Passenger (Passenger, #1)(58)

Cyrus Ironwood had drained what last bit of patience she had, and exhaustion was making her head throb as she surveyed the cramped room. This, again? Maybe this was the old man’s real punishment for what her mom had done: keeping her trapped in confined quarters with a furious Sophia, forced to listen to all of her rantings without strangling her. The frustration that choked her was so real, she felt her hands curl over the back of a frail-looking chair, and seriously considered smashing it against the nearby wall.

“What are you even doing?” she asked, but Sophia only held up a hand and pressed her ear to the wall.

“I can’t hear them,” she said quietly. “So, hopefully they won’t hear us.”

She sat down on the bed in a flounce of skirts, seething. “The nerve of them, making me look like a fool—shutting me out, after I was the one who retrieved you. How dare they keep this from me!”

“From you?” Etta asked pointedly.

“Yes, from me,” she said, tearing the pins out of her hair. A trunk had been left in the room, filled to the brim with cloth, glass bottles, and a silver brush. Sophia yanked the latter through her loose hair, tearing at it fiercely.

The old man was as pleasant as an enraged cat; if Etta had been in Sophia’s shoes, she would have welcomed the opportunity to spend as little time with him as possible. The man had forced Sophia to serve him, had basically barred her from going to any year that might have gifted a woman with a few real rights. Etta had to wonder how much better Sophia’s life might be if she wasn’t under Grandfather Dearest’s unyielding thumb.

“Why did you even want to be in there?” Etta asked. “If it bothered you that much that he didn’t tell you why he wanted me, couldn’t you have argued to stay?”

Sophia scoffed. “No one fights with Grandfather. Just ask the other families. They’ll tell you firsthand what you get for ignoring his wishes.”

Etta considered the situation, moving slowly to sit beside her. The girl was fuming, blowing out one harsh breath after another, and Etta couldn’t tell her anger from her humiliation.

“Tell me exactly what they said,” Sophia demanded.

Etta did, mostly. She kept the coded letter from her mother pressed against her gown’s heavy skirts, out of the other girl’s sight.

“The astrolabe?” Sophia repeated with disbelief. “He’s still looking for it after everything that happened?”

“Do you know anything else about it?” Etta asked carefully.

Sophia let out a humorless little laugh. “Of course not. Why would they tell me anything about it? You’ll have to ask your friend, Mr. Carter. He and Julian were sent out to look for it four years ago.”

The mysterious “Julian” again.

“Cyrus’s grandson, right?” Etta pressed.

“He’s…” Sophia began. “He’s dead. He was the heir after his father got himself drowned and his uncle managed to shoot himself in a hunting accident.”

She ran a hand back through her thick, dark hair, her doll-like face bleak and empty. “He was my intended.”

Intended. As in…“You were engaged?”

Despite everything, Etta felt a flush of sympathy. She fumbled for a way to cool her emotions, regain some of the distance she felt toward the other girl.

“From the time we were children,” Sophia said. “It was a perfect match. Do you know how rare it is for travelers to be able to marry each other? It was only because I was born to a distant cousin. It was my—”

“Your what?” Etta prompted. The way Sophia said it, barely catching herself, made her wonder if maybe the other girl did want to talk about this—if there was no one else she could discuss it with.

“My father was no one in this family,” Sophia said, raking a hand through the ends of her hair. “A distant cousin of Grandfather’s who forced himself on some unsuspecting harlot and came back for seconds, only to find the woman dead and me all alone. He drank himself to death a few years later, and only Grandfather was willing to raise me. Said he couldn’t allow a true traveler to slip through the cracks. Most people only have one shadow, but I feel as though I have two. My past trails me every day, every second, and I can’t shake it off. Marrying Julian might have finally stopped the whispers from the other travelers. It might have finally earned me a measure of respect.”

Marrying up was the only way that any number of women in history had escaped their pasts and whatever stations they’d been born into. They couldn’t work to improve their lives the way men did, and live by their own means. It was grossly unfair to them—and it was especially unfair that Sophia, someone who should have had a future, access to opportunities, was trapped inside of this cage the family had thrown over her.

Etta finally released her last trace of anger and pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to process this. Sophia pushed herself up onto her feet and began to tug at the strings of her stays and gown.

After a moment, Etta stood to help her. “If you are related to the old man, and there are so few travelers left, why aren’t you Cyrus’s heir?”

Sophia rolled her eyes. “Because an infant born a few months ago, who’s so distantly related to Grandfather as to only share a drop of blood—somehow that child is more eligible, simply by virtue of having been born a boy. Little Marcus Ironwood is the heir. For now. I’ll have to wait until he’s old enough for everyone to discern whether he’s a traveler or a guardian. If it’s the latter—well, perhaps Grandfather will be desperate enough to reconsider the rule.”