“Is that the lot?” the captain asked the mate.
“That’s it. Thirty-seven big cages and thirteen small ones. Only ones left are in the after hold, a dozen of ’em, consigned farther upriver. Erebus, if I remember right. Oh, and there’s one little box for Abaddon, up the Rio Desmemoriarse. What do the natives do with them, anyhow?”
“No idea. Long as they do it out of sight, I don’t much care. I get paid to ship ’em, and ship ’em is what I do. Load ’em aboard at the Edge and take ’em wherever they’re consigned, if they’re consigned. Sell the others. Any we don’t sell, we drop off in the Great Swamp, but I get paid anyhow.” The captain took a deep breath and sighed. “You took a look down in the forward hold, did you, to see none of them got out of the cages?”
“I always do.”
“Wouldn’t do to have one of those wandering around the Queen, now would it. Ugly things. Scare Mrs. Gallimar out of her pretty shoes.”
I, who had seen all that the cages contained, had not found them that ugly. Pitiful. Angry. Hopeless. But not ugly.
The mate answered, “No, no escaped ones. I did find something else down there, though.”
The captain turned and fixed him with a stern eye. “You found …?”
“This,” said the mate, beckoning to one of the boatmen on the lower deck who came up the ladder tugging a struggling young woman along behind him. It was the Viceroy’s daughter, Constanzia. I had wondered when she would show up.
“Stowed away,” said the mate. “And she’s the Viceroy’s daughter, to top it all.” If he had intended surprise, he had achieved his goal. The captain stared at the young person as though he could not believe it.
“What in the …?”
She shook herself, thrust wild hair back from her broad, low forehead, then smoothed her dress and stood erect, glaring at him. “I have brought money to pay for my passage. The only reason I went down into the hold is that I couldn’t let anyone see I was aboard.”
“Your father will be very annoyed with me,” said the captain throatily. I knew he was thinking of beheading, or of quartering, or perhaps of both. “He was annoyed with me last time, and he will be annoyed with me again.”
“Papa will not even know I am gone if you do not do anything foolish, Captain. I have come to see the virgin with a difference, as I seem to remember having done once or twice before, though this time there may really be a difference, which has not happened before now. I thought I might get to know her a little on the return voyage. When we get back to Nacifia, I will disembark quietly, and Papa will think I was merely avoiding him for a time, which I often do.”
Captain Karon shook his head, then nodded, then shook it once more, conveying the confusion of his thought. “We’re full,” he muttered. “There’s no cabin space.”
“Oh, yes, Captain,” I murmured, having taken off my cloak and folded it over one arm. “The young lady is welcome to share my cabin with me.”
And so it became possible for me to read even more in the diaries of Abrosius Pomposus.
[“She’s getting too involved!” I cried to Israfel “She’s thinking too much. How can this be a safe hiding place if she starts analyzing it? She’ll pull it to pieces!”
“Hush,” said Israfel, “Imaginary lands are hard to destroy.”
“They are not hard to disbelieve in,” I told him. “She’s reading, studying …”
“She learned to do that in the twentieth,” he said. “It’s not something you can stop her doing.”
“We may have to talk to her,” I said. “Tell her.”
“Wait a while,” he said. “See what happens.”]
“There are slaves down there in the holds,” Constanzia cried to me later that night as we prepared for bed, tears coursing down her olive cheeks. “Slaves.”
I nodded understandingly. I had seen them.
“Women and children, too,” she sobbed. “And men, young ones and old, old ones. It’s dreadful.”
“Dreadful,” I admitted. But there was nothing she could do, nor I. She had evidently not understood the implications of the book she carried with her.
Kindhearted child. She cried herself to sleep.
I went out onto the deck. The old woman, Senora Carabosse, was standing there. I nodded and smiled good evening. In the saloon, I heard a clock strike. Suddenly, with a rush of memory which was almost a physical blow, I knew where I had heard the name before. Carabosse! It was the name on my clock. She was the fairy who had cursed me!
“Is it you!” I said, raising my hand as though I would ward her off or strike her, one. I don’t know whether I would have struck her or not. I felt like it.
“Hush,” she said, raising her own hand. Mine fell to my side as she gestured at it. “Whatever you think you know about me is probably false, so don’t do that.”
“You cursed me,” I said.
“If you call that a curse. As it turned out, I cursed your half sister, Mary Blossom,” said the old woman. “Which I meant to happen, right from the beginning.”
“Why?” I cried.
“To get you away without anyone knowing,” she said. “Away from Westfaire. Away from England. Away from the middle centuries. To hide you somewhere safe.”
“Here?” I looked about me at the wallowing riverboat and laughed. “Here?”
“No one knows you are here,” she whispered to me. “Jaybee doesn’t know. The Dark Lord doesn’t know.”
“What Dark Lord?”
“Hush. Men like Jaybee do not spring into existence like spring spinach. They are aided into being by the Dark Lord. The evil power. The Devil. He who has taken his portion in horror and pain. That one.”
“And you would hide me from him here?”
She
