Chapter Seventeen Nina
Traveling out of Belavere City via stolen narrow boat was treacherous.
First was the regularity with which we passed other boats, their hulls gliding within inches of ours, the passengers aboard staring out the windows or from the stern.
It forced Patrick, Theo, and me to stay below, where we drew the curtains and hoped John (who had quickly decrypted the coal engine’s mechanisms and taken the helm) could guide us in the right direction.
In the city, water Charmers turned the currents of the canals and left Crafters to steer the tillers without steam chests coughing soot into the air, but outside the city’s network, the drivers were left to paddle or shovel coal, sputtering to their destinations unaided by magic.
John Colson sat out there in broad daylight, wearing his bowler hat and whistling, hardly the man I’d envisioned him being.
I’d imagined a man much like Patrick. Contemplative, watchful, meticulous.
But John seemed closer to Gunner in demeanor.
There was gravel in his voice, and he carried himself with violence.
Like Donny, he spoke unchecked. He was, in every part of his appearance, Crafter-hewn.
Tall and broad shouldered, like Patrick.
His face heavily lined and bearded. He did not look out of place as he moved coal from bin to chest, picking dry blood from his whiskers.
The cabin of the narrow boat was filled with soft bench seats lining the walls from one end to the other, a tiny aisle down the middle. The cushions, while finely embroidered, smelled damp, and with the windows closed, I soon felt mildew in my hair, spores colonising my nostrils.
I peered out of a hole in the threadbare curtains as yet another narrow boat passed by, and for a moment, a child stared out of his own porthole and met my eye, his forehead wrinkling against the glass.
And then the boat was gone. My view was replaced with the brown water of the black-bricked canal, grass and ravenous shrubbery barricading the entire length of it.
“We should be skirting around Gilmore soon,” Theo murmured, his voice unsure, as though it might offend.
And it did. The three of us hadn’t uttered a single word to one another since leaving the deck and hiding below like mice. Patrick’s knuckles were bleeding. Theo could make eye contact with no one.
I felt shell-shocked, like my bones hadn’t yet settled back in place. My eyes begged to close. My ears rang in a soothing way, my nervous system seeking to numb itself.
Across from me, his knees careful not to glance mine, sat Patrick, his head in his hands. He, too, did not look my way.
All that calamity. Now nothing except damp, uncomfortable silence.
Theo cleared his throat. “Does—do you think your father knows the way?” His eyes swept the window at the rear, where John’s legs could be seen before the tiller. Patrick’s father sang in low tones that floated down into the cabin.
“The way to what?” I asked, my voice odd and hollow.
Theo only seemed relieved that I’d spoken at all. “Morland,” he said. “There aren’t any canal maps aboard. I checked the storage holds, but—”
“Southeast past Gilmore,” Patrick muttered, though he continued to cradle his forehead in one hand. His eyes were now pinched closed. “Due east, seven clicks after Fuller’s Pass. Then straight on.”
Theo looked at Patrick with a creased brow. “You’ve been there before?”
“Been everywhere,” Patrick said, seemingly with momentous effort.
“And you memorized the geography?”
“I did,” he said bluntly. When I finally saw his face, it seemed stricken. He leaned his head back on the bench seat, a bruise burgeoning slowly over his right cheekbone.
Questions poured in, a river of them, but instead of asking a single one, I slept.
When I woke, it was dark beyond the curtains. Theo’s light snores sounded nearby. Water lapped gently against the hull, and moonlight broke over Patrick’s face.
He was awake, his fingers steepled in front of his lips. And finally, as though the dim made it easier to do so, he was looking at me. Watching.
His eyes were silver, swirling in unshed misery.
I was curled onto my side and found no energy to rise. My lip trembled. “Will you tell me everything?” I asked, terrified that he would turn away. Terrified of what he might say if he didn’t.
If he denied owing me a damn thing, that would be just as well. What would he have to say to Lord Tanner’s agent, harbinger of Kenton’s downfall? Would he spit and yell this time? Or worse, those same deadened eyes I’d seen after our capture? That slow breaking.
Did he hate me?
His expression faltered, then collapsed altogether. One beat, two, and he left his seat.
Not to leave, but to kneel before me.
He didn’t touch me. Didn’t reach out to take my hand.
Instead, he said with a depth I could not fathom, “I’m sorry, Scurry girl.”
He told me everything. Every wretched detail. From the moment Lord Terrence Shop had stepped into his room and spoken of wolves, made outlandish promises of a truce and idium for the brink, to the moment my mother hung.
“I didn’t trust him,” Patrick said, “but he wanted Tanner dead, and it seemed we could agree on that.”
With every word, I felt fire lash beneath my skin. “And you all decided that I should be the one?”
His eyes flashed. “No.”
“Then who?” I asked, just now picturing it, Patrick and John and Theo and Lord Shop, foreheads bent as they concocted a plan I wasn’t party to.
“Me” came a cracked voice, and Theo’s body rose in the dark. I couldn’t see his face, but the register of his voice was soft and pained. “We told Patrick that it would be me.”
It would have been more dignified, had I lifted my head from the bench seat, untucked my limbs from the curl of my torso. I did neither. What use was dignity now?
“Why?” I asked. A child questioning the turn of the earth.
Theo sighed like it might be his last. “Because my father decided that it would benefit him most to have you assassinate Tanner, and I told him Patrick would never allow it. I told him he’d refuse to siphon a drop of idium if that was the case.”
“So you tricked the ink out of him and passed it on to me?”
Theo nodded gravely. I was glad I couldn’t see the contours of his face.
“Was my mother to be hanged in the hopes it would inspire me to… to kill?” The words left my lips on a tremble, the realization that I was now a murderer finally dawning.
For seven years I’d escaped without blood on my hands, and it had caught up to me anyway.
Perhaps it was visible in my expression—the fabric of my being disintegrating—because Patrick’s hand came over my wrist and his face hovered before mine, imploring me.
“Shh,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”
Another lie.
“Was it Lord Shop who ensured the lever was pulled?” I asked. I needed this one last truth. I saw my mother’s face, terror consuming her, following her into death as she swung.
“Yes,” Theo said, hesitant now.
“But you knew?” There were no tears, no cracks in my voice. Just an emptiness I couldn’t put a name to. “Did you know my mother would die for this plan?”
They answered one after the other.
A shake of the head from Patrick.
Silence from Theo.
Answer enough.
I rose then, finally gathering my feet beneath me, Patrick rearing back with his hands proffered, as though waiting for me to fall.
I faced Theo, compelled by whatever dregs remained of myself.
“Did you walk into that courtyard, knowing my mother would die for your father’s benefit? Be man enough to answer me.”
Moonlight crept through and turned him bone-colored. His jaw shook. “Yes.”
And I thought, we were kids together. We grew up together. Did you forget?
A painful breath rattled out. “And… did you know he’d have me whipped afterward?”
Theo swallowed. His eyes went skyward and then to his shoes, his shaking hands into his pockets. Still, he wore that Artisan blue. “Yes.”
Patrick allowed me two hits. The first was open handed and landed across Theo’s cheek, a shock of crimson left behind.
The second was a closed fist skidding across his jaw, the impact lackluster, my knuckles seizing immediately.
Theo’s eyes were wild as he raised his arms to fend me off, but there was no need.
Patrick’s arms came around my torso like thick iron bands, pinning my arms down, and I settled instead for shrieking at Theo.
And I dug up every foul name Scurry had taught me and hurled it at him, then through him to his father, to Lord Tanner in the ground somewhere. To every minister in the House and all those that came before.
“You fucking swank!” I shouted, bucking against Patrick’s hold, useless as it was. “Fucking godless bastard!”
And it wasn’t until Theo’s face was awash with tears that I caught my breath, which gave Patrick opportunity to whisper, “He saved us, Nina. I ain’t sayin’ it makes up for the rest, but you should know he got us all out.”
“His conscience arrived too late!”
Patrick swore as I bucked again. “You’re right. Oy! Listen to me, you’re right! But his conscience saved you from the whip, and I can’t let you kill him, whatever satisfaction it might bring me.”
“My mother is dead!” I said. And my limbs weakened, my knees buckled. “Did she deserve it, Theo? Did I?”
Theo said nothing. From his place on the bench seat, I heard the soft sounds of his regret, and it meant little. It made up for nothing.
“Let go of me,” I said, and Patrick did by degrees.
I pulled myself away from his hands, and made my wooden limbs carry me away, back to the steps and out to the deck, ducking my head under the cabin roof and slamming the door behind me.
There was John, a wrinkled, calloused assortment of his three sons, whistling into the icy night, one hand on the tiller.
“Evenin’, miss,” he nodded to me, spitting over the side of the hull. “Should get some sleep while you can. We’ll be in Morland by sunup.”
I contemplated him a second longer, then walked toward him with my fist already clenched. What was one more strike? One more split knuckle?
But I was too obvious or too weak, and John stood easily with a slowness that warranted embarrassment and caught my fist in his wide hand.
A short laugh barked from him. “You’ve got some spirit left, at least,” he said, then pitched my hand off to the side as one shoos a fly. “We’ll have to teach you to box properly.”
I descended to the deck then. Melted to it. Buried my face in the darkness of my hands.
After a moment or two, I felt John join me, his hand patting my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, hen. I’m sorry for your poor ma. There ain’t any justice in it.”
Tears plinked off the wood. I wished he would stop speaking.
“And I apologize for the knife,” he added. “Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
And that was perhaps the only truth. There was no meaning to any of it.
War was a gentlemen’s game. Women were just the currency.