Beyond the Endless Sky

Chapter 1

Small hands clung to a cotton flotsam, and bare knees shook in the cold wind.

Grey eyes — soft as granite and less yielding — glared down at a young woman, who hung onto the hem of a grey skirt as if it were all that kept her on the ground. "Clarissa, child, this is inappropriate. I will not let him see us like this," the woman said, her jaw clenched and a warning finger extended. But even before the hard woman finished speaking, her gaze returned to the ship at the end of the pier.

Torn between fears, the girl hung on for just a moment longer, before she looked at her hands and forced them open. "Yes, Abbess," Clarissa said, as she smoothed her dress down. She realized her hands were shaking and squeezed the pockets at her sides.

"Compose yourself," the Abbess replied. But as Clarissa looked up, she wondered which of them the hard old woman was talking to. The Abbess' cloak — the uniform grey cotton flannel that every member of the monastery wore — barely twitched in the breeze as they waited. The still cloak clashed with the fingers tapping on the edge of her pockets, and the boots fidgeting impatiently on the uneven wooden planks of the dock.

Clarissa turned her gaze to the ship. A wide metal gangplank rested on the dock, its edges digging into the wood and drawing out splinters. Two people were crossing that plank, walking towards Clarissa and the others. A man and a woman, both dressed strangely, almost as if they had come out of the storybooks of her childhood.

To Clarissa's eyes, the man leading the pair looked every bit a pirate and a scoundrel. He wore both a sword and a gun in holsters at his left hip. His coat was midnight black and blood red. All the mud-brown hair below the top of his head was shaved off, leaving just stubble over skin the colour of well-creamed coffee. The man stepped up to the Abbess, and Clarissa was both impressed and appalled when all he offered in greeting was a raised eyebrow.

"You expect me to take the girl?" The man made a pointed look in her direction, and Clarissa squirmed under his scrutiny.

"To the shield, along with the box," the Abbess replied, and she pointed with her thumb over her shoulder. A lifetime of obedience had Clarissa's eyes following that gesture as if she had been told to, turning her head around to look behind.

Asides from the luggage trunk resting by Clarissa's feet, there was only one piece of cargo waiting at the dock. As tall as a grown man, and as wide as it was tall, the box was so black even the scoundrel's coat looked bright and colourful next to it. It wasn't glossy, didn't reflect the light of the sun, and was only marred by the tracings of long silver lines arrayed in impossibly complicated circuits. The only marring to its geometric perfection was a small control box on one side. It had no lid or hinges, and in fact, didn't look at all like it was meant to be opened.

Even Clarissa, who knew the people who had helped make the box, had no idea what was inside.

"A bird that's tasted the free skies doesn't always return to the cage," someone said. Clarissa turned back to see the strange woman had spoken. Her face was obscured by a rakishly tilted hat that covered the right side of her face. Like the man, she wore both a pistol and a sword at her belt, and silver clasps and buttons adorned her clothes. The combination looked to Clarissa, as close to dressing as a lightning storm as she had ever seen.

"She doesn't share your failings," the Abbess replied curtly, though she looked at the man as she spoke.

"Suspect you've written a book of my failings by now," the man replied, with a wry grin. "If you have it handy, you can add 'disinclined to charity' to your ongoing encyclopedia. What did you expect to pay for her passage?"

The Abbess sighed, and to Clarissa the old woman's eyes looked sad, the way she looked when Clarissa had lied about doing something wrong. "I'd hoped you'd have learned some gratitude by now," she said, as she pulled a necklace out of her pocket.