“If we are not sent away again.”
“I have let my mother push us around too many times. I will do it no longer. I will find some reason for us to stay in Bernshulme and we will search. I did not want it to be true, Joron, but the papers the shipwife showed me, it did indeed look like my mother’s hand.” Her voice drifted away then she shook her head. “And to have so many gullaime, there has always been illegal trade in them, but only in ones and twos, never so many at once. I do not understand. Something is off, Joron, something—”
Her words were cut off by the gullaime storming in. “Windshorn!” it squawked,
“What?” said Meas.
“Windshorn!” it squawked again.
“I do not know what that means, gullaime,” she said.
The creature hopped from one foot to the other, slowly, and it almost seemed as if it hovered in the air for a moment between each step. Then its head orientated towards the corpse in the chair.
“That one not smell sick,” it said.
“What is windshorn, gullaime?” said Joron.
The windtalker clacked its beak at the corpse in the chair before turning back to them. “Some gullaime windtalk. Some gullaime windshorn.”
“Do you mean that they cannot control the weather?” said Meas.
“Wind. Shorn,” it said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“I did not know there was such a thing,” said Joron.
“Humans do not know gullaime,” it said. “Windshorn no use.”
“So,” said Meas, “we have a ship full of the sick and the useless, on their way to somewhere unknown.” If the woman in the chair had not already been dead Joron felt sure Meas would have hit her again – there was exasperation in her every movement. “It sounds like slavery, Joron, you are right. But if this ship really does come from my mother I cannot imagine it. She has many bad qualities but she abhors slavery. The idea someone else may profit from her people infuriates her.” She paced up and down the bloodied cabin floor. “We will return to Tide Child. Decide what to do there and sort out a crew for this ship.”
“Gullaime,” said Joron, “what should we do with your windshorn?”
Painted eyes stared at them.
“Kill all,” it said.
5
In the Depths, Only Darkness
Back on Tide Child they sat in the great cabin and Meas poured them both anhir, while Mevans bustled about bringing food they had no stomach for.
“I said we were not hungry, Mevans,” said Meas.
“Ey, but the body must be fuelled even if you do not like it,” he placed steaming bowls of fish stew before them both. Meas shook her head slightly and cast Mevans a dark glance before picking up her spoon and placing a measure of stew in her mouth. Mevans rewarded her with a smile and left the great cabin.
“Acts like a Hag-forsaken mother bird.”
“Talking of birds,” said Joron, “will you do as the gullaime asks and kill these ‘windshorn’?”
Meas shook her head. “No. Not unless it chooses to share more of why it feels so strongly about them, and even then I may not.”
“So what shall we do with them?”
“Send them to Safeharbour with the Maiden’s Bounty.” She stared into the distance as she spoke.
“You worry about something, Shipwife Meas?” She took another spoonful of stew and Joron, despite the horrors of earlier, realised he was also hungry.
“Ey, many things,” she said quietly. “Mostly I worry about sending my crew away on the Maiden’s Bounty.”
“That they will run?”
She shook her head. Gave him a black look.
“The ones I send will not run. I worry that the ship will not make it back. It is in poor repair and I cannot afford to lose loyal crew.” He knew what was unsaid there. More and more it had become clear there was a faction on Tide Child who believed things could be run better by them. Better, and not run as fleet, but as pirates. Those who were cruel or thought themselves wronged had found one another, bonded, come together. At their head stood Cwell, and though she was a fierce and violent woman she was also intelligent enough to know she did not have the skill to be shipwife. There were reasons the poor were not taught navigation or reading in the Hundred Isles. But now Cwell had a friend in Dinyl, and there was a man with reason to be resentful, and skill to pilot a ship, and with Sprackin they had a man who, though corrupt, understood the financial workings and how to properly stock a boneship.
They ate in silence, mechanically fuelling their bodies while not looking at one another. Once done Meas went to one of the shelves in the cabin, boots knock-knocking on the bones of the deck, and took down her ledger. She opened it, Joron had time to see lists of names before she angled the book so he could not read what was there.
“Bring me the gullaime, Joron,” she said.
“I could have Solemn—”
“Do it yourself please.”
He nodded. Stood and gave her a small bow of respect before making his way through the ship. Along the black decks, down the black stair to the underdeck. Aware of each body around him, the ones who greeted him with a friendly nod and shout of “D’keeper,” and the ones who turned away, and those rarer few who stared at him without subservience. The few who he knew would push him on every order, react just too slowly, give not enough respect to their officer. It was never quite enough disobedience for Solemn Muffaz to bring out the cord and have them disciplined; these deckchilder were old hands like Sprackin and knew the exact width of the tightrope they walked, how much disrespect could be shown without it actually becoming enough to warrant discipline in return. And though Joron hated himself for it, he knew he avoided giving them orders if he could. He passed the job to Dinyl, though he was sure it only strengthened the deckholder’s hand.
He knocked on the gullaime’s cabin door. Once he had walked in and caught the creature without its robe, preening the long feathers of its body with its beak – feathers that had once been white but now other colours were growing through. The moment he walked in that day, he had known he intruded upon something intensely personal. It may have been the link between them that Joron felt growing day by day that let him know, or it may have been the fury the gullaime blew into when it noticed him – throwing rocks and rags and dust and all the strange bits and pieces it had gathered to itself. But he had been careful to knock ever since.
“Come, Joron Twiner,” it said.
The gullaime’s cabin was like no other on the ship. The bowpeek was always open, the cabin always cooler than anywhere else. The wind blowing through it set the trinkets strung across the ceiling on lengths of rope – feathers, glass, rocks with holes in that it had a particular fascination for – to jingling. In the centre of the room was its nest – a circular construction of cloth, feathers and varisk stalks stolen from the hold – the place where the gullaime slept. If slept was the word; it never seemed to truly be asleep, just squatted there in what approximated a meditative state. No matter what time he came for it, the gullaime always seemed to snap straight into full wakefulness. When Joron slept, sometimes he saw this room as if through the secret eyes of the windtalker.