Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [40]
Yasmeen had to laugh, too. He just couldn’t take the easy route, could he?
The worried furrows in the blacksmith’s brow smoothed, and she watched them approach Vesuvius with an expression that seemed at once distracted and intensely focused. “With this much wind, I wouldn’t ever climb on one of those. But do you see how his weight stabilizes it? It’s because he’s so low. I’d have to figure out a way to land despite some heavy object hanging below—or design them not to land at all. For an airship, perhaps. And with that much weight, two to spin. That boy is sweating already. And by the blessed stars, those breeches are something else.”
“So is Archimedes Fox,” Yasmeen said.
“The adventurer?” Ivy glanced at Yasmeen for confirmation. After a moment of disbelief, her eyes softened and she looked to the man hanging beneath the autogyro again. “In London, the girls in our house who knew their letters would read his stories aloud to the rest of us. We’d pool our pennies when a new copy of the Gazette was printed, though sometimes it meant going without a supper. It was worth it, though. No matter how terrible the danger, he always escaped. Always. Even when it seemed impossible.” She smiled with the memory. “We listened to them so often, I knew chapters by heart.”
So did Yasmeen. Perhaps that was why she’d found it so difficult to hold on to her anger—not because of his lean body or charming grin, but because in a sense, Archimedes Fox had been one of her closest companions for almost a decade.
And now, he made her laugh when she had little reason to.
“I heard he was someone else,” Ivy said quietly.
Of course she had. Mad Machen wouldn’t have known any better, not immediately. “It’s funny, the things you hear on these seas. About ten years ago, I heard a story about a weapons smuggler who was betrayed by the Lusitanian mercenary he’d hired to carry his cargo from Reval to Copenhagen. Santos Silva was the mercenary’s name—have you ever heard of him?”
“No.”
“That’s because Silva and his men put a gun on the smuggler, and promised to leave him alive if he handed over the crate of weapons. Of course they wouldn’t have, so the smuggler dove behind the crate for cover and shot all of Silva’s men except for two seamen and the cook—he’s the one I heard the story from. But a smuggler who can kill eight men and then sail their bodies across the Baltic Sea so that his remaining associates will know better than to betray him doesn’t sound like the sort of man who’d laugh his way across a harbor beneath an autogyro, does he?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Ivy agreed, smiling. “That sort of man sounds like Archimedes Fox.”
Clever girl. “So he does.”
Flying near enough now that Yasmeen could see the buckles of his waistcoat and the diamond pattern in the orange brocade, Archimedes called out, “Permission to board, Captain?”
“It’s not my ship!” she called back. “You’ll have to wait for your welcome!”
“Wait? Well, that’s a fine way to ruin my entrance!”
Grinning, he tilted his head back and said something to the messenger above him. Their direction veered slightly, carrying Archimedes to Vesuvius’s tall poop deck, where the autogyro’s blades were less likely to catch on the rigging.
“I have to talk to him for a bit,” she told the blacksmith. “Then I’ll bring him over to meet you. He’ll probably try to persuade you to take him under.”
“Not today, not until I’ve tested her. But give me ten minutes to polish her guts, and I’ll let him crawl around inside.”
“He’s charming,” Yasmeen warned her.
“Yes, but I can’t try to escape Mad Machen with a passenger in my boat, can I?”
“If you escape with my strongbox, I’ll quarter you.”
Ivy heaved a great, theatrical sigh. “And now fear for my life forces me to come back.”
Yasmeen shook her head. She’d once paid the girl a fortune to leave Eben alone; Ivy had used the money to set up a blacksmith’s shop on Vesuvius instead. But Yasmeen supposed that it had worked out in the end: Ivy had also used a portion of that fortune to build the submersible for her, and it hadn’t cost