Luckstones Read online

  LUCKSTONES

  Three Tales of Meviel

  Madeleine E. Robins

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  June 16, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-527-4

  Copyright © 2015 Madeleine E. Robins

  for David, Lucie, TJ, and Richard

  Swash, buckle, repeat!

  Foreword

  Deborah Ross asked me for a story. This was in 2007, and she was editing an anthology of swashbuckling stories—stories with romance, intrigue, maybe a little swordplay—to be called Lace and Blade. When an editor asks you for a story, particularly for the kind of story that sounds like it will be great fun, you say “yes, please, thank you,” and get to work.

  I knew I wanted swordplay; as a former actor-combatant, I love swordplay and derring-do, particularly when the sword and the daring are wielded by a woman.

  I also knew I wanted to set it in a city, a sprawling place of grand architecture and mean streets. I am an urbanist by nature—I love cities—and wanted to create a place that had some of the grit and incense of Riverside, Sky, Ile-Rien . . . it's a long list. I wanted a new place, with its own customs and mythology, its own architecture. Thus was born Meviel, which I described to Amy Sterling Casil (who designed the cover for this book, which I flat out love) as “18th century as to technology, in a setting I’d describe as a Turkey-Italy mash-up.”

  Finally, I wanted to play with a society where luck, status, and gender could be mixed up in interesting ways.

  What I came up with was “Virtue and the Archangel.” It was followed by “Writ of Exception” and “A Wreath of Luck.” And I'm playing with the idea of writing more stories set there—if you like these, please let me know.

  The city-state of Meviel has mean streets and open boulevards, pirates and footpads and private guards, brothels and harbor-rats, jewel-draped ladies and working women of all descriptions. It's a great playground for swashing, buckling, and subverting the dominant paradigm.

  I bid you welcome. Step in.

  A Wreath of Luck

  Amielle me Ortun had a genius for self-effacement rare in a child of twelve. Whether this was a good thing or bad is hard to say, but it is quite certain that without this gift she would not have been left behind on the Plover when the ship was captured. Her family fled at once to the lifeboat and, while the captain and crew were engaged in dying to protect their passengers, rowed heartily for the east and Meviel. By the time they realized that Amielle was not among them, the Plover was long gone from the horizon.

  Amielle, a slight, spindly girl who preferred reading about adventure to undertaking it, heard the ado above-decks and did what she generally did when there was a commotion: she hid. A few hours later, when the cries and footfall overhead had quieted, she slid from a cupboard in the Ladies’ Cabin and made her way up the stairs to find out what was what. The sun had set but the moon had not yet risen; in the green twilight Amielle realized with a shock that the persons in charge of the Plover were no longer the genial, brisk Captain ha Blifen and his well-spoken crew. These, without doubt, were pirates.

  There were seven of them, a skeleton crew left by the captain of the Drunken Daisy to bring the ship to port on Isl’Alander; the master, even to Amielle’s unexperienced eyes, was a man remarkable for his beauty: tall, well-built, with light eyes, a square jaw, and long, waving dark hair. His hair drew her eyes to the necklace he wore: a wreath of luckstones, each gem glimmering with the unmistakable spark of luck burning within. Amielle barely suppressed a cry of dismay when she recognized among them the beryl ring which had belonged to the Plover’s captain; the opal luck which the Plover’s mate had worn in his hatband. The effect was as shocking as seeing a wreath of human ears round the neck of an Egeni savage.

  Seeing this, all thought of throwing herself on the pirates’ mercy left Amielle’s head. She slithered into the shadows while the master was giving directions to his crew, and waited to see what would happen next. “’Til we meet the Daisy there’s to be no raids; we haven’t the numbers for it. Breggan, Lyd, you two take first watch.” The master tossed his hair out of his eyes dramatically as he descended from the bridge. Silly peacock, Amielle thought. Not half full of himself. Certainly he was the only one of the pirates who was in the least a figure of romance. Of the six men listening, five were grizzled and ill-formed, with cast eyes, broken noses, missing teeth and puckered scars. The sixth man, a short, tidy fellow with spectacles and his hair in a dark queue, looked more like an office clerk than a pirate. He certainly offered the master no competition.

  All the pirates except the two left on watch went below, passing so close to the shadows where Amielle hid that she expected to be found and dragged into the moonlight. She crouched below the rail, not breathing, until they had passed and the last two on deck disposed themselves, one at the helm, the other staring out over the silent, moonlit sea. After half an hour Amielle slipped from her hiding place and, heart pounding, went below.

  The door to the Ladies’ Cabin stood open, with piles of lace, silk, and linen garments strewn everywhere by marauders searching for plunder. Along the passage the door to the captain’s cabin was closed; Amielle suspected that the master had taken that cabin himself. From the muttering that issued from the Men’s Cabin she thought that it must be where the crew had quartered themselves. Amielle turned back to the Ladies’ Cabin, stole in, and made for the cupboard. It was a small cupboard, and difficult to climb into, but Amielle had not yet achieved a woman’s height or figure, and she managed it. Then, with her knees folded tight to her chest, she covered herself well with linens and left the cupboard door ajar for air.

  Remarkably, albeit uncomfortably, she slept.

  ~o0o~

  The sheets which covered her were damp, and by the time the sun cast a stripe of light into the cupboard, Amielle was fighting the urge to sneeze. She was about to slide from her hiding place when she heard voices from the passageway and thought better of it.

  “I’ll get precious little sleep with you snoring in my ear, Breggan.” It was a young voice. Amielle thought it must belong to the pirate who looked like a clerk.

  “Don’t make no mind to me, Lyd me boy. P’raps the captain’ll let you take his cot.” This seemed to be an unsavory joke, for the second man laughed heartily.

  “I don’t think I’m the captain’s meat,” Lyd said evenly. To Amielle’s horror his voice came from within the Ladies’ Cabin, not two feet from her head. “Your snores won’t rattle the walls in here, I think.”

  Breggan made some indecipherable joke; Amielle heard him laugh heartily at his own wit as he went down the passage, then Lyd closed the door to the Ladies’ Cabin. Amielle drew the quietest breath she could manage, realizing that nothing more than the cupboard door separated her from discovery. She pushed the sheet away from her face and peered through the slit of the door: the spectacled pirate, in an attitude of exhaustion, had untied the string from his queue, shook out his lank, dark hair and scratched his head with every evidence of refreshment. His luck, a ruby in his ear, gleamed through the curtain of dark hair.

  “Gods alive,” the pirate muttered, and shrugged off his coat, rolling his shoulders. Amielle, whose muscles were stiff and sore with her unnatural position, watched enviously. The pirate turned to look out the port, peeled off his shirt, and began to unwind a strip of bandage which suggested that he had been injured in the taking of the Plover. With the bandage off the pirate stretched, pivoted, and scratched as vigorously at her breasts as she had done, a moment before, at her scalp.

  Amielle let out a gasp of astonishment.

  The pirate girl seized her shirt to her chest with one hand and tore the cupboard door open with the other. “Out of there!” she
cried, pushing aside the linens.

  Amielle unfolded herself, slowly and painfully, from the small space, and slid out into the confines of the Ladies’ Cabin.

  “Gods alive,” the pirate girl said again. “What will Nault say about you?”

  Amielle was shaking her leg, which prickled almost unbearably with the return of circulation. “Is that the captain?” she asked.

  “The master—until we reach Isl’Alander, anyway. I’d best take you right along to him.”

  “Wait.” The middle-most of five children, Amielle me Ortun had negotiated the pitfalls of life in the Ortun nursery. She knew an advantage when she saw one. “You’d best put on a shirt first, hadn’t you? Unless your captain already knows you’re a woman.” She put a singsong lilt to her words.

  Lyd pursed her lips and Amielle knew she had drawn blood. “It makes no difference,” Lyd said.

  “Then why bind your breasts and dress like one of them?” Amielle shrugged. “If it makes no difference, then by all means let us go and—”

  “All right! All right!” Lyd attempted to bind her breasts as she talked, but surprise and distraction had her making a bad job of it. “What do you want?”

  Amielle considered. Her immediate objective was not to be turned over to the pirate master, for she doubted he’d see that she was treated kindly, and this Lyd, while a pirate, had not immediately offered to kill her, which she thought a hopeful sign.

  “What do you want?” Lyd asked again.

  “Not to be thrown over board,” Amielle said firmly. “Here, I’ll help you with that.” She took the end of the bandage from Lyd’s hand. “Really, all I want is to go on hiding until I can get away. No offense, but your captain doesn’t seem the sort who’d let me do that.” She pinned the bandage snug and tidy.

  “Probably not,” Lyd agreed. “He doesn’t care for females aboard ship. Thank you.” She shrugged the shirt back on and buttoned her brown waistcoat over it. “But look, child. This ship’s being taken to Isl’Alander, and even if you leave it there, where will you go? It’s a port for privateers and pirates and—well, not for nice little girls like you.”

  “I’m good at hiding,” Amielle told her. “I only gave myself away because—” she pointed at Lyd’s chest. “And if I can get to this Isl’Alander, surely I can find a way home from there. If I’m not drownded for being a girl, that is.“

  “That’s still most likely.” Lyd sighed. “Look, child: I’m going to sleep. Perhaps I’ll forget I saw you, perhaps not. If you’re smart you’ll stay quiet.”

  Amielle, recognizing a good offer when one was made, nodded vigorously and, once again, climbed into the linen cupboard.

  ~o0o~

  For several days it seemed that Lyd had all but forgotten about the stowaway in the Ladies’ Cabin; it could have been forgetfulness that caused her to leave a trencher of stew and biscuit in the cabin from time to time. Amielle did not think so, but she was happy to eat the stew (which was tasty) and the biscuit (hard crackers kept for the crew). Her chiefest problem, aside from unending anxiety about her fate, was boredom. Shut into the cupboard it was all too easy for Amielle to let her imagination run wild and consider her fate if she was discovered. Reciting romantic poetry to herself was very little distraction, and finally she gave in to that occupation which her governess had regarded as the worst sin a child could commit: eavesdropping. If she was not shut into the cupboard she could hear any business not conducted at a whisper—and pirates, she soon realized, conduct little business at a whisper.

  Amielle learned a number of things. The master’s second-in-command was Gorle, whom the others called Fatty behind his back. It was Gorle more than the master, Nault, who managed things. Most of the men thought Nault too pretty to be captain, although they were willing to admit that he was a good pilot. Only Lyd seemed willing to stick up for the master when grousing started, as it did, like clockwork, when the grog ration was doled out. Lyd stubbornly insisted that the master was a clever fellow, smart even. And he’d been put in authority over them all, so there was no point fretting about it.

  Amielle had heard that same tone of voice from the governess who had eloped with her riding teacher. She had heard the painfully nonchalant terms of praise from her older sisters when they fell in love but did not wish to be twitted about it. And because Amielle found Lyd rather admirable, she wished to understand what the pirate found admirable in the pirate master.

  She asked Lyd. “That vulgar necklace was almost all I noticed about him. What kind of man wears the luck of dead—”

  “You don’t understand,” Lyd said—more hotly than she might have done were it some other pirate under discussion. “Any man may choose to keep the luckstones of the folk he fights, and some do. Nault’s just more aboveboard about it.”

  “Perhaps he needs to look fierce, since he’s so beautiful,” Amielle suggested.

  “Well, yes, aye, that’s it. The other men might not take him seriously if he did not appear ruthless.”

  “All that hair, and those blue eyes,” Amielle went on. “But vicious, too, I reckon—”

  “Not always.” Lyd muttered. “Sometimes he—”

  “What?” Amielle urged. “Is he nice to you?”

  Lyd shrugged. “When I was first aboard the Daisy I lost my footing while I was up in the rigging, and I thought I was going to fall to the deck, but Nault caught me.”

  Amielle wondered: wouldn’t any of the others have caught her? But Nault had, and when a man who looks like him saves your life, perhaps it was reasonable to fall in love with him. Amielle was certain there were aspects to the whole business she was not old enough to understand.

  The next time Lyd came to “forget” a plate of food, Amielle asked another question.

  “Should we not have reached Isl’Alander by now? We’ve been sailing for days since . . .” she trailed off. Since you killed the crew and took the ship sounded aggressive.

  Lyd nodded, taking the opportunity to re-tie her queue. “We’ve been becalmed for two days—not a breath of wind on the sea. Gorle swears this ship is unlucky.”

  “Well, it wasn’t until you lot captured us,” Amielle said, a little sharply.

  Lyd grinned. “I spose not. Other things have been happening too, though. One of the grog casks leaked out almost the whole tun’s worth last night. Hold smells like a tavern, but there’s naught to drink. And you may have noticed the biscuit—”

  “Crackers,” Amielle said.

  “Crackers, then. It’s what us lot are used to. Somehow the barrel they’re in got soaked, and now the bisc—crackers—are water-logged, a great slimy mess. The men are talking about curses and jinxes. You stay in your cubby, little one. If they find you, they’ll put it all to your account and I doubt they’ll be kind.”

  In fact, Amielle had become bold enough to spend some part of the day behind one of the berths, reading her sisters’ left-behind novels. When Nault ordered a careful search of all cabins for items of worth it was Lyd who volunteered to go through the Ladies’ Cabin, and Amielle helped her fold the extravagant lace and silk left behind by her family. It would be sold to doxies on Isl’Alander, “and make a neat sum,” Lyd told her.

  “Don’t you want to keep some for yourself?” Amielle asked.

  Lyd snorted and gestured at her tidy brown coat and waistcoat. “What would I do with such stuff?” But she fingered the heavily laced petticoats with appreciation. “Any road, Nault and the captain’d take my head if I kept anything back for myself.”

  Except for luck stones, Amielle thought, but did not say.

  As they worked, Amielle learned a good deal about the pirate. Her true name was Lydanne me Kenn; her father had been a shipfitter, and she had run away to sea with her first love when she was only a few years older than Amielle herself. That first love had drowned within a three-month, and Lydanne had found herself on Isl’Alander and, in boys’ garb, hired by the captain of the Drunken Daisy.

  “Didn’t you want to go ho
me?” Amielle asked.

  Lydanne shook her head. She was packing the folded dainties away in a chest for when they reached port. “Not by then. I love the sea. And the men are good enough fellows—”

  “Unless you’re on another ship,” Amielle said. She still regretted Captain ha Blifen and the Plover’s crew.

  Lydanne did not disagree. “It’s the way of things. But even if I could, I wouldn’t go back to Meviel. Nothing for me there. This is my life; everything I love is here.”

  Amielle thought she was speaking of Nault.

  After more than a week without breeze, a wind picked up and the Plover began to make for Isl’Alander again. Amielle, hidden behind the berth in the Ladies’ Cabin, knew at once that this was not a kindly freshening breeze but the making of a storm: the groans and creaks of the Plover’s boards, the fearsome motion of the ship, and the increasing tension in the sailors’ calls made that clear. Then rain beat down on the deck over her head, and the ship rocked and rose on great swells. Amielle, buffeted between the berth and wall of the Ladies’ Cabin, climbed unsteadily into the linen cupboard, wrapped herself well against bruises, and sat to wait out the storm.

  It was a bad time. The voices of the seamen on deck were lost in the wind, and she knew nothing of what was happening except that the Plover sounded as if it was being wrenched apart. The tossing made Amielle sick, but she did not dare give way to her nausea lest someone hear her retching. The storm went on for hours; at some point, worn out by fear, Amielle fell asleep, uncertain if she would wake again.

  She did wake, stiff and sore. The fearsome rocking of the ship had ceased, leaving a quiet that was eerie. She heard no voices, and for a moment Amielle entertained the idea that all the pirates had been swept overboard and that she would die aboard the Plover; she had no illusion about her ability to pilot the ship herself. Then she heard footfall in the passage and almost laughed with relief. Likely it was Lydanne with food. But to be safe, she stayed where she was, arms wrapped around her legs and chin on her knees, with the sheets draped around her.