Page 64 of Fate of the Argosi

‘Oh, do shut up.’

Tone’s too sharp, too much like some dockside fish trader shooing away unruly kids. Not controlled or haughty like she usually is.

What she’d really wanted me to hear was:I need you to move past your impressions of me. I need you to trust me, just for a moment.

‘I never liked you before you saved all our lives.’

Again, too much heat, the words spoken too quickly.When you came to the enclave, you scared me. Scared all of the elders.

‘And, somehow, you manage to make me like you even less now . . .’

Guilt. Confusion. Trepidation. She uses the word ‘like’ to mean ‘understand’.I never understood you until you led us out of the necropolis, and yet I understand you even less now.

‘. . . now that I owe . . .’

Owe.So much emphasis on that one syllable, stretching the vowel until it no longer carries a sense of debt but instead one of . . . gratitude?Now that I am so grateful to you for. . .

‘Everything.’The last word, the destination to which she was trying to lead me, even though she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.Everything. Everything in what? Possessions? No. Lives? More even than that. This was an everything that encompassed not only that whichwas, but that whichhas yet to be. The future.

So what she’d really wanted to tell me was:‘I need you to move past your impressions of me, Ferius. I need you to trust me, just for a moment. When you came to the enclave, you scared me. Scared all of the elders. I never understood you until you led us out of the necropolis, and yet I understand you even less now – now that I am so grateful to you for the future.’

My unwinding of her utterances had taken only a couple of seconds, and I hadn’t spoken any of them aloud, but Stoika was staring at me, wrinkled lips parted a little, her exhale sending the foggy fumes of the tea across the tiny cabin. ‘You already know what I came here to say, don’t you?’

‘I believe so, elder.’

‘How? Have the Argosi uncovered the secrets of Jan’Tep silk magic that you can pluck from my mind words not yet spoken?’

‘No, elder. It is that you . . .’ I searched for a way to explain the third tenet of arta loquit. ‘Conversations such as the one you came to have are not linear in nature. They’re more like . . . like a single painting cut into hundreds of tiny scraps and kept in a bag. With each sentence, you reach into the bag and toss a few more scraps onto the table between us, reassembling the picture ever so slowly. Yet, in one sense, each of those scraps is—’

‘Part of that greater whole,’ she finished for me. ‘And from it, one might infer the rest?’

‘Yes.’

Stoika reached inside her coat and took out a tiny leather pouch. Mahdek teas are often combined with mixtures of spices and sugars. This particular melange smelled overly sweet. Maybe she was tired of smelling me already. She tapped out a thimbleful of the sweet-scented crystals into one of the cups, then asked, ‘Would you like some as well?’

I stared at the little pouch, listened to the flat tone in her voice. ‘Yes, please,’ I replied. ‘A little more than you’ve put in yours.’

Stoika nodded but didn’t actually pour even a fraction of her own portion into my cup before she began stirring it in. ‘Do you suppose you might allow me to speak awhile without telling me what I intend to say before I’ve even found the words?’ she asked.

I grinned. ‘I make no promises, elder.’

‘The young,’ she complained as if that were a complete sentence, then sat there chewing and watching me in relative silence as the creaks and groans of the galleon went on around us. The hull listed a little, so I reached over and steadied the tray on her lap. She batted my hand away before finally beginning what anyone, regardless of whether they’d ever studied arta loquit, would have instantly recognised as a confession. ‘The council thought we were helping our young,’ she began quietly, ‘shielding them from the heartache that our generation and all the ones that came before us experienced when realising there was no future for our people. Our ancestors had failed us, and we, in turn, had failed ourselves. We thought . . .’ The words trailed off. She lifted her wooden cup to her lips.

‘Go on,’ I urged her.

She put down the cup. ‘We believed that Kievan and the others would be the last generation of Mahdek, that, whether through disease, violence or simply neglect, our people’s lineage would end within these next few decades. When Marshal Colfax offered us a place of safety on his estate, the council decided that this would provide a gentler life, an easier passage into oblivion for our children.’

Shouts from the deck above seeped through the wooden planking. Something about ‘the causeway’ being in sight. I ignored the cacophony though. When someone’s struggling as hard to get their words out as Stoika was, you don’t rush them. She seemed to sense this and smiled a silent acknowledgement before reaching for one of the wooden cups.

‘That one’s mine,’ I said.

She looked down at the tray. ‘Really? I could’ve sworn—’

I picked up both cups, and made a show of sniffing at each one. ‘See?’ I asked, holding up the first. ‘This one stinks of too much sweetspice and ginger.’ I handed it back to her and then turned to the second. ‘This one just reeks of good old-fashioned Mahdek tea.’ I set mine aside. ‘Either way, there’s a commotion above decks, so if you’ve got something to confess, now’s the time.’

She stared into the steam coming off her cup and sighed. ‘Do you remember what I said to you when the ship ran aground in the black ice, or rather the black ice had surrounded the ship?’

‘You said, “It was always going to end this way. Our doom was coming soon enough. What difference would a few more years of shaking our fists and swearing at the sky have done?”’

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