In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

Author:Rachel Hartman [Hartman, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

Mind of the World, sometimes we feel like strangers in our own skin. What used to give comfort now pinches and chafes. The music drifts flat; the very colors have changed.

A cicada cracks its shell, and however much it wants to, it cannot stay inside.

Once upon a time (time being a prism for understanding), a countess had spent a week trying to persuade her former navigator to draw her a map, but he’d parried every argument. His ripostes had been stinging. She thought she’d come away unscathed, but there are cuts you don’t feel until you see your own blood on the ground.

After Giles’s escape, Marga shut herself up in her stateroom for almost a week—the rest of the way to St. Remy—to lick her wounds.

Upon the sixth morning, Father Jacomo was sitting in what had become his usual armchair, cup of tea in hand. He had kindly but firmly taken over tea duty in the mornings as a way of checking in on her, she suspected; Marga had bristled at first, but she was secretly glad. Mentoring her protégé would have been one thing too many right now, wholly occupied as she was by pacing, scowling, and arguing with Giles in her head.

Father Jacomo took everything with equanimity. She supposed that was his job, as a priest.

“How are you feeling today?” he said, leaning back in his chair.

It was not an easily answered question. Her fiancé was dead, Giles had spoiled everything, and today she would be seeing Lady Aemelia Borgo—a dear friend, but not a comforting or entirely unstressful sort of person.

And she’d just gotten irritating news from her napou.

“I’ve been better,” said Marga, forcing herself to stop pacing and sit down. “Uncle Claado will be coming ashore after all—for moral support. Mortifying support, more like.”

Jacomo raised his woolly brows, looking uncertain about whether that had been funny.

“He always picks fights with Aemelia,” Marga explained. “But I can’t have him insulting her this time; we need her help repairing the submersible. She gets mercurial when she’s upset, and she’ll already be upset about William.”

“I could tell her about Lord Morney’s passing, if that would help,” said Jacomo. “Sometimes people take bad news better from a priest.”

“I don’t suppose you could persuade Napou to stay on the ship?” said Marga, disliking the pout in her own voice. “Usually, he sails circles around the island while I’m visiting.”

Jacomo took a sip of tea. “Why does your uncle dislike Lady Borgo? He doesn’t seem the sort to insult someone for no reason.”

Ah, she’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask.

Darienne approached with Marga’s best hair (the copper waves, newly promoted); Marga sat up straighter so her maid could pin it on, trying to think of the most diplomatic way to explain Aemelia. “Your father is a duke, Jacomo. You know how powerful people can have powerfully eccentric opinions. Aemelia has no qualms about letting you know what she thinks—and sometimes, I admit, she’s uncharitable.”

“Uncharitable as in…stingy? Or unkind?” said Jacomo.

It was both, of course.

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