A Daughter of No Nation (39 page)

Brother No Name had divided up their borrowed pair of shacks so that she was with both siblings, and Verena was managing to lie without moving against the wall of the A-frame, radiating rage and jealousy across the wood-beam floor.

Parrish told Verena he was taking me up there, she thought. Broke it to her that he was going to … ask me out, basically.

She hoped this was true; otherwise, Verena would have gotten the news when the eccentric monk said they were making love at Stronia Bel-Parrish's feet.

Next door, Tonio and Parrish were bunking with the monk. Or trying to—she heard the occasional rustling there, too, and once an aggrieved and piercing shout of “Watch your elbows, lad!”

Who wouldn't be attracted to Parrish, what with the face and the build and the lamb's-wool hair and the fact that he was the only person on this superstition-ridden world who was interested in provable facts rather than hocus-pocus?

Even if he did seem to believe in true love and, possibly, predestination.

He's not into Verena, he's just not. He's almost twice her age. She's a kid; she'll get past it.

This bit of rationalization didn't do a thing for the irrational guilt, the sense that she'd somehow wronged her newfound sister.

After everything, had she just come back to Stormwrack for Garland Parrish? Was all this desire to explore and angsting over citizenship and butting heads with Cly and trying to help Beatrice just some kind of extended subconscious agenda in getting close to a cute guy?

Supercute. And what the hell does “courting” mean?

In the other hut, someone—Tonio?—snored softly.

Sophie turned her head until she could see across the compound. The great gate was shut for the night, a precaution against specters (happily, serving the dead didn't mean providing easy prey for the big cats), and a small herd of goats had been corralled nearby to serve as additional warning, not to mention bait, if one got in. The grave markers and huts were barely outlined, velvety black on black. The moon was new, the sky so dark that, given the lack of light pollution, the only thing you could see with any accuracy at all was the stars.

They were scattered across the black, vivid constellations, some familiar. Stuff she had seen before—the triangle of Saturn, Spica, and Mars, the constellation Cassiopeia.

She could hear high-pitched chittering—bats, out on the hunt—and the rush of wind in the foliage. Some of the wood children hooted to each other. A monk was praying out there, too, soft bass voice singing cadences in a language she didn't understand, and something was snuffling out by one of the graves.

There was so much to discover here. She thought of walking away before she and Bram had unlocked the puzzle of Stormwrack and Erstwhile, how they were related.

Issues they weren't supposed to explore.

She caressed her book of questions, thinking about how Cly had said he'd follow her to the outlands.

Thought experiment: What if I stayed away, but Parrish came with me?

She imagined him living in San Francisco, sipping lattes and checking his e-mail on a smartphone, making his living as … what? An underwear model? Maybe he'd help her analyze reef footage.

Nope, that didn't scan at all.

There was plenty of science to do at home.

But magic had ruined that a little, hadn't it? Inscription was a game-changer. She didn't know how it worked, but it blew all their assumptions about the nature of reality to hell. If she wasn't allowed to tell anyone, it only increased her duty to research it. Her duty, and Bram's, too.

They still didn't know whether their world turned into this one or, if so, when catastrophe would strike.

You're allowed to want things,
Bram had said.

Bram's breathing had lengthened at long last and Verena had stopped thrumming. Sophie should have been able to sleep.

First things first, she decided. She had to see through this tangle with Beatrice and Cly.

In the meantime, it won't hurt to ask Parrish what “courting” means.

It wasn't much of an answer; she wanted something easier, cleaner. But
muddle on
seemed to be all there was.

She must have dozed, skimming over the surface of sleep without dipping in, floating back into wakefulness. It was pitch black out now; the stars were gone, and something was tugging, ever so carefully, at the lace on one of her packs.

She had her dive light at the ready. Turning it on, she speared a raccoon in its beam. It had its paw wound into one of the nylon straps of her pack.

It gave her a saucy, unconcerned glance and waddled away.

Pregnant, Sophie noticed.

She slid out of her bedroll noiselessly, grabbing up her shoes and tiptoeing into the compound. The white light of the flash formed a dense cone with the raccoon at its edge. Fog had crept in, turning the air to soup.

She checked her camera—still tied in place, still shooting frames at regular intervals, battery fine. She left it, though the sky wasn't likely to clear before dawn.

You'd think in a holy place, some Obi Wan Kenobi type would materialize out of the fog and offer some cryptic but decipherable advice about sorting all this out.

Follow your heart, weigh your choices, today's the first day of the rest of your life, a woman's work is like a fish … no, that's something else.

Fluttering shadows drew her eye—then the beam of the light—to the crypt doors. A skinny, lurking figure in new robes was caught in her spotlight. Brother No Name: he shot her a vicious glare, shook the doors, then minced up the path to the heights of the mountain.

No more chaperone, she thought. If Parrish was awake, we could get on with some quality courting.

The memory of that one kiss rose, making her shiver a little, putting the lie to her pretense of lightheartedness.

She leaned against the A-frame, feeling churned up, waiting to see if he'd come out. Maybe he couldn't sleep, either. Maybe he'd turn up, sleepy, tousled and disaffected by this homecoming. Needing comfort.

Ha, she thought.

She took a seat on what passed for the porch and was still out there, half-dozing, more than a little horny, when the sky began to lighten, the monuments and shadows of the monks drawing colorless lines on the white cotton curtain of morning, as if even the colors of the waxing day were forbidden in this desolate place.

 

CHAPTER    
25

Tonio was first to arise the next day, maybe fifteen minutes after dawn broke. He sketched a wave and a friendly glance in Sophie's direction, then made his way into the fog, headed for the outhouse.

The monks sang as they emerged from their shacks, joining the lone voice who'd sung all night. The group of them built a low chord that was unmistakably a lament. Sophie was reminded of the Whos coming out of their homes at Christmas in the old Grinch cartoon, except of course that instead of cheery “wahoo and dahoo,” this was all “woe, oh, ah.”

Sustained musical chords built in complexity as more singers came out, adding mournful notes to the chill. The song rose, rolling through the encampment and the forest, cold and damp like the fog, and even the crows and wood children seemed to fall silent as the sound permeated everything.

The reverberations of sorrow drove the others out of their sleeping bags. Verena appeared, favoring her with a neutral “Good morning” and then balancing her leg, like a ballet dancer, on a crossbar of wood while brushing her hair, preparatory to binding it into the screamingly tight ponytail she favored.

“Can I borrow that after you're through?” Sophie said, just to break the silence.

“Sure.” Short word, bitten off angrily.

I shouldn't say anything, Sophie thought, but what came out was “You know that monk overstated what Parrish and I—”

“It's none of my business,” Verena said.

So much for rapprochement. The men appeared, one by one, Bram wide awake, as always, with no apparent need for a transition between deep sleep and full consciousness. Then Parrish, clad in his white shirt and a pair of Bram's bike shorts. His eyes found hers just as she was taking in his bed head. He barely smiled in response. She felt a schoolgirl flutter and then, a moment later, a deeper, more internal response.

Verena broke their gaze by walking between them, proffering the hairbrush. “Your turn.”

Sophie took it. “Thanks.”

“There anything else of mine that you want?”

“Ahhh.” She felt herself coloring. “I think I'm good.”

“Yes, you sure do.” Verena didn't move, just stood there between her and Parrish.

Sophie ran the brush through her curls. “I need a haircut,” she said, inanely, just to make a sound.

“Done?” Verena held her hand out pointedly.

Sophie returned the brush. “I appreciate it.”

“Verena,” Parrish said, and she turned, rapidly, teeth all but bared. “Might I?”

“Keep it.” She shoved it blindly into his hand and took off.

Tonio bit his lip. “Someone should—”

“I'll go after her,” Bram said. “Garland. Will they feed us?”

“Not in any way we're likely to appreciate.”

“I have protein bars,” Sophie said.

“Let's resurrect the saboteur, charm the truth out of him, and get going, shall we?” Tonio said.

“Agreed,” Garland said.

“Where's your governess?”

Sophie laughed. “If you'd like Brother No Name to reappear, I'm sure all Parrish and I would have to do is step into one of the cabins together.”

“He crept out, late,” Parrish said. “He may find sleeping under a roof uncomfortable, after living in the wild.”

They repacked their things. Bram returned with Verena, who threw them all a sullen “Sorry,” and went inside to sort her bags.

The chorus was wrapping up the morning etude when the monk Sophie had spoken to yesterday, named Brother Piper, approached.

“Fortunate morning to you all,” he said, breaking the somber mood with a great, beaming grin that suggested that, given the slightest encouragement, he'd hug them. “How was your night?”

His Fleet accent was different from Brother No Name's—he said
nicht
for “night.” His arm bore scars from some terrible long-ago accident, hooks and drag marks that had left his hand twisted so it hung backward. He had holes in his ears, marks left by piercings, jewelry he no longer wore. Not a native, Sophie deduced—he'd come from another island.

He rapped on the red lacquered crypt doors and a white-robed monk pushed them wide, letting them into a stone atrium little bigger than a cloakroom and lit by torches. The room was bare, and its floor was carved with words in a hundred or more languages. Those she recognized seemed to be words and phrases of farewell: “good-bye,” “safe journey,” “good luck to you.” At the end of this textual carpet was a path leading down into a narrow corridor, so steep that the wooden rungs or stoppers had been hung or affixed to the stone, making of it an amalgam of staircase, ladder, and path into blackness.

She could hear Bram breathing heavily, slowly, controlling his not-so-latent claustrophobia. It wasn't usually so bad, but … ah, he was drawing Verena's attention, obliging her to caretake a little.

Saint Bram, taking her mind off Parrish, Sophie thought. I don't deserve you.

The air coming up from the shaft was fresh, cold, and ever so slightly wet. Cave breath, she called it: the moisture that permeated systems that lay atop fast-moving underwater rivers.

“We've had the Sylvanner brought to an audience chamber,” Brother Piper said. “Follow me.”

Sophie raised her light and camera, capturing the text on the floor before stepping eagerly onto the incline. The stone underfoot was slick and the passage led down a good long way—about thirty vertical feet, she estimated—then ended in a shaft that might have been a train tunnel, lined on both sides by regular round chambers, each barely illuminated.

Brother Piper managed the incline nimbly, smiling encouragement up at the others before leading them along the corridor. It was punctuated by random boulders, above and below, and he'd utter a cheery “Watch your head!” or “Mind your toes” with about every third step.

They arrived in a space that was brighter by several orders of magnitude than the corridor, dominated by a pool on the floor that appeared to be filled with bioluminescent dinoflagellates in—Sophie dipped a finger for a taste—fresh water. The glow emanated upward, bouncing off a big silver bowl, newly shined, set into the ceiling. There were candles, too, set at one-foot intervals on a ledge that encircled the chamber.

Sophie took a slow circle of the room, recording everything, before homing in on the body.

Highfelling had been laid on a carved stone couch angled much like a recliner, with a chest strap to hold him in place. Under the belt, he was clad in a long white robe. Beside him was a low table with bamboo cups of cold water and a steaming urn of what smelled like rosehip tea.

He was unmistakably dead but, as advertised, he had not decayed; the smell in the air reminded Sophie of something in a butcher's shop, meat nearing its expiration date but not quite past it.…

Tonio took a position as far from the corpse as he could, quietly muttering what Sophie guessed was a prayer, in Erinthian.

Brother Piper rang a bell, held his hands over the dinoflagellate pool, then washed them in a nearby basin before holding them over the body. “It is no small thing to restore the murdered,” he intoned. “Who would take responsibility for such a portentous choice?”

Before Sophie could respond, Verena said, “I am the interested party here.”

“You will feed Wevvan Highfelling, clothe him, take him where he wishes to go? Answer his questions, hear his travails, seek his loved ones?”