“And I ate him. ” There was satisfaction in Relpda’s quiet rumble.
The copper distracted Carson completely from what Sedric had said. His head swiveled to face her. “You ate him? You ate Jess?” He was incredulous.
“It’s what dragons do,” she replied defensively. Sedric’s own words, coming out of her mouth.
Sedric found himself justifying it. “Jess wanted me to help him trick her into keeping still while he killed her. I wouldn’t. So he stabbed her with a spear and then came after me. Carson, he was going to kill her and cut her up and sell her. And he didn’t care if he had to kill me first to do it. ”
The hunter’s head swiveled back to regard Sedric skeptically. His eyes wandered over Sedric, his bruised face and battered condition, assigning new meaning to what he saw. Sedric felt his muscles tighten as he faced that gaze, fearing that soon it would turn to judgment and condemnation. Instead, he saw disbelief slowly become admiring amazement.
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“Jess was one of the nastiest fellows I’d ever had to work alongside. He had a reputation for being a dirty fighter, the kind who didn’t stop even after the other fellow was willing to give in. And you stood up to him for your dragon?” He glanced over at Relpda. Nothing remained of the elk carcass. She’d eaten it all.
“I had to,” Sedric said quietly.
“And you won?”
Sedric just looked at him. “I’m not sure I’d describe it as winning. ”
The comment surprised a guffaw out of Carson. Then Relpda intruded.
“And I ate him. Sedric fed him to me. ” She seemed to savor the memory.
“That isn’t exactly what happened,” Sedric hastily interposed. “I never intended for that to happen. Though I’ll admit that at the time, what I mostly felt was relief. Because I wasn’t sure if anything else would have stopped him. ”
“And Jess is what happened to your face, then?”
Sedric lifted a hand to his jaw. His cheekbone was still tender, and the swollen inside of his cheek kept snagging on his teeth. But he felt almost strangely proud of his injury now. “Yes, it was Jess. I’d never been hit in the face like that before. ”
Carson gave a brief snort of laughter. “Wish I could say that! I’ve caught plenty of fists with my face. Though I’m truly sorry to see it happen to yours. ”
Almost timidly, the hunter put out a large hand. The touch of his rough fingers on Sedric’s face was gentle. Sedric was shocked that such a slight brush against his cheek could send such a rush of feeling through him. The fingers pressed gently around his eyes socket and then the line of his cheekbones. He sat very still, wondering if there would be more, wondering how he would react if there was. But Carson dropped his hand and turned his face away, saying hoarsely, “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think. You should heal. ” A moment later, he fed another stick to the firepot. “We should get some sleep soon if we’re going to get up early. ”
“Jess said Leftrin was in on it. ” Sedric blurted the statement out, letting it be its own question.
“In on what?”
“Killing dragons and selling off the parts. Teeth, blood, scales. He said that whoever had sent him had said that Leftrin would be willing to help him. ”
Carson’s dark gaze grew troubled. “And did he?”
“No. That was part of Jess’s complaint. He seemed to feel Leftrin had cheated him. ”
Carson’s expression lightened somewhat. “That seems likely to me. I’ve known Leftrin a long time. And over the years, once or twice, he’s been involved in a few things that I found, well, questionable. But slaughtering dragons and selling off their bodies? No. To Chalced? Never. There are a number of reasons why I couldn’t imagine him getting involved with something like that. Tarman being the big one. ” His brow wrinkled as he stared into his fire. “Still, it would be interesting to know why Jess thought he would. ”
He shook his head, then stood up slowly, rolling his shoulders as he did so. He was surprisingly graceful for his size, catching his balance easily as he stepped down into his small boat. His own blanket was neatly stowed, folded, and shoved high under the seat out of the damp. Sedric still clutched the damp and wrinkled blanket Carson had tossed at him. He looked at Carson’s boat, at every item in a precise location, and he suddenly felt childish and ashamed. Over in the other boat, a hatchet was probably rusting from its immersion in the bloody bilgewater. Carson had arrived and had seen to every need that he and the dragon had, without a single wasted movement. Sedric hadn’t even remembered to spread his blanket out to dry.
He wondered how Carson saw him. Incompetent? Self-indulgent? Rich and spoiled? I’m not truly any of those things, he thought. I’m just out of my place right now. If we were back in Bingtown, and he came to where I was helping Hest prepare to negotiate a trade, he’d see what I truly am. Carson would be the incompetent and useless one there. Then even that thought seemed self-indulgent and spoiled, a child’s wish to show off for someone he desired to impress. What did it matter what Carson thought of him? When had he begun to care what an ignorant Rain Wild hunter thought of him?
He shook out the smelly blanket and slung it around his shoulders. Within its shelter, he sat hugging himself. And thinking.
NIGHT WAS FULL dark around Tarman. Captain Leftrin walked his decks. The night sky was a black strip sprinkled with glittering stars. To one side of the barge, the river stretched out to an invisible distant shore. On the other side the forest loomed, making the barge small. At the foot of the forest, on a narrow muddy bank, the dragons slept. On the roof of the deckhouse, laid out in neat rows as if they were corpses, the keepers slept. And Leftrin was awake.
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Swarge was supposed to be on watch, but he’d sent him off to his bed. The entire crew was asleep. The river was down, Tarman was safely snugged on mud for the night, and his crew deserved a rest. It would be the first full night of sleep any of them had had since the wave hit. They all needed the rest. Everyone needed to sleep.
Even Alise. That was why she had sought her room early. She was exhausted still. He began another slow circuit of the decks. He didn’t need to walk laps around his ship. All was safe and calm now. He could have gone off to his own bunk and slept and left Tarman to watch for himself. No one would fault him for that.
He passed Alise’s door. No light shone from under it. Doubtless she was asleep. If she had wanted his company, she would have lingered at the galley table. She hadn’t. She’d vanished immediately after dinner. He’d hoped that she would stay. He faced that fading hope frankly. It would have been the first and only night that they’d been together on board his ship without Sedric’s presence as a reminder of who and what she was. He had hoped to steal this one night from her Bingtown life and possess it as something of their own.
But she’d excused herself from the table and vanished into her own room.
What did that mean?
Probably that she was a lot smarter than he was. Which, he told himself, he’d known all along. What intelligent man would want to share harness with a woman stupider than himself? His Alise was smart, and he knew it. Not just educated but intelligent.
But he wished she hadn’t chosen to be smart on this particular night.
And what sort of a man was he, that he felt Sedric’s absence as a sort of relief rather than a loss? The man had been Alise’s friend since childhood. He knew that. He might find him an annoying spoiled twit of a fellow, but Alise cared about him. She was probably wondering if he was dead or in dire circumstances tonight. And here he was, brutishly thinking only that the watchman was gone.
He finished his circuit of his ship and stood for a time on Tarman’s blunt-nosed bow. He leaned on the railing and looked at the “shore. ” Somewhere there the dragons slept in the mud, but he couldn’t see them. The forest was pitch before his eyes. He spoke to his ship.
“Well, tomorrow’s another day, Tarman. One way or another, Carson will return. And then what? Onward?”
Of course.
“You seem so sure of it. ”
I remember it.
“So you’ve told me. But not the way it is now. ”
No. That’s true.
“But you think we ought to keep going?”
The others have no choice. And I think it’s the least we can do for them.
Leftrin said nothing. He glided his hands lightly along the bow railing, thinking. Tarman was an old ship, older than any of the other liveships. He was one of the first to have been put together from wizardwood, as it was known then. He hadn’t been designed to be a trading ship of any kind, only a simple wooden barge, given a thick layer of the only sort of wood that seemed impervious to the Rain Wild River’s acid rages. In a tradition much older than Bingtown or even Jamaillia, Leftrin’s ancestor had painted eyes on his ship not only to give it a wise expression but as a superstition that the barge would literally “watch out” for itself on the dangerous waterway. At the time, the only known properties of wizardwood were that it was hard and heavy and could withstand acid. No one had known then that after lifetimes of human presence on board, a liveship could attain its own awareness. That would not be discovered until the first sailing ships with figureheads were carved from the stuff.
But that didn’t mean that Tarman hadn’t become aware. It didn’t mean that his captains hadn’t known and felt his presence.
The sailors of Leftrin’s lineage had known there was something peculiar about their ship, especially those who grew up on his deck, who slept and played aboard him. They developed an affinity for both the barge and the river, an instinctive knack for navigating and for avoiding the ever-shifting sandbars and hidden snags of the forest waterway. They dreamed strange dreams that they seldom shared except with other members of the family. The dreams were not just dreams of the river and sliding silently through it. They had dreams of flying and sometimes dreams of swimming in a deep and blue-shadowed world.
Tarman had become aware, just as all liveships eventually did. But he had no mouth to speak with, no carved hands or human face. He was silent, but his eyes were old and knowing.
Perhaps Leftrin should have left him that way. Things had been good between them. Why had he desired to try to make them better?
The wizardwood log had been both a windfall and a complication in his life.
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He’d made his plans so carefully. He’d reduced his crew to a handful of men whom he absolutely trusted. He’d found men who had worked wizardwood, men with sterling reputations for honesty and carpentry skill. He’d scrimped and saved and bartered for the tools he needed to have. And when all was ready, he’d transported them to where he had found and secured the log of wizardwood.
And he had done it knowing that it was neither log nor wood.
He’d run Tarman aground, and then with lines and pulleys he’d winched the barge up into an isolated inlet along the river’s shore. He’d lost most of a summer’s work to that project. The wizardwood log had to be cut into rough planks and blocks on site and then fastened to Tarman. The barge had to be lifted up on blocks to allow the workmen access to the bottom; the soft ground along the river meant that every day, the blocking had to be reinforced and releveled.
But when all was finished Tarman had what the barge had conveyed to Leftrin it most desired. Four stout legs with webbed feet and a long tail had been added to the hull. Tarman could now go almost anywhere he and his captain wished to go.
It had taken several weeks for Tarman to get complete motion in all his limbs. Leftrin had been terrified for him the first time the blocks were jerked out from under the hull. But Tarman had caught himself, with difficulty, and slowly dragged himself back into the river. The ship’s eyes had gleamed with satisfaction as he propelled himself about in the shallows. He was equally content to swim in the river or crawl along in the shallows. His crew became more a sham than a workforce. They preserved the illusion that Tarman was a barge like any other.
Every scrip and scrap of leftover “wood” had been stowed inside Tarman as dunnage. Not so much as a sliver of the stuff had he sold; that would have been breaking faith with his ship. He respected the dragon stuff Tarman was made from. As the weeks and months passed, he had sensed the ship integrating his new material and memories. Tarman’s placid nature had changed; he had become more assertive and adventurous, sometimes even edging into mischievousness. Leftrin had enjoyed the changes in his ship just as much as if he’d been watching a child grow to manhood. Tarman’s eyes had become more expressive, his connection to his captain more eloquent, and his efficiency as a barge a wonder. If any of the other Traders suspected Leftrin’s secret, none asked about it. Almost every Trader had his own store of undisclosed magic or technology. Not prying too deeply into the affairs of others was an essential part of being a Trader. Leftrin had had no problems, and his profits had steadily grown.
All had been well until one of the carvers had flapped his mouth to that Chalcedean trader, and the hunter had come on board to threaten them, his own kind. Leftrin gritted his teeth so hard that it made a noise. Beneath him, he felt Tarman dig his feet into the mud in anger. Betrayal! Betrayal is not to be tolerated. The traitor must be punished.
Leftrin immediately loosened his grip on the railing and calmed his own emotions. The captain of a liveship always had to keep a rein on his darker thoughts. His emotions could infect his ship in dangerous ways. The strength and clarity of Tarman’s response startled him. He seldom conveyed his thoughts so directly. He had not realized the ship felt so strongly about the hunter. So now he calmly pointed out that the river had done their task for them. Jess was gone, most likely drowned.
At that thought, he sensed a wave of grim satisfaction from the ship, tinged with a bloody amusement. Did the ship know more of Jess’s fate than he had shared? Leftrin wondered uneasily. And then he hastily turned his thoughts away from that. The liveship had a right to his own secrets. If he had seen Jess struggling in the water and deliberately turned away from him, that was the ship’s business, not Leftrin’s.
Don’t be troubled about that. I didn’t need to do anything so crude.
He ignored the amusement in the ship’s tone. “Well, I’m glad of that, Tarman. I’m glad of that. If I’d had to face that, well. Just glad it was a decision that didn’t come my way. ” He sensed the ship’s calm assent. “And tomorrow we can expect Carson to rejoin us. ”
Yes. You should expect that.
Sometimes the ship just knew things. The ship had heard Carson’s horn when he’d first found the survivors and told Leftrin. The captain had learned better than to ask him how he sensed things or to ask for details. Only once had Tarman been in a mood to tell him anything, and then he had only said, Sometimes the river shares its secrets with me. Sometimes, but not always. For tonight, Leftrin simply accepted that tomorrow the hunter would rejoin them, and he asked no more. Instead he suggested, “Think we’ll head upriver tomorrow, then? Or anchor another night here?”
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Probably another night here. The dragons can use a bit more rest, and there is still dead fish for them to feed on. If they are going to take rest, they may as well have it while there is food. Even if it is rank food.
“Will they sicken on it?”
Dragons are not such a feeble race as humans. Carrion displeases the palate and eating too much of it can bring on a bellyache. But dragons can eat what they must, and when dead fish is all that is to be had, then they will eat it. And go on.
“As shall we, then,” Leftrin affirmed.
As was agreed, the barge reminded him.
“As was agreed,” the captain concurred. For he had not been quite honest with Alise in that small matter. The fact was that even before he had docked in Cassarick, he had known t
hat he and Tarman would be escorting the dragons up the river. It was why he had been able to load so swiftly and depart. The fact that it dovetailed so completely with Alise’s plans had seemed like fate to him, as if he were predestined to enjoy her company. It had been a wonder and a pleasure to see her shine at that meeting.
She’s not asleep. She’s in the sneaking whiner’s chamber.
“I think I might just go check on that. See if she’s having trouble sleeping. ”
Think you might have the cure for such wakefulness? the ship asked him in amusement.
“Perhaps some quiet talk with a friend,” Leftrin returned with what dignity he could muster.
Didn’t know you’d already introduced her to your “friend. ” You go along. I’ll keep watch here.
“Watch your words!” Leftrin rebuked his ship, but felt only Tarman’s amusement in response. “You’re chatty tonight. ” He made the comment not just to divert the ship’s attention but because he had seldom experienced such clarity of thought from Tarman. It was much more common for him to have an unusual dream, or to sense emotions through his connection to the ship. Direct conversation with Tarman was highly unusual and he wondered at it.
Sometimes, the ship agreed. Sometimes, when the river is right and the dragons are close by, it all seems easier and clearer. There was a time of stillness and then Tarman added, Sometimes you are more willing to hear me. When our thoughts align. When we agree on what we want. We both know what you want right now.
He lifted his hands from the railing and went in search of Alise. Despite his attempt at rebuking the barge, a small smile crept across his face. Tarman knew him far too well.
He stood for a time on the dark deck outside Sedric’s door. Tarman was right. A very faint glow was visible at the crack at the bottom of the door. He tapped lightly and waited. For a time, all was silence. Then he heard the scuff of feet on the deck and the door opened a crack. Alise peered out, limned against a faint candle glow.
“Oh!” She sounded surprised.
“I saw the light coming out from under the door. Thought I’d best check on who was in here. ”
“It’s only me. ” She sounded disheartened.
“I see that. May I come in?”