The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (31 page)

             
Finishing out a neat brushstroke, Po said, “That's alright. Gideon's been tellin' me stories’a his own. He said when you were little, you always tried jumping outta windows with a bed sheet tied to your hands, so the duke had to have all Emathia's upstairs windows sealed.”

             
“Thanks for that,” Reece grumbled in Gideon's direction.

             
Gid held a curved piece of metal up to the hanging galley light, squinting. “Pleasure.”

             
The significance of Gideon being here and not in the infirmary suddenly caught up to Reece, and he sat up straight. “Where's Owon?” he asked suspiciously.

             
With an unhappy grunt, Gid jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. The Vee was sitting on the floor against the wall, reading
Legends from The Voice of Space
. His black eyes peered over the top of the book at Reece; from their slant, he was grinning slyly.

             
“What did you do, reward him for good behavior?”

             
“Aitch asked me to take him out. Said he couldn't concentrate.”

             
“Sorry,” Hayden said as he came in from the corridor, his head bowed over his datascope and his eyebrows pressed together in thought. “I couldn't think with you two in there, it was too…intense. Has anyone seen Nivy?”

             
Mordecai strode into the room on his heels, an empty mug in his fist. “She's up on the bridge, keepin' her eye on the autopilot.” He leaned against the counter next to Po with a muttered complaint about his back as she smilingly took his empty cup and refilled it with hot tea from the dented thermos next to her paint tin.

             
“Up on the bridge,” Hayden repeated under his breath, and after making one full circuit of the room without looking up from his datascope, doubled back to the door. “She should be
in bed
. Honestly.” Not a second after disappearing into the corridor, he ducked his head back in through the door, pointed firmly at Gideon, and ordered in a no-nonsense voice, “Sling on, Gideon. I mean it.”

             
Gideon took the sling and started using it to polish the barrel of his revolver. Hayden's irritable murmurs could be followed all the way to the end of the corridor, where they faded into the Afterquin's perpetual humming.

             
Resting his forehead on the table, Reece closed his eyes, burning with heaviness. The table was hard, but he thought he might be able to convince himself he was perfectly comfortable and just fall asleep here rather than take the effort to walk the distance to the bridge.

             
Click
. He opened an eye and glared blurrily at the mug Po had sat by his ear. It seemed the hardest thing in the world, bringing up his head and forcing his other eye open.

             
“Hey, um, Cap'n?” Po asked as he tipped back the tea and drank. “Could we maybe talk about tomorrow?”

             
“What about it?”

             
“Well,” she glanced anxiously at Mordecai, tugging on her braid, “me and Mordecai had an idea…and it wouldn't have to be anythin' fancy…but we thought it might be nice to maybe do somethin'. To bring everyone's spirits up, you know? We could recreate some'a the traditions, and I've got the music on the wireless, and—” Pausing, she studied Reece's blank expression, glanced again at Mordecai, and said, “You know tomorrow’s Sterlin' Eve, right?”

             
“Sterling Eve?” Reece repeated, trying to summon up a mental calendar. “Nah. It can't be.”

             
“It is, Cap'n,” Po insisted. “It's three weeks to the day since we left Honora.”

             
Sterling Eve. That meant for Honora, tonight was the Sterling Eve Festival. Last year's festival was a surreal blur in his memories. He'd eaten the traditional holiday dinner with Mordecai and Gideon at the Rice's before they'd all taken the trolley into Caldonia together, watching as the city powered down its photon energy in favor of old-fashioned hanging lanterns. The main square had been quartered off for dancing and caroling. Bathtub-sized casks of spiced cider and cinnamon nog, sitting next to bars stacked with pumpkin crusts and cider doughnuts, were worked by peddlers wearing the long-tailed, green hat of the Sterling Patron. As midnight grew near, performers on a wooden stage in the middle of the square reenacted the centuries-old story of the Sterling Patron, for whom the holiday was named, battling the evil pirate Lousbard for the right to bring snow to the city.

             
Reece had danced with Scarlet that night, he remembered vaguely.

             
“What did you have in mind?” he asked, wary of Mordecai and Po putting their heads together without someone to restrain them.

             
“Nothin' much,” Po said quickly, brightening. “Mordecai's gonna cook a big dinner—we've both been savin' stuff for the holiday outta our rations since we left. We were gonna bring out what we saved when it looked like the Raiders wiped the cargo bay clean, but since we had enough to make it to Oceanus…we thought…you know, it might make a nice surprise if we—I mean, you're not angry, are you?”

             
“What? No.”

             
“It's just…you were starin' at me funny.”

             
That was probably true. He'd been thinking about her putting her rations aside so everyone else could have a nice dinner for Sterling Eve, and wondering in his delirious tiredness if maybe she'd been adopted from some distant planet where the main trade was in being nice.

             
“Yes.”

             
“Huh?”

             
“Yes. To everything.” Reece returned his forehead to the table, yawning around his words. “Everything you do is good Po. I trust you.”

             
“You trust him?” Gid asked, gesturing with his reassembled revolver at Mordecai, who was pouring himself a second cup of tea with a much too innocent smile.

             
“It's just Sterling Eve,” Reece slurred, letting himself be pulled off to sleep. “What's the worst he could do?”

             
The next morning, by Hayden's request, Reece made Mordecai admit to all the places he'd hung makeshift holly leaves, then went hunting, taking them down one at a time after first making sure none of the girls were around when he stepped beneath them. Despite that particular misadventure, he did feel lighter, knowing there was something to look forward to at the end of another long day at the helm—namely, dinner. Even if it
was
cooked by Mordecai.

             
It didn't feel like Sterling Eve, or like people back on Honora could be doing something as normal as exchanging gifts or having snowball fights. But Aurelia definitely had an air of bubbling eagerness. Anywhere Reece went in his quest to track down Mordecai's holly traps, there were signs the others were as happy as Po for an excuse to celebrate. When he walked by the infirmary, snatching down some cleverly-placed holly that would have trapped Hayden in his study indefinitely, he peered in and discovered his friend humming to himself and drumming his datascope wand on the edge of his desk…when he wasn't using it like a conductor's wand, flicking it in the air.

On his way back to the bridge, Reece stopped and poked his nose into the galley, following a delicious smell that made his stomach lurch hungrily. What he found was Po, sitting on Gideon's shoulders and draping streamers of red and green silk and velvet from the ceiling over the table as he handed them up to her one at a time. Gid had tied one of the red strips like a band around his forehead.

              “Where'd you get the fabric?” Reece asked, and the Gideon-Po tower turned to face him.

             
“Scarlet! She let us rip up a couple'a her dresses!” Pausing, Po traced a finger down one of the hanging, shimmering banners. “It's kinda sad. They were so pretty.”

             
“But it was fun rippin' them up,” Gideon offered as he passed her up a piece of red velvet.

             
“Yeah, it was,” she admitted.

             
Laughing, and glad for a reason to laugh, Reece started backing out of the galley, and noticed Owon, sitting in the corner with his beakish nose pointed down at the book in his lap. Without lifting his head, he humorlessly smiled and turned a page. Reece's high spirits dipped significantly. Without the Vee, he might've been able to make himself forget what had happened on Leto long enough to really enjoy this Sterling Eve, but Owon had a way of rubbing salt in Reece’s wounds. For fun. He marched determinedly out of the galley as Owon leisurely opened his mouth to make an observation, calling over his shoulder, “Gid, you'll probably want to get her off your shoulder before Hayden sees.”

             
Unfortunately for Gideon, when Reece turned the corner, it was Hayden he bumped into, hurrying from the other direction with what looked like another dress donation from Scarlet. Try as he might to outrun the storm, Reece hadn't made it far before Hayden's shrill voice rose up behind him,
“What part of 'don't put any unnecessary strain on it' didn't translate for you?”

             
Reece stared blindly into the Perseus Stream with his boots on the flightpanel, toying with his watch and waiting for its minute hand to move onto six, the allotted hour for
The Aurelia
's official Sterling Eve celebration. His stomach felt like it was trying to claw its way free and go chasing after the mouth-watering smells wandering up from the galley.

             
“Do The Heron celebrate Sterling Eve, Nivy?”

             
Nivy, curled up sideways in the navigator's chair, nodded. He stopped playing with his watch and looked at her with it hanging from one of his fingers, frowning. She wore the empty expression of someone dozing, but she was radiating a feeling like she wasn't finished with her answer. 

             
“What is it?” he asked.

             
She slowly opened her eyes to stare thoughtfully out the canopy window before signing,
Where are The Kreft
?

             
“Not here. That's all that matters.” He repaid her disparaging look with a helpless shrug. “Look, I'll admit it's odd we haven't seen them, but there’s nothing for it but to keep on to The Ice Ring and see what happens.”

             
Unhurriedly picking up his boots one at a time from the flightpanel, Reece straightened, cracked his back, and toggled a few switches on the green graph radar with one eye on the speckled planet the size and color of a robin’s egg in the distance. Exiting the Perseus Stream had been twice as smooth as before they’d swapped turbines; Aurelia had hardly jerked at all as she’d come into Oceanus’s small piece of space. The radar was quiet, the Voice as open and cold as always.

             
When he checked his watch, it was eighteen hundred on the nose. He happily dropped the watch into his chest pocket and started setting the autopilot before he noticed Nivy grimacing like she had a stomach ache as she stared out the canopy window.

             
“Hey. What's wrong? Really?”

             
Sighing, she shook her head dismissively, and at once stood and turned to go before he could pester her more. Reece followed slowly, scrutinizing the back of her head. Nivy had always kept her share of secrets from him; he’d had to learn to be alright with that. But since the night of the masquerade…since they’d faced down Eldritch together…well, if she told anyone
anything
, it was Reece. What was troubling her?

             
Regardless of whatever was troubling her, by the time they reached the hall to the galley, he had to jog to keep up with her eager march after the full, lusty smells of their holiday dinner. The photon lights along the corridor had been dimmed, and music from Po's wireless trickled out into the dimness, strings and horns and a low, rich voice singing about crackling fires. And suddenly, Reece and Nivy were in a race to reach the galley, and the food, first. Reece let her win. By a hair.

             
“Good Sterlin' Eve!” Po cried, waving with a giant oven mitt as she leaned up from setting a steaming bowl of greens on the table. For the first time Reece had seen, she was wearing her white-blonde hair loose around her waist. It was held back from her startlingly clean, freckled face with a red band.

             
“Good Sterling Eve!” Hayden and Scarlet, who were already seated on the other side of the table, echoed in greeting. Their cleanness (and Scarlet's prettiness; apparently she hadn't completely purged her wardrobe, because her dress was vivid green and white) made Reece feel like spitting in his hand and combing down his hair, but one look at Gideon and Mordecai, coming in from the galley with armloads of dishes, made him feel right at home…and even a little clean, himself.