Philip Reeve: Predator's gold

“Tell who what?”

“Tell everyone that it was me who sold you to Arkangel?”

Freya had been wondering about that herself, and she thought for a while before she answered. “What if I did?”

Hester looked down at the floor, smoothing the pile of the thick carpet with her scuffly old boots. “If you did, I couldn’t stay. I’d go off somewhere, and you’d have Tom.”

Freya smiled. She would always be fond of Tom, but her crush on him had faded somewhere on the Greenland ice. “I am the Margravine of Anchorage,” she said. “When I marry, it will be for good political reasons, to someone from the lower city, perhaps, or…” (She hesitated, blushing a little at the thought of Caul, so sweet and awkward.) “Anyway,” she went on quickly, “I want you to stay. Anchorage needs someone like you aboard.”

Hester nodded. She could imagine her father, in some chamber of High London long ago, having just such a conversation as this with Magnus Crome. “So when there’s trouble, like if Uncle and his Lost Boys find your little settlement, or air-pirates attack, or a traitor like Pennyroyal needs quietly killing, you’ll turn to me to do your dirty work?”

“Well, you do seem rather good at it,” said Freya.

“And what if I don’t choose to?”

“Then I’ll tell everyone about Arkangel,” Freya said. “But otherwise, it’ll be our secret.”

“That’s blackmail,” said Hester.

“Ooh, is it? Gosh!” Freya looked rather pleased, as if she felt she was finally getting the hang of running a city.

Hester watched her carefully for a moment, then smiled her crooked smile.

And at last, very close to journey’s end, there came a night when she was woken from her half-dreams in the chair beside Tom’s bed by a small, familiar voice that said just, “Het?”

She shook herself and leaned over him, touching his brow, smiling into his pale, worried face. “Tom, you’re better!”

“I thought I was going to die,” he said.

“You almost did.”

“And the Huntsmen?”

“All gone. And Arkangel stuck in trap-ice somewhere behind us. We’re heading south, right into the heart of old America. Well, it might be old Canada, technically; nobody’s sure where the border used to run.”

Tom frowned. “Then Professor Pennyroyal wasn’t lying? The Dead Continent is really green again?”

Hester scratched her head. “I don’t know about that. This old map’s turned up — it’s complicated. At first I didn’t see why we should believe Snori Ulvaeusson any more than Pennyroyal, but there are definitely patches of green here. Sometimes when the fog lifts you can see twisty little trees and things clinging on for dear life to the sides of the mountains. I suppose that’s what gave rise to all those airman’s tales. But it’s nothing like Pennyroyal promised. It’s no Hunting Ground. Just an island or two. Anchorage will have to become a static settlement.”

Tom looked frightened, and Hester squeezed his hand and cursed herself for scaring him; she’d forgotten how much townies like him feared life on the bare earth. “I was born on an island, remember? It was nice. We’ll have a good life here.”

Tom nodded and smiled, gazing at her. She looked good; rather pale, and still nobody’s idea of beautiful, but very striking, in new black clothes she told him she’d taken from a shop in the Boreal Arcade to replace her prison-slops. She had washed her hair, and tied it back with a silvery thing, and for the first time that he remembered she did not try to hide her face while he watched her. He reached up and stroked her cheek. “And are you all right? You look a bit white.”

Hester laughed. “You’re the only person who ever notices how I look. I mean, apart from the obvious. I’ve just been feeling a bit queasy.” (Better not to tell him yet about what Windolene had found when Hester went to her complaining of sea-sickness. The shock might make him ill again.)

Tom touched her mouth. “I know it feels awful, those men you had to kill. I still feel guilty about killing Shrike, and Pewsey and Gench. But it wasn’t your fault. You had to do it.”

“Yes,” she whispered, and smiled at how un-alike they were, because when she thought of the deaths of Masgard and his Huntsmen she felt no guilt at all, just a sort of satisfaction, and a glad amazement that she had got away with it. She lay down on the bed beside him and she held him, thinking of all the things that had happened since they first came to Anchorage. “I’m Valentine’s daughter,” she said softly, when she was sure he was asleep, and it seemed a good thing to be, as she lay there with Tom in her arms, and Tom’s child inside her.

Freya woke to find a sliver of grey daylight showing between the curtains. Voices were calling out, down in the street outside her palace. “Land ho! Land ho!” It was hardly news, since Anchorage had been close to land for days now, nosing cautiously down a long, narrow inlet towards the place which Snori Ulvaeusson had called Vineland. But the shouting went on. Freya climbed out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown, opened the curtain, opened the long window, stepped out into the cold on the balcony. Dawn was breaking, clear as ice. On either side of the city black mountains squatted over their reflections, striped with snow, and among the crags and scree slopes small starveling pines showed like the first growth of hair on a shaven head. And there…

She gripped the balcony rail with both hands, glad of the bite of the frosty metal which proved she was not dreaming. Ahead, the outline of an island was hardening out of the mist which hung above the still water. She saw pine trees on the heights, and birches still holding up handfuls of last summer’s leaves like pale gold coins. She saw steeps green with heather and rusty with dead bracken. She saw a lacework of snow on dark stands of rowan, blackthorn, oak; and beyond, across a shining strait, another island and another. And she laughed aloud and felt her city tremble beneath her for the last time as it yawed and slowed, bearing her safely into the secret anchorages of the west.