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Words deserted Wintrow. He stared at his father and floundered through his thoughts, trying to find some common ground where he could begin reasoning with him.

He could not. Despite the blood-bond between them, this man was a stranger, and his beliefs were so utterly different from all Wintrow had embraced that he felt no hope of reaching him.

Finally he said quietly, ‘Sa teaches us that no one may determine the life path of another. Even if you cage his flesh and forbid him to utter his thoughts, even to cutting out his tongue, you cannot still a man’s soul. ’

For a moment, his father just looked at him.

He, too, sees a stranger, Wintrow thought to himself.

When he spoke, his voice was thick. ‘You’re a coward.

A craven coward.’ Then his father strode past him.

It took all of Wintrow’s nerve to stop from cowering as his sire passed him.

But Kyle only threw open the door of his cabin and bellowed for Torg.

The man appeared so promptly that Wintrow knew he must have been loitering nearby, perhaps eavesdropping.

Kyle Haven either did not notice this or did not care.

‘Take the ship’s boy back to his quarters,’ his father ordered Torg abruptly. ‘Keep a good watch on him and see he learns all his duties before we sail. And keep him out of my sight.’ This last he uttered with great feeling, as if wronged by the world.

Torg gave a jerk of his head and Wintrow rose silently to follow him. With a sinking heart, he recognized the smirk on Torg’s face. His father had given him over completely into this wretch’s hands, and the man knew it.

For now the man seemed content to shepherd him forward to his miserable dungeon.

Wintrow just managed to duck his head before the man pushed him across the threshold.

He stumbled, but caught himself before he fell.

He was too deep in despair even to pay attention to whatever mocking comment it was that Torg threw after him before slamming the door shut.

He heard the man work the crude latch and knew he was shut in for the next six hours at least.

Torg hadn’t even left him a candle. Wintrow groped through the darkness until his hands encountered the webbing of the hammock.

Awkwardly he hauled his stiff body up into it and tried to arrange himself comfortably.

Then he lay still. About him the ship moved gently on the waters of the harbour.

The only sounds that reached him were muffled.

He yawned hugely, the effects of his large meal and long day’s work overwhelming both his anger and his despair.

Out of long habit, he prepared both body and mind for rest. As much as the hammock would permit, he did the stretches of the large and small muscles of his body, striving to bring all back into alignment before rest. The mental exercises were more difficult.

Back when he had first come to the monastery, they had given him a very simple ritual called Forgiving the Day.

Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day’s pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight.

As initiates grew in the ways of Sa, it was expected they would grow more sophisticated in this exercise, learning to balance the day, taking responsibility for their own actions and learning from them without indulging in either guilt or regrets.

Wintrow did not think he was up to that tonight.

Odd. How easy it had been to love Sa’s way and master the meditations in the quietly structured days of the monastery.

Within the massive stone walls, it had been easy to discern the underlying order in the world, easy to look at the lives of the farmers and shepherds and merchants and see how much of their misery was self-generated.

Now that he was out in the midst of it, he could still see some of that pattern, but he felt too weary to examine it and see how he could change it.

He was tangled in the threads of his own tapestry.

‘I don’t know how to make it stop,’ he said softly to the darkness.

Doleful as an abandoned child, he wondered if any of his teachers missed him.

He recalled his final morning at the monastery, and the tree that had come to him out of the shards of stained-glass.

He had always taken a secret pride in his ability to summon beauty and hold it.

But had it been his skill at all? Or had it been something created instead by the teachers who insulated him from the world and provided both a place and a time in which he might work?

Perhaps, given the right atmosphere, anyone could do it.

Perhaps the only thing about him that had been remarkable was that he had been given a chance.

For an instant, he was overwhelmed by his own ordinariness.

Nothing remarkable about Wintrow. An indifferent ship’s boy, a clumsy sailor.

Not even worth mentioning. He would disappear into time as if he had never been born.

He could almost feel himself unravelling into darkness.

No. No! He would not let go. He would hang onto himself, and fight and something would happen.

Something. Would the monastery send anyone to inquire after him when he did not return?

‘I think I’m hoping to be rescued,’ he observed wearily to himself.

There. That was a high ambition. To stay alive and remain himself until someone else could save him.

He was not sure if… if… if. There had been the beginning of a thought there, but the upsurging blackness of sleep drowned it.

In the dark of the harbour, Vivacia sighed.

She crossed her slender arms over her breasts and stared up at the bright lights of the night market.

So engrossed was she in her own thoughts that she startled to the soft touch of a hand against her planking.

She looked down. ‘Ronica!’ she exclaimed in gentle surprise.

‘Yes. Hush. I would speak quietly with you.’

‘If you wish,’ Vivacia replied softly, intrigued.

‘I need to know… that is, Althea sent me a message. She feared all was not well with you.’ The woman’s voice faltered. ‘The message actually came some days ago. A servant, thinking it unimportant, had set it in Ephron’s study. I only found it today.’

Her hand was still set to the hull. Vivacia could read some of what she felt, though not all. ‘It is hard for you to go into that room, isn’t it? As hard as it is to come down here and see me.’

‘Ephron,’ Ronica whispered brokenly. ‘Is he… is he within you? Can he speak through you to me?’

Vivacia shook her head sorrowfully. She was used to seeing this woman through Ephron’s eyes or Althea’s.

They had seen her as determined and authoritative.

Tonight, in her dark cloak with her head bowed, she looked so small.

Vivacia longed to comfort her, but would not lie.

‘No. I’m afraid it isn’t like that. I’m aware of what he knew, but it is commingled with so much else.

Still. When I look at you, I feel as my own the love he felt for you. Does that help?’

‘No,’ Ronica answered truthfully. ‘There is some comfort in it, but it can never be like Ephron’s strong arms around me, or his advice guiding me. Oh, ship, what am I to do? What am I to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Vivacia answered. Ronica’s distress was awakening an answering anxiety in her.

She put it in words. ‘It frightens me that you ask me that question. Surely you know what to do. Ephron certainly always believed you did.’ Reflectively, Vivacia added, ‘He thought of himself as a simple sailor, you know. A man who had the knack of running a ship well. You were the wisdom of the family, the one with the greater vision. He counted on that.’

‘He did?’

‘Of course he did. How else could he have sailed off and left you to manage everything?’

Ronica was silent. Then she heaved a great sigh.

Quietly Vivacia added, ‘I think he would tell you to follow your own counsels.’

Ronica shook her head wearily. ‘I fear you are right. Vivacia. Do you know where Althea is?’

‘Right now? No. Don’t you?’

Ronica answered reluctantly. ‘I have not seen her since the morning after Ephron died.’

‘The last time she came to see me, Torg came down onto the docks and tried to lay hands on her. She pushed him off the dock, and walked away while everyone else was laughing.’

‘But she was all right?’

Vivacia shook her head. ‘Only as “all right” as you or me. Which is to say she is troubled and hurt and confused. But she told me to be patient, that all would eventually be put right. She told me not to take matters into my own hands.’

Ronica nodded gravely. ‘Those are the very things I came down here to say tonight, also. Do you think you can keep such counsels?’

‘I?’ The ship almost laughed. ‘Ronica, I am three times a Vestrit. I fear I shall have only as much patience as my forebears did.’

‘An honest answer,’ Ronica conceded. ‘I will only ask that you try. No. I will ask one more thing. If Althea returns here, before you sail, will you give her a message from me? For I have no other way to contact her, save through you.’

‘Of course. And I will see that no one save her hears the message.’

‘Good, that is good. All I ask is that she come to see me. We are not at odds as much as she believes we are. But I will not go into details now. Just ask her to come to me, quietly.’

‘I shall tell her. But I do not know if she will.’

‘Neither do I, ship. Neither do I.’