And in a way they were. Anchorage would never be the same again, now that all these boisterous, ill-mannered, sometimes troubled children had come to live there. Freya set about opening the abandoned upper floors of the Winter Palace, and the old building filled with life and noise as the children moved into their new quarters. Some of them were not quite used to the idea that they were not supposed to steal, and some had nightmares, calling out Uncle’s name and Gargle’s in their dreams, but Freya was convinced that with patience and love they could be helped to forget their time beneath the sea and grow into happy, healthy Vinelanders.
After all, it had worked with Caul, eventually. Freya wouldn’t say what had passed between them on the voyage home, but the former Lost Boy never went back to his shack in the engine district. At the beginning of that October, when the harvests were in and the animals down from the high pastures and the city was preparing for winter, he and the margravine were married.
Freya awoke early on the morning after her wedding: wide-awake at five o’clock, the way she used to be when she was young. She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Caul, and went to the window of her chamber with the floor cold under her bare feet and the tatters of her bridal wreath still hanging in her hair.
When she drew back the curtains, she saw that the ice was thick upon the lake and that a dusting of snow had fallen in the night. She felt glad that her city was back in the domain of the Ice Gods for another six months. The gods of summer, of the lake and the hunt, had all been good to her people, and the gods of the sea and the Goddess of Love had been very kind to her too, but the Ice Gods were the gods she had grown up with, and she trusted them better than the rest. She breathed on the window and drew their snowflake symbol in the mist and whispered. “Keep Tom safe. And Hester too, though she doesn’t deserve it. Lead them to Wren, wherever she may be. And may they all come home again to us, safe and happy and together.”
But if the Ice Gods heard her prayer, they sent no sign. The only answer Freya had was the sound of the wind in the spires of the Winter Palace, and her husband’s voice, gentle and sleepy, calling her back to her bed.
Part TWO
Chapter 20
A Life on the Ocean Wave
Pennyroyal, my dear?”
“Mmmmm?”
Morning in the Pavilion, and the mayor and mayoress sitting at opposite ends of the long table in the breakfast room, screened from the hot sun by muslin blinds. Behind the mayoress’s chair, her African slave waved an ostrich-feather fan, wafting cool air over her and rustling the pages of the newspaper that her husband was trying to read. “Pennyroyal, I am talking to you.”
Nimrod Pennyroyal sighed and put down the paper. “Yes, Boo-Boo, my treasure?”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself saddled with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke. Fifteen years earlier, when Predator’s Gold was topping the bestseller lists aboard every city of the Hunting Ground, she had seemed like a good idea. Her family were old Brighton aristocracy, but poor. Pennyroyal was a mere adventurer, but rich. The marriage allowed the Heckmondwykes to restore their fortunes, and gave Pennyroyal the social clout he needed to get himself elected mayor. Boo-Boo made an excellent wife for a man of ambition: She was good at small talk and flower arrangements, she planned dinner parties with military precision, and she was expert at opening fetes, galas, and small hospitals.
Yet Pennyroyal had come to regret his marriage. Boo-Boo was such a large, forceful, florid woman that she tired him out just by being in the same room. A keen amateur singer, she had a passion for the operas of the Blue Metal culture, which went on for days with never a trace of a tune, and usually ended with all the characters dead in a heap. When Pennyroyal annoyed her by questioning the cost of her latest frock or flirting too openly with a councillor’s wife over dinner, she would practice her scales until the windows rattled, or crank up her gramophone and treat the household to all six hundred verses of the Harpoon Aria from Diana, Princess of Whales.
“I expect you to listen when I talk to you, Pennyroyal,” she said now, setting down her croissant in an ominous manner.
“Of course, dear. I was just studying the latest war reports in the Palimpsest. Excellent news from the front. Makes one proud to be a Tractionist, eh?”
“Pennyroyal!”
“Yes, dearest?”
“I have been looking over the arrangements for our Moon Festival ball,” said Boo-Boo, “and I could not help noticing that you have invited the Flying Ferrets.”
Pennyroyal made a sort of shrugging motion with his entire body.
“I’m not sure we should be entertaining mercenaries, Nimrod.”
“I just happened to invite their leader, Orla Twombley,” Pennyroyal protested. “I may have said she could bring a few of her friends if she wanted. Wouldn’t want her to feel left out, you know… She’s a famous aviatrix. Her flying machine, the Combat Wombat, downed three air dreadnoughts at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal.”
As he spoke, a vision of the female air ace filled Pennyroyal’s mind, sleek and gorgeous in her pink leather flying suit. He had always prided himself on how popular he was with the ladies. Why, in his younger days he had enjoyed passionate romances with exotic and beautiful women (Minty Bapsnack, Peaches Zanzibar, and the Traktiongrad Smolensk Ladies’ Croquet Team all sprang to mind). He’d been rather hoping that the dashing Orla Twombley might soon be added to that list.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” said Boo-Boo frostily.
Pennyroyal shifted awkwardly in his chair. “Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed…” he mumbled. He hated scenes like this. That nasty, suspicious look in Boo-Boo’s eyes was just the sort of thing, he thought, to put a chap right off his breakfast. Luckily he was saved from any further interrogation by one of his house slaves, who opened the breakfast-room door and said, “Mr. Plovery to see you, Your Worship.”
“Excellent!” cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his visitor. “Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!”
Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the Laines, was the mayor’s advisor on Old Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal to make himself a tidy little nest egg by secretly selling off items from the Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face that looked as if somebody had molded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He seemed startled by Pennyroyal’s exuberant greeting—people weren’t usually so glad to see him, but then, people weren’t usually being quizzed about lovely aviatrices by Mrs. Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.
“I have been doing some research into that item Your Worship showed me,” he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly toward Boo-Boo. “You remember, Your Worship? The item?”
“Oh, there’s no need for secrecy, Plovery,” Pennyroyal told him. “Boo-Boo knows all it about it. Don’t you, my little upside-down cake? That metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a look at it, just to see what he thought…”
Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the gossip page. “Do excuse me, Mr. Plovery. I find talk about Old Tech so dull…”
Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction, and turned back to Pennyroyal. “You still have the item?”