← The Gilded Shore

Chapter 16

Chapter 16: Open Water

Nico

Flat blue water stretches in every direction. Seravalle is a pale smudge, then nothing at all behind the stern. The Sans Souci moves with an easy, rolling lift, her white sails full and silent. On the deck, the daily machinery of the boat runs without my help. At dawn, a steward brings coffee and warm bread to the rail, the butter soft from the morning heat. Below, the cook is already grilling mackerel over the galley coals, the smell of woodsmoke and charred skin drifting up through the hatch.

Forward, Théo has turned the foredeck cushions into a nest. He is sprawled on his back with his two girls from the Circle. A bottle of Vermentino is already open, sitting in a bucket of melting ice. Théo claps his hands along with the mandolin, his linen shirt unbuttoned to his waist. The two of them are still in their casino silks, bright peach and teal, looking ridiculous and beautiful against the white canvas of the sails. One is plucking the strings, a loose, simple tune that drifts over the water. They have the lazy stillness of people who have forgotten the shore exists.

I remain forward of the helm, letting Sandro take the wheel. The stern is clear, and I dive clean into the deep water. The cold hits my skin, washing away the grease of the Seravalle hotels and the stale air of the upper town. The Mediterranean is warm today, but the depth is cold. I float on my back, watching the masts of the Sans Souci trace slow arcs against the open sky. The hull looks massive from down here, a clean white wall rising from the sea. When I dive under, the sound of the deck party disappears, replaced by the deep, hollow hum of the water.

Climbing back up the stern ladder, I let the sun go to work on my bare back. A grilled mackerel is breakfast, eaten with my fingers. The skin is hot and salty, the white flesh sliding off the bone. I do not bother to wash my hands.

Mostly, I watch Kahina. She goes into the water off the stern, letting the sea hold her weight. The tight wariness in her shoulders has dissolved. Steady strokes carry her out, her warm brown skin dark against the swell. The iron ring on her left ankle catches the light below the surface, a dark circle against her skin, before the current pulls her deeper. Her cotton shift billows around her in the current, the white fabric turning transparent. On her back, eyes shut, she turns her face to the sun.

Later, Théo's girls pull her into their camp on the foredeck. They are braiding her hair with cheap ribbons and laughing over some nonsense about a merchant in the upper town. Kahina does not measure her laugh before it comes. She simply laughs, the sound cutting across the deck.

Out here, her laugh lands and I feel it under my ribs, and I keep feeling it. The Duke's letter sits below deck with its seal still whole, where it has sat since Seravalle. The anchor mark rides on my wrist, kohl over old ink. We have only the salt and the sun on a good boat. Forward, my friend plays the fool on the bowsprit.

Théo is who I was a month ago, and he is being it twenty feet from me in the sun: two girls and a bottle, a mandolin going, no stakes and no tomorrow. He catches me watching and grins. "You used to be fun, Valderre," he calls. "A month off the leash and you have gone domestic. One woman, and you stand at the helm mooning like a husband." A month ago I would have answered him girl for girl and made a contest of it. I lift my coffee at him and stay where I am. The helm is where I want to be, with her laugh still in my chest, and the party I would once have run is just noise on the foredeck.

There is the other thing too, the one none of us says aloud. When Kahina laughs in the girls' camp Théo's eyes go to her and stay a beat too long, and when she feels it she does not look away as fast as she might. Something sits in the air between them, left over from whatever passed in my apartment the night I walked out on my father, and it has not gone anywhere. She is mine, and Théo knows it and honors it, and the pull between them is still there under the sun. It does not frighten me today. Today there is only salt and sun and the boat moving under us.

By the afternoon, the sun and the saltwater have washed the kohl V on my wrist to a pale shadow. I sit on the deck beside Kahina. Her hand reaches for mine. She pulls a small clay pot of kohl from her shift. Her fingers are cool and steady as she holds my wrist. Using a thin bone stylus, she draws the dark lines over the old tattoo, dragging the wet pigment along the faded ink of the V. The tip is a light, cold touch against my skin.

She recaps the pot and slides it back into her pocket. The black lines on my wrist are dark and clean again, matching the kohl around her own eyes.

"We will raise Saverno by tomorrow night," she says, her voice level. "And then Valderre."

"Then we go and take Armand apart the slow way," I say. "Paper, and my name, and a court that has to look at it."

She nods once. Her gaze turns back to the open water, her wet hair curling against her neck.

The horizon is a sharp clean line, dividing the sea from the sky. I hold my eyes on it and let it stay a line.

Kahina

The sun is lower now, and the deck is hot under my feet. The iron on my left ankle holds the day's heat against the bone. I sit at the stern with a book open in my lap, ignoring the pages. Nico stands shirtless at the tiller, and his back is all muscle and old sun, and his shoulders work as he holds the boat steady.

"Why did you take me from Eclaire's?" I ask.

My voice is level. The question stands on its own.

"Paying what you paid was not only to irritate your father," I say.

The easy salon manner goes out of him. He keeps his eyes on the sails for a second before he answers.

"I was bored," he says. His voice is quiet. "Everything in Seravalle was a rehearsal for a play I did not want to be in. Then I saw you at the rail of the transport ship. You looked ready to burn the world down for a better view. I wanted to know what that was like."

"And now?" I ask.

"Now I know," he says, turning his head to look at me. "And I think I am still interested in the view."

I look at the dark water sliding past the hull.

"I want the names," I say. "Captain Malik is the first. I need the ones who know where they carried my sisters."

Nico meets my gaze without flinching. His nod is his only answer.

"Then we will find them," he says.

Théo is sitting on the cushions forward. He glances once at the stern, then stands and grabs his two girls. He herds them below to the salon without a word and leaves us alone.

We eat dinner topside with the crew as the light dies. Afterward, the boat settles for the night. The stewards finish in the galley and Théo and his girls stay below. Sandro holds the helm aft, alone, his eyes fixed on the bow and his back to us. Everything goes dark and quiet under a sky thick with stars. The only light is the binnacle lamp and the white wash of the Milky Way.

I pull a blanket and cushions onto the warm deck boards near the bow. Nico follows me. The open air is cool, but the deck still holds the day's heat against my bare legs. Overhead, the sail is a pale wall against the stars. The black sea stretches endless on every side.

I lift the linen dress over my head in one slow motion, and I let the night air hit my bare skin. The iron on my left ankle is cold against the teak, a hard circle I work around without thinking. My gaze stays on his. Nico pulls his shirt off, and his movements are urgent. I push him back onto the cushions and straddle his hips, discarding the chemise. Low on his ribs, I find a thin white knife scar, new to my fingers. I run my thumb along the pale mark.

"Knife," he says.

"I know the shape of a blade," I say.

Then there is nothing left to say. Our bodies are familiar and certain. His mouth finds my neck and then my breasts, and his lips are warm in the starlight. Down between my thighs, his thumb and two fingers work the wet of me. I shift my weight and rise over his face to ride his mouth. His tongue strokes my clitoris with long, firm pressure. His hands hold me flat over him until my orgasm breaks against his mouth under the open sky.

I move down, guiding him. I sink onto his cock in one slow, heavy stroke, and the movement brings the cool night air to my back as his heat fills me deep inside. I ride him. His hands grip under my buttocks, tilting my hips so his shaft rubs my clitoris on every plunge. The wet slap of our bodies is the only sound against the wash of the water. My second climax breaks on his name, and only then does he let go. He grips my waist, spilling into me, my name low in his throat.

Afterward, we lie tangled on the deck under the blanket, and the salt and sweat cool on our skin. The mast circles slow against the stars as the boat rolls, and neither of us speaks. On the horizon, the lights of the coast are a faint scatter of gold against the black. His hand is over mine, and I do not want to pull away.

My breathing has slowed to match his. There are a dozen colder places I could be sleeping tonight, and I have stopped counting them.

Nico

The tiller is warm under my palm, polished smooth by salt and hands. Sandro is forward by the mast, securing the halyard. His skin is dark from the season, and his movements are slow in the midday heat. Near the bow, Théo and his two girls are asleep under the shadow of the mainsail. They lie tangled on the canvas cushions, surrounded by empty plates and a drained bottle of Vermentino. The wind is steady off our quarter, pushing the hull through the low swells with a clean, sliding hiss.

Kahina sits on the bench at the stern, a few feet from where I stand. A leather-bound volume lies open in her lap, its edges curled and yellowed by the salt air. She has not turned a page since Sandro went forward. Her chin rests in her hand as she looks out over the wake. The deep-ochre linen dress clings to her shoulders, the fabric damp from the spray. Her eyes follow the green trail we leave behind us, tracking the foam as it dissolves into the blue. The black ink on her fingers is dry.

Neither of us speaks. The theater of Seravalle is behind us, and the old charming lines stay behind my teeth where they belong. We do not work to fill the quiet now. She does not look up to see if I am looking, and I do not perform for her benefit. The wind fills the canvas above us with a low, steady push. The sea is the only thing moving between the hull and the sky.

Below the deck, on the teak chart table, the letter from my father sits under a brass paperweight. The red wax seal with the Valderre lion is still unbroken, the edges of the stamp sharp in the dim light of the cabin. The paper smells of dust and the cold stone of the estate walls. It smells of Geneviève, whom I have never met and am ruining anyway. She is the Count's daughter, and my father means to marry the name to a woman who will spend forty years keeping his accounts in order and pretending she does not mind my absences. Somewhere in Valderre there is a real person inside that sentence, and I am one of the walls going up around her. I have spent the whole summer not looking at her either. The nearer that coast comes, the less I can joke her into someone who does not exist.

I could turn the tiller. The Sans Souci is mine, paid for with the inheritance my mother left in Genoa. My voice is the only one the crew obeys. With the gold in the locker and this wind off the quarter, we could reach the Spanish coast or the islands further south. My father's name would become a collection of empty syllables, meaning nothing to a harbor master in Seville. We could vanish past the cliffs of Seravalle, and no one would come looking.

I am not a beggar. The funds my father's auditors never found have kept the crew paid for five years. In the yards at Saverno, the same money is framing a blue-water merchantman with a clean keel and a deep hold. The shipwright is waiting for my word to step the masts. No father's signature or Armand's manifests can stop me. I could run south tomorrow, clear the Italian coast, and head for the open sea. The horizon would belong to us.

I do not move the rudder. The bow stays pointed east, toward the land I have spent ten years escaping. Valderre is the wrong world, a cage of gravel paths and family ledgers. But Valderre is where Armand can be broken. We already carry the case, Felix's manifests and the Tunis dock behind Kahina's eyes; what Valderre holds is the power to spend it. My name opens the ministries of commerce, and the Crown keeps a fleet for exactly this kind of stain. The Valderre seal sits over the whole fraud, and my father will cut Armand loose to protect it once it is dragged into the light. I am steering into the cage because the cage is the weapon. She has a man to bring down by law, and I am going with her.

My right wrist aches under my cuff. The skin is still tender where she dragged the kohl yesterday, pressing the lines deep. It is her mark, redrawn by her hand. The dry, crusty texture of the pigment rubs against my linen sleeve. When I run my thumb along the lines, a tiny flake of black powder drifts down onto the deck. I do not wash it off. I keep it under the gold cuff links my father gave me, a secret beneath his metal.

The wood holds steady against my palm. The horizon is wide and empty, offering a dozen ways to disappear, but I hold the bow on the course she needs, both hands on the helm.

Kahina rises from the bench, leaving the book open on the teak. Her dark linen dress snaps against her ankles as the wind catches the hem. When she reaches the helm, she leans her shoulder against mine. She smells of salt and the almond oil she uses for her hair.

"You are quiet," she says. Her eyes stay on the horizon, tracing the grey outline of the coast as it takes shape.

I keep my eyes on the sail. "I am a man of deep, unspoken thoughts."

"You are a liar," she says. She does not laugh, but the corners of her mouth soften. "The silence does not suit you."

I turn my head and pull on the old Seravalle face, the one I keep behind my teeth for the salons. "You prefer the theater?"

"It is easier to ignore," she says. She leans her weight against the rail, her shoulder pressing against mine. "Two days."

"Two days," I say.

I turn my eyes back to the horizon. The wind is cool now, but the warmth of her shoulder stays. I hold the bow east toward the wrong world, and for the first time in my life, I do not want to be anywhere else.