Chapter Eight Before
IT WOULD TAKE two weeks to sail to Beacon Island. Two weeks to Archenport, to a proper city, to other people.
To freedom, if Cat could only seize it.
She certainly did her best along the journey, laying whatever groundwork she could.
Charming Captain Quine, ingratiating herself to his officers.
Observing their card games, clapping with amusement whenever one man or another won a mediocre hand.
Cat even made sure to save a biscuit for the cabin boy every night, giving it to him in plain view of the other sailors.
If the low men talked of Lady Rose, they would talk of her gentle nature and generosity.
Lieutenant Fell looked on silently, watching her with his silver gaze. But his advice was still a steadying anchor.
A sullen, sad shadow will win no allies.
So Cat lit a candle within herself and let it shine upon any who passed. She tried to make herself the opposite of a sullen shadow indeed—all while Lord Rose sank deeper into his toad-like nature. Of Ryman, the crew said many things, none of them complimentary.
“I am a son of House Rose, a born lord of the Meridian. Quine may not be a gentleman, but he is not foolish. He should cede his cabin to us, at the very least,” he muttered over his breakfast porridge.
Her wretched husband refused to eat in the wardroom with the officers or, gods forbid, in with the greater crew. Instead, he insisted on taking their meals on deck, in full view of the laboring men.
It was no wonder Captain Quine had not invited them to dine in his cabin, let alone give them his quarters.
Ryman’s scowl deepened. “It is unbecoming of a lady such as yourself, sharing a bunk with your maid.”
Across the table, Cat scraped her bowl clean, humming a noncommittal answer around her spoon. Sara is a far better bedfellow than you, my lord.
Ryman huffed, the first steps towards another mortifying tantrum. Most days, Cat did her best to coach her husband into being less of an ass, if only to improve her own lot.
Most days she failed.
“At least I am not so ill as I was on the crossing,” he added, snapping at his bowl, indicating for more. Sara was quick to oblige, clearing the bowl to run back to the cook. “The Lyrian agrees with me now.”
“It does indeed,” Cat replied with an empty smile. She eyed his still-sunburned cheeks, his squinting eyes barely tolerant of the brightness, and his hands blistered from even the slightest hint of physical labor. “It does indeed.”
“Don’t repeat yourself, you sound like a parrot,” Ryman said, gulping at his ale.
Cat smiled even wider, a balm against the burn of his rudeness. “Thank you for pointing it out.”
“I will not let you shame us in front of Governor Baltross. You are to be every inch a Meridian lady, befitting of a lord.” He surveyed her with a roving eye, gaze snagging here and there.
On frayed hems, on new freckles. “I know you were not raised well, Catrine, but gods willing, you can rise to this occasion.”
Not raised well.
Cat swallowed hard. He was not wrong. She was low country nobility at best, with a simple education, enough to read and write well, but little else.
She did not speak Esperese or Anticlean, and could not play piano or violin, nor sing.
Her embroidery was merely passable, her stitches forever crooked and mismatched.
But I am not so stupid as you, she thought, holding her smile. You, Lord Rose, who were given the best of everything and still manage to act like a pig.
“I hope I do,” she answered truthfully.
Sara put another bowl of porridge on the table, along with a rasher of heavily cured bacon. Lord Rose set to it like a wolf.
“Did you know the governor back home?” Cat prodded, gentle and strategic.
“On the Continent? I had little time for government business and politics,” Ryman spat.
As always, Cat saw between the threads her husband so poorly spun. Lord Rose was never appointed to governance, never invited to political gatherings, never consulted by anyone on matters of state or import.
“And what of his wife?” she continued, her tone light.
Ryman rolled his eyes. “Just another society woman,” he answered. “If you can call these islands society at all.”
Above them in the rigging, a few sailors climbed hand over hand along rope ladders.
They cast roving shadows across the deck, like flocking birds.
Cat wanted to join them and fly away. Her eyes followed their forms, the men in varying states of undress.
Unlike the officers, the enlisted sailors were far less fastidious with their uniforms. Cat could not help but marvel at so much bare skin, tanned and toned by life onboard a navy ship. They were so unlike Ryman.
“Perhaps we can make a little society for ourselves,” she offered, thinking of streets and markets, of people beyond her quiet, crumbling island.
Ryman tipped his head, a bemused look crossing his face.
He put his hand on his chin and stared, examining his wife.
For a moment, he looked softer, kinder. Not a gentleman, but something close.
Reminding Cat of the first time they met, the way he smiled and took her hand.
How he had promised to give her a different life than the one she lived.
It gave her pause, Cat’s sharp edges wearing smooth.
“You say such stupid things,” he finally mused, smiling at her with empty eyes.
Her sharpness returned tenfold, air hissing through her teeth as she sucked in a steadying breath. Fire licked up her spine, the rage hot and burning, and Cat’s vision slanted, taking on a red sheen.
Before she could construct a response, Lord Rose laughed, a cruel sound. It was blissfully cut off by a shout from the rigging, one of the shadows pointing.
“Sail!” the spotter called, a hand stretched out, the other holding a spyglass.
Dread doused Cat’s rage like a veil of ice across a hearth.
She spun, peering across the water, trying to discern a sail between the Venerable and the distant islands dotting the horizon. After five days at sea, they were close enough to Pearl Key to see her white dunes, with the faded mountains of Goldcoast beyond.
As Cat’s eyes darted along the flash of cresting waves, a black flag unfurled in her mind’s eye, a smiling skull sewn on its face.
She stared and stared, willing a ship to appear, its flag bared for all to see so she might at least know her own fate.
The white skull or the green cross?
Pirates or the Esperese navy?
Neither would pass without a fight.
The Venerable was a warship before all else, as Captain Quine so often liked to remind them. He ferried the Roses under orders from the governor, but this was not a transport vessel. The war did not lie down and stop for anyone, least of all a minor lord of the Meridian.
If duty called, the Venerable would answer.
Her heart thumped. She remembered the Credence, what it felt like to cower belowdecks.
To be marched back out like a spoil of war, her life shredded around her, her knuckles bleeding.
Her hand was still scarred, a little cross of pearly white on the bump of her ring finger.
She touched it now, running a thumb across the marked skin.
But her fist on a man’s nose was not the touch she remembered most from that day.
His name was Valerian, she reminded herself, as if she might ever forget the young man with tempest eyes. He stole a prayer bead from her pocket, whispered his name and something else.
May the sea always sing for you.
The sea filled her senses. Blue, green, white clouds above and white waves below. The sailors jumped to attention, their officers shouting orders, but Cat barely heard them above the wind in the sails and the slap of water against the hull.
Is the sea singing now? she thought, listening.
Searching.
Then a ship bloomed on the horizon, and the spotter cheered.
“The Lion!” he shouted, describing a distant flag. “She’s one of ours! Meridian navy!”
A joyous roar rippled across the deck, and Ryman gave a theatrical sigh, returning to his breakfast.
Cat sighed too. But in disappointment or relief, she could not say.
* * *
THE MERIDIAN WARSHIP wasted no time closing the distance, turning to catch the wind. In what felt like seconds, the imperial vessel the Paladin approached. The ship was smaller than their own, with fewer gun decks, but still a formidable ship of the line.
To Ryman’s dismay, sailors cleared away the breakfast table, leaving him befuddled with his half-full bowl of porridge in one hand.
Cat tried to press herself against the rail, both to keep out of the way and hide herself.
Certainly, the navy would not want a woman in the center of their military business.
She caught Lieutenant Fell’s eye in the fray.
She wanted to ask what was happening but knew he would not answer.
The officer was too busy jockeying for position next to his captain, far more concerned with his own prospects than Lady Rose’s.
He managed to plant himself at Quine’s side, to receive the party from the Paladin in a place of great honor.
Cat shrank back even farther, safe in the shadow of the quarterdeck. Keeping her distance, but well within earshot.
“What news, sailor?” Quine said, facing the officer from the Paladin when he clambered on deck.
The man panted, still breathless from rowing between the ships and climbing up the sea ladder. But he bowed, holding out a piece of folded parchment.
“Captain Quine,” the officer said. “I bring word from Captain Kent.”
Shading his eyes, Quine glanced over the man’s shoulder and back to the Paladin bobbing some distance away.
“He is a long way from his posting in the Stills. Well, your captain is welcome to join me for tea if he likes,” Quine said as he took the parchment.
It was a polite, if useless, offer. This was the deck of a warship, not a Brycam City parlor. But Meridian etiquette dictated such things, Cat knew. Even here, in the middle of a hostile sea.