14.

2^ND EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

OVER THE WESTERN SEA

In her dream, Leyah walked with Rowena as she paced the deck of the Lady Lucinda, her body just a shadow pacing at her side. It was like this in more than just her dreams. As often as not, Rowena would wake in her room above the Stone Scales to find Leyah sitting in the chair at her bedside, tinkering with something in her lap that wasn’t really there, acting out the memory of living.

And they would talk. They talked a lot. Rowena longed to speak with the Old Bear in the quiet confines of their shared mind-space, but she kept their conferences brief, afraid of what he’d see if she let the connection linger. She never told him what had happened to Leyah, after the Old Cathedral. He thought he’d let his wife go, at last.

He had. But that wasn’t the same as her suddenly being able to leave this world.

Neither Rowena nor Leyah knew what the Old Bear would think about her being so near, still restless. Trapped because he’d failed to let her go for so long, she’d taken on a piece of substance beyond mere memory. Leyah had no desire to complicate Rowena’s life. She rarely spoke in a way that demanded a response. Meeting the Rolands again had been a sharp, silent agony, calling up memories as jagged as the metal that had torn Leyah’s life from her body. But the rest of the time, she was simply there inside Rowena, a warmth smelling of jasmine and machine oil. That suited Rowena fine. She knew all too well a woman only needed to be caught talking to herself once for folk to decide she’d lost her wits. Half-gone, the other prisoners of Oldtemple had called Clara Downshire.

But Leyah Pardon was supposed to be whole-gone.

In the dream, she paced with Rowena up and down the deck of the ship, trying to follow all the lines and cracks in its boards. Between the wind pushing against them and the ship keeling, it was no easy task. They debated without words if they should follow the seams of the boards or the knots between them, connecting them like dots on a map. The difference seemed to matter, as foolish differences always did in Rowena’s dreams, as essential as choosing a fork in a road.

They traveled the deck in a circuit until they reached the edge of the companionway headed below. Someone was coming up.

A lot of someones.

There were aigamuxa, swinging forward on their knuckles, their eyeless faces smeared with blood. Their mouths bristled with jagged teeth— too many, even for a proper aiga. Even for a dream. Their lips and tongues bled from the saw-teeth bursting in all directions. Leyah took Rowena’s hand, suddenly becoming more than a shadow, and pulled her away from the stairs.

Run, she shouted.

Rowena turned to flee. Out of the grain of wood and the cracks of planking, lanyani rose up, paper-thin, and turned to face her. They rippled like the sails overhead, took on dimension, unfolded into their whole and terrible selves, bristling thorns and briars. Leyah opened her mouth, but the hiss and crackle of branches was like a forest in a gale, consuming her words, and loud enough for Rowena to notice how absolutely silent the aigamuxa had become.

And then she understood. The lanyani were talking to the aigamuxa— and the aiga were listening.

Rowena awoke, curled in a ball so tight her back ached. She slipped a jacket over her nightshirt and padded barefoot from her cabin into the gangway beyond, then up the companionway stairs. The air above the Western Sea struck her, heavy with damp and cold, but she didn’t care about that any more than she cared to go back to her bunk. The chill swept the cobwebs of sleep away. She hugged herself, squinted against the huge, pockmarked moon’s glare, and saw a figure slouched against the portside rail.

Master Meteron had played cards with the ship’s crew the last two nights, which might not have seemed too odd to Rowena, if they weren’t a bunch of blank-eyed Trees that never spoke to anyone. They played with cards of hammered tin, with the proper figures scratched on. Meteron claimed he was making a point to lose most of the time at first, so the lanyani would invite him back—so they’d make big bets to fill up the pot, thinking they were bound to win the lot. And they had. He’d taken two big pots just before she turned in for the night, though Rowena knew he didn’t need the money or enjoy the Trees’ company. He was keeping them busy. Keeping an eye on them, while she and the Old Bear slept. She remembered the dream and shivered, wondering if Leyah would agree with her line of reasoning. She hadn’t been at Rowena’s bunkside when she jolted awake.

Anselm Meteron leaned into the rails, looking down at the sea. The curve of his shoulders spoke more of exhaustion than his usual, feral ease. Rowena wondered if he was out of his ether—if, maybe, he’d forgotten to pack it.

“You’re awake?” she asked. Then she cringed. It was so obvious, she wanted to slink back down the stairs before he could turn his measuring gaze on her.

“I had better be, cricket. It would be a very bad idea to sleepwalk out here,” he said.

Rowena took a piece of the rail beside him. Meteron smiled in that way that made her feel like a bug on a dissecting tray, staring at the scalpel as it descended.

“You’re awake, too,” he added, with a needling indulgence. “I had a . . . I just had to get up.”

“Pity. Bad dream?”

“I’m not a baby,” Rowena snapped. “You’ve a penchant for stating the obvious.”

She pulled a face. “What’s a ‘penchant’?”

“Expanding your impoverished vocabulary?”

“You don’t have to be like that about it.”

He sighed. “Penchant. A habit. A strong preference or inclination.”

“How d’you spell it?”

“God’s balls, cricket, am I your Free School tutor?”

“I write stuff in a diary now! Sometimes, anyway. I’m learning how. Bear’s teaching me.”

“It’s a bad idea to keep too close a record of what you do, in our line of work.”

Rowena considered the chop of waves far below. “Don’t know what else I’m supposed to do when you en’t drilling me up in the riggings, or Bear needs to rest his leg from dueling.”

Meteron studied her a good, long while, then gave his nod that was almost a bow. He spelled the word, very slowly. Rowena took it down in her mind, repeating it over and again, until Leyah murmured that she’d remember it for her.

Pay attention now, Rowena, she said. “You never said why you’re up, though.”

He shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

“Bloody Reason,” she groaned. “You’re like what Mick said talking to girls is like.”

“Mick?”

“Big ox who worked for Ivor. He was older’n me, thank the Proof. Kept his hands and eyes from getting too interested.”

“And what did Mick say about talking to girls?”

“‘Girls,’” she recited, “‘is lackwits and fuckteases, and they never just give simple answers, because if they did, you could tell they’ve nothing to say.’”

Meteron had been taking a pull off his cigarette, but his laugh sent the butt flying away on an air current. Rowena jerked back as its bright tip spun past, almost clipping her nose.

“That,” he said, “is so perfectly pubescent, it’s almost brilliant. Not entirely wrong, either. Not a feminist, your Mick.”

“Guess not. Feminist is . . . ?”

“Women are as good as men, treat them well, all that stuff.” He rolled a hand in the air, as if he were bored already of defining words—or perhaps just bored by that word in particular.

“Doesn’t sound like anything you buy into.”

“Not especially. But I can count on one hand the people I’ve been legitimately afraid of in my life, and two of them were women. It seems just to call them my equals, with equal numbers as evidence.”

Rowena blinked. “But you can’t have an equal count with five—” He lifted his right hand and waggled its four fingers. She looked away from the stubby leftover of his pointer.

“You never did tell me what happened to your hand.”

“Slammed it in a door.”

“I en’t stupid.”

“Never said you were.”

“Fine,” Rowena countered, “I don’t have to know. S’not like I care. But why are you up here in the middle of the night, anyways?”

He looked away, the silence between them taut as the jib sail’s line. Keep talking to him, Rowena, Leyah urged. There’s something he isn’t telling you.

Rowena could never sort out how she felt about Master Meteron. He was a puzzle box, full of confounding levers and catches, as likely to nip a fingertip as offer a prize. But she did care enough to push.

“Look, we’re supposed to be a team. How can I do anything right if I don’t know what’s going on in your head? Or what you’ve got planned?”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “You’d make a very fine face-woman, with a bit of practice.” He must have seen the question in her frown. “The business-dealer. The reasonable one.”

Rowena blinked as the slides of her memory sorted into order, taking images from the Rolands’ parlor and riffling them into a proper narrative. “Was Bear the face-man for your old group?”

“Well,” Meteron chuckled, “it certainly wasn’t Ivor, I can tell you that. And it was very useful to leave the talking to the man who had a certain insight into what people were really thinking.”

“See, that’s what I mean!” she cried. “I need . . . what do you call it? Context.”

Meteron pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and the stump of his forefinger. “Context is exactly the problem. I was trying to make up my mind how much to tell you about what’s likely to happen next.” He carried on grudgingly. “This is a dangerous job. That’s why there has to be a contract.”

“Because of Doc Chalmers’s research. People want it, and you want to know more about it, because—” Rowena stopped. “Because why? Why’s it matter to you, anyway?”

Meteron fussed a thumb over his missing finger, distant and abstracted. The expression looked familiar. It took Rowena a minute to work out where she’d seen it before.

Years earlier, she’d snuck off from a delivery route to watch a trade company send a “flying freighter” ship off from the docks at Misery Bay. She was so small then, she couldn’t see past the crowd’s belt buckles, and had to clamber up on the coiled chains of the quay itself to snatch a view. A man stood behind her with his son sitting on his shoulders. The launch was a big to-do. Some EC squints had come up with a design that would let the gas-bubble freighter rise up from the water and fly over the sea, doing what sea ships and air galleons each could only do separately, flying or sailing back and forth in the same trip, whichever best suited the cargo or the clime. The ship bristled with rotors and gears, a beautiful riot of brass and wood. They got it out on the water, and once it had put a half-mile between itself and the quay, they started the rotors, and raised the gas bags, and then—

She’d been too young to understand what she was seeing. Something went wrong, and Rowena never knew what to look for or how to explain it. Something caught fire—the gas in the hold, or a spark from the machinery, or Reason only knew what. In an instant, the ship was a bloom of flame on the water.

The first thing Rowena saw after flinching back from the explosion was the boy and his father.

Meteron’s face looked like that father’s, all his knowledge and sureness seared clean away. It lasted just a moment, but she saw it just the same. He might as well have been naked. Rowena had to look away, though she wasn’t sure why.

“I care about the book and Chalmers’s work because it matters,” he said, handling the words carefully, as if they were old, fragile things, better than half-forgotten. “Because it matters, we have to do everything possible to learn what we can, and keep what shouldn’t be learned by others away from them. That means dealing with bad people. And being bad people.”

It was all Rowena could do to keep from barking laughter. “You really believe there’s such a thing as bad people?”

“I had damned well better. I’m one of them.”

“But, no. That’s . . . that’s too simple. You know yourself. I know you. You’re . . . you’re . . .” She stopped there. Good? Was that really what she meant to say? Rowena couldn’t seem to find the right word, and Leyah had gone conspicuously quiet, as if she, too, would hesitate to use that label for her brother.

But Meteron had the words. “I’m the sort of monster who can admit what he is. I’ve never kept that from you.”

Rowena thought back. The rich meals, the warm bed, the charming words. The elegance of the ball, and the silk of his praise—and his sudden, needling cruelties. He had his fangs and claws, and still grazed her with them, to prove his point. To make sure she wouldn’t forget.

“No,” she said. “You haven’t.”

“I came up here because I had too much to think about. How to tell you about all the bad things we might have to do, for one, and all the bad people we might have to do them with.”

“I thought we’re the ones doing the right thing—protecting important stuff from the bad guys so they can’t do worse things with it.”

Meteron sighed. “Cricket, the worst kind of bad person is the one who is convinced they are a good person. The right person with the wrong convictions is a terrible creature, indeed.”

Rowena tried to smile. “So are you a wrong person with the right convictions?”

“Maybe for the first time in my life.”

That was when she felt it—the tug in the back of her mind that was Leyah, telling her something too urgent for words.

Rowena looked over her shoulder, toward the tug, and saw the sweeping arm coming down before she understood it was more than an arm.

It was a club, and it was attached to one of the lanyani crew. “Down!” she yelped, snatching Meteron’s bracers and hauling him to the deck.

The lanyani’s arm crashed through the galleon’s rail, showering them in splinters. Meteron and Rowena scrambled apart, him reaching for his trouser leg, her crabbing back until she thumped against something hard that lashed around her, pinning her arms against her body.

Another lanyani. One arm had transformed into something like vines, knotting around Rowena, hauling her close.

Don’t fight it, Leyah urged. Go slack.

But Rowena’s heart pounded in her throat, pushing fear up through her in a high, brittle scream. She could already imagine her bones crunching under the noose as the lanyani drew her ever nearer. Its other arm was a single giant thorn, and hooked, too, and oh God oh God oh Holy fucking Reason—

Rowena, go slack, now! Leyah cried.

The vines wound toward her face. Rowena thrashed her head, trying to find Meteron, shouting for him.

She only saw more lanyani snaking down the riggings, tumbling toward the deck.

Now now now!

Rowena’s breath was gone, wasted in a scream nobody seemed to have heard. She slouched, sucking air, and felt herself sink lower, slipping a little from the creature’s grasp.

And then she understood.

The lanyani had tried to bind Rowena up as she pushed out and thrashed, struggling to encompass the wild, flailing bulk of a human being. But it was made of wood, not rope, its green fibers too dense and stiff to wrap as tightly as a proper length of cord. Rowena played dead and slid to the deck before it could close its grip completely. She staggered away, looking for something she could use to defend herself.

“Cricket!”

She spun toward Meteron’s voice. He had some kind of knife up in a guard and was weaving his way between three lanyani swinging at him with limbs turned into thorny bludgeons and whittled blades. But he didn’t stab or slash. In a cold wave of horror, Rowena remembered why. Everything the Old Bear said about the lanyani being better suited to the galleons than humans. No blood, no organs, no flesh or bone. Meteron might use the knife to deflect a lanyani limb, but there was no hope of it actually injuring them.

Rowena used to think the aigamuxa were the scariest things she would ever have to fight. But at least their bodies broke the same as those of humans. At least they made sense.

“Belaying pin!” Meteron snapped, nearly losing his head to a swipe from a third arm turned into an ugly wooden broadsword.

She dashed to the rail surrounding the base of the main mast and snatched a pin up from its bulwark. Or tried to. It was solid iron, and she had to heave until spots exploded behind her eyes before pulling it free.

“Here!” Rowena shoved it with her bare heel, rolling it down the planks.

It raced toward Meteron, picking up speed, and would have taken him out at the ankles if he hadn’t spied it coming and swept a hand down to catch it. With a grunt, he swung it round and the thorny club arcing toward his head exploded into kindling.

Rowena didn’t know if lanyani felt pain, but the creature’s reaction proved it knew rage. Fury roared like a flame behind the Tree’s white eyes. The wounded lanyani staggered back, letting another of its kind step forward, bristling murder.

Rowena had just turned for the companionway stairs when another form cut off her path, lunging up the steps from below decks.

The Old Bear pushed the weaponette into her hands. “It’s charged.” He pointed toward the lanyani who’d wound her up a minute before. “Take that one. I’ll get Ann.”

And then he was moving past her, limping fiercely toward the fight with something that looked like a garden stake in his fist.

“What the hell good is this thing now?” Rowena shouted.

The wind took her words. She was lucky it shook a cloud of piney needles off the roper lanyani, too, or she might not have seen it coming up on her flank.

A limb flashed toward Rowena. She swatted it back with the weaponette, still in its short and stubby form, cussing herself blue.

“He’s crazy,” she panted, ducking, scrambling, dancing back. “You can’t stab a tree to death!”

Smell the air, Rowena, Leyah’s voice coached inside her. It’s some kind of juniper. That’s why it bends so well.

“So what?” Rowena yelped back, not caring if anyone heard her speaking to no one. Somewhere farther off came the sound of a crack like an axe splitting cord wood and a basso roar from an inhuman throat. The Old Bear had joined the fray, at last.

Junipers are conifers. They’re full of resin!

Rowena grinned at the weaponette’s leather-wrapped handle. “Oh, you brilliant Old Bear—how do I work it?”

She winced as a jagged whip-limb lashed her bare arm.

Put your index finger over the crosspiece and pull the trigger there.

The lanyani raised its arm to strike her again. This time, Rowena stepped in closer—inside its guard, just as the Alchemist had shown her in their practice duels—and jabbed the weapon’s tip into its craggy chest, as deep as the fissures of its bark allowed.

She pulled the trigger.

The shock-stick hidden inside the blade flared hot in the lanyani’s heartwood. Then it sparked. Rowena leaped away from the plume of flame, almost losing her grip of the weapon. She staggered against the galleon rail, but there wasn’t enough of it. She’d found the broken section, the one where she’d ducked and narrowly missed being turned to pulp. Her bare foot kicked out for the deck and found nothing there. The sky and ship traded places. Rowena watched her feet flail up before her, saw the hull of the ship from the outside, and the glaring moon—

Everything jerked around, including her head on her shoulders. But the falling had stopped. Slowly, Rowena opened her eyes and saw a length of mooring rope tangled about her ankles, the bulk of the Lady >Lucinda swaying back and forth twenty feet above, and Meteron and the Old Bear hauling at the rope’s other end.

Somewhere in all of that, she passed out, wondering if she’d ever woken up from her nightmare in the first place.