The House of the Four Winds: Book One of One Dozen Daughters Read online

  The tension Clarice felt was well-nigh unbearable; she could not imagine what it was like for the crew. Dobbs moved constantly among them; Clarice had overheard him, time and again, counseling the Asesino’s crew to bear their fate with scriptural meekness: “—for the sons of Ammon have no part in the theurgy which is the birthright of the lastborn and must resign themselves to servitude.” Thanks to Dr. Karlavaegen, Clarice could have capped that verse with half a dozen about mercy being the duty of princes, but it would have done little good. Floggings had become constant, and Sprunt had ordered half rations until further notice as an additional disciplinary measure. But neither floggings nor near starvation could stop the crew from whispering together. Just this morning, Sprunt had ordered that three or more sailors gathered together on deck would be considered insubordinate and disciplined accordingly.

  He could not stop them from gathering together belowdecks or talking together there. But he could have them beaten if they did. No one knew who would report a conversation to Mr. Lee and who wouldn’t.

  Gone were the days when she could spend a few precious nighttime hours on deck with Dominick. She had not dared to seek him out since the day David was flogged. It was too risky. A walk in the night air meant a risk of being drawn into—or overhearing—the wrong sort of conversation. She was terrified that she would be asked by Sprunt or his cronies to report any mutinous overtures made to her—and she did not think any of them would believe her when she said she’d heard nothing. Guilt was not necessary. Only the appearance of guilt.

  And so she had taken to a self-imposed imprisonment in her cabin, where she counted the days until the Asesino might reach landfall. And with each passing hour, Asesino slipped closer to open mutiny.

  * * *

  Tonight, as usual, she left the captain’s mess the moment she could. Even the isolation of her cabin, cramped and stuffy as it was, was preferable. She latched her door—there was no lock—and wrote a few lines in her diary, but it was hard to come up with anything that was both true and that she would ever want her parents to read. So she undressed and resolutely composed herself for sleep. Tomorrow would be no better than today, but it would bring them one day closer to landfall.

  But sleep, it seemed, was to be presented tonight with an intermission.

  She sat up, straining to discern what had wakened her. She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept. The hiss of the water against the hull, the rhythmic creak of a hull under sail, were all familiar sounds. But there was more, some discordant element in the customary symphony.…

  She heard the distant ring of steel on steel.

  Her first thought was pirates. But a pirate ship wasn’t a troop of horse, and the open ocean offered no form of concealment—to close with the Asesino it would have needed to chase them for hours or even days, and the ship’s lookout would have seen them.

  No, the violence on Asesino came from within. Mutiny. Everyone involved would be hanged—or worse.

  Dominick! He will be with them!

  Without thought Clarice sprang to her feet, fumbling in the little desk for her spellmatch. In the lantern’s dim gleam she dressed quickly, yanking the laces of the corset tight, flinging on a coat chosen at random, her ear tuned to the growing discord of armed combat above. She buckled her swordbelt over her coat and seated her rapier firmly in its sheath.

  * * *

  The passage to the deck was both deserted and darker than usual: Clarice realized that several of the lanterns in the corridor had gone out for lack of oil, apparently abandoned—or sabotaged—by whichever crewman was in charge of filling them. As she climbed the ladder to the main deck, the sound of steel on steel grew louder, and she caught the scent of blood on the night wind. The smell sent her up the last steps of the ladder and through the hatch before she could think further.

  The forecastle was ablaze with light. She could see men—dark, anonymous figures at this distance—holding torches. The torchlight flashed from the drawn blades, though she couldn’t see who was fighting. The only good thing was that nobody on the Asesino was paying any attention to anything but the scene before them.

  She cut sharply to the left as she approached the foredeck. Men lined the rail and stood on the ladder and she couldn’t get past them without being seen—or stopped. Thankfully the construction of the ship left her many other routes to the upper deck. First to the railing, where she balanced for a precarious moment before springing upward. Then she clutched at the spindles of the half rail, swinging her body back and forth until she could find purchase for her feet. She didn’t know what it was, but it was enough to allow her to make the last lunge that took her over the foredeck rail.

  A sight from her nightmares greeted her gaze. The deck around the wheel was choked with the wounded and the dead. Captain Sprunt stood with a cutlass in his hand. Its blade was dark and wet. Lee, Foster, and Dobbs stood at his back—Lee with an enormous bludgeon, Foster with a musket, and the reverend with a saber. The three of them held the rest of the mutineers at bay as Sprunt closed with his prey. Of all of them, Clarice recognized only Kayin Dako, Emmet Emerson, and Dr. Chapman. Dr. Chapman held his arm as if it was broken, and his face was badly bruised. Most of the others were in similar shape.

  A spreading stain was at Dominick’s left shoulder where the heavy cutlass had struck him. His face was white and his eyes glittered with exhaustion and pain. Sprunt loomed over him like a great bear, his piggish eyes gleaming with triumph and bloodlust. He had the advantages of size, reach—and skill, for even in the split-second glimpse Clarice had gotten as she vaulted the railing, it was plain to see that Dominick was no swordsman. Sprunt must know it. If Dominick was still alive and so lightly wounded, it was clear the captain had merely been playing with him, as a cat would a mouse.

  And now, as a cat with a mouse, he meant to deliver the coup de grâce.

  Clarice’s feet skidded on the deck as she sprang into the little space between them. Sprunt sprang backward as she drew her sword.

  “This is not your fight, Swann!” he shouted. “Or do you cast your lot with the mutineers?”

  I have no choice, Clarice thought. “Shut up and fight!” she snarled, lashing out at him with her sword.

  He laughed—a wordless shout of rage—and raised his own blade.

  The world narrowed to the clash of blades. Sprunt had strength and reach and the heavier blade; Clarice dared not block his attacks directly, for she risked her rapier being broken by the bludgeoning weight of the heavier blade. But she had speed and skill, a skill honed by a master swordsman over her whole life. And not just any master, but one who taught the skills of the street brawler along with those of court fencing—and the means of countering the former with the latter.

  Again and again she slipped away from Sprunt’s attacks—out of reach, or merely dodging the few inches that led him to cleave air instead of flesh. She shut out the sounds around her. Her heart raced, blood roared in her ears, her spine was etched with chill—and she ignored all these symptoms of the deadly peril she was in. There was nothing in the world but this deadly midnight dance on a bloodstained deck. Parry, attack, riposte, remise. Classical training and deep knowledge against back-alley brawling and brute strength.

  Slowly, Clarice saw the way to win. Sprunt was a thug and a bully, relying on terror and main force to gain him the victory in any encounter. He knew nothing of pacing himself, of blade-work that was as much science as art. She did not know how many he had slain already tonight, but now he was tiring. And this opponent was not afraid.

  It seemed to take hours before he gave her the opening she sought. Hours of stamping her boots against the deck as she danced out of reach, hours of measuring success or failure by the ethereal ting of steel against steel, hours of slitting her eyes against the blaze of torchlight and hoping she would see the next attack as it came. In reality, of course, bare minutes—if that—had passed.

  Clarice stepped back, as if seeking a way to flee, and dropped her guard. S
prunt roared out his triumph and lunged for her, blade held high.

  And she struck upward, the sharpened point of her rapier shearing through his filthy shirt, and transfixing his heart.

  Only because the disengagement that followed that stop-thrust had been drilled into her, month after month, in the sallé at Swansgaarde by the exacting von Karstetter, did she jerk her sword free and step back, automatically falling into first position once more. With an effort, she stopped herself from reflexively raising her sword in salute to her opponent. This was no salon bout, where the loser would cheer the winner’s skill and they would shake hands afterward. Her opponent was dead and only now realizing it.

  Sprunt crashed to his knees and fell forward, a look of astonishment still on his face.

  She looked around wildly as the night was split by the roar of the musket.

  “Captain Sprunt is dead!” she heard someone shout. “The ship is ours! Throw down your weapons and you will not be harmed!”

  So I am a mutineer now, Clarice thought numbly. Whatever shall I tell Mama and Papa?

  All around her, from every corner of the captured ship, sailors began to cheer.

  3

  A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME

  THE SUN that rose that day illuminated a far different ship from that over which it had set the day before. Clarice sat down on the nearest barrel and sighed in weariness. It had been a long night.

  The Asesino carried two ship’s boats, used to reach shore when the ship dropped anchor some distance from land or dock. Each boat could carry twenty people in the usual way of things, of which twelve to fourteen were the rowers needed to propel the heavy, narrow hull through surf or rough water.

  Today the boat being lowered over the side held over thirty people. It might even hold the long oars that propelled it. But it was being launched into the open sea.

  “Ship’s boat away!” Dominick shouted.

  “Ship’s boat away!” Kayin Dako echoed.

  “Damn you, Moryet—this is murder and you know it!” Simon Foster cried.

  “You had your chance!” Kayin shouted back. “It is a better one than Sprunt gave any of us!”

  Dominick, stripped to the waist, his shoulder bandaged, watched as a dozen sailors began to lower the jolly boat to the sea. The boat’s passengers seemed resigned to their fate now; they sat quietly as the boat began to descend.

  “I imagine this was not what you expected when you booked passage on our fine ship, is it, Mr. Swann?” the Reverend Dobbs said with a meaningful smirk.

  Dobbs had been firmly in Sprunt’s camp. He’d fought at Sprunt’s side last night in a most unchurchly way, but now he wouldn’t share the fate of the captain’s cronies. His vows protected him from retribution.

  And what danger can one man present to us? Aside from getting all of us hanged the moment we make port and set him ashore …

  “I did not think I would be sailing with a monster, it is true,” she said, looking up to meet his eyes. She had learned only a few hours ago that David Appleby had died last night of his injuries. His death had been the spark laid to the tinder of unrest.

  “I doubt you are in any position to judge, young man,” Dobbs said repressively. The ropes creaked as the boat began its descent toward the surface of the ocean. Dobbs glanced toward it. “Their fate is hard, but it may yet be sweeter than what awaits these wayward souls.”

  “If it’s as sweet as all that, you’ve still got time to join them,” Clarice pointed out acerbically.

  Her remark was received with a tiny bow of acknowledgment. “I believe I may do more good here,” Dobbs murmured. “And there is still the last office I must perform for the victims of these misguided men. And of yourself, of course,” he added with a malicious glitter in his dark eyes.

  Clarice kept her face smooth with an effort. Even though she knew she had made her choice when she entered the fight, the awful finality of Sprunt’s death was something she saw afresh every time she closed her eyes.

  “Of course,” Clarice echoed, rising to her feet.

  She glanced up the deck, to where the bodies of the dead lay, shrouded and anonymous. They had barely begun to stiffen and certainly had not had time to putrefy, but she could have sworn she caught a whiff of charnel odor from them, and she repressed a shudder. There was no place to bury them save in the sea, but Dominick had said they would wait until the jolly boat was well away before putting the bodies overboard. The wait would give its passengers as good a chance as possible, though their only true chance for life was to be rescued by another passing ship—an unlikely possibility.

  And if they were, their rescue would seal Asesino’s doom.

  As he hauled to lower the boat, Kayin began to sing. First one voice took up the song, then another, until at last all of them were singing. The tune, in despondent antiphon, wafted up from the lowering boat:

  Oh, the times was hard and the wages low

  Leave her, Enoch, leave her

  And the grub was bad and the gales did blow

  And it’s time for us to leave her

  Leave her, Enoch, leave her

  Oh, leave her, Enoch, leave her

  For the voyage is done and the winds do blow

  And it’s time for us to leave her …

  Clarice had heard the mournful song, and others like it, many times in the past several weeks. A few moments later, the song broke off and the sailors released the ropes. Far below, she heard a splash as the jolly boat fell the last few feet to the sea. A few moments more, and the work party began drawing the ropes up again.

  “Set sail!” Dominick shouted, and the etiolated crew sprang to obey. All around her, the Asesino exploded with mysterious calls and orders transformed into the rhythmic squeal and creak of ropes drawn through pulleys, the snap and rattle of canvas as it opened and caught the wind. The great white sails filled, making the Asesino look almost unbalanced, and suddenly Clarice felt the ship come alive as it leaned into the wind. Soon the jolly boat became an anonymous speck in the distance.

  The sea was wide.

  “I do hope Mr. Moryet doesn’t have ambitions of becoming captain,” Reverend Dobbs murmured. “He is far too young to be selected for the post.”

  “I am certain that is a decision that does not rest with either you or I,” Clarice said repressively, deliberately turning her back on Dobbs.

  Dominick was one of only three ship’s officers who had not been set adrift in the aftermath of the mutiny. But the Asesino’s new captain would be chosen by a vote among the crew, and only one sort of ship on all the wide ocean chose its captain by election.

  A pirate ship.

  * * *

  She returned to her cabin to clean her sword and to make herself more presentable. The ship was restoring itself to its familiar routine. Only a few last tasks remained.

  She shrugged off her coat, noted that the shirt beneath was blood spotted, and tossed it away with a weary sigh. She took out a cloth and a bottle of oil, then sat down to clean her sword. When it was gleaming once more, she tucked away the cleaning supplies, washed her face and hands, and brushed her hair out thoroughly—the sea wind had tangled it—before tying it back in its customary ribbon once more.

  Once she was dressed, she searched among her belongings until she found a black kerchief. She folded it into a mourning band and tie it firmly around her left arm. She had not liked Captain Sprunt, but that did not mean he deserved to be dishonored in death.

  Her last act before she left the cabin was to place her rapier carefully into her sea chest and lock it away.

  * * *

  At a little before noon she returned to the deck. If she’d been asked a month ago, she would have said that seamen, deprived of their master, would quickly devolve into idleness, just as any laborer deprived of an overseer might. Yet everywhere around her, Clarice saw evidence of industry, from sailors scrubbing down the deck with buckets of salt water, to the pennon of smoke lacing backward from the chimney of the galley. S
he supposed the difference between this and some farm somewhere was that if the farmhand idled, the crop wouldn’t flourish—but if the sailor idled, the very thing that preserved his life upon the bosom of the sea would vanish beneath it.

  She glanced around herself for people she knew. Dr. Chapman stood at the rail, looking out to sea; he wore his coat capelike over his shoulders, his broken arm thoroughly strapped and in a sling. Dominick (now wearing a shirt) stood beside Dickon at the helm, taking a sighting. Everyone was going about his business in a perfectly normal way.

  It was Dobbs’s attempt to be furtive that drew her attention.

  When she saw him kneel beside the shroud-wrapped bodies, she thought at first he was praying over the dead and wondered why, for he could gain nothing by doing so. Then she saw him surreptitiously draw a tiny penknife from his pocket and begin to cut through the stitches on the topmost shroud.

  Clarice moved toward him slowly and carefully, taking as much shelter as she could to keep him from noticing her advance. But Dobbs was intent upon his task. Finally, when he had opened the shroud, Clarice saw why. The body was Sprunt’s, and Dobbs’s goal had been the curious pendant Captain Sprunt wore. She watched as he eased the neck chain free. Whatever magic the pendant possessed, it had not been linked to Sprunt’s life, for the green-and-gold disk was as sorcerously vivid as ever.

  Dobbs had folded the shroud back into place and was just about to tuck the pendant into his pocket when Clarice plucked it from his hand and held it out of his reach.

  “Robbing the dead, Reverend? I wonder why.”

  “Give that back!” Dobbs snarled. “You do not know—”

  “—what it is for? Do you?”

  “It is a keepsake, nothing more, Mr. Swann. In fact, it is owed me, for Samuel pledged it at cards and lost, and I was to have it when we reached the Hispalides.”

  What a very bad liar you are, Reverend Dobbs, Clarice thought to herself. Of course, you know I was not in the common room of an evening, and so you feel you may say what you like. And yet …