Carousel Seas Read online

  “Thanks for talking to me, Kate. Cap’n Borgan, I apologize for monopolizing your lady’s conversation. Let me make it up to you—name a song and I’ll play it, first off.”

  Borgan considered him.

  “How ’bout ‘The Mary Ellen Carter’?”

  Andy might have blinked—impossible to tell behind the glasses. He did throw back his head and laugh out loud.

  “Oh, yeah; that’ll play fine! Shoulda thought of it myself!”

  * * *

  I leaned on the rail of the summer parlor and looked out over the dunes, and the long stretch of dark beach.

  Far away, the waves were nothing but smooth rolls, showing a faint greenish glow just beneath the surface. The air had finally and truly cooled, and a little landside breeze patted my face shyly. As far as I could see, my vision enhanced by the land, the beach was empty. It was, I supposed, late. Borgan and I had stayed through Andy’s last set before paying the tab and walking the long way back to Dube Street.

  The town was quiet—as quiet as it had been since the motorcycles had opened the Fourth. If I listened hard, I could hear the band cranking down at the Neptune, and the occasional high scream of laughter.

  I took a deep breath of damp, salt-flavored air and sighed it out, absolutely content.

  Borgan sighed, too, his elbows resting on the rail next to me.

  “That’s an impressive bit of work the man does,” I said, slowly. “I wonder if it does any good, in the long run.”

  “Good’s a changing tide. Prolly, he does mix things around, here and there. Whether they stay mixed or no—I’m thinking that’s outside what he can do. And, y’know, if all and everything he can do is lay heart-ease for a couple hours—there’s good done enough.”

  “I guess . . .” I let the sentence drift off, as my brain went off in pursuit of a sudden, shiny thought.

  “Borgan, did Andy . . . he said he’d taken half of Mother’s burden. Her only burden was what Ramendysis had done to her soul. Does that mean he . . . took . . .”

  “Andy’s trenvay,” he pointed out, and leaned his shoulder into mine. “Trenvay don’t have much to do with souls in the general way of things.”

  “But—”

  “Likely all they did was share their magic.”

  He said it so casually, like it was a simple, usual—even a pleasurable undertaking. My sharing with Prince Aesgyr had damn’ near killed me, though it might, I thought, trying to be fair, have been different, if there had been anything like informed consent, or something approaching assistance. Then, it might have been . . . not traumatic. I could see that. Pleasurable, though . . .

  I cleared my throat.

  “Mother doesn’t have any power. I offered her some of my jikinap, and she turned it down. Said it would eat her.”

  “Might be true, given the Big Magic’s nature,” Borgan conceded. “But she’s got her magic, don’t she? Just like all trenvay?”

  I’d never actually thought of that. What was the child of the union of an Ozali from the Land of the Flowers and a dryad of the Changing Land? Surely, she was . . . not mundane. But, unlike every trenvay—and Guardian—I knew, Nessa had no service, no one place that rooted and nourished her; the source of her magic; intertwined with and informing her life . . .

  Rather, it seemed she was able to take nourishment from any that offered. It was how she had survived in the Land of the Flowers, after Ramendysis had ravished and all but destroyed her. The plants in the garden of what had been our house—the plants had loved her; they had taken her in, and hidden her; nourished her and kept her alive.

  “I’ll accept your theory as a theory,” I told Borgan. I cleared my throat, remembering my mother’s look of radiant health . . .

  “So, she and Andy . . . merged . . .” I broke off, shivering in horror, the stink of peaches clogging my nose.

  Borgan looked down at me, his eyes glinting in the darkness.

  “You not as okay with this as you thought?”

  I swallowed, and breathed in, banishing the remembered odor of peach with good sea air.

  He’s making her happy, I reminded myself. He eased her pain and brought her closer, if not all the way, to full health.

  “I—It just seems . . . sudden,” I said. “And irrevocable.”

  “You heard what the boy said. The music’s all around and in us, too. You can’t break it.”

  “And you can’t escape it,” I said, more sharply than I had intended.

  I felt Borgan flinch, like I’d dealt him a sharp slap on the ear.

  “Most people,” he said, after a pause. “Most people, they share magic, it’s a good thing. It . . . enriches both; it increases understanding. There’s no wishin’ for something like escape. Be like trying to run away from yourself.”

  Which, for the record, I had done. Also? It’s a really short-term solution. Still, not getting entangled in the first place seemed the best bet.

  “If you say so,” I told Borgan, dubiously.

  “Listen, Kate . . .”

  His voice faded, and he sat down, suddenly, on the deck.

  Fear, abrupt and icy, struck, and I dropped to my knees, my hand over his heart, calling the land, in case—

  “Borgan?”

  He put his hand over mine and held it where it was. I could feel his heart beating, strong and steady, like the waves. The land reported health, and strength, and a solid, pleasant weight upon it.

  “You okay?” I asked, anyway.

  “Hope to be.” He raised his other hand, and touched my lips, gently, with his fingertips. Then he released me, and settled his back against the spindles. “Come give us a snuggle.”

  I don’t know much about it, from personal experience, but my opinion is that Borgan’s a world-class snuggler; I got myself onto his lap, leaned into his chest, and put my arms around his waist.

  “That’s nice,” he said, and I heard his voice rumble under my ear. He sighed, and put his arms around me; resting his chin on the top of my head.

  “Listen, Kate. You know I won’t hurt you or do anything you wouldn’t like?”

  “’Course I do.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I trust you,” I said, starting to feel drowsy. I pressed my head closer against his shoulder.

  “All right, then,” he murmured. “I trust you, too. Remember that, right? Dream on it.”

  “I will,” I promised, my eyes drifting closed; the comforting sound of his heartbeat filling my head . . .

  . . . until I fell asleep in his arms.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THURSDAY, JULY 6

  HIGH TIDE 7:44 A.M. EDT

  SUNRISE 5:06 A.M.

  I was too well rested to even think of going back to sleep after I’d seen Borgan off, so I made a pot of coffee and sat down on the living room floor with my maps and guidebooks to hand. Still zone study, that was—an ongoing project. Granted, High Season probably wasn’t the best time to go walking the land, looking for this or that wyrd place, having conversations with odd-looking creatures of possibly questionable sanity.

  It is true that most . . . mundane folk can’t see trenvay at all, unless the trenvay push the glamor hard, nor feel the wyrd pushing them away from this place or that. That’s just their nature and nothing to be done, for or about it. A purely mundane person might see me talking to myself in the marsh—but most wouldn’t. People are pretty good at editing things that are too strange to bear right out of their lives. Editing them out, real-time, before they even permit themselves to realize that something out of the ordinary is happening.

  That’s a kind of magic, right there, I guess—a nice, tight protection spell.

  The folks who are the danger, say, to a Guardian wanting to get about her business with the trenvay—those were the folk who can see, or hear, things and beings that just can’t be, and the smaller subset of those who aren’t frightened, are more curious than frightened. Or are crazy.

  That all being true, it would be wisest for me to wait until the Season ended before resuming any physical scouting. I accepted that.

  However, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with studying up at home and noting down a few leads. Pinpointing a particular still zone wasn’t the easiest thing in the world—in fact, it was damned frustrating. I held out some hope that practice would make perfect, if I just kept at it long enough.

  This morning, though, I kept returning to the map, and the land just where Goosefare Brook entered Saco Bay, right where the trestle for the Dummy Railroad used to be . . . and couldn’t you just see the old pilings still there, after all these years, sticking up out of low tide like a row of broken teeth.

  That bit of land right there . . . that had once—long ago—held the service of a trenvay. To hear Felsic tell it, the service of that trenvay had been to bring ships in close until they broke up on the sandbar, and that had been too strange and terrible even for the Guardian of the time and other of the trenvay, who had banded together to strip her service from her.

  I looked up from the map on my lap, and frowned hard at the ceiling. Stripping a trenvay of his or her service was—not something I had the least idea how to accomplish. Apparently, it took the agreement of the land and the rest of the trenvay. I’d have to ask Felsic to elaborate, or make an appeal to Nerazi.

  In the meanwhile, there was this bit of land, which had no trenvay in service to it—not that every bit of land or chunk of rock did hold a trenvay, but the other part of Felsic’s story was that it had been expected in this case that someone else would take up the service.

  And that had never happened.

  Which gave rise to all sorts of interesting speculation about what attributes made any certain someplace . . . worthy of? interesting to? . . . a proto-trenv
ay.

  I sighed and reached for my coffee mug.

  Hell of a Guardian you are, I scolded myself. You don’t even know how trenvay arise. I’d have to ask Nerazi that, too, and take my ribbing like a big—

  There came a knock at the door. I’d been so deep in my speculations that it surprised me, even as the land showed me Peggy standing on the porch, bag in hand.

  “It’s open!” I called.

  The latch snapped and she stepped inside.

  “Single woman ought not to leave the door unlocked, even if she is the local equivalent of Oz,” Peggy said, shutting same firmly.

  “I can lock it from here,” I said, and did; the snap of the deadbolt going home sounded nice and authoritative.

  She shook her head.

  “Cute, but not enough, if somebody sneaks up on you while you’re sitting on the floor covered in books, and your mug empty.”

  “Old habits die hard; I’ll try to do better,” I told her, and only about half the contrition I showed her was bogus. Because she was right, I should lock the door, and take ordinary reasonable precautions like I’d learned to do, out Away. It wasn’t that Archers Beach was any more dangerous than other places, it was only that it wasn’t any less dangerous.

  “Whatcha got?” I asked, closing my books and setting them aside.

  “Breakfast!” she announced triumphantly. “Bob made us grilled blueberry muffins.”

  “Give the woman a raise,” I said, and climbed to my feet, bringing my coffee mug with me.

  Peggy was already in the kitchen, opening the cabinet and fetching down the yellow mug painted with delphiniums.

  “Coffee?” she asked over her shoulder.

  I put my mug beside hers and opened the refrigerator to get the creamer.

  Leaving Peggy to pour, I grabbed silverware and napkins and carried them over to the table. The bag was sitting in the place of honor at the center; I unrolled the top and took out two foil-wrapped packages, each one as big as my two fists together.

  “Civilized, or barbarian?” I asked.

  “Barbarian, for the win!”

  She put the mugs down by the silverware and napkins, and pulled out a chair. I handed her a foil package.

  I unwrapped my package, breathing in appreciatively. Cinnamon, blueberries, hot butter. Mmmm. Beside me, Peggy gave a little gasp.

  “That smells awesome!”

  “Tastes even better,” I told her, flattening the foil and picking up my fork.

  We didn’t do much talking for the next while. Not until Peggy leaned back in her chair, and put her fork gently down on the empty foil.

  “I think I died and went to heaven.”

  “If you do that, you can’t have another one tomorrow.”

  “You make a very good point, though I probably shouldn’t have another one tomorrow, anyway.”

  She sighed, picked up her mug, and sipped reverently. I finished the last bite of my muffin, savoring it, then leaned back, mug in hand.

  “So what’s the occasion?” I asked.

  She opened her improbably purple eyes wide.

  “You don’t think maybe I owe you at least a sort of token repayment for all the times you’ve fed me breakfast?”

  “I don’t think it, but if you thinking it means having one of Bob’s grilled blueberry muffins, and your company, too, I’m not complaining.”

  Her pink cheeks flushed a little pinker and I wondered if I’d come off flirtatious. I really was glad of her company, the muffin being a plus.

  “So’s the committee heard anything back from Arbitrary and Cruel yet?” Peggy asked.

  “If there’s been an answer, nobody told me about it. I imagine they haven’t got ’round to it yet, what with the Fourth.”

  Peggy lowered her mug, and looked at me, her expression that of a tough woman with a tough job ahead of her.

  “Kate, listen . . .” she began.

  From the coffeetable, my cell phone trilled.

  “’Scuse me,” I said, and dove for it.

  Caller ID displayed a number I thought I’d never seen before—and then recalled that I had, once, when we did the test run to make sure the speed-dial on his phone worked.

  “Vassily,” I said, “good morning.”

  “Kate Archer, also good morning. I am calling to you on my break at the motel. One of the others will not be in work today; he calls in sick, you see?”

  “I see,” I said.

  “The boss, he says that I must stay and do the work of this sick one. I explain to him about my other job, with you. He says someone has to make the rooms ready, and if I leave when my shift is done, I will be fired. From this, I call Samuil, who comes to talk for me. Samuil just said to me that I must call you and tell you of this situation. Samuil says also to tell you that he goes now to the Chamber office, where he will speak with Mr. Poirier and seek his influence. It is hoped, by Samuil and myself, that I will be able to come to the carousel on time. But, perhaps this discussion will take time.” There was a small pause.

  “I am sorry, Kate Archer. I hope you will not fire me.”

  “No, I’m not going to fire you, though I might have a few words with your boss over there.”

  “This Samuil does, and perhaps Mr. Poirier. Samuil said to tell you that there may be paperwork you must do for Park Manager Marilyn Michaud.”

  Right. Samuil was the official speaker-for-greenies, and Dan Poirier, head of the Chamber of Commerce as he was, would be a lot more persuasive than I would be.

  “I’ll take care of the paperwork at the park,” I told Vassily. “You do your best, keep your head down and let Samuil and Mr. Poirier handle this. Call me when it’s all sorted out and we’ll look at what’s best to do.”

  “Yes. Thanking you. Again, I am sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, and there’s nothing to thank me for. I’m sorry you’re in this position, okay? Now go eat or whatever you need to do before your break’s over.”

  “Yes,” Vassily said, and closed the connection.

  Peggy had cleared away the breakfast debris, and refreshed the cups while I’d been on the phone.

  I sat down and gave her a grin. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, it’s your coffee. What’s up?”

  “The contract between the Chamber and the agency that hires the greenies stipulates that each greenie work a particular number of hours a week . . .” I sipped my coffee, staring across the room at nothing particular. “Sixty hours across seven days, I think it is, for the length of the Season. That means most of ’em work for two or even three employers. Another greenie called in sick, and Vassily’s other boss is making him fill in. He apparently thinks he doesn’t have to pay attention to the fact that Vassily has another job.” I sighed and sipped more coffee.

  “Samuil—the guy with the agency—tried to fix it; that didn’t work, so he’s kicking it upstairs, to the Chamber. That oughta do the trick, but in the meantime, Vassily wanted to let me know he might be late, or even completely MIA, today.”

  “So, you’ll be running the carousel today?”

  “It’s why I get the big bucks.” I finished my coffee and glanced at the clock. “There’s also some paperwork I need to fill out, so I guess I’ll wander on down and get that out of the way before the excitement starts.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Peggy said, getting up. “Got somebody coming in today to train on the smoothie machine.”

  “Really? Greenie?”

  “A local. Somebody Felsic knows. Ethrane, her name is. Used to fill in around the midway when Jens was managing. I found her on his lists as a will-call, so that’s okay.” She shook her head. “Have to get her to apply for a Social Security card, so I can pay her. I dread the day that stuff goes to computerized filing only; it’s gonna change a lot of things.”

  “Change is what we do, hereabouts.”

  “Yeah, and it’d be boring if we didn’t. I just wish we could turn the speed back a notch or two.”

  I slipped my keys, wallet and phone into various pockets of my jeans.

  “Hey, Kate?”

  There was something . . . tentative in her husky voice and as a general rule, Peggy didn’t do tentative. I turned to face her.

  “Yeah?”

  “I just want to let you know that . . . I really value our friendship. It’s been swell knowing you, and I wouldn’t want anything to, you know, come between us.”