CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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PIRATES AND
CAPTIVES

“They’re pirates, you damn fool!” Kyle spat at Sa’Adar. “Muster your men to repel them. We’ve still got a chance to get away. With Wintrow at the helm, Vivacia will …”

“Yes, they are pirates,” Sa’Adar agreed triumphantly. “And they fly the Raven flag. They’re the pirates that every slave in Jamaillia prays for. They capture slaveships and free the slaves. And they feed the crews to their own stinking serpents.” The last he uttered in a low growl that was at odds with the joyous smile on his face. “Truly, Sa has provided,” he added, and then he was striding away from them, to the waist of the ship where the gathered slaves were pointing at the Raven flag and shouting joyously to one another.

The word had spread through the ship like fire. As the Marietta came alongside, grapples were thrown. Wintrow felt Vivacia’s apprehension as the sharpened hooks dragged across her decks to catch in her railing. “Steady, my lady,” he breathed to her again. Her anxiety mingled with his own. They had no crew with which to resist the capture, even if he had had the stomach for more fighting and blood. He felt his exhaustion hung on him like a heavy, cold garment. He kept her wheel, even as the other ship hauled in tight to her. Like an outpouring of ants from a disturbed nest, gaudily dressed sailors were suddenly swarming over her sides. Someone in the waist was barking orders, to slaves as well as sailors. With a swiftness and order that was almost magical, men began to flow up the masts. The sails were quickly and neatly reefed. He heard the anchor chain rattle out. Someone was barking orders in a voice of authority that the slaves responded to as they crowded out of the way of the pirate crewmen.

Wintrow kept still, and he hoped, inconspicuous among the other slaves. A feeling of almost relief welled up in him. These pirates were taking over his ship, but at least they moved competently. She was in the hands of true seamen.

The relief was short lived as, a moment later, bodies began to splash overboard. The white serpent that Wintrow had supposed left far behind in the storm suddenly broke to the surface to gape eagerly for the corpses. Several others, more gaudily colored, lifted their heads at a distance to regard the ship both warily and curiously. One suddenly lifted a great crest around its neck and flourished its head with a challenging bellow.

Vivacia gave an incoherent cry at sight of them. “No! Get them away!” she cried out. Then, “Not Gantry, no! Do not give him to the foul things! Wintrow! Make them stop, make them stop!”

The only response was a terrible laughter.

He glanced at his father. His eyes looked dead. “I have to go to her,” Wintrow apologized. “Stay here.”

His father snorted. “There’s no sense in bothering. You’ve already lost her. You listened to that priest and let the pirates just board her. You just stood here and let the pirates take her. Just as last night you did nothing to warn us when the slaves rose against us.” He shook his head. “For a time, last night, I thought I had misjudged you. But I was right all along.”

“Just as I stood by and did nothing as you changed my ship into a slaver,” Wintrow pointed out bitterly. He looked his father up and down slowly. “I fear I was right, too,” he said. He looped off the wheel and went forward without a glance back. The ship, he told himself. I do it for the ship. He did not leave the man there alone and injured because he hated his father. He did not leave him there half-hoping someone would kill him. He only did it because the ship needed him. He moved towards the foredeck. When he reached the waist, he tried to thread his way inconspicuously through the gathered slaves there.

By daylight, the released slaves were an even more ungodly sight than they had been in the dimness of the holds. Chafed by chains and the movement of the decks beneath them, their rag-draped hides showed scabby and pale. Privation had thinned many to near bones. Some few wore better clothes, stripped from the dead or salvaged from the crew’s belongings. The map-faces seemed to have appropriated his father’s wardrobe and seemed to be more at ease than some of the others. Many had the blinking, confused gaze of animals caged long in the dark and suddenly released. They had broken into the ship’s stores. Barrels of biscuit had been dragged out onto the deck and stove open. Some of the slaves clutched handfuls of ship’s biscuit, as if to promise themselves food readily available. Freed of chains, they looked as if they could not yet recall how to move freely or act as they wished. Most shuffled still, and looked at each other only with the dull recognition that cattle have for one another. Humanity had been stolen from them. It would take them time to regain it.

He tried to move as if he were truly one of the slaves, slipping from one huddled knot to another. Sa’Adar and his map-faces stood in the center of the ship’s waist, apparently offering a welcome to the pirates. The priest was speaking to three of them. The few words that Wintrow overheard seemed to be a flowery speech of welcome and thanks. None of the three looked particularly impressed. The tall man looked sickened by it. Wintrow shared his feelings.

They were not his concern. Vivacia was. Her futile pleas had died away to small inarticulate sounds. Wintrow caught sight of two map-faces on the lee side of the ship. They were systematically throwing the stacked bodies of slain crewmen and slaves overboard. Their faces were detached, their only comments relating to the gluttony of the white serpent who seized them. Wintrow caught a glimpse of Mild as he went over, and would recall forever the image of bare feet dangling from ragged trousers as the white serpent seized his friend’s body in an engulfing maw. “Sa forgive us,” he prayed on a breath. He spun away from the sight and got his hands on the ladder to the foredeck. He had started up it when he heard Sa’Adar order a map-face, “Fetch Captain Haven here.” Wintrow halted an instant, then swarmed up it and raced to the bow. “Vivacia. I’m here, I’m here.” He pitched his voice low.

“Wintrow!” she gasped. She turned to him, reached up a hand. He leaned down to touch it. The face she turned up to him was devastated with both shock and fear. “So many are dead,” she whispered. “So many died last night. And what will become of us now?”

“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “But I promise that of my own will, I will never leave you again. And I will do all I can to stop any further killing. But you have to help me. You must.”

“How? No one listens to me. I’m nothing to them.”

“You are everything to me. Be strong, be brave.”

In the waist there was a sudden stir, a muttering that grew to an animalistic roar. Wintrow didn’t need to look. “They have my father down there. We have to keep him alive.”

“Why?” The sudden harshness in her voice was chilling.

“Because I promised him I would try. He helped me through the night, he stood by me. And you. Despite all that is between us, he helped me keep you off the rocks.” Wintrow took a breath. “And because of what it would do to me if I just stood by and allowed them to kill my father. Because of who that would make me.”

“There is nothing we can do,” she said bitterly. “I could not save Gantry, I could not save Mild. Not even Findow for the sake of his fiddling could I save. For all these slaves have suffered, they have only learned to disregard suffering. Pain is the coin they use now in all their transactions. Nothing else reaches them, nothing else will satisfy them.” An edge of hysteria was creeping into her voice. “And that is what they fill me with. Their own pain, and their hunger for pain and …”

“Vivacia,” he said gently, and then more firmly, “Ship. Listen to me. You sent me below to recall who I was. I know you did. And you were right. You were right to do so. Now. Recall who you are, and who has sailed you. Recall all you know of courage. We will need it.”

As if in response to his words, he heard Sa’Adar’s voice raised in command. “Wintrow! Come forth. Your father claims you will speak for him.”

A breath. Two. Three. Finding himself at the center of all things, finding Sa at the center of himself. Recalling that Sa was all and all was Sa.

“Do not think you can hide yourself!” Sa’Adar’s voice boomed out. “Come out. Captain Kennit commands it!”

Wintrow pushed the hair back from his eyes and stood as tall as he could. He walked to the edge of the foredeck and looked down on them all. “No one commands me on the deck of my own ship!” He threw the words down at them and waited to see what would happen.

“Your ship? You, made a slave by your father’s own hand, claim this ship as yours?” It was Sa’Adar who spoke, not one of the pirates. Wintrow took heart.

He did not look at Sa’Adar as he spoke but at the pirates who had turned to stare at him. “I claim this ship and this ship claims me. By right of blood. And if you think that true claim can be disputed, ask my father how well he succeeded at it.” He took a deep breath and tried to bring his voice from the bottom of his lungs. “The liveship Vivacia is mine.”

“Seize him and bring him here,” Sa’Adar ordered his map-faces disgustedly.

“Touch him and you all die!” Vivacia’s tone was no longer that of a frightened child, but that of an outraged matriarch. Even anchored and grappled as she was, she contrived to put a rock in her decks. “Doubt it not!” she roared out suddenly. “You have soaked me with your filth, and I have not complained. You have spilled blood on my decks, blood and deaths I must carry with me forever, and I have not stirred against you. But harm Wintrow and my vengeance will know no end. No end save your deaths!”

The rocking increased, a marked motion that the Marietta did not match. The anchor rope creaked complainingly. Most unnerving for Wintrow, the distant serpents lashed the surface of the sea, trumpeting questioningly. The ugly heads swayed back and forth, mouths gaping as if awaiting food. A smaller one darted forward suddenly, to dare an attack at the white one, who screamed and slashed at it with myriad teeth. Cries of fear arose from Vivacia’s deck as slaves retreated from the railings and from the foredeck, to pack themselves tightly together. From the questioning tones of the cries, Wintrow surmised that few of them had any understanding of what the liveship was.

Suddenly a woman broke free of the pirate group, to race across the deck and then swarm up onto the foredeck. Wintrow had never seen anything like her. She was tall and lean, her hair cropped close. The rich fabric of her skirts and loose shirt were soaked to her body, as if she had stood watch on deck all night, yet she looked no more bedraggled than a wet tigress would. She landed with a thud before him. “Come down,” she said to him, and her eyes made it more a command than her voice did. “Come down to him now. Don’t make him wait.”

He did not answer her. Instead he spoke to the ship. “Don’t fear,” he told her.

“We are not the ones who need to fear,” Vivacia replied. He had the satisfaction of seeing the woman’s face go blank with astonishment. It was one thing to hear the liveship speak, another to stand close enough to see the angry glints in her eyes. She glowered scornfully at the woman on her deck. The Vivacia gave a sudden shake to her head that tossed her carved tresses back from her face. It was a womanly display, a challenge from one man’s female to another. The woman brushed back from her brow the short black strands that had fallen over her forehead and returned the figurehead’s stare. For an instant it shocked Wintrow that the two could look so different and yet so frighteningly alike.

Wintrow did not wait any longer. He leaped lightly from the foredeck to the waist of the ship. Head up, he strode across the deck to confront the pirates. He did not even look at Sa’Adar. The more he saw of the man, the less he thought of him as a priest.

The pirate chief was a large, well-muscled man. Dark eyes glinted above the burn scar on his cheek. A former slave himself, then. His unruly hair was caught back in a queue and further confined in a bright gold kerchief. Like his woman, his opulent clothing was soaked to him. A man who worked his own deck, then, Wintrow thought, and felt a grudging respect for that.

He met the man’s gaze. “I am Wintrow Vestrit, of the Bingtown Trader Vestrits. You stand on the decks of the liveship Vivacia, also of the Vestrit Family.”

But it was a tall pale man next to the scarred man who replied to him. “I am Captain Kennit. You address my esteemed first mate, Sorcor. And the ship that was yours is now mine.”

Wintrow looked him up and down, shocked beyond speech. Numbed as his nose was to the stench of humans, this man reeked of disease. He glanced down to where Kennit’s leg stopped, and took note of the crutch he leaned on, on the swollen leg that distended the fabric of his trousers as a sausage stuffs a casing. When he met Kennit’s pale eyes, he noted how large and fever-bright they were, how the man’s flesh clung to his skull. When Wintrow replied, he spoke gently to the dying man. “This ship can never be yours. She is a liveship. She can only belong to one of the Vestrit family.”

Kennit made a brief motion of his hand to indicate Kyle. “Yet this man claims he is the owner.” Wintrow’s father yet managed to stand, and almost straight. Neither fear nor his physical pain did he permit to show. He was a man who waited now. Kyle spoke not a word to his son.

Wintrow shaped his words with care. “He ‘owns’ her, yes, in the sense that one can own a thing. But she is mine. I do not claim to own her, any more than a father can claim to own his child.”

Captain Kennit looked him up and down disdainfully. “You look a bit young of a pup to be claiming any kind of a child. And by the mark on your face, I would say the ship owned you. I take it your father married into a Trader family, then, but you are blood of that line.”

“I am a Vestrit by blood, yes.” Wintrow kept his voice even.

“Ah.” Again the small gesture of his hand toward Kyle. “Then we don’t need your father. Only you.” Kennit turned back to Sa’Adar. “That one you may have, as you requested. And those other two.”

There was a splash, and a trumpeting from one of the serpents. Wintrow looked starboard just in time to see two map-faces tip the other Jamaillian sailor over the edge. He went screaming until the white serpent cut his cry short with a snap. Wintrow’s own cry of “Wait!” went unheeded. Vivacia gave a wordless cry of horror, and flailed at the serpents, but could not reach them. Map-faces were laying hold of his father. He sprang, not towards them, but at Sa’Adar. He gripped the man by the front of his shirt. “You promised them they would live! If they worked the ship for you through the storm, you promised them they would live!”

Sa’Adar shrugged and smiled down at him. “It’s not my will, boy, but that of Captain Kennit. He does not have to keep my word for me.”

“You spin your word so thin, I doubt anyone could be bound by it,” Wintrow cried furiously. He whirled on the men who had seized his father. “Set him free.”

They paid no attention to him as they forced his struggling father to the rail. Physically, Wintrow had no chance against them. He turned back to Captain Kennit, speaking quickly. “Set him free! You have seen how the ship is about the serpents! If you throw one of her own to them, she will be greatly angered.”

“No doubt,” the pirate captain replied lazily. “But he isn’t truly one of her own. So she’ll get over it.”

“I won’t,” Wintrow told him furiously. “And you will soon discover that if you cut one of us, we both bleed.” His father was struggling, but wordlessly and without much strength. Beside the ship, the white serpent trumpeted eagerly. Wintrow knew he had not the strength to prevail against those two men, let alone however many would muster to Kennit’s command.

Kennit, however, was another matter. Swift as a snake striking, Wintrow seized the pirate captain by his shirt front. He jerked him forward, so that his crutch fell to the deck and he must depend on Wintrow or fall also. The sudden motion wrung a low cry of pain from the man. The mate sprang forward with a snarl.

“Back!” Wintrow warned him. “And stop those men. Or I’ll kick him in that leg and spatter his rotten flesh all over the deck.”

“Wait! Release him!” The command came not from Sorcor, but the woman. The men halted uncertainly, looking from her to Sa’Adar. Wintrow did not waste time speaking to them. Kennit was all but fainting in Wintrow’s grasp. Wintrow gave him another shake and growled up into the man’s face. “You burn with fever and you stink of decay. As you stand here, on the one leg left to you, you may kill both my father and myself. But if you do, you will not possess my ship for more than a handful of days before you follow us down. And whoever you leave behind upon the Vivacia’s decks will perish, too. The ship will see to that. So I suggest we find a bargain between us.”

Captain Kennit lifted his hands slowly, to clutch at Wintrow’s wrists with both of his own. The boy didn’t care. At the moment, he had it within his power to cause the man incredible pain, perhaps enough pain to kill him with the shock of it. The deep lines in the pirate’s face told Wintrow that he, too, knew that. Beads of pain sweat shone on the pirate’s brow. For a scant moment, Wintrow’s eyes were caught by the odd wrist-brooch the man wore. A tiny face, like to the pirate’s own, grinned up at him gleefully. It unsettled him. He looked up again at the man’s face, met his eyes and stared deep into their coldness. They returned his gaze and seemed to look deep into the core of him. He refused to be cowed.

“Well? What say you?” Wintrow demanded, with the barest hint of a shake. “Do we bargain?”

The pirate’s mouth scarcely moved as, in the softest whisper imaginable, Wintrow heard him say, “A likely urchin. Perhaps something useful can be made of him.”

“What?” Wintrow demanded furiously. Savage anger rose in him at the man’s mockery.

An extremely strange look had come over the pirate’s face. Kennit stared down at him in a sort of fascination. For an instant, he seemed to recognize him, and Wintrow, too, felt an uncanny sense of having been here, done this and spoken these words before. There was something compelling in Kennit’s gaze, something that demanded to be acknowledged. The silence between them seemed to bind them together.

Wintrow felt a sudden prick against his ribs. The woman with the knife said, “Take Kennit gently, Sorcor. Boy, you have missed your chance to die swiftly. All you have bought is that you and your father will die together, each praying to be the first to go.”

“No. No, Etta, stand aside.” The pirate managed his pain well, never losing his educated diction. He still had to take a breath to speak on. “What is your bargain, boy? What do you have left to offer? Your ship, freely given?” Kennit shook his head slowly. “I already have her, one way or another. So I am intrigued. Just what do you think you have to trade with?”

“A life for a life,” Wintrow offered slowly. He spoke knowing that what he proposed was likely beyond his skill to perform. “I have been trained in healing, for I was once promised to Sa’s priesthood.” He glanced down at the pirate’s leg. “You need the skills I have. You know you do. I’ll keep you alive. If you allow my father to live.”

“No doubt you’ll want to cut more of my leg off for such a bet.” His question was contemptuous.

Wintrow looked up, searching the older man’s eyes for acceptance. “You already know that must be done,” he pointed out to him. “You were simply waiting until the pain of the festering would make the pain of the removal seem like a relief.” He glanced down at the stump again. “You have nearly waited too long. But I am still ready to honor the bargain. Your life for my father’s.”

Kennit swayed in his grasp and Wintrow found himself steadying the man. All about them, men were frozen in a tableau of watching and waiting. The map-faces had his father pressed up against the railing, that he might watch the serpent that waited so impatiently.

“It’s a poor sort of bet,” Kennit observed weakly. “Up the ante. Your life as well.” He grinned a sickly grin. “So that if I win by dying, we all lose together.”

“You have a strange idea of winning,” said Wintrow.

“Then you include your crew in your wager,” Vivacia suddenly pointed out. “For if you take Wintrow’s life from me, I shall see every one of you to a watery grave.” She paused. “And that is the only bargain I offer to any of you.”

“High stakes,” Wintrow observed quietly. “Nonetheless, I accept them if you do.”

“I am scarcely in a position to shake hands upon it,” the pirate pointed out. His tone was as cool and charming as ever, yet Wintrow could see the man’s strength fading even as they spoke. A small smile bent his lips. “You do not try to make me agree that if I live, I give your ship back to you?”

It was Wintrow’s turn to shake his head slowly. His smile was as small as Kennit’s. “You cannot take her from me. Nor could I give her to you. That, I think, is something you must discover for yourself. But your word will suffice to bind me to the rest of our wager. And that of your mate and the woman,” he added. He looked past Kennit to the woman as he added, “And if my father comes to ill from the slaves aboard this ship, I shall take it to cancel the bet.”

“There are no slaves aboard this ship!” Sa’Adar declared pompously.

Wintrow ignored him. He waited until the woman gave a slow nod.

“If you have my captain’s word, you have my word,” Sorcor added gruffly.

“Fine,” Wintrow declared. He turned his head and looked straight at Sa’Adar as he spoke. “Clear the way to my father’s salon. I want the pirate captain in his bed there. And let my father go to Gantry’s cabin and take some rest. I will be seeing to his ribs later.”

For just an instant, Sa’Adar’s eyes narrowed at the boy. Wintrow was not sure what passed through the man’s mind. He knew he could not trust the priest to abide by anyone’s word, not even his own. The man would bear watching.

Slaves milled apart to open a channel to the aftercastle. Some moved grudgingly and others impassively. Some few looked at him and seemed to remember a boy with a bucket of water and a cool, moist rag. Wintrow watched his father led away to Gantry’s cabin. He never turned to look back at his son, nor spoke a word.

Wintrow decided he should press his power, to see how far it would extend. He glanced at the map-faces that flanked Sa’Adar. “This deck is still a shambles,” he observed quietly. “I want the canvas and line cleared from it, and all mess scrubbed away. Then begin below decks. Free men have no excuse to live in squalor.”

The map-faces looked from him to Sa’Adar and back again.

Sorcor broke the impasse. “You can obey the boy when he tells you to do it, or you can obey me. The point is, it gets done and promptly.” He looked away from them to his own crew. The map-faces slowly moved away from Sa’Adar, to take up their directed tasks. The priest remained standing as he was. Sorcor was giving commands. “… and Cory on the wheel, Brig running the deck. I want anchor up and sail on as soon as you see the Marietta start to move. We’ll all be heading back to Bull Creek. Move lively, now, show them how a sailor does his work.” He glanced again at the slowly dispersing map-faces and included the priest, who stood with his arms crossed on his chest. “Lively. There’s work for all of you. Don’t make Brig find it for you.”

Two steps brought him to Wintrow’s side, where the boy more held than threatened the man anymore. As gently as if he were picking up a sleeping infant, the burly mate eased his arms about his captain. The smile he gave Wintrow showed him more teeth than a bulldog’s snarl. “You lived through laying hands on the captain once. It won’t happen again.”

“No. I trust it won’t need to,” Wintrow replied, but it was the woman’s cold black eyes on his back that made his belly cold.

“I’ll see you to your room, sir,” Sorcor suggested.

“After I have presented myself to the ship,” Kennit countered. The man actually tried to smooth his shirt front.

Wintrow smiled. “I’ll be pleased to introduce you to Vivacia.”

The methodical slowness with which Kennit worked his way across the deck made Wintrow’s heart sink. He was a man held together by sheer will and sense of self. Should either falter, he would die. As long as he was determined to live, Wintrow had a powerful ally in curing him. But if he gave it up, all the skill in the world would not prevail against the spreading infection.

The ladder to the foredeck was a major obstacle. Sorcor did his best to maintain Kennit’s dignity as he helped him up it, while Etta, who had preceded them, turned to glare down at the gawking slaves. “Have you nothing better to do than stare?” she demanded of them, and then to Brig she suggested, “There are sick slaves below, no doubt. These ones could be employed in bringing them up for air.” A moment later Kennit gained the foredeck. She tried to take his arm, but he waved her away. By the time Wintrow had gained the foredeck, Kennit had used his crutch to make his painful way to the bow.

Vivacia turned to look over her shoulder. Her eyes traveled up and down him before she said in a quietly reserved voice, “Captain Kennit.”

“My lady Vivacia.” He bowed to her, not as deeply as a healthy man might have, but more than a nod. When he straightened, he returned her inspection. Wintrow watched uneasily, for the man’s nostrils widened and the smile that curved his mouth was both approval and avarice. His frank appraisal flustered Vivacia. In an almost girlish response, she drew back and lifted her arms to cross her wrists over her breasts. Kennit’s smile only widened. Vivacia’s eyes went very wide, but she could not seem to stop the smile that crept to her own face.

She broke the silence first. “I do not know what you want of me. Why have you attempted to claim me this way?”

Kennit took a step closer. “Ah, my lady of wood and wind, my swift one, my beauty. What I want could not be plainer. I wish to make you my own. So my first question must be, what do you wish of me? What must I do to win you?”

“I do not … No one has ever …” Obviously flustered, she turned to Wintrow. “Wintrow is mine and I am his. We have both discovered that nothing can change that. Certainly you cannot come between us.”

“Can’t I? So says the girl who speaks fondly of her brother, until her lover steals her heart away.”

Wintrow found himself speechless. Perhaps the only other person as flabbergasted at this interplay was the woman who had come aboard with Kennit. Her eyes were narrowed, like a cat’s when she stares down a hostile dog. Jealous, Wintrow thought. She is jealous of his sweet words to the ship. As I, he admitted to himself, am jealous at Vivacia’s confusion and pleasure.

The fine grain of her cheeks had taken on a pink blush. The breath that moved her bare breasts behind her arms came more swiftly. “I am a ship, not a woman,” she pointed out to him. “You cannot be my lover.”

“Can’t I? Shall not I drive you through seas no other man would dare, shall not we together see lands that are the stuff of legends? Shall not we venture together under skies where the stars have not been named yet? Shall not we, you and I, weave such a tale of our adventures that the whole world will be in awe of us? Ah, Vivacia, I tell you plainly that I shall win you to me. Without fear, I tell you that.”

She looked from Kennit to Wintrow. Her confusion was pretty, as was the sweetness of her pleasure at his words. “You shall never take Wintrow’s place with me, regardless of what you say,” she managed. “He is family.”

“Of course not!” Kennit told her warmly. “I do not wish it. If he makes you feel safe, then we shall keep him aboard forevermore.” Again he smiled at her, a smile both wicked and wise. “I do not wish to make you feel safe, my lady.” He crossed his arms on his chest, and despite his crutch and shortened leg, he managed to look both handsome and rakish. “I have no desire to be your little brother.”

In the midst of this courtship, his leg must have pained him, for he suddenly faltered, losing his smile to a grimace of pain. He bowed his head forward with a gasp, and in an instant Sorcor was at his side.

“You are hurt! You must go and rest now!” the Vivacia exclaimed before anyone else could speak.

“I fear I must,” Kennit concurred so humbly that Wintrow suddenly knew he was more than pleased at the ship’s reaction. He even wondered if the man had deliberately sought it. “So I must leave you now. But I shall call again, shall I? As soon as I am able?”

“Yes. Please do.” Her hands fell away from her chest. She extended one towards him, as if to invite him to touch palms with her.

The pirate managed another deep bow but made no move to touch her. “Until then,” he told her, fondness already in his voice. He turned aside, to say in a huskier voice. “Sorcor. I shall require your assistance yet again.”

As the brawny pirate took his captain’s weight and began to help him aft, Wintrow caught sight of the look that the woman gave the ship. It was not pleasant.

“Sorcor!” All turned back to the Vivacia’s imperious command. “Be careful with him. And when you have finished there, I would borrow some of your archers. I’d like these serpents discouraged, if nothing else.”

“Captain?” Sorcor asked doubtfully.

Kennit leaned on him heavily. His face was moist with sweat, but still he smiled. “Give the lady her due. A liveship under me. Court her for me, man, until I can charm her myself.” With a sigh like death, he folded suddenly into his mate’s arms. As Sorcor hefted the man and then bore him off to what had been his father’s stateroom, Wintrow wondered at the strange smile Kennit yet wore. The woman walked behind them, her eyes never leaving Captain Kennit’s face.

Wintrow turned and walked slowly to the bow, to the spot where Kennit had stood. No one, he marked, moved to stop him. He was as free aboard the ship as he had ever been.

“Vivacia,” he said quietly.

She had been staring after Kennit. She broke from her bemusement to look up at Wintrow. Her eyes were wide with wonder. They sparkled.

She lifted a hand to him and he leaned to let their palms touch. No words were needed, yet he spoke them anyway. “Be careful.”

“He is a dangerous man,” she agreed. “Kennit.” Her voice caressed the name.

         

He opened his eyes to a well-appointed room. The grain of the paneled walls had been carefully selected to match. The fixed lanterns were of brass that would gleam when properly polished again. Rolled charts graced the chart rack like fat hens in nesting boxes. They would be a treasure trove of information, the gathered wealth of a Bingtown Trader family’s charts. There were other niceties, too. The washstand with its matching porcelain bowl and pitcher. The framed paintings fastened securely to the walls. The meticulously carved shutters for the thick glass windows. A tasteful and elegant room indeed. True, it had been recently rifled, and the captain’s possessions scattered about, but Etta moved quietly about it, setting it to rights. There was an over-lying smell of cheap incense that could not disguise the under-lying stench of a slaver. Yet it was obvious to him that the Vivacia had not been so used for long; it should be possible to scrub it out of her. Once more she could be a bright and tidy vessel. And this was a room for a true captain.

He glanced down at himself. He had been undressed and a sheet draped his legs.

“And where is our boy-captain?” Kennit asked Etta.

She spun at the sound of his voice and then hurried to his side. “He has gone to tend his father’s ribs and head. He said it would not take long, and he wished to have the chamber cleared of clutter before he tried to heal you.” She looked at him and shook her head. “I do not understand how you can trust him. He must know that if you live this ship can never be his. Nor do I understand why you will allow a mere boy to do what you forbade three skilled healers even to think of in Bull Creek.”

“Because he is a part of my luck,” he said quietly. “The same luck that has given this ship to me so easily. You must see this is the ship I am meant to have. The boy is part and parcel of that.”

He almost wanted to make her understand. But no one must know of the words the charm had spoken when the boy looked so deeply into his eyes. No one must know of the bond forged between them in that instant, a bond that frightened Kennit as much as it intrigued him. He spoke again to keep her from asking any more questions. “So. We are under way all ready?”

“Sorcor takes us back to Bull Creek. He has put Cory on the wheel and Brig in charge of the deck. We follow the Marietta.”

“I see.” He smiled to himself. “And what do you think of my liveship?”

She gave him a bittersweet smile. “She is lovely. And I am already jealous of her.” Etta crossed her arms on her chest and gave him a sideways glance. “I do not think we shall get along easily. She is too strange a thing, neither woman nor wood nor ship. I do not like the pretty words you sprinkle so thickly before her, nor do I like the boy Wintrow.”

“And as ever, I care little what you like or dislike,” Kennit told her impatiently. “What can I give the ship to win her, save words? She is not a woman in the same way you are.” When the whore still looked sulky, he added savagely, “And were not my leg so painful, I would put you on your back and remind you of what you are to me.”

Her eyes changed suddenly from black ice to dark fire. “Would that you could,” she said gently, and disgusted him with the warmth of the smile his rebuke earned him.

         

Kyle Haven lay on Gantry’s bare bunk, facing the bulkhead. All that the ransacking slaves had left of the mate’s possessions were scattered on the floor. There was not much. Wintrow stepped over a carved wooden chain and a single discarded sock. All else that had been Gantry’s—his books, his clothes, his carving tools—had been taken or left in fragments, either by the slaves in their first rush of plundering, or by the pirates in their far more organized gathering of loot.

“It’s Wintrow, Father,” he told him as he shut the door behind him. It would not latch anymore; during the uprising, someone had kicked it open rather than simply trying the knob. But the door stayed shut, and the two map-faces that Sa’Adar had posted as sentries did not try to open it again.

The man on the bed did not stir.

Wintrow set the basin of water and the rags he’d salvaged down on the cracked remains of Gantry’s desk and turned to the man in the bed. He hastily set his fingers to the pulsepoint in his throat, and felt his father jolt back to consciousness at his touch. The man shuddered away from him with an incoherent sound, then sat up hastily.

“It’s all right,” Wintrow said comfortingly. “It’s only me.”

His father showed his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “It’s only you,” he conceded. “But I’ll damn well bet it isn’t all right.”

He looked terrible, worse than he had when the slaves were trying to feed him to the serpent. Old, Wintrow thought to himself. He looks suddenly old. Stubble stood on his cheeks and blood from his head wound was smeared through it. He had come in here intending to clean his father’s wounds and bind them. Now he felt himself strangely reluctant to touch the man. It was not dismay at the blood, nor was he too proud to do such tasks. His time in the hold tending the slaves had eroded those things away long ago. This was a reluctance to touch because the man was his father. Touch might affirm that link.

Wintrow faced what he felt squarely. He wished with all his heart he had no bond to this man.

“I brought some wash water,” he told him. “Not much. Fresh water supplies are very low just now. Are you hungry? Shall I try to get some hard-tack for you? It’s about all that is left.”

“I’m fine,” his father said flatly, not answering his question. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account. You’ve more important friends to pander to just now.”

He ignored his father’s choice of words. “Kennit’s sleeping. If I’m to have any chance of healing him, he’ll need all the rest he can get to strengthen him.”

“So. You’ll truly do it. You’ll heal the man who’s taken your ship from you.”

“To keep you alive, yes.”

His father snorted. “Bilge. You’d do it anyway, even if they’d fed me to that snake. It’s what you do. Cower before whoever has the power.”

Wintrow tried to consider it impartially. “You’re probably right. But not because he has power. It would have nothing to do with who he is. It’s life, father. Sa is life. While life exists, there is always the possibility of improvement. So, as a priest, I have a duty to preserve life. Even his.”

His father gave a sour laugh. “Even mine, you mean.”

Wintrow gave a single nod.

He turned the gashed side of his head toward his son. “May as well get to it, then, priest. As it’s all you’re good for.”

He would not be baited. “Let’s check your ribs first.”

“As you will.” Moving stiffly, his father drew off what remained of his shirt. The left side of his chest was black and blue. Wintrow winced at the clear imprint of a boot in his flesh. It had obviously been done after his father was already down. The rags and the water were the only supplies he had; the ship’s medicine chest had completely disappeared. Doggedly, he set out to at least bind the ribs enough to give them some support. His father gasped at his touch, but did not jerk away. When Wintrow had tied the final knot, Kyle Haven spoke.

“You hate me, don’t you, boy?”

“I don’t know.” Wintrow dipped a rag and started to dab blood from his face.

“I do,” his father said after a moment. “It’s in your face. You can scarcely stand to be in this room with me, let alone touch me.”

“You did try to kill me,” Wintrow heard himself say calmly.

“Yes. I did. I did at that.” His father gave a baffled laugh, then gasped with the pain of it. “Damn me if I know why. But it certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Wintrow sensed he would get no more explanation than that. Perhaps he didn’t want one. He was tired of trying to understand his father. He didn’t want to hate him. He didn’t want to feel anything for him at all. He found himself wishing his father had not existed in his life. “Why did it have to be this way?” he wondered aloud.

“You chose it,” Kyle Haven asserted. “It didn’t have to be this way. If you had just tried it my way … just done as you were told, without question, we’d all be fine. Couldn’t you have, just once, trusted that someone else knew what was good for you?”

Wintrow glanced about the room as if looking about the entire ship. “I don’t think any of this was good for anyone,” he observed quietly.

“Only because you muddled it! You and the ship. If you both had cooperated, we’d be halfway to Chalced by now. And Gantry and Mild and … all of them would still be alive. You’re to blame for this, not I! You chose this.”

Wintrow tried to think of an answer to that, but none came. He began to bind his father’s head wound as best as he could.

         

They worked her decks well, these brightly clad pirates. Not since Ephron had sailed her had she enjoyed a crew so swiftly responsive to her. She found herself in turn accepting their competent mastery of her sails and rigging in a sort of relief. Under Brig’s direction, the former slaves moved in an orderly procession, drawing buckets of water and taking them below to clean her holds. Others pumped the filthy bilge out while still others worked with scrubbing stones on her deck. No matter how they abraded the blood stains, her wood would never release them. She knew that, but spoke no word of it. In time the humans would see the futility of it and give it up. The spilled food had been gathered and restowed. Some few worked at removing the chains and fetters that festooned her holds. Slowly they were restoring her to herself. It was the closest she had felt to content since the day she had been quickened.

Content. And there was something else she felt, something unsettling. Something much more fascinating than contentment.

She extended her awareness. In the mate’s cabin, Kyle Haven sat on the edge of the narrow bunk while his son silently washed the blood from the gash on his head. His ribs were already wrapped. There was a quiet in the room that went beyond silence, as if they did not even share a language. The silence ached. She pulled away from it.

In the captain’s salon, the pirate dozed restlessly. She was not aware of him as keenly as she was of Wintrow. But she could sense the heat of his fever, feel the uneven rhythm of his breathing. Like a moth drawn to a candleflame, she approached him. Kennit. She tried the name on her tongue. A wicked man. And dangerous. A charming, wicked and dangerous man. She did not think she liked his woman. But Kennit himself … He had said he would win her to him. He could not, of course. He was not family. But she found that there was great pleasure in anticipating his attempts. My lady of wood and wind, he had called her. My beauty. My swift one. Such silly things for a man to say to a ship. She smoothed her hair back from her face and took a deep breath.

Perhaps Wintrow had been right. Perhaps it was time she discovered what she wanted for herself.