A Daughter of No Nation (6 page)

Sophie addressed herself to her breakfast. She was pretty sure she knew where the sudden sulk had come from: Verena's crush on Parrish was blindingly visible to everyone except, possibly, Parrish himself.

Every time the topic of romance comes up, we're gonna be walking on eggshells.

And she felt a little breakable now, to be honest. She'd thought Parrish might be interested in her, this spring, and she'd thought about him more than she might have guessed during her six-month exile in San Francisco. Now, being here, with a teenage romance suffocating in the aft cabin under the weight of whatever crime Corsetta had committed, and Verena abovedecks, pining and jealous, she was remembering a dozen reasons why Parrish was a bad idea.

Shake it off, she told herself. What are you gonna do, bring him home to Mom and Dad?

Parrish ran a hand along his chin, looking thinky. “You've learned to use a sextant.”

“I was hoping to come back.”

“To meet your family.”

“And so I could … explore, you know.” Could she explain, in any way he'd understand, how important a discovery the existence of Stormwrack might be?

Before she could frame the words, he asked, “What about knot tying?”

“Of course. You'll have to tell me what you call them—we have our own names for everything.” Then, for no reason she could think of, she said, “Verena said you got rid of the books.”

“Convenor Gracechild's orders about leaving research material lying in your path were, unfortunately, detailed and explicit.”

“What does she think I'm going to learn?”

“Obviously, I can't say.” He continued: “Gale's will left the library to a school on Zingoasis. Most of her possessions went to starboard communities with little wealth.”

The cook brought a selection of savory cakes to the table. They seemed to finish a lot of meals on board this way, with unsweetened scones that had a bit of chocolate and pepper, or orange, turmeric-scented breadsticks. She wondered if that was a Fleet convention or something to do with the cook's home culture.

She scooped one up, burned her fingertips—straight from the oven!—and dropped it again. Parrish's gaze was making her uncomfortable.

“You say you lost the medic?”

“Richler returned to his home nation.”

“And your bosun's gone?”

He nodded. “Gale's death was a significant change. The crew is adjusting. I meant to ask if you'd continue to serve as our medical officer while you're aboard.”

“If I'm the best choice, sure. But I'm no doctor.”

“Understood. How's Bram?”

Ha. Changing the subject.
She sensed disquiet there, something unsaid. What had made the medic quit?

“Bram's good,” she said. “Busy. And then she thought: Parrish won't tell tales about Cly, and probably asking about Sylvanna would constitute espionage or something.

But before she could get in a question, Parrish said, “Sophie, I've been wondering…”

“Yes?”

“The other night, on Erstwhile, you argued with your parents about … my Anglay has deficits, but it sounded like a combat class.”

“Women's self-defense,” she said, trying not to remember her parents' faces as she drove away. “So?”

“Are you learning to duel?”

She burst out laughing. “Can you see me trying to hold my own in a sword fight?”

The relief on his face might have been insulting. Verena had fought a practice match with a duelist on Erinth, and the two of them had been like something out of a martial arts movie. Verena's opponent had been magical—what was the term? A transform—he'd been covered in flames and used them to fight.

And Verena was on the
amateur
circuit. Sophie had seen Cly go through a magically altered opponent like a wood chipper through Styrofoam.

She fought an urge to squirm in her seat. How to explain? “It's—”

She'd been about to say, “It's stupid,” but she'd promised Bram she'd break that habit.

“I did a lot of studying,” she said, beginning again. “Celestial navigation, a bunch of math I was just okay on. The knots, and I've been swimming, running, biking…”

“Excellent preparation.”

“The self-defense class was … okay, not a whim, exactly. It was obvious, before, that things happen here. Violence.”

“Gale's murder,” he said. “John Coine's attacks on Bram and yourself.”

“I don't have the slightest illusion that I could ever be a fighter.”

“Don't underrate yourself,” he said. “You're athletic and have excellent reflexes. I wouldn't have said ‘never'—”

“Okay. But how much time would I have to spend practicing, just to be as good a fighter as, say, Verena?”

“Hours. Every day, hours.”

“For years. That's not a good use of my time. I'm a photographer and a biologist.”

“Then why take a combat course at all?”

“All the things I like to do—climbing, diving, hiking,” she said, “your life depends on the people you're with. You trust yourself to ropes someone else fixed to a rock wall. If your oxygen mix goes off and your dive partner doesn't notice, you're toast. Cooperation equals survival, you know?”

He nodded. “A duty to your crew, we say.”

“If all of us are going to end up in the occasional … brawl? Dustup?”

“Brawl.” It was an English word.… He repeated it, apparently just to savor the sound.

“I don't want to fold like a sack of laundry whenever you and Verena find yourselves in trouble. I don't want to be a liability. So I was … I dunno, trying to get comfortable with hitting people.” She remembered punching practice in the community center.
Commit, commit, commit.

It was so removed from the reality of fighting, in this world, that she half-expected him to laugh. Instead, he broke out one of those dazzling, movie-star smiles.

“You've given a good deal of thought to what might be required, were you to stay here.”

She opened her mouth to answer and felt anew the surge of guilt over her mom and dad, and that competing sense of weirdness. As Bram had put it:
What the hell, Sofe, are you really gonna move to a backwater Narnia without CAT scans or DNA sequencing or the Internet?

“Stormwrack's not as violent as all that, if it helps,” Parrish said. “Fleet society has become very civilized since the Cessation.”

He meant the international peace that had prevailed since the defeat of a fleet of pirates, 109 years before. “Is that so?”

“It's merely that you've fallen in with something of a specialized community.”

“Spies and dueling judges.”

“Speaking of your father,” he said. “You won't have anything to fear aboard
Sawtooth.
”

Somehow that rankled. “I said I was preparing, not that I was
afraid.
”

But some little noise abovedecks had captured his attention—he gave her one of his obnoxious, polite, not-really-engaged-anymore bows and excused himself.

She listened for a second, heard him mounting the ladder to the main deck, giving orders, nothing unusual. Then curiosity overcame her: she followed. “What is it?”

“A ship,” he said, pointing.

“Are we being shadowed?”

“No, it's headed away from us,” he said, handing her the spyglass.

The craft was at the farthest edge of the spyglass's field of vision. It was double-masted, with a strangely spherical wheel, and smaller than the derelict they'd encountered. It was also making in the opposite direction as fast as it could.

“No name on the stern,” Sophie said, wishing for her camera. “They're running without lamps, even though it's not fully dawn.”

“Yes.”

“They don't want to be seen.”

“Maybe they're being hunted or are bound on some kind of mischief.”

“Could they be Corsetta's attackers?”

“No. She said they'd headed to the Fleet days ago.”

“Pirates? I thought they'd all gone legit.”

“There are still raiders. Desperate people of various stripes,” Parrish said.

“Exiles, outlanders, fugitives,” Verena added.

“They could be the ones who sunk the derelict?”

“Perhaps,” Parrish said.

“But we're not chasing them?”

“No,” said Verena, “We'll note the sighting in the logs—position, direction, what have you. If someone's after them, we'll report it.”

As the sun continued to rise, the morning stretched pleasantly: the wind was brisk, and though they were out in the open ocean there was plenty to observe aboard ship. Sophie began studying each of the ship's two dozen crew members, taking note of everything from scars and jewelry to turns of speech and general mood. She hunted down the ferret, which was also a transform: its tail was a live snake. It seemed to like her: she fed it bits of fish and worked to transcribe the magical blue text lettered onto its abdomen.

Corsetta was unconscious for most of the day. She appeared to be weakening; her pulse was light and irregular, her breath unsteady. No seizures yet, but her eyes were getting wandery in a way Sophie didn't like at all.

She and Sweet managed to get a little more broth into the girl during one of her more wakeful stretches. Afterward, she slept, and Sophie took advantage of the break to go below and see if her diving suit was still in the hold.

The trunk looked just as she'd left it six months before, and inside, her wetsuit and dry suit were in perfect shape. Her mask was dusty but the seals were fine.

All good, of course. As was the nylon rope and her half-dozen carabiners.

When she had come before, the trunk had been packed with electronics: DSLR camera, video camera, waterproof housings, and a smartphone, not to mention half a dozen scientific instruments of Bram's. Now all of that was gone except for the solar battery chargers.

She felt a pang of melancholy she couldn't quite account for. Neither here nor there, she thought. I don't belong here, but I can't just live in the real world now.

This was frustration at being unable to explore, she told herself. Explore, study, and record. She wouldn't be spending all this energy navel-gazing if she could just answer a few questions instead of digging up more.

She opened the trunk next to hers. It was full of stuff that had to belong to Verena—clothes, fencing equipment, and an MP3 player.

“Double standards,” she muttered.

The next trunk, an old wooden box, held human bones—a single skeleton, from the pieces.

She looked this over for a minute, trying to figure out why it was aboard. The bones had a few healed breaks: one wrist, one rib. Under the skull she found a ribbon-bound roll of filled-out donation forms, indicating the remains were the bones of a magically enhanced pipe player and had been bequeathed to a music school on the island Zingoasis.

Music? She tapped two of the bones together experimentally, eliciting two notes, both something like what you might get with a tuning fork.

The bioluminescent wakelights heralding their approach to the Fleet got smaller as they closed the distance between them. They grew with time, like bubbles, until they either burst or sank, so the farther away they were from having been set asea, the bigger they got.

By afternoon there were also miniature ships, maybe five feet in length and made of wood so soft that one of them splintered when it hit the
Nightjar
's prow. The models were laden with things that symbolized summer: unripened sheaves of wheat, emptied butterfly chrysalises, and hundreds of flowers.

Next they found themselves coming upon fishing boats, first a few, then twenty, then a hundred, all abustle with activity, men and women hauling tons of protein from the water. As afternoon gave way to evening, they found themselves sailing through cold water thick with cod. Tonio and two of the other crewmen lowered a net, just for a minute, and pulled up perhaps twenty fish, great shining animals, unblemished and thrashing vigorously as they filled the air with the smell of the sea.

They sorted through them quickly, tossing back anything that weighed less than twenty pounds, and then ran them below to the galley, presumably so the cook could salt them. Sophie claimed the net when they were done, scavenging samples of seaweed, a sea jelly, two eels, and a small ray while Verena alternately fumed and pretended not to see her.

“Fleet of Nations, dead ahead!”

The winking of hundreds of aft lanterns came into view, clarifying as the sun set.

A hang glider shot overhead and a lanky teenager dropped to the ship's main deck. “Compliments to the captain and crew!” the daredevil said, bowing. “I bear an invitation for Sophie Hansa and Verena Vanko Feliachild of the Verdanii.”

He held out a sealed envelope to Sophie.

“Well?”

She tore it open. “It's … dinner.”

“Dinner with Annela Gracechild and Cly Banning,” Verena said, reading over her shoulder. “That'll be fun.”

“Like a root canal. Why not Beatrice, too?”

“She's under house arrest on
Breadbasket.
”

“Oh, right. Why not go to
Breadbasket
?”

“His Honor wouldn't feel welcome there,” Parrish said. “And you agreed to keep your distance from the Verdanii.”

This was a polite way of reminding Sophie that she'd repudiated Verdanii citizenship, to the point of signing a crazily long agreement promising she wouldn't set foot on their soil or any ships of theirs unless she was specifically invited.

Sudden curiosity itched her: Wasn't that overkill?

“There's also…” Verena seemed to be debating. “We haven't told Mom that we're doing this.”

“Beatrice doesn't know I'm back?”

Verena shook her head.