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The question jolted her. She stood silent a moment, running over the past few days in her mind.

‘He treats them well,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve never seen him turn his temper on them.

He does not mingle them with the rest of the crew as much as he might.

Some seem to have great potential. Harg and Kitl deny it, but I believe they’ve worked a deck before this.

Some of the others have the scars and manners of men who are familiar with weapons.

Our two best archers have tattooed faces.

Yet every one of them swears he is the son of a tradesman or merchant, an innocent inhabitant of the Pirate Isles captured by slave raiders.

They are valuable additions to our crew, but they keep to themselves.

I think, in the long run, we must get the other sailors to accept them as ordinary shipmates in order to… ’

‘And you perceive that he not only allows them to keep to themselves, but seems to encourage it by how he metes out the work?’

She wondered what Brashen was getting at.

‘It could be so.’ She took a breath. ‘Lavoy seems to use Harg and Kitl almost as a captain would use a first and second mate to run his watch. Sometimes it seems that the former slaves are an independent second crew on the ship.’ Uncomfortably, she observed, ‘The lack of acceptance seems to go both ways. It is not just that our dock-scrapings don’t accept the former slaves.

The tattooed ones are just as inclined to keep to themselves. ’

Brashen leaned back in his chair. ‘They were slaves in Bingtown. Most came to that fate because they were originally captured in Pirate Isles towns. They were willing to risk all and steal away from Bingtown aboard the Paragon because we represented a chance to return home. I was willing to trade that to them, in exchange for their labour aboard the ship when we were preparing for departure. Now I am not so sure that was a wise bargain. A man captured in the Pirate Isles to be sold as a slave is more like to be a pirate than not. Or at least to have a good sympathy for the pirates.’

‘Perhaps,’ she conceded unwillingly. ‘Yet they must feel some loyalty to us for helping them escape a life of slavery.’

The captain shrugged. ‘Perhaps. It is difficult to tell. I suspect the loyalty they feel just now is to Lavoy rather than to you and me. Or to Paragon.’ He shifted in his chair.

‘This is Lavoy’s suggestion. He says that as we enter the waters of the Pirate Isles, we stand a better chance of getting in close if we pretend to be pirates ourselves.

He says his tattooed sailors could lend us credibility, and teach us pirate ways.

He hints that some may even have a good knowledge of the islands. So. We could go on as a pirate vessel.’

‘What?’ Althea was incredulous. ‘How?’

‘Devise a flag. Take a ship or two, for the practice of battle, as Lavoy puts it. Then we put into one of the smaller pirate towns, with some loot and trophies and generous hands, and put out the word that we’d like to follow Kennit.

For some time, this Kennit has been touting himself as King of the Pirates.

The last I heard, he was gathering a following for himself.

If we pretended we wanted to be a part of that following, we might be able to get close to him and determine Vivacia’s situation before we acted. ’

Althea pushed her outrage aside and forced herself to consider the idea.

The greatest benefit it offered was that, if they could get close to Kennit, they could find out how many of Vivacia’s crewmen still lived.

If any. ‘But we could as easily be drawn into a stronghold, where even if we overcame Kennit and his crew, there would be no possibility of escape. There are two other immense barriers to such an idea. The first is that Paragon is a liveship. How does Lavoy think we could hide that? The other is that we would have to kill, simply for battle practice. We’d have to attack some little merchant vessel, kill the crew, steal their cargo… how can he even think of such a thing?’

‘We could attack a slaver.’

That jolted her into silence. She studied his face.

He was serious. He met her astonished silence with a weary look.

‘We have no other strategy. I keep trying to devise ways for us to locate Vivacia surreptitiously, then follow her and attack when Kennit least expects it. I come up with nothing. And I suspect that if Kennit does hold any of the original crew hostage, he would execute them rather than let us rescue them.’

‘I thought we intended to negotiate first. To offer ransom for survivors and the ship.’

Even to herself, the words sounded childish and na?ve.

The cash that her family had managed to raise prior to Paragon’s departure would not be enough to ransom an ordinary ship, let alone a liveship.

Althea had pushed that problem to the back of her mind, telling herself they would negotiate with Kennit and promise him a second, larger payment once Vivacia was returned intact to Bingtown.

Ransom was what most pirates wanted; it was the underlying reason for piracy.

Except that Kennit was not like most pirates.

All had heard the tales of him. He captured slavers, killed the crews, and freed the cargo.

The captured ships became pirate vessels, often crewed by the very men who had been cargo aboard them.

Those ships in turn preyed on slavers. In truth, if the Vivacia had not been involved, Althea would have cheered Kennit’s efforts to rid the Cursed Shores of slavery.

She would have been pleased to see Chalced’s slave trade choked off in the Pirate Isles.

But her sister’s husband had turned their family liveship into a slaver, and Kennit had seized her.

Althea wanted Vivacia back so intensely that it was like a constant pain in her heart.

‘You see,’ Brashen confirmed quietly. He had been watching her face.

She lowered her eyes from his gaze, suddenly embarrassed that he could read her thoughts so easily.

‘Sooner or later, it must come down to blood. We could take down a small slaver. We don’t have to kill the crew.

If they surrendered, we could put them adrift in the ship’s boats.

Then we could take the ship into a pirate town and free her cargo, just as Kennit does.

It might win us the confidence of the folk in the Pirate Isles.

It might buy us the knowledge we need to go after the Vivacia.

’ He sounded suddenly uncertain. The dark eyes that regarded her were almost tormented.

She was puzzled. ‘Are you asking my permission?’

He frowned. It was a moment before he spoke.

‘It’s awkward,’ he admitted softly. ‘I am the captain of the Paragon. But Vivacia is your family ship. Your family financed this expedition. I feel that, in some decisions, you have the right to be heard as more than the second mate.’ He sat back in his chair and gnawed at his knuckle for a moment.

Then he looked up at her again. ‘So, Althea. What do you think?’

The way he spoke her first name suddenly changed the whole tenor of the conversation.

He gestured to a chair and she sat down in it slowly.

He himself rose and crossed the room. When he returned to the table, he carried a bottle of rum and two glasses.

He poured a short jot into each glass. He looked across at her and smiled as he took his chair.

He set a glass before her. As she watched his clean hands, she tried to keep her mind on the conversation.

What did she think? She answered slowly.

‘I don’t know what I think. I suppose I’ve been trusting it all to you. You are the captain, you know, not me.’ She tried to make the remark lightly, but it came out almost an accusation. She took a sip of her rum.

He crossed his arms on his chest and leaned back slightly in his chair. ‘Oh, how very well I know that,’ he murmured. He lifted his glass.

She turned the conversation. ‘And there’s Paragon to consider. We know his aversion to pirates. How would he feel about it?’

Brashen made a low noise in his throat and abruptly set down his rum. ‘That’s the strangest twist of all. Lavoy claims the ship would welcome it.’

Althea was incredulous. ‘How could he know that? Has he already spoken to Paragon about this?’ Anger flared in her. ‘How dare he? The last thing we need is him planting such ideas in Paragon’s head.’

He leaned across the table towards her. ‘His claim was that Paragon spoke to him about it. He says he was having a pipe up on the bow one evening, and that the figurehead spoke to him, asking him if he’d ever considered turning pirate.

From there, the idea came up that to be a pirate vessel would be the safest way to get into a pirate harbour.

And Paragon bragged that he knew many secret ways of the Pirate Isles. Or so Lavoy says.’

‘Have you asked Paragon about it?’

Brashen shook his head. ‘I was afraid to bring it up with him; he might think that meant I approved it. Then he would fix all his energy on it. Or that I didn’t approve of it, in which case he might decide to insist on it just to prove he could.

You know how he can be. I didn’t want to present the idea unless we were all behind it.

Any mention of it from me, and he might set his mind on piracy as the only correct course of action. ’

‘I wonder if that damage isn’t already done,’ Althea speculated. The rum was making a small warm spot in her belly. ‘Paragon has been very strange of late.’

‘And when has that not been true of him?’ Brashen asked wryly.

‘This is different. He is strange in an ominous way. He speaks of us encountering Kennit as our destiny. And says nothing must keep us from that end.’

‘And you don’t agree with that?’ Brashen probed.