Dead Man's Shadow, Chapter 10

It was approaching midnight on the fourth day of the voyage out of Barcino, and Elena found herself unable to sleep. Her mind seemed to resist sleep, but no particular thoughts seemed to be behind the feeling. For once, the questions she had in her mind about her father had stilled to a quiet background hum, leaving her nothing to attempt to silence while trying to fall asleep. After trying unsuccessfully to become tired, she slipped out of her hammock and headed back out onto the deck of the ship.
The Hope’s Return was not a large vessel by most merchant shipping standards. Its main advantage was the relatively shallow draft, which allowed the two-masted schooner to run up the narrow river that led to Barcino. Right now, however, all that Elena cared about was the advantage provided by its open decks and railings that were the perfect place to lean and quietly think. She often sought out a quiet stretch of that railing at night, when the ship was quiet, with the only sounds coming from the slow crash of the waves and the gentle creaking of the rigging above her. She could lose herself staring into either the dark waters or up at the starry sky. She had every intention of doing so on that night when she saw that someone was already leaning against the ship’s wooden railing. Having just come from the candlelit lower deck, it took Elena a moment to determine that she was looking at Valeri’s back. The aging shopkeeper was staring out at the lights of a city that they sailed past.
“Hey, that’s my spot,” Elena said playfully as she drew near.
Valeri turned slightly. “Oh, Miss Hunt. I didn’t realize. My apologies.” He took a step sideways to lean against an identical stretch of railing. A faint smile played across his lips, and Elena matched it with her own. She moved up alongside the shopkeeper and rested her forearms on the railing.
“What brings you out here on this lovely night?” she asked, allowing her eyes to wander across the distant lights of the city.
Valeri gestured at the city. “Just getting one last good look at my homeland.” He sighed. “It’s been less than a week, and I’m already homesick.”
“It gets better,” Elena assured him. Her gaze drifted down to the water. “Heaven knows that I wasn’t ready for it when I went on my first long trip.”
“That’s good to know. Still, realizing that I will never see this country again…” He fell silent, his gaze fixed on the horizon. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but it looked like he was fighting back tears.
Elena reached out a hand and rested it on his shoulder. She said nothing, for no words could help him in that moment. At the contact, Valeri stopped trying to hold back his tears. Minutes passed in near total stillness, the only sounds coming from the ship and from Valeri’s quiet sobs. Eventually, he reached up and patted her hand in gratitude. He removed it from his shoulder and sniffed a few times as he composed himself.
“Thank you for your help. Both before and now. I… I truly don’t know that I will ever be able to repay you.” He took a deep, shuddering breath and set his lips into a firm line for a moment before visibly forcing himself to change the subject of their conversation. “I suppose I never asked you what you were doing in Castille before rescuing me. What brought you to my city in the first place?”
“An Explorer’s Society dig. A friend of mine found some Syrneth ruins outside of Barcino. She knows that I love to learn about Syrneth ruins and artifacts, so she invited me to come along and help with the excavation. Long story short, we had a bit of an altercation with the Inquisition, and that was how I ran into Felix.” Valeri nodded to himself. “The Explorer’s Society. That makes sense.” A smile came to his lips and his gaze grew distant. “Tell me, is being a member of the Society just like all of the stories say it is?”
Elena laughed. “It’s not always like that. The stories are often exaggerated. Still, some of them aren’t. I’ve been a member for three years now, and I’ve only really had a few really exciting adventures.”
“What’s it really like, then? What do you do?”
“Nothing too unusual. We’re a lot like you in the Invisible College, really. We have a love of knowledge just like you do, which is probably why the Inquisition hates us too. The difference is that we tend to be more interested in finding out about the distant past and going places that no one else has ever gone. We’re much more interested in digging up old ruins than we are in organizing all of the information already in the world. Syrneth sites are our favorites. Trying to puzzle out who the Syrne were and why they vanished before any of the Théan civilizations we have now existed is fascinating!” She laughed again, feeling a lightness come across her heart. “I guess we like to have adventures rather than just read about them.”
“Reading about adventures was always good enough for me.” Valeri sighed.
“It was for my father too.” Elena laughed. “He would get so animated when he was reading me the Adventures of Alistair Taggart! I could almost quote that book.”
Valeri nodded. “It’s been a favorite of mine as well. Your father must have been a man of discerning taste. What did he think of you joining the Society?”
A frown crossed Elena’s face. “He never found out. He died almost two years before I joined.” She glanced upwards, towards the stars. “I doubt that he would even have noticed. Around that time, he barely seemed to care about anything except for his latest theory on where Mum was.”
Silence fell in the wake of her words. Though he didn’t say anything, Elena could tell from the slight tension in his shoulders that Valeri wanted to ask something else. She could guess what it was. She decided just to answer it and spare him the discomfort of prying.
“This is all because of my parents.” She tapped the railing to indicate that she was speaking of the ship and others like it. “My father took over the shipping business from his father. Before too long, he managed to strike up a partnership with a Montaigne businessman, and then he married Mum, who was Castillian. He now had a connection with both of the main sides of the War of the Cross, and so he could reliably run goods during the war, which was more than most merchants at the time could do. The money he got during the war was enough that he was able to expand Hunt & Dantes to quite the endeavour. He and Mum would occasionally go along with the fleets, and told me that one day I would be able to do so as well.” She chuckled once. “‘My own great adventure,’ they called it. Then one day Mum went out to the Atabean Sea with one of our fleets, and the fleet vanished. Not one ship ever reached its destination.
“Dad was never the same after that. For years, he looked for her. Even when it became obvious that she was dead and gone.” A tightness came into Elena’s throat that had nothing to do with the wound caused by the noose. “He became obsessed with finding her. He even started looking for ways to find her that we just can’t explain. Supernatural ways, I mean. He sought out and tried to contact the Sidhe, but those creatures merely wanted to play with his head. That’s why he started looking more closely at the Syrneth ruins and artifacts. ‘Have to find something reliable,’ he would say.” Elena wished that she had something to toss into the water. It would have made her feel better. “I guess he thought he was onto something, because he stopped caring about anything else. He was obsessive with his papers, but never showed me anything that was in them.”
“And what about those documents that I gave to Felix?” Valeri asked. “What do they have to do with that?”
“They apparently started circulation right about the time that Dad died. I think he may have been working on those translations before he did. And if he was, I just want to know what he was trying so hard to find out. What was he pursuing so hard that he shoved me aside?”
Once again, silence fell, only broken by the noises of the ship around them. Valeri did not speak, and when Elena glanced sideways at him, she saw that he had returned to staring out at the lights on the horizon. She could see them reflected in his eyes. After a long time, he spoke quietly. “Do you think those papers contain the answer?”
“I hope that some of them do.” Elena returned her gaze to the dark water below them. “Maybe not the ones that you had, but the rest of the ones back at home just might.”
“But will they contain absolution or damnation?” Valeri asked, his voice gone distant, his comment more to himself than to her.
Elena had no answer to that. She remained where she was, silently letting the shopkeeper’s comment turn itself over in her head. Even after the lights of the city began to recede into the distance and Valeri excused himself with a soft apology for anything he had said that might have brought her pain (which she truthfully denied), Elena stood against the railing. Once she was alone, she peered up at the stars.
In truth, she did not know which answer she would have preferred.