A Daughter of No Nation (18 page)

What was she going to do? Move to Stormwrack, vanish from her family's lives, give up her friends? For the first time, she wondered if she might have been better off not knowing about any of this.

The dinner gown came to just below the knee. It had a flared skirt and a cowl neck; it was comfortable enough, but somehow it reminded her of the 1970s.

Disco isn't dead; it just came to Stormwrack.

It was made of a thin, silky fabric, green in color, so sheer it was nearly weightless. The tailor frowned at it as she stepped out from behind the screen, twitching the cowl over her chest—she'd been showing a bit of cleavage. He absolutely glowered at her bra.

“That's not coming off,” she said, and he promptly put a stitch in the cowl to hold it demurely shut over her chest.

Am I really going to move to a world without spandex?
She could feel a giggle building.

Cly was true to his word—he'd stopped being emo, or faking it, perhaps. As she attempted a twirl, he nodded. “You look lovely, my dear.”

The tailor muttered something.

“He says you're built like a mermaid.”

“Swimmer's shoulders,” she said.

“Indeed,” Cly replied. “I think perhaps … two more sporting sets, then, and a second dress in what color?”

“I look good in deep blue,” she said.

“That chestnut hair,” he said. “Beatrice does, too.”

He spoke to the tailor and dismissed him, then picked a wooden box off the desk.

“What's this?”

“A gift.”

“Cly, you don't have to keep giving me presents.”

“Sylvanner parents believe in giving their children everything they want,” he said. “I'm well behind.”

She fingered the box. “What if what I wanted was for Beatrice to be off the hook?”

“She should be home soon.”

“On bail. She's going on trial for fraud, isn't she?”

“She behaved with criminality and malice.”

“Ever hear the phrase ‘no harm, no foul,' Cly?”

“I was excluded from most of your childhood,” he said. “I call that great harm.”

“What about ‘forgive and forget'?”

A blaze of fury in his face, unmitigated rage, and that emotion she did entirely believe. And then it winked out, like candleflame being snuffed. “Open this gift and I'll consider it.”

She fumbled the latch.

“I realize the lab and the memorician are probably more to your taste. Clothes and fancy balls and visiting other estates … I've no idea if that holds any appeal.”

“It seems a little old-fashioned, but I'm game to try if you are.” She opened the box. Inside was a jade necklace, intricately carved with images of braided leaves.

“Allow me.” He opened the clasp, slipping it around her throat. It was a snug fit. “There. Brings out your eyes, I think.”

Accepting it felt odd, like sneaking something past her parents. “It's lovely. Thank you.”

“Sit.” He gestured at a chair and as soon as her butt hit the seat, a steward appeared with a silver tray containing coffee. “Let me try again to tell you about Sylvanna, shall I?”

“That'd be good. Let's start with this whole thing where unmarried people are children.”

He poured a steaming cup and nudged it over. “It's been a problem for me. My parents never reconciled themselves to the divorce. The day Beatrice left me, they moved my possessions back into the nursery.”

“Harsh!”

“They tried for a time to find me someone new, but … well, maybe if I'd been home more.”

“You arrange marriages on Sylvanna?”

“Sometimes. All this occurred during my early days at the Advocacy, when I was very much at home in the Fleet. I know what it is, Sophie, to be pulled in two directions.”

Manipulative.
She swallowed.

“My estate, Low Bann, is in the lowlands, on the northeast coast in the Autumn District, quite near the Butcher's Baste. Much of the land in that area is swampy; we hunt alligator and a big fish called saltsander there, and harvest figs and wild redplum from the preserve. I have some land under cultivation. Hemp and tobacco mostly. We also raise nightshades.”

“Hemp, huh?”

“Sylvanna does trade in rope. It's not as fine as Ualtar's, but we make do. And hemp's crucial to binding spells. Tobacco's a popular smoking herb, and you can kill crop pests with it. There's a poison—”

“Nicotine.” She nodded.

“When I was a child, I would sometimes elude my tutors and attempt to make a big circuit of the estate. They usually caught me at the boat launch. I was often restless, and there was something about pacing out the boundaries of Low Bann that I found … calming.”

“Is there a High Bann?”

“Yes. In Winter District. It's held by distant relations, but there's no real family connection there.”

“You make it all sound very landed gentry. Country estates, agriculture, hunting, fishing, riding.” As she said this, she felt a hint of disquiet. Tobacco plantations, she thought. “What about cities?”

“Ah!” He leaped up, opening a chest and bringing out a huge leather-bound folio that turned out to be full of watercolor paintings. Cracking it open, he laid a picture in her lap.

It was a city viewed from a height. Its structures were largely made of red brick. A cluster of towers maybe five stories high marked the downtown core. The cityscape lacked steeples or domes. Its most prominent features were a marble turret and the double spike of a clock tower. East of that was a high ridge with what looked like giant marbles scattered across it.

“This is Autumn City,” Cly said, “capital of the harvest province, nearest city to Low Bann. The complex on the hill, with the round structures, is Autumn's Spellscrip Institute.”

“This is an aerial view,” she said.

“You're familiar with hot air balloons?”

“Yes.”

“The artist sketched the city from above.”

She laid a finger on the clock tower.

“The county government,” he said. “The nation is too populous to be managed by a single bureaucracy, you see. There are four districts, named for the seasons.”

The bridges over the river showed a suggestion of horse-drawn carriages, and there were riverboats on the water. How many people lived there? A hundred thousand? Two?

She turned to the next picture in the folio, finding a painting of a stone-faced boy holding a dog that might have been a whippet. He had the blank expression one saw on devil-children on the posters of horror films. “Is this you?”

“Awful, isn't it?” Cly nodded. “Mother and I had a row over me sitting that day; she made an especially unflattering portrait as revenge.”

“These are—my grandmother painted these?”

Cly thumbed to another picture, removing the blank expression from view. She didn't blame him. It was an unnerving image. “I thought you might be interested, since you make pictures, too, in your way.”

“In my way,” she echoed.

“You are stunningly easy to offend,” he commented, which miffed her all the more.

The next picture showed a dock extending into a swamp. The path to the dock had been carved through foliage so dense it looked like a green tube, with a little skylight cut through it for light. The brush had been cleared around the dock itself to create a work area—there were two canoes tied up in the water and a third racked between two nearby trees. The close-cropped grass was decorated with sprays of red flowers and nodding Jack in the pulpit. A cleaning hut sat back from the water—a trio of dead rabbits, dressed but not yet skinned, sat on a low shelf beside its door.

“Is this the boat launch you mentioned? Where they'd catch you?”

“On my escape attempts, yes.”

Her eye fell on a painted trunk of a dead tree at the edge of the clearing. It was covered in vine and familiar bursts of purple blooms.

“Throttlevine,” Cly said. “You reviewed the case?”

“The brief, yes. Sylvanna thinks the … you call them Havers, right?”

“The people of Haversham? Yes, they're Havers.”

“That the Havers deliberately introduced the vine to your ecosystem. It does look like kudzu.”

“The case was part of the reason I joined the Judiciary.”

“The infestations are on Low Bann. On your estate? That's why you're recused from the case?”

“Exactly. It's all over the lowlands.” He nodded. “Under control, for the most part, but ineradicable.”

“Controlled how?”

“In the Autumn District, at last count, we had corps of four hundred transformed slaves—”

Sophie got to her feet so fast she didn't even feel her grandmother's watercolors spilling off her lap onto the floor.

 

CHAPTER    
11

She didn't try to explain herself; there was no explaining, and so she just ran, out of the cabin, still clad in the super-thin green seventies dress and the jade necklace. She blew past the captain, Beck, and then froze.

Cly would just follow her to her cabin.

The talking masthead, she thought, and made her way below.

Eugenia was arranged on her post, a dangling angel. She reminded Sophie of a play she'd seen:
Peter Pan,
Wendy hovering from the fly loft on barely visible cables.

“Are you a slave, too?” Sophie demanded, but Eugenia remained wood.

She sank to the floor, hugged her knees, and started to bawl. “Oh, Bram, I've been so stupid.”

She'd known some of the island nations kept slaves; the Piracy smuggled them, and the theocracy she'd tangled with last time, Ualtar, kept people in bondage. But it wasn't allowed in Fleet, nobody ever talked about it, and she'd assumed … what?

That it was the minor countries, the ones that used that phrase, what was it?

We're no great nation,
that was it.

Sylvanna was big and rich and she'd figured it was kind of corporate, what with all the big talk of the Spellscrip Institute and its accomplishments. And once again she'd gotten all wrapped up in vegetation and swamp ecosystems and turtles.

Asking the wrong questions.

She thought of Tonio, trying to say something and getting hushed. And Parrish, every time he'd said something about one nation or another. This country, from the port side, he'd kept saying. That one, to starboard. Euphemisms for slave and free.

To hell with obeying orders. He should have just said!

A hand on her shoulder—Eugenia.

“What is it, child?”

“Not—a—child,” Sophie managed to blurt out between sobs, and then she cried the harder.

“I feel uneasy,” Eugenia said, when she began to calm. “I wish my crew were aboard. Cly and his training cruises … the cadets yank me around so.”

“You're the ship?” Sophie sniffled. “Does it hurt where the deck caught fire?”

“Like a healing wound now. Itches. Tell me, Sophie, what's wrong?”

She shook her head. “I just realized something about…” She paused. Eugenia was probably a charter member of the Cly Banning fan club. “I don't think I can become Sylvanner after all.”

“You're from one of the free nations.”

She nodded. “Parrish was trying to tell me. They must have ordered him not to, Verena and Annela and Beatrice; they must have known I'd missed it.”

“Beatrice Feliachild Banning would
never
have agreed to deceive you about that.”

“You know her? My birth mother?”

“She had many a good weep right where you're sitting, in the later days with Cly. And once, more recently.”

“When Cly hauled her off to face charges.”

Eugenia nodded.

“How could she do it? How could she marry someone who keeps four hundred slaves in his personal swamp?”

“It's a difficult situation.” The carved woman tiptoed over to a barrel, one of a bunch lashed to a low shelf. It contained some kind of wood oil. She ran it up and down her arms like lotion, working it into her body until she glowed, lavishing extra attention on her toes.

“Issle Morta doesn't have slaves, does it?” Sophie asked.

“Which one is that?”

“The monks who care for the dead. They used to be pirates.”

“Oh, flailers. Yes, but they use the slavery clauses in a rather peculiar way—to protect kidnap victims. Why?”

She colored. “No reason.”

Eugenia finished working the oil into her limbs and said, “Come. I know something that used to cheer Beatrice.”

“I'm not sure I want to be cheered.” But, despite everything, curiosity stirred. Beatrice had, so far, seemed entirely bad tempered. What could put a dent in that much sour?

Being married to a slave-owning, sociopathic, court-appointed killer might make me pissy, too.

Eugenia pulled a sheet off of a huge draped object. It looked like a double-wide harp, two strung frames like a butterfly's wings, with a low platform between them.

“Nice,” Sophie said.

“Come, play with me.”

“I don't know beans about the harp. I play guitar, but—”

“Don't worry, I'll do the tough work.”

“Won't someone hear?”

“Do you think your father doesn't know exactly where you are?”

Sophie's spirits sank. Of course he did. “Okay. Show me what to do.”

Eugenia led her to the harp and stepped onto the platform, holding out a hand. Sophie joined her. They stood almost back to back, and she could easily imagine what a sight it would make in a grand hall. Two musicians, prettily dressed, framed by the spreading wings of the harp.

The wood of its frame was darker than Eugenia's; it had gold filigree in flowered patterns.

“Pick a note, any note.”

Sophie plucked a string, sending a low, humming note through the boards of the hold.