Venturess Page 9

  “Thank you, Wheelock,” Fin said. “To a safe and happy voyage, led by your skill and guidance.”

  Wheelock looked startled at having the toast returned, and after we’d all sipped another time he bowed stiffly and hurried away into the darkness.

  I found myself smiling after him with amusement and sympathy.

  “How formal he is,” Caro whispered, not unkindly. “You’d think him a man of sixty, but he couldn’t possibly be older than, oh—”

  “Twenty,” Fin said. “He’s the youngest airship captain who’s ever qualified, and one of the most promising; everyone says so. I requested him specifically for this journey.” He frowned. “I hoped his youth might make him more sympathetic to my, ah, views of things, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “I think it’s shyness,” I offered. “Part of it, at least. If he’s the youngest captain ever, he’d hardly be used to the company of people his own age.” I remembered how terrifying it had been when I’d started to make friends my age for the first time, not much more than a year ago. But I’d gotten extraordinarily lucky: my first friends had been Fin and Caro, and it was impossible to feel ill at ease with them for long.

  Caro nodded. “He’d probably have to act older for the other sailors to take him seriously too.”

  We nestled back onto the deck chairs with our hot drinks, our conversation gradually turning to the month-long journey ahead of us.

  “I think I’ll be busy with Jules’s mods for most of the days,” I said, “but I did notice the library is well stocked, and Wheelock mentioned that phonograph. I don’t think either of you will be bored.”

  Fin straightened in his chair. “Did you see the pods in the library? Lord, I can’t wait to try them.”

  I vaguely remembered the rounded shapes at the edges of that huge window. “I was still a little seasick—​airsick, I mean—​so I didn’t really examine them,” I admitted. “Although I think that’s passed now.”

  Fin smiled. “Oh, I’m glad.”

  “What are they for?” Caro asked.

  “They’re bathysphere pods,” Fin said, and I gasped with sudden delight at the word. He grinned at me and nodded excitedly. “They’re for underwater sightseeing,” he explained to Caro, whose eyes widened. “They’re lowered from the stern of the ship on calm days when we go down close to the water to catch fish. This is the first time a Faerie-bound ship has been equipped with them. Something else I requested specifically,” he confessed.

  Caro laughed. “You must admit, Fin, there are times when it’s good to be a prince.”

  He raised his cup to her with a wink and we all sat in silence for a moment, imagining voyages underwater.

  But Fin’s expression soon changed. He looked up at the sky with a grave determination, and I knew that Caro’s mentioning his title had turned his thoughts toward the heavy responsibilities he carried with him on our voyage.

  “What are those stars there?” I asked, trying to help him return to lighter thoughts, at least for now.

  Fin blinked and smiled at me, relieved.

  It must have been very late, but the events of the day and the prospect of all the adventures to come had made us too excited to sleep. We stayed up talking until the stars began to fade.

  When we finally wandered below deck, still talking quietly through our yawns, we all went to the royal suite without saying a word about it. We lounged on the bed together just as we’d done on the deck above, sharing little jokes and memories, little hopes for our journey. I’m not sure when we fell asleep.

  I woke up a few hours later with Caro’s and Fin’s arms thrown loosely over my waist, our heads sharing a pillow. I stayed still, breathing softly, nestled between them.

  Caro woke soon after and slipped silently out of our room to her own berth, placing a soft kiss on Fin’s and my foreheads first.

  As we looked at one another with sleepy happiness over breakfast later that morning, I knew without asking that we’d spend every night of the voyage together. Somehow, just knowing that made the ship seem more like home.

  TEN days into our journey, Wheelock declared the wind conditions safe enough to fly low the next morning. Billowing nets would be cast out from the sides of the boat to catch fresh fish for the galley, and Fin, Caro, and I were cleared to use the bathysphere pods.

  It was amazing how quickly we’d adjusted to life on the Imperator. My motion sickness was entirely gone. Although I hadn’t yet managed to scurry up the ropes with the crew, as Fin and Caro had done several times, I’d helped pull those ropes from the ground when the folding, fin-like sails had to be adjusted to catch the wind. We needed stiff breezes for this voyage, especially if we were to reach Faerie in only a month, but a few slow days were necessary too if we wanted to eat any fresh food at all.

  After my years of eating the Steps’ scraps, I knew better than to complain about having a plentiful supply of food, but I was still looking forward to a fish fry instead of the salted-meat stew that had become our standard dinner fare. The luxury of the first day’s refreshments had turned out to be just a ceremonial anomaly. I yearned for rhodopis berries, which could pop back into freshness at the touch of a finger and would have been perfect on the long voyage. I felt more annoyed than ever about Esting’s embargo on Fey goods.

  That was one of the many things Fin and I would try to fix once we reached Faerie.

  On the morning of our voyage underwater, all three of us woke up early and excited. Caro rose before dawn every day in order to return to her own bunk undetected, but on that particular morning we were all up and dressed with starlight still whispering through the portals in the royal suite.

  When we got to the galley, Wheelock was already there, spinning his empty teacup on its saucer like a toy top. His hands hovered over the cup and he watched it intently, as if he could keep it spinning through sheer willpower.

  It was the first unserious thing I’d ever seen him do, and I couldn’t help the little giggle I let out. But when he heard the noise, Wheelock flinched and clamped his hands down over the cup.

  Twin ruddy spots appeared on his cheeks as he quickly stood up. “Good morning, Your Highness, my ladies,” he said. He hurried to the side of the galley. “Would you like some tea? Cook isn’t up yet, but I’d be honored to serve you my—​myself.” He turned away from us, hiding his face, but I could see his hands shaking a little as he poured.

  I smiled at him gratefully when he handed me my cup, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. After he brought us our drinks he bowed deeply and hurried out the galley door.

  “Poor fellow,” said Fin. “I wish I could make him feel more at ease.”

  “I think Caro was right—​he’s afraid he won’t be taken seriously if he acts his age,” I murmured. “Did you notice how excited he was when he told us about the sailing conditions last night? He was trying so hard not to show it, but . . .”

  I pushed my chair away from the long galley table and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I told Fin and Caro, who didn’t seem surprised at all by my leaving.

  I walked swiftly across the deck. The bridge was raised to provide the best possible view to the navigators, and I climbed the steep spiral half-staircase to reach it. Sure enough, Wheelock was there, twirling a dial on the side of a large compass while he examined it closely. He looked completely absorbed, but those spots of color still burned in his cheeks.

  I knocked softly. He flinched again, and when he turned and saw me through the window, he snapped into such rigid formality that I almost believed the cup-spinning had been just a hallucination.

  “Hello, my lady,” he said, opening the door. “I apologize for my inappropriate comportment earlier. How may I be of service?”

  I bit my lip. I wanted to tell him that I was sure I knew just how he felt: young and successful and smart, and, well, terrified that people wouldn’t take the latter two seriously because of the first one. Terrified, too, of spending any time around other young people because he’d spent his
life working so hard that he’d never learned to make friends. I knew that story all too well.

  But saying so might only embarrass him further. “I hoped you might show me the navigation equipment,” I told him instead. In fact, that was very true; I’d been waiting for a clear day so that I wouldn’t be in the way on the bridge, but I had longed to see the machinations of the ship’s steering.

  Wheelock nodded, still as formal as an elderly butler, but his face relaxed by degrees as he showed me around the bridge’s equipment. By the time Sneha arrived to take over helmsman duties, I was helping Wheelock steer the ship down toward the water, both of us putting our weight into the huge wheel at the front of the bridge. I was smiling even as I breathed heavily with the effort, and I thought I nearly had Wheelock smiling too.

  “Now,” said Wheelock, nodding at Sneha as she took over the wheel, “I must take you to your companions in the library. Soon we’ll be able to release the bathyspheres.” He said the word with a little envy, and I was suddenly sure that he’d woken early in excitement about seeing them work, just as we had . . . except, of course, that he’d be confined to the ship.

  I opened my mouth to invite him to join us, but he was already halfway down the staircase that led back to the deck. I followed him, chagrined.

  In the library, Caro was running her hands over one bathysphere’s exterior, examining it thoughtfully, while Fin paced the room with barely suppressed impatience. “Oh, good!” he cried when he saw us, making sure to smile at both Wheelock and me. “Come on, Nick.” He rushed to the second bathysphere and opened the door. “I want you to ride with me, if you don’t mind.”

  I smiled at him and nodded. I turned to meet Caro’s eyes, then glanced toward Wheelock. She winked at me in understanding.

  “Won’t you join me, Wheelock?” Caro asked, grinning. “There’s plenty of room.”

  A surprisingly youthful smile swept across Wheelock’s face for a moment. When his old-gentleman expression came back, it seemed almost like a mask.

  “Thank you very much, Miss Hart,” Wheelock said. “However, it’s proper for a captain to remain with his ship. I’m afraid I must decline.” But he watched a little enviously as Fin and I settled ourselves onto the brass seats inside one triple-sealed pod and as he helped Caro into the other. We pulled on the oilskin life jackets Wheelock handed us and smiled at one another in nervous excitement.

  When the porter arrived to man the crank that would lower us into the sea, Wheelock’s expression of quiet longing only increased.

  The porter, a hardy-looking man named Walsh, let out an amused huff.

  Wheelock spun around and fixed him with a lofty glare. “Yes, Sailor?”

  Walsh quickly saluted, looking both ashamed and genuinely embarrassed. “Meaning no offense, Captain. It’s just, you’ve talked of hardly nothing else but . . . it’s nothing, sir.”

  This was a surprising development, as was the evident friendship between Walsh and the inscrutable young captain; they both smiled a little even as the porter submitted to his captain’s authority.

  Wheelock sighed. He looked at the empty seat beside Caro and finally he gave one curt nod, as if convincing himself to go rather than accepting her invitation.

  “You won’t be leaving the Imperator, you know,” said Fin, a twinkle in his eye. “The pods stay attached to the hull with those telescoping pipes, and therefore they’re part of the ship, don’t you think?”

  That youthful smile stole across Wheelock’s face again. “Indeed, Your Highness,” he said. Turning back to Walsh, he added, “Gunning’s been wanting to give his first-mate duties a real run, has he not?”

  “Aye, sir.” Walsh smiled and stepped aside to let Wheelock past. The captain stepped into the bathysphere pod and settled down beside Caro, his posture ramrod-straight, his face severe and formal again. I was sure that spark was still hidden somewhere . . .

  But I didn’t watch Wheelock’s face very long, because the porter started to turn the crank, and we began to move.

  I winced and reached for Fin. I’d looked forward to this part of the voyage more than any other ever since I’d learned that it was possible, yet my heart beat wildly as the glass egg in which we sat detached from the stability of the airship.

  Fin caught my hand at once and held firm. That gave me the courage to look around. Once I did, I was so very glad.

  The ship had descended even more since Wheelock and I had left the bridge, and we were only thirty or so feet above the surface. Our pods were connected to the Imperator by a series of reassuringly strong, metal-reinforced ropes and two telescoping pipes. One of these attached to the top of the glass pod and was clearly structural; the other was thinner, jointed, and flexible, and it extended through the three reinforced layers of glass to a perforated brass circle, from which I heard the voice of the porter, tinny and barely comprehensible.

  “All well on board?” he asked.

  “All well here, sir,” Fin and I chorused, as we’d been instructed.

  “All clear, so!” the porter shouted, and then the pod touched water.

  I stood up involuntarily. For a moment it was like walking on waves, skimming ahead toward the horizon as sea foam frothed at my feet.

  “Oh!” I gasped.

  “I know,” Fin said, laughing, standing up with me.

  Then we were going under, smooth and slow. The waves swallowed us, reaching the brass reinforcement at waist height, and then the level of our eyes, and at last closing over the top of our pod with a small gulp.

  The light underwater was green and gold at once, streaming down in changing ribbons that looked sometimes like swords and sometimes like long golden hair. The space around us receded infinitely into a green, green gloom.

  “The nets, Nick, look,” Fin said joyfully. His voice sounded different now, more enclosed, bouncing off the curved glass walls.

  Already a few fish struggled against the nets billowing and stretching in the currents. I couldn’t help feeling a little bad for the fish in that moment, even though I knew that I would be more than happy to eat them for dinner that night. I admonished myself for hypocrisy.

  I saw Caro and Wheelock in their pod off to our side, and I waved even though my arm shook a little. I loved this so much, yet it scared me so much at the same time, on such a basic, instinctive level.

  Caro waved back, looking perfectly delighted. Wheelock patted the oilskin life jacket he wore and nodded at me reassuringly. I remembered what he had said that morning: If anything happened, we’d be pulled back onto the ship in less than a minute.

  I took a deep breath and tried to enjoy the sightseeing, the streaming gold-green light, the billowing nets, the schools of little and not-so-little fish that plunged around our pod.

  And then I decided to look down.

  All the vertigo I’d felt early in our voyage came rushing into reality below me, where the water grew darker and darker until nothing was there at all except black. I could not guess how deep it was; it seemed utterly endless.

  I knew there were many places in the ocean where even our longest anchors could not reach. In bad storms far out at sea, it was safer for an airship to go above the clouds than try to anchor below them, Wheelock had told us.

  I wanted to tell Fin to look down so that at least I wouldn’t be staring into that void all alone. But my mouth was dry; it took me a moment to find my voice.

  And in that moment I saw something that I will never in my life forget.

  It was just a shape at first, rising up out of the darkness and into the green ribboning light, moving so fast I almost didn’t see it.

  Just a shape with a tail, that was all.

  But it also had arms. And a head.

  And I could have sworn, even in that brief moment, that it had a human face.

  I found my voice. “Fin!” I rasped. “Fin, a merman!”

  “What on earth?” Fin looked down with me, crouching on the glass floor so that he could see better, but it was gone.r />
  He looked up, disappointment and doubt blending together on his face. I shook my head, not knowing what to say. The shape had come out of the darkness and then vanished so quickly. I began to think that it had only been a strange kind of fish.

  As we slipped through the water, Fin and I kept watching the changing light around us and the schools of fish collecting in the nets. Every so often we turned to wave at Caro and Wheelock again, as if seeing their safety could reassure us of our own. They usually smiled and waved right back, although sometimes they were too entranced with the view to notice us. Wheelock, especially, looked around at the ocean with a childlike rapture.

  I checked my pocket watch. We would go back aboard in only five minutes, even though we had at least an hour’s worth of air remaining in the chamber with us. I realized that I would miss my sojourn here when I returned to the ship. Though I would undoubtedly feel more secure up there—​and yet more secure back on land, even in Faerie—​there would be a part of me that always missed this green light, this infinite liquid space, this little bubble where all the water in the world rushed over and under and around me while I stayed safe and dry.

  Then that bubble shattered.

  “No!” Fin hit the glass wall so hard with his fist that a crack appeared in its surface.

  “Fin, don’t!” I cried, frantically reminding myself that there were three layers of glass around us, not just one, and that we were perfectly safe. “What are you doing?”

  “Look, Nick, look! They can’t, they can’t!” He hit the glass again, and a few splinters fell to our feet.

  My breath stopped. There was a shape, a shape with a tail and arms and a human face, tangled up in the fishing nets.

  The merman tore at the ropes with his translucent webbed hands, thrust his powerful, sickly-white tail through the water, and bit at the lines with astonishingly long and sharp teeth, but the nets only tangled him tighter. The wire-reinforced ropes sawed against red gills in his sides, and dark blood began to cloud the water.