Blightborn (14 page)

Of course, what he wanted then was their strange little garden. That ties into all this somehow—him being on the run, the McAvoy farm being burned up, the proctor sitting at the mayor’s house like a goose on a nest of eggs. Folks haven’t seen the mayor, but some say they saw the proctor and her guards pulling a body out of the McAvoy house, and it was the elder Barnes.
Killed, they say, by Arthur McAvoy. And they say Cael killed Pally Varrin and Grey Franklin with naught but his slingshot.

Wanda doesn’t know all the details. She just wants Cael back. She hopes that bringing him back means they’ll pardon him of whatever crimes they think he committed.

She knows he didn’t commit them.

Cael’s not a killer. Nor is he the type to burn another man like this . . . vagrant is claiming. A contrary voice inside her asks,
Or is he?

As if he can sense her thinking about him, Eben the vagrant sidles up next to her.

“You don’t have your sail-legs yet,” he says.

“No, I suppose I do not.”

“This ain’t your crew.”

“Well. No. There was another girl, but . . .” She doesn’t know the whole story so she doesn’t bother telling it. All she knows is that Felicity tried to get on this boat, but Boyland denied her. She cried. Jeez, the girl didn’t just cry; she fell to the ground and wept like a mother who lost her child. Wanda knew the look in Felicity’s eyes. Felt its familiarity. The girl was in love with Boyland, and he didn’t love her back.

Well, they weren’t Obligated, so she can just shove off,
Wanda thought at the time. The coldness of that notion surprises her as she remembers it now. Just the same: Obligation has to mean something.

Eben adjusts his damp swaddling. “I’m going to need to change this. Do you have a first-aid kit?”

“You’re gonna have to talk to the captain about that.” She
gestures toward Boyland, who stands at the front of the boat, looking out over the corn. Jorge Cozido is at the other end, lying down, shielding his eyes from the sun above, sipping at his flask.

“Boyland is his name,” the hobo says.

“Boyland Junior. His father was Boyland. He was mayor.”

“Was?”

“As in, he’s not anymore.” She doesn’t say any more than that. But already she wonders if it’s too much.

Dangit
. This hobo’s like her dog, Hazelnut, scratching at the bedroom door to be let in—old Haze would scratch real quiet, almost so you couldn’t hear it. But eventually the scratches would grow louder and louder, all the more insistent, and . . . well.

He’d end up in the room. Snoring and farting and scratching.

But she doesn’t want to let this mongrel in.

“Why you hunting these boys?” he asks. “You seem a strange crew for that. Figured this sort of thing was up to the Empyrean.”

“We’ve been deputized!” says Mole, suddenly hanging above their heads from the mast-pole. Dangling there like a possum.

“Deputized, huh.”

Wanda shrugs. “I guess you’d say that.”

“But it’s different for you,” the hobo says.

“It’s different for all of us.”

“How’s that?”

“I’d rather not say.”

He laughs. “It’s okay, Little Mouse. I’m just making talk. Killing time. We don’t have much if we don’t have each other. People, I mean. Heartlanders.” She feels his eyes cutting holes in her.

“Cael was my Obligated,” she says, blurting it out.

“Sorry to hear that.”

She wheels. “Don’t be. He’s a good boy. Still a boy, though, which means he makes mistakes, and that’s okay because I’m still a girl, and
I
still make mistakes, too. But don’t misunderstand me. I know he didn’t burn up your face like that. Not how you said it. He’s not that way.”

“He’s a mean whip is what he is.”

“Shut up.” She feels tears building behind her eyes, which surprises her, but she stiffens her lip and folds her arms over her chest as if tightening her body will stop them. It works. For now.

The hobo continues: “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Vipers are born of other vipers. Bet the whole family is a nest of troublesome types.”

Suddenly, Jorge Cozido is there.

“This piss-soaked guttersnipe botherin’ you?” he asks Wanda, giving Eben a long look over.

She shakes her head. “No. No, Mr. Cozido, it’s fine. Thank you.”

Eben holds up his hands: a sign of surrender.

“Gonna go see about that first-aid kit,” he says. “If you’ll excuse me.”

AN UNSCHEDULED VISIT

BALASTAIR’S DREAMS RUN
together like spilled paint on a white-tile floor, colors crawling between grout-lines, drips of red against rivulets of purple, or blue, or black. He dreams of being stomped by horses without skin, horses who are all bone and who have wings made of book bindings and black leather. He dreams of kissing Gwennie, and bedding Cleo, and punching Eldon Planck in his handsome-yet-unobtrusive nose. He dreams of falling, of flying, of dancing, of drinking—and it’s this last one that lingers with him, the taste of the Ghost Orchid floral brandy leaving with him the taste and scent of elderflower, hibiscus, and rose petal. His stomach clenches like a fist and then—

Next thing he knows, he’s vomiting in the drawer of his bedside table.

His head pounds.

Boom boom boom
.

“Uh-oh!” Erasmus says, hopping about on the back of the
lounge. (The little bird, free from his cage. Not that it’s ever locked. Erasmus has the freedom to fly where he chooses. He is less a pet and more a friend.)

The hangover throbs louder:
Boom boom BOOM
.

“At the door! At the door!” Erasmus chirrups.

Balastair groans, sits up, tries to stand.

His head is pounding, yes.

But so is the front door.

He staggers forward, thinking,
You really fell into your cups last night, didn’t you?
Feels as if he almost drowned in them.

Balastair opens the door.

“Peregrine,” he says. Trying to hide his shock and failing utterly.

The grackle flits through the air and lands on Balastair’s shoulder.

The peregrine’s mouth tightens into a small, stiff smile.

“Harrington,” Percy Lemaire-Laurent says. “You look well.”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“Of course I am. You look like a half-digested cat. May I come in?”

Can I stop you?

“Absolutely. Yes. Please.”

“Please!” Erasmus squawks.

They sit across from each other at a mirror-topped nook table. Above their heads, a small chandelier hangs, and the pink waterdrop crystals
tink
together with the flotilla’s gentle, undetected movement.

Balastair pours boiling water slowly over a carafe and filter of ground coffee. Steam rises. The scent of coffee parts the brandy fog.

“Would you like a cup?” Balastair says. “They’re, ah, my own beans. I mixed two strains: Corwin’s Winedark and Allborn Redjack’s Robustness.”

“You’d rather be doing that, wouldn’t you?”

“What’s that? Drinking coffee?” He tries to take a sip and burns his lips.
Like Vikare, flying too close to the sun with wings of wax
.

“No, growing your beans. Or any plants at all.”

“It was my mission in life, yes.”

“Your mother’s mission, you mean.”

“And her father’s before her. And it was mine, too. But I have been . . . retasked.”

“The Pegasus Project.”

“Yes. Of course. Not toward the
Initiative
,” he says, dropping that word, the same word that Eldon Planck dropped just last night. He hopes that it will elicit some reaction—anything at all!—from the peregrine, but Percy’s face remains as undisturbed as a blue sky.

“Well, to the point of my visit, then,” Percy says. “You made something of a mess at last night’s party—”

“I did, and I’m truly sorry, a grave social error on my part. Won’t happen again. All better now.”

“You didn’t answer any of my messages last night.”

“Messages?”

“I came to check on you and the girl.”

Balastair’s guts turn to slush.

Oh, by the seventh heaven. Gwennie.
He goes through it in his mind as quick as a lashing vibro-whip:
We were here. I was drinking. I was babbling. What was I babbling about? Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, I rested my head, then . . . then she left. Or she stayed. Or was she . . . did she . . .

Did we?

“Balastair?” the peregrine asks, snapping his fingers around the margins of Balastair’s face. “You in there?”

“Ah. Yes. As noted, I really lost my rudder last night, and I’m trying to get it back.” He clears his throat into his fist. “We’re fine. Gwendolyn and I. Just fine.”

“The girl. I want to see her.”

“See her? The girl?”

“Yes, Balastair, the girl.”

“She’s . . . gone to work,” he says. “Mucking stables.”

“How would she have operated the elevator?”

He’s on to you
.

“She . . . didn’t, of course. I did. Me. I took her down and then came back up here for a little, you know. A little winky-eye.”

“Winky-eye!” the grackle grackles.

His headache is bright and cruel. A living, laughing thing.

“So you will not mind if I go and see her?”

“See her.”

“In the stables, yes.”

Balastair forces a cock-eyed smile. “It wouldn’t be my place to stop you. You’re the peregrine. No door is locked to you.”

“I like to ask. Manners are important to men such as we.”

“Then please, let me acquiesce to your manners and say, of course you may”—
What if she’s not there oh no oh no oh no no no
—“go to the stables and see her. You have my permission.”

“You should come, too.”

“Should I?”

“You should.”

“Then let me find a more presentable outfit than the one from last night. I shall don professional garb.”

“Please,” the peregrine says. “But make it snappy.”

“Of course.”

He goes upstairs.

Into his bedroom.

He stands at the foot of his bed for a little while. Trying to remember. Reaching back through the ache and the fog to see if he can conjure any memory of what Gwennie did. Or where she went. Or—

Something’s off.

The door. To his desk-room. It’s wide-open.

The light is on.

She didn’t—

She couldn’t have—

He steps through the door, and instantly he sees what’s missing.

“My visidex,” he says.

His headache leaps and grows, a fire fed by a thousand fears.

THE KEY

IT’S LANE WHO
figures it out. The three of them lie on their bellies behind the clay berm, playing with this device far fancier than anything Heartlanders are used to. The screen glows bright and is projected a quarter inch off a hard glass backing, which is itself backed by a scalloped titanium shell.

On the flip side is the Empyrean logo. Beneath that, another bit of text, not embossed but on its own backlit screen:
Archaway Noribishi Collective v4.2
.

“Check this out,” Lane says, tapping the screen. He’s good with this thing already. Opening up all kinds of screens: a camera, some documents, schematics. Said he was good at it because his father used to let him help set the programs on the motorvators, which used screens like these.

When Lane taps the device, a small map opens—Cael figured the
map
icon would’ve loaded that, but that’s why Lane’s holding the visidex and not him, because by now he would’ve
winged the thing into the corn and been done with it; the map on the screen is explicitly local.

They can see the clay berm—a topographical lump. Beyond it, the Provisional Depot. On the map it’s just a big rectangular block surrounded by a lot of smaller rectangles and circles (crates and barrels, Cael realizes). But inside the depot, within that larger rectangle, is another, smaller icon: an antenna with little lightning symbols radiating away from it.

“Someone in there has a visidex, just like us,” Lane says.

It takes a second for Cael to understand what that means. He suddenly yanks the visidex out of Lane’s hand and starts feeling around for a rock—“We need to break this thing, shatter it so they can’t see us.”