The Underwater Ballroom Society

Penhallow Amid Passing Things

It is said that in the lands over the ocean, where birds rise from their own ashes and cats sing like larks, the court magicians can create twelve wondrous enchantments over breakfast and no one thinks anything of it. Nothing like England, where magical things fade like sun-bleached cloth, and nothing at all like this miserable Kernow, where the sea flows in all the moth-eaten holes and resets everything to true north. Nothing here but the unadorned real, for now and—perhaps—for all time.

Penhallow and the scholar Merryn–the wits and pedantry of the operation, respectively–have been arguing about this all the way from the wreck of the Leander, though their oars clank softly, and their voices are pitched as not to carry over the water. Merryn thinks the English magicians will find the trick of it again someday, so they might once again cast something extraordinary even on these godforsaken shores. Never, says Penhallow. The sea will give up her dead before she allows enchantment at her edges.

“And it’s just as well,” she adds. “We don’t have need of it. We want for nothing.”

In the broadside of this outrageous opinion Merryn is mustering return fire when the lights flash over the headland. Two fast blinks, then two slow: hurry, hurry.

“Quickly!” Penhallow calls to the flotilla ahead; she and Merryn are the rear guard. “Out and unload!”

They’re on the shore now, pulling up the boats. Hurry, but handle carefully: this is all precious stuff, potions and packages, rum bottles, fine lace. Leander went down with no loss of life three days past and what’s left is decidedly salvage.

Over the hill, silver tack jingles, and a horse picks up speed at the prick of spurs. This is Newlyn Trevelyan, who rides for the Crown. An austere figure, Trevelyan; a precise speaker, a born horsewoman; no home or hearth fire that anyone knows of. “Saltwater for blood,” say the villagers along the coast, hissing through their teeth, but that’s nothing untoward in this place where all souls sing of the sea. Trevelyan has grey eyes and ice in her marrow and is so much the living embodiment of His Majesty’s Inland Revenue that there are those who wonder if she can be human at all.

(She is. Penhallow knows. More on that later.)

Hurry!

Now it’s just potion jars left—green, pink, and red. Decorations for fancy folk’s parties, Pen thinks with disdain; not like the real enchantments that Merryn prays will someday return to Kernow. If one of the jars cracks, they’ll be awash in glittery nothings—peacocks, elephants and birds-of-paradise.

Which is not a consummation devoutly to be wished with Trevelyan on the other side of the hill. “Careful!” Pen calls, still low but carrying. “Jackie, Ram Das! Into the tunnels!”

Her voice echoes. The coast beneath the town–also Penhallow; Pen was named for it—is as delicate a lacework as anything they smuggle from France, friable rock riddled with passageways at the mercy of the sea’s ebb and flow. Pen’s men and women who know their way through the darkness are waiting just within the entrances. Jackie hefts the crates with enthusiasm—this is his first time out under a smuggler’s moon—and the unseen watchers take them from him. By dawn the cove and most of the tunnels will be underwater, and the boxes stowed safe in the farthest caverns, to be retrieved when the tide falls again.

“Quickly,” Penhallow calls again, not to chide, but time is not on their side. “No, Jackie, lad. Right, not left.”

The left-hand path runs deep underground and then deep under the water. The wind sings inside those passageways with nothing to raise it, and the shadows whisper in long-forgotten cants. Penhallow doesn’t believe in the fairy folk, but she’s a sensible creature. All her girls and boys march sharp right.

Another flash of the lights: three rapid blinks, then the long one.

One more agonising minute, and the crates are all unloaded, the boats beached and secured. “Tomorrow,” Ram Das says, and ducks away, his footsteps the last to disappear into the earth. Jackie lingers – Pen promised his mum she’d see him right to his doorstep – and she and Merryn snuff out the lanterns just as Trevelyan crests the hill. She pauses, her straight-backed-profile a sharp cut-out in the moonlight, then moves on. No lights on the beach; none on the wreck. The hoofbeats fade away in a soft, regular rhythm.

Pen lets out a breath and leads the way to where the ponies are tethered. It’s a squelch of a journey – as ever in this thrice-damned damp Kernow – but a job well-done. The Leander went down with a cargo bound for the New World. Those little enchantment bottles cross the Atlantic with the benefit of European cachet, but they’ll fetch a pretty price here right enough and the whole town will eat well in consequence.

(Pen has read most of the books of her family’s inheritance, but would have to ask Merryn how to pronounce ‘cachet’.)

“There you are, lad,” Pen says, to Jackie. “First time out, and you did just fine. Didn’t I tell you?”

Jackie gives her an amiable smile, lets her clap him on the back. And then the bottle falls out of his sleeve and cracks on the hard ground.

Peacocks. Green, glittering, glorious with light, visible a mile off. Fucking peacocks.

“Scatter!” Pen yelps. She and Merryn run and duck together, slotting themselves into the long ridge of gorse. She reaches for Jackie, misses grabbing his arm, but he’s close behind. No doubt he’d thought to sneak the bottle home and impress a girl with it. Pen swears silently at the idiocy of youth and keeps her head down.

But perhaps it’s no harm done, after all. The little enchantment fades to nothingness, leaving just a faint sparkle in the air. The empty bottle rolls away, and Jackie’s almost under cover. Pen sighs with relief, then realises it’s too late.

Trevelyan halts and dismounts in a single movement. She’s done years of heavy work on this stretch of coast, brought in naval men from Plymouth and unravelled smuggler operations like spun silk. But this isn’t a case where she needs to expend any significant effort. She picks up the empty bottle, inspects its Leander cargo label and its lack of excise mark. Jackie, who froze in place at the sight of her, is standing there with his mouth open like a codfish.

“Name, boy,” Trevelyan says.

“Jackie.”

Trevelyan merely stares at him.

“Nanskevel,” the lad says. Penhallow shifts forwards, so as to see better. Charging in wholesale would likely just get herself and Merryn arrested in turn, and she’ll need her freedom as well as all her guile to get him off this charge. Smuggling in these parts is a hanging offence, but it’s taking a while for the gravity of Jackie’s situation to descend upon him. His affable face strains from the effort of exerting his intelligence.

Trevelyan considers, then hoists the boy into the saddle with her. He squeaks but has the blessed wits not to try and catch Pen’s eye. She lurks beneath the bushes and is grateful for that small mercy, and the hoofbeats fade again.

When the coast is clear Merryn spits into the gorse, and disturbs one final peacock, which struts off into the darkness. “Time was,” she says, “when the Revenue would stay bought.”

Pen remembers. They could have had the boy home for his breakfast.

But no one’s tried to buy off Trevelyan and lived to speak of it. They trudge on towards the horses.

In the morning Pen gets a visit from Goodwife Nanskevel, Jackie’s mother: a chattering, silly woman, who takes in washing and lodgers, and cries for the fall of every sparrow. “He’s just a boy,” she says, wiping her eyes with her apron. “Just seventeen. Just foolish. Pen, if you could do something for him, if you could say a word in the officer’s ear—”

“I can’t promise,” Penhallow says, “but I’ll do my best for him.”

“You’re a fool, Pen,” says Merryn, who doesn’t suffer them gladly. She’s right, of course; if the Revenue won’t be bought, there’s nothing to be done for the boy save a clean shirt before the Assizes. After that he’ll be in other hands.

Nonetheless. Penhallow walks through the cobbled streets of the town, thumbs hooked in her pockets, and for all the good it will do, puts the fear of the Lord in the boy’s gaoler. The elderly village constable is susceptible to Penhallow’s name—Pen is its only bearer at present, and shoulders its whole weight accordingly—but it’s more than his job’s worth to interfere with the due process of the Law. (Pen can hear the initial capital.) And then she’s getting dispirited, and the sun is over the yardarm. She steps inside the Crooked Arms and finds it unoccupied, save for a gentleman with fine braid around his cuffs and ruffles on his shirt, wearing boots Pen can see her face in. He’s peering into a half-pint tankard as though it offends him.

And also: Trevelyan. Hands clasped, pensive. Pen rarely sees her by daylight and thinks: she looks tired. Not that Pen isn’t the same way, having got to her bed as the sun was coming up and out of it again for Goody Nanskevel. “About Jackie,” she says.

“The boy.” Trevelyan looks up at her. “Apprehended in an illicit endeavour in the full sight of the Revenue. You’ve come to beg for his life?”

Pen blinks. Penhallow, like the town: with its weight and dignity. “To request that his mother might see him. I don’t beg.”

“No.” Trevelyan seems startled by herself, as though coming out of a dream. “No, of course not. I apologise, Penhallow.”

An apology from an officer of the Crown. Pen stares at her in mute amazement, as Trevelyan gets up and strides out with spurs jangling, resolutely on her way to God knows where. When she’s gone, the man dressed in rich cloth comes up to Pen.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, ah, Miss—”

“Penhallow. Just Penhallow.”

The man nods. “I’d thought to speak with you. About, ah, smuggling. In these parts.”

Pen resists the urge to hush his mouth with her fist and ask if he were born in a barn. “I fear you must be confusing me with someone else, sir,” she says politely. “That was the Revenue officer just leaving.”

“I hear she made an arrest last night,” the man says. “A young lad with a bottle of something he shouldn’t have had. I doubt he’ll hang.” He waves a hand. “Not in Kernow, not with a jury of his peers. But would you want to take the risk?”

Pen starts paying attention. “Who are you, to speak to me so?”

His fingers uncurl and a seal clinks on the bar in front of him. It’s made of dull metal, the engraving worn to nothing by centuries. Pen has seen things like it in her father’s books.

“My name is Deveraux,” the man says. “Perhaps you’d care to take a walk, Miss Penhallow.”

“Just Penhallow,” Pen says irritably. But she follows him out to the harbour edge out of curiosity more than anything.

“Lovely part of the world, this.” Deveraux gestures around him with the beer mug, which he’s apparently appropriated from the pub. The sun is dazzling, the fishing boats lining up on their return. “Wouldn’t do the ride down again, for God’s love. Bruises weren’t the worst of it. Tell me something, Miss Penhallow. What do you know of magic?”

“Less than most,” Pen says briskly. “We don’t hold with it here.”

“You can’t hold with it here,” Deveraux says. “All the better. If I had a package I needed out of the country in a hurry. If it were—dangerous. If, in the wrong hands, it might cause more plagues than just peacocks.”

News does travel fast, Pen thinks sourly. Damn the boy, anyway.

“The tunnels,” Deveraux prompts, after a while. “The ones beneath the beach. You know your way around, I’m sure.”

“That’s as well as may be,” Pen says. “For all I know you’re a travelling charlatan.”

He isn’t. Not with the seal of the King’s messengers, with the same ancient insignia that marks Trevelyan’s collar. But Pen’s stubborn. (Too stubborn. Merryn despairs. Will you ever know the love of a good woman, Pen, and you almost forty.)

Deveraux glances at her, then pours his tankard out into the harbour. He leans down, fills it again with brine, tosses his seal into it as though it weren’t worth cut rubies, and hands the tankard to Pen. “Drink.”

“I see the ride from London addled your brain as well as your arse,” Pen observes.

“Drink,” Deveraux says again, and Pen shrugs; one may as well indulge the touched. She dips her head to the brine, and then stills, a shiver passing through her sinews—it’s fresh water.

(Speaking of those touched: When magic began to pass from Kernow, it was said to be the reckoning that was due to her. Inhabited time out of mind by intemperate, wilful, pagan-fey people, finally brought low by a righteous God—but it turned out they were the first, not the only. Magic is leaving everywhere on an island, everywhere bruised by the sea. A king’s seal is an old, great, powerful thing, but a last thing. Its like will not be seen here again.)

“I hope that will suffice for my credentials,” Deveraux says. “To business, then. I have something that needs to be kept safe overnight, then rowed out on tomorrow’s tide. Something powerful, you understand. Not to be pried upon, not to be tampered with. If it gets clear away, so does your lad. Agreed?”

He pours the fresh water back into the harbour as he says it, each droplet a separate jewel. It will be a shame, Pen thinks, if this is the last Cornish springtime that Jackie will ever see.

“Tonight,” she says. “An hour before sundown, the headland north-northwest. I’ll leave a light. Don’t be late.”

Deveraux holds out a hand and they shake on it. He ambles off into the town once the bargain is concluded but Pen lingers where she is, contemplative in the sunshine, with the taste of clear water still crisp in her mouth.

“A king’s man in the tunnels!” Merryn splutters, overturns her ink, and spends the next two watch bells rewriting the day’s correspondence, swearing at Pen every minute of the time. The ship in harbour—Caernarfon, for once going about her legitimate business—puts out on the evening ebb and Penhallow sets out towards the cove.

Deveraux and his men arrive promptly on their hour and waste no time in unloading their bundle. Whatever precious magical artefact it may be, it’s unremarkable in its sailcloth wrapping, about the size of a fisherman’s trail net and secured by long ties. They handle it with ruthless care, not letting it touch the rock walls of the tunnels and stepping on Pen’s feet if they must to avoid it. Pen’s uncomfortable enough already. A king’s man in the tunnels. Merryn wasn’t wrong to spit piss and vinegar, and Pen’s father is like to be spinning in his grave.

(A taciturn, rigorous man, Pen’s father, who went out by nights as Pen does, and accorded the smuggler’s trade its due solemnity. He would have made the same promises to Goody Nanskevel. Pen is comforted by the thought.)

After ten minutes of shuffling through the tunnels, with Deveraux bringing up the rear, they come to the parting of the ways. One passage leads through to the sea-caves beneath the cove, where the crates are brought in and stowed. The other is the left-hand path, the one Pen’s girls and boys never take. It leads deeper underground, the route marked only in glimmers of phosphorescence.

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.”

On her way up to the cove Pen spots a cocked hat and wool coat, and finds it both comforting and unsettling that Trevelyan, too, was worried.

“There are naval men of many years’ service,” Trevelyan remarks, without greeting, “who might expound to you all day long of the great accuracy of their timepieces, and never think to change from London time.”

Pen smiles. The tiny beach is deserted, though a fishing boat sits ready for use, tied up just in the lee of the cove. Penhallow watches the movement of water. Trevelyan is impassive, but tapping her foot. They do not speak.

When at last the men emerge, it’s just in time, the sea a short man’s height from the roof of the tunnels. They’re damp, stained by the green-glimmer of the cave phosphorescence, rattled in their demeanour—but out of the tunnels, and this time for sure no longer Pen’s business. She starts off towards the path to the town, and only turns back because of Trevelyan’s sharp intake of breath.

The package is no longer neatly wrapped, and the men are struggling with it. It shifts in their grip, the ties unravelling. As Pen watches, the rest of the binding comes loose, and a body flops to the ground.

“God almighty,” Pen says, starts off down the beach with no notion of what she intends to do next, viscerally conscious that Trevelyan has mirrored her movement, is close by her side.

But she’s brought short, all the wind knocked out of her. Pen thuds into Trevelyan and the two of them hit the ground together, buffeted by a massive, unseen force.

The body in the wrapping is not, after all, dead. It belongs to a young man with large, dark eyes, from which a drugged fog is clearing. As he sits up, Deveraux stumbles backwards, trying to get out of the way. His men—frightened and confused, the most animation Pen’s ever seen in them—are backing away. A shimmering ripple passes through the air from the boy’s hands.

“Not party tricks,” Trevelyan mutters.

“Oh,” Pen says; it’s the lens she needed to see this clearly. Whoever he is, this boy who was being smuggled out of the country by the king’s agents, he has enough magic in him to hold Pen and Trevelyan flat on the beach, and to keep Deveraux and his men at a distance. The tide laps out away from him, in the wrong direction, against all laws of nature. With her head pressed against the sand, Pen thinks with sucking horror about the underwater ballroom—of power that can withstand the sea.

“Get away from me,” the boy says to Deveraux, in a London accent. Deveraux tries to get up again and staggers backwards, his hands to his mouth with blood showing between his fingers.

They kept the boy prisoner in the ballroom overnight, Pen understands suddenly. They will have kept him drugged all the long journey to this coast. To keep him a secret—not to be seen, not to be heard; to be smuggled in the dead of night with the Revenue’s cooperation—and to protect themselves from precisely what’s happening now. Pen imagines him waking up in the dark of the tunnels, seeing only the phosphorescence through sailcloth, and feeling himself carried like a sack of cargo.

But whatever power he has, it’s not enough. With urging from his master, one of the king’s men manages to throw something small at the boy, who doesn’t see it coming. His expression goes slack, his head tipping onto his shoulder. A poisoned dart, Pen realises. The boy slumps to the ground again and she and Trevelyan find they can stand up. Deveraux, too, is getting to his feet, apoplectic with fury. “You incompetent bumbling fools,” he’s saying to his men, “which part of unimaginably dangerous was in any respect unclear to you?”

Pen has had enough of this.

“Deveraux!” she says, the word a whip-crack so all three men turn. “What evil is this?”

Trevelyan has a hand on her arm: caution, not restraint. Pen is suddenly comforted by her presence. But she strides forwards anyway, not willing to remain a bystander.

“Miss Penhallow,” Deveraux says, oily and serene. “As I believe I stated, this is the confidential business of the Crown. It has happened to fall within your area of expertise, but the need for that expertise is finished.”

“I don’t smuggle flesh,” Pen says. Peacocks and rum bottles are a different affair. There are some things neither she nor Trevelyan will tolerate, and they are the authorities here.

“Stand aside,” Deveraux says. Pen ignores him. She kneels down by the boy, her fingers going for a pulse. She finds one, thready; she supposes the poison on the dart must have been calibrated precisely, rather than risk his life.

When Pen doesn’t move, Deveraux draws steel. With head down Pen can feel the presence of the blade at the back of her neck, and breathes calmly, deeply: she hasn’t been a smuggler for twenty years without getting herself out of scrapes like this. But there’s no need. Another shriek of metal, the stamp of a boot on Deveraux’s foot, and Trevelyan is by Pen’s side again.

“Sir,” she says, “I would not have violence within my riding.”

She pulls Pen back with her, out of reach of the blade. The boy is still slumped on the sand and Deveraux has the same contemptuous, pitying look that Pen saw before.

“Up until now there hadn’t been any need for it,” he says. “This is necessary work for a greater good, and I’d be grateful if the pair of you would cease being troublesome. I’d have expected better from the Revenue, for God’s sake.”

He’s holding them off now just by his lofty righteousness of purpose, and the menace in his stance. Behind him the men start loading the drugged boy into the boat, wrapping him up again in the bundle of blankets and sailcloth.

“This is not what I do,” Trevelyan says softly, and Deveraux ignores her as he ignored Pen, turning to the boy. Trevelyan’s dagger is still in her hand and Pen is tough, her shoulders broad enough for all the weights that she carries, but she knows they couldn’t hold their ground here for long. Not two against three.

Pen lunges forwards anyway, tries to get to the boat before they loose the ropes. Trevelyan has read her mind, mirroring her movements exactly, and Pen is comforted again by her presence.

“Trevelyan, stand down,” Deveraux says. “Whom do you serve?”

Pen looks across in alarm. Trevelyan has halted in her tracks, her hand going to the insignia on her collar.

“You were apprised as a professional courtesy,” Deveraux said. “Now stand aside.”

Trevelyan steps away, and Deveraux looks triumphant. Pen wants to kill him. She wants to deliver his carcass to the sea’s embrace, for it to scour his flesh from his bones. She darts towards the boat again, and jerks as Deveraux tries to drag her away bodily. Every instinct in Pen’s body comes into alignment. She breaks his nose.

“Fuck!” Deveraux says thickly, and now he’s spitting blood, ready for a killing blow of his own. “Will you return to Goodwife Nanskevel tonight? Will you tell her you condemned her boy, for the sake of another who was nothing to you? Will you tell her that?

“And you, Trevelyan”—this is said over Pen’s head—“will you break the oaths you swore in the King’s service? Will you refuse your orders?”

There’s no answer. Trevelyan doesn’t move. Deveraux lets go and Pen stumbles, her ears ringing, and doesn’t fall because Trevelyan steadies her. Pen barely registers it, thinking about Goody Nanskevel and her son who’s the apple of her eye, and damn him, anyway, and damn all this mess. The men finish loading the boat and settle at the oars.

“Now,” Deveraux says. The boy is deeply unconscious again, the sailcloth hiding his face. The oars dip, and Penhallow and Trevelyan are silent in the cove as the boat sets out. There’s a dark shape in the distance, a ship standing immediately offshore. In half a minute the sloshing sound is almost inaudible in the wind. The boat makes its way out towards the waiting ship, and by the way the shadows move across the lights, Pen can even make out the lowering of the ropes, the unloading of the cargo.

Her hands are still twitching with the desire to do violence. And then it drains from her, as it already has from Trevelyan, and the two of them set out still in silence, back up the headland.

I don’t smuggle flesh. To be foresworn in such a thing, Pen thinks, is not a mere venial sin. It’s only as the town’s lanterns are close that she can find it within herself to ask, “Where might they be taking him?”

“To the New World,” Trevelyan says dispassionately. “There are places there that are a thousand miles from the sea.”

“You knew all about it,” Pen says, this more shocking than anything else has been in these strange few days. “You knew, damn your eyes, Trevelyan!”

“No!” Trevelyan says, panicked, and Pen’s heart hurts. “I didn’t. I didn’t know enough to stop it.”

She’s gripping her cuffs, and Pen knows it’s just as Deveraux said. Trevelyan serves at the pleasure of those who may use her as they will.

“But I’ve heard of such things,” Trevelyan says, after a minute. Calm again, though still waters run deep in her. “Those with true magic”—in which Trevelyan does not include herself, Pen understands—“are not entirely gone. Some are still born with it, but they’re not enough to be more powerful than the sum of their parts. Not enough to hold off the sea, nor to return magic to Kernow. So when they are found, a different use is found for them. Money changes hands in considerable sums, and… well. The Crown needs revenue.”

“It doesn’t need you,” Pen says. She’s angry that the Crown should have Trevelyan in its service alongside Deveraux; as though the two were in any way like. “Not for its dirty work.”

“I have my orders,” Trevelyan says impatiently. “Would you have me a smuggler instead? Shall I unload your tubs and crates?”

Her night work spoken of so plainly, but Pen doesn’t bristle. Without the Revenue, Pen would not be a smuggler. For the first time, she understands the truth of this—that they hold the same equilibrium as the tides, she and Trevelyan. Each unable to be what she is, without the other.

“We don’t know,” Pen says, after a while. “We don’t know what the boy dreams of. He could… find something there.”

(It’s not likely. There was such fear in him, such violence born from desperation. But nevertheless he may not know where he is bound, and he may not have loved the things and places that he left behind.)

“A new life. A new world.” Trevelyan considers it. “But even if he does. This is still what we do, with what we have.”

Yesterday, Pen wondered if Trevelyan minds the loss of her own inheritance; that she will be the last of a particular kind of people, who have lived in this place since the sea gave it up, and thought they were to be here forever. Looking at her now, Pen knows she was foolish to wonder. Trevelyan minds it. She minds it a great deal.

“They will all be sent far from here,” Trevelyan says. “The old ways will never return to Kernow.”

Her voice has a bleak, awful finality. It settles in Pen’s stomach like a stone.

As they reach the town, her attention is caught by the lights burning in the town square, the yellow glow shuttered by the bars on the windows. The old constable is about his business, lighting the lamps. In the morning, Pen will call on Goody Nanskevel, to speak of her son’s freedom. She has that comfort, cold as it is. Trevelyan does not.

In that moment, Pen makes a decision. “Trevelyan,” she says. “If you’re not to ride tonight, you’re welcome to stay.”

You’re a fool, Pen, Merryn says, as clearly as though she were really there. And Pen may be, but Trevelyan is not. She considers the offer, and says:

“Yes.”

(This is where Penhallow lives: in the town that bears her name, yes, and in a house maintained by its rents and tithes. But simple, nevertheless. It’s a fine name with much to recommend it, but its finery is not in the stripped-wood beams, the ewers and plain cloths. It is in its antiquity, and its hospitality. Because—as Penhallow will have to explain to Merryn in due course—this is not the first time the Revenue have been invited under this roof. They have taken the bread and ale due to them as an honourable foe, and come and gone in peace.

That, Merryn will say, is quite a different thing.)

Penhallow is climbing the wooden stairs with a lantern held in both hands. At the top, in a darkened room, Trevelyan turns from the window with a smuggler’s moon high and proud behind her.

A hush descends, though there is no silence here that is not underscored by the sound of the sea.

“I hear you take orders, Trevelyan,” Pen says. “Take off your coat.”

Trevelyan steps away from the diamond panes. The brushed, heavy wool lands on the bed.

“And your boots.”

A thump, then another.

Next, the undone cuffs; the shirt and the buttons; breeches; everything beneath. The dagger. Her throat and wrists are bare without the insignia of the Crown. When only moonlight remains, Pen sets the lantern by her feet so the shadows are enormous. Trevelyan stands upright, always—through this as everything.

For a moment, Penhallow wants to make her kneel. She’s played that game with other women, women she’s liked, who would have laughed and done it. But for Trevelyan it would be an obscenity to countenance.

(She could have saved Jackie on her own account. She could have chosen not to see what she saw, three nights ago; she could have made a promise to Pen, to make in her turn to Goody Nanskevel; and the two of them might somehow have brought the gifted boy back to his own shores, to decide for himself what might be wrought by his power. But she did not, and Pen did not ask. Trevelyan does not bend and she does not break.)

“Get on the bed,” Penhallow says. Still crisp, to be obeyed. “And make it pretty for us.”

It takes Trevelyan a moment to understand, the instant of confusion more softening to her features than any sweet nothing would be. And then they’re awash with tiny glittering lights, like fireflies at midsummer, and for all it’s a party trick it’s the loveliest thing Pen has ever seen. More so then Trevelyan herself, whose body is bones and sharp edges against Pen’s sheets, to be investigated with care for fear of being cut.

But this is what Pen wants. She checks again that it’s what Trevelyan wants. And it seems the firefly lights have a little extra magic in them; they brighten and dim in rhythm with their maker’s pitch of breathing, and Pen laughs with delight as they all go out.

In the rose-red dawn, Trevelyan gathers her clothes and Pen pretends to be sleeping. With her eyelids open a crack she watches the rise and dip of Trevelyan’s feet, arched away from the ice-cold floorboards. Trevelyan pauses in the doorway, boots in hand, looks back at Pen with an indefinable sweetness about her expression, and turns to go.

Penhallow doesn’t regret this, not at all. She couldn’t return what was taken—she couldn’t bring magic back to Kernow; but she could bring Trevelyan to this quiet, comfortable place, and she could give what was hers to give.

What was hers to give. Pen sits bolt upright, swears at the cold, and launches herself at the door. “Trevelyan! Wait! I’ve got an idea!”

Not quite an hour later Trevelyan is looking out over the water lapping in the harbour and saying, “Penhallow, this is not a good idea.”

“Neither is His Majesty’s Inland Revenue. Get in the boat.”

Trevelyan sighs and steps in, and Pen scans the horizon intently, running her internal calculations again. The delay in the tunnels the night before, together with the struggle she and Trevelyan had with Deveraux and his men, and sea’s long rise and fall at this time of year.

“Got it,” Pen says, pointing. Trevelyan shades her eyes and follows Pen’s outstretched finger, takes in the ship still standing offshore. The crew missed the tide. If they hurry—and Pen is rowing as fast as she can—they might still have time.

“It’s still not a good idea,” Trevelyan says, and then gives Pen a look of utter disgust. Pen has dropped a handful of soft cloth into the rowlocks, so the sound is muffled and doesn’t carry.

“Don’t you start,” Pen says. “Have you got everything?”

She’s just realised that she could have waited for Trevelyan to go and fetched Merryn for this errand. That this never occurred to her at the time is not something she wishes to examine too closely.

Trevelyan inspects the inventory on the bottom of the boat. The little packet contains a knife—which one can grip with one’s teeth; Penhallow and Trevelyan both tested this—; a bag of coins; and a small green bottle containing distilled essence of peacock, or perhaps elephants. When smashed it should prove an excellent diversion.

“What if it doesn’t break when it hits the deck?” Trevelyan asks, wrapping everything back up. Despite her griping, it’s a clever notion. These old merchantmen are all hold and barrels, with no internal partitions; the bundle only needs enough corrosive magic on its outside to eat through one layer of decking. If it doesn’t land close enough to him, the boy will need his own magic to get to it.

“Then we wait for someone to stand on it,” Pen says. “Hush your mouth.”

They’re close enough to be noticed now if anyone happens to be looking. It’s taking all of Pen’s professional skill to keep them as quiet as possible, letting the eddies of the water push them from side to side rather than using long strokes of the oars. But it’s early yet, the midshipmen sleepy at their posts, and though Pen is straining to hear, she can’t make out the watchbells.

“Easy,” Trevelyan breathes, and it seems they haven’t yet been spotted. Another stroke of the oars, and they’re as close as they can get.

“Now!” Pen says.

Trevelyan stands up and throws the packet over the side. It drops out of sight, Trevelyan drops to her knees, Pen starts rowing with no thought for discretion. They cover the distance with great alacrity but not so much so that they can’t hear someone shouting, “What the fuck?” and then a great deal of indistinct yelling.

Pen rows furiously for a few minutes longer, until the crew couldn’t come after them even if they wanted to, and then Trevelyan throws a net astern. They come into harbour as a fishing boat, eccentrically crewed by an anonymously-dressed Revenue officer and the woman who owns most of the land she stands on, but they tie up without inciting remark, and come back up into the town as the two respectable pillars of society that they are.

“I suppose we’ll never really know,” Pen says, as they settle on the harbour wall in the usual spot. The bundle may not have eaten its way belowdecks. The peacocks may not have been enough of a diversion. It wasn’t a great distance to land, for a strong swimmer, but the lad may never have seen open water before. And even if he gets so far, comes ashore at Pen’s familiar cove to the north-northwest, he may not have found the other gifts for him, the knife or the coins, and without those, have no way to evade the agents of the Crown.

“But we tried,” Trevelyan says.

Pen nods, slowly, and then elbows Trevelyan; she’s spotted the cloud of green sparkles, still visible against the pinks and purples of dawn. They’re both laughing a little, and they sit in companionable silence until the sun has risen entire over the water.

“Well,” Trevelyan says, standing up. “Daylight’s burning.”

“It is at that,” Pen agrees. “I suppose you’ve got your duties to attend to.”

“As have you,” Trevelyan says. She tips her hat to Pen and sets off with spurs jangling, as relentlessly determined as those she serves. Penhallow watches until she’s quite out of sight, and then goes up to see Goody Nanskevel.

Four months later, it’s a small operation, five cases of rum and another three of jenever, so it’s just Merryn, Penhallow and Ram Das stowing the crates. It would have been Jackie, too, had his mother not had another attack of the vapours and refused to allow him out of the house. But Ram Das is both willing and efficient, and Pen is thinking about letting him handle the next small job by himself.

“But take the right-hand path, never the left,” Pen cautions, when proposing this idea to him, and Ram Das promises he won’t, not for the sake of a crate of jenever or to impress a girl. They amble back on foot, Pen and Merryn and the boy beaming like all his feast days have come at once, and they run into the Revenue just on the edge of the town.

“Keeping late hours,” Trevelyan observes, halting in the lamplight.

“A moonlight stroll,” Pen says, hands in her pockets. They’re empty, as are Ram Das’s. She patted him down before they left the cove.

“Yes, of course.” Trevelyan clicks her tongue and makes to ride on, but Pen holds up her hand.

“How’s your mum, Trevelyan?” she asks.

“She does well, thank you for asking,” Trevelyan says. “She thinks that she would like to see London again. Perhaps at Christmas, when the fairy lights are out.”

“That’s a long way to go alone,” Pen says.

“I may accompany her.” Trevelyan pauses. “I might… take the opportunity.”

Pen smiles. “Will you come back?”

“Yes.” Trevelyan clicks her tongue again. “Good evening to you, Pen. Merryn, Ram Das.”

She nods at them each in turn, picks up her reins and disappears into the night.

“Pen,” Merryn says. “You’re—”

“An idiot and a fool, I know,” Pen says. She puts her hands back in her pockets, and smiles.

(Because this is Kernow, where she was born; this is Penhallow, for which she was named; and this is a world in its passing, from which the great things are almost gone, but still and all, are not gone yet. Perhaps those who built the ballroom under the water will one day call for its return, and perhaps they will not. It makes no difference to Penhallow. She will be here.)

(And Trevelyan will come back.)

About Iona Datt Sharma

Iona is a writer, lawyer, linguaphile, and the product of more than one country. She’s currently working on her first novel, a historical fantasy about spies. Her other short fiction is at www.generalist.org.uk/iona/fiction/ and she tweets as @singlecrow.