might just be right.” She sniffed the freshening breeze. “I should go.”

  She hesitated, and then, more softly, “Keep an eye on her. Nobody falls in love with broken things unless they’re a little cracked themselves.”

  I PERCHED ON the rail to see her off. The longboat was a big, cranky craft, and it took four normal sailors to row it, but Latoya, with an oar in each hand, fairly lifted it out of the water. She reached the Sod Off in about eight and a half seconds, climbed the rope ladder in easy swinging jerks, and gave me a last wave as she pulled herself over the gunwale.

  As I crossed the deck, I was thinking about Darren’s breakfast—both about cooking it, and about the shenanigans that I might have to pull to get it into her. When she was distracted, Darren would forget that she had a body, much less that it had needs of its own. Sometimes, even when I put a plate in front of her, she didn’t notice it until I shoved her face down into the porridge.

  Then I heard Ariadne again, screeching from the forecastle, loud and shrill even through the wood planking. “Oh, don’t pretend that you saved her, Darren. You don’t even know her.”

  “Who is her saviour then?” Darren asked, her voice as nasty as I’d ever heard it. “You?”

  “Look, you stupid bloody pirate, I know better than to think that Lynn needs a saviour! I—oh, don’t you tell me to be quiet—”

  Their voices went down to a muted grumble, but it was only a few seconds before Ariadne was yelling again. “It’s pathetic! You think that Lynn is your big success story? You don’t get to take credit for Lynn. You didn’t save her—she saved herself, and she saved you too because she had some time to kill and why not? And she lets you pretend that you’re in charge so that your fragile self-esteem won’t crack. And you know what I think? I think she’s settling for you until she can find someone who can actually keep up with her. When all of this is over, you’ll be the woman who got her started. That’s all.”

  Well, shit. I was getting ready to sprint to someone’s rescue—whose rescue, I wasn’t quite sure—when I heard Darren reply, her words measured and venomous. “Right now, Lynn still thinks that you’re the good angel of her childhood. But when she gets her head right, she’ll figure out that you stood by for seventeen years, watching her get tortured and starved. You’ll say that you helped her—and maybe you did—but you sure as hell didn’t stick out your neck. And you know what that tells me? Shut up, I’m talking. Even if you liked Lynn, even if you loved her, she didn’t mean dick to you. Not compared to your position, your title, your real family, and your real life. She didn’t. Mean. Dick.”

  A sharp intake of breath from Ariadne. “How dare you?”

  “Face facts, princess. Maybe you’re right—maybe Lynn will move on from me someday. But by the time that happens, you’ll just be a slightly brighter part of a bad, bad memory.”

  Someone softly touched my elbow, and my hand flashed to my knife. I had it halfway out of its sheath before I recognized Regon.

  “What do you reckon?” he asked, eyebrows bobbing. “Should we pull them apart, or just grab a pump and hose them down until they start to squelch?”

  “Neither,” I said. I was a little light-headed—it could have been the lack of sleep, the argument, the sudden shock, choose your weapon—and I grabbed Regon’s arm to steady myself. “I should have known this would happen eventually.”

  Regon gave an affirmative kind of grunt. “I’ve seen this kind of dick-measuring contest before. Hard to avoid it, when you put two nobles on one boat.”

  “Well, they’ll have to sort it out for themselves, because I’m not going to give up either of those two. And I will not spend the rest of my life playing monkey in the middle.”

  He nodded, but still asked, “What if they strangle each other before one of them gets smart?”

  “They’ll figure it out,” I said fiercely. “If those two can’t figure it out, then I don’t know what hope there is for Kila.”

  I just felt so terribly tired. The war had gone on so long already, and Darren and I had been fighting for years, and had we even begun to make headway? We could ferry a thousand starving children to a place of peace and plenty, and a million more hungry mouths would gape open. We could cut down a thousand murderous raiders, and a million more would rip bloody sabres from their scabbards. I might be able to draw the line and call it quits sometime, when I couldn’t take it anymore, but Darren wouldn’t. Darren couldn’t. And how long could I keep her alive in the centre of the firestorm?

  And hell, say that we won. Say that it all went exactly according to plan, and we managed to end the war and unite the islands and put my sister on the long-vacant throne of the High Lord. Wouldn’t there still be small children who had to carry heavy buckets up and down tower stairs every day, and who got the crap beaten out of them if they took too long?

  When you have, for whatever idiotic reason, made it your mission to save your country, there are bound to be times like this, when your energy drains out of you all at once. At such moments, you wonder why you would ever bother, and you’re tempted to crawl back into bed and sleep for a solid month. For a second, I looked longingly at the hatch that led to the captain’s cabin.

  Just for a second, though. Maybe servants have an advantage when it comes to dealing with moments when nothing seems worthwhile. Every servant knows that the work has to get done, no matter how you feel.

  I sighed, and refocused.

  “I’ll be in the galley, if anyone asks,” I told Regon. “My mistress needs her breakfast.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)

  AFTER THAT DAY, Ariadne and I were barely on speaking terms. We stepped carefully around each other if we met on the companionway, and only went to the galley when the other wasn’t there. If we had to look each other in the face, we maintained expressions of weary indifference, as if the other was just too tedious to be borne.

  All right, you don’t need to tell me, it wasn’t my finest hour.

  Lynn told us conversationally that we were both being idiots, and then left it alone. Regon wasn’t nearly as restrained. First chance he got, he cornered me on the maindeck, and gave me a look that suggested he’d caught me eating babies or using puppies as bedroom slippers. “Word to the wise, captain: if you want to stay in good with a girl, then you have to stay in good with her sister. It’s just a law of life.”

  “But she’s a spoiled brat!”

  “And you’re a fluffy kitten, are you?” He snorted. “Fix it before someone gets hurt.”

  I thought of a really snappy retort to that—half an hour later. I considered tracking Regon down to deliver it, but even I could tell that was a bit pathetic.

  For a whole ten minutes, I thought about apologising to Ariadne. Then I thought about how she’d called me a stuck-up, self-obsessed megalomaniac, and suggested that I could only get off if I was looking at my own face in a mirror all the while. Then I decided that she could apologise first.

  So I ignored her, with what I liked to think of as cold dignity, and got back to work.

  We should have been heading north by then, away from my father’s sphere of influence. Just a few months before, he’d sent an assassin after me who looked about sixteen. She posed as a refugee and sat sobbing on the shore while my crew drove raiders from a burned-out village. When I came near enough to pat her on the shoulder, she flung herself into my arms, sobbed some more, and then, without changing expression, she lunged for my throat with a saw-edged blade. I managed to catch her wrist, but even so, I took a nasty slash in the shoulder before Latoya could reach me. The wound didn’t hurt nearly as much as the tongue-lashing that I caught from Latoya after the fact. As she reminded me fifty-six times in succession, I knew better than to assume a woman couldn’t be dangerous.

  I also knew better than to spend too much time paddling around in my father’s domain . . . but somehow I couldn’t make myself giv
e the order to change course. I knew this southern stretch of ocean better than I knew the alphabet, after all those years spent on my father’s merchant ships. Every time I saw a landmark, I went almost drunk with memory. There was the yellow sand of the Tavarene coast. There was the islet with the purple oyster beds. And there was the reef where, at the age of fourteen, I very nearly sunk the first ship I ever commanded. I’m going to save myself a little embarrassment by not telling you the whole story. Suffice to say, if you insist on sailing at night and taking the rudder yourself, you should at least be sober.

  Gods, I’d been an idiot. Still, I felt some inexpressible tenderness, thinking of that first command. My ship back then was a balky, ugly old scow, over-generously named the Glory of the Isles. Her sails were heavily patched and she had so many leaks that she could have been usefully employed as a sieve for boiled asparagus, but she was mine. That was the first time I encountered the magic that’s a ship at sea, a mass of wood and metal that can take you anywhere. Ships stink, and unless you stick close to land, the food is worse than what you’d get in prison. Still, if you want my opinion, they’re better than wings.

  Then, too, there was the heady joy of being in charge for the first time in my life. No older siblings to thump me on the head and stuff worms down the front of my shirt. No tutors to whip me with bunches of reeds when I made an mistake in a geometry problem. Just a crew of ten sailors who did their best to pretend that I knew what I was doing.

  Whenever I gave a particularly stupid order, Teek the helmsman would tug his forelock and say of course, captain, of course. Then he’d quietly do the opposite and never mention it again.

  Regon had been there too: a dark, stocky youth with a cautious smile. Though he was three years older than I was, he’d served as my cabin boy, bringing me my morning porridge and my evening wine, blacking my boots and washing my shirts every other month. I pretended to accept all this as my rightful due, but the truth was, I was a little bit in awe of him. He’d been at sea since age seven. He could climb the rigging like a set of stairs, set the sails as neatly as a maid could thread a needle, and he never stumbled in the dark of the hold. He positively liked the taste of salt beef.

  Meanwhile I was pretending to understand what it meant when someone yelled out, “Heave her to!” I was always tempted to respond, “Make it three, and you’ve got a deal!”

  Gods of hell, it had been so long ago.

  A week after Alek’s death, when we still hadn’t headed north, my excuses were getting increasingly threadbare. I think we should sail around that completely random patch of ocean for a while—that was the kind of thing I was coming up with. No one broke out in open revolt, but Lynn’s tone of voice became more and more exasperated with each Yes, Mistress.

  I wasn’t sleeping well, either. Every time I sunk deep enough to dream, the same words went thudding through me: Traitor—one of us—one of our own—betrayed us—backstabber. Darren, not much time, Darren, Darren, it was my—

  I would wake dry-lipped and shaky, and find it impossible to get back to sleep. Instead, I’d watch Lynn sweating and shaking in her own nightmares, and wonder why I couldn’t save either of us.

  All in all, it was a good thing that the Tavarene ambassadors showed up then.

  “THEY WANT YOU to help them negotiate a peace,” Lynn said, amused. “I think I should tell them how you and Ariadne have been plotting each other’s deaths all week.”

  “Go ahead. Just make it clear that she’s the evil aggressor and I’m simply defending myself.”

  “You’re looking at me like you expect a yes, Mistress, and lover, it isn’t going to happen.”

  A word about Tavar. It’s not part of Kila, of course. It’s on the mainland, removed from the isles, and it wasn’t a player in the Kilan war. But violence is like a liquid, in the way it spreads, and stains, and spills. With every lord in Kila busily trying to slaughter his neighbours, it was no surprise that some of our friends in the south were getting in on the act.

  Two Tavarene villages had spent the past several years locked in a small but brutal conflict of their own. Now, with many of their young men dead, and many of their women abducted or sold, and their cattle butchered, and their date palms burned, they’d become sick of the whole mess.

  It’s always a hopeful sign when two warring parties agree to come to the bargaining table, but it’s a mistake to hope too much. Peace talks can, and do, break down over the stupidest things. Accidental insults, for example, or strange signs that someone takes as a portent, like a two-headed calf or a shooting star. Sometimes the talks go on for so long that no one has the energy to continue. And there are always war profiteers—weapon sellers, slave merchants and the like—pulling puppet strings behind the scenes.

  So it’s a good idea to call in some neutral third party who will keep the talks moving forward. That’s why the village chieftains called me.

  This was what I needed: something that would keep me in the south, but keep me too busy to fret. I threw myself into the job, and Lynn followed suit. We both needed the distraction.

  It would have been a great help to have Latoya there, but even without her, we had two Tavarene sailors on board. We began by questioning them mercilessly about the customs on the coast: how the locals dressed, acted, thought, and spoke. Then, when we reached the warring villages, we dispatched the crew of the Banshee to fan out and comb the area. They inspected buildings, counted crop fields, and struck up conversations with every Tavarene they could find, asking about their problems and their fears.

  The chieftains of the warring villages asked me to dinner. I accepted and, as if it was an afterthought, offered my own slave girl to serve at table. All through the evening, as the headmen and I sprawled on couches padded with leopard hides, Lynn went back and forth between us, filling wine cups and passing platters of pomegranates and dates. She wore the briefest of white linen tunics, with copper anklets and bangles, and the chieftains looked at her the way you would look at an elaborate table decoration. They gave her a single appreciative glance, and then ignored her.

  While the chieftains and I were talking about the war and cows and millet fields and trade and temples and mining rights and date palms, Lynn glided invisibly from couch to couch, noticing all manner of tiny details that you or I would never see. She knew it every time that the headmen changed expression, changed position, fidgeted, or began to breathe faster. With those signs as a guide, she was able to follow their thoughts throughout our conversation. She knew what made them nervous and what made them bored, what issues mattered to them and which were throwaways.

  The chieftains both drank heavily. Lynn pretended to fill my cup every time she filled theirs, but, in fact, I made one cup of palm wine last the whole evening. When the chieftains began to slur and ramble, Lynn slipped from the tent and Ariadne slipped inside to replace her. Nobody appeared to notice that the blond serving girl had suddenly gained a hand’s breadth of height and an extra stone of weight. The chieftains just yelled for more drink and Ariadne went to serve them, rolling her eyes.

  As soon as Lynn was free of the tent, she tracked down the chieftains’ luggage and rifled through it, taking note of every detail that might give a clue to their personalities. Then she met up with my crewmen and heard their reports. Spinner had done the best—he’d found a loom-house and spent the better part of two days with a bunch of weavers. Weaving is one of those things that keep about one percent of your brain busy, so weavers keep up an endless flow of chatter as they work. You might think it strange that they would talk freely when there was a strange man standing nearby listening in, but Spinner, like Lynn, had a gift for blending into the scenery. Don’t ask me how he managed it. Maybe he held a potted plant in front of his face. I’m not good at that kind of thing myself and I don’t understand the people who are.

  Eventually, the feast ended and the chieftains staggered off to bed. I retreated to my tent and Lynn briefed me, summarizing all the information my crew had managed
to glean, as well as everything that she’d learned or guessed during dinner. Then, with Regon and Spinner and Ariadne, we held a council of war—actually, not a council of war. A council of not-war, I suppose. We hashed out a plan for the arbitration, guessing what problems would come up and deciding how I would respond to each of them. It went on long into the night and we only broke it off when we were too tired to see.

  Ariadne and I managed to maintain a sort of chilly politeness during the meeting. I’d included her mainly so that Lynn wouldn’t glare at me, but if I’m going to be honest about it, she came up with more good ideas than I did. It made sense, as I realized when I really thought about it. As my father’s eighth child, I had always been destined for the merchant ships, so my schooling had focused on navigation, mathematics, and languages. Ariadne, as Iason’s heir, had been trained in politics and diplomacy from the cradle. But—going for complete honesty again—it still irked me to be out-thought by someone so . . . girly.

  Ariadne’s diplomatic education wasn’t the only thing that gave her an edge, though. She and Latoya had been together five months, and during that time, she’d absorbed a lot of information about her lover’s homeland. I guess that all those times that she and Latoya snuck away together to “talk,” some talking actually did go on.