IT WAS EARLY IN THE MIDDLE WATCH when Duncan woke with a start. Something had brushed his face. He lay perfectly still in his hammock, and it came again—a furry paw patting his cheek, and with it, the tiniest of meows in his ear.
“Now?” Fia’s whiskers tickled his neck. “Can I show you now?”
Duncan sighed deeply and swung his legs to the deck. He didn’t bother to put on his shirt—it was getting too small for him anyway. Bare-chested, he slipped past the hammocks that held the sleeping, snoring crew, and snatched up a candle, a dark lantern to put it in, and some matches. He shut the metal slide so that only a thin line of light showed, and ducked through the hatch that led to the hold. His feet found the smooth wooden slats of the ladder, and he went down, down, all the way to the bottom.
He yawned widely as he set the kitten on the rough wooden planks and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The air was thick and musty; it smelled of bilgewater. Huge hanks of rope hung between bales and boxes, and all around him, Duncan could hear the gentle, incessant creak of a ship at anchor.
He felt stupid. What was he doing, following a kitten when he should be sleeping? He put his foot wrong in the dark, stumbled, and nearly fell. He stood up, breathing hard. If he had dropped the lantern, he might have started a fire. And a fire in a wooden ship was no laughing matter.
“Hurry up, Fia,” he said. “Show me whatever it is, and let’s get out of here.”
“There! There!” Fia cried. “Take a sniff!” Her ears pointed at a row of large boxes, black, brown, and faded gray. They were the crew’s sea chests, tucked against a forward bulkhead.
Duncan stared at her in disbelief. “You want me to sniff a sea chest? Are you out of your little kitty mind?”
“Just this one.” Fia leaped onto a black, brass-bound chest and put her nose down to the lid. “See? It smells like Grizel!”
Duncan lifted the lantern. He didn’t have a cat’s sensitive nose—he wouldn’t have been able to smell Grizel’s scent in a hundred years. But he had eyes. In front of him was the very chest that had stood at the top of their stairs at home for as long as he could remember. He knew every nick, every dent, every scratch.
So Bertram had used Duncan’s house key, after all. No wonder he had taken a burly sailor with him. Duncan’s breath came harshly through his nose as he imagined the two men breaking into his house, frightening Grizel away, clomping down the stairs with his father’s sea chest between them. Duncan’s mind held an image of the door left swinging open and his mother coming home to find the marks of muddy boots, the sea chest gone, and Duncan nowhere to be found.
He wrenched his mind away from the unbearable thought. In its place came a fierce realization—this was proof of Bertram’s evil deeds. The earl would have to believe Duncan now.
Fia unsheathed a claw. “Do you want me to pick the lock?” she asked.
Duncan stared at the chest. His mother had kept it locked and never told him what was inside. “Isn’t that an advanced skill for a kitten your age?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Fia admitted, “but I’ve been hiding down here for days, and I’ve been practicing.”
The big brass lock didn’t need to be picked after all. Someone had forced it already. At Duncan’s first touch, it fell open and hung from its hinge, dangling.
There was a squeak from behind a coil of rope, and the sound of a tiny scuffle, but Duncan hardly noticed the rats fighting in the shadows. With hands that shook slightly, he hung the lantern from a nail in the bulkhead and opened the metal slide all the way. A wide shaft of light streamed out, making the chest’s brass bindings gleam and tinting the white kitten’s fur with gold as she leaped off the chest.
Duncan put his hands on the chest lid and pushed up. The hinges creaked. The lid swung back. His heartbeat quickened as he leaned over the edge to look inside.
The first thing he saw was an old white shirt. He touched the familiar frayed cuffs, the small monogram on the collar—McK, within an embroidered square with points on top. It was the shirt he had once used as a cape, pretending to fight evildoers. He put it on and buttoned it to the neck. It was too big for him, but it felt warm and comforting, almost like a father’s arms, and his other shirt was getting so small he had burst a shoulder seam. He rolled up the cuffs and looked in the trunk again.
It wasn’t very full. There was a long wooden tube, the sort that held rolled-up ship’s charts, empty. There was a jumble of clothing and a glint of gold lace at the bottom, and a belt of fine leather with two straps and a loop. And something else shone with reflected light—something long, thin, and ever so slightly curved.
He drew in a breath and reached inside. His hand curled around the hilt. His father’s sword. It had to be his father’s sword.
Duncan sat back on his heels. He set the blade across his thighs, and its thin, wicked edge flashed silver as it caught the light. It was too heavy for him now, but someday it wouldn’t be.… With an interior bubble of delight, Duncan examined it more closely.
There was gold on the hilt. Duncan did not see the insignia of the Island Patrol, or the King’s Guard. Instead he found a stamp of the letters McK, inside a double square with points on top like a crown—just the same as the monogram on the shirt. There were three lines, like rays of light, angling out from either side. It wasn’t a symbol that he recognized, though it seemed vaguely familiar. Maybe it was the emblem of some kind of special forces.
Hardly breathing, Duncan set the sword aside and reached into the chest again. He saw a swordbelt of fine leather. He lifted out a jacket of deep blue broadcloth, with brass buttons in a double row and something gold pinned on the collar. It was a kind of uniform, Duncan knew. He was sure he had seen it somewhere before. It was slashed under one arm, with a large brownish stain, crusty with—
“Blood!” Fia sniffed at the fabric in alarm. She leaped away to the next chest over, then to the box stacked on top of that.
Duncan did not want to think about whose blood it was. With an effort, he returned the jacket to the sea chest, and as he did, he saw the gold on the collar more clearly. It looked almost like a wave, or wings.
He blinked. It was the Gannet Medal—two arched wings of the seabird that haunted every island in Arvidia. Not many won the Gannet.
Duncan frowned. Maybe this wasn’t his father’s uniform after all. Someone who was decorated with the Gannet Medal would be known. But Duncan couldn’t remember ever hearing of a famous McKay.
He scrabbled in the bottom of the chest, but there was only a sort of folder, flat and wide, made of soft leather. He dropped it when he heard a panicked meow from somewhere above his head.
“I smell something!” Fia’s meow was as close to a shriek as a kitten could produce.
Duncan snatched the lantern and lifted it, training the light on the bulkhead (as all walls in a ship were called). Like most bulkheads, this one had a space of a few inches at the top for ventilation, and it was on this ledge that Fia was crouched. She was looking over into the area behind—the cable tier, perhaps, where the great anchor ropes were coiled, twenty inches around, as thick as a man’s thigh.
“You’re always smelling something,” Duncan said. “Anyway, that’s just the anchor cable in there. It’s not a giant snake or anything.”
Fia shook her head. “I’m not scared of any old rope. But there’s a smell of kittens—kittens afraid.…”
“Are there any kittens in there now?”
Fia sniffed the air delicately and shook her head. “The scent is old. But there were kittens. And they were scared.”
There was no door in the bulkhead, but the stacked chests and boxes had been lashed in place and made a good stair. Duncan found them easy to climb, even with a lantern in one hand, and when he got to the top, he lay on his stomach and put his eye to the gap.
There were no thick coils of rope stacked high. There was one hanging rope that looked as if it might come from a hatchway above, but the bit Duncan could see was not even as thick as his wrist.
He moved the lantern in an attempt to see more of the room. Now he could see the top part of a machine with a handle that looked like a giant grinder. But if the cook wanted to grind something, wouldn’t he do it two decks up, in the galley?
“I can smell your scent in there,” Fia said suddenly.
Duncan rolled his eyes privately. “You’re just smelling me right here, you goof.”
“I don’t think so.” Fia dug her claws into the wood and poked her head through the gap. “There’s an old scent of you down there. Were you ever in that room?”
“Not that I know of.” Duncan stifled a yawn. He was finding it hard to worry about a room where kittens might have been scared long ago. Besides, he was feeling good. He liked thinking of his father with a uniform and a sword and a medal from the king. And he could hardly wait to tell the earl what Bertram had done.
“Where are you going?” demanded Fia. “Let’s find out what’s in that room!”
“Later,” said Duncan. He climbed backward down the stacked boxes, feeling blindly with his feet, and landed on a heaped sailcloth. He tripped and almost fell on the leather folder that he had dropped.
Fia followed him, still meowing in frustration. As Duncan reached for the leather folder, a newspaper clipping fell out.
He held it to the lantern, reading eagerly at first and then with growing disappointment. It was just some old column about the Capital City Orchestra. They had played a special concert to celebrate the fourth birthday of the Princess Lydia. A lot of nobles were there.… Duncan skipped over the names. There had been a beautiful violin solo, blah blah blah.… Everyone was entranced, blah blah.…
This wasn’t any help. Maybe his father had been a music lover, but that didn’t explain what Duncan most wanted to know.
He opened the leather folder and saw some papers and a photograph. The photo showed a man and a woman, smiling, holding a baby between them. In the background was part of a stone building that looked familiar somehow. And the woman and the man looked almost like people he knew—or had known once.
Duncan brought the photograph closer to the lantern. With a skip of his heart, he recognized his mother. Younger, happier, with her hair loose on her shoulders and no covering scarf at all.
Then, the baby she was holding must be himself. And the tall man with the strong nose and the military hat had to be—
Hissst! Fia leaped onto his knee. “Do you hear footsteps?”
Duncan shook his head. He kept his eyes on the photograph. It was hard to see in such dim light, and his vision was blurring.
“Someone’s coming!” Fia’s meow was urgent. Now heavy footsteps could be heard over the gentle creaking of the ship, and the hatch above was filled with a lantern’s swinging light.
Fia tried to close the dark-lantern’s slide with her paws. There was a smell of singed hair. “I think I burned a toe,” she said in a faint meow.
“Close your eyes—they shine in the dark,” Duncan whispered. He stuffed the photograph and papers into the folder, threw a corner of sailcloth over the lantern, and closed the sea chest hurriedly. He stifled a yelp as the heavy lid pinched a finger on one hand. He sucked on his sore finger and crouched behind the sea chest in the shadows.
Large feet descended the ladder. The face of the night watchman came into view, peering down into the hold. “Rats again,” said the man in a tone of deep disgust, and turned back.
Duncan waited a minute to be sure he was gone, then opened the folder in a small circle of dim lantern light. The papers crackled, their yellowed edges crumbling in his hand. He bent closer, squinting. There were names, dates.… He read them, but it was like trying to read through water. The meaning shimmered and would not come clear.
The air in the hold was fetid; it smelled of rat droppings and old cheese. Duncan felt strangely dizzy. He did not want to look at the papers again. He did not want to try to make sense of them. There was a dread pressing upon his shoulders; there was a truth lurking in the shadows that he did not want to see.
Fia had curled up on his thigh and gone to sleep. Duncan stroked her soft fur, feeling the tiny heartbeat beneath his fingers. There was something wonderfully comforting about a cat, however small. He picked up the papers once more and forced himself to read them carefully.
He had not understood the news clippings and other papers at first. They seemed to have nothing to do with him or his parents. For one thing, the violinist for the royal court, the famous “Sweet Bow of Arvidia,” was called Elizabeth, not Sylvia. The name on the birth certificate was not Duncan McKay, but Duncan McKinnon. McKinnon was an old and noble name, a name storied in the history of Arvidia, nothing to do with him.
Duncan brought the birth certificate closer to his eyes. The birth date was his own. The mother’s maiden name was spelled out in full: Elizabeth Sylvia Lachlan. And the father’s name was there, too: Charles David McKinnon, with his full title beneath.…
Duncan shut his eyes. Instinctive denial came rushing in—it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be—but it was too late to unread the papers. It was too late to stop the pieces from coming together in his mind.
A slow tide of shame washed over him, a sick, hot flood rising up into his throat and choking him with dismay. His father was not the hero Duncan had imagined. He wasn’t even an ordinary, decent man with a family and a job.
His father was hated. His father was despised. His father had betrayed king and country, and to this day, his name was mocked in the streets by chanting schoolchildren.
His father was Charles, Duke of Arvidia.