The First Reading

Ixara had rehearsed this meeting a thousand times in the dark.

She had imagined him cruel. She had imagined him cold, and cursing, and drunk on rum, with a pistol in one hand and a whip in the other. She had imagined him laughing at her, and she had prepared a speech for that. She had imagined him striking her, and prepared herself for that, too, down to the position of her feet.

She had not imagined him standing at the end of the aisle with his lantern lowered and his face gone white, looking at her as though she were a ghost.

That was a mistake, she thought. Never prepare for the man you expect.

"On your feet," said Garrick Wynmore.

His voice was exactly as she remembered from the vents, cold and level and precise. But it had a thin crack in it now, a hairline, and she saw him hear it, and saw his jaw tighten.

She rose. It took longer than she liked. Her knees had forgotten how to unfold, and the hold swung dizzily round her, and she put out a hand to the powder keg and kept her face smooth by sheer stubbornness. When she was upright, the top of her head came to the level of his chin.

He looked at her, up and down, with the same impersonal care he had shown the stars through his sextant. She understood that she was being measured. Her bare feet. Her rags. The leather pouch at her hip. The fish-bone dagger, which she did not draw.

"You are a stowaway," he said. "You have been aboard my ship for four weeks without authorization, consuming provisions and corrupting the crew. Under the Articles, I would be within my rights to hang you from the yardarm."

"Yes."

"You understand English."

"A little." She let her accent thicken, deliberately. Let him think her smaller than she was. "I learned from the trading men who came to my island."

"Your island." His mouth twisted. "Corvane."

"You know its name."

"I know a great many things." He took a step closer. The lantern light slid up the planes of his face, and she saw what the smoke had shown her, but sharper and stranger: the severe jaw, the lines at the corners of his mouth that were the lines of a man who had not smiled in years, and the eyes. They were gray. Not the warm gray of dove feathers, but the gray of cold iron, of a fog bank, of the sea before a storm, and they were the most tired eyes she had ever seen.

A child will have those, said a small voice at the back of her head. One of them.

She locked her knees and ignored it.

"Come," he said. "You will walk in front of me, and you will not run, and you will not make a sound. If you reach for that dagger, I will take it from you. I would prefer not to hurt you."

"You would prefer."

"I am a man of science, madam, not a brute."

"Then why do you tremble?"

His hand, the left one, the one that held the lantern, closed so tightly that the light shivered.

"Walk," said Garrick.

…

The captain's stateroom was exactly as she had seen it in the smoke, and nothing like it at all.

In the smoke it had been a place of charts and candlelight. In the flesh it was a vault. A cold, ordered, dry-smelling place, walled in books and brass, where every object sat at an exact angle to every other and nothing was soft. A small stove burned in the corner. A lamp swung gently over the desk. On the desk, bolted to the wood, was the lead box.

She felt it the instant she crossed the threshold.

It struck her like a shout in an empty room. Beneath the layers of lead and brass and lock-work, faint and muffled and furious, the Aurelith was calling her. A slow, pulling, aching beat, thump and thump and thump, against the inside of her ribs, against the roots of her teeth, against the child she had not yet conceived and already could feel waiting. Her eyes filled. She turned her head so that he would not see.

Not yet. Not yet. I hear you. I am here.

"Sit," said Garrick.

There was a chair before the desk. She sat in it, because her legs gave her no choice. He remained standing, with his hands clasped behind him, and between them lay the lead box and a small stack of papers, and she saw that he had positioned himself so that his body was between her and the box.

A small, unconscious gesture. She stored it away.

"Name," he said.

"Ixara."

"Of what house?"

"I am the High Priestess of the Ahtelan. I have no house."

"A priestess." He said the word as a physician says fever. "Of the tribe whose temple I visited."

"Visited." She let the word hang in the air, and watched it land.

He did not flinch. "I conducted a transaction for a scientific specimen. I left considerable compensation."

"You left gold."

"And firearms."

"We are people of the forest. We do not eat gold." She leaned forward very slightly. "You took the Heart of the Great Forest from the stone where it slept for ten thousand years, and you left us a box of metal that cannot feed a child. Tell me, Captain. Is that what your science calls a bargain?"

A muscle jumped in his cheek.

"It is what my science calls an acquisition," he said. "I do not expect you to understand it."

"You expect me to understand nothing. You think I am a savage who hid in your hold because I was hungry."

"I think you are an intelligent woman who has used a trick of herbs and ventriloquism to terrorize a ship's crew, and I think you stowed away in order to steal something, or to be taken to England. Possibly both. What I want to know, madam, is who put you up to it."

"No one."

"Someone gave you the means."

"The smoke gave me the means."

"The smoke." He sighed, with the patience of a man deprived of sleep. "Of course. Tell me what it is that you do with the smoke."

She had expected this, too. She laid her hands flat on her knees and let her gaze go soft and distant, as she did at the beginning of a reading. "It is a door," she said. "I breathe it, and the door opens. On the other side there is time. All of it, at once. Things that have happened. Things that will happen. Things that are happening now, in rooms I cannot see."

"Convenient."

"It is a burden."

"Then prove it."

She looked up.

He had moved. He stood beside the desk now with one gloved hand resting on the lid of the lead box, and his face was composed, almost serene. A man laying a trap and enjoying it.

"I will give you one chance to demonstrate your gift," he said. "If you can tell me one thing, a single true thing, that you could not have learned from my crew, I will consider your claim. If you cannot, I will deliver you to the authorities at Bristol, and you may explain the smoke to the magistrate."

He wants me to fail, she thought, with a sudden, strange clarity. He wants it so much. He has been waiting his whole life for someone to fail.

It would have been easy, then, to give him the wrong thing. To tell him the number of rings on his hand, the name of his dead mother. Cheap tricks, the kind she might have used on a drunk trader.

But the ashbloom pouch lay at her hip, and the Heart was beating under his palm, and four weeks of darkness had worn something thin in her. She was tired of tricks.

"Give me your hand," said Ixara.

"I think not."

"Then I will tell you without it."

She closed her eyes.

It was not the smoke this time. There was no smoke; she had left the dish in the hold. It was only the Aurelith, a few feet away, beating against her bones, and him, with his heat and his tension and the whole story of him written in the air around his body. She did not need leaves to see him. He stood too close to the Heart. Everything about him was lit up from inside.

She saw a house, tall and narrow, with white stone steps. She saw a bed in an upper room with the curtains drawn. She saw a girl lying in it, small as a bird, with a heavy braid of fair hair on the pillow and a handkerchief in her hand.

The handkerchief was spotted with red.

"Her name is Odette," said Ixara.

She heard him stop breathing.

"She is seventeen. She keeps a book of star maps under her pillow, though she is not allowed to read at night. She has a habit of tapping her fingers on the sheet when she is afraid, one-two-three, one-two-three, as if she were counting for a dance." Ixara's voice was soft, and slow, and sounded to her own ears like it came from very far away. "She is very brave about it. She pretends she is not afraid when you write. But she is afraid of the nights. In the nights, her breath..."

She stopped. Something small and sharp had risen in her throat.

"Her breath goes in and out like a bird in a closed hand," she whispered. "As if she is trying to get out and cannot find the way. That is what she says. In her last letter. She wrote: I am a bird in a closed hand, Garrick. And then she crossed it out."

Silence.

It was absolute. The ship creaked. The stove ticked. She heard her own pulse, and his.

She opened her eyes.

Garrick Wynmore stood with his back against the bulkhead, as if he had been pushed. The color had drained from his face so entirely that his lips looked blue. The fingers of his gloved hand were splayed on the lid of the lead box as though it were the only thing holding him up. And in his eyes, which she had thought were gray and tired and cold, there was something she had not imagined at all.

Terror.

Not for himself. She saw that at once. It was the terror of a man who has been struck in the one place he had thought was armored.

"Who told you," he said.

It was barely a whisper.

"No one told me."

"Brandt. Pike. The boy." His voice rose. "You have been in the hold. You listened at the vents. You overheard—"

"I have never heard those words in my life. They were written on a piece of paper that is tied with a pale blue ribbon in the drawer to your left." She lifted her chin. "You keep it with the others, but you do not read it. You are afraid to read it. You have read it so many times that the creases have gone soft, and you cannot read it again."

He stared at her.

His hand moved. It dropped from the box to the edge of the desk, and from the desk to the drawer, and his fingers hovered over the brass pull as though it were red-hot. She saw him decide. She saw him open it.

The letter lay on top. A single sheet, soft as cloth. A line near the bottom crossed out in a hasty, shaking pen.

He read it. He did not need to. He stood there with the paper in his hand and read it, as though the words might have changed.

"You are lying," he said, very low. "This is some trick. A mountebank's trick. The—the girl who copied it, the clerk—"

"Ask me three questions," said Ixara.

His head came up.

"Three. Any you like. Questions only you can answer. If I am wrong once, hang me from the yardarm, and I will thank you for it. If I am right three times..." She drew a breath. "Then you will know I am not lying, Captain. And you will have to decide what you are."

…

It lasted ten minutes.

He asked her the color of the door to his childhood nursery, and she said it was green, the green of the sea in shallow water, and that the paint had been scraped by a boy's boot near the bottom. He asked her the name of the horse he'd ridden at ten, and she said it was not a horse, but a gray pony called Biscuit, and that it had died in the cold the winter his father died, and that he had been the one to find it. He asked her what he had been doing the evening before he sailed from Bristol, and she said that he had stood alone on the dock with a letter in his hand until the lamplighter came, and that he had said, aloud, to nobody: Hold on.

Each answer fell into the cabin like a stone into water.

By the third, he had sat down.

He sat with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed and his hands pressed together in front of his mouth, a man listening to the sound of his own beliefs breaking. He did not speak. The lamp swung. Ixara sat across from him with her hands folded, trembling in every muscle, and did not look away.

When at last he raised his head, his face was composed again. That frightened her more than anything. It was the stillness of a lake after a storm.

"You are a very remarkable fraud," said the Viscount.

"Captain—"

"No." He stood. "No. I have read of this. Cold reading. Hot reading. The mind of the subject supplies the pattern. You watched my face, madam. You have an extraordinary gift for it, and I commend your talent. But I am not a credulous man, and I will not be made a fool of by a clever trick and a pretty voice."

"It was not a trick."

"Then it was a coincidence."

"You do not believe that."

"I believe," said Garrick, with terrible gentleness, "that there is an explanation, and that I do not yet have it. That is the whole of the scientific method, Miss Ixara. It is not certainty. It is the courage to say I do not know yet."

She stared at him.

Of all the things he might have said, she had not expected something so honest.

"I am not going to hang you," he went on, quieter. "Nor am I going to hand you to the magistrate. Not yet. I will have you put in the sailroom aft, which has a lock and a bunk and a window. You will be fed. You will be examined. Dr. Pike will see to your health. You will answer, honestly and in full, every question I put to you."

"And if I will not?"

"Then I will have you brought back to the hold."

She almost laughed. "You are keeping me."

"I am studying you."

"You are keeping me," Ixara said again, and now she did smile, slowly, with her cracked lips, and watched him not look at her mouth. "That is a different thing, Captain. You will find it out."

"I think you misunderstand your position."

"No." She rose. Her legs held, this time. She stood in front of him in her rags with her braids in disorder and her pulse beating in time with the stone in the lead box, and looked up into those cold, haunted, beautiful eyes.

"You think you are holding me," she said softly. "But you are not the one who made the choice."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I came aboard your ship of my own will. I came to find you." She let the words sink in. "I did not stumble on you, Garrick Wynmore. I followed you. Across the sea, and in the smoke, since before you knew my name. You think you have found a stowaway in the dark."

The lamp swung. The Aurelith pulsed beneath the lid like a second heart.

"You have not found me," said Ixara. "I have chosen you."