Heads together, they leaned over a tray of bread, hummus, and dates. Jacky was a year older than me and Kenté a year younger. I had spent many weeks with them at Bollard House over the summers. Jacky was my mother’s cousin’s daughter. In truth I wasn’t sure how Kenté and I were related, but all the Bollards called one another “cousin.” As children we’d climbed on shipping crates in the family warehouses and spent hours balancing on the dock posts, making up stories about the ships that puffed slowly up and down the river. Though my feelings about being a Bollard were complicated, I loved my cousins.
“Current carry you,” Kenté said as I joined them, the gold stud in her nose twinkling in the candlelight. “I thought you weren’t coming till summer!”
She wore her hair parted into four sections and twisted up in braids. Her dress was green and gold striped, and very handsome indeed. It showed off even more chest than mine, which was saying something, but this was Siscema. They did things differently in town.
“Current carry you.” It felt like days since I last smiled, but with my cousins it was impossible not to. The ominous sense of danger that had been constantly humming around me lifted a little.
“I don’t see your father,” Jacky said.
“It’s just me and Fee.” I dropped into a chair. “I’m making my first run up to Valonikos as captain.” I decided to leave it at that, lest they guess I was hiding something.
“Are you? Well done, Caro!” Kenté poured a glass of wine nearly to the top, shoving it across the table.
“Ooh, wait till Akemé finds out he missed you.” Jacky poked me in the shoulder. A sly smile stole across her face, which was a lighter shade that came of there being Akhaian blood in her branch of the family.
I took a date, hoping they wouldn’t notice me blushing. “He’s not here?”
Akemé was the sailor boy I’d slept with last summer, in what was my first and so far only experience of that kind. My cousins knew all—well, most—of the details of the encounter, and were determined to never let me forget it.
“Apprenticing in Iantiporos. With his father.” She batted her eyelashes at me. “I’ll tell him you sent him a kiss.”
“Jacaranda Bollard, you wouldn’t!” Kenté squealed, sloshing wine over the rim of her glass.
“Oh yes, she would,” I said. “Listen, you girls know anything about these Black Dogs?”
Kenté always knew the good gossip. As I expected, she seized on my question, her eyes narrowing. “I know they came into town an hour ago on that sloop Alektor. Down the river, from Doukas. Your ma’s put the captain to wait in the Blue Room.”
An hour. While I was luxuriating in the feel of hot water on my skin. How could I be so stupid? And how many ships did the Black Dogs have out looking for us? I’d never heard of a sloop called Alektor. I needed to get back to the docks and warn Fee and Markos.
“I heard Diric Melanos is the handsomest outlaw on the high seas,” Jacky said.
I almost snorted. How legend exaggerates. “He’s not here, is he?”
“No, more’s the pity.”
“What do they want?” I asked Kenté, my heart thumping erratically. I ripped off a chunk of bread and swiped it across the plate, scooping up hummus and oil.
“To negotiate.” She shrugged.
Ma was the chief negotiator for Bollard Company. That didn’t tell me much. “D’you know what about?” I asked with my mouth full, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter a bit to me.
“They’re looking for someone on a wherry.”
“Oh, ayah? Do the Bollards be stooping to bounty hunting now?” I demanded, with more snap than I’d meant.
“It’s something to do with a stolen cargo.”
My fingernails dug into the table. The filthy liars.
“How do you always know everything?” Jacky asked her.
For a flash of an instant Kenté’s face took on an odd glow. “Such is my fortune,” she said, candlelight playing on her brown skin and amber eyes. “The shadows favor me.” She laughed, and I realized she was only joking.
I leaned closer. “What do you hear of a cutter called Victorianos, out of Iantiporos?”
“Nothing at all. Why?”
I chewed in silence. The Blue Room was the Bollards’ second-best sitting room. I needed to somehow scheme my way in and find out what was going on.
“They say Captain Melanos captured a hundred ships, you know,” Kenté said. “During the skirmishes of ’88, when he was a privateer for Akhaia.”
Jacky laughed. “They also say the Nikanor was sunk by a great sea drakon, don’t they?” She nodded at the painting on the wall. “But that’s just a fish story.”
Kenté looked sharply at her. “How do you know?”
“Because there’s no such thing as drakons, of course.”
A shiver went unbidden down my neck. Everyone who’s ever read a story knows there is no better way to ensure that you are swallowed up by a drakon in the last chapter than to say there’s no such thing as drakons.
I knew Kenté was thinking the same thing, but she didn’t say it. Instead she dropped her voice low. “I know a story that has a drakon in it. It begins like this: Long ago, time out of mind, there was a girl who loved secrets. Fortunately for her, she lived in a great old house that had many of them. Late at night she used to creep like a ghost down the servants’ passage. It so happened that in this particular passage, there was a particular knothole next to a chimney. When she put her eyes and ears to that knothole, she could see and hear all that went on in the parlor beyond. It came to pass that one night—”
Jacky rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe there’s any drakon in this story. You’re just making it up as you go.”
Kenté stuck out her tongue, but her eyes crinkled as they met mine. A thrill ran through me, for I understood it wasn’t a story at all. Her words were for me.
I shoved my chair back. “I’m going to the washroom, girls.”
Kenté tapped the side of her nose with her finger.
There are many secrets in Bollard House. Lucky for me, Kenté knew most of them. She was right about the servants’ passage. I opened the door a crack and slipped through. The narrow hall had whitewashed walls and low-hanging rafters, a poor reflection of its fancier companion running parallel along the front of the house. Stacked crates and barrels lined the hall, all stamped with the Bollard cask and stars. This end of the passage was deserted, for most of the servants were occupied with dinner.
And in that way I was able to put my eye to the knothole by the chimney and spy on my mother’s meeting with the Black Dogs’ man.
Likely this was the very same Philemon that Captain Melanos had mentioned. He didn’t look like much to me. His beard was straggly and unkempt, and he kept pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead with a striped handkerchief.
“We heard about a massacre at Hespera’s Watch.” Ma pushed a glass of wine across the table.
The man smirked. “Only two people were killed, so it can hardly be called a massacre.” I itched to punch his ugly face. The Singers were real people—good people—and he thought the whole thing was a joke.
My mother waited with folded hands. “I heard the Black Dogs were responsible.”
“Diric Melanos took a contract from the Theucinian family to seek out and recapture a certain crate of stolen goods. By any means necessary, love.” He took a gulp of wine and grunted. “It’s good.”
A look of disdain, promptly hidden, floated across my mother’s face. She was probably thinking this man a waste of a fine vintage. The Bollards were particular about wine.