Threadbare - 61A Savvy Parley

It was Harey Karey that found him, sitting placidly among the fragments of the broken engines, and the three working ones that he had managed to fix. Karey squinted through her spectacles in the dim light of the glowstones, considering what to her sight was a porcelain princess, albeit a grease-stained and rather bedraggled one.

“We be owing ye a debt of gratitude, Princess Cecelia.”

“It’s just Councilor Cecelia. And actually I’d prefer it if you called me Celia.”

“Very well then. That’s probably a better choice, the crew ain’t much for high-faluting manners at the best of times. And these ain’t the best of times. Come with me if ye please, yer high… ah, Celia.”

Threadbare nodded and fell into step behind the woman. “What happens now?”

“That’s fer the Captain to say.”

The sun was a faint glow to the east, across a gap in the nearest towering, ice-crusted peaks. Another towered above them, and a blackish skid mark in the snow showed where the Cotton Tale had hit the side of the mountain and half-landed, half-skidded downslope to where it sat now, tilted on the last ledge before a six hundred foot drop.

On the upside, the rain had stopped. And they were at a level where the mountain was mostly muddy rock and stone, instead of snow.

“Aye,” Anne Bunny’s voice boomed out, and Threadbare glanced over to see her huddled at the helm, half-buried under a stack of blankets, capes, and loose clothing. “Twere a close thing,” she called, breath blasting out as a puff of white vapor. “Ye couldn’t have seen it there down in the belly of me ship, but there were a few clenched cheeks and dropped pellets when that edge was getting closer and a closer.”

Threadbare folded his arms in that way Celia did when she was dealing with someone who definitely wasn’t a friend, but wasn’t entirely an enemy. “So what do you plan to do now?”

“Well me pretty princess, that’s in some small part up to ye. As it happens, due to recent losses, yer the only engineer-type on board me vessel at the minute. So tell me, how be the Cotton Tale’s engines lookin’?”

It took him a second to translate her pirate talk. Then Threadbare rubbed his chin. “Bad,” he said simply. “They are very complicated. I used the parts of five very broken engines to fix two sort of broken engines. There’s one that will probably be fine if I take my time and work on it while it’s not running, but I’m not so sure how fixed the other two are. And that leaves us five short.”

“Pity,” said Anne. “I know fer a fact that the Cotton Tale can fly on four engines. We’re one short.”

“You’ve been down to four engines before?”

“Aye! Less than that, sometimes.The bottom of the ship be full of engines, and most of our prey be below us when we strike, so inevitably ye get some balls coming up yer wazoo.”

One of the crewbunnies huddled across the deck from Anne started to laugh, but stopped when Anne cocked a pistol at her.

“That sounds painful,” Threadbare said. “So how did you fix them? The parts are very delicate, and about half the time I mended them their enchantments vanished. They were repaired, but they were just nonmagical pieces of metal and crystal after the spell was done.”

“Tis a ticklish process. Somedays we have crewbunnies who are Tinkers, and that helps a bit. Even rarer than that we’ll have an Enchanter, and they can replicate parts one enchantment at a time, but that gets a mite costly when ye look at the crystals and reagents it requires. Fortunately, though, there be a third way…”

She paused, expectantly.

Threadbare stared up at her.

One of the crewbunnies coughed, shivering in the frigid air.

Threadbare looked over to her. “You know, I’m a Tailor, I could probalby sew you some warmer clothes if you liked.”

A whisper came over the wind, a stranger’s voice. Fairly husky, it reminded him of Jean Lafeet. “She’s expecting you to say ‘what is the third way, captain?’”

“Oh!” Threadbare said, nodding vigorously. “That makes sense. What is the third way, Captain?”

“Why I be so glad ye asked.” It would have been more convincing if she hadn’t been saying that through clenched gold teeth. “It comes down to dungeons, me girl.”

“It always does seem to,” Threadbare agreed. “How does this work?”

“I’ll show ye once we find one,” Anne said, stretching and enjoying the rays of the rising sun. “But that’ll be later. First we’ll go over the ship, and mend the hull and the non-engine bits. Seal er up tight against the cold and the night, so we don’t freeze. After that we’ll start sendin’ out shifts, go all up and down this peak and try to find us a dungeon. But afore that…”

Anne rose, throwing aside the layers of fabric over her, and sauntered over to stare down at Threadbare.

For his part, he held as still as possible. From what he recalled of illusions, they were a little more effective if they didn’t have to move.

“Afore that,” Anne said, the vapor of her breath steaming over Threadbare’s head as she loomed over him. “We need to be talking about terms.”

“I’m going to assume you mean the terms of my surrender,” Threadbare said, searching her eyes for hostile intent. But she was a canny one, and her gaze gave him no hint of her thoughts.

“Aye. And a few other things. So… it occurs to me that things got a bit… wibbly during that there fight we had.”

“Wibbly’s a good word.”

“Aye. See, I accepted yer surrender on the terms I wouldn’t be killing your friends anymore. Then new friends of yers showed up and tried their luck against me, and I had to try killing them. And ye helped them, because of course, I was a’ killing them. Seems fair. I’ll be letting that one slide. But…”

Anne stood, with only her loose jacket draped around her normal thin pirate clothes, fur standing up against the cold and the wind, staring down at Threadbare with terrible, dead eyes. “Ye got no friends here, save maybe for that Jean wench. And I ain’t gonna take her hostage just to blackmail ye into behaving again. I also ain’t gonna lock you down at night in the hopes ye won’t run, or tie ye up, or deal with the worry of you fleeing me in some faint idear of getting back home.”

“So you’re overlooking the fight, and going back to the first surrender? I’m sorry I’m a little confused about how this works, I’ve never really surrendered before.” Threadbare tried to think back to the history books he’d read. “Should we sit down and sign a treaty? Or should I hand over a flag? I don’t really have one of those but I’m a Tailor, I could probably whip one up with a little time.”

“What?” Anne’s eyes crinkled around the edges. “No, no, no. Ah, I’m seeing where your little bear gets his humor. No, see, the truth of the matter is this; I have power over ye right now, and if it comes down to it yer just a job. And ye’ve already caused me quite a bit of trouble. So if ye cause me too much more trouble, I’ll take a hammer to ye, walk away from the job, and go get drunk in a tavern somewheres until the next job pops up. Ye run into the wild? I’ll find and destroy ye. Ye try to kill me in my sleep? Not the first, won’t be the last. Ye try to sabotage me ship, or hurt me crew? It’ll go poorly.”

Threadbare nodded, and looked around the mountain. “I don’t have any place to go at the moment.”

“Aye, which is why I ain’t worried right now. But at some point ye might, and when that happens I fully expect ye to try to escape. I’m fine with that. I know I can stop ye. But until then you be our guest, and fellow friend, aiding us to fix our ship and travel through the dangers of the journey.

“ But if ye cause me trouble to no good end along the way, well…”

The gun was in her hand and against Threadbare’s head before he could react. Distantly he heard the faint ringing of metal tapping porcelain. Renny’s illusions working overtime, to convince her he was Celia.

For the moment, it worked. “Boom,” said Anne. “So don’t be testing me. Savvy?”

“I understand,” Threadbare told her, staring up into her still-dead eyes.

And he did.

No matter how friendly she was, no matter how good natured and calm she pretended to be, he’d seen her fight, seen her kill.

He was in danger. And if his ruse was uncovered, then he not only risked his own life, but his little girl’s life as well.

That settled, Anne started belting out orders, and her crew scurried, shivering and with yellow numbers flying out of them due to the chill, to carry out her will. Threadbare found himself brusquely directed to get belowdecks and mending the hull, and he set to that task with a will.

The problem, though, was that the mind was willing, but weak. He had been through a lot tonight, and all the spells he was using to fix the ship were depleting his sanity. Threadbare found his focus giving out, found his mind drifting to thoughts of escape, even though he knew it was a bad idea. Found his memories drifting back to Celia’s outstretched arms, trying to reach for him as she fell from the airship.

The fact that she’d looked like him at the time didn’t make a difference. He had seen the illusion go up, knew what it was, and his imagination filled in the blanks that illusory fur had covered. That memory hurt.

The one thing that had kept Threadbare going through his life, even when times were hard, was that Celia loved him.

He was her bear.

And he knew that she must be hurting right now, and he couldn’t hug her.

There in the relative solitude of the hold, with the repair crews bumping and thumping on the other end of the ship, Threadbare let his body sag forward, rested his head against the hull, and sobbed.

And outside the wind howled in the mountains, and nobody heard him cry.