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But sleep betrayed her. As weary as she was, oblivion would not come to her.

She tried to relax, but could not remember how to loosen the muscles in her lined brow.

It was the words with Brashen, she decided.

Somehow they brought the situation back to her as a whole.

Often she went for days without catching so much as a glimpse of him.

She wasn’t on his watch; their lives and duties seldom intersected.

And when she had no reminders of what her life once had been, she could simply go from hour to hour, doing what she had to do to survive.

She could give all her attention to being the ship’s boy and think no further than the next watch.

Brashen’s face, Brashen’s eyes, were crueller than any mirror.

He pitied her. He could not look at her without betraying to her all that she had become, and worse, all that she had never been.

Bitterest of all, perhaps, was seeing him recognize as surely as Althea herself had, that Kyle had been right.

She had been her Papa’s spoiled little darling, doing no more than playing at being a sailor.

She recalled with shame the pride she had taken in how swiftly she could run the rigging of the Vivacia.

But her time aloft had mostly been during warm summer days, and whenever she was wearied or bored with the tasks of it, she could simply come down and find something else to amuse herself.

Spending an hour or two splicing and sewing was not the same as six hours of frantically hasty sailwork after a piece of canvas had split and needed to be immediately replaced.

Her mother had fretted over her callouses and rough hands; now her palms were as hardened and thick-skinned as the soles of her feet had been; and the soles of her feet were cracked and black.

That, she decided, was the worst aspect of her life.

Finding out that she was no more than adequate as a sailor.

No matter how tough she got, she was simply not as strong as the larger men on the ship.

She had passed herself off as a fourteen-year-old boy to get this position aboard the Reaper .

Even if she had wished to stay with this slaughter-tub, in a year or so they were bound to notice she wasn’t growing any larger or stronger.

They wouldn’t keep her on. She’d wind up in some foreign port with no prospects at all.

She stared up into the darkness. At the end of this voyage, she had planned to ask for a ship’s ticket.

She still would, and she’d probably get it.

But she wondered now if it would be enough.

Oh, it would be the endorsement of a captain, and perhaps she could use it to make Kyle live up to his thoughtless oath.

But she feared it would be a hollow triumph.

Having a stamped bit of leather to show she had survived this voyage was not what she had wanted.

She had wanted to vindicate herself, to prove to all, not just Kyle, that she was good at her chosen life, a worthy captain to say nothing of being a competent sailor.

Now, in the brief times when she did think about it, it seemed to her that she had only proved the opposite to herself.

What had seemed daring and bold when she’d begun it back in Bingtown now seemed merely childish and stupid.

She’d run away to sea, dressed as a boy, taking the first position that was offered to her.

Why, she asked herself now. Why? Why hadn’t she gone to one of the other liveships and asked to be taken on as a hand?

Would they have refused as Brashen had said they would?

Or could she, even now, be sleeping aboard a merchant vessel cruising down the Inside Passage, sure of both wages and recommendation at the end of the voyage?

Why had it seemed so important to her that she be hired anonymously, that she prove herself worthy without either her name or her father’s reputation to fall back on?

It had seemed such a spirited thing to do, on those summer evenings in Bingtown when she had sat cross-legged in the back room of Amber’s store and sewed her ship’s trousers. Now it merely seemed childish.

Amber had helped her. But for her help, with both needlework and readily shared meals, Althea would never have been able to do it.

Amber’s sudden befriending of her had always puzzled Althea.

Now it seemed to her that perhaps Amber had actually been intent on propelling her into danger.

Her fingers crept up to touch the serpent’s egg bead that she wore on a single strand of leather about her neck.

The touch of it almost warmed her fingers and she shook her head at the darkness.

No. Amber had been her friend, one of the few rare women-friends she’d ever had.

She’d taken her in for the days of high summer, helped her cut and sew her boy’s clothing.

More, Amber had donned man’s clothing herself, and schooled Althea in how to move and walk and sit as if she were male.

She had, she told Althea, once been an actress in a small company.

Hence she’d played many roles, as both sexes.

‘Bring your voice from here,’ she’d instructed her, prodding Althea below her ribs.

‘If you have to talk. But speak as little as you can. You’ll be less likely to betray yourself, and you’ll be better accepted.

A good listener of any sex is rare. Be one, and it will make up for anything else perceived as a fault.

’ Amber had also shown her how to wrap her breasts flat to her chest in such a way that the binding cloth appeared to be no more than another shirt worn under her outer shirt.

Amber had shown her how to fold dark-coloured stockings to use as blood rags.

‘Dirty socks you can always explain,’ Amber had told her.

‘Cultivate a fastidious personality. Wash your clothing twice as much as anyone else does, and no one will question it after a time. And learn to need less sleep. For you will either have to rise before any others or stay up later in order to keep the privacy of your body. And this I caution you most of all. Trust no one with your secret. It is not a secret a man can keep. If one man aboard the ship knows you are a woman, then they all will.’

This was the only area in which Amber had, perhaps, been mistaken.

For Brashen knew she was a woman, and he had not betrayed her.

At least, he hadn’t so far. A sudden irony came to Althea.

She grinned bitterly to herself. In my own way I took your advice, Brashen.

I arranged to be reborn as a boy, and not one called Vestrit.

Brashen lay on his bunk and studied the wall opposite him.

It was not far from his face. Was a time, he thought ruefully, when I would have scorned this cabin as a clothes-closet.

Now he knew what a luxury even a tiny space to himself could be.

True, there was scarce room to turn around once a man was inside, but he did have his own berth, and no one slept in it but him.

There were pegs for his clothing, and a corner just large enough to hold his sea-chest. In the bunk, he could brace himself against the ledge that confined his body and almost sleep secure when he was off watch.

The captain’s and the mate’s cabins were substantially larger and better appointed, even on a tub like this.

But then on many ships the second mate had no better quarters than the crew.

He was grateful for this tiny corner of quiet, even if it had come to him by the deaths of three men.

He had shipped as an ordinary seaman, and spent the first part of his trip growling and elbowing in the forecastle with the rest of his watch.

Early on, he had realized he had not only more experience but a stronger drive to do his job well than the rest of his fellows.

The Reaper was a slaughter-ship out of Candletown far to the south, on the northern border of Jamaillia.

When the ship had left the town many months ago in spring, it had left with a mostly conscripted crew.

A handful of professional sailors were the backbone of the crew, charged with battering the newcomers into shape as sailors.

Some were debtors, their work sold by their creditors as a means of forcing them to pay back what they owed.

Others were simple criminals purchased from the Satrap’s jails.

Those who had been pickpockets and thieves had soon learned better or perished; the close quarters aboard a slaughter-ship did not encourage a man to be tolerant of such vice in his fellows.

It was not a crew that worked with a will, nor one whose members were likely to survive the rigours of the trip.

By the time the Reaper reached Bingtown, she’d lost a third of her crew to sickness, accidents and violence aboard.

The two thirds that remained were survivors; they’d learned to sail, they’d learned to pursue the slow-moving turtles and the so-called brack-whales of the southern coast inlets and lagoons.

Their services were not, of course, to be confused with the skills of the professional hunters and skinners who rode the ship in the comparative comfort of a dry chamber and idleness.

The dozen or so men of that ilk never set a hand to a line or stood a watch; they idled until their time of slaughter and blood.

Then they worked with a fury, sometimes going without sleep for days at a time while the reaping was good.

But they were not sailors and they were not crew.

They would not lose their lives save that the whole ship went down or one of their prey turned on them successfully.