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‘Oh, yes. Amber lives inside me now.’ A hesitation.

‘Oh. You were probably coming to me for a place to sleep, weren’t you?

Well, there is plenty of room, you know.

It’s only the captain’s quarters that she has taken over, and stored a few things in my hold.

Amber? You don’t mind, do you? Brashen always comes to sleep here when he has no other place to stay, and no more money. ’

The pause was just a trifle longer than was polite. Brashen heard a touch of uneasiness in Amber’s voice as she replied, ‘You belong to yourself, Paragon. It’s not up to me who you welcome aboard.’

‘I do, do I? Well, if I belong to myself, why are you so intent on buying me?’ Now he teased her, hooting like a boy at his own joke.

Brashen found nothing humorous about it.

What business had she with the liveship?

‘No one can buy a liveship, Paragon,’ he corrected him gently.

‘A liveship is a part of a Trader’s family.

You could not sail without a family member aboard you.

’ In a quieter voice, he added, ‘It isn’t even good for you to be out here by yourself so much. ’

‘I’m not by myself, not anymore,’ the figurehead protested.

‘Amber comes out almost every night to sleep aboard me. And every ten-day, she takes a holiday and spends the whole afternoon with me. If she buys me, she won’t sail me.

She’s going to just have me levelled up, and she’s going to create some cliff-gardens over there, and… ’

‘Paragon!’ Brashen rebuked him almost sternly. ‘You belong to the Ludlucks. They can’t sell you and Amber can’t buy you. Nor are you some great flowerpot to be decorated with vines. Only a cruel person would tell you such things.’ He glared at the slender figure sitting silently in the shadows.

Amber flowed to her feet. She advanced on him, shoulders squared, as if she were a man about to challenge him to a fight.

Her voice was tight but even as she said, ‘If what you claim is true, then the cruelty originates with the Ludlucks. They have left him here to brood and rot, all these years. Now, when times are changing and it seems that all of Bingtown can be bought, they entertain offers from New Traders. They would not make Paragon into a “great flowerpot”. No. They’d chop him up in bits and sell him off as trinkets and curiosities. ’

Brashen was struck dumb with horror. Instinctively he reached out a hand to the ship’s silvery hull in a calming gesture. ‘That can’t happen,’ he assured him in a husky voice. ‘All of the Traders would rise up in arms before they’d let such a thing happen.’

Amber shook her head. ‘You’ve been gone a long time from Bingtown, Brashen Trell.

’ She turned and kicked at the sand. Sparks flew up from the fading coals of a campfire.

She stooped and a moment later, tiny flames blossomed.

Brashen watched in silence as she awakened the fire with twigs and then larger sticks of wood.

‘Sit down,’ she invited him in a weary voice.

In a conciliatory tone, she added, ‘This has begun badly. Actually, I have looked forward to your returning to Bingtown. I had hoped that you and Althea might work together to aid me in this. She has grudgingly agreed that my acquiring the Paragon might be the best thing for him. If you join your voice to hers, perhaps we could all go to the Ludlucks and make them see reason.’ She lifted her gaze to his disapproving stare. ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’

He sat, lowering himself stiffly to perch on a driftwood log. He tried to keep his voice conversational as he said, ‘It is hard for me to believe Althea would ever support the sale of a liveship.’

‘I but pointed out the facts to her and she concurred.’ In the firelight, she rolled her eyes toward the Paragon.

The small jerk of her head was a plain indication she didn’t want to discuss details in front of the ship.

Curiosity burned in Brashen, but he recognized the wisdom.

The Paragon was in a cheery mood tonight.

There was no sense in awakening the quarrelsome side of him.

For now, the best course was to humour them both and collect what information he could.

‘So. I know Paragon is so happy to see you and will want to know all of your adventures. How long have you been back in Bingtown?’ Amber went on in a natural voice.

‘We just anchored up today,’ he replied. A silence fell after his words. The oddness of the situation swept over him. Amber was conducting this as if she were a Bingtown matron hosting a tea.

‘And will you be staying long?’ she prodded him.

‘I don’t know. I came back to tell Althea I had seen Vivacia. Pirates have captured her. I don’t know if Kyle and Wintrow are alive. I don’t know if any of the crew is alive.’ The words spilled from him before he could consider the wisdom of sharing this information.

There was true concern in Amber’s voice as she asked, ‘Althea knows this? How did she react?’

‘She is devastated, of course. Tomorrow she goes to the Bingtown Council to seek their aid in recovering the ship. The damnable part of it is that this Kennit most likely doesn’t want a ransom.

He wants to keep the ship. If Wintrow and Kyle are still alive, he’ll probably have to keep them as well to keep the ship sane –’

‘Pirates.’ Paragon’s voice was almost dreamy save for the terror in it.

‘I know about pirates. They kill and kill and kill on your decks. The blood soaks in, deeper and deeper, until your wood is so full of lives you cannot even find your own. Then they chop off your face and open your seacocks and you go under. The worst part is, they leave you to live.’ His voice broke into boyish treble before it tremored into silence.

Brashen’s eyes met Amber’s. Hers glittered with unspoken horror.

She and Brashen rose as one, both reaching out toward the ship.

His voice stopped them. ‘Don’t touch me!

’ His voice was deep and hoarse, a man’s frantic command.

‘Be gone from me, you traitorous vermin! Feckless, dung-crawling rats! You have no souls! No creature with a soul could endure doing what you did to me!’ He turned his face from side to side blindly.

His huge hands, knotted into fists, swung back and forth before him defensively.

‘Take your memories away from me. I do not want your lives. You are drowning me! You are trying to make me forget who I am…who I was. I will not!’ This last he roared out in defiance.

Then his voice dropped low into a wild laugh, followed by a string of mocking obscenities.

‘He’s not talking to us,’ Amber assured Brashen in a low tone, but he was not so sure.

He made no move to touch the ship. Neither did she.

Instead, she took his arm, turned him away from the ship and walked him down the beach into the darkness.

The sounds of Paragon’s rabid curses and imprecations followed them.

When the light of the fire no longer touched their faces, she halted and turned to him.

She still spoke in a hushed voice. ‘His hearing is exceptionally keen.’ She glanced back at him.

‘He’s best left alone at times like this.

If you try to talk him back to rationality, he only gets worse.

’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘He has to come back on his own.’

‘I know.’

‘I know that you know. I think you understand that he can’t take much more of this.

Every moment of every day, he dreads them coming for him.

He cannot even sleep to escape it. Almost every day now, he retreats into his madness.

I try to let nothing trouble him, but he is not stupid.

He knows that his survival is threatened and that there is very little he can do to defend himself.

’ Even in the dark, he could feel the strength of her gaze. ‘You have to help us.’

‘There is nothing I can do. I don’t know what the ship or Althea Vestrit told you about me to make you think I have some kind of influence, but it’s not true.

The truth is the opposite. Anything I support, proper Bingtowners will righteously oppose.

I’m as much of an outcast as that ship. Your cause is more likely to succeed without me.

’ He shook his head at her. ‘Not that I think it can succeed at all.’

‘So. I should just give up now?’ she asked mildly.

‘Just let him spiral down into madness until the New Traders come to haul him away and chop him up? What will we say to one another afterwards, Brashen? That there was nothing we could do, that we never believed it would really happen. Will that make us innocent?’

‘Innocent?’ He was incensed at her suggestion he was somehow responsible for this mess. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, I intend nothing wrong. I am innocent!’

‘Half the evil in this world occurs while decent people stand by and do nothing wrong. It’s not enough to refrain from evil, Trell. People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed.’

‘Even when it’s stupid to try?’ he asked with savage sarcasm.

‘Especially then,’ she replied sweetly. ‘That’s how it’s done, Trell. You break your heart against this stony world. You fling yourself at it, on the side of good, and you do not ask the cost. That’s how you do it.’

‘Do what?’ he demanded, truly angry now. ‘Get myself killed? For the sake of being a hero?’

‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘Perhaps that. But it is definitely how you redeem yourself. How you become a hero.’ She cocked her head and eyed him appraisingly. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to be the hero.’