Bloodrush (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

‘There’s nothing else to do on this cursed boat.

The faerie couldn’t argue with that, and he shrugged as Merion covered his face with the dubiously stained blanket that had come with the cot.

*

Something sharp began to slice through Merion’s slumbers and mangle his dreams, shred by shred. He could hear a distant clanging, the muted notes swirling around his head. Slowly but surely, he was dragged from the sucking depths of sleep.

The first thing he saw was Rhin waving to him from the trunk. The biscuit was nowhere to be seen. ‘Rise and shine, Lordling.’

‘What is that infernal racket?’ Merion mumbled, wiping the drool from his face.

Rhin pointed at the wooden ceiling as if the answer was written amongst the flakes of peeling varnish. ‘Ship’s bells. Better go and have a look.’

The prospect of going back on deck was about as alluring as a sausage from a leper’s pocket. Merion sighed, something of which he was quickly making a habit.

‘Who knows, it could be important,’ Rhin coaxed him.

Merion frowned. ‘If you’re so bored, then why don’t you go and have a look?’

Rhin thought for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Fine by me.’

Merion sat upright and immediately regretted it. He clamped his mouth shut, expecting to be sick, but nothing came. The nap had done him good. ‘No, you can’t go out there alone. The ship is stuffed to bursting with sailors and passengers. You’ll get seen, or tripped over, or …’

Rhin smiled, his sharp white teeth a gleaming contrast to his mottled grey skin. Merion would never have told him, but the colour kept reminding him of his father’s pallid body, lying on the sterile white tiles of the surgeon’s table. The boy shook his head, pushing that thought into the dark recesses of his mind. ‘Then come with me,’ said the faerie.

‘I believe you mean you should come with
me
,’ Merion corrected his friend. ‘Let’s use the bag.’

One of Tonmerion Harlequin Hark’s most prized possessions was, to the untrained eye, a simple rucksack. A relic of his father’s days spent exploring the frozen mountains of Indus, Merion had found it in Harker Sheer the summer before last, lodged behind a bookshelf in his father’s study. His father had grudgingly allowed him to keep it, just as long as it was put to good use, and kept safe. Merion had done just that. Made from a rough green material, and functional to the core, it was full of pockets and holes and grit. It became immediately and permanently affixed to Merion’s shoulders. He would wear it to dinner, and he would wear it to bed, having turned it into the perfect receptacle for smuggling a faerie in.

*

A crowd of passengers filled the deck: a sea of people all wrapped up in coats and scarves and blankets. They muttered to one another in hushed tones, staring at the man on the
Tamarassie
’s bridge, who was hitting the bell with a hammer every handful of seconds. A fog had fallen on the ocean, muffling the churning of the paddles, which echoed eerily about the ship. Every now and again, a lump of ice would bang loudly against the hull, and cause all the passengers to flinch.

‘What’s going on?’ Merion asked of a woman standing nearby. She was a silver-haired lady in her twilight years, standing bolt upright and proud as though a steel rod had been sewn into her coat. When she turned to face him, Merion could see a glint in her wrinkled eye, the spark of life. She smiled with two rows of very straight and very perfect teeth. A single, lonely scar marred her upper lip, leading from the creased corner of her mouth to her left nostril, weaving a fine, pink path.

‘Mist, young’un. And an ice field,’ she whispered, in a thick accent Merion had never heard before. He guessed it to be from somewhere deep in America, and he guessed right, though he did not know it. He had never been called ‘young’un’ before, and he couldn’t yet decide what to make of it.

‘Are we in danger?’ he asked politely.

‘Most likely!’ she grinned, and rubbed her hands together eagerly.

Suffice it to say Merion did not share the old woman’s enthusiasm. He heard Rhin whispering from the rucksack. ‘Sounds like this old bag’s got a screw loose.’

‘Shh,’ Merion hushed him.

‘What’s that?’ asked the woman, leaning close.

‘Er … nothing.’ Merion coughed. ‘Thought I’d heard something.’ Even though Merion had lied, at that moment a shout rang out from the bow—a sailor’s voice craggy with years of cheap tobacco and even cheaper wine.

‘Berg on the port side! To starboard lads, to starboard!’

Merion felt a shudder as the ship’s innards clanked and clattered. He could imagine rusty cogs clanked and old cables shimmying from side to side, a strange dance of elderly machinery. He craned his head to look towards the bow. The paddle on the left-hand side—or
starboard
as the sailors stubbornly called it—began to stutter and slow while the paddle on the right-hand side, the
port
side, thrashed the water viciously with its flat iron teeth. Slowly, he felt the
Tamarassie
turn. Merion, his head full of stories and headlines concerning ill-fated matrimonies between ships and ice on the high seas, half-wondered if he was about to meet his watery grave.

The boy was pondering this when a loud gasp fluttered across the deck, cold breath drawn sharply into a hundred or so mouths. The passengers began to move then, some to the railing, others shying away, hurrying to cover the eyes of their children and some of the more fragile women. The crowd split right down the middle, and Merion found himself sliding inexorably towards the railing with the braver half, gaze transfixed on an ethereal mass appearing out of the fog. He was staring goggle-eyed at the bloody crown that graced the peak of that floating mountain of jagged ice.

‘Rhin …’ he breathed, ‘are my eyes broken?’

‘No more than mine, if that’s the case,’ Rhin hissed. ‘By the Roots …’ he said, and then swore in his own tongue.

The old woman was still nearby. She broke off from staring so she could seize the young Hark by the shoulder and drag him closer to the railing, where arms and shoulders and swaddled bodies would not impair his grisly view.

‘There, young’un! Take it all in. You don’t see this every day. No sir!’

Merion didn’t even know what
this
was. Only that it was making him feel sick again. The woman talked in his ear as he took in every tiny, grisly detail.

‘Ever been to the deep ice, lad? Me neither, though I heard tales aplenty. Endless ice, they say, far as the eye can see. Not dead though, not at all. It’s full of bears and yak and foxes—and people too. Nomads from the mountains. They say a nomad is the only thing in this world that ice can’t freeze in one place. And they’re vicious folk, as you can see, lad. More animal than man,’ the woman waved her arm at the top of the iceberg as it drifted slowly past the ship, as if her jaw had become tired of flapping, and her body needed something else to flap while it rested. A moment of silence passed, punctuated only by curious whispers and the slapping of the paddles. Merion craned his neck and took it all in.

The towering shard of dirty white ice wore a crown of jagged wire and slumped bodies. Half frozen to the ice at their backs, half burnt by the endless, tormenting northern sun, six men had been bound tight to the ice with their legs slashed at the calves. Merion held a hand to his mouth as he thought of how much blood must have pumped when the men were sentenced to their exile, how they must have screamed. They were far from screaming now. What hadn’t been picked at by the gulls and petrels now lay, heads yawning at the murky air around about, empty-eyed, but still blissfully sailing the seas.

‘What did these men do?’ Merion asked in a hollow voice, whilst trying to hold back the crashing wave of nausea surging up his throat.

‘Who can tell? They don’t look nomad, not in the slightest. Soldiers, by the look of their black fingers. Powder will do that to you, it will, should you play with it long enough. White folks from the places where the wild pines meet the ice and stop dead. Hunting folk. Must have crossed paths with the nomads, then crossed swords. That’s what you get when you go wanderin’ into nomad territory. They were punished, the fools,’ she lectured, almost spitting the last word. But then, in a silent moment of respect, she held her hand to her chest and watched them drift on by, just until they disappeared back into the fog.

Merion shuddered, as if the ghosts of the dead men had tickled his spine. ‘I, er, thank you,’ was all he could think of to say.

‘Welcome, young’un,’ she nodded, and then stuffed her hands into a pair of deep, fur-lined pockets. ‘So where you headed?’

‘Probably back to my cabin …’

The woman laughed then, a harsh cackle, and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. Merion’s jolted stomach performed a somersault, and he felt that wave rising again … ‘I meant in the motherland, son, the big wide open, the Endless Land.’

Merion scratched his head. ‘Wyoming, I believe.’

The woman threw him an odd expression, the bottom half of her face pressing into her neck as her eyes and her ears lifted. A high-pitched hum rose and fell in her throat. ‘Been there before, have you?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Seems an odd choice, is all, for a young willow like you.’

Merion found himself trying to stand wider, thicker somehow. He failed. ‘Trust me, madam, there was no choice in the matter.’

‘Don’t know many folk from Wyoming. Don’t know many heading there neither, ‘cept for workers.’

‘Should I be worried?’

‘I’d be worried about her instead. She’s mad as a bucket of smashed crabs,’ Rhin hissed, his voice a skinny whisper on the icy wind.

‘Gods, no, young’un. I don’t suppose you shouldn’t,’ she shook her head vehemently, but that last sentence stuck like a fishbone in Merion’s gullet.
Suppose
. He hoped it was just the old woman’s strange drawl, or her astoundingly appalling grammar, that made him start to sweat, even in the cold.

‘Well,’ the woman said, and clapped her hands. ‘Best be back to my supper. Good luck to you, son. Fare well.’

‘Madam.’ Merion sketched a shallow bow. He abruptly felt a little foolish. Bowing, there on a rusty deck in the middle of the wide Iron Ocean. Well, he may not be in London any more, but he was London-born, a son of a lord, and that meant that it wasn’t just blood flowing through his veins, but manners as well, stout, Empire-grown manners.

If you’re going to get stabbed, then get stabbed by a gentleman. At least then you get an apology along with his cold length of steel.
Merion had heard that whilst hiding under his father’s desk during one of his long and stuffy meetings. The young Hark had been unearthed and captured shortly after, unable to stifle a sneeze. His father had beaten him in the garden. Not enough to bruise, but enough to make him think twice the next time.

‘You’re incorrigible, you blaggard,’ Merion snapped at his rucksack, once he was good and alone.

‘That one’s definitely missing a few tiles from the roof,’ Rhin sniggered.

Merion rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s just go inside before any more nightmares swim past.’

‘Right you are.’

As they made their way back to the main stairs, and back to their tiny cabin, Merion scratched his head and asked, ‘How many miles, Rhin?’

The faerie didn’t even have to count. ‘One-thousand, one hundred and ninety-four.’

‘What was that particularly colourful word you used that time? When you decided to “spar” with Lord Hafferford’s spaniel?’

‘Clusterfuck.’

‘That’s the one.’

THE ENDLESS LAND

‘It’s been three days now since I left. Sift must be furious, but there’s no going back. The soldiers keep on coming, spreading wider. Killed two yesterday, but now the sewers are crawling with them, which means I’ll have to go over, through the streets. Damn if this isn’t heavy.’

30th April, 1867

I
t was a Tuesday morning when the ship’s horn shook the walls of their tiny cabin, shaking their tiny sanctuary down. The
Tamarassie
had reached Boston safe and sound, but the harbour was busier than a brothel on payday, as Rhin had said, looking out of the grimy porthole. Merion did not know enough to comment.