Bone, Fog, Ash & Star (16 page)

“Their lives seem very hard,” Foss commented.

“Not like the north,” sneered Brouton, then seemed to remember who he was talking to and shut his mouth. That was all he said all day. Whenever they passed a village with a market he began to shoot Eliza sidelong glances. She filled his nets with fish and he stopped to sell them to a fishmonger. Each time he returned with a tortured grin on his face, pockets jangling with coins.

The river wended its way southeast and then northeast, growing deeper and narrower as they went. The fields on either side became richer and greener, with forest stretching off in the north and low mountains thick with cedars to the south. It was an overcast day, with low rumblings of thunder, but thankfully it did not rain. They slept in the boat and the next morning Eliza made her way into the town to buy bread for breakfast while Foss stayed hidden in the boat.

As she walked through the town the villagers stopped in their tracks and stared at her. That was nothing unusual in itself but she noticed ravens hopping along the tin rooftops and began to get the uneasy sense that something was wrong.

In the bakery, she saw a newspaper lying open on the greasy counter and her heart nearly stopped. There was a very accurate sketch of her and of Foss. She snatched up the paper and read the caption:
If you see these two dangerous Tian Xia worlders, report immediately. Do not approach them. Substantial reward is offered.

She looked around her in horror. The baker was squinting at her nervously. The few patrons who had been in the bakery were edging out the door. Of course they had already been reported.

“Bread,” she said. The baker handed her a loaf. She didn’t pay and he didn’t ask her to. She took the newspaper as well and hurried back to the docks, still going easy on her ankle. Foss was lying in the bottom of the boat but Brouton was gone.

“The Mancers know where we are,” said Eliza. “Or they will soon, aye. We’re in the paper, like criminals.”

“We are criminals, Eliza,” said Foss wearily, looking up. “We’ve stolen a great treasure from the Mancer Citadel.”

His face looked faded, his skin fragile and crumpled like an autumn leaf.

“Are you all right?” She asked, taken aback by his appearance.

“I am fine, Eliza.”

“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She jumped in the boat and started the engine.

“Now we’re stealing a boat,” said Foss sadly.

“I know, aye, I feel badly too,” said Eliza, steering it out into the river and revving the engine to full throttle. “It’s a horrible thing to do when he’s gotten us this far but I have a feeling he’s nay helping us anymore and we just
cannay
get caught.”

“We will not be safe for long on the river.”

“I know. Keep down.”

Eliza maneuvered them out into the thick of the fishing boats, hoping that nobody was looking at her too closely. She made her way slowly to the other side of the river. A man was getting out of a truck, putting his keys in his pocket and heading into a tobacconist’s shop set on the little wharf. She docked the boat awkwardly while a raven dove down and plucked the man’s keys from his pocket.

“Eliza Tok!” gasped Foss, shocked.

“The truck,” she said in a low voice, scrambling out of the boat. “Before anyone sees you.”

Foss hunched low and scuttled after her towards the truck. They scrambled inside and the raven dropped the keys in Eliza’s lap. She started it up and drove off before the poor man had come back with his cigarettes.

“Terrible! Terrible! We are boat thieves and car thieves on top of everything else! You’ve seen how poor the people here are. What will the man do without his truck? Or good Brouton without his boat?”

“We’re running for our lives, Foss. I can’t think of a nice way of doing this,” said Eliza. She followed the narrow gravel road out to a paved road that ran in a straight line with forest on either side. She gunned the engine and they roared eastward.

“I hope the gas lasts,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “Why dinnay we have any money? It’s been so long since I needed money.”

Foss was much too big for the truck. He had to bend over, his long arms folded on the dashboard and his head hunched low. “I didn’t know you could drive,” he said.

“My da used to let me, sometimes, when I was a kid. We travelled a lot, aye. Lots of wide empty roads like this one.”

Indeed, the whole day felt like a flashback to her early life. Run-down towns and people who were just scraping by. The underbelly of the glorious Republic. She’d been on the run from the Mancers then, too, though she hadn’t known it at the time.

A dark cloud was following them from the west, making the day seem later than it was. They passed only a few other cars on the drive to Elmount and ate the bread as they drove, but Eliza was soon hungry again.

“Can you make Illusion money?” she asked Foss.

“It would fall apart as soon as somebody touched it,” he replied, his head bowed nearly to his knees, which were pressed up uncomfortably against the dash.

“Back to begging,” she muttered.

She left Foss and the truck in the woods and walked into Elmount, which was marked out by the huge lighthouse on the bluff, fallen into disrepair along with the rest of the city. People sat at the little cafes along the waterfront eating sandwiches. Eliza was able to scavenge leftovers until she was more or less satisfied. A wind had set up and the grey sea was peaked with whitecaps. The few people left in the streets were holding their hats on and hurrying home. Shops began to close up early. There must be a storm warning out, she thought, and saw that indeed the tidal wave gates were being drawn across the harbor.

She went into a shop and borrowed a pen from the shopkeeper. He didn’t seem to recognize her, so she assumed he hadn’t looked at the newspaper. She was not so strange in Elmount; all kinds of people passed through this town. She turned over the newspaper clipping she had stolen and scrawled over the pictures of her and Foss:
Call off the Thanatosi and I will return the Gehemmis
. She gave the pen back to the shopkeeper, thanked him, and went outside. A raven was waiting for her, perched on a trash can.

“Take it to Kyreth,” she said, rolling up the newspaper clipping. The raven took it with one agile claw and took off into the darkening, stormy sky. If Foss was right and the Thanatosi could not be called off then it was pointless, but worth a try even so. Kyreth was powerful, resourceful, and might find a way Foss had not seen. At least she had something to bargain with now. But it was only a useful bargaining tool if she could be sure she was out of their reach, and that meant getting to Tian Xia and getting help.

She went back for Foss when it grew dark. With no money, and Foss’s strange appearance as well, there was no way to get tickets for one of the boats out to the archipelago. It was a matter of stealing or hiring another private boat when the storm subsided. The fishermen here were more prosperous, for Ebele’s Ocean was still full of fish; they might be harder to buy off with what meager enchantments she could offer.

Foss was glad to see the last of the truck. They made their way up the bluff to the abandoned lighthouse. The air smelled of the coming rain and it seemed as good a place as any to spend the night. The rusted door was open and they climbed up the steps to the top of the lighthouse. It was entirely black but for the dim glow of Foss’s eyes. They lay themselves down on the floor and Eliza wrapped her coat around herself for warmth. The rain came then, a great thundering rush of it.

“Just in time,” Eliza said, laughing with relief.

A flash of lightning illuminated the room and they saw that they were not alone.

Chapter

~10~

“We’ve got to say something,” said Nell.
“Honestly! I cannay eat another apricot.”

“I know. And it’s horrible being trapped in this body,” Charlie grumbled. “I think being human for so long is starting to make me sick, aye.”

“It’s nay being human, Charlie! It’s eating nothing but apricots for days!”

“I dinnay want to be rude.”

“I know, lah, but we could be here for…I dinnay know, weeks, I spose. Eliza will come for us once she’s sorted everything out and we’ll be orange in the face. We’ll have turned into mushy little apricots ourselves!”

“Really?” Charlie looked alarmed.

“No, but we’re going to get seriously ill if we dinnay eat something else, lah.”

“I’ll bring it up when we go out today.”

“Good. Thanks, Charlie.”

They were being terribly polite to each other and had not spoken again of the argument they’d had the first night or the strangeness between them that had lasted over a year. Every day Charlie went out into the apricot orchards to pick the golden fruit with Emin and Mala. The apricots were then sent off by morappus to the Faery City. Nell stayed behind poring over her cream-coloured folder, memorizing formulas and equations and arcane terminology.

A bit light-headed, her stomach grumbling, Nell climbed a spiraling staircase up to Emin’s “library.” He had told her proudly that he had books on every topic imaginable and she had almost hoped that she would find something useful for her studies. The room itself was usually large and circular, with bookshelves lining the walls and tall windows between them. However, it was clearly a recent and unfinished Illusion. Nothing in it seemed to keep its shape for long. Whenever she took one of the books from the bookshelves and opened it, it turned immediately into something else. She found herself alternately holding a large, hissing raccoon, a diamond-studded tennis racquet, and a big brass kettle before she gave up on the books altogether. The whole tower began to tilt dramatically as the day wore on, the desk where she sat changing size and shape, and sometimes the ceiling began to sag or the walls bulged in a way that Nell found most alarming.

Nell’s goal for the past year had been to study cetology, marine mammal science, with the famous cetologist Graeme Biggis. All her life Nell had longed to leave Holburg, to see the larger world, but once she left she came to appreciate the natural splendour she had grown up with. As children, she and Eliza had spent hours sitting on the cliffs in winter watching for whales, cheering whenever they saw a spout or a great dark back surging out of the waves. In the summer they swam with schools of curious dolphins, recognizing individuals year after year by size and scars. They found mushrooms that glowed in the dark and observed the nesting habits of the hundreds of species of birds that populated the island. Biology classes at Ariston Hebe had given her a context for the wonders of her childhood. Cetology in particular – exploring the mystery of those huge underwater mammals, so intelligent, so beautiful – had captivated her completely.

While many students chose to do another two years of secondary school before transferring to a university, the best students usually went on to university after their third year. As a top third-year student at Ariston Hebe she would no doubt win scholarships to any number of reputable universities, but Nell didn’t care about that. As far as she was concerned, there was no Plan B. She would go to Austermon and study with Graeme Biggis. He taught select courses at Austermon and chose his top students to be assistants on his marine expeditions. She intended to be one of them, and go deep beneath the sea to witness the lives of the marvelous creatures there. Nothing less would do.

Since she was seeking to enter the Department of Natural Science, the entrance exam would be weighted heavily towards the sciences and mathematics. There would be shorter sections on history and literature but Nell was confident of her ability when it came to the humanities. What she needed to cram were the more complicated branches of physics and mathematics. She wouldn’t be given a full scholarship unless she demonstrated excellence in all areas, and the fees were so outlandish that it was simply impossible for her to go without a scholarship.

She spent the morning deep in her notes. At odd moments her mind would wander to Jalo, the way he had bent towards her on the path and how she had stepped away like a fool. When she’d told Charlie her relationship with Oscar Van Holt was “on and off” she had made it sound rather more “on” than it was. In fact, neither of them was capable of a relationship around exam time, and while she was deeply impressed by his intellect, the more she got to know him the less impressed she was by the rest of him. Oscar Van Holt was all brain, without much charm or humour to balance him out. Jalo, on the other hand, well, Jalo was a Faery, unspeakably beautiful, powerful, mysterious. Why hadn’t she let him kiss her? What would it be
like
to kiss a Faery?

Angry with herself for wasting precious minutes with such thoughts, she went back to her notes. Kissing Jalo was far from the point. She had to ace the Austermon exam. That was all that mattered for the next three weeks.

Behind her, someone entered the room on silent feet and watched her carefully through brilliant, changing eyes before soundlessly drawing a dagger.

~~~