My stomach was full for the first time in days, and for the moment we seemed safe from Pembroke’s slavers. But now I had something new to worry about.
Why would Rovian soldiers invade the New Lands?
Rovia and Cartage were enemies, but not like the Moku and Okalu. They weren’t dead set on wiping each other out. They only fought occasionally, and the Barker War five years back had seemed to settle things between them, at least as far as the New Lands went. When it was over, Cartage controlled the mainland, and Rovia ruled the islands. And that was that.
Or so I thought.
And this business about making slaves of everyone—how could that be? Rovia wasn’t in the slave trade. The king had outlawed it. Roger Pembroke was a slaver, and a Rovian…but the only soldiers he had any control over were the hundred or so in the garrison on Sunrise, and that was just because according to Millicent, he paid their salaries.
Surely you couldn’t invade a whole continent with a hundred soldiers. You’d need thousands. And warships, too. Roger Pembroke didn’t have that kind of power.
Or did he?
I watched Millicent walk back to us from the elder’s hut.
“What’s this about Rovian soldiers invading the New Lands?” I asked her.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head.
“How can it not matter?!”
“There’s a stream nearby,” she said, ignoring the question. “They’ll take us there if we want to wash up. Three shells a person, and they’ll wash our clothes. I recommend it—you look like a pack of animals, and you smell even worse.”
Two teenage Flut girls were approaching. One of them called out in Cartager, and Millicent turned to greet them.
“Fine,” I said. “But what about the soldiers—”
She talked over me, directing a comment to Kira in Cartager. Then she and Kira began to follow the two Flut girls.
“Go with the boys when they show up,” Millicent said over her shoulder as she walked off. “And don’t waste time. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
“What about the soldiers?!” I called out, exasperated.
She didn’t even turn around.
“Girlie ain’t changed a bit,” Guts muttered as he watched her go. “Still a pudda saca.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“Pudo la, ye billi glulo porsamora.”
“You sure you’re saying it right?”
“Shut up.”
A moment later, two boys a few years younger than us arrived
and led us to a secluded spot on the bank of a slow-moving stream. They motioned for us to give them our clothes. We stripped down, and they began to rinse the clothes as we plunked ourselves down in the stream.
The water was chilly, but I forced myself to stay in it until I’d scrubbed myself clean, especially my hair. Then I sat down on the riverbank, shivering and wet, and watched the boys beat our clothes against some rocks. It was late morning, the sun was hot, and pretty quickly I stopped shivering.
Guts sat down next to me. “Wot ye make of this soldier business?” he asked.
I just glared at him, my teeth clenched together. And not from the cold.
“Wot’s yer problem?” he asked.
“What’d you attack me for?” I yelled at him.
“Tryin’ to make me look stupid! Nosin’ in on her!” he yelled back.
The two kids stopped beating out our clothes and turned to watch us argue.
“I wasn’t!” I told him. “I don’t even like her!”
“Tell the other one!”
“I don’t!”
“Prove it!”
“Oh, come on!” I lowered my voice. “You know how I feel about Millicent. I don’t care about anybody else.”
He thought about that. “Promise?”
We were both quiet for a minute. The kids went back to beating out our clothes.
“Right then,” Guts said finally. “We’re square.”
“Aren’t you going to apologize?”
“Fer wot?”
“Beating me in the head!”
“Had it comin’! Shouldn’ta made me look stupid.”
“I was telling the truth! I told you not to name that hook!”
“Still.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
There was another minute of silence while I tried to tamp down my anger. I felt like the whole thing was his fault. But Millicent was still mad at me, and I didn’t know what to make of Kira. So if I wasn’t at least on good terms with Guts, I wouldn’t have anybody.
“Sorry I made you look stupid,” I said, trying not to sound resentful.
Guts nodded. “Sorry I beat yer head.”
That was a start, I guess.
“She says she’s marrying someone else,” I told him.
He shot bolt upright. “Who is he?! I’ll strangle ’im!”
“Not Kira! Millicent.”
“Oh.” He relaxed again. “How’d that happen?”
I told him what I knew about this Cyril fellow. Guts considered the situation as he used the side of his hook to scratch a bug bite on his arm.
“No worry. Get out o’ this mess, ye can go kill ’im.”
I sighed. “I’m not going to kill him.”
Guts shrugged. “Fine. I’ll kill ’im for ye.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but it made me feel good about Guts again.
WHEN THE BOYS returned our clothes, they were damp but clean. We put them on and walked back to the middle of the village. Kira and Millicent were waiting, looking clean-scrubbed and fresh. They’d both swapped their dirty clothes for Native cotton leggings and tunics, and Millicent’s still-wet hair was tucked behind her ears.
She was so pretty it hurt a little to look at her.
There was a long final conversation between Millicent and the village elder. At one point, he took out a stick and scratched a map in the dirt. The girls nodded their heads like they understood, but I couldn’t make any sense of what he’d drawn.
Then the elder presented Millicent with a thin strand of rope that one of his warriors had been busy knotting in dozens of places along its length.
At Millicent’s direction, we all bowed to the Flut. They returned the bows. Then the same warrior who’d taken us to the village led us out in the opposite direction.
“Wot’s with the rope?” Guts asked as we walked.
“It’s a message,” said Millicent. “To give to the other Flut villages. So they’ll let us pass through, and sell us food.”
Guts looked skeptical. “Can’t say all that with a piece o’ rope.”
“Yes, you can,” said Kira. “It’s how the Flut write. With knots on string.”
“Stupid,” said Guts.
“No,” Millicent told him. “Stupid is not writing at all.”
“Shut up, ye saca!” Guts snapped at her.
“I wasn’t talking about you,” said Millicent.
There was an awkward silence after that. When I glanced over at Guts, he was red-faced and twitching.
I felt sad for him. Until just then, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not know how to write. But now that I thought about it, considering what little I knew about his past, it made sense.
The Flut warrior led us to a trailhead just outside the village. He left us there with a few final instructions in Cartager, and we set off down the trail, which led west along the bank of the stream where we’d bathed.
“So what about these soldiers?” I asked Millicent.
Once again, she didn’t answer.
“Is it true? Why on earth would Rovia invade the New Lands?”
She was walking in front of me, and I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her utter a short sigh.
“You’ve got to tell us what you know, Millicent,” I said.
“There’s some kind of plan afoot,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t know anything specific. But, yes. It’s going to happen.”
“Is your father involved?” I asked.
“How else would I know about it?”
“But how could he get the troops to—”
“That’s all I know,” she said sharply. “I’ve no idea how, or where, or when—just that they’re planning it.”
“If Rovians invade the New Lands, it will start a war with Cartage,” said Kira.
Millicent shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Wot’s this mean for us?” asked Guts.
“It doesn’t change a thing,” said Millicent. “Still got to get that map translated. And we’ve still got to find the Fist.”
“What do you want with the Fist?” Kira asked her.
“Who says I want it?”
“If you don’t, why are you here?”
“Because I fancy the outdoors,” said Millicent.
I figured that would set Kira off, but she let it go. Something seemed to have changed between her and Millicent. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they liked each other. But between her bartering with the Flut and her new willingness to threaten Kira with violence of her own, Millicent seemed to have earned Kira’s respect.
I waited until we’d been walking for a while and were spread out along the trail before I fell in close to Millicent and quietly pressed her for more information.
“Tell me more about this invasion.”
“There’s nothing more to tell.”
“You’ve got to know more than that,” I insisted.
“Well, I don’t! And it doesn’t matter. We’ve still got to find this stupid tribe and figure out what that map says.” She looked back at me with narrowed eyes. “You haven’t forgotten any of it, have you?”
I felt a little pang of worry.
Dash dot feather cup two dash dot firebird…
“No! Course not!”
“Well, don’t. It’s the least you can do,” she said bitterly.
“You know, I really am—”
“Quit saying you’re sorry!”
I was, actually. I couldn’t help it. I still felt sorry.
Not that it was doing me any good with her.
THE VALLEY WAS ENORMOUS. We spent the whole rest of the day walking, and judging by the position of the mountains to the north, by sunset we hardly seemed to have made any progress at all. Partly that was because of the route we were taking. The Flut had told Millicent and Kira that the easiest way across the mountains was over a pass on the far western shoulder of the Gran, the tallest peak in the range.
The Gran looked almost as wide as it was tall, and it stood well to the west of where we’d started. So the route the Flut had sketched out sent us nearly as far west as north.
All of it was through farmland and pastures held by the Flut, who kept a close eye on their territory. Every few miles, we came upon another tall, slender lookout post. By the time we saw them, they were usually empty because their sentry had spotted us first and scrambled down to spread the news.
Within minutes, a hostile clutch of Flut warriors would approach us. They didn’t always speak Cartager, but they all recognized the knotted rope Millicent carried. After examining it, one of the warriors would escort us through his fields before sending us off in the direction of the next territory.
After the time we’d spent running from the slavers, the sentries were a comfort. As long as we stayed in Flut territory and minded our manners, we didn’t seem to have much to fear other than sunburn and sore feet.
In the late afternoon, we reached another village, twice as big but otherwise identical to the first one. We bought a day’s worth of food from them after an epic negotiation, during which Millicent made us pretend to walk away three times.
This time, we took the food with us. Half an hour before sunset, we came upon a lightly wooded stretch of high ground that some Flut shepherds must have used for camping themselves, because there was a pit already dug with the charred leftovers of multiple fires. We gathered some wood, then built a fire using the flints Kira had brought with her. After watching her pray to the sunset, we ate a quick dinner and fell asleep around the fire.
I woke up in the middle of the night to muffled sounds that at first I thought were coming from a wounded animal. I looked around the smoldering rim of the fire and saw just two bodies asleep on the ground.
I got up and walked toward the noise. About twenty yards away, I came upon Millicent, sitting hunched over on the hillside with her knees tucked to her chest, sobbing into her arms.
When she heard me coming, she tried to pull herself together.
“Leave me alone,” she said in a scratchy whisper.
“What’s the matter?”
“I said leave me alone!”
I sat down next to her.
“No,” I said.
She started sobbing again.
“I don’t want the others to see me like this,” she said miserably.
I put a hand on her back, figuring she’d pull away. But she did the opposite, shifting closer and pressing her head against my chest. I put an arm around her and ran my hand back and forth across her shoulder until it grew warm from the touch.
Eventually, she stopped crying. She nuzzled my chest a little, but I wasn’t sure if she meant it, or if she was just wiping her runny nose on me.
Then she sat up straight and stared out at the moonlit pasture with a wrung-out look in her eyes.
“It just gets worse,” she said. “Every time, I think, ‘That’s it. It can’t get any worse.’ But then it does. It never stops.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. But opening my mouth hadn’t been working out too well for me lately, so I kept it shut.
She started to cry again. “The whole silver mine,” she whispered, her voice quavering through the sobs. “They’re all slaves up there. They always have been.”
I gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s okay,” I said.
“No, it’s not.” She buried her head in my chest and really let go. Her whole body shook with grief, and as I held her, I finally understood why she hadn’t wanted to talk about the slavers, or even admit they existed.
She’d spent her whole life rich and happy and carefree. But all that happiness had been paid for with other people’s pain. And knowing it was too much for her.
Eventually, she cried herself out. She straightened up and took a few deep breaths. Then she let out a long, shaky sigh.
“I’m not a bad person,” she said.
“I know you’re not,” I told her.
“I had no idea! Nobody on Sunrise does. They say they’re paying them. And it’s not like anyone goes up there to see for themselves. Mother doesn’t know, I’m sure of it. I mean, she’s beastly, but she’d never put up with that.”
Millicent sighed again, wiping her eyes. “And he’s such a good liar…When I’m with him, and he looks me in the eye, and turns on all his charm…You should have heard Daddy on the way back from Deadweather. When we first got on that boat, I didn’t even want to speak to him. But he was so kind, and he seemed so sorry about the whole mess…
“He told me it was all a terrible misunderstanding. That he’d just asked Birch to lean on you a bit, like businessmen do. But that Birch misunderstood. Daddy said it’s because of the way he manages employees—he gives them too much leeway, and some of the more ruthless ones go overboard trying to impress him…He said the same thing happened with the lawyer, and the legal papers. And when Birch went over the cliff, he completely misread the situation, and didn’t realize the truth till he got to Deadweather—but now that he knew it, he’d leave you be.
“And he did—I mean, first thing when we came back to Sunrise, he had all your wanted posters taken down, and I heard him tell Birch’s brother and the garrison commander you were innocent, and not to be bothered if you showed up.”
It was such obvious nonsense it made me burn a little to hear the way she talked about it, like there was any chance her father had ever been telling the truth.
“He admitted he’d bungled the whole thing, and never should have brought troops to your plantation, but he said he’d been too distracted by the Cartager problem to think it through. I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me Cartage was plotting against Rovia in the Blue Sea—and maybe even planning to invade Sunrise. And it was really the Cartage Navy, not the pirates, that attacked the Earthly Pleasure.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I was on that boat—it was a pirate attack.”
“I know! When Daddy first told me Cartagers were to blame, I thought it was absurd. But back on Sunrise, I kept hearing the same thing. Everybody was whispering that it must have been the Cartage Navy behind it. Even the refugees from the Earthly Pleasure—to hear them tell it, all the pirates were Short-Ears.”
I thought about that. “It’s true Ripper Jones is a Cartager…So are a few of his men. But not a lot—maybe five or six out of fifty.”
Millicent shrugged. “People are sheep. If everyone around them says up is down, soon enough they’ll start saying it, too. I remember once…”
As she went on, the memory of the Cartager pirates from Ripper’s crew who’d harassed Guts back in Pella Nonna jumped into my head. For a moment, I tried to puzzle out whether their meeting with Li Homaya meant there was any truth to Pembroke’s claim that Cartage was behind Ripper’s attack on the Earthly Pleasure.
But Millicent was still talking, and I couldn’t think and listen at the same time, so I had to quit trying to think.
“There was a lot of bluster about making Cartage pay for what they’d done. One morning, I came down to breakfast, and Daddy was talking to Lord Winterbottom. As I walked in, I heard Daddy say, ‘One stroke, and we’ll own the whole continent.’ He wouldn’t tell me what he meant by that. But later, Cyril came over. He and I talked it through, and we pieced together that they were talking about invading the New Lands.”
At the mention of Cyril, my heart sank. I’d been hoping he didn’t really exist, and she’d just invented him to get back at me for not being nicer to her when she first showed up.
“Then the night before I was supposed to leave for Rovia, Cyril came—”
“Wait—‘leave for Rovia’?”
“Oh. Right…A couple days after I got back from Deadweather, my parents sat me down and said they thought it’d be a good idea if I went across the Maw to school. There’s a famous boarding school for girls, called Winthrop. All the Rovian noblemen’s daughters go there, and I’d been itching to go for years. But Daddy had always said no. And now suddenly, he was practically begging me to get on a boat.
“So I agreed. I mean, I knew he was just doing it to get rid of me after I caused so much trouble running off to help you. But even so, going to Winthrop was a dream come true. There was a ship coming down from the Fish Islands to pick up the Earthly Pleasure refugees and bring them back to Rovia, and they got me a ticket, and the ship came in, and I was all set to leave.
“Then Cyril came over the night before I left, full of news. He’d eavesdropped on a meeting his father held at their house. His father works for Daddy—I mean, Cyril would tell you they’re partners, but it’s nonsense, Daddy’s the one who calls all the shots. Mr. Whitmore’s just a glorified bookkeeper…”
It was strange how Millicent could manage to be completely disgusted by her father and still not be able to resist bragging about how important he was.
“Anyway, the meeting was all about some attack they were planning—lots of talk about troops, and ships, and bombarding something from the sea—”
“How can your father do all that? He’s just a businessman.”
“Daddy’s not just any businessman. And this wasn’t just him. He’d somehow gotten the approval of the Governor-General in Edgartown. That’s why it was so important for people to think the Earthly Pleasure was attacked by Cartagers. Because then it wasn’t a pirate attack—it was an act of war. And Rovia had to fight back.”
There was so much to keep straight that my head was starting to hurt from it. And Millicent was still talking.
“At one point in the meeting, someone mentioned Birch—not the dead one, but his brother. They said he was leaving for the New Lands in two days.
“Someone else said, ‘What’s he up to?’ And the answer was, ‘He’s off on Pembroke’s errand.’ ‘What errand?’ they asked. The man said, ‘The one he advertised all over town,’ and they all laughed. And right away, Cyril figured out they were talking about your wanted posters, and Birch was coming after you.”
I didn’t much like hearing that a room full of evil rich men were laughing about Birch coming to kidnap me. And I was even less keen on hearing this Cyril fellow had relayed the news to Millicent.
“I knew I had to help you if I could. But they were putting me on the ship for Rovia the next day, and if I ran off, Daddy would tear the island apart looking for me. So Cyril and I went to see Etsy Featherton.”
“You mean that girl who cuts her hair exactly like yours?” I’d met Etsy once while I was staying with the Pembrokes. Millicent and I had run into her in Blisstown, and even though Millicent wasn’t exactly nice to her, Etsy had spent hours tagging along after us like a hungry puppy.
“That’s the one. Complete prat. But she’s always been desperate for attention, and she positively hates her family, so when I offered to pay her to stow away on the ship to Rovia and pretend to be me, she jumped at the chance. Didn’t even have to pay her that much. But that’s the thing about most people—dangle a few coins in front of them and they fall all over themselves. It’s sad, really.
“Anyway, the next day, right after I boarded the ship and said good-bye to Mother and Daddy, Cyril paid a couple of deckhands to start a fight on the dock. During the commotion, we snuck Etsy on board and into my cabin. We traded clothes—she was thrilled about that—and I told her to pretend she was seasick and stay in the cabin the whole trip. That way, no one would see her except the crew when they brought her meals. And none of the crew knew what I looked like, so nobody’d be the wiser until the ship got to Rovia.
“When we sailed out past North Point, I jumped from the portal window and swam to shore. Cyril met me there, and we waited until the middle of the night, then went to the cove—Daddy’s secret port, where you and I got the boat to Deadweather. I understand why it’s there now, and why Daddy made me promise never to tell anyone about it. He always said it was so he could come and go without being bothered. But the truth is, that’s how they get the slaves up to the mine without anyone in Blisstown knowing about it.”
She paused, and for a moment I thought she might start to cry again. But she didn’t.
“Birch’s ship was anchored there, and I snuck on board and hid down in the hold. The next day, it set sail for the New Lands. The whole thing went off beautifully, except I didn’t bring enough food and water. And I couldn’t have managed any of it without Cyril—he thought the whole idea was mad, and he never stopped trying to persuade me not to go through with it. But he came through for me. I really owe him for that.”
I guess I did, too. Which was annoying, because it made me feel guilty for hating his guts.
“Thanks for doing all that,” I said.
Millicent shrugged. “You would have done the same for me.”
I still had my arm around her, and as we sat in the silence, I started to wonder whether it might be a good idea to try and kiss her.
I turned my head toward her. She met my eye with a pained look.
“I’m sorry for what I said about marrying Cyril. I know it was cruel.”
I smiled at her. “That’s okay. Long as it’s not true.”
I waited for her tell me it wasn’t. Instead, she turned her head away to stare glumly into the distance.
My stomach started to sink.
“It’s not true, is it?”
She shook her head and made a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a huff. “It doesn’t matter. Not at a time like this…I understand why Daddy wants the Fist now. You heard Kira—you know what kind of power it’s got. He’s going to use it to take over this whole continent. And he’ll make slaves of them all. Every one.”
“He doesn’t need that many slaves to run a silver mine.”
“The silver mine’s just a drop in the bucket. Daddy wants an empire.”
“You really think the Fist is that powerful?”
Millicent nodded. “Whatever else my father is, he’s no fool. He’s been searching for the Fist of Ka my whole life. If it wasn’t that powerful, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to find it.”
Her eyes met mine again. The pained look was gone, replaced by a fierce one.
“And we’ve got to make sure he doesn’t get it.”