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‘Satrap! We must try to get to the Vivacia.’ Kennit kept his firm grip on the Satrap’s shoulder and shouted by his ear. ‘I’ll guide you there,’ he asserted, lest his living crutch try to go on his own.

‘Kill them!’ The Jamaillian captain’s roar cut through the sounds of battle. It was the furious cry of a desperate man. ‘By Lord Criath’s order, they must not be taken alive. Kill the Satrap and the pirate king. Don’t let them escape!’

Bodies still cluttered Vivacia’s deck, the blood beading and running over the sealed wood.

Walking was slippery. The frantically scrambling sailors, the outstretched, pleading hands of the injured, and the increased shifting of the deck made Malta’s journey to where Reyn had fallen a nightmare.

She felt she moved sluggishly, alone, through chaos and insanity, to the end of the world.

Pirates darted past her to Wintrow’s shouted commands.

She did not even hear them. Reyn had come all this way, seeking her, and she had been too cowardly to give him even a word.

She had dreaded the pain of his rejection so much that she had not had the courage to thank him.

Now she feared she sought for a dead man.

He lay face-down. She had to pull another body off his.

The man on top of him was heavy. She tugged at him hopelessly while all around her the world went on a mad quest to save Kennit.

No one, not her brother, not her aunt, came to her aid.

She sobbed breathlessly, tearlessly as she worked.

She heard the two liveships shouting to one another.

Rushing sailors dodged around her, heedless of her toil.

She fell to her knees in the blood, braced a shoulder against the dead man’s bulk, and shoved him off Reyn.

The revealed carnage left her gasping. Blood soaked his garments and pooled around his body.

He sprawled in it, horribly still. ‘Oh, Reyn. Oh, my love.’ She squeezed out the hoarse words that had lived unacknowledged in her heart since their first dream-box sharing.

Heedless of the blood, she bent to embrace him.

He was still warm. ‘Never to be,’ she moaned, rocking.

‘Never to be.’ It was like losing her home and her family all over again.

In his arms, she suddenly knew, was the only place where she could have been Malta again.

With him died her youth, her beauty, her dreams.

Tenderly, as if he could still feel pain, she turned him over. She would see his face one last time, look into his copper eyes even if he did not look back at her. It would be all she would ever have of him.

Her hands were thick with his blood as she untucked the veil from the throat of his shirt.

She used both hands to lift it up and away from his face.

It peeled away, leaving a latticework of blood inked on his slack face.

Tenderly she wiped it away with the hem of her cloak.

She bent down and kissed his still mouth, lips to lips, no dream, no veil between them.

Dimly she was aware that the shouting world of sail and battle went on around them.

She did not care. Her life had stopped here.

She traced the scaled line of his brow, the pebbled skin like a finely-wrought chain under her fingertip.

‘Reyn,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh, my Reyn.’

His eyes opened to slits. Copper glints shone. Transfixed, she stared, as he blinked twice, then opened his eyes. He squinted up at her. He gave a gasp of pain, his right hand going to the wet sleeve on his left arm. ‘I’m hurt,’ he said dazedly.

She bent closer over him. Her heart thundered in her ears.

She scarcely heard her own words. ‘Reyn. Lie still. You’re bleeding badly.

Let me see to you.’ With a competence she did not feel, she began to undo his shirt.

She would not dare to hope, she hoped for nothing, no, she did not even dare to pray, not that he would live, not that he would love her.

Such hopes were too big. Her shaking hands could not unfasten the buttons.

She tore the shirt and spread it wide, expecting ruin within. ‘You’re whole!’ she exclaimed. ‘Praise Sa for life!’ She ran a wondering hand down his smooth bronze chest. The scaling on it rippled under her hand and glinted in the pale winter sunlight.

‘Malta?’ He squinted, as if finally able to see who knelt over him.

In his bloody right hand he caught both of hers and held her touch away from him as his eyes fixed on her brow.

His eyes widened and he dropped her hands.

Shame and pain scorched Malta, but she did not look away from him.

As if he could not resist the impulse, he lifted a hand.

But he did not touch her cheek as she had hoped.

Instead, his fingers went straight to her bulging scar and traced it through her hair. Tears burned her eyes.

‘Crowned,’ he murmured. ‘But how can this be? Crested like the ancient Elderling queen in the old tapestries. The scaling is just beginning to show scarlet. Oh, my beauty, my lady, my queen, Tintaglia was right. You are the only one fit to mother such children as we shall make.’

His words made no sense, but she did not care.

There was acceptance in his face, and awe.

His eyes wandered endlessly over her face, in wonder and delight.

‘Your brows, too, even your lips. You are beginning to scale. Help me up,’ he demanded.

‘I must see all of you. I must hold you to know this is real. I have come so far and dreamed of you so often.’

‘You are hurt,’ she protested. ‘There is so much blood, Reyn…’

‘Not much of it mine, I think.’ He lifted a hand to the side of his head. ‘I was stunned. And I took a sword thrust up my left arm. However, other than that –’ He moved slowly, groaning. ‘I merely hurt all over.’

He drew his feet up, got to his knees and slowly managed to stand.

She rose with him, steadying him. He lifted a hand to rub his eyes.

‘My veil,’ he exclaimed suddenly. Then he looked down at her.

She had not thought such joy could shine on a man’s face.

‘You will marry me, then?’ he asked in delighted disbelief.

‘If you’ll have me, as I am.’ She stood straight, chose truth. She could not let him plunge into this blindly, not knowing what others might later whisper about his bride. ‘Reyn, there is much that you first need to know about me.’

At that instant, Vivacia shouted something about yielding.

An instant later, a wrenching impact threw them both to the deck again.

Reyn cried out with pain, but rolled to throw himself protectively over her.

The ship shuddered beneath them as he gathered her into his embrace.

He lay beside her, holding her tight with his good arm, bracing them both against the blows of the world.

As sailors clamoured and the fresh clatter of battle rose, he shouted by her ear, ‘The only thing I need to know is that I have you now.’

Wintrow knew how to command. Amidst all else, as Althea scrambled to his orders with the others, she saw the sense of them.

She saw something else, something even more important than whether she approved of how he ran his deck.

The crew was confident in him. Jola, the mate, did not question his competence or his authority to take over for Kennit.

Neither did Etta. Vivacia put herself in his hands, without reservations.

Althea was aware, jealously, of the exchange between Vivacia and Wintrow.

Effortless as water, it flowed past her.

Naturally, without effort, they traded encouragement and information.

They did not exclude her; it simply went past her the way adult conversation went over a child’s head.

The priest-boy, small and spindly as a child, had become this slight but energetic young man who roared commands with a man’s voice.

She knew, with a sudden guilt, that her own father had not seen that possibility in Wintrow.

If he had, Ephron Vestrit would have opposed Keffria sending him off to the priesthood.

Even his own father had intended to use him only as a sort of place-holder until Selden, his younger, bolder son, came of age.

Only Kennit had seen this, and nurtured this in him.

Kennit the rapist had somehow been also the leader that Wintrow near worshipped, and the mentor who had enabled him to take his place on this deck and command it.

The thoughts rushed through her head as swiftly as the wind that pushed the sails, trampling her emotions as the barefoot sailors trampled Vivacia’s decks.

She poured her angry strength into hauling on a line.

She hated and loathed Kennit. Even more than she longed to kill him, she needed to expose him.

She wanted to tear his followers’ love and loyalty away from him the way he had torn her dignity and privacy from her body.

She wanted to do to him what he had done to her: take from him something he could never regain.

Leave him always crippled in a way that did not yield to logic.

She did not want to hurt those two, her nephew and her ship.

But no matter how much she cared for both of them, she could not walk away from what Kennit had done to her.