A Daughter of No Nation (9 page)

“Fights happen.”

“Maybe I'll get one of those telescoping cop batons,” she said. She didn't mention the little canister of bear spray on her key ring. Verena had missed it in her search.

“That would be smarter.”

Sophie had circled so her back was to the blond head, but her jeans had, once again, given her away.

“Sophie Hansa!”

It was Lais Dariach.

 

CHAPTER    
5

Lais was a horse breeder from an island nation called Tiladene, a place where families were run as communes that owned businesses and where the sexual morals were profoundly relaxed. On her first visit to Stormwrack, Sophie stumbled onto a conspiracy to invade the country and murder Lais: a neighboring nation, Ualtar, had taken offense at his trying to breed a spider exclusive to their microclimate.

Does everyone hate science here?
she thought, as he strode across the market, giving them both a deep bow. He let his eyes roam up Verena's stiff, upright, seventeen-year-old form.

“You remember my little sister,” Sophie informed him, more frostily than was probably necessary. “She's good with a sword.”

“I'd better mind my weaponry then,” he said, kissing Verena's hand and then sweeping Sophie into an exuberant crush. “How fares the heroine of all Tiladene?”

Lais looked like he'd been primped to model for the cover of a romance novel: he had the Hercules hair, the whole-body tan and baby blue eyes, the tight breeches and the flowing white peasant shirt. A leather vest overtop did nothing to hide chest muscles worthy of a bodybuilding competition.

He was smart and easy-going. There was nothing dark underneath his charm, just friendliness. Lots of friendliness.

“I'm hip-deep in family conspiracies and international politics,” Sophie said.

“Same thing, in your case.”

Inspiration struck. “And apparently I'm in need of a lawyer. Can you hook me up?”

“Annela—” Verena said.

“Annela will pick someone who's all about the government's best interests,” Sophie said. “I need someone who's in it for me.”

Lais beamed. “Mine's a horse swapper, devious beyond measure. Of Tiladene and feared round the Fleet. I would love to introduce you.”

“Great. How do we go about—”

“You should come to dinner tonight, Lais,” Verena blurted.

“Should he?”

“Sure. He knows the score, right? You spilled the truth about Erstwhile to him.”

“Well, yeah. But we already invited Parrish.”

“
You
invited Parrish. I get a guest, too.”

Lais beamed. “I'd be honored. Verdanii hospitality is legendary. Sophie, I'll see if I can get you an appointment with Bimisi. Who are your kin, little sword sister?”

“It's Verena.” She dug out her invitation. “Of the Feliachilds.”

“Until later, then,” he said, saluting with it before vanishing into the crowd.

Dismayed, Sophie watched him go. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what? I thought you liked him.” A hint of smugness there.

“I do better with shipboard flings when they're … you know, now you see him, now you don't? Ever again?” Sophie wasn't sure why she was so flustered. She'd blown him off, last time she'd seen him. Though not fast enough: Parrish had caught them in each other's arms.

Verena shrugged. “Annela is extra-charming when there's a pretty new man around. It'll make dinner way more fun. Anyway, you were happy enough to be nice to him when you wanted a legal referral.”

This was starting to have a vibe that reminded Sophie of her rare fights with Bram.

“Right, okay, you're right,” she said, just to head off any possible argument, and without looking took another ladder down, further into the shipboard mall, looking for another shiny science thing, as Verena would put it, to distract herself.

By the time they'd finished their big shop and made their way to
Constitution
for the dinner date with Annela Gracechild, Sophie was beginning to feel that Parrish might have been right about the Fleet being a reasonably safe city. They'd spent the afternoon in what was, essentially, a shopping center. Nobody had tried to kill her or anyone else. As for the whole “running into a guy you slept with” thing, it wasn't as though that had never happened to her before.

Three cheers for less violence
.

The self-defense course had, initially, been Bram's idea. He'd pitched it as part of her overall plan to prepare for a return to Stormwrack. “You're learning celestial navigation and working all these quick dives to make money so you can buy trade goods and animal specimens. You're in triathlon training and you went to that meditation seminar so you could
omm
your way through the scary stuff.”

“Don't make fun,” she'd said. Even if she'd wanted to seek conventional therapy after witnessing a murder and a handful of attempted killings, it was a moot point: she couldn't tell anyone in San Francisco what she'd experienced.

“I'm just saying—wouldn't it help if you learned to throw a proper punch?”

She'd assumed that deep down, the advice had its roots in Bram's persistent idea that Sophie was some kind of good-hearted pushover—that she ignored every slight, said yes to every favor, and let people walk all over her.

She wasn't entirely sure where this image of her came from. Some of it stemmed from their father and his endless picking about her intellectual rigor or lack thereof. But that was Dad: only happy when he was criticizing something. It didn't bug her the way it bugged Bram.

As Sophie saw it, she did whatever she pleased.

Whatever Bram's motives, he'd handed her the flyer for the class shortly after they'd gotten home from Stormwrack, just a few weeks after her aunt's murder. She'd bought her key-chain-size blast of bear spray and signed up for the class at the community center without a second thought.

But maybe all that badness last time was exceptional, just as it would be exceptional at home if your mom's sister was murdered and the same people came after you. It was a once-in-a-lifetime explosion of violence, not an ongoing obstacle to her physical safety and ability to explore Stormwrack.

Yes, they'd found Corsetta in the water and someone had attacked her. There was definitely something going on there. But that didn't have anything to do with Sophie or the
Nightjar
crew, not anymore. They'd handed the situation over to the authorities, just as you would at home.

Call the cops and go on with life, right?

She spent the last couple of hours before dinner aboard
Nightjar
writing all of her observations and questions about Stormwrack into one of her new notebooks.

There was so much here to explore. What was the exact nature of the relationship between Stormwrack and Erstwhile? Was one the future of the other? Were they parallel dimensions?

Was there a way to determine the age of Stormwrack?

A year was still 365 days long. Whatever had happened, that hadn't changed. But the length of a mean sidereal day was shorter, by about five minutes, as compared to home. Stormwrackers adjusted their calendar annually, cutting off the last day of the year at midnight on the winter solstice, starting a fresh calendar as the days began to lengthen.

Sophie hadn't been able to check the planet's angle of rotation, though she'd gathered a few measurements with the sextant that Bram might be able to use.

Question upon question filled the notebook: Was there a weather office? Did anyone measure the temperature of the seas from year to year? Who made the charts?

Verena had said half of the snow vulture's young didn't survive in the wild. That implied someone had done a study. Who did studies here? Why was almost everyone so terribly lacking in curiosity? Was it just regarded as a personality defect, or was there something more behind it?

People might just think it's true, about the vultures' survival rate. They could be making all sorts of unproved assertions.

And all of that was warm-up for the big questions: How was it that Stormwrackers could use magic? When did that develop? Did all magic really use writing and inscription or were there other forms? Did that mean there was no magic before the development of writing?

She wrote:
The effects of magic persist when I go home. I still spoke Fleet when I was in San Francisco and was able to teach it to Bram. How is it that we haven't discovered inscription?

Why didn't Stormwrackers do more science and tech? Was there some kind of agreement just to give up on development when they hit the Age of Sail and go no further? Was it on record? Or did it have something to do with the idea some of them had that steel and petroleum were inherently dangerous?

And so on.

The book filled with questions: a lifetime's worth of things to study. The problem, she thought, would be choosing. Some mysteries would yield to simple experimentation and measurement—if they could find or build the instruments. She could buy blood samples at the sanguarium and bird carcasses at the bird skin shop. Others might be researched, if she could get herself into the company of people who weren't so damned guarded with their information.

What Bram and I need is for Annela to chill out, she thought. Which meant winning her over at dinner.

Annela had been introduced to her as a cousin, though nobody had expressly told Sophie how she was related to Verena, Beatrice, and the other Feliachild women. She was in government—at home, she'd be something akin to a congresswoman. She was copper-skinned and curvy, with thick hair the color of graphite and a fondness for comfort: velvet curtains, warm rooms, lush foods.

For this particular not-quite-family gathering, she had put on a feast that had autumnal, harvesty overtones: there were fry breads, a corn dish, baked squash in abundance, ale, and slices of a red meat with a bit of a wild flavor. Venison? Buffalo?

She'd greeted them all with no sign of displeasure; she said hello to Parrish and Lais as warmly as if she'd been hoping they'd come and asked after Bram.

Politicians, Sophie thought. They can just pour it on, can't they? She decided she preferred Annela when she was pissed off.

Since Cly had opted out and Beatrice was under house arrest, it was just the five of them.

Verena's prediction that Annela would set herself to charming Lais proved true. They talked about horse racing—the Verdanii were horse crazy, apparently. Sophie let the conversation flow over her and picked out what information she could.

She'd already figured out that Verdanii was located about where Saskatchewan was, at home. So—the prairies. But instead of being the inner grain belt of a big continent, it was a landmass perhaps half the size of Australia.

This being a traditional Verdanii meal, she could draw other conclusions: fry bread was from a wheat harvest, and the horse talk argued that there were extensive grasslands there.

No creams, cheeses, or big dairy products.
No cattle
?

By the time the dessert—a custard not entirely divorced from pumpkin pie, though the crust was more in the line of an oat crumble and the glaze, atop, was a thin layer of salt caramel—had arrived, she could see that Annela had copped to what she was doing.

“Well, Sophie, if we can interrupt your examinations of us all, perhaps we can come down to business.” She gestured for the servants to pour more ale.

Sophie tried to wait her out and couldn't. “You're looking for a favor, right? I go visiting Cly, he lets Beatrice have bail. He's basically agreed, so…”

“So,” Annela said.

“Look, I'm not some whiz-bang brass-knuckles negotiator. I want Beatrice bailed, I do, and of course I want to go see Sylvanna with Cly. What am I supposed to do—pretend I don't care? That I'm gonna let Beatrice sit around pining for home aboard
Breadbasket
?”

Lais laughed. “That would be the usual mode, yes.”

Annela looked like she might be fighting a smile.

“I'm not that kind of person.”

“So you keep telling us,” Annela said. Sophie wondered, suddenly, if they knew she'd smuggled some bio samples and a bunch of Stormwrack footage home. If they knew about the map she and Bram had been working on …

“What if we ditch this whole quid pro quo thing and act like human beings,” she said. “I'm not out to put Stormwrack's existence on the front page of
The New York Times.
Trying to censor everything I see and hear—come on, Annela, you must see it's a waste of Verena's time.”

“The value of Verena's time is very much an open question.”

“Not to me, it isn't. Give me back my camera and equipment.”

“Impossible.”

“Last time I was here,” Sophie said, “I learned stuff that was useful to you.”

“Last time,” Annela fired back, “I said your presence on Stormwrack would materially injure your kin. You returned. Now your aunt is dead and your mother under criminal charge.”

Parrish cleared his throat. “You cannot blame Sophie for Gale's death, Convenor, not when it was so long foretold and forestalled.”

“Can't I?” She looked at him cannily and to Sophie's surprise, he looked abashed and turned away.

What's that about?

“Ohhkay. Material damage to kin. Beatrice got arrested, kinda my fault for coming back, true. But you're saying there was a … a prophecy? About Gale's death—”

“As for Beatrice's arrest,” Parrish interrupted, “a citizen must answer for her own actions.”

“What would you have had her do, Parrish?” Annela leaned back in her chair. “Raise Sophie on Low Bann?”

“Sophie stopped an invasion of my nation,” Lais said, surprising everyone. “Tiladene owes her a favor, and the Convene does, too. It's not a stretch to say she preserved the Cessation of Hostilities.”