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‘Because it is all as it should be,’ Vivacia rejoined. Her voice was a woman’s timbre. It had the same velvety darkness as the night, with the same tinge of smoke. Warm pleasure welled up in Wintrow at the sound of it, and pure gladness. It took him a moment to wonder at his reaction.

‘What are you?’ he asked her in quiet awe. ‘When I am away from you, I think I should fear you, or at least suspect you. Yet now I am aboard, and when I hear your voice, it is like… like I imagine being in love would be.’

‘Truly?’ Vivacia demanded, and did not hide the thrill of pleasure in her own voice.

‘Then your feelings are like to my own. I have been awakening for so long… for years, for all the life of your father and his father, ever since your great-grandmother gave herself into my keeping. Then today, when finally I could stir, could open my eyes to the world again, could taste and smell and hear you all with my own senses, then I knew trepidation. Who are you, I wonder, you creatures of flesh and blood and bone, born in your own bodies and doomed to perish when that flesh fails? And when I wonder those things, I fear, for you are so foreign to me, I cannot know what you will do to me. Yet when one of you is near, I feel you are woven of the same strand as I, that we are but extensions of a segmented life, and that together we complete one another. I feel a joy in your presence, because I feel my own life wax greater when we are close to one another.’

Wintrow leaned on the rail, as motionlessly silent as if he were listening to a blessed poet.

She was not looking at him; she did not need to look at him to see him.

Like him, she gazed out across the harbour to the festive lights of the night market.

Even our eyes behold the same sight, he thought, and his smile widened.

There had been a few occasions when words had so reached into him and settled their truth in him like roots in rich earth.

Some of the very best teachers in the monastery could wake this awe in him, when they spoke in simple words a truth that had swum unvoiced inside him.

When her words had faded into the warmth of the summer night, he replied.

‘So may a harp string, struck strongly, awaken its twin, or a pure high note of a voice set crystal to shimmering as you have wakened truth in me.’ He laughed aloud, surprising himself, for it felt as if a bird, long caged in his chest, had taken sudden flight.

‘What you say is so simple, only that we complement one another. I can think of no reason why your words should so move me. But they do. They do.’

‘Something is happening, here, tonight. I feel it.’

‘As do I. But I don’t know what it is.’

‘You mean you have no name for it,’ she corrected him. ‘We both cannot help but know what this is. We grow. We become.’

Wintrow found himself smiling into the night. ‘We become what?’ he asked of her.

She turned to face him, the chiselled planes of her wooden face catching the reflected gleam of the distant lights. She smiled up at him, lips parting to reveal her perfect teeth. ‘We become us,’ she said simply. ‘Us, as we were meant to be.’

Althea had never known that misery could achieve perfection.

Only now, as she sat staring at her emptied glass, did she grasp how completely wrong her world had become.

Things had been bad before, things had been flawed, but it was only today that she had made one stupid decision after another until everything was as completely wrong as it could possibly be.

She shook her head at her own idiocy. As she fingered the last coins from her flattened pouch, and then held up her glass to be refilled, she reviewed her decisions.

She had conceded when she should have fought, fought when she should have conceded.

But the worst, the absolute worst, had been leaving the ship.

When she had walked off Vivacia before her father’s body had even been consigned to the waves, she had been worse than stupid and wrong.

She had been traitorous. False to everything that had ever been important to her.

She shook her head at herself. How could she have done it?

She had not only stalked off leaving her father unburied, but leaving her ship to Kyle’s mercy.

He had no understanding of her, no real grasp of what a liveship was or what she required.

Despair gripped her heart and squeezed. After all the years of waiting, she had abandoned Vivacia on this most crucial day.

What was the matter with her? Where had her mind been, where had her heart been to have put her own feelings before that of the ship?

What would her father have said to that?

Had not he always told her, ‘The ship first, and all else will follow.’

The tavern keeper appeared suddenly, to take her coin, ogle it closely, and then refill her glass. He said something to her, his voice unctuous with false solicitude. She waved him away with the refilled glass and nearly spilled its contents. Hastily she drank it down lest she waste it.

She opened her eyes wide as if that would clear her head and looked around her.

It seemed wrong that the folk in this tavern shared none of her misery.

To all appearances, this slice of Bingtown had not even noticed the departure of Ephron Vestrit.

Here they were having the same conversations that they’d been having for the past two years: the newcomers were ruining Bingtown; the Satrap’s delegate was not only overstepping his authority in inventing taxes, but was taking bribes to ignore slave-ships right in the harbour; the Chalcedeans were demanding of the Satrap that Bingtown drop their water taxes, and the Satrap would probably concede for the sake of the pleasure herbs Chalced sent him so freely.

The same old woes, Althea thought to herself, but damn few in Bingtown would stand up and do anything about any of it.

The last time she had gone to the Old Traders’ Council with her father, he had stood up and told them to simply outlaw it all.

‘Bingtown is our town,’ he’d told them determinedly.

‘Not the Satrap’s. We should all contribute toward our own patrol ship, and simply deny slave-ships access to our harbour.

Turn the Chalcedean grain boats back, too, if they don’t want to pay a tax to water and provision here.

Let them resupply elsewhere, perhaps in one of the pirate towns, and see if they’re better treated there.

’ A roar of consternation had greeted his words, composed of both shock and approval, but when it came to the vote, the council had failed to take action.

‘Wait a year or two,’ her father had told Althea as they left.

‘That’s how long it takes for an idea to take root here.

Even tonight, most of them know that I’m right.

They just don’t want to face what needs to be done, that there must be confrontations if Bingtown is to remain Bingtown and not become southern Chalced.

Sa’s sweat, the damn Chalcedeans are already challenging our northern border.

If we ignore it, they’ll creep in here in other ways: face-tattooed slaves working Bingtown fields, women married off at twelve, all the rest of their corruption.

If we let it happen, it will destroy us.

And all the Old Traders know that, in their hearts.

In a year or two, I’ll bring this up again, and they’ll suddenly all agree with me. You’ll see.’

But he wouldn’t. Her father was gone for ever now. Bingtown was a poorer, weaker town than it had been, and it didn’t even know it.

Her eyes brimmed with tears once more. Yet again, she wiped them on the cuff of her sleeve.

Both cuffs were sodden, and she did not doubt that her face and her hair were a wreck.

Keffria and her mother would be scandalized to see her now.

Well, let them be scandalized. If she was a disgrace, they were worse.

She had acted on impulse, going on this binge, but they had planned and plotted, not just against her but ultimately against the family ship.

For they must realize what it meant for them to turn Vivacia over to Kyle, to a man not even blood related to her.

A tiny cold trickle of doubt suddenly edged through her.

But her mother was not born a Vestrit. She had married into the family, just as Kyle had.

Perhaps, like him, she had no real feelings for the ship.

No. No, it could not be so, not after so many years with her father.

Althea sternly forbade the thought to have any truth in it.

They must know, both of them, what Vivacia was to their family.

And surely all of this was only some strange and awful, but temporary, revenge upon her.

For what she was not sure; perhaps for loving her father more than she had loved anyone else in the family.

Tears welled afresh. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered.

They would have to change their minds, they would have to give the ship back to her.

Even, she told herself sternly, even if it meant she had to serve under Kyle as captain.

As much as she hated the thought, she suddenly embraced it.

Yes. That was all they wanted. Some assurance that the ship’s business would be conducted as he and they saw fit.

Well, at this point, she cared nothing for any of that.

He could traffic in pickled eggs and dyeing nuts as much as he wished, as long as she could be aboard Vivacia and be a part of her.

Althea sat up suddenly. She heaved a huge sigh of relief, as if she had suddenly resolved something.

Yet nothing had changed, she told herself.

A moment later, she denied that as well.

For something had changed, and drastically.

She had found that she was much more willing to abase herself than she had believed, that she would do virtually anything to remain aboard Vivacia. Anything.

She glanced about herself and gave a soft groan of dismay.

She’d had too much to drink, and wept too much.

Her head was throbbing and she was not even sure which of Bingtown’s sailor dives she was in.

One of the most sordid, that was for certain.

A man had passed out and slid from his seat to the floor.

That was not that unusual, but usually there was someone to drag them out of the way.

Kinder innkeepers left them snoring by the door, while the more heartless simply tumbled them out into the alleys or streets for the crimpers to find.

It was rumoured that some tavern keepers even trafficked with the crimpers, but Althea had always doubted that.

Not in Bingtown. Other seaports, yes, she was certain of that, but not Bingtown.

She rose unsteadily. The lace of her skirts snagged against the rough wood of the table leg.

She pulled it free, heedless of how it tore and dangled.

This dress she would never wear again anyway; let it tatter itself to rags tonight, she did not care.

She gave a final sniff and rubbed her palms over her weary eyes.

Home and to bed. Tomorrow, somehow, she would face all of it and deal with all of it.

But not tonight. Sweet Sa, not tonight, let everyone be asleep when she reached home, she prayed.

She headed for the door, but had to step over the sodden sailor on the floor.

The wooden floor seemed to lurch under her, or perhaps she did not quite have her land legs back.

She took a bigger stride to compensate, nearly fell, and recovered herself only when she grabbed at the door post. She heard someone laugh at her, but would not sacrifice her dignity to turn and see who.

Instead, she dragged the door open and stepped out into the night.

The darkness and the cool were both disorienting and welcome.

She halted a moment on the wooden walkway outside the tavern and took several deep breaths.

On the third one, she thought suddenly that she might be sick.

She grasped at the railing and stood still, breathing more shallowly and staring with wide eyes until the street stopped swinging.

The door behind her scraped open again and disgorged another patron.

She turned warily to have him in view. In the dimness, it took a moment for her to recognize him. Then, ‘Brashen,’ she greeted him.

‘Althea,’ he replied wearily. Unwillingly he asked, ‘Are you all right?’

For a moment she stood in the street looking at him. Then, ‘I want to go back to Vivacia.’ The moment she impulsively spoke the thought, she knew it was something she had to do. ‘I have to see the ship tonight. I have to speak to her, to explain why I left her today.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Brashen suggested. ‘When you’ve slept and you’re sober. You don’t want her to see you like this, do you?’ She heard the note of cunning in his voice as he added, ‘Surely she would be no more pleased than your father would.’

‘No. She’d understand. We know one another that well. She’d understand anything I did.’

‘Then she’d also understand if you came in the morning, clean and sober,’ Brashen pointed out reasonably. He sounded very tired. After a moment’s silence, he proffered her his elbow. ‘Come on. I’ll walk you home.’