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Althea groaned. ‘Torturing Clef.’

Amber smiled. ‘Someday Clef will thank Brashen for insisting that he learn his letters.’

‘Perhaps, but this morning it does not seem likely. I had to leave them before I lost my temper with both of them. Clef spends more time arguing about why he cannot learn them than he does trying to learn them. Brashen gives him no ground. The boy is quick-witted on his seamanship. He should be able to learn his letters.’

‘He will learn his letters,’ Brashen asserted as he joined them. He pushed his hair back from his face with an ink-stained hand. He looked more like a frustrated tutor than a sea captain. ‘I set him three pages to copy and left him. I warned him that good work would free him faster than messy.’

‘There!’ Paragon’s voice boomed. His sudden shout flung a small flock of bright birds skyward from the looming forest. He lifted a big hand aloft, to point up and back into the trees. ‘There. That is it.’ He leaned, swaying the entire ship slightly. ‘Semoy! Hard starboard!’

‘You’ll run aground!’ Brashen cried in dismay. Semoy had not questioned the order. The ship swung in suddenly towards the looming trees.

‘It’s a mud bottom.’ Paragon replied calmly. ‘You’ll get me off easily enough when you need to.’

Althea seized the railing, but instead of running aground, Paragon had found a deep if narrow channel of near-still water.

Perhaps in the rainy season it was one of the many watercourses that fed the Rain Wild River.

Now it was reduced to a finger of calm water winding back beneath the trees.

They left the main channel of the Rain Wild River behind them.

They did not get far, however, before Paragon’s rigging began to tangle in the over-reaching branches.

‘You’re fouling your rigging,’ Brashen warned him, but the ship deliberately moved deeper into the entangling mess.

Althea exchanged an anxious grimace with him.

He shook his head at her, and kept silent.

Paragon was an independent soul. He had the right to command where his body would go.

The new challenge to running this liveship was respecting his will for himself and crediting him with judgement.

Even if it meant letting him run himself aground in a jungle lagoon.

There were questioning yells from several deckhands, but Semoy was steady on the wheel. Leaves and twiggy branches rained down on them. Startled birds gave cry and fled. The ship slowed and then stopped.

‘We’re here,’ Paragon announced excitedly.

‘We certainly are,’ Brashen agreed sourly, staring up at the tangled mess.

‘Igrot’s hoard,’ Amber breathed.

They both turned to look at her. Her gaze was following Paragon’s pointing finger.

Althea saw nothing save a dark mass high overhead in some ancient trees.

The figurehead turned to regard them with a triumphant grin.

‘She guessed first, and she guessed right,’ he announced as if they had been playing a game.

Most of their reduced crew was on deck, staring up where Paragon had pointed. Igrot’s infamous star had been branded deep in the bark of the near tree. Time had expanded the mark.

‘Igrot’s biggest haul,’ Paragon reminisced, ‘was when he took a treasure shipment meant for the Satrap of all Jamaillia. This was back in the days when the Satrapy sent a tribute ship once a year, to collect what was due him from his outlying settlements. Bingtown had put in Rain Wild goods, a rich haul of them. But en route to Jamaillia, the entire barge disappeared. None of it was ever seen again.’

‘That was before my time, but I’ve heard of it,’ Brashen said. ‘Folk said it was the richest load ever to leave Trehaug. Some treasure chambers had been unearthed. All of it was lost.’

‘Hidden,’ Paragon corrected him. He looked again to the lofty trees. Althea peered up at the dark mass, festooned with vines and creepers, perched high. It spanned the live branches of several trees.

Paragon’s voice was triumphant. ‘Didn’t you ever wonder why Igrot wanted a liveship?

It was so he could have a place to hoard his trove, a place that no ordinary pirates could ever reach.

Even if a member of his crew jabbered of where it was, robbers would need a liveship to recover it.

He put in here, and his hearties travelled from my rigging to the trees.

There they built a platform and hoisted the treasure up to it. He thought it would be safe forever.’

Brashen made a low sound. There was fury in his voice as he asked, ‘Did he blind you before or after he selected this place?’

The figurehead didn’t flinch from the question.

‘After,’ he said quietly. ‘He never trusted me. With reason. I lost count of how many times I tried to kill him. He blinded me so that I could never find my way back without him.’ He turned back to the awestruck crew on his deck and dropped Amber a slow wink.

‘He never thought that anyone might recarve me. Neither did I, back then. Nevertheless, here I am. Sole survivor of that bloody crew. It’s mine now.

And hence, yours.’ A stunned silence followed his words. No one spoke or moved.

The figurehead raised his eyebrows questioningly. ‘No one wants to reclaim it for us?’ he asked wryly.

Getting their first look at it was the easy part.

Rigging catwalks and hoists through the trees to transport the stuff back to Paragon’s deck was the time-consuming part.

Despite the back-breaking labour, no one complained.

‘As for Clef, you would think Paragon had planned this specifically to get him out of his lessons,’ Brashen pointed out.

As the ship’s nimblest rigging monkey, the boy had been freed from his lessons for this task.

‘If he grins any wider, the top half of his head may come off,’ Althea agreed.

She craned her neck to see Clef. A heavy sack bounced on his back as he made his way back to the ship.

Neither snakes nor swarming insects had damped the boy’s enthusiasm for his rope-walking trips back and forth between ship and platform.

‘I wish he were a bit more cautious,’ she worried.

She, Brashen and several crewmen stood on a layered platform of logs.

The vines had reinforced the old structure with their growing strength through the years, actually incorporating it into their system of tendrils and air roots.

The chests and barrels that had held Igrot’s hoard had not fared as well.

A good part of the day’s work had been re-packing the spilled treasure into emptied food crates and casks.

The variety of it astounded them. They had found Jamaillian coins and worked silver among the loot, a sure sign that Igrot had squirrelled more than just the Rain Wild hoard here.

Some of his booty had not survived. There were the long-mouldered remains of tapestries and rugs, and heaps of iron rings atop the rotted leather that had once structured the battle-shirts.

What had survived far outweighed what had perished.

Brashen had seen jewelled cups, amazing swords that still gleamed sharp when drawn from their filigreed scabbards, necklaces and crowns, statues and vases, gameboards of ivory and marble with gleaming crystal playing pieces, and other items he could not even identify.

There were humbler items as well, from serving trays and delicate teacups to carved hair combs and jewelled pins.

Among the Rain Wild goods were a set of delicately-carved dragons with flakes of jewels for scales and a family of dolls with scaled faces.

These last items Brashen was packing carefully into the onion basket from Paragon’s galley.

‘I think these are musical instruments, or what is left of them,’ Althea theorized.

He turned, stretching his back, to see what she was doing.

She knelt, removing items from a big chest that had split its seams. She lifted chained crystals that tinkled and rang sweetly against one another as she freed them from their tomb and smiled as she turned to display them.

She had forgotten that her hair was weighted with a net of jewelled chains.

The motion caught glittering sunlight in her hair. She dazzled him. His heart swelled.

‘Brashen?’ she complained a moment later.

He realized he was still staring at her.

Without a word, he rose and went to her.

He pulled her to his feet and kissed her, careless of the tolerant grins of two sailors who were scooping scattered coins into heavy canvas bags.

He held her in his arms, still half-amazed that he could do this.

He swept her closer. ‘Don’t ever go away from me,’ he said thickly into her hair.

She turned her head up to grin at him. ‘Why would I leave a rich man like you?’ she teased. She put her hands on his chest and pushed gently free of him.

‘I knew you were after my fortune,’ he replied, letting her go.

He held back a sigh. She always wanted to be clear of him before he was ready to let her go.

It was her independent nature, he supposed.

He refused to worry that she was wearying of him.

Yet she had not seemed overly upset when he had been unable to arrange their wedding at the Traders’ Concourse.

Perhaps she did not wish to be bound to him quite that permanently.

Then he chided himself for his lingering doubts and discontent.

Althea was still beside him. That was more than he’d ever had in his life and it was worth more to him than this incomprehensible wealth of treasure.