Page 367

Brashen gave her a cold captain’s look. ‘Not wise perhaps, but necessary.’ He sighed as he leaned back in his chair.

He poured himself another jot of brandy.

Instructively, he addressed Amber. ‘He’s the mate.

I can’t allow him to think he is my voice, nor that no opinion save his and mine count.

I asked you here for your opinion. For him to disparage that is not acceptable.

’ He allowed himself a small, tight smile.

‘But keep in mind that for me to do that would be entirely within my authority.’

Amber frowned, but Althea instantly grasped his position.

She suddenly looked at him with new eyes.

He had it. Whatever that indefinable quality was that made a man capable of captaining a ship, Brashen had it.

There were new lines in his brow and at the corners of his eyes.

But he had also drawn that cold hard line that separated the commander from his crew.

She wondered if he were lonely. Then she knew it did not matter.

He was what he had to be. He could not be any other way and still command effectively.

She felt a pang of loss that the line must separate him from her as well.

But the surge of pride she felt in him overwhelmed any selfish regrets.

This was what her father had seen in him.

Brashen had justified all of Ephron Vestrit’s belief.

For an instant, he looked at her without speaking, as if he could sense her thoughts.

Then he gestured at the scraps of canvas on the table.

‘Althea. You’ve always had a better hand with a pen than I did.

These are rough sketches. I’d like you to make clean copies of them.

They’re all I could chart of the pirate ports I visited with the Springeve.

We’ll look for Vivacia first in Divvytown, but I doubt we’ll be lucky enough to catch her there.

These bits of charts may come in handy. If you have any questions, I’ll go over them with you.

When they’re finished, we need to bring Lavoy in on them as well.

He doesn’t read, but his memory is sharp.

It’s important this knowledge is shared amongst us. ’

The words he left unspoken chilled her. He was obviously considering what would be best for the ship and crew in case of his death.

She had avoided thinking of such things.

He had not. That, too, was part of command.

He pushed the scraps of canvas towards her and she began to leaf through them.

His next words to Amber brought her attention back to him.

‘Amber. Last night, you were over the side. Paragon was holding you. I heard your voices.’

‘I was,’ Amber agreed evenly.

‘Doing what?’

The carpenter looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘Experimenting.’

Brashen sighed out through his nose. ‘I won’t tolerate that from Lavoy. What makes you think you can adopt that attitude?’ More gently, he added, ‘If it happens on the ship, and I think it’s my business, I’ll know about it. So tell me.’

Amber looked down at her gloved hands. ‘We all discussed it before we left Bingtown. Paragon knows of the work I did on Ophelia. He supposes that if I could restore her hands, I could give him eyes again.’ Amber licked her lips. ‘I have my doubts.’

Brashen’s tone was dangerous. ‘As I do. As you were well aware. I told you before we sailed, this is no time for risky experiments in wizardwood carving. A failure that disappointed him could endanger us all.’

Anger flickered over Amber’s face.

‘I know what you are thinking,’ Brashen told her. ‘But it isn’t something that is between the two of you. It involves all of us.’

She took a breath. ‘I haven’t touched his eyes, sir. Nor told him that I would.’

‘Then what were you doing?’

‘Erasing the scar from his chest. The seven-pointed star.’

Brashen looked intrigued. ‘Has he told you what the star means?’

Amber shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I only know that whatever memories it holds for him are extremely unpleasant.

It was a sort of a compromise. That encounter with the serpent disturbed him.

Deeply. He has thought of little else since then.

I sense that he is reconsidering all he is.

He’s like a boy in adolescence. He has decided that nothing is the way he believed it to be, and is reconstructing his whole vision of the world.

’ She took a deep breath as if to say something important.

She seemed to reconsider it, and said instead, ‘It’s a very intense time for him.

It is not necessarily bad, what he’s doing, but it’s deeply introspective.

For Paragon, that means sifting through some very bad memories. I sought to distract him.’

‘You should have asked me first. And you should not be over the side without someone watching you.’

‘Paragon was with me,’ she pointed out. ‘He held me while I did the work.’

‘Nevertheless.’ Brashen made the single word a sharp warning. ‘When you are over the side, I want to be aware of it.’ More gently, he asked, ‘How is the work progressing?’

Amber kept her temper. ‘Slowly. The wood is very hard. I don’t want to just plane it off and leave a different sort of scar. I’m more obscuring than erasing it.’

‘I see.’ Brashen stood and paced a turn around the chamber. ‘Do you think it’s possible you could restore his eyes?’

Amber shook her head regretfully. ‘I’d have to rework his whole face.

The wood is simply gone. Even if I just carved eyes there, there is no guarantee he could see out of them.

I have no idea how the magic of wizardwood works.

Nor does he. I’d be taking a great risk, and possibly damaging him more. ’

‘I see.’ Brashen considered a moment longer.

‘Carry on with it, but I want you to take the same precautions I’d expect of any other hand.

This includes having a partner of some kind when you are over the side.

In addition to Paragon.’ He was silent briefly, then nodded. ‘That’s all, then. You can go.’

Althea suspected it was not easy for Amber to accede to Brashen’s authority. She rose to his command, not resentfully, as Lavoy had, but stiffly, as if it offended her sense of self. Althea rose to follow her out, but Brashen’s voice stopped her at the door. ‘A last word with you, Althea.’

She turned back to him. He glanced at the door standing ajar.

She shut it quietly. He took a deep breath.

‘A favour. I’ve put Amber in a bad position with Lavoy.

Watch over her no, that’s not what I mean.

She’s as dangerous to him as he is to her.

He just doesn’t know that yet. Watch the situation.

If it looks as if they will clash, warn me.

Lavoy is bound to have resentments, but I won’t permit him to take them too far. ’

She nodded, then spoke the words. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘One other thing.’ He hesitated. ‘You’re all right? Your hands, I mean?’

‘I think so.’ She flexed her fingers for him. She waited.

It took a time before he spoke. ‘I want you to know —’ His voice went quiet. ‘I wanted to kill Artu. I still do. You know that.’

She smiled crookedly. ‘So did I. I tried.’ She pondered an instant.

‘But it was better as it came out. I beat him. He knows it. The crew knows it. If you had jumped in, I’d still be trying to prove myself to them.

But it would be worse now.’ She suddenly knew what he had to hear from her.

‘You did the right thing, Captain Trell.’

His real smile broke through briefly. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ There was real satisfaction in his voice.

She crossed her arms and held them tightly against her chest to keep from going to him. ‘The crew respects your command. So do I.’

He sat a bit straighter. He didn’t thank her. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. She walked quietly from the room. She didn’t look back at him as she quietly closed the door between them.

As she closed the door, Brashen shut his eyes. He’d made the right decision. And they had made the right decision. They both knew it. They had agreed that it was better this way. Better. He wondered when it was going to get easier.

Then he wondered if it would ever get easier.

‘There’s two of us.’ Paragon divulged the secret to her as he held her in his hands. She weighed so little. She was like a doll stuffed with millet.

‘So there is,’ Amber agreed. ‘You and I.’ The rasp moved carefully over his chest. It reminded him of a cat’s tongue. No, he corrected himself. It would have reminded Kerr Ludluck of a cat’s tongue. That long-dead boy had liked cats and kittens. Paragon had never had one.

Paragon. Now there was a name for him. If only they knew. The secret he held slipped from him again. ‘Not you and I. Me and me. There’s two of us.’

‘Sometimes I feel that way myself,’ Amber replied easily. Sometimes, when she was working, he felt like she went somewhere else.

‘Who is your other me?’ he demanded.

‘Oh. Well. A friend I had. We used to talk a lot. Sometimes I hear myself still talking to him, and I know how he would answer.’

‘I’m not like that. There has always been two of me.’

She returned the rasp to the tool sling. He could feel her do it, and felt the shift of her weight as she searched for something else. ‘I’m going to use sandpaper now. Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

She went on as if she had not interrupted the conversation. ‘If there are two of you, I like both. Keep still now.’ The sandpaper worked back and forth against his chest. The friction made heat. He smiled at her words because they were true, even if she didn’t know it.

‘Amber? Have you always known who you were?’ he asked curiously.

The sandpaper stopped. In a guarded voice, she replied, ‘Not always. But I always suspected.’ She added in her normal voice, ‘That’s a very odd question to ask.’

‘You’re a very odd person,’ he teased, and grinned.

The sandpaper moved against him slowly. ‘You are one spooky ship,’ she said quietly.

‘I haven’t always known who I was,’ he admitted. ‘But now I do, and that makes it all easier.’

She set aside the sandpaper. He heard the clink of tools as she rummaged for something else.

‘I have no idea what you mean by that, but I’m happy for you.

’ She was distracted again. ‘This is an oil pressed from seeds. On ordinary wood, it swells the fibres and can erase a scratch. I have no idea what it will do on wizardwood. Shall we try a little and see?’

‘Why not?’

‘A moment.’ Amber leaned back in his arms. Her feet were braced against his belly. She wore a safety line, but he knew she trusted more to him. ‘Althea?’ Amber called up to the deck. ‘Have you ever used oil on wizardwood? For maintenance?’

He felt Althea stand. She had been lying flat on her belly, drawing something. She came to the railing and leaned over. ‘Of course. But not on painted surfaces like the figurehead.’

‘But he’s not really painted. The colour is just…there. All through the wood.’

‘Then why is the chopped part of his face grey?’

‘I don’t know. Paragon, do you know why?’

‘Because it is.’ It was odd. When he tried to tell them something about himself, they didn’t listen. Then they pried into things that were not their business. He tried again. ‘Althea. There are two of me.’

‘Go ahead and use the oil. It can’t hurt. It will either sink in and swell the wood, or it will stay on top and we can wipe it off.’

‘What if it stains?’

‘It shouldn’t. Try a little bit and see.’

‘I’m not just what the Ludlucks made of me!’ he burst out suddenly. ‘There is a me I was before, just as much a part of me. I don’t have to be whom they made me. I can be who I was. Before.’

A shocked silence greeted his words. Amber was still in his hands.

It shocked him when she reached out and set her gloved hands on either side of his face.

‘Paragon,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don’t have to be whom the Ludlucks made you.

You don’t even have to be who you were before that.

You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising.

’ Her hands travelled over the high bones of his cheeks.

When her hands came to where his beard began, she tugged it playfully, on either side.

It could not have been a stronger reminder of the human elements in his make up. Yet it was as she had just said.

‘I don’t have to be what you want me to be, either,’ he reminded them both.

His hands closed around Amber. Such a trifling toy she was, a creature made mostly of water enclosed in a bag of thin skin.

If humans ever grasped completely how fragile they were, they would not be so cocky.

With one hand, he casually snapped her safety line.

‘I want to be alone now,’ he told her. ‘I have something I want to think about.’ He lifted her over his head and he felt her stiffen in his hands.

Her sudden realization that he could dash her down into the water brought a smile to his lips.

She knew now what he had finally discovered.

‘I have choices to consider,’ he told her.

He swung her over his head and held her steady until she grasped the railing.

When he knew she was secure, he let go of her.

Althea was there, grabbing hold of her and pulling her onto the deck.

He heard Althea’s low question, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Amber said softly. ‘Just fine. And I think Paragon is going to be just fine too.’