A moment later, she returns with a gladstone bag and a thick oiled cloak thrown over her shoulders. I am still debating the best way to tell her who I am—why had I thought it would come up more naturally than this? As she fumbles with her keys, the teeth skating along the rain-slick surface of the latch, she asks, “It’s your brother, you say?”
“Yes. His name is Henry Montague.”
She drops her keys. I almost bend to retrieve them for her, but she spins to face me, and her gaze pins me in place. She whips off her spectacles and looks me up and down, a careful inspection, like she hadn’t truly seen me before. “Adrian,” she says.
I swallow. “I’m sorry, I should have said right away, but I thought you’d . . .” No use babbling—the more I try to make excuses for the nonsensical order in which I introduced myself and my reasons for coming, the deeper I dig this grave. So I surrender any hope of a better first impression and simply say, “Yes, I’m Adrian. I’m your brother.”
18
As excruciating as my first meeting with Monty was, my fumbling introduction to my supposedly dead pirate doctor sister is worse. She isn’t hostile to me like he was—instead, she’s entirely disinterested. Her focus is so elsewhere, I have a sense that, when I told her who I was, she chose to put that information in a box and store it on the highest shelf of her mind until she has time to properly take it out and look at it. If ever. I try to talk to her several times as we make our way back down the hillside, but unless the subject is details of Monty’s condition, she simply shakes her head, an unspoken Not now.
Which is fine. Silence is fine. I feel like we should be talking—I feel like she should want to talk to me—about anything. It doesn’t have to be about the fact that we have the same goddamn parents who never told me there was one, let alone two, other Montagues before me, just a few words about the weather would be grand. But silence is fine. It’s fine.
The rain has collected in puddles along the path, impossible to see in the darkness so I step up to my ankles more than once. The storm is gathering strength overhead—somewhere over the ocean, thunder rumbles. Felicity pulls her hood up, face out of my sight. I try to keep my eyes on the path and resist the urge to stare out to sea, searching the horizon for . . .
For what, Adrian? Another hallucination?
I dig my nails into my thigh, and ignore the missing weight of the spyglass.
At the first cross street into town, Felicity says to me suddenly, “Is Monty actually hurt?”
The question startles me. Even in my wildest imaginings, it hadn’t occurred to me that Monty being near death might be an elaborate hoax to lure her from hiding. “I . . . think so.”
“How dramatic is he being?”
“Dramatic?” I repeat, unsure how to answer. “Well. He hasn’t really woken much since it happened. So.”
Her brow furrows as she considers this. “So probably real, then,” she says, and keeps walking.
At the top of the last block that slopes down to the harbor, Felicity stops abruptly, like she’s pausing for a carriage to pass. I stop too, not sure what we’re waiting for. Then I realize that, for the first time, she has a clear view of the harbor. Where the Dey is waiting. Her posture changes suddenly, the authoritative slant of her shoulders suddenly sinking into a defensive crouch. “Which ship did you come here on?” she demands.
“Uh.”
Before I have a chance to properly reply, she’s turned and started back up the street again, heading away from the port at a sprinting walk.
“Wait!” I chase her, but her pace quickens, hands flying up defensively as if she’s under fire.
“This is a trap.”
“It’s not, I swear!”
“Who’s paid you to come lure me out? Who are you really?”
“No one!” The answer seems relevant to both points of question. She whirls on me, and now it’s my turn to shield my face, trying to remember what she did with the pistol. “Please, Monty’s hurt. He’ll die without you.”
“It’s a lie.”
“It’s not a lie!”
“Why would Monty be here? Why would you be here?” She presses her fingers to her forehead, so hard she leaves crescent indentations. “Well done. You laid your snare and I almost tripped it.”
“It’s not!” I try to stop her crossing the street, but she swings her bag at me. I fling up my hands in front of my face and it clunks hard off my elbow. I can hear the items inside rattle when disrupted, a metallic clatter that puts me in mind of medieval torture implements, and I realize she may not need a pistol to do damage.
She raises the bag again for a second swing, but someone grabs it, wrenching it behind Felicity’s head, though she clings on like a violent acrobat. She whirls under the bag, her hands still clamped around the handle, and on the other side of it is Sim.
Felicity stares at her, then wrenches the bag from her grip with such force the momentum swings it backward and I’m nearly knocked again.
“Goddammit,” Felicity mutters.
“She brought us here,” I say weakly.
“Yes, I assumed as much, because before today, she was the only person who knew where I was.” Felicity looks from me to Sim, like she cannot decide whom she is more displeased to see.
“Your brother is on the Dey,” Sim says, then glances at me and adds, “Your other brother. He’s hurt badly. He needs you.”
“And who is standing on the gun deck to shoot me when I approach?” Felicity crosses her arms, the gladstone bag bouncing against her hip. I hear those saws sharpening themselves against each other again.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” Sim says.
“Not yet.”
Sim doesn’t respond to that. Instead, she says simply, “We did the best we could.”
Felicity stares at her for a moment, eyes narrowing. The silence widens. Then, without warning, she turns and starts back down the street, toward the harbor. Her hood flies off, and several strands of her wild hair flutter around her face. Sim and I both jog to catch up. The rain has left the street shining, the wet pavement slick and glossy as an otter’s back.
“You’re early,” Felicity says to Sim as we walk toward the harbor. “I thought I’d have at least another year before you changed your mind and gave me up.”
“Yes, well.” Sim’s mouth twitches, that taut intention she always carries there almost certainly holding back a smile. “I missed you.”
In the surgeon’s cabin of the Dey, Badis, Saad’s appointed surgeon, is snoring in the corner with a bottle of spirits that were surely meant to be medicinal tucked into his arm. He looks like a father fallen asleep rocking his child. Seb, our man from the Eleftheria, is sitting on the cabin floor beside the hammock where Monty is curled. The thin bedframe and mattress are suspended from the ceiling with a series of intricate knots, rendering it flatter than other suspended hammocks on ships, but gentler than a bunk when the ship cants.
“He woke for a bit,” Seb says to me as he, Felicity, and I execute a complicated dance in which we squeeze ourselves into the narrow cabin while Seb gets out of our way. Badis’s outstretched legs take up a disproportionate amount of real estate. “He asked after you, and when I said you’d gone he called me a nasty name and then dropped off again and—”