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The rain was nasty, cold and penetrating, but the wind that drove it was steady.

Althea had put Cypros on the wheel tonight.

The duty demanded little more than that he stand there and hold it steady.

Jek was on lookout on the foredeck. The downpour of rain might loosen drift logs from the surrounding islands.

Jek had a keen eye for such hazards and would warn the steersman well in advance of them.

Paragon preferred Jek to the others on her watch.

Although Brashen had forbidden anyone to speak to the figurehead, she had the knack of making silence companionable rather than accusing.

As Althea prowled the deck, she chewed over her problems. Brashen, she told herself stubbornly, was not among them.

Letting a man distract her from her real goals had been her greatest error.

Now that she knew his true opinion of her, she could set him aside and focus all her efforts on regaining her own life.

Once she stopped thinking about the man, everything became clear.

Since the day of the battle, Althea had raised her own expectations of herself.

It did not matter that Brashen regarded her as incompetent and weak, as long as she held herself to a high personal standard.

She now centred her life on the ship and seeing that it ran perfectly.

She had tightened discipline on her own watch, not with blows and shouts as Lavoy did, but with simple insistence that every task be done exactly as she commanded, and had uncovered both weaknesses and strengths in her deckhands.

Semoy was not fast, but he had a deep knowledge of ships and their ways.

During the first part of this voyage, he had suffered greatly from being separated from a bottle.

Lavoy had pushed the old man onto her watch as a useless annoyance with shaky hands, but now that he had his sea legs again, Semoy had proved to know a great many tricks about rigging and line.

Lop was simple and dealt poorly with decision-making or stress, but at the tedious and routine chores of sailing a ship, he was tireless.

Jek was the opposite, quick and relishing challenges, but swift to become bored and then careless with repetitive work.

Althea flattered herself that she now had her watch well matched to their tasks.

She had not had to speak sharply to anyone for two days.

So there was little excuse for Brashen to appear on the deck during her watch when he should have been sleeping.

She could have forgiven it if the storm had been taxing her crew to the utmost, but the weather was only nasty, not dangerous.

Twice she encountered him on her patrol of the deck.

The first time he had met her eyes and offered her, ‘Good evening.’ She had returned the courtesy gravely and continued on her way.

She had noted he was on his way to the foredeck.

Perhaps, she had reflected ironically, he was ‘watching’ Jek at her duties.

The second time she encountered him, he had the grace to be discomfited. He halted before her, and made some inconsequential comment about the storm. She agreed it was unpleasant, and made to move past him.

‘Althea.’ His voice stopped her.

She turned back to him. ‘Sir?’ she asked correctly.

He stood staring at her. His face was a study in shifting flats and shadows in the swinging light from the ship’s lantern.

She saw him blink cold rain from his eyes.

Served him right. He had no real errand to bring him out on the deck in this weather.

She watched him grope for an excuse. He took a breath.

‘I wanted to let you know that at the end of your watch, I’ll be lifting the restriction on speaking to the figurehead.

’ He sighed. ‘I’m not sure it made any impression on him.

Sometimes I fear that isolation will only drive him more deeply into defiance. So I’ll be lifting that order.’

She nodded once. ‘So you said. I understood, sir.’

He stood there a moment longer, as if expecting her to say more.

But there was nothing more for the second mate to say to the captain about this announcement.

He was about to change an order; she would see her crew obeyed it.

She continued to give him her attention until he nodded briefly and then walked away from her.

After that, she had gone back to her work.

So they would be allowed to speak to Paragon again.

She was not sure if she was relieved or not.

Perhaps it would lift Amber’s spirits. The carpenter had brooded darkly since Paragon had killed.

When they spoke of it, she always blamed Lavoy for it, insisting that the mate had incited the ship to it.

Althea personally could not disagree, but nor could a second mate agree with such a statement.

Therefore, she had held her tongue, which had only exasperated Amber.

She wondered what Amber would say the first time she spoke to Paragon.

Would she rebuke him, or demand that he explain himself?

Althea knew what she, personally, would do.

She would treat it as she had treated all of Paragon’s sins.

She would ignore it. She would not speak of it to the ship, any more than she had ever really spoken of how he had twice capsized and killed all his crew.

Some acts were too monstrous to recognize with words.

Paragon knew how she felt about what he had done.

He was an old liveship, built with much wizardwood throughout his frame.

She could touch no piece of it without communicating her horror and dismay to him.

Sadly, all she felt in response from him was defiance and anger.

He felt justified in what he had done. He was angry that no one else shared that emotion.

She added that to her unending list of mysteries about Paragon.

She made another slow circuit of the deck, but found nothing to fault.

It would have been a relief to discover some simple task.

Instead, she found her thoughts turning to Vivacia.

With every passing day, her hopes of recovering her ship dwindled.

Her pain at being separated from her liveship was old pain now.

It ached deep within her, like an injury that would not heal.

Sometimes, as now, she prodded it, as if she were rocking an aching tooth.

She dwelt on it to stir it to new flames, simply to prove her soul was still alive.

If only she could recover her ship, she told herself, all would be well.

If she had Vivacia’s decks beneath her feet, none of her other worries would matter.

She could forget Brashen. Tonight her dream of regaining her ship seemed a hopeless one.

From what that boy had said before Paragon killed him, Kennit would not be open to a ransom offer, especially not a humble one.

That left only force or deceit. The crew’s haphazard defence of Paragon during the pirate attack had left her with little confidence in their ability to force anyone to do anything.

Deceit remained. Yet, the idea of pretending that they were runaways from Bingtown with hopes of becoming pirates struck her as material for a stage farce rather than a plan of action.

In the end, it might prove worse than ridiculous or useless.

It might play right into Lavoy’s hands. Plainly, he and his tattooed crew savoured the idea.

Did he hope to take it one step further, to take over Paragon and truly use him as a pirate vessel?

To play-act the role would inevitably put the idea into every sailor’s mind.

The Bingtown dock-scrapings they had taken as crew would not harbour strong moral opposition to such a change in career and goal.

As for the ship himself, she no longer knew.

This whole adventure had revealed facets to Paragon’s character that she had never suspected.

Time was what she needed, time to concoct a better plan, time to understand this poor, mad ship.

But time burned through her hands like a wild line.

Every watch carried them closer to Divvytown, Kennit’s stronghold.

The rain let up towards morning. As her watch ended, the sun broke through the cloud cover, sending broad streaks of light down to touch the water and the islands that dotted it.

The wind began to bluster and shift. She ordered her watch to assemble to hear Brashen’s change in orders as Lavoy’s men came on deck.

Lavoy glowered at her in passing, but his hostility no longer surprised her. It was part of her job.

When all hands were mustered onto the deck, Brashen spoke his piece.

She listened impassively as he lifted his ban on speaking to the figurehead.

As she had expected, Amber’s face expressed her relief.

When Brashen went on to move men off her watch in order to shift the former slaves onto it, she managed to hold her peace.

Without even consulting her, he had undone her careful efforts to make her watch operate as efficiently as possible.

Now, as they sailed deeper every day into pirate territory, he had made her responsible for men she scarcely knew, men that perhaps Lavoy had been inciting to mutiny.

A fine addition to her watch. She seethed silently, but gave no sign of her outrage.