Except for me. I squeezed the tiller, fervently hoping he wouldn’t think to ask for particulars. I felt Fee’s keen gaze on me, but she said nothing.
“Don’t you think a real god has better things to do than skulk at the bottom of the river like a crocodile?” he persisted. “Or cook bacon, for that matter?”
“No wonder the consulate made you travel in a box,” I snapped. “You’re not very good at diplomacy, are you? I doubt you’ll have a long career as a courier. If you ever make it back.”
He clenched his hands into fists. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s an observation.”
“Well, in Akhaia it’s known that the gods who once walked among us have long since returned to their halls in the sky and under the earth.” He put one boot on the cockpit seat, looking out at the flat land drifting by. “The only people who can speak to them now are the oracles.”
“In words, maybe,” I scoffed.
I’d seen the ostentatious temples in Akhaia, decorated with snarling lion heads made of solid gold. I suspected the Akhaian god was nothing like the river god.
“How else would you speak, other than in words?” Tarquin asked.
“The god at the bottom of the river speaks to us in the language of small things.”
He gave a loud sniff to tell me what he thought of that.
The pig man had said my fate was far from here. I hoped he wasn’t really a god, because that was just nonsense. I was Pa’s first mate on Cormorant, and someday, after he retired, I would become her captain. Perhaps when the pig man had said “you,” he’d meant Tarquin. Your fate … and that boy’s. Those were his exact words.
Or maybe the pig man wasn’t a god at all, but an eccentric old coot who sat on a houseboat and smoked pork.
And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d been too unnerved to say to Tarquin.
He knew about you.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
As a wherryman’s daughter I’m not supposed to admit this, but I think fishing is gods-blastedly dull. That was what I found myself doing the next morning. And I was not happy about it.
Like other unpleasant things to recently befall me, it was Tarquin’s fault. By the time he dragged himself out of his bunk, Fee and I had been sailing for hours. He lounged on the bench cushions, the wreckage of his morning meal strewn about him. Sticky flatware lay in a lopsided stack on the tablecloth and a string of greasy drips trailed across the cabin floor. I didn’t know one person was capable of making such a mess.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to clean up after you.” I glanced at the sideboard. “Where’s the rest of the pork? I left it right here.”
“Oh. I … ate it for breakfast.”
“All of it?” I stared in horror. “That was supposed to last for days.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “It was hardly enough for breakfast.”
“It’s not meant to be the whole meal. It’s a treat. A luxury.”
He snorted. “It was good, but not that good.”
I stomped up to the deck. “Thanks to you, lunch is fish. Dinner is also fish. I hope you aren’t stupid enough to ask what’s for breakfast tomorrow.” Opening the basket of fishing supplies, I fixed tackle to a line. “But as I suspect you might be, it’s fish.”
He followed me. “Look, I didn’t know. Can’t we stop and get more provisions?”
“Look around you,” I said. “There’s nothing for the next twenty miles.”
Tall grasses stretched out on all sides. About half a mile ahead, a humpbacked ruin lay covered in green moss—an old manor house, perhaps, or the remains of a bridge. We’d spent last night hidden behind another such ruin, with Cormorant’s mast lowered and the curtains pulled tight to hide our lantern.
“There’s not another pig boat or something?” he asked.
I cast the line over the stern. “And after you made fun of the pig man too. This is your fate catching up to you, is what it is.”
Tarquin leaned out to survey the pile of rounded stones. “I wonder if that ruin dates back to the days when Kynthessa was still part of the Emparchy.”
“I reckon so.” I twitched the fishing pole. “This is where the patriots held the line, to keep the Emparch’s army from sacking Siscema during the Thirty Years’ War.”
In those days, the Oresteias were blockade runners for the patriots. I tried to imagine these empty marshes crowded with Akhaian galleys and campfire smoke, the riverlands plunged into war.
“Patriots,” Tarquin scoffed. “Traitors to a great empire, you mean.”
“Ayah, Akhaia must be a wonderful empire,” I said. “I guess that’s why little bits of it keep cutting themselves off to become independent.”
He pressed his lips in a flat line. “The Margrave was just as much at fault for that war as Akhaia.”
“I heard the current Emparch exiled fifty men and women just for having political meetings,” I shot back. “That was only last year, so you can’t blame it on people who died long ago.”
“Antidoros Peregrine and his revolutionaries had been a thorn in the Emparch’s side for years.” After a pause, he explained, “But it wasn’t the meetings that caused the Emparch to finally lose his temper. It was that pamphlet he published—full of radical ideas about the rights of the common people.”
“Have you read it?” I asked, irritated by his dismissiveness. I was one of the common people.
“Of course not.” He waved a hand. “The Emparch didn’t want it to cause an uprising, so he ordered it burned. But Lord Peregrine used to dine with us when I was a child,” he mused. “Before he published his mad writings. I wonder what became of him.”
I could have told him. Lord Peregrine was hiding out in Kynthessa. He and his friends were, in fact, the very same rebels whose muskets the harbor master had confiscated in Hespera’s Watch. I certainly wasn’t about to share that secret, since I suspected it would anger my passenger to hear we were running guns to people he considered traitors.
“Is your father a lord too?” I asked instead. “Or was he elected?”
“No one is elected in Akhaia,” he said, as if it was a filthy word. “That would show weakness. He was appointed to the council by the Emparch, as is only fitting.”
I guess he thought our Margravina weak then. Her title was inherited, passed down from the original Margrave who’d led the rebellion against Akhaia all those years ago, but she was really more of a figurehead these days. She presided over the senate, which was elected from among the people. The Free City of Valonikos had gone even further when it seceded from Akhaia, abandoning all hereditary titles. If Tarquin planned to continue talking like this after he got there, he’d offend everyone. I wondered if I should warn him.
“Ready?” Fee called to me. I jumped up, abandoning the fishing reel.
She put the tiller hard over and we jibed, the boom slamming across. I paid out the mainsheet as the sail filled with a snap. We began to heel over on the starboard side. Cormorant swept down the river, our wake bubbling behind us.
Tarquin gripped the edge of the cockpit, his knuckles white. “What’s going on? I don’t like that.”
“A jibe,” I said. “We switched the sail to the other side.”