Page 144

GIFTS

‘T HE WINTER MOONLIGHT IS CRISP. It makes the shadows very sharp and black. The shore rocks are sitting in pools of ink, and your hull rests in absolute blackness. Then, because of my fire, there’s an overlay of another kind of shadow.

Ones that jump and shift. So, when I look at you, parts of you are stark and sharp in the moonlight, and other parts are made soft and mellow by the firelight. ’

Amber’s voice was almost hypnotic. The warmth of her driftwood fire, kindled with great difficulty earlier in the evening, touched him distantly.

Warm and cold were things he had learned from men, the one pleasant, the other unpleasant.

But even the concept that warm was better than cold was a learned thing.

To wood, it was all the same. Yet on a night like tonight, warm seemed very pleasant indeed.

She was seated, cross-legged she had told him, on a folded blanket on the damp sand.

She leaned back against his hull. The texture of her loose hair was finer than the softest seaweed.

It clung to the grain of his wizardwood hull.

When she moved, it dragged across his planks in strands before it pulled free.

‘You almost make me remember what it was like to see. Not just colours and shapes, but the times when sight was a pleasure to indulge in.’

She didn’t reply but lifted her hand and put the palm flat against his planking. It was a gesture she used, and in some ways it reminded him of making eye-contact. A significant glance exchanged without eyes. He smiled.

‘I brought you something,’ she said into the comfortable silence.

‘You brought me something?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Really?’ He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever brought me anything before.’

She sat up straight. ‘What, never? No one’s ever given you a present?’

He shrugged. ‘Where would I keep a possession?’

‘Well… I did think of that. This is something you could wear. Like this. Here, give me your hand. Now, I’m very proud of this, so I want to show it to you a piece at a time.

It took me a while to do this, I had to oversize them, to get them to scale, you know.

Here’s the first one. Can you tell what it is? ’

Her hands were so tiny against his as she opened the fingers of his hand.

She set something in his palm. A piece of wood.

There was a hole in it, and a heavy braided cord ran through it.

The wood had been sanded and smoothed and shaped.

He turned it carefully in his fingers. It curved, but here there was a projection and at the end of it, a fanning out.

‘It’s a dolphin,’ he said. His fingers followed the curve of the spine again, the flare of the flukes. ‘This is amazing,’ he laughed aloud.

He heard the delight in her voice. ‘There’s more. Move along the cord to the next one.’

‘There’s more than one?’

‘Of course. It’s a necklace. Can you tell what the next one is?’

‘I want to put it on,’ he announced. His hands trembled.

A necklace, a gift to wear, for him. He didn’t wait for her to reply, but took it by the cord and shook it open.

He set it carefully over his head. It tangled for a moment against the chopped mess of his eyes, but he plucked it clear and set it against his chest. His fingers ran rapidly over the beads.

Five of them. Five! He felt them again more slowly.

‘Dolphin. Gull. Seastar. This is… oh, a crab. And a fish. A halibut. I can feel its scales, and the track where its eye moved. The crab’s eyes are out on the end of their stalks.

And the starfish is rough, and there are the lines of suckers underneath.

Oh, Amber, this is wonderful. Is it beautiful? Does it look lovely on me?’

‘Why, you are vain! Paragon, I never would have guessed.’ He had never heard her so pleased.

‘Yes, it looks beautiful on you. As if it belongs. And I had worried about that. You are so obviously the work of a master carver that I feared my own creations might look childish against your fineness. But, well, to praise my own work is scarcely fitting, but I shall. They’re made from different woods.

Can you tell that? The starfish is oak, and the crab I found in a huge pine knot.

The dolphin was in the curve of a willow knee.

Just touch him and follow the grain with your fingers.

They are all different grains and colours of wood; I don’t like to paint wood, it has its own colours you know.

And I think they look best on you so, the natural wood against your weathered skin. ’

Her voice was quick and eager as she shared these details with him. Intimate as if no one in the world could understand such things better. There was no sweeter flattery than the quick brush of her hand against his chest. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she begged.

‘Of course.’ His fingers travelled slowly from one bead to the next, finding new details of texture and shape.

‘From what I’ve heard, the figurehead of a liveship is painted. But when the ship quickens, the figurehead takes on colour of its own. As you have. But… how? Why? And why only the figurehead, why not all the ship’s parts that are made of wizardwood?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said uneasily. Sometimes she asked him these sorts of questions.

He did not like them. They reminded him too sharply of how different they were.

And she always seemed to ask them just when he was feeling closest to her.

‘Why are you the colours you are? How did you grow your skin, your eyes?’

‘Ah. I see.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I thought perhaps it was something you willed. You seem such a marvel to me. You speak, you think, you move… can you move all of yourself? Not just your carved parts, like your hands and lips, but your planking and beams as well?’

Sometimes. A flexible ship could withstand the pounding of wind and waves better than one fastened too tightly together.

Planks could shift a tiny bit, could give with the stresses of the water.

And sometimes they could shift a bit more than that, could twist apart from each other to admit a sheet of silent water that spread and deepened as cold and black as night itself.

But that would be cold-hearted treachery.

Unforgivable, unredeemable. He jerked away from the burning memory and did not speak the word aloud.

‘Why do you ask?’ he demanded, suddenly suspicious.

What did she want from him? Why did she bring him gifts?

No one could really like him, he knew that.

He’d always known that. Perhaps this was all just a trick, perhaps she was in league with Restart and Mingsley.

She was here to spy out all his secrets, to find out everything about wizardwood and then she would go back and tell them.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Amber said quietly.

‘No? Then what did you mean to do?’ he sneered.

‘Understand you.’ She did not respond in kind to his tone.

There was no anger in her voice, only gentleness.

‘In my own way, I am as different from the folk of Bingtown as I am from you. I’m a stranger here, and no matter how long I live here or how honestly I run my business, I will always be a newcomer.

Bingtown does not make new folk welcome.

I get lonely.’ Her voice was soothing. ‘And so I reach out to you. Because I think you are as lonely as I am.’

Lonely. Pitiful. She thought he was pitiful. And stupid. Stupid enough to believe that she liked him when she was really just trying to discover all his secrets. ‘And because you would like to know the secrets of wizardwood,’ he tested her.

His gentle tone took her in. She gave a quiet laugh.

‘I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t curious.

Whence comes the wood that can turn to life?

What sort of a tree produces it, and where do such trees grow?

Are they rare? No, they must be rare. Families go into debt for generations to possess one. Why?’

Her words echoed Mingsley’s too closely.

Paragon laughed aloud, a harsh booming that woke the cliff birds and sent them aloft, crying in the darkness.

‘As if you didn’t know!’ he scoffed. ‘Why does Mingsley send you here? Does he think you will win me over? That I will sail willingly for you? I know his plans. He thinks if he has me, he can sail fearlessly up the Rain Wild River, can steal trade there that belongs rightfully only to the Bingtown Traders and the Rain Wild Traders.’ Paragon lowered his voice thoughtfully.

‘He thinks because I am mad, I will betray my family. He thinks that because they hate me and curse me and abandon me that I will turn on them.’ He tore the bead necklace from his throat and flung it down to the sand.

‘But I am true! I was always true and always faithful, no matter what anyone else said or believed. I was true and I am still true.’ He lifted his voice in hoarse proclamation.

‘Hear me, Ludlucks! I am true to you! I sail only for my family! Only for you.’ He felt his whole hull reverberate with his shout.