He looked up, met eyes with the younger man, who blinked behind the glass lenses he wore. “I’ll do it,” Petronus answered.
And his voice was steady and strong as he said it.
Chapter 11
Rae Li Tam
Rae Li Tam paced the beach, shouting orders that were in turn shouted out to what remained of her father’s iron armada. Her family scrambled and scurried about her, helped by natives obligated now by kin-clave and by reciprocity for the fine tools and trinkets they now possessed.
Her family had to leave.
Now.
Before the bird had arrived this morning, they were down three vessels plus the flagship. Those Vlad Li Tam had steamed forth to rendezvous with and his own vessel. She’d followed protocol and sent out two more when the distress bird reached them, informing her that a vessel was reefed and in need of repair. She’d also sent two additional engineers and a sizable portion of their repair parts. Now she knew both vessels and crew would not be coming back.
She added the numbers silently. Over two thousand souls lost or gods knew where.
She smelled treachery but could not discern whose. Someone within the House, perhaps the First Son, though the notion was unheard-of. In all of these generations, never had there been division within House Li Tam. Still, the note seemed real enough, and she could not discount it. She still held it in her hand and periodically, stopped pacing long enough to read it again.
Windwir a ruse, the coded message said. We are betrayed by our own. Save what can be saved. There was no mistaking the seal and signature. It was her father, Vlad Li Tam. But the message bird had been from one of the ships they’d most recently dispatched. Its feathers were singed.
Her brow furrowed and she bit her lip. A ruse. Betrayed by our own. She lowered her hand and looked again at the flurry of activity around her as the longboats were loaded and rowed out to tall iron ships that belched steam into a cloudless sky. The engines were up, and they neared their last load.
When Baryk approached, her feet were back to moving across the water-packed sand. “We’re nearly finished. Two more trips and we’ll have everything.” His voice lowered. “Are we leaving the trade goods?”
Rae Li Tam pondered this. “Yes,” she said. “We will leave them. But spread word that we go south. And leave birds for that direction with feed for six months.”
Baryk nodded, then his face softened. “How are you?”
She forced a smile at his concern. He was a strong partner, and she was grateful that her father had approved the match. There was logic and purpose behind the pairing. “I’m fine,” she said. “Focused on what must be done.” But underneath the words, she was afraid.
“Where are we going, then?”
She shook her head and moved her hands low and to her side. Not here. Not until we are at sea.
He read the movements, then nodded. “I understand.” He looked out to the ships, cupping a hand over his eyes against the sun. “I’m going out with this lot,” he said. “I’ll check the armaments and the watch rotations.” He looked back to her, his mouth suddenly grim. “You think the others are lost, then.”
She swallowed against the fear she felt. “I do. I think we’ve been brought to this place and Father just figured that out. I think he was lured out to sea.”
Removed from the Named Lands. Set apart from them. Far apart and by his own kin-the only predators who could match Lord Vlad Li Tam of House Li Tam. She thought of wolves hunting in the northern timberlands and shivered despite the tropical heat that baked her skin, hanging heavy and hot in her lungs.
Save what can be saved. She realized Baryk was speaking, though his words were lost to her. “I’m sorry?”
“I said he’s a crafty old hawk. Perhaps the note means he’s safe.”
But something within her told Rae Li Tam that was not to be hoped for. Something whispered that her father may indeed still be alive but could not possibly be safe. “We can’t afford to think that he is. Which means everything changes. No birds without my consent-I want the coops locked and under guard.”
“I’ll pass the word,” he said. Then, Baryk leaned in close and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “I’ll see you aboard.”
He moved off quickly, shouting for two young men to wait for him as they prepared to cast off their boat. Rae Li Tam watched him climb over the bow and settle onto one of the benches. When he inclined his head toward her, she returned his gesture of respect.
Then she was back to pacing and barking orders, pointing and calling out to this one or that one while her mind continued spinning.
Half of the fleet was gone now, though the vessels had not carried full complements. It would mean cramped quarters on the remaining ships.
And slower speeds.
But if there was a threat to the House-from within the House-it would not be speed that saved them. It would be strategy and misdirection, craft and deception-all skills she’d learned at her father’s feet during the forty years she’d served him before settling into her married retirement with Baryk in their villa on the Outer Emerald Coast outside the city-state P’Shaal Tov. Certainly, she’d still served her father during those quieter years, often putting her skills as an apothecary to work. Three years of pretending to be a boy acolyte with the Androfrancines now made her the New World’s leading authority on all things chemical with the Order fallen. From time to time, her father required those services of her. And she’d agreed to provide them when he’d approved her request to take Baryk as husband and live with the warpriest near the city-state he’d served most his life.
Four times in fifteen years had her father required anything of her. Most recently, it had been a recipe for her sister’s procreative work with the Gypsy King-a simple enough task. Each assignment had come with little information and she’d given herself to the work gladly. And though she’d have paid every last coin she owned to please her father, he had arranged generous compensation for each assignment.
But then the triple-coded note had come last year, and she’d known for the first time that her father had encountered something that had changed him, some kind of respect-based fear that drove him to retreat. Within weeks of that fateful bird, and after a short but impassioned conversation culminating in their first raised voices as a couple, she and Baryk had packed what they could not live without, sold off what they could, and had arrived at the Tam Estates to see the iron ships laying in their cargo at anchor in the bay. They joined in the work of loading while her father, Vlad Li Tam, burned the books of his family’s work and prepared to flee the Named Lands.
Or did he go a-hunting? she wondered.
Perhaps, she thought, it was both.
Regardless, after seven months at sea, moving at a leisurely, methodical pace, something had happened. The armada was halved, and though some part of her felt the compulsion to know, she knew there was little chance of discovering what might have happened to her father and to the rest of her family.
Save what can be saved. There was finality in those words, and despite her best hope, she sensed that some night soon, once they were safely to sea and steaming toward points unknown to all but her, she would sit at her writing table in her cramped captain’s quarters aboard the new Tam family flagship. She would give herself, for a moment, to grief and compose a poem to honor her father’s passing.
Even as her mind laid out these nets, her feet moved across the sand and her voice rang out with command. Years away, and yet the mantle fell easily to her as the oldest of Vlad Li Tam’s surviving children in the absence of his First Son or his First Grandson.