Venturess Page 8

  Fin burst out laughing, as did the nearby members of the crew . . . and Caro, who was already waiting for us on deck.

  I quickly lowered my arm. I knew, of course, that clouds were nothing more than high-altitude mist. But that one had seemed so solid, and so swift, moving toward us like that.

  I decided it wouldn’t do to feel ashamed that my protective instinct toward Fin was working so well, so I joined in the laughter around me, exaggeratedly miming my own frightened reaction to, of all things, a cloud. I fixed my gaze firmly on the wooden floor of the deck and very firmly not on the ropes and chains that attached our ship to the great balloon that kept us floating through the (don’t look at it) sky.

  With my eyes on the ground, even if that wasn’t the right word, I was able to walk confidently in the direction of the galley hatch, fairly dragging Fin along behind me.

  But before I could return to the security of indoors, Caro ran—​ran!—​across the deck and grabbed my arm.

  “Come on, Nick,” she said. “You have to see!”

  “Oh no,” I said, still looking toward the galley. “The only thing I’d like to see at the moment is a strong cup of tea.”

  Caro looked at me sympathetically, but she shook her head. “Soon enough we’ll only be able to see ocean, and for a whole month,” she said. “When else will you get to see Esting from above?”

  “On a map?” I suggested, but I had to acknowledge that such a sight might be worthwhile.

  Fin grabbed one of my hands, Caro took the other, and I followed them slowly to the high railings at the edge of the top deck.

  I grasped my friends’ hands tightly and gratefully. Even my shaky ankles and wobbly stomach couldn’t completely distract me from the wonder of the landscape below us.

  How could I not have realized before how lovely Esting was? Had I been too close, too familiar, to see it?

  Gentle hills, deep green woodlands so dark they looked almost black, the spiraling roads of little valley-cradled villages . . . and, already far away in the distance, the forbidding blackstone turrets of the royal palace, rising out of Esting City’s geometric grid of streets. Why, that meant the trees in front of the city were the beginning of Woodshire Forest, and hidden somewhere at their edge was Lampton Manor. I couldn’t see it from here, but the thought of my childhood home in the Brethren’s hands twisted in my heart.

  Woodshire Forest was far vaster than I’d realized; the path from the manor to Esting City, though it had seemed so long to me before, cut through only one sliver of the forest’s huge expanse.

  I thought of the Forest Queen, Caro’s five-times-great-grandmother, who had lived in those woods with her merry band and had so many adventures. Thinking of Silviana gave me courage, and I found that my feet stood a little steadier on the rising deck.

  “The Forest Queen had a vast demesne,” Fin said quietly at my side, echoing my thoughts.

  I nodded, staring dreamily at the undulating treetops, wondering if that’s what the ocean would look like once we crossed over the shoreline. I’d never seen the ocean before, even though it was only a day’s hard ride from Lampton.

  I heard a loud rushing sound far above us. The airship swept upward, lifting us who knew how much farther into the air. The movement was too smooth to call a lurch, but my legs certainly didn’t like it, and I felt the warmth drain from my face.

  The higher we went up into the sky, the colder the atmosphere around us grew, and I had to take deeper breaths to get the same amount of air. We’d been warned of this before our trip, and I began to think longingly of the lovely boiled-wool cloak in my steamer trunk. I hadn’t liked the idea of being wrapped up tight while I felt motion sick, but cold was quickly becoming the more pressing concern.

  Yet I couldn’t bear to tear my gaze away from the receding land below us. Everything looked small and perfect and ordered, like the clockwork I had loved and studied all my life. I started to wonder how I’d ever thought any problem I had, down there in that tiny clock country, had ever seemed insurmountable.

  Woodshire Forest rolled on and on, even when the palace became nothing more than a black speck on the horizon. Then suddenly it cut off into a jagged face of gray cliffs, so small from up here, and . . .

  Below the cliffs, the crashing sea.

  “Oh,” Fin and I gasped together, and I could tell from the way his tone matched mine that he had never seen the ocean before either. The thought startled me until I remembered that he’d spent most of his royal childhood behind the closed doors of the palace, except for when he went riding or when Caro snuck him out to the Market. When his mother was still alive, surely the journeys they made were to the desert Sudlands where her family ruled, connected to Esting by a thin strip of barren land. I knew from the time Fin, Caro, Bex, and I spent in the paddock’s pond last summer that Fin was a strong swimmer, but there would have been no need for him ever to visit the sea.

  The ocean was its own continent, dark as the forest above it, churning and roiling white froth so that it seemed as if at any moment it might swallow the cliffs. Yet it was seductive, too, in the way it rolled and beckoned and sang, waves stroking the edge of the land like lovers. Infinitely fierce and infinitely gentle, like every love I’d ever known.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Caro asked. When I looked over at her, she was radiant, her cheeks red and sweet as apples in the cold wind. “I told you both you’d want to see it.”

  I shivered. “It’s fantastic,” I said. “I couldn’t have even imagined it.”

  Caro put her arm around me from my right, and Fin did the same from my left. Bending our heads together for warmth, we watched our home country slip into the hazy distance.

  ✷

  The refreshments laid out in the galley far exceeded my idea of an airship’s food stores. I was surprised at how hungry I felt when I looked at the laden table, given how wobbly my stomach had been a few minutes ago, but something about the cold ocean air made me feel both refreshed and somehow famished.

  To begin with there was fresh fruit, at least a dozen different kinds: the apples and dark grapes that grew so well near Esting City, of course, as well as large, translucent golden plums from southern Esting, syrupy green succulents from the Sudlands, and tapered bunches of the tiny, sour orange frostberries that grew year-round in Nordsk, where so few other fruits could weather the cold.

  Fat rolls of the fine wheat bread that the palace kitchens always served were stacked in pyramids at one end of the table, still warm enough to let out little puffs of yeast-scented steam when you ripped into them, which all three of us did with abandon. We hadn’t eaten since a very early and hurried breakfast back in Esting City, and it seemed the cold, thin air on deck had woken Fin’s and Caro’s appetites too.

  Gooey triple-crème cheese, shards of aged cheddar, fresh goat’s-milk butter, and smoked wild pheasant from Woodshire Forest were all arranged amid dripping chunks of honeycomb on a platter near the bread. The pheasant, a smear of cheese, and a few grapes on one of the warm rolls made just about the nicest sandwich I’d ever had.

  My favorite clary-bush tea wasn’t there, of course, nor was there any other Fey food or drink on this royal journey (although I remembered the strange liquid painkiller the chirurgienne had used on Fin, and once again I wondered how stringent the quarantine really was), but the black tea and coffee were strong and delicious.

  After we’d eaten, Wheelock appeared again, as silently and suddenly as if he’d arrived, I whispered to Caro, “by magic.”

  “Treacherous thought!” she murmured, barely suppressing a giggle. I had to hide an unladylike snort.

  “Would Your Highness and my ladies wish for some entertainment after your meal?” he asked with another bow. “We have an excellent portable phonograph, or I can show you into the ship’s library.”

  An airship’s library appealed to me indeed, and I glanced at Fin eagerly.

  “Well, if you don’t mind,” he said with a courteous nod to Caro an
d me, “I would love to see our balloon up close. Would it be possible for one of the crew to take us up the ropes?”

  My eyes widened, and my perfect sandwich began to tumble unpleasantly in my stomach. “Ah, I’m not sure I could manage that yet,” I said, a little embarrassed. Was I so poor a venturess as this?

  “Nick, I’m so sorry!” Fin said quickly. “I’d quite forgotten about your seasickness. Airsickness?”

  “The latter is the correct term, Your Highness,” Wheelock said with utter deference and with the same gravity he’d used on our first meeting, which made his voice seem so much older than his face.

  “Airsickness, then.” Fin looked at me with genuine sympathy. “I’ll certainly wait to see the balloon until we can all manage it,” he said stoutly.

  “You will do no such thing!” I exclaimed. “You’ve been talking about seeing that balloon up close for the last month—​and I’ll expect a full report of its engineering,” I added, more to Caro than to Fin. She had a better mind for such things. Fin was always the artist . . . and the idealist, the politician who really believed in what he said.

  I just hoped it wouldn’t get him hurt again.

  Caro nodded squarely, silently conveying that she’d look after Fin’s safety so that I needn’t worry about leaving him for a while.

  “I would love to see the library,” I said to Wheelock, who bowed yet again in acknowledgment.

  “At your convenience, my lady,” he said, then backed out the door and shut it so silently that it was hard to notice even while you were watching him.

  “Are you sure, Nick?” Fin asked. “I really don’t mind waiting. I’d like for all of us to see it together.”

  “Not at all,” I said sincerely. “I couldn’t enjoy it now, not until my legs get a little bit better—​and my stomach. A nice, slow look around the library seems like exactly what I need. But I meant it when I said I want to hear all about it.”

  ✷

  The library was a small, ovoid room in the very stern of the ship with a huge curved window displaying a little more open sky than I was prepared for when I walked through the door. I felt briefly vertiginous, as if I were about to fall through that reinforced glass and away into the endless air. We were high enough that I could see neither land nor sea, nor even horizon; nothing but blue, scudded through with white cloud.

  There were two big, brass-lined bubbles of some kind at the lower corners of the window, but I couldn’t look at them quite long enough to get a clear impression of what their function might be. Instead I focused my gaze on the tightly packed bookshelves, the leather club chairs bolted to the floor, and the library’s main table, which displayed a gigantic, pinned-down map.

  I looked back at Wheelock. He was standing by the library door, as still and rigid as a statue. I wondered if he even felt allowed to blink.

  “Could you show me our route, please, Wheelock?” I asked, indicating the table. I wanted to examine the map, and it would have felt peculiar to do so alone while he waited in the corner.

  He nodded and silently came to stand before the map with me. From a shallow drawer under the table he produced brass pins and a black thread.

  “We began here, at Port’s End,” he murmured, sticking a pin into the city and deftly looping the thread around it.

  I traced my fingers over the outline of Esting’s shores. “I know the geography of our country well enough,” I said, “and of our neighbors, Nordsk and the Sudlands. I devoured maps of Faerie as a child, too, but this one . . . it makes the place seem much larger than I had imagined.” I gestured toward the vaguely teardrop-shaped continent on the opposite side of the map. It was so far away that I couldn’t touch the outlines of Esting and Faerie at the same time even if I stretched out both my arms.

  “The area of Faerie is thirty-one thousand square miles,” Wheelock recited, gently sticking pins into the vast expanse of ocean between the two countries.

  I sucked in my breath at the figure, although I supposed I must have heard it before. Esting was barely a third of that size.

  “It’s not a straight line,” I said. “Our route.”

  He gestured over the smooth arc of the thread. “We follow the trade winds,” he said.

  “Of course. And then there’s the curve of the earth, I suppose; it would be hard to account for that on a flat map.”

  “Yes.”

  Somehow the space between Esting and Faerie made the strongest impression on me; all the space we were about to cross, our journey hanging on Wheelock’s thread. The paper ocean wasn’t blank, either. Here and there the inked forms of huge curling serpents broke the water.

  “Here be monsters,” I whispered, reading the inscription under one such beast.

  Wheelock looked up at me; just for a moment I caught the trace of a secret smile behind his eyes, as if he were a young adventurer too. But he quickly looked down at the map and tacked in the last pin, on a Faerie beach not too far from their capital. “Yes,” he said again, in old-man tones, and the secret smile was gone.

  I turned away from the paper monsters.

  “Thank you, Wheelock,” I said. “I think I’d like to go back to the suite now, please. I would like to see to my, ah, work for a while. I might return to the library afterward.”

  “As you like, my lady,” Wheelock said. “Your animal companions have already settled themselves in your suite’s storeroom. I took the liberty of installing an extra lock on your storeroom door. I thought an inventor must value privacy in her work.” He pulled a brass key from his pocket and offered it to me. I smiled and accepted the key, and when he bowed once more and extended his arm, I took it gladly. I felt brave enough to look out that huge window again when I had someone else to lean on.

  For all his funny, elderly-gentleman mannerisms, I decided I liked Wheelock. I appreciated the utterly normal way he spoke of my buzzers, without the awe or cautious judgment I heard so often. I felt quite cheerful, and even a little less airsick, holding on to his arm as we made our way back to the royal suite.

  ✷

  After I helped the buzzers settle into the briefcase I’d made to house them for the month-long voyage, and I’d stroked their heads in the pattern that let them wind down and rest until I needed them again, I turned to Jules.

  “You’ll be able to rest soon too,” I said, “and it’s very well deserved.”

  He shook his head and nudged me toward the largest of the three tool chests I’d brought. Jules took up nearly half the space in this little windowless storeroom, and I knew that he and the supplies that filled up the rest of it had more than doubled the Imperator’s weight. But I was so far into my work on Jules’s modifications that I couldn’t bear to leave the project behind unfinished. Leaving him or the buzzers behind in Esting had been even more unthinkable.

  My lightest luggage was the stuff I guarded most carefully, though: the briefcase with my buzzers and the unused Ashes from my mother’s cupboards, labeled with their different animal species and carefully sorted into more than a hundred little boxes and cork-topped vials.

  It was Jules who’d insisted I bring them, strangely enough, in spite of how he usually couldn’t stand even to be in their presence. “Not safe,” he’d said in his gravelly, pained voice when I explained that I’d leave them locked in one of Lord Alming’s vaults. I’d brushed him off at first. But “Not safe!” he’d said again, stamping the floor of his stall hard enough to raise sparks.

  “Would you like to sleep now, Jules?” I asked after I’d been toiling away at his modifications for several hours. He shifted back and forth on his feet, trying out the new weight I’d added to his frame, and then he nodded.

  I stroked the three spirals on his shoulders, the way I’d learned from Mother’s old journals. Jules’s clockwork wound to a stop, and I doused the low burn in his furnace.

  I fastened all the bulky padlocks I’d brought to secure the storeroom door, turning Wheelock’s key last of all; he was right that I valued my privacy
, even from him.

  When I emerged onto the deck, snugly wrapped in my wool cloak, night had already fallen. Caro and Fin lounged on deck chairs near the bow, talking quietly and now and then pointing up at a dark sky that overflowed with the brightest stars I’d ever seen. A huge moon glowed above us, smooth and bright as a crystal ball.

  I walked confidently toward them, relieved to find that my shaky legs and stomach had returned to normal in the past few hours. They smiled when they saw me, and Caro patted the empty deck chair next to hers.

  “That’s the Cryptid, those six stars,” said Fin, gesturing upward at a cluster that did, perhaps, look a little bit like a vicious beast if one squinted just right. I had often envied Fin the many excellent tutors he’d had as a child and his resulting knowledge on such a wide array of subjects. I’d always been a voracious reader, but the only real schooling I’d had was in engineering and physics with Mother, and Faerie history and housekeeping with Mr. Candery. Those had come in handy, of course, but I would have given nearly anything to listen in on one of Fin’s private lessons in languages or poetry or music. I hoped to begin taking such lessons myself, or even to travel to one of the women’s academies in the Sudlands, once my business was established and once I’d bought back Lampton—​

  But I couldn’t buy back Lampton. I kept forgetting that my home was lost to me.

  I refocused on the bright river of stars above us and on the low murmur of Fin’s voice as he told their stories.

  After a while, Wheelock brought us some hot port in little hammered cups. I was surprised he hadn’t delegated the task to one of his crew and was pleased to see him.

  The captain clicked his heels together and made Fin a little salute. “A toast, if I may,” he said, taking a small flask out of his peacoat.

  Fin raised his cup with a smile, and Caro and I followed suit.

  “To Your Highness’s long life, to success in your journey’s aim and in your coming marriage,” he said, with a salute to me this time. “Long life and love to you all.” He saluted Caro last, then touched his flask to each of our cups and took a quick drink.