Claire McKenna - The Deepwater Trilogy

The fight might have been silent, but that did not mean it had gone unnoticed. Mere minutes later the person Arden had been trying to avoid before the fight made his unwelcome reappearance.

He slid in behind her, exhaling a loud indignant rasp of breath in her ear. His voice followed, both sulky and wheedling. ‘You saw the fight? It is the way things are settled here in Fiction, in blood and violence. The ignoble creatures of the Darkling Coast do not bargain with words, if they consent to bargain at all.’

Then there it was, the male body pressing insistently against her back, pretending support, but hoping for the other thing too. A sharp stab of irritation made Arden grimace. She pulled away from him and affected a smile of bewildered relief, as if his appearance baffled her utterly.

‘Coastmaster Justinian, I’d wondered where you’d gotten to.’

‘What happened? I said explicitly for you to remain close.’

‘I’d thought you were following me, when I said I was going to look at the market. Then I was lost in the crowd. I didn’t realize you were only instructing the old man, and not exactly helping him.’

His eyes narrowed. Peacock he might have been, but Mr Justinian was not stupid. There was hardly a crowd on a Vigil market day. Arden had evaded him. No mere accident had made her slip away while his back was turned.

‘You do understand you may call me Vernon, now? We are not strangers to each other.’

His hand slithered about her waist. The flinch was instinctive. Handsome he might have been, with his coif of pomaded hair and smooth chin, his height six foot by the old measure, grey eyes the colour of an institutional slate, perhaps some hint of a tan to his skin that a distant and more noble ancestor had begrudgingly gifted.

But something in the Coastmaster’s features was small and bitter. Snivelling . As if the world owed him more than the sizable portion he’d been given, and he resented any other soul who merely received a fraction of his advantages.

For a woman newly arrived at this town under the employ of the powerful Seamaster’s Guild, Coastmaster Justinian was the only thing close to an equal associate she had. Even though she was sanguis and he was not, they were both of them isolated aristocrats in a way, graduated from Northern technical academies, degree-holders beholden to the great service Guilds that linked the two countries into one fraternal parliament. It made a sort of sense that they should cultivate a professional partnership.

The man’s constant touching, well, that was merely a Fiction trait, was it not? Certainly, the cold weather made even bare acquaintances huddle.

‘… now you have made a fool of yourself by running off unaccompanied.’ Mr Justinian continued to scold Arden while steering her towards the row of trestles that made up the last of the marketplace stalls. ‘Fortunately you must only contend with appearing slovenly in public.’

She held the sharp tongue in her head that would have corrected him, I have seen more and bloodier dock fights than this one, and I’d prefer a hundred of them rather than one more day with you.

These things she would have said, if her position in Vigil was not so dreadfully fraught and insecure. Though she had taken her orders dutifully, coming to Fiction had meant abandoning her secure signaller’s position in Clay Portside. If she lost this one, she would be effectively over-specialized and unemployed. This was a bad position for a sanguis to be in.

So Arden kept her counsel, and stored the little nuisance in a mental glory box of accumulated offences.

Mr Justinian steered her back towards the main street with its row of trestles while maintaining his lecture.

‘… the worst of the reprobates operate out of that establishment and upon these streets. See? This is why I have kept you in the safety of the Manse all this time, despite your obvious lack of gratitude. I have saved you from the worst outcomes that occur when men gather.’

‘They rather seemed more concerned with their own arrangements,’ Arden said, pulling away from him, and gladly so, for the Coastmaster’s hands were never content to rest upon her middle and had the unfortunate habit of crawling up towards the undersides of her bosom or the smallest part of her back. ‘My standing there was completely accidental.’

‘Oh, so you think yourself lucky for having escaped their attention?’ Mr Justinian said mulishly.

‘I do, in fact.’

He picked at the ruined sleeve of her coat. ‘Go buy a replacement for your torn coat and charge it to the Guild. Then we can leave this place. But don’t wander.’

I’ll wander off however I like, you insipid creature , Arden thought ferociously, her anger a physical pain that could not be soothed by her speaking the curse aloud, so remained inside her like a swallowed coal that did not cease to burn.

Arden picked in despondent indecision at the mess of fisherman’s clothing with gloves too fine for a village on the edge of nowhere, until her arms smelled of fishwax and linseed oil.

She had wasted so much time shut inside Mr Justinian’s decaying baronial estate, and at her first breath of liberty all she’d been allowed to see were street-fights and offal sellers. Despair – always so close and so suffocating – had fermented in her time under curfew. She had heard the domestic staff talk behind closed doors or under stairs. To them, Arden Beacon was not a professional guildswoman sent from the great ports of Clay Portside. She was merely produce fatted up for the eventuality of Mr Justinian’s bed.

‘A devil’s curse upon you, Mr Justinian,’ she said beneath her breath, tossing aside a scale-speckled pair of trousers, ‘and curse you, Mr Lindsay, for—’

The bronze flash caught her by surprise, stopped at once the bleak train of her thoughts. What imagination was that, her seeing such a thing in all these stained linens and thistle-cottons?

Arden dug in deep again and disinterred her find – an odd, slightly sheened garment – out from the knot of unwashed rags.

She raised to the day a thing that in her hands made no sense.

A coat. A stout, utilitarian coat cut for a female worker of hard ocean climates. Not too long in the hem though; no loose fabric to foul a hurried journey up stone steps in a high storm. A thing rightly made of old canvas and felted wool, worn on a body until it fell to pieces.

But the fabric …

Arden had to rub the collar with her fingers, make certain her earlier fall was not causing her to see wonders. There was only one creature alive that could supply such a hide. Leather as bright as an idol’s polished head and with a crust of luminescent cobalt-blue rings across the arms and yoke. Subtle grading to black when it hit the light just so.

She turned the coat around and her breath caught. She had not expected the fabled kraken crucifix , the terrifying pattern of a sea-monster’s crest. By all the devils of sky and blood, you’d have found its likeness only in a Djenne prince’s wardrobe in Timbuktu, not a filthy rag pile at the edge of the world, and yet here it was; hidden away with thrice-mended broadcloth trousers and sweaters that were more knots than knits.

Before Arden could inquire about the article, her benefactor already had his hand about the coat’s collar.

‘Let me put that aside for you,’ Mr Justinian said and, without asking, slid in between her and the table, ready to yank Arden’s prize away. ‘This is not suitable.’

Despite her relatively short stature, and the dark, fragile air of over-breeding about her, Arden was no pushover. Growing up within the labyrinthine map of the capital city docks, one learned in the hardest of ways those streetwise traits anybody needed to survive. She saw the snatch coming in Mr Justinian’s beady eyes before he made his move, and quickly secured the coat within her strong lantern-turner’s hands.