Pen leads the way leftwards without hesitation. Deveraux’s two men are unaffected, concentrating on their bundle; they’re pleasing to the eye but they weren’t brought along for any surfeit of acumen. But Deveraux can feel the strange wind rising; he can hear the whispers in the dark. “Something built these tunnels,” he says.
“Someone,” Pen says, as the walls narrow around them, and then they emerge into the sea’s gemstone depths, beneath great arches of light and glass.
(An underwater ballroom, Pen’s family have always called it, as though it were for the fairy folk to hold their solstice balls, or for the selkies to dance their unaccustomed reels. But this is a real place, a human place. Built by the old powers, in the days when magic might still be wielded beneath fathoms of saltwater, but built by the people of Kernow.
Still and all, you couldn’t stow crates here, not with the strange breeze and the echoes of things past. Pen has been here three times in twenty years. The later visits were in discharge of the duty; she checked all was well and scurried back through the dark. But the first time was on the occasion of her majority, guided by her father as his mother had guided him. Penhallow, her father said, as she put away childish things: This, too, is yours. To care for, as she does the people and the town, until those who might claim it call for its return.)
“Quite something,” Deveraux says, shakily. “Who built it?”
“We did,” Pen says. “And whatever your piece is”—she points at the package, being laid down carefully by the two men on the dry dusty floor—“it’ll come to no harm here.”
And nor will anything else, if what’s in the bundle itself seeks to cause harm. The men investigate the perfect circle of the walls, finding no seals or seams, no doors or hatches. One may enter by the tunnel at low tide and leave the same way, and that is all; the glass is a single piece. Pen waits and looks up at the sea’s green underside, obscene in its way, as though one were peering at a great lady in her smalls.
“I’m obliged,” Deveraux says, as the two men finish their inspection, and come to stand by their bundle. “Now, if you’ll excuse us.”
Pen sets off along the tunnel without demur; they would rather she were not here when they open the bundle, and if the king’s men wish to get themselves lost in the tunnels it’s no business of hers.
But it seems that Deveraux and his men are officious but not entirely without gumption. They emerge on the beach only a short while after Pen, though water is splashing their boots and glossing the pebbles. Pen is looking to the path around the headland when a familiar voice says: “Cutting it fine, aren’t you?”
“Trevelyan!”
It’s an instinctive panic. But Deveraux gives Pen a pitying look as he steps out onto the beach. “The Revenue take their orders from the King, Miss Penhallow. We shall not be trespassing further upon your time.”
“You’ll be wanting a guide tomorrow night,” Pen says.
“I fancy I have committed the path to memory,” Deveraux says. “But I thank you for your invaluable assistance. It has not gone unappreciated.”
He tips his hat to her and offers a bow to Trevelyan, who scarcely nods in return. And then the king’s men are gone, their hoofbeats receding into the sodden evening, leaving Penhallow in the grey murk to consider the topsy-turviness of everything.
“About your boy, Nanskevel,” Trevelyan says abruptly. “The circuit Assizes isn’t travelling through until Michaelmas at the earliest. Send his mother to him. She might take in a blanket and a basket, if she cared to.”
“Thank you,” Pen says, and Trevelyan shrugs as though it were nothing to do with her. “You’re riding tonight?”
Trevelyan nods again, gesturing towards the sweep of coastline. A hard life, Penhallow realises for the first time—patrolling night after night, through scorn and pitiless weather.
(King’s men in the tunnels, sympathy for the Revenue. This is certainly her father’s night for spinning in his grave.)
But they’re going the same way, and all at once Pen’s tired, tired of her responsibilities, tired of mysterious folk from London and the lost powers of long ago. When they’ve cleared the curve of the headland she settles on the harbour wall, out of the wind, and pulls out a hip flask.
“Drink?” she says. According to Deveraux they’re in this together, whatever it is, and Trevelyan’s guarded look is suddenly plain exasperating. “For God’s sake, Trevelyan. You’ve a hard ride ahead of you and you’re chilled to the bone.”
Trevelyan hesitates, then sits down on the wall next to Pen. She takes a swig of the raw spirit and hands it back. “Duty paid,” Pen says, impish despite herself, and that might be a flicker in Trevelyan’s expression. A sense of humour, if there’s still scope for wonders in this world.
Although—perhaps there is such scope, at that. “Do you know what’s in the bundle?” she asks.
“Some great new magic for a modern age.” Trevelyan shrugs. “Or so they said, when they told me I wasn’t to interfere.”
Pen wondered about that; she supposes the king’s men can prevail over the Revenue if they see fit. Trevelyan reaches into her pockets and lights a rolled-up strand of tobacco, which startles Pen; she’d never have ascribed Trevelyan any vices. And she does it with no need for matches, which is more startling altogether.
“Well, there’s a thing,” Penhallow says. She’s seen magic cast, even in Kernow, but it’s vanishing rare, an arresting strangeness.
Trevelyan’s hand drops, though the flame stays at her fingers. “Party tricks.”
“Still,” Penhallow says, uncertain. It suggests that there’s something under Trevelyan’s skin that isn’t just saltwater. Something of the places far from the sea.
“My mother came from London,” Trevelyan says crisply, reading Pen’s mind. “Washed ashore here and never went back. She had the knack. But it won’t breed true.”
Pen thinks about that. It likely won’t, even if Pen could imagine Trevelyan with a babe in arms. It’s too late for such things.
Still, there remain the dissenters. “Merryn thinks it will come back some day,” Pen says, hesitantly. “This is just a shadow, a passing-off time. It will come back to us when we need it. For whatever we come to be.”
Trevelyan nods. “My mother thinks the same.”
Penhallow wonders if Trevelyan believes it herself, and if she minds the loss. “Your mother,” she says, surprised at the present tense; Trevelyan does have a home and hearth fire, after all. “Where does she stay?”
“Plymouth.” Trevelyan shrugs again. “My brothers went to sea.”
So did Pen’s, once. “Trevelyan,” she says, and then stops; in the lamplight, in the wind’s lee, she had thought to say something unwise. Without realising it until now, she’s been staring all this time at Trevelyan’s delicate, lovely hands, cupped around roses of flame.
No further need to trespass on your time, the king’s men said to Pen, and that ought to be all there is to it. But Pen is nervous, up and pacing, listening for the watchbells, driving Merryn to distraction.
“Have you a thistle up your arse, Pen?” she snaps finally, laying down the treatise she has spent the whole afternoon trying to read. It’s a loan from another Hindustani scholar, passing through the village on his way to take ship from Penzance, and in whose arse Merryn is also interested.
“Strangers,” Pen says. “They don’t always know the tides. Half-an-hour—it makes such a difference…”
“Not that it’d make any odds if they drowned,” Merryn says, “but go and see they don’t, if you must.”