CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
RESCUES
“I DON’T CARE ABOUT KENNIT!” BRASHEN ROARED. “GO BACK for Althea!”
“She is safe where she is for now!” Paragon shouted defiantly. “I must have Kennit back. I need him.”
Brashen clenched his teeth. So close, for an instant, and then they had swept past. The need to see Althea and know she was safe hollowed him, but the headstrong ship seemed intent on bearing them to their deaths. Every time Brashen began to trust Paragon, he dashed his hopes again. He defied both rudder and orders, arrowing after the fleeing Jamaillian ship. The white serpent leapt and dove in their bow wave like a dolphin. On the foredeck, Mother leaned on the railing as if she could push the ship to go faster. Amber stood straight and tall, the wind whipping her hair. Her eyes were wide as if she listened to distant music. “At least slow down,” Brashen begged. “Let the other ships pull even with us. We don’t need to face the whole Jamaillian fleet alone.”
But Paragon rushed blindly ahead. Brashen surmised that somehow the white serpent guided him. “I can’t delay. They’ll kill him, Brashen. They might be killing him right now. He must not die without me.”
That had an ominous tone. Brashen suddenly felt a light touch on his wrist. He glanced down to find Kennit’s mother standing beside him. Her pale eyes locked with his dark ones and spoke all the words her tongue could no longer say. The eloquence of that appeal could not be refused. Brashen shook his head, not at her but at his own foolishness. “Go then!” he suddenly shouted at the ship. “Fling yourself forward blindly. Satisfy whatever madness drives you once and for all.”
“As I must!” Paragon flung back at him.
“As must we all,” Amber agreed quietly.
Brashen rounded on her, glad of a new target. “I suppose this is the destiny you bespoke,” he challenged Amber in frustration.
She gave him an ethereal smile. “Oh, yes indeed,” she promised him. “And not just Paragon’s. Mine. And yours.” She flung an arm wide. “And all the world’s.”
KENNIT HAD NEVER BEEN IN A WORSE PLACE. CRUTCHLESS, weaponless, he sat on the deck while working sailors moved matter-of-factly past him. The few men who had boarded with him were bloody corpses. Pointless to take satisfaction in the Jamaillians they had taken with them. The Satrap was a crumpled heap behind him. He was uninjured but swooned. Kennit himself was battered, but as yet unbloodied.
He sat on the open deck near the house of the ship. He had to look up at his guards. He refused to do so. He’d had enough of their sneering faces and mocking grins. They’d taken much pleasure in snatching his crutch away and letting him fall. His ribs ached from their boots. The sudden change in his fortunes dazed him as much as his injuries. Where had his good luck vanished? How could this have happened to him, King Kennit of the Pirate Isles? But a moment ago, he’d held the Satrap of all Jamaillia captive and had the signed treaty that recognized him as King of the Pirate Isles. He had felt his destiny, had briefly touched it. Now this. He had not been so helpless and defeated since he was a boy. He pushed the thought aside. None of this would have happened if Wintrow and Etta had followed him, as they should have. Their courage and faith in his luck should have matched his own. He’d tell them so when they rescued him.
Behind him, he felt the Satrap stirring from his dead faint. He moaned faintly. Kennit elbowed him unobtrusively. “Quiet,” he said in a low voice. “Sit up. Try to look competent. The more weakness you admit, the more they’ll hurt you. I need you in one piece.”
The Lord High Satrap of all Jamaillia sat up, sniffled and looked fearfully around. On the deck, men thundered past them, intent on wringing yet more speed out of the ship. Two men guarded them, one with a long knife, the other with a nasty short club. Kennit’s left arm was near numb from his last encounter with it.
“I am lost. All is lost.” The Satrap rocked himself.
“Stop it!” Kennit hissed. In a low voice he continued, “While you whine and moan, you are not thinking. Look around us. Now, more than ever, you must be the Satrap of all Jamaillia. Look like a king if you wish to be treated as one. Sit up. Be alert and outraged. Behave as if you have the power to kill them all.”
Kennit himself had already followed his own advice. If the Jamaillians had taken the Satrap to be rid of him, he reasoned, they would have killed him outright. That they both still lived meant that the Satrap had some living value to them. And if he did, and if the Satrap felt some small measure of gratitude to Kennit, perhaps he might preserve the pirate’s life as well. Kennit gathered strength into his voice. He poured conviction into his whisper. “They shall not emerge unscathed from this treatment of us. Even now, my ships pursue us. Look at our captors, and think only of how you will kill them.”
“Slowly,” the Satrap said in a voice that still shook slightly. “Slowly they will die,” he said more firmly, “with much time to regret their stupidity.” He managed to sit up. He wrapped the scarlet cloak more closely about himself and glared at their guards. Anger, Kennit reflected, suited him. It drove the fear and childishness from his face. “My own nobles turned on me. They will pay for their treason. They, and their families. I will tear down their mansions, I will cut their forests, I will burn their fields. To the tenth generation, they will suffer for this. I know their names.”
A guard had overheard him. He gave the Satrap a disdainful shove with his foot. “Shut up. You’ll be dead before the day is out. I heard them say. They just want to do it where they all can witness it. Binding by blood, they call it.” He grinned, showing a sailor’s teeth. “You, too, ‘King’ Kennit. Maybe they’ll let me do it. I lost two shipmates to them damn serpents of yours.”
“KENNIT!”
The roar was the voice of the wind itself, the cry of an outraged god. The taunting guard spun around to look aft. A terrible shiver ran over Kennit. He did not have to look. It was the voice of his dead ship, calling him to join it. He struggled to stand, but without his crutch, it was hard. “Help me up!” he commanded the Satrap. At any other time the royal youth would probably have disdained such a command, but the sound of the pirate’s name still lingered in everyone’s ears. He stood quickly and extended a hand to the pirate. Even the men on deck had slowed in their appointed tasks to look back. A look of horror dawned on some faces. Kennit hauled himself to a standing position by the Satrap’s slender shoulder and stared wildly about for the ghost ship.
He found it, coming up swift on their starboard.
Impossibly, it was Paragon, transfigured in death to a youth. A ghostly white serpent gamboled before the ship. More swift than the wind, unnaturally fleet, the liveship drew alongside. Completing the nightmare, his mother stood on the foredeck, her white hair streaming in the wind. She saw him. She reached a beseeching hand toward him. A golden goddess stood beside her, and a dead man commanded the crew. Kennit’s tongue clove for an instant to the roof of his mouth. The ghosts of his past came on, impossibly swift, drawing abreast of the Jamaillian ship and then veering toward it. “Kennit!” the voice thundered again. “I come for you!” Paragon put cold fury in his voice. “Yield Kennit to me! I command it! He is mine!”
“Yield!” Vivacia’s voice cracked the sky, coming from the port side of the ship. Kennit’s view of her was blocked, but he knew she was close. His heart lifted painfully in his chest. She could save him. “Yield, Jamaillian ship, or we take you to the bottom!”
The Jamaillian ship had nowhere to go. Despite her master’s frantic commands to spill wind from her sails, he could not slow her fast enough. The Paragon cut recklessly toward her bow. The Jamaillian ship veered, but it was not enough. With a terrible splintering sound followed by the groans of stressed timbers, she caromed at an angle against Paragon. His wizardwood absorbed her impact, but splinters flew from the Jamaillian ship. The Jamaillian ship slewed around, all control lost. Overhead, canvas flapped wildly. Suddenly, there was another grinding impact as the Vivacia pressed up against her other side. It was a reckless maneuver, one that could take all three ships down. The halted momentum of the ships swung them all in a slowly turning circle. Sailors on every deck roared in dismay. Overhead, rigging threatened to tangle. To either side, the Marietta and the Motley swept past, to hold off approaching Jamaillian vessels.
The deck under Kennit was still shuddering from the impacts when grapples from both liveships seized onto it. Boarders from both sides leapt over the railings. The clash of fighting rose around them, supplemented with the wild shouts of the liveships themselves. Even the serpent added his trumpeting. Their captors were suddenly intent on defending their own lives.
“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 facedown. 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, fearfully 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 clamored 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 placeholder 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 worshiped, 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.
It hurt worse, now that she knew Brashen was alive. Every time she caught a glimpse of him on Paragon’s deck, her leaping joy was stained with dread. The thought of telling him tainted her anticipation of reunion. Would even Brashen grasp the whole of it? She was not sure what she feared most: that he would be enraged by it, as if Kennit had stolen from him, that he might spurn her as dirtied, or that he might dismiss it as a bad experience that she would get over. In not knowing how he would react, she suddenly feared that she did not know him at all. The open love and trust between Brashen and her was, in some ways, still new and fresh. Could it bear the weight of this truth? Her anger roiled inside her as she wondered if that, too, would be a thing that Kennit had destroyed.
Then there was no time to think anymore. They were beside the Jamaillian ship. Althea heard a terrible sound as it collided with something. Probably the Paragon, she thought with sudden agony. Her poor mad ship flung into this battle for Kennit’s sake. The Jamaillian ship loomed larger, and closer and—
“Brace!” Someone shouted the word.
An instant later, she knew it had been meant as a warning, but by then, she was sliding across the deck. Anger flashed through her as she rolled and skidded. How dared Wintrow risk her ship that way? Then she felt, through her flesh against the wizardwood, how intent the ship had been on this chase and capture. Vivacia had chosen the peril. Wintrow had done all he could to minimize it. Althea fetched up against one of the bodies on the deck. With a shudder, she rolled to her feet. The side of the Jamaillian ship was as close as a pier. She saw Etta make the jump, deck to deck, a blade in her hand. Had Wintrow led the way? She could not see him anywhere. She scrabbled for the blade the dead man still clutched.
An instant later, her feet hit the Jamaillian deck. There was fighting all around her, too thick for her to make sense of any of it. Where was her nephew? A Jamaillian sailor sprang to meet her wavering blade. Althea clumsily parried his first two efforts at killing her. Then, from somewhere, another blade licked in, slashing him across the chest. He turned with a cry and staggered away from her.
Jek was at her shoulder suddenly, grinning insanely as she did for any danger. “Think if I save the Satrap, he’ll marry me? I’d fancy being a Satrapess, or whatever she’s called.”
Before Althea could answer, something rocked the deck under her, sending combatants staggering. She clutched at Jek. “What was that?” she asked, wondering if the Jamaillian fleet was using its catapults against the locked ships. Her answer came in a frenzied shout from a Jamaillian sailor. “Cap’n, Cap’n, the damnable serpent has torn our rudder free. We’re taking on water bad!”
“We’d best get what we came for and get off this tub,” Jek suggested merrily. She plunged into the battle, not singling out any opponent, but scything a way for herself through the mêlée. Althea followed on her heels, doing little more than keeping men off their backs. “I thought I saw Etta—ah, here we are!” Jek exclaimed. Then, “Sa’s breath and El’s balls!” she swore. “They’re down and bloody, both of them!”
THE JAMAILLIAN CAPTAIN HAD TAUGHT HIS MEN TO OBEY without question. That was a thing to admire, until it was turned on you. Their complete obedience was in their eyes as they closed on Kennit. They’d kill both the pirate and the Satrap, without hesitation, on their captain’s order. Evidently the Satrap either had to be in their control, or dead. Kennit’s estimate of Cosgo’s value soared. He’d keep him alive and in his own control. Clearly that was where he was the greatest threat to the Jamaillians, and hence most valuable. They’d come through a serpent attack and risked everything to capture him. Kennit would take him back, and then they’d pay more dearly than they had ever imagined. Vivacia was alongside; he only needed to hold them off for a few minutes until Etta and Wintrow came for him.
“Get behind me!” he commanded the Satrap, and pushed him roughly back. Kennit braced his hand on the ship’s house to keep from toppling over. His body shielded the cowering Magnadon. With his free hand, Kennit tore his cloak loose. The oncoming men didn’t pause. He foiled the first man’s thrust by flinging his cloak around the blade as it came in and shoving it aside. He tried to grab for it, risking that he could wrench it loose from its owner’s grip, but it slipped out from the folds of heavy cloak.
The second man was a big beefy fellow, more blacksmith than swordsman. Without finesse or pretense, he stepped up and thrust his heavy blade through Kennit and into the Satrap. The blade pinned them together. “Got ’em both!” he exclaimed in satisfaction. His killer’s striped shirt was stained with grease, Kennit noted in shock. The man wrenched the blade back out of them and turned to face the boarding parties. Kennit and the Satrap fell together.
Even as he fell, Kennit did not believe it. This could not be happening, not to him. A shrill screaming, like a cornered rabbit, rose right behind him. The screaming ran down and became pain. It ruptured inside him and spread through his entire body. The pain was white, unbearably white, and so intense there was no need to scream. A long time later it seemed, the deck stopped his fall. Both his hands clutched at his middle. Blood poured out between his fingers. A moment later, he tasted blood, his own blood, salt and sweet in his mouth. He’d tasted blood before; Igrot had loved to backhand him. The taste of blood in his mouth, always the forerunner to worse pain.
“Paragon,” he heard himself call breathlessly, as he had always called when the pain was too intense to bear. “I’m hurt, ship. I’m hurt.”
“Keep breathing, Kennit.” The tiny voice from his wrist was urgent, almost panicked. “Hang on. They’re almost here. Keep breathing.”
Stupid charm. He was breathing. Wasn’t he? Unhappily he turned his eyes down. With every heavy breath, he spattered blood from his lips. His fine white shirt was ruined. Etta would make him a new one. He tasted blood, he smelled it. Where was Paragon? Why didn’t he take this pain? He tried to summon him by speaking his ship’s old words for him. “Keep still, boy,” he whispered to himself, as Paragon had always done. “Keep still. I’ll take it for you. Give it all to me. Just worry about yourself.”
“He’s alive!” someone cried out. He rolled his eyes up to the speaker, praying for deliverance. But the face that looked down at him was Jamaillian. “You jerk, Flad! You didn’t even kill him.” Efficiently, this man stabbed his slender blade into Kennit’s chest and dragged it out. “Got him that time!” The satisfaction in the voice followed Kennit down into the darkness.
THEY WERE TOO LATE. WINTROW SHOUTED HIS AGONY AND killed the man who had just killed his captain. He did it without thought, let alone remorse. The crew who had followed him from the Vivacia cut them a space on the crowded deck. Etta flung herself past Wintrow to land on her knees by Kennit. She touched his face, his breast. “He breathes, he breathes!” she cried in stricken joy. “Help me, Wintrow, help me! We have to get him back to Vivacia! We can still save him.”
He knew she was wrong. There was far too much blood, dark thick blood, and it still spilled from Kennit as they spoke. They couldn’t save him. The best they could do was to take him home to die, and they would have to act swiftly to do that. He stooped and took his captain’s arm across his shoulders. Etta got on the other side of Kennit, crooning to him all the while. That he did not cry out with pain as they lifted him proved to Wintrow that he was nearly gone. They had to hurry. The Jamaillians had been beaten back, but not for long.
The Satrap was underneath Kennit. As they lifted him off, the Satrap spasmed into life, screaming and rolling himself into a ball. “No, no, no, don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” he babbled. With the voluminous red cloak, he looked like a child hiding under his blankets.
“What a nuisance,” Wintrow muttered to himself, and then bit his tongue, scarcely believing he had uttered such words. As they started back to the ship with Kennit, he shouted to his crew, “Somebody bring the Satrap.”
Jek bounded past him from the edge of the group. Stooping, she picked the Satrap up in her arms, then shifted him over her shoulder. “Let’s go!” she proclaimed, ignoring the Satrap’s cries. Althea, at her side, menaced the closing Jamaillian warriors with a sword, guarding Jek’s back. Wintrow caught one flash from her dark and angry eyes. He tried not to care. He had to bring Kennit back to his own deck. He wished she could understand that despite what Kennit had done to her, there was still a bond between Kennit and him. He wished he could understand it himself. They crossed the deck at a half-run. Kennit’s leg and peg dragged behind them, leaving a scrawl of his blood in their wake. Someone caught his legs up as they went over the railings and helped them. “Cast off!” he shouted to Jola as soon as Althea and the others had regained the deck of the Vivacia. They turned to slash at Jamaillians, who sought to board them, intent on reclaiming the Satrap or at least his body. The ships began to move apart. A Jamaillian made a furious leap and fell into the widening gap. Their ship was wallowing now. Whatever the serpent had done to their rudder was flooding their holds. The same serpent watched their ship avidly, positioned just beneath the boat they were trying to get off. Wintrow tore his eyes away.
“Wintrow! Bring me Kennit!” Vivacia shouted. Then, even louder, “Paragon, Paragon, we have him! Kennit is here!”
Wintrow exchanged a glance with Etta. The pirate hung silently between them. Blood dripped from his chest to puddle on the deck. Etta’s eyes were wide and dark. “To the foredeck,” Wintrow said quietly. Then he shouted to the crew, “Get us clear of the Jamaillian ship. It’s sinking. Jola! Get us away before the fleet can close us in.”
“We’re a bit late for that!” Jek announced cheerily as she dumped the Satrap to his feet on Vivacia’s deck. Althea caught his arm to keep him from falling. As he gasped in outrage, Jek took hold of his shirt and tore it open. She inspected the dark wound that welled blood sluggishly down his belly. “I don’t think it hit anything really important. Kennit took your death for you. Best get below and lie down until someone has time to see to you.” Casually, she tore a hank of his shirt free and handed it to him. “Here. Press this on it. That will slow the blood.”
The Satrap looked at the rag she had thrust into his hand. Then he looked down at his wound. He dropped the rag nervelessly and swayed on his feet. Althea kept a firm grip on him as Jek took his other arm with a shake of her head. She rolled her eyes at Althea.
Althea stared after Wintrow. Kennit’s arm was across her nephew’s shoulders, Wintrow’s arm around his waist as they dragged him along. She clenched her jaws. That man had raped her and Wintrow had still risked his own life for him. The Satrap took a gasp of air. Then, “Malta!” he wailed, as a child would have cried “Mama!” “I’m bleeding. I’m dying. Where are you?”
A good question, Althea thought. Where was her little niece? She scanned the deck. Her eyes halted in amazement. Malta and Reyn were working together to take a wounded pirate below. Reyn’s left arm was swaddled in a thick white bandage. He went unveiled and Malta’s head was uncovered. In the sunlight, her scar glinted red. Althea saw her turn and speak briefly to Reyn, who nodded to her without hesitation. He put his arm around the man they had been helping and took him below while Malta hastened over to the Satrap. But she addressed her first words to Althea.
“Reyn thinks I’m beautiful. Can you believe that? Do you know what he said about my hands? That they will scale heavily as far as my elbows, most likely. He says if I rub off the dead skin, I’ll see the scarlet scales working through. He thinks I’m beautiful.” Her niece’s eyes shone with joy as she rattled words at Althea. And more than joy? Althea leaned forward incredulously. Reyn was right. Malta had a Rain Wild gleam to her eyes now. Althea lifted a hand to cover her mouth in shock.
Malta did not seem to notice. She slipped her arm around the Satrap, her face suddenly concerned. “You are hurt!” she exclaimed, surprised. “I thought you were just—oh, dear, well, come along, let’s take you below and see to that. Reyn! Reyn, I need you!” Cozening and coaxing, Malta led the Satrap of all Jamaillia away.
Althea turned away from the spectacle of the unmasked Rain Wilder hastening to her niece’s imperious summoning. She nudged Jek out of her stare. “Come on,” she told her. They hastened toward the foredeck, following Kennit’s blood trail. The beads and puddles of blood looked odd to her. Then it struck her. The wizardwood was refusing it. Kennit’s blood remained atop it, as did the other blood shed today. She tried to puzzle out what that might mean. Was Vivacia rejecting the dying pirate? She felt a sudden lift of hope.
An instant later, it turned to dismay as an immense splash showered her. “That was close!” Jek exclaimed. The next ballast stone hit Vivacia’s hull. The hard wood rang with the impact and the ship shuddered. Althea turned wildly, seeking a gap in the circle of ships that surrounded them. There wasn’t one. The Marietta and the Motley were trapped as well, though they were trying to break free. Another catapult lofted an immense stone toward them as Paragon drifted around the bow of the Jamaillian ship and into full view.
“ETTA, ETTA.” HIS PANTING WHISPER BARELY REACHED HER EARS.
“Yes, dearest, I’m here, hush, hush.” Another splash rocked the ship. “We’ll take you to Vivacia. You’ll be all right.” She tightened her hold on Kennit as they hurried him forward. She wanted to be gentle, but she needed to get him to the foredeck. Vivacia could lend him strength; she knew it, despite the wooden despair on Wintrow’s face. Kennit would be all right, he had to be all right. The danger of losing him drove all doubts from her mind and heart. What could it matter to her what he had done to anyone else? He had loved her, loved her as no one else ever had.
“I won’t be all right, my dear.” His head hung forward on his chest, his gleaming black curls curtaining his face. He coughed slightly. Blood sprayed. She did not know how he found strength to speak. His gasped whisper was desperate, urgent. “My love. Take the wizardwood charm from my wrist. Wear it always, until the day you pass it on to our son. To Paragon. You will name him Paragon? You will wear the charm?”
“Of course, of course, but you aren’t going to die. Hush. Save your strength. Here’s the ladder, this is the last hard bit, my love. Keep breathing. Vivacia! Vivacia, he’s here, help him, help him!”
The crewmen and Wintrow seemed so rough as they hauled him up onto the foredeck. Etta leapt up the ladder and hurried before them. She tore off her cloak and spread it out on the deck. “Here,” she cried to them, “put him here.”
“No!” Vivacia thundered. The figurehead had twisted around as far as she could, further than a real human could have turned. She held out her arms for Kennit.
“You can help him,” Etta sought her reassurance. “He won’t die.”
Vivacia didn’t answer her question. Her green eyes were deep as the ocean as they met Etta’s gaze. The inevitability of the ocean was in her look. “Give him to me,” she said again quietly.
An unuttered scream echoed through Etta’s heart. Air would not come into her lungs. Her whole body tingled strangely, and then went numb. “Give him to her,” she conceded. She could not feel her mouth move, but she heard the words. Wintrow and Jola raised Kennit’s body, offering him to Vivacia. Etta kept Kennit’s hand tightly in hers as the ship took him in her cradling arms. “Oh, my love,” she mourned as Vivacia received him. Then the figurehead turned away and she had to release his dangling hand.
Vivacia lifted Kennit’s limp body to her breast and held him close. Her great head bent over him. Could a liveship weep? Then she lifted her head, flinging back her raven hair. Another rock struck her bow. The whole ship rang with the impact.
“Paragon!” she cried aloud. “Hurry, hurry. Kennit is yours. Come and take him!”
“No!” Etta wailed, uncomprehending. “You would give him to his enemy? No, no, give him back to me!”
“Hush. This must be,” Vivacia said kindly but firmly. “Paragon is not his enemy. I give him back to his family, Etta.” Gently, she added, “You should go with him.”
Paragon loomed closer and closer still. His hands groped blindly toward Vivacia. “Here, I am here,” she called, guiding him to her. It was an insane maneuver to bring two ships into such proximity, bow to bow, let alone in the midst of a hail of stones. One such missile crashed down, the splash wetting them both. They ignored it. Paragon’s hands suddenly clasped Vivacia and fumbled their way to Kennit in her arms. For a long instant, the two liveships rocked in a strange embrace, the pirate between them. Then, silently, Vivacia placed Kennit’s lax body in Paragon’s waiting arms.
Etta, standing at the railing, watched the change that came over the ship’s young face. He caught his lower lip between his teeth, perhaps to keep it from trembling. Then he raised Kennit’s body.
Paragon’s pale blue eyes opened at last. He looked a long time into the pirate’s face, gazing with the hunger of years. Then, slowly, he clasped him close. Kennit looked almost doll-like in the figurehead’s embrace. His lips moved, but Etta heard nothing. The blood from Kennit’s injuries vanished swiftly as it touched Paragon’s wood, soaking in immediately, and leaving no stain of passage. Then he bowed over Kennit and kissed the top of his head with an impossible tenderness. At last, Paragon looked up. He gazed at her with Kennit’s eyes and smiled, an unbearably sad smile that yet held peace and wholeness.
An elderly woman on Paragon’s deck strained toward Kennit’s body. Tears ran down her face and she cried aloud but wordlessly, a terrible gabbling wail. Behind her, a tall dark-haired man stood with his arms crossed tightly on his chest. His jaw was set, his eyes narrowed, but he did not try to interfere. He even stepped forward and helped support Kennit’s body as Paragon released it into the woman’s reaching arms. Gently they stretched him on the liveship’s deck.
“Now you,” Vivacia said suddenly. She reached for Etta, and she stepped into the liveship’s grasp.
SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS, SOMEONE WAS BEATING A DRUM. It was an unsteady rhythm, loud-soft, loud-soft, and slowing, slowing inexorably to peace. There were other sounds, shouts and angry cries, but they no longer mattered. Closer to his ears, familiar voices spoke. Wintrow muttering to him and to someone else, “Damn, sorry, sorry, Kennit. Be careful, can’t you, support his leg as I lift—”
On the other side of him, Etta was talking. “. . . Hush. Save your strength. Here’s the ladder, this is the last hard bit, my love. Keep breathing . . .” He could ignore them if he chose. If he ignored them, what could he focus on? What was important now?
He felt Vivacia take him. Oh, yes, this would be best, this would be easiest. He relaxed and tried to let go. He felt the life seeping out of his body, and he hovered, waiting to be gone. But she held him still, cupped in her hands like water, refusing to take him. “Wait,” she whispered to him. “Hold on, just for a moment or two longer. You need to go home, Kennit. You are not mine. You were never mine, and we always knew that. You need to be one once more. Wait. Just a bit longer. Wait.” Then she called aloud, “Paragon. Hurry, hurry. Kennit is yours. Come and take him!”
Paragon? Fear stabbed him. Paragon was lost to him, no more than a boyish ghost now. He had killed him. His own ship could never take him back. He could never go home. Paragon would fling him away, would leave him to sink beneath the sea just as he had—
He knew the touch of the big hands that accepted him. He would have wept, but there were no tears left. He tried to make his mouth move, to speak aloud how sorry he was. “There, there,” someone said comfortingly. Paragon? His father? Someone who loved him said, “Don’t fear. I have you now. I won’t let you go. You will not be hurt anymore.” Then he felt the kiss that absolved him without judgment. “Come back to me,” he said. “Come home.” The darkness was no longer black. It grew silvery and then as Paragon embraced him and took him home he faded into white.