The Chase

The Heart came back to her on the morning of the twenty-second, in a handkerchief, in her husband's hands.

She had not expected to feel it so. She had thought she was prepared. She had lain in the captain's cot with the baby asleep against her ribs and Mrs. Hatch dozing in the chair, listening to the tramp of feet on the deck above, the shouts, the rattle of the capstan, and she had told herself: He will come when he can. But when the cabin door opened and Garrick stood there, black with soot, scorched, unshaven, grinning like a boy, with a small blue light shining through the linen in his fist, she sat up so quickly that Sennet whimpered.

She held out her arms.

He put it in her hands.

…

It was a homecoming.

That was the only word. It was not the vision of the Hall, with its great storm of images. It was not the roaring rush of the vault. It was a slow, soft, enormous unfolding, like the first warm day after a long winter. The cabin dissolved. The ship, and the river, and the morning, all faded. She felt the thread, that long hot line she had thought was cut for good, reach through the dark and tighten and sing, and she heard the Heart, the true Heart, the heart of her mother and her mother's mother, speak in the old tongue as it had spoken in her childhood.

Daughter, it said.

Daughter. You came.

She wept. She did not know for how long. She wept with her face bowed over the stone, and the baby stirring beside her, and Garrick's arm round her shoulders, and she felt, far off, as through water, the green roar of the forest rising to meet her. She saw it all. She saw the great trees nodding. She saw the temple. She saw Oma Teyra, small and straight and bright as a lamp, sitting on the steps of the shrine with her face lifted, listening.

Not long, said the old woman, without words. Not long, child.

I know, thought Ixara. I am coming.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was in the cabin windows, and the baby was awake.

Sennet lay looking at the stone.

She did not make a sound. She lay on her back on the quilt with her small fists curled, and her gray eye and her green eye fixed on the blue light with an expression of profound and peaceful recognition. The Aurelith pulsed. Sennet's chest rose and fell in the same rhythm. Their two small lights, the blue in the stone and the faint answering shimmer of the marks on the child's tiny wrist, moved together like two instruments tuning to the same note.

"She knows it," whispered Garrick.

"She knew it before she was born."

"What happens when they..." He faltered. "When it is home?"

"I do not know," said Ixara. "I have never known. Nobody has. The oldest songs do not say."

"Does that frighten you?"

"Yes." She smiled, wet-eyed. "But I think that is how it is meant to be."

…

They sailed on the ebb.

Garrick had meant to leave at once. But Pike had refused to move until Ixara had been examined, and Hatch had refused until the baby had been bathed, and Nell had refused until her men had been fed, and it was past ten before the Albatross weighed anchor and swung her black bows toward the sea. There was a thin sleet blowing. The river ran gray. Behind them, over the City, a pillar of smoke hung in the windless air, brown and ragged, with a dull red heart at its base.

Ixara stood at the taffrail with the baby in a sling at her breast.

She had not meant to look. She had been told not to. Mrs. Hatch had said, You are three days from a fire and a birth, miss, and you'll catch your death. But she could not help it. She stood in her borrowed cloak with her bandaged feet in a pair of sea-boots that Jory had found for her and watched London recede: the towers, the spires, the black dome of St. Paul's, the hundred thousand chimneys. The city that had been her prison. The city where she had been given a name, and a love, and a daughter.

I shall not see you again, she thought.

She was surprised to find that she was a little sorry.

…

The first of them came in sight at noon.

"Sail ho!"

The cry came from the masthead, thin and clear. Ixara looked up. A sailor was pointing astern, to the north, and following his arm, she saw a faint cluster of white specks on the gray horizon, like gulls on a distant pier.

"How many?" shouted Garrick, from the quarterdeck.

"Three, sir! Three at least! Square-rigged! Two sloops and a—" The man shaded his eyes. "A frigate, sir. Thirty-two guns, by her lines. She's making sail!"

A silence fell on the deck.

"Navy," said Pike quietly.

"Yes."

"They've recovered."

"They've recovered their compasses." Garrick lifted the glass. He stood on the quarterdeck in his shirtsleeves, his bandaged shoulder stiff beneath the linen, his hair blowing, and Ixara saw his jaw tighten. "Hollis. You've the charts. Where are we?"

"Off the Mucking Flats, I make it. The Nore is six leagues ahead. Beyond that, the Swin, and the channel."

"Shoals?"

"A good many."

"Are they marked?"

"On the Admiralty charts."

"They'll have those."

"They'll have better ones."

Garrick lowered the glass.

"Mr. Gale!" he called.

The first mate, a stocky red-faced Cornishman who had taken Brandt's place without a word, came running.

"Sir?"

"Every stitch of sail that will draw. Clear the guns. Both batteries, double-shotted. I want the powder-monkeys on deck and the magazine open."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"We are not going to fight," said Garrick. "I want that understood. We have a woman and a child and a dying girl aboard, and a precious cargo. But I will not be taken, and I will not be sunk. If they come within a cable's length, you may give them a broadside across the bows."

"Across the bows, sir?"

"Not at the hull. Not at the crew." His voice was hard. "There are boys on that ship, Gale. There are always boys."

…

They ran all afternoon.

The Albatross was fast. She was long and low and black, built for speed, with raking masts and a hull like a knife. In a following sea she could do fourteen knots. But the frigate behind them, the Hyperion, was newer and bigger and carried a third more canvas, and the sloops flanked her like hounds. By two o'clock they had closed to four miles. By three, to three. Ixara could see the red cross on the frigate's ensign, and the gleam of her brass guns.

She went below, once, to feed Sennet. She came up again to find Garrick at the wheel.

He had taken the helm himself. She had never seen him do it. He stood with his legs braced and both hands on the spokes and his gray eyes narrowed, reading the water as a scholar reads a page. The sleet had thickened. The sea had turned the color of slate. Ahead, in the murk, a long low line of yellow-brown showed, and beyond it a smear of white breaking water.

"The Barrow Sands," he said, without turning his head. "I'm going to take her through the Black Deep."

"Is it deep enough?"

"At high water. Which it is, in about an hour." A humorless smile. "The frigate draws four fathoms more than we do. If I'm right, she'll have to go round. That's a day's sail."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then we shall be aground on a sandbank in front of a thirty-two-gun frigate." He spared her one glance. "You should be below."

"I would rather be here."

"It's dangerous."

"So is everything."

His mouth twitched. He said nothing.

…

It was Sennet who gave her the idea.

She was standing at the lee rail with the baby against her shoulder, looking at the frigate. It had drawn level with the sands now, and she could see the white water breaking across its bows. Sennet stirred in her sling. She turned her small head. She looked, with grave attention, at the gray ship behind them, and then at the sea, and then up at the low gray cloud that hung over the estuary like a lid.

And Ixara felt the Heart, in its fold of cloth against her breast, give a long slow throb.

What? she thought.

Yes, said the stone. Yes.

She understood.

It was not a vision, or a word. It was a feeling, simple and perfect, as one knows the answer to a riddle. The sea was cold. The air was warm. The estuary lay low and wet and still, and above it hung a lid of cloud that wanted only a little push to come down. And she had in her hands, for the first time in six months, a thing that was not afraid of the dark.

She found Pike at the foot of the mainmast.

"I need a brazier," she said.

"A what?"

"An iron pan. Coals. And the largest quantity of green wood you can find." She did not wait for his answer. "And Captain Wynmore must hold his course. Whatever he sees. Whatever he hears. He must not turn."

Pike stared at her. Then, slowly, he nodded.

…

They set up on the poop.

It was Jory who found the pan: a battered iron skillet from the galley, wide as a cartwheel. Nell's men carried up a hod of charcoal. Somebody brought a cord of damp pine from the carpenter's store. Ixara knelt in the lee of the mizzenmast, with the wind whipping her hair and the baby in her sling, and arranged it all with her bandaged hands. She laid the coals. She laid the green wood. She took from the bosom of her gown the little pouch that Mrs. Hatch had pressed into her hands at the gangway, the spare she had sewn into the hem of a winter petticoat in the east bedchamber, months ago, against a day like this, and opened it.

It held a pinch of ashbloom.

It was all she had left. She looked at it, a thimbleful of dried purple dust, the last of the island's gift, and then at the stone in her lap. Its glow lit her fingers.

Together, she told them. We shall do this together.

She laid the stone in the fold of her cloak, between her knees and the pan. She struck a spark from Jory's tinderbox. The coals caught, red, then orange, and she tipped the ashbloom onto them with one hand and laid the other flat on the Aurelith.

"Mother of leaves," she said.

Her voice was steady. She was amazed.

"Mother of roots. I am your daughter. I am the voice of the Gate. I ask you for a veil."

The smoke rose.

It rose slowly, at first, a thin violet thread, no thicker than a hair. It climbed past her face. It coiled in the damp air. And then, as the Aurelith flared beneath her palm, it grew. It swelled. It rolled out across the poop like a living thing, a great soft billowing wave of lilac, thick as wool, dense as cream, and where it passed the world went out. The mizzenmast vanished. The rail vanished. The sailors at their stations dwindled to gray ghosts and then to nothing.

"Jesus wept," whispered Nell.

The smoke poured over the side.

It fell upon the water like a blanket, and spread, and thickened. It climbed. It joined with the cold sea mist rising from the estuary, and the damp from the sleet, and the heavy lid of the sky; and in the space of ten minutes the whole Thames mouth, from the Nore to the Foreland, was swallowed in a vast silent violet fog.

She could not see the bows of her own ship.

She could not see her own hands.

She knelt in the heart of it, with the baby warm against her breast and the stone throbbing between her knees, and sang the Song of the Leaves into the silence.

…

They heard the frigate's guns a minute later.

Boom. Boom. Boom. A ragged, bewildered broadside, fired at nothing, at a guess. The balls whistled overhead and fell into the sea a cable off, in tall white columns. A second salvo followed, then a third. She heard the shouts of the Navy gunners, thin and far away, and a voice crying through a speaking-trumpet: Where is she? Where's the damned ship?

Steady, said Garrick's voice, from somewhere ahead in the mist. It was very quiet and very calm. Steady as she goes. Mr. Gale, bring her two points to larboard. Mind the lead.

Aye, sir. By the mark, seven.

Seven. Good. She'll draw it.

By the deep, six!

Hold her. Hold her. Easy, now.

A ball struck the hull.

It was a lucky shot, or an unlucky one. It came out of the fog at a long slant and took the Albatross square in the stern, with a crash that shook the whole ship from truck to keel. Timbers burst. Glass flew. A fountain of splinters exploded above Ixara's head, and she screamed, and flung herself over the baby, and felt something hot and heavy graze her back and clatter across the deck.

Silence.

She lay with her arms locked round Sennet. The baby had not cried. She lay in her sling, wide-eyed, solemn, looking up at her mother's face. Ixara felt her small chest rising and falling. She touched the tiny head. It was whole.

"Ixara!"

He was beside her in an instant. She heard his boots thudding on the planks, and his hands were on her, hard, shaking, turning her over, running down her arms and her back. He was breathing as if he had run a mile. His face, close to hers, in the violet gloom, was white as bone.

"I'm all right."

"You're hurt."

"I am not. It's a splinter. It missed." She caught his wrist. "Garrick. Garrick, look at me. We are both all right."

He stared.

"The stern gallery," he said, hoarsely. "The cot. The cabin, the cabin's there— I put her cot against the stern windows, I thought it would be warmest—"

"She is here. She was with me. She's here."

He looked at the baby.

Sennet looked back at him. After a moment, she raised one small hand. She patted his chin.

He made a sound. It was almost a laugh. Then he pulled them both against his chest, wife and daughter together, in a crushing grip, and she felt him shaking from head to foot.

…

The fog held for three hours.

It carried them through the Black Deep at the top of the tide, past the Barrow Sands and the Sunk and the long yellow shoals off Harwich, in perfect blindness. The frigate lost them. She had gone round by the Swin, as Garrick had said, and when at last the mist thinned and the stars came out, the Hyperion and her consorts were hull-down to the north, going the wrong way, hunting for a ghost.

Ixara sat on the deck of the poop with her back against the mizzenmast and the baby asleep on her breast.

She was drained. She had never felt so empty. The brazier had burned out, and the ashbloom was gone, and the Aurelith lay quiet in her lap, warm and drowsy as a cat. The marks on her wrists had faded to a faint blue shimmer. She felt as though she had been wrung dry. But she was warm, and alive, and she could hear the sea, and the creak of the ship, and the low murmur of Garrick's voice, a few yards away, giving his orders to the helmsman.

She watched him.

He stood on the quarterdeck in the starlight, with Pike and Nell at his side. He had put on his coat. He had bound his shoulder. He was talking quietly, gesturing at a chart, and she saw the line of his back, the set of his head, the way he rubbed the bridge of his nose when he was tired. She knew every movement. She had memorized it.

She heard Pike say, in a low voice: "You had a chance, you know."

"Of what?"

"At the Sands. Back there. When she came about, and the sloops were on our quarter, and we had the wind." The physician's voice was dry. "Your gunners were ready. You could have raked the frigate's bows. You'd have crippled her. You might have taken her."

"I might."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Why?"

There was a pause. Ixara found that she was holding her breath.

"Because," said Garrick, slowly, "there was a cot in the stern gallery."

Pike said nothing.

"And a woman asleep beside it. And a child I had held for eleven hours." His voice was quiet and rueful. "I did the arithmetic. I wanted to win. God knows I wanted to. A broadside would have ended it in ten minutes. But I looked at the stern windows, and I thought: If they return fire, that's where it goes."

"So you ran."

"So I ran." He gave a short laugh. "It is the first time in my life, Hollis, that I have made a decision without once thinking of the stone, or the Duke, or my sister. Not even of the island. Only of two people on a ship."

"And how did it feel?"

"Terrifying," said Garrick. "And correct."

Ixara closed her eyes.

He put us first.

She had been told it, in the hold, in the library, in a hundred soft dark hours. I love you. I would walk through fire. She had believed it. She had said it herself. But there was a difference between a thing said and a thing done, and she had lived all her life among people who knew that difference, and she knew it now, in her bones, with the baby's breath warm against her throat.

He gave up the fight, and the glory, and the prize. He gave it up for a cot in a stern gallery.

She had stolen him. She had come to this country to take him, as one takes a seed from a field. She had told herself that she would use him, and leave. She had not known that she would be the one to be taken.

She opened her eyes.

…

At midnight, the wind freshened.

The Albatross rounded the North Foreland under a full moon, and the sea opened out before her, wide and black and glittering. The Channel lay ahead. Beyond it, the Atlantic. Beyond that, a green island.

Ixara went to the stern.

She stood at the rail with the baby in her arms and the stone in the breast of her cloak, and looked back. The coast of Kent was a dark line. Beyond it, far off, low on the horizon under a pall of cloud, there was a faint dull glow, red and sullen, like the embers of a dying hearth. She watched it for a long time.

It was London. It was the fire she had left behind, the pyre, the priory, the burning wharves. It was her prison and her pain and the first place she had been loved.

Slowly, as the ship drew away, the light grew fainter. It dwindled to a smudge, to a spark, to a single faint ruddy star. It flickered.

It went out.