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SHIPS AND SERPENTS

I T WAS A CRUDE TATTOO, done hastily and only in green ink. But for all that, it was her image marked on the boy’s face. She stared at him aghast. ‘This falls upon me,’ she had said. ‘But for me, none of this would have befallen you.’

‘That is true,’ he agreed with her wearily. ‘But that does not mean it is your fault.’

He turned away from her to sit down heavily on the deck.

Did he even guess how his words wounded her?

She tried to share his feelings, but the boy who had vibrated with pain the night before was now a great stillness.

He put his head back and drew a great breath of the clean wind sweeping her decks. He sighed it out.

The man at the wheel tried to force her back out into the main channel. With almost idle malice, she leaned against it, weltering as he forced her over. That for Kyle Haven, who thought he could bend her to his will.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ Wintrow confessed quietly.

‘When I think of you, I feel shamed, as if I betrayed you by running away. Yet when I think of myself, I am disappointed, for I nearly managed to regain my life. I don’t wish to abandon you, but I don’t wish to be trapped here either.

’ He shook his head, then leaned back against the railing.

He was ragged and dirty, and Torg had not taken the chains from his wrists and ankles when he left him there.

Wintrow now spoke over his shoulder as he looked up at her sails.

‘Sometimes I feel I am two people, reaching after two different lives. Or rather, joined to you, I am a different person from who I am when we are apart. When we are together, I lose… something. I don’t know what to call it. My ability to be only myself.’

A prickling of dread ran over Vivacia. His words were too close to what she had planned to say to him.

She had left Jamaillia City the morning before this, but only now had Torg brought Wintrow to her.

For the first time she had seen what they had done to him.

Most jolting was her crude image in coloured ink on the boy’s cheek.

Nothing marked him as a sailor now, let alone the captain’s son.

He looked like any slave. Yet despite all that had befallen him, he was outwardly calm.

Answering her thought, he observed, ‘I don’t have anything left for feelings any more. Through you, I am all the slaves at once. When I allow myself to feel that, I think I shall go mad. So I hold back from it and try to feel nothing at all.’

‘These emotions are too strong,’ Vivacia agreed in a low voice.

‘Their suffering is too great. It overwhelms me, until I cannot separate myself.’ She paused, then went on haltingly, ‘It was worse when they were aboard and you were not. Just your being gone made me feel as if I were adrift. I think you are the anchor that keeps me who I am. I think that is why a liveship needs one of her own family aboard her.’

Wintrow made no reply, but she hoped from his stillness he was listening. ‘I take from you,’ she admitted. ‘I take and I give you nothing.’

He stirred slightly. His voice was oddly flat as he observed, ‘You’ve given me strength, and more than once.’

‘But only that I might keep you by me,’ she said carefully. ‘I strengthen you so I may keep you. So I can remain certain of who I am.’ She gathered her courage. ‘Wintrow. What was I, before I was a liveship?’

He shifted his fetters and rubbed his chafed ankles distractedly. He did not seem to understand the importance of her question. ‘A tree, I suppose. Actually, a number of trees, if wizardwood grows as other wood does. Why do you ask?’

‘While you were gone, I could almost recall… something else. Like wind in my face, only stronger. Moving so swiftly, of my own free will. I could almost recall being… someone… who was not a Vestrit at all. Someone separate from all I have known in this life. It was very frightening. But.’ She halted, teetering on a thought she didn’t want to acknowledge.

After a long silence, she admitted, ‘I think I liked it. Then. Now… I think I had what men would call nightmares… if liveships could sleep. But I don’t sleep, and so I could not wake from them completely.

The serpents in the harbour, Wintrow.’ Now she spoke hurriedly in a low voice, trying to make him understand all of it at once.

‘No one else saw them in the harbour. All now admit of that white one that follows me. But there were others, many of them, in the bottom mud of the harbour. I tried to tell Gantry they were there, but he told me to ignore them. But I could not, because somehow they made the dreams that… Wintrow?’

He was dozing off in the warm sun on his skin. No one could blame him after the hardships he’d endured.

It still hurt her. She needed to talk to someone about these things, or she thought she would go mad.

But no one was willing to truly listen to her.

Even with Wintrow back on board, she still felt isolated.

She suspected he was somehow holding himself back from her.

Again, she could neither blame him, nor stop the hurt she felt at that.

She felt an unfocused anger as well. The Vestrit family had made her what she was, created these needs in her.

Yet since she had quickened, she had not had even a single day of ungrudging companionship.

Kyle expected her to sail lively and well with a belly full of misery and no companion. It wasn’t fair.

The thud of hasty footsteps on her deck broke her thoughts.

‘Wintrow,’ she pitched urgency into her voice as she warned him, ‘Your father is heading this way.’

‘You’re wide of the channel. Can’t you hold a course?’ Kyle barked at Comfrey.

Comfrey looked up at him, a hooded glance. ‘No, sir,’ he said evenly, as if he were not being insubordinate. ‘I can’t seem to. Every time I correct, the ship goes wide.’

‘Don’t blame this on the ship. I’m getting sick of every crew member on board this vessel blaming their incompetence on the ship.’

‘No, sir,’ Comfrey agreed. He stared straight ahead, and once more turned the wheel in an attempt to correct.

The Vivacia answered as sluggishly as if she were towing a sea-anchor.

As if in response to that thought, he saw a serpent thrash to the surface in her wake.

The ugly thing seemed to be looking right at him.

Kyle felt the slow burn of his anger begin to glow.

It was too much. It was just too damn much.

He was not a weak man; he could face whatever fate threw his way and stand up to it.

Unfavourable weather, tricky cargoes, even simple bad luck could not break his calm.

But this was different. This was the direct opposition of those he strove to benefit.

And he didn’t know how much more of it he could take.

Sa knew he had tried with the boy. What more could his son have asked of him? He’d offered him the whole damned ship, if he’d but be a man and step up and take her. But no. The boy had to run off and get himself tattooed as a slave in Jamaillia.

So he’d given up on the boy. He’d brought him back to the ship and put him completely at the ship’s disposal.

Wasn’t that what she’d insisted she’d needed?

He’d had the boy taken to the foredeck this morning, as soon as they were well out of the harbour.

The ship should have been content. But no.

She wallowed through the water, listing first to one side and then to another, constantly drifting out of the best channel.

She shamed him with her sloppy gait, just as his own son had shamed him.

It all should have been so simple. Go to Jamaillia, pick up a load of slaves, take them up to Chalced, sell them at a profit.

Bring prosperity to his family and pride to his name.

He ran the crew well and maintained the ship.

By all rights, she should sail splendidly.

And Wintrow should have been a strong son to follow after him, a son proud to dream of taking the helm of his own liveship some day.

Instead, at fourteen, Wintrow already had two slave tattoos on his face.

And the larger one was the result of Kyle’s own angry and impulsive reaction to a facetious suggestion from Torg.

He wished to Sa that Gantry had been with him instead of Torg that day.

Gantry would have talked him out of it. In contrast, Torg had acted immediately, much to Kyle’s unspoken regret. If he had it to do again—

A movement off the starboard side caught his eye.

It was the damned serpent again, slithering through the water, and watching him.

It was a white serpent, uglier than a toad’s belly, that trailed in their wake.

It didn’t seem much of a threat; the few glimpses of it he’d had, the thing had seemed old and fat.

But the crew didn’t like it, and the ship didn’t like it.

Looking down on it now, he realized just how much he didn’t like it.

It stared up at him, meeting his gaze as if it were not an animal at all.

It looked like a man trying to read his mind.

He left the wheel to be away from it, striding toward the bow in agitation. His troubled chain of thought followed him.

The damned ship stank, much worse than Torg had said it would.

Stank worse than an outhouse, more like a charnel house.

They’d already had to put three deaders over the side, one of which had seemed to die by her own hand.

They’d found her sprawled wide in her chains.

She’d torn strips from the hem of her garment and stuffed them into her mouth until she choked on them.

How could anyone do such a stupid thing to herself?

It had rattled several of the men, though none of them had spoken to him directly about it.