"You know," I say, because Keeper does know. Keeper knows all my secrets. "My right eye, the bad one. It can't keep the shadows back."
"Oh fuck me sideways 'til I cry. And what're the shadows gonna do when they catch you?"
Derisive anger, like the cut of a whip. "I don't know," I say, looking down at my hands. "Something bad."
"
Something bad
. Powers! Look, you come walk here by me, and if the shadows grab you, I'll fight 'em off. Okay?"
I look up at him.
"I promise," he says with heavy patience, "I won't lay a finger on you. Okay? Would you move your ass, for the love of all the fucking powers?"
If he gets any angrier, he will get out his nun's scourge. And maybe he is right; maybe the shadows are as frightened of him as I am. Reluctantly ready to dodge out of reach, I walk toward him.
"
Thank
you," he says; I expect to be cuffed across the back of the head, but he looks at me for a moment, darkly, then places himself on my right and starts walking.
I don't want him there; I don't want him there so much I can barely keep from screaming. But the shadows cannot get to me past him, and if I keep walking, maybe I won't make him angry. Maybe he won't hurt me.
The land is drowning in purple and red when we come to a little cluster of houses. Keeper stops short of them, gives me a long, smoldering look that makes me back away from him, and says, "If I tell you to stay right here, will you stay?"
I gulp and nod. I cannot find my way back to Joline now, and the only shred of comfort I have is that the monsters are frightened of Keeper and will not advance on me when he is near.
"Don't lie to me, now."
"I'm not, I swear. I'll stay right here."
"Okay. Then I'm gonna go see if I can get some food and maybe figure out where the fuck we are. Here—sit where you won't be in nobody's way and
don't move
."
I sit down where he tells me and wait. He walks away, trailing clouds of iron-black and old-blood red. I sit and wait. The monsters sit behind me and wait, too; I can hear their breathing.
And then Keeper is back again, motioning me to my feet. "Come on already. They sold me food, but they don't want no red-haired strangers hanging around, and I ain't keen on staying. And at least they told me where the nearest place with boats is. Come
on
."
I go, seeing iron and old-blood streamers reaching out to tangle around my legs, twine around my fingers and wrists.
We walk and walk, and it gets darker and darker. But the clouds roll back, and eventually there is a
moon. The monsters cringe from the moonlight, and I can breathe more easily. Keeper shares out the food as we walk. The ground changes under our feet, going from grass, to rock, to a hard, uneven, sharp-edged jumble of stones. I stumble and catch my balance, stumble and catch my balance, stumble and fall, wrenching my ankle and landing heavily on my shoulder. I yelp.
"Felix! Are you okay?" Keeper comes back across the rocks to help file, and now I am more frightened, because that must mean he has a use for me.
"I'm fine," I say hastily, scrambling up and almost falling again. "Really."
"Okay, okay. Let's keep moving then." And he starts ahead; he never places a foot wrong that I can tell. My shoulder and ankle are throbbing but I do not want him to know.
And then I come over a slight rise, toiling still in Keeper's wake, and find him standing stock-still, staring out… staring out at the sea. I stand too, staring. It is dark and brilliant and terrifying, vaster than anything I have ever imagined, and I sink down to my knees, my hands pressed against my mouth, my eyes wide and burning. I have feared the monsters behind me, when it was the monster before me that I should have dreaded.
Beside me, thoughtfully, Keeper says, "Well, fuck."
Chapter 11
Mildmay
The woman at the farmhouse gave me the hairy eyeball up one side and down the other, 'til I wondered why she didn't just slam the door in my face and get it over with, but then she said, like every word was costing her money, "The folk
you'll
be wanting are down to the cove," and gave me directions. Which I'd followed, best I could in the dark and with Felix acting the mooncalf all over the place.
I was just about floored by seeing the ocean. I'd heard about oceans in stories, but I'd never really been able to get my head around the idea. It made the Sim look like a kid's toy, and a cheap one besides. I gawked like a flat for probably a septad-minute—least it felt that way—before I got myself together. And then I had to get Felix up off the ground, but by then I'd managed to put that woman's directions together with what I was looking at, and could start working my way down toward the cove she'd told me about.
I was kind of puzzling the whole way about what she could've meant by the folk
you'll
be wanting." I hadn't liked to ask her, since she'd looked maybe an inch this side of siccing the farm dogs on me, and, I mean it didn't
matter
, as long as she'd sent me where I could find a boat. But it was like a mosquito whining in my ear, and I couldn't quite shake it.
After a little, I realized there was a light ahead of us, like a fire. I could see the glow, although not the actual fire, and I followed it, figuring that even if these people didn't have a boat themselves, they might be able to point me to somebody who did. And I was fucking well tired of stumbling around in the dark. Felix followed me, and it crossed my mind that there was something to be grateful for, since if I'd lost him out there, I might never've found him again.
We came round a big jutting rock, and there was the fire and people sitting around it. I made for it like a homing pigeon. We were still some ways out when one of the guys by the fire shouted something—not in no hostile way or nothing. I mean, I didn't understand a word of it, but he sounded friendly.
I stopped where I was and called back in my best Kekropian, "Excuse me, but I'm looking for a ship headed to Troia."
The four guys sitting there all jumped like they'd been bit and said some things in that language I didn't know, and then the one who'd shouted got up and came closer. I felt my jaw drop.
"As I am a child of Ocean," he said in Kekropian. "You aren't Piotr."
"No," I said, grabbing after my wits. "Sorry."
"Come closer, you and your friend."
"Brother," I said, purely on reflex, and came into the firelight with Felix tagging along not quite in grabbing distance.
The guy standing there was probably past his Great Septad. His hair was going gray, and he had wrinkles like trenches around his eyes. But the reason we were gaping at each other like a pair of half-wit dogs was his hair was as red as mine—where it hadn't gone gray, I mean—but he wasn't no tall, skinny Troian type, either. He was shorter than me and considerably broader in the beam. But at least now I knew what the woman at the farmhouse had been talking about. She'd thought I was one of these guys, whoever they were.
"What…" this red-haired guy started, then changed his mind. "Are you Troian?"
"Nope," I said.
"And you aren't Merrovin."
"If that's what y'all are, that's another nope."
"What are you?"
"Needing a boat going east."
His eyebrows went up, but he let me get away with it. "Come then," he said, and waved us toward the fire. "Sit down and tell me of your 'needing.' For I am Dmitri, captain of the
Morskaiakrov
, and we are bound for Haigisikhora, the finest port in all Troia."
We sailed for Haigisikhora a couple days later on what Ilia told me was the eighteenth of Byzioz. I'd never heard of Byzioz, so that wasn't as helpful as you might think, but I was guessing it was somewhere around the middle of Pluviôse.
From what I could tell, the
Morskaiakrov
was into smuggling and piracy and most anything that might turn a profit. Frankly, I didn't give a rat's ass what they did so long as it didn't involve pitching me and Felix over the side, and we really weren't even worth the effort. They could've left us where they found us and I wouldn't've blamed 'em, but they figured, what with us having red hair and not being Troians, we had to be some sort of distant kin, and their gods seemed to have a down on people who abandoned their relatives. And nobody ever liked to say, but they could see Felix was nuttier than a box of squirrels, and I think they thought it was unlucky if you didn't help crazy people.
They called themselves Merrows. It was a good thing they all spoke Kekropian because I'd've hated to try and learn the language they spoke in a hurry. They thought my Kekropian was funny enough.
They were most of 'em built like Dmitri. And they had these pale, pale gray eyes, like the color of water—which is to say no color at all. Spooky. And they didn't have the Troian bones like Felix did. Their faces were square and snub-nosed, and they had these wide stubby-fingered hands that looked kind of almost like paws. I can't say if that's what all Merrows look like, because the crew of the
Morskaiakrov
were all cousins or something. They had a great time explaining it to me a couple nights out and falling around laughing when I got tangled up in it.
They laughed at me a lot once they were sure I could pull my weight—and Felix's—and I figured that was okay. I mean, it didn't hurt me none, and it was way better than them picking on Felix, which they could've. And when they saw I could take it and wasn't going to get all bent out of shape about it, a lot of the mean went out of what they said. And anyway Ilia was nice from the get-go, and Dmitri cussed me up one side and down the other, but not in no personal way.
Everybody on the
Morskaiakrov
had like three or four jobs, which was why they were okay with me working our passage, even though they didn't hardly have nowhere to put us. Ilia was the cook, along with a bunch of other things, and he was absolutely glad of me, because when I scrubbed a potato, I didn't fuck around with it. And I ain't no flashie chef or nothing, but I can cook.
So basically I did whatever anybody needed done during the day, and I learned a lot about splicing rope
and mending sails and shit like that. And of course I was riding herd on Felix, and they were all real clear on how that wasn't no soft job.
Felix was way worse, and I knew it was because of Nera. He didn't talk to me no more—hardly talked at all except for whispering to himself in the spookiest way you can think of. He scared the daylights out of me, no kidding. After I got him on board the
Morskaiakrov
, I was frightened to go near him for like two, three days—not to mention ashamed.
I hadn't realized getting him onto the
Morskaiakrov
was going to be a problem. I mean, I knew how he felt about deep water, but I also knew he knew we had to cross the ocean to get to this garden of his, because we'd talked about it when he was topside. And it wasn't like I was asking him to go swimming or nothing.
So I'd worked out this deal with Dmitri—fastest damn talking I'd ever done in my whole life—and turned and said, "C'mon, Felix, let's go," and he was sitting there staring at me with this look on his face like a cat with its ears laid back.
"What?" I said. "What is it?"
But he wouldn't say nothing, and he wouldn't fucking budge, and the Merrows were all watching like a row of cats themselves, and I could feel my patience splitting down the middle like rotten cloth. It was just too much, that one little thing more than I could handle.
If I say I lost my temper, that gives you the wrong idea. And that wouldn't've been so bad, if I'd yelled at him or even smacked him one. I mean, it wouldn't have been what you might call
okay
, but there wasn't no way in Hell that face-off was going to come out okay. But it didn't have to be so fucking awful.
What happened was, I hit the cold place inside my head, the place where I'd been when I killed people for a living, the place especially where I'd ended up when a job looked like it was going bad. I can't describe it so it makes sense. It's really cold and really clear and nothing in the world matters except not fucking up the job—in this case, getting my damn brother on board this ship because it was what he'd said he wanted. And I did it. But afterward, it made me feel crawly and sick inside, like I'd felt in that farmhouse pantry getting ready to steal stuff and knowing that these people, who weren't no rich flashie bastards, were going to go hungry because of me. Only this was even worse. Because he was my brother and I knew none of this was his fault and I knew just how fucked up his head was.
But right then I was in that perfect cold place where it didn't matter, none of it. I wanted him on that fucking ship, and I was done arguing. It took me maybe half a minute to get him where I wanted him and me with a good grip on his poor stiff fingers. And two seconds later he was screaming. It was simple as that.
I guess I can say for myself that I didn't actually break them, although there was a moment where I thought about it because I was betting he'd pass out. I didn't do it, and that's something a little more okay than the rest of it. The trip out to the
Morskaiakrov
was just plain nasty. I had my grip on Felix's fingers, and he was panting. But he wasn't scared. I'd got myself on his right side, because with that eye being bad, it'd be that much more trouble for him to try and fight. And he sat there the whole way with his head turned so he could see me, and, Kethe, the look in his eyes—I wouldn't've been surprised if he'd pulled his lips back and snarled like a dog, because he purely did look ready to bite. And to this day I don't know how we would've got him up onto the
Morskaiakrov's
deck if it hadn't been that when the row-boat bumped the ship, he looked away from me and I guess realized for the first time that there was nothing between him and a fuck of a lot of water excepting some planks. He turned like five different shades of white, and then he did faint, and me and Yevgeni manhandled him up the side.