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It had been an interesting evening spent in the captain's cabin, enjoying their first meal on the water. The food was better than the rations she remembered having when shipping out with Jerod, the purser was attentive, the captain and his first mate were gruffly charming, Kyril was quiet but smiled a lot, and Lucas regaled the table with many entertaining stories.
Solange nodded a thanks to the purser as he refilled her wine glass, then sat back and watched the masculine interactions around her. Unless Lucas or the captain had a companion stashed away somewhere, with Lilly gone she was the only woman on board. Her cousin Paige would relish this. She would be witty and charming and have the sailors somersaulting over themselves for a glimpse of her smile. Solange just felt oddly exposed, as if under a bright scrutinizing light. Her new-found feminism from shadows where gender roles were more egalitarian warred mightily with Aunt Felicity's more demure upbringing. In the end, Aunt Felicity won--for this evening, at least. Solange listened more than she talked, laughed where socially appropriate, and carefully sipped her port.
The stories lasted until very late--Lucas seemed to have a never-ending supply--but at last the captain stood and said something about getting back to steering the ship. Amid polite laughter, Solange took the opportunity to excuse herself as well and retreat to her cabin. It was a simple pleasure to slide the pocket door shut behind her and finally be alone.
Under this pleasant, relaxed demeanour that Lucas presents to all around, someone of high Water might sense a restlessness, an impatience, a strange sort of constrained energy that has Lucas prowling the decks late at night, or very early in the morning, swathed in a heavy overcoat, while the morning mist has not yet been burned away by the sun.
On such a morning ...
Solange, her bulky cableknit sweater pulled down over the tops of her hands to keep them warm, crosses her arms against the wind and walks up to stand behind him. "Whatever you do, don't look down," she cautions.
For a moment he stiffens - perhaps, lost in thought, he has not heard her approach, or perhaps the morning sea drowned out her footsteps.
"I never look down," he says. "Always out ... across ... "
He falls silent. In profile his face looks fixed and set. Cold, perhaps ... and from more than the stiff breeze that his colour is turned up against. The wind is making his dark hair stream back - the usually hidden ear is visible, the ugly red slash that sliced it all too apparent.
Solange find herself staring at the ear out of curiosity, thoughts of family healing rates flitting through her head. Shouldn't it be healed by now? Her eyes narrow.
After a long time, without turning his head, he asks, "And how is the good doctor this morning?"
This would be an excellent time to practice her "not letting Lucas get under her skin" techniques. She takes a long breath and lets it out slowly. "He was fine when I left him last night," she replies cheerfully. "Described the medical supplies provided on ship as barbaric and primitive, but he'll cope. And you? You seem...preoccupied."
"You could say that," he says. He reaches into the inside pocket of his overcoat and slides out a cigarette case - gold, and bearing the Sant Cyr crest. He flips it open and reveals a row of black cigarettes tipped with gold, which he offers to Solange, angling the case to shield the contents from the spray.
"Do have one. If you're lucky, you'll get the one I rolled in opium - my own little wager with Fate."
Solange smiles but shakes her head, declining. "So what's on your mind? Is it something I can help with?"
Lucas takes one for himself and slides the case away again, taking out a flintlock lighter and lighting it. He slips the lighter away, and takes a draw on the cigarette.
"Not opium," he says to Solange, although he still stares out to sea. "My luck ... again."
He turns now, a full 180 dgrees, so his back is to the railing, and the sea is behind him.
"I was calculating how many Shadows must lie between me and my family," he says, almost conversationally. "Do you ever do that? Did you ever do it, with your Doctor?"
Solange looks at him guardedly. "Yes, I suppose I did. It's...complicated."
She deflects the conversation back to Lucas. "I suppose you could always trump your mother and see how they're doing."
Lucas gives a little laugh. "I suppose I could. If I had a Trump of her."
Solange shrugs. "You can borrow mine, if you like."
His dark eyebrows lift. "Thank you. I didn't realise you had one of my mother."
She smiles. "The trump deck was a gift from my father after walking the pattern. Do you want it now?"
"Later," says Lucas. "Later will do. But thank you."
He starts to move now - the early morning chill seemingly having penetrated even his overcoat. A brisk walk ...
"Perhaps my mother would have had a gift for me for walking the Pattern too," he says, "had I waited to find out. As it was, she seemed more likely to throttle me than to reward me."
Solange raises an eyebrow at him, the wind blowing strands of blonde hair about her face. "Did you walk without her permission? Just up and do it?"
Lucas laughs, a little bitterly. "Au contraire. Maman returned from a visit away to discover that in her absence, I had decided to have my portrait painted by an artist known as M.le Diable who promised me a painting like nothing I had ever seen before. He was right - although at the time I thought it an exercise in rather dreary realism. It was only later I learned he was more commonly known as Brand."
Both of Solange's eyebrows lift, threatening to disappear into her hairline.
"On her return, it took Maman about half an hour to grasp what was happening, and then she hauled me to Amber, much to my indignation, and - en effet - threw me onto the Pattern. I believe we have rarely - if ever - exceeded the level of mutual vituperation we rose to on that occasion. I must be the only person to have ever walked the Pattern literally shaking with anger. I shoved my way through each Veil in turn so I could resume yelling abuse at her."
Solange looks out over the water and smiles. "I can picture that. At least your anger was a strong enough emotion to carry you through the ordeal--probably even helped, truth be told." She looks back at him. "But Brand? Really? When..." Solange pauses, a thought suddenly occurring to her. "How was the timing? Could you have been Brand's original subject for the whole 'stabbing on the Pattern' trick, only to be later replaced by Martin?"
Lucas shrugs - a fatalism that seems very French. "Peut etre. I might have been dupe, or tool. At the time, perhaps it simply amused him to pander to my self-conceit which, as you may have observed, is boundless."
There is a note in Lucas voice, almost as though he is jeering ... but the subject of his contempt is not Solange.
It is himself.
Solange smiles at his joke, but then the smile fades at the tone of his voice and is replaced by a bemused regard. "Why, then?" she asks quizzically. "Why are you like that?"
"Why are any of us the way we are?" he counters. "We take what we have, and we use it for protection. We defend ourselves, perhaps by becoming paranoid, perhaps by becoming better than all our kin - although that's a tough one. Perhaps by espousing a cause. Perhaps by devoting our lives to the pursuit of the trivial until it appears the all-consuming."
He pinches out his cigarette and turning slightly, pitches it into the sea.
"Sometimes ... it takes an action by another to show us the truth."
Solange watches him curiously but keeps quiet.
"Adonis," he says briefly. "He gave his life to save his children. And I ... "
A beat.
"Shall we have breakfast?"
This touches a nerve with Solange. "It was a fool's death, Lucas. It accomplished a respite, nothing more. He threw his life away."
"At least he was prepared to," says Lucas softly. "He didn't put his own sorry hide first."
She narrows her eyes. "I don't believe you would. You may think so now, academically, but I think if something was mortally threatening your children, you'd stop it any way you could."
Lucas laughs. "Oh, don't credit me with a nobility I don't possess, Solange! Maybe if in some improbable Shadow we were savaged by a lion or some foul emissary of Chaos, then I'd interpose my willowy form to protect them. But if thought, and calculation, and politics come into it ....
"I had the choice then, and I chose to protect myself ahead of the children. I stood outside the walls of Amber and wrestled with the dilemma. Should I stake all, to save them? I chose not to."
Solange frowns.
His smile twists. "It's as well you know my measure as well as I know it myself before we go any further."
"What stakes, Lucas?" she asks, looking for clarification.
"I could have got into the Castle," he says quietly. "But to do so ... would have revealed more than I wanted to reveal. So I chose ... to gamble their safety."
He turns suddenly, to gaze at the sea again. "I'm dangerous to the people who love me, Solange."
"I guess it's a good thing I don't love you, then," she replies cynically. "I should be perfectly safe." Her expression hard, Solange turns partway away and hugs herself tighter against the wind. Then she laughs incredulously. "Why are you telling me this, Lucas? I could rat you out. Your 'gamble' would have been for nought."
"Yes," says Lucas. "You could. And do you know what? I'm not sure I care anymore. The stakes I've been playing for ... no longer seem worth it. Not compared with what I was prepared to throw away."
She studies him out of the corner of her eye, not completely convinced. "And what brought you to that conclusion?"
Lucas hesitates, then turns his back to the sea. He reaches into his overcoat and brings out his cigarette case once more, flipping it open to reveal the black and gold cigarettes. But this time he inserts a nail into a hidden groove on the left side of the case. A click ... and then a hidden spring opens it to reveal a narrow hitherto hidden compartment. Inside are a few familiar squares of pasteboard, but the design of the topmost trump is in a hand Solange does not recognise.
It shows Lucas' study in Amber.
Solange turns back around to face him. She looks at the card, then up at Lucas. "You've been studying trump? This is your secret way into the castle?"
Lucas hesitates - and then nods. "In a manner of speaking. You could say I'm a student of trumps. And yes, this was my way in."
He reaches a little way down the slim pile and withdraws a single card, then snaps the case shut.
Solange wonders what trump he withdrew, but she can't see the front. She comes back to the conversation-at-hand, still confused by a point. "You still haven't answered my question. What brought you to that conclusion? Why the change?"
Lucas is staring in front of him.
"I've told you, Solange. Adonis died for his children. I wasn't prepared to risk this coming out for the sake of mine. I put my own security above theirs. The force of the contrast was ... striking."
Ah. And now they've come full-circle, back to the beginning of their conversation. She marvels over the interconnectedness of things, that someone dying--something she considered so tragic--could have such positive repercussions. And such repercussions they must have been to manage to reach inside that impenetrable shell Lucas surrounds himself with and touch his heart.
Not wanting to diminish his confession with her own inadequate words, Solange nods and says nothing.
He turns and smiles at her, a little bleakly. "Here. You should have this. We don't know what lies ahead and - for what it's worth, we may need to rely on each other."
His statement gets a slight smile from Solange. Relying on each other was something she assumed, and yet it was something he thought he needed to clarify. Would she ever really understand him?
She can now see that the trump is one of Lucas himself.
She accepts the trump and studies it.
Lucas is dressed in subdued dark clothes. The style is not so good as that of the drawing of the room, as though the artist is happier with landscapes rather than portraits. Or possibly beautifully rendered interiors are his forte. But the artist has captured Lucas' half-smile perfectly.
The back is - perhaps inevitably - the St Cyr crest.
"If you can reciprocate," he says, "so much the better. I have a certain wariness about ... ah ... accepting trump calls. The only one I know in existence was found among Brand's papers by his younger son. Who, for reasons of his own, seems to be determined to hang on to it."
"Interesting," Solange replies, still studying the trump. It's hard to tell if she's referring to the trump or his statement about Ambrose. She looks up. "I can't reciprocate, sorry. The only trump I know of myself is the sketch Ossian did that's hanging in the trump booth."
She adds his trump to her own deck and replaces the deck back in her pocket. "Thank you. It's a generous gift. Perhaps...well, perhaps you'll even let me keep it after this is all over." Solange blinks, wondering if her statement sounded forward to him. It almost sounded forward to herself, as if she was implying their relationship had more than just formal aspects. But they were friends, weren't they? Could someone of the opposite sex just be a friend to Lucas? That's certainly all she was trying to imply, nothing more. But would he take it that way? Or not?
A faint blush rises to her cheeks.
If Lucas sees it (and, being Lucas, he probably does) he is far too gallant to comment. But it is doubtless stored away for later reference.
Feeling suddenly awkward--a feeling that's becoming all too familiar to her of late--she changes the subject. "So...are you self-taught, or has Ossian been giving you lessons?"
"If Ossian has been giving me lessons," says Lucas, "they haven't been in trumps."
Solange is half-tempted to ask...but doesn't. Her imagination is already far too vivid. She smiles politely instead.
"If you wish, I think I can probably make a trump of you between now and our destination. There's not a great deal else to do ... "
The smile widens, transforming her face, and Lucas can catch of glimpse of the sun angel she's named for. "That would be...I'd like that. Thanks."
Lucas smiles back, his own cold mood perhaps a little thawed by the sunlight. "It will be a pleasure," he tells her. "But be prepared, though. When I draw a trump, somehow it seems ... as though I go deep into the soul of the subject."
Solange's express is dubious, wondering exactly what that means.
He sheakes his head. "It's one of the reasons I find rooms easier than people. Another is probably that I have a draughtsman's eye. A third ... " The smile grows wider. "Unless you've strayed into a remarkably strange Shadow, the room is less likely to wonder how you came by a trump of it ...
"Now - shall we have that breakfast?"
"Certainly," Solange nods. "I think I smell kippers."
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LVII: Setting Sail | Index | LIX: Secrets and Trumps
