These Rebel Waves Page 4

  “Bring the barbarian down!” a defensor shouted.

  “Hold!” Ben countered. He flung himself up to sit on the railing while hooking his leg behind the Mecht’s knees. The Mecht buckled, thrown off balance, and as he dropped, Ben rammed his other leg into the man’s stomach. This laid him out across the deck, with the defensors training a dozen different weapons on him.

  Ben eased off the railing. “This is the evil forcing him to lash out,” he barked. “This man will still have the opportunity to repent, along with the rest of you. I beseech you all: see through the Devil’s corruption in your hearts, repent, and choose freedom. Otherwise, you will burn.”

  Had Ben saved the raider now only to have him die in front of a jeering crowd later?

  Though he didn’t care. If raiders wanted to burn, let them burn—Argrid offered a way to survive, if those convicted weren’t so proud.

  Three defensors dragged the Mecht away as others moved toward the rest of the crew.

  Ben tugged his hat lower, the deck spinning.

  Jakes bumped his shoulder. “This will please your father.”

  “Why?” Ben honestly wanted an answer. “I did nothing. Ever since the Church did away with any real due process of justice, I have no use.”

  Jakes’s eyes widened. “You’re going to be king someday—”

  “Of a country built on ashes and fear. I—” I don’t believe magic is evil. And I miss it.

  He’d never be drunk enough to say that. Especially not to Jakes.

  A low hum came from Jakes, the lilt of a Church hymn. A tic of his—when he was nervous, or anxious, or thinking too hard about responsibilities that should have been Ben’s alone.

  “If the treaty with Grace Loray happens,” Jakes said, “we won’t arrest every sailor from there. Evil won’t be as easy to identify. They’ll need Inquisitors to judge cases again.”

  Ben sighed. “Wishful thinking, Defensor.”

  The Church had ultimate power now. Any treaty with Grace Loray would mean more of this, only on their shores. Patrols. Purity. Cleansing.

  Did Grace Loray know what was coming for them?

  3

  THE STABLES PROVIDED the quickest route to the infirmary’s Shaking Sickness wing. Lu hurried down the aisle, stirring up dust as she passed drowsy horses flicking their tails in the heat.

  A little boy plunged down in front of her, hanging by his knees from a rafter. “Gimme yer plants!”

  Lu screeched and dropped the parcel in her arms.

  “Oh, Lu!” Teo said. “You’re not the nurse.”

  Her surprise eased into a laugh. “And I have no magic plants for you to steal.” She bent to salvage the treat she had picked up on her way here. The filling in one of the pastries had leaked, making the parchment wrappings sticky, the air overly saccharine with sugary coconut against the sweet smell of straw. “Yet you are quite fearsome—tell me, raider, who are you?”

  Though she knew—Annalisa’s brother always chose to be the same raider no matter the game.

  He isn’t the first boy I’ve encountered today who’s pretending to be Devereux Bell, Lu thought.

  Teo swung up, grabbed the beam, and plummeted to the ground, surprisingly nimble for a six-year-old boy. “I’m Devereux Bell!” he confirmed, closing one brown eye and stabbing his fist into the air. “Uncatchable! Undefeated! So scary I don’t need any syndicate to protect me!”

  “Among other things,” Lu added, but she smiled at his delight. “As I said, Mr. Bell, I am but a simple lady. May I interest you in a treat instead?”

  Teo dove to his knees, leaning over the two small pastries she managed to recover.

  “Luuuuu,” he sang. “Can I have one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anna gets the other one?”

  “Anna gets the other one.”

  He moped. “But you don’t get any.”

  Lu passed him the largest pastry. “I already had one, Tee, but you’re sweet to worry.”

  “Teo Casales—oh, there you are!”

  The nurse he had been playing with appeared at the stable’s door. Her smile struggled to hide her fatigue, brought on from too long tending Grace Loray’s needy.

  When Annalisa fell too ill to care for herself, she had insisted on staying at the infirmary where she had volunteered, the one that served the impoverished of New Deza.

  “If I have good days, I can lend a hand,” she’d said.

  If it gives you hope, Lu had thought, then anything.

  “Lu brought treats!” Teo leaped up to show the nurse.

  Lu rose and smoothed the hair away from his face, freeing the black strands that stuck to his cheeks as he chomped a mouthful of the chocolate-covered pastry. Whether his skin’s red undertones were from childish exertion or an Argridian heritage was almost difficult to tell.

  Almost.

  “Why don’t you go out to the garden?” Lu told him. “I’m sure they could use help.”

  The nurse nodded when Lu looked up for encouragement.

  Teo’s eyes widened. “Maybe we’ll find magic plants! I know they’re only in rivers. But maybe. You never know.”

  Lu smiled. Garden plants had their uses but didn’t offer the guaranteed and unnatural effects of Grace Loray’s magic. And even if the infirmary could grow healing magic plants, none had any effect on Shaking Sickness.

  Lu had spent enough time looking.

  “Maybe,” she told him. “The gardeners will appreciate your help regardless.”

  Teo took off but slammed to a halt and looked back. “Thank you for the treat!” he called, and resumed running, the pastry clutched in both hands.

  The nurse’s expression tightened. “Have you brought more treatments today?”

  Lu’s lips straightened. “Soon.” She wouldn’t be able to create the sleeping concoction with the ingredients from the market for a few days. “What’s the count?”

  As if Lu might have forgotten how long Annalisa had been in the hospital. But she always hoped she miscalculated.

  “Twelve days, miss.” The nurse bit her bottom lip. “We lost another this morning. A man who had been here for”—she wrung her hands—“ten days.”

  Shaking Sickness was as mysterious as Grace Loray’s magic. No treatments, magical or otherwise, affected it; it didn’t spread from person to person; some patients suffered with it for years, others were taken in days. The only predictable thing about it was that it manifested in tremors at first, which eventually deteriorated a person’s bones until they could no longer stand or walk on their own, confining them to an infirmary bed. Once that happened, it was a matter of days before the disease claimed its victim.

  Annalisa had gone into the hospital twelve days ago.

  The nurse pushed her wrists together, fingers cupped upward. Lu recognized the motion as one used by followers of Argrid’s Church.

  Her nose curled. How people could still believe in the Church on Grace Loray, after everything that toxic religion had done here, was beyond Lu.

  “I pray for the Casales children,” the nurse said, speaking of Annalisa and Teo. “And for your soul as well.”

  Pray all you like, Lu wanted to tell her. Your god would never accept my soul.

  “Thank you,” Lu said through gritted teeth. She moved past with the remaining pastry. Annalisa would tell her to give it to Teo, but it would make her happy for a moment.

  Moments were all they had now.

  The war had seemed like a fun game at first: taking school lessons in the lower decks of steamboats and sleeping in blanket-filled cellars, always on the move, waking up in new places and around new people. But the illusion came to a crashing end when Lu was whisked out of a cellar one morning, her mother, Kari, screaming orders to their soldiers, with Tom grasping Lu’s hand and yanking her around sprays of cannon debris.

  Lu learned that when Tom sang her to sleep at night, it was not always to comfort her—it was to cover the moaning of their soldiers upstairs as others dug bullet
s out of their limbs. And when people called her mother Kari the Wave, it was not because she so loved the ocean, as she told Lu—it was because she had single-handedly led dozens of armed rebels into an Argridian headquarters to steal their battle plans, sunk a fleet of enemy steamboats, rescued prisoners from a damp mission basement, and performed dozens of other acts that kept the rebels afloat.

  None of this was a game. The war was a necessity. And as Lu got older, she became a part of that necessity, more than the other children of the rebels. Like Annalisa, they believed in the fun of revolution long after she had learned the truth.

  “It’ll end soon!” Annalisa had often declared. “My mother promised.”

  My parents have never promised me that, Lu thought. But she would smile, and play with the other children, and use their innocence as fuel when her parents sent her on missions.

  But she was with Annalisa for the war’s end. Lu tried not to remember the day, for many reasons. It served as a definitive break—before that day lay the war and her duty as a soldier; after it, peace, and her duty to help her parents build a functioning country.

  There was no place in her new reality for the children she had grown up alongside. Only months after the revolution’s end did Lu’s mother ask, “Why have you not seen Annalisa? You two were once friendly.”

  Looking at Annalisa was like reliving the sacrifices of the war. Lu had been glad to have other children to motivate her during it, but it was finished. Annalisa had escaped unscathed. What more could there be?

  Sickness, apparently. After Annalisa and Teo’s mother, Bianca, died of Shaking Sickness and Annalisa came down with the same illness, Lu had stumbled back into her life. She had kept a war from hurting Annalisa—she would not let something as small and useless as a disease harm her.

  Or so she had tried. And still tried.

  Now Lu reached Annalisa’s wing. The peeling plaster walls surrounded a dozen patients in cots, most of Mecht ancestries thanks to New Deza’s position in the declared territory of the Mecht syndicate. Only the impoverished hospitals needed entire wings dedicated to Shaking Sickness—it struck mostly the poor. However Shaking Sickness happened, Annalisa had probably gotten it, like Bianca, from helping those who refused to help themselves. This was Annalisa’s reward for being more selfless than Lu could hope to ever be: a death sentence.

  Annalisa’s dark eyes dropped to the pastry as Lu approached. “You smuggled that past Teo?”

  Lu sat next to her, knotting her petticoat and shift around her legs to block bedbugs from making a meal of her. She ignored the stench of the foul bedding, the muffled screams from the surgery wing, and the occasional retching of other patients.

  “He insisted you have it,” Lu said. “A generous little boy, that one.”

  Annalisa picked up the pastry. Her arm’s splint reached only to her wrist, leaving her hand free. A few bruises decorated her fingers, but Lu forced herself to overlook them.

  “Have they finalized the treaty yet?” Annalisa asked.

  Lu bit down on her lip. The Council was weeks from approving the treaty, according to Lu’s mother. The war might have technically ended five years ago, but this would ensure it was truly, finally, over.

  Lu fought the unease that had been filling her since the Argridian diplomats had landed. She didn’t want to think of them. She yanked open Botanical Wonders, the cover creaking as much as the cot. The descriptions from Grace Loray’s earliest explorers stared up at her, along with her own scribblings, and she dove into the distraction.

  “Where did we leave off last time? The Digestive plant?”

  Annalisa hesitated, her finger coated in the pastry’s rum glaze. Her eyes widened and her face broke out with sweat. Violent tremors clacked her teeth, and she dropped the pastry, a shaking spell rushing over her, limbs twitching so she looked as though she was trying to fly.

  When it passed, Annalisa pressed her forehead to Lu’s arm, tangles of black hair falling around her face. The patients in the other cots didn’t glance over, so it wasn’t shame that made Annalisa turn away. It could have been pain—though her body occasionally released tremors, her internal organs were in a constant state of convulsion. That was part of why she was covered in blankets despite the heat. She didn’t want Teo seeing the yellow and blue marks on her limbs.

  “Digestive,” Lu tried again. “Purple stems with magenta leaves. Found in the peat bogs of Backswamp. Consuming one stem sates hunger for seven days. Based on that”—Lu forced a smile—“when would be the most inopportune moment to take it?”

  Annalisa lifted her head. A vein in her eye had burst, streaking red around her dark iris.

  “Will you never give up?” she asked. Bianca had fled from Argrid when Annalisa was ten, and painful fits let the accent Annalisa had grown up with sneak through.

  I fought in the revolution to keep people like you happy, Lu thought. If I can ease this suffering of yours now, somehow, someway—no, Annalisa. I will not give up.

  “Digestive.” Lu nudged her, emphasis heavy on the word.

  “Fine, fine.” Annalisa let her head fall back against the wall, her dark hair sliding off her neck. “Digestive. If it sates hunger for days, then . . . then the most inopportune moment to take it would be the day before the Mild Season Festival. Think of all that food you’d be unable to eat. Roasted aubergine and pig-tail stew—and, oh, the smoked fish! It would be torment.”

  “Then we’d best get some for Teo before the next festival. Remember last year? He ate fistfuls of that imported whipped sugar and vomited all over the Emerdian trader’s booth. You had to buy two dozen stone rings and a whole stack of Emerdian leather hats because he ruined them.”

  Annalisa’s grin froze. “Lu,” she said.

  Lu’s hands tightened around Botanical Wonders, her finger finding its way to the bullet hole in the back cover.

  “You’ve done so much already. But you’ll take care of him? Teo, I mean.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “I’m all he has. When I . . . I need to know he’ll be cared for.” She took a breath. It did little to steady her voice. “His Argridian heritage is as undeniable as mine. If he ends up on the streets, a child his age, with obvious enemy blood? Even if the Council signs a treaty, prejudices like that don’t die. He’ll be—”

  “Stop.” Lu laid a hand on her arm. “He isn’t Argridian, and neither are you. You’re Grace Lorayan. You’ll be cared for, and so will he, and you don’t need to worry about such things.”

  Annalisa’s smile matched her bloodshot eyes. “The island is so simple from your view.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” Lu’s tone was harsher than she’d intended, but words spilled out from behind her unease. “Why shouldn’t we be one country working toward the same goal? Why shouldn’t we put our past ills behind us? If everyone agreed to live by the laws of this new country, we would have a fresh start. We could stop fearing people with Argridian blood, or assuming those who look Mecht or Tuncian or Grozdan are raiders, because we would all be Grace Lorayan. We wouldn’t even need a treaty to ensure that Argrid wouldn’t attack us again. We would be so strong in our unity that they could never hurt us.”

  Lu stopped, gasping. Annalisa put a hand on Lu’s where she gripped Botanical Wonders. The book mocked her now, that she thought a game could distract from the meeting that awaited her.

  “Lu,” Annalisa started, voice cautious. “Are you—”

  “Anna!”

  Teo’s squeal made the inhabitants of the wing stir. He hurried down the aisle, his black locks once again sticking to his sweaty face, proof he had been out toiling under the sun.

  “Anna,” he whispered when he got to the foot of her bed, remembering her rule in the infirmary—soft voices. “Did Lu give you the pastry? Isn’t it delicious?”

  Annalisa grinned. “So delicious, Tee. I doubt I can finish it—help me?”

  He crawled up onto the bed, squishing in on her other side, his hands leaving stre
aks of chocolate syrup on the already-stained bedding.

  His eyes brightened when he saw the book on Lu’s lap.

  “Lu! You brought the magic book!” he cried, and patients groaned at the volume.

  Lu grinned and passed it to him. “You’ll be better at this game than I am one day.”

  “I’m good at every game.”

  “Oh, are you?” Annalisa nudged him. “Prove it, little man.”

  Footsteps thudded toward them on the warped floorboards. Lu rose, expecting nurses rushing to attend a patient, but a lone nurse slid to a stop at the foot of Annalisa’s bed.

  “Miss Andreu,” she gasped. “A runner brought a note for you, but news is already spreading. They’ve caught him! He’s being held at the castle.”

  “Caught who?” Teo asked.

  Lu took the proffered note as the nurse smiled at him. “A stream raider. But not any stream raider—one who isn’t with a syndicate. It’s—”

  Disbelief squeezed Lu’s throat, making her voice high as she read the name in her mother’s note. “Devereux Bell.”

  4

  NEW DEZA’S CASTLE provided the best view in Grace Loray. Argrid had built it decades ago, high on one of the ebony cliffs that jutted over Lake Regolith. The port spread out beneath it like a sand deposit, cut apart by narrow rivers that infused the air with gray plumes of steamboat fog. Beyond, the view dissolved into the crisscrossing waterways that split Grace Loray into a bedlam of soggy swamps, dense jungle, and ramshackle ports, capped by the dormant volcanic mountains in the northern distance.

  Normally, the enchanting view would immobilize Lu. But today she found her anxiety too potent to be cleansed by beauty, and she stopped on the highest of the stone steps that led to the castle’s doors, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  Beyond these doors, the Argridian negotiation awaited. And now, the fate of Devereux Bell.

  Suspicion tasted sour on her tongue. But no—it was a coincidence that her pickpocket had resembled Devereux Bell. The most notorious stream raider on Grace Loray certainly would not have failed to rob her, nor was he so young, and—surely it was not him.