The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea Page 4

  “Corsets are stupid,” she said. Flora coughed a laugh. The Lady smiled appreciatively at her. She’d been testing the waters, Flora realized, to see if they could be honest with each other. Which, of course, they couldn’t be. “I’m glad you agree, Florian.”

  Florian. This time the name was less a mask and more a slap. Snap out of it.

  Flora cleared her throat. “Yes, milady.”

  The casket sat, finally emptied, in the middle of Evelyn’s cabin. The cabin was small, much smaller than Evelyn might have hoped, so the casket dominated the space.

  It was made of fine, deep cherrywood, and her family’s crest — a balloon flower — was carved into its lid and inlaid with gold leaf. Her mother was a stickler for maintaining family pride. Even if her daughter had been sold to the highest bidder to cover her husband’s debts, the Lady Hasegawa would not have her daughter look like a pauper.

  The sight of the casket made Evelyn’s skin crawl.

  Imperial nobles shipped their casket-laden daughters off daily from Nipran’s shore. This was just the way of things. With so many officers in so many colonies, they couldn’t be expected to marry the locals. The Emperor conquered, yes, but his men were still meant to marry nice Imperial girls, not any natives, no matter how exotic or beautiful they may be. It was stupid across all measures, so far as Evelyn could figure. She was sure Finn Callum would likely rather marry some pretty Floating Islands girl with curls down to her waist and thick, fisherman’s arms, and who could blame him? Evelyn surely didn’t.

  But then, here she was.

  Death and marriage, both so frankly inevitable, both so unavoidable. Mandatory.

  She wondered who her parents would have married if they’d had the choice. Certainly not each other. Her father had served the Emperor all over the Known World. There was likely some half sister or brother in Iwei that she’d never meet. Likely in Crandon, too, in all honesty. He was always chasing after other men’s maid staff. As for her mother, Evelyn hardly knew. She didn’t seem terribly fond of her husband, but then she didn’t seem fond of anyone.

  Perhaps the dearth of love between them explained their lack of love for their daughter.

  Perhaps Evelyn was just trying to make herself feel better.

  She’d always told herself that she wouldn’t be like them. That she’d find love, like the love she read about in her novels. But then, she didn’t love Keiko, not the way Keiko loved her. She loved her, but she wasn’t in love with her. And Keiko was lovely and perfect, kind and patient. If she couldn’t love Keiko, maybe there was something wrong with her, something inherited from her loveless parents. Maybe she was born with a broken heart.

  She put aside the letter to Keiko she’d been trying — and failing — to write. What was there to say? Sorry, I’m not in love with you and I never was, but kissing you sure was fun? No. So she instead set about planning an introduction to the syllabaries for Florian. She crossed her legs like a child — how her mother would have hated to see her like that, it was such a crass posture — and used the casket as a makeshift table.

  Yes, teaching Florian was a worthy purpose. Maybe the only worthy thing Evelyn would do in her life. Marriage and death would come and take her. There was no fighting that. But she could teach this boy to read. How it was he’d grown up in Crandon and never learned to read was something Evelyn despised thinking about. She had grown up with access to tutors and teachers so plentiful that she’d resented it. And she wasn’t even that smart, if all those tutors were to be believed. But Florian was smart. Evelyn could see it, could see his mind churning unceasingly.

  If anything good was to come of her wasted life, it’d be spiriting all the knowledge wasted on her into someone who actually deserved it. The fact that he wasn’t Imperial made it all the better. It would rankle her parents to know that after all the money they’d spent on Evelyn’s education, she would give it away for free. She smiled at that and set about making the best lessons she could muster. She was not a creature of courage, but she was one of spite. This one little rebellion would sate that, at least.

  There was a knock on the door then, which violently startled Evelyn. She knocked over her inkwell. The ink spilled, and she knew immediately that it would stain her casket.

  “Yes?” she called. She frantically tried to sop up the ink with — due to her lack of options — a corner of the fine kimono she wore. It was one of her mother’s favorites anyway. She was glad it was ruined.

  A younger girl — the Lady Ayer’s maid, Evelyn was pretty sure — stepped into the cabin and performed a low, respectful bow. The girl’s eyes darted to the spilled ink, and a look of superior distaste washed over her face. A spark of annoyance shot through Evelyn. She knew she looked ridiculous; there was no need to goggle.

  “Yes?” she said again, a little tartly.

  The girl shook herself from judgment, clearly remembering her place. She bowed again, lower this time — perhaps a little too low, almost sarcastically low — at Evelyn. “My lady, the Lady Ayer wishes to extend her warmest invitation to her cabin tonight, so that, thanks to the Emperor, you may have supper together.” She kissed her fingers and touched her heart.

  “Ah.” Evelyn held her hands aloft, both stained with ink. “Any suggestions here? I’m out of my depth.”

  The girl looked at her with obvious disdain. “I’ll send your boy along, my lady.”

  Evelyn narrowed her eyes at her. “Yes, thank you. Please do send Florian along, and please send the Lady Ayer my regrets tonight. I’m just so very busy, as you can see.”

  The girl bowed, her face sour. She obviously didn’t think it was proper for Evelyn to decline the offer. She was right, of course: it wasn’t. But the last thing Evelyn could stand at the moment was making more polite conversation with her mother’s friend. Not this night, the first night of the voyage. She needed more time to be angry.

  “What a little —” Evelyn muttered, but she didn’t finish. The girl wasn’t Imperial. That much Evelyn could see straightaway from the spattering of freckles across her nose, the point of her chin. She may have lost her accent — Evelyn suspected Quark — but she could never escape her face. She’d done a great job adopting the judgmental nature of Imperials, though. Evelyn’s mother would have loved her.

  Florian was less impressed with the syllabary lesson than Evelyn might have hoped.

  Had she misread him? Not his intelligence — that much was obvious. When she could wrangle his attention, he understood things readily enough. But his interest.

  “I just don’t see the point,” he admitted finally.

  They were sitting on either side of Evelyn’s casket as the Dove groaned beneath them. The sea was a bit choppier that day, so now and again all of Evelyn’s belongings slid about the cabin loudly. Florian didn’t seem to notice or mind, but it made Evelyn terribly nervous.

  “The point?” Evelyn swallowed her indignation. How could he know? She hefted a book into her hand. “I know a book doesn’t seem like much, but I promise you, there are worlds in here.”

  Florian eyed the book dubiously. “You’ll forgive me, milady, but it’s hard to trust something worth more than a week’s supply of food, something that wouldn’t keep me warm for a night if I burned it.”

  Evelyn’s eyes went wide. “Don’t you dare burn a book.”

  Florian chuckled. “They’d be terrible kindling anyway.”

  “Look. I know a book can’t feed you, or warm you at night, or, I don’t know, wipe your ass —”

  “Could do that, actua —”

  He stopped himself. As soon as he said it, Evelyn could see he regretted it. It was not proper to joke with Imperial ladies; Evelyn knew this. But he was right. She laughed, and as soon as she did, she could see relief spread over him like a sunrise, his gray eyes alight. She liked him, even if he didn’t like her yet.

  “My point is not about the physical merits of books. But about what they contain. Master the syllabary and you’ll have access to all of it
.”

  “Secrets?”

  “No, better. Stories. There’s freedom in stories, you know. We read them and we become something else. We imagine different lives, and while we turn the pages, we get to live them. To escape the lot we’ve been given.”

  Florian picked up a book and idly flipped through its pages. “My life is fine,” he said.

  “I’m sure yours is. You live on the open sea! You have the kind of life I read about in my books.” Evelyn took the book back from him and flipped to a page where a drawing showed a soldier, his hands to his belly, which bled from a mortal wound. “We don’t just read to imagine better lives. We read to be introduced to all kinds of lives. Any kind. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. To understand others better. It’s escape, and it’s also a way to become more connected to everyone around you. There’s power in that, you know. In understanding. It’s like magic.”

  “I’m not sure you’d want to understand the people I know, milady.”

  Evelyn chuckled, but Florian only looked at her, his eyes serious.

  “I’m not sure that’s for you to say,” she said.

  She wondered what kind of men he knew. Maybe he had met pirates on his voyages. Maybe he knew the Pirate Supreme. She thought of the people who surrounded her parents — desperate social climbers, boring officials and their bored wives. No, it wasn’t for him to say at all.

  Silence spread between them then. Above them, the footsteps of the sailors pounded and the wood of the Dove creaked. She wanted so badly to give Florian this gift, this access, but he just didn’t want it. Disappointment rose in her throat, and she felt suddenly that she wanted to cry. Which was pathetic, of course. She was pathetic. That she thought she could just mince onto this boat and force a sailor into lessons was so arrogant and foolish. She was as worthless as her parents had so rightly noticed. She took in a breath and tried to steady herself against her own burning humiliation.

  Florian watched her, his face impassive.

  “I’d be more interested in books if they had secrets,” he said finally.

  Evelyn laughed, her relief infinite. “Fine. Some of them do. Will you concentrate now?”

  Flora wanted to hate the Lady Hasegawa, but the Lady made it difficult.

  Where other Imperials were stiff and proper, she was breezy and — Flora hated to admit it — funny. She seemed to live for startling Flora into laughter, and she was deadly good at it, no matter how stiff an upper lip Flora tried to keep.

  Flora was lying in her berth, willing sleep to come, but she couldn’t get the sight of the Lady talking with her hands out of her mind. All around her, men of the Dove snored and farted in their sleep. Usually at this point in the voyage, Flora couldn’t wait until the passengers were moved to the brig so that the men could spread out across the cabins. But somehow, this time, that expectation felt like dread.

  A skeleton crew still remained abovedeck, but Flora’s new posting had seen her promoted to the day schedule, which was a blessing. Initially, she’d looked forward to all the extra sleep she’d get, but night after night it seemed that sleep would not come.

  She was awake still when Alfie came trundling into his own hammock, just below hers. When he saw she was awake, he stood so that his face was uncomfortably close to hers.

  “Saw you having a good laugh with her Ladyship today,” he whispered.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She did know what he was talking about. During one of the Lady’s supervised walks about the upper deck, she had told Flora a joke so crass it might have offended even Fawkes, and Flora had been so shocked that she’d let out her full laugh, her real laugh, her girl laugh, and had only stopped when she realized at least three men from the Dove were watching her. Alfie included.

  “You know, you weren’t assigned to watch over her so that you could moon about in her skirts.” His voice was a hiss, and Flora sat up, angry now.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Remember, we’re here for us.”

  Flora scoffed. “Yeah, all right, brother. I’ll remember that the next time I come back to our savings and find them empty.”

  Alfie’s face fell, and Flora knew right away she’d swung hard and aimed low. But she was too mad to care. “I said I was sorry for that,” Alfie said. More than that, he’d practically groveled for her forgiveness.

  “Doesn’t change anything.” She glared at him then, and it was as if he shrank beneath her, as if her gaze made him as small as he was inside. “It’s me earning the extra coin this go-round, and I don’t need you nagging me as I get to it.”

  Alfie took a deep, steadying breath and held his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying. I saw you laughing today, and you looked so — happy. And I wanted to remind you what she’s here for. What we’re here for.”

  Happy. As if that were a bad thing. As if that were not allowed — not for Flora, at least.

  “You think I could ever forget?” She wanted to hit him, to slap him across his stupid face, that face that looked so much like her own. “I’m the one with blood on my hands, remember.”

  Alfie glared at her then, and she knew she’d come at that all wrong. “I don’t think you want to start playing the suffering contest with me, Florian. It was me that took Fawkes’s hazing. Or did you forget?”

  Flora could never forget, but worse, she knew Alfie never would either. When they’d first joined the crew of the Dove, Fawkes had insisted that some hazing was in order. Alfie, being the elder brother, stepped in and took it so that Flora didn’t have to. If he had known what would happen, the extent of the pain Fawkes would deal to him, maybe he wouldn’t have, Flora knew. But he had, and now, Flora also knew, it was not for her to judge his need to forget. She wished she could forget, too. She wished they both could.

  Flora let her head drop. “I’m sorry, Alfie.” She pulled his forehead to hers. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just us,” Alfie whispered.

  Her eyes were closed, but she could still see the Lady Hasegawa, her head tossed back in laughter. But Flora replied in the way that she always did, even if the words tasted sour in her throat.

  “Just us against the world.”

  Once, when Alfie and Flora were still new on the Dove, they’d stopped in Tustwe.

  They could not stop on the Skeleton Coast, of course. It was called that for a reason — the currents on the western coast of Tustwe were so impossible to navigate that all who tried ended up shipwrecked, their bodies and boats eventually washed up on the shore.

  So, like all reasonable sailors, the crew of the Dove had sought shore leave on the east coast of Tustwe, where gold was easy to spend. Most of the crew — Alfie included — were drinking in the famous beachside taverns that gave the whole city a festive air. But Flora went wandering.

  It was hot, the yellow sun high in the palm fronds that grew everywhere. Flora was delighted. She’d never been anywhere that she felt like she fit — not in Crandon, not on the Dove. But as she walked through the sandy streets of the city, she felt powerfully comfortable. The men, the women, and people all manner of genders she didn’t recognize strode with their heads held high, their hair in so many different curious arrangements that Flora could hardly keep from staring. And everywhere, people were laughing and dancing and singing and running. It was so unlike the world Flora had known. Vibrant, and noisy, and alive.

  She spent most of her coin on a tray of oysters that she sucked straight from the shell, and then to have two elderly women, their fingers gnarled with age, set her hair into a thousand thick twists with beads interspersed in them. She felt full. She felt beautiful. She strode next to the oryxes the locals used to transport their goods to market, feeling like she belonged.

  But when she got back to the Dove, she was greeted by Rake’s cold stare of disapproval. Rake was from Quark, but he was pink, which meant the Tustwe sun was too much for his skin to bear. He had stayed behind while the rest of
the men went carousing.

  “You look like a girl,” he said. This, Flora thought, was not exactly fair. She looked like a person from Tustwe, and all the people in Tustwe seemed to have exciting and different hair, not just the women. But she was a child, and she was afraid, and so she didn’t say that.

  “I am a girl,” she responded. She was not yet Florian then.

  Without warning, he pulled her by the arm to the forecastle, where he stored his things. He pulled out his knife, and for a brief terrible moment, Flora was sure that Rake meant to murder her. But instead, he started methodically cutting off her hair. All around her the twists fell to the deck, like leaves falling from a tree, as Flora watched wordlessly in horror.

  “This is for your own good,” he told her. But it didn’t feel good. It felt like punishment for a crime she did not commit.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “And listen good. If you want to survive, you’re going to have to learn how to blend in. Become invisible. The more visible you are, the more you remind people you exist. And the more people remember you exist, the more likely they are to come for you. Do you understand me?”

  Flora nodded, because of course she understood. It was the lesson Crandon had most thoroughly taught her. Rake had left her then, to clean up the remains of her hard-earned hair. As soon as he was gone, Flora let herself cry.

  The thing was, she had felt like she was blending in. There among the palm trees and the dancing, the oryxes and the sand. That was the great gift the new hair had given her.

  She was just blending into the wrong place.

  Lessons with Florian had been going better than well. Once he mastered his syllabary, he was seemingly unstoppable. He soared through her curriculum, and already he could read sentences aloud, though haltingly. She liked to watch him puzzle out the words, the way his gray eyes narrowed, the way he sometimes bit his lip in concentration.