The Liveship Traders Series

by Robin Hobb

  ‘Me, too,’ he commiserated. He probably meant the remark in sympathy, but she bristled to it. How could he say that? Vivacia wasn’t his family ship. How could he possibly feel about her as Althea did? The silence stretched between them. A group of sailors came in the door and claimed an adjacent table. She looked at Brashen and could think of nothing to say. The door opened again and three longshoremen came in. They began calling for beer before they were even seated. The musicians glanced about as if awakening, and then launched into a full rendition of the bawdy little tune they’d been tinkering with. Soon it would be a noisy, crowded room again.

  Brashen drew circles on the table with the dampness from his mug. ‘So. What will you do now?’

  There. The very question that had been stabbing her all day. ‘I guess I’ll go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Just as you told me to do months ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because maybe you were right. Maybe I’d better go and mend things there as best I can, and get on with my life.’

  ‘Your life doesn’t have to be there,’ he said quietly. ‘There are a lot of other ships in the harbour, going to a lot of other places.’ He was too off-handedly casual as he offered, ‘We could go north. Like I told you. Up in the Six Duchies, they don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, so long as you can do the work. So they’re not that civilized. Couldn’t be much worse than life on board the Reaper.’

  She shook her head at him wordlessly. Talking about it made her feel worse, not better. She said the words anyway. ‘Vivacia docks in Bingtown. If nothing else, I could see her sometimes.’ She smiled in an awful way. ‘And Kyle is older than I am. I’ll probably outlive him, and if I’m on good terms with my nephew, maybe he’ll let his crazy old aunt sail with him sometimes.’

  Brashen looked horrified. ‘You can’t mean that!’ he declared. ‘Spend your life waiting for someone else to die!’

  ‘Of course not. It was a joke.’ But it hadn’t been. ‘This has been a horrible day,’ she announced abruptly. ‘I’m ending it. Good night. I’m going up to bed.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Because I’m tired, stupid.’ It was suddenly more true than it had ever been in her life. She was tired to her bones, and deeper. Tired of everything.

  The patience in his voice was stretched thin as he said, ‘No. Not that. Why didn’t you come to meet me?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to bed you,’ she said flatly. Even too tired to be polite any more.

  He managed to look affronted. ‘I only invited you to share a meal with me.’

  ‘But bed was what you had in mind.’

  He teetered on the edge of a lie, but his honesty won out. ‘I thought about it, yes. You didn’t seem to think it went so badly last time…’

  She didn’t want to be reminded. It was embarrassing that she had enjoyed what they had done, and all the more so because he knew she had enjoyed it. At the time. ‘And last time, I also told you it couldn’t happen again.’

  ‘I thought you meant on the ship.’

  ‘I meant anywhere. Brashen… We were cold and tired, we’d been drinking, there was the cindin.’ She halted, but could find no graceful words. ‘That’s all it was.’

  His hand moved on the table top. She knew then just how badly he wanted to touch her, to take her hand. She put her hands under the table and gripped them tightly together.

  ‘You’re certain of that?’ His words probed his pain.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ She met his eyes squarely, defying the tenderness there.

  He looked aside before she did. ‘Well’ He took a deep breath, and then a long drink from his mug. He leaned towards her on one elbow and tried for a convincing grin as he suggested, ‘I could buy the cindin if you wanted to supply the beer.’

  She smiled back at him. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied quietly.

  He shrugged one shoulder. ‘If I buy the beer as well?’ The smile was fading from his face.

  ‘Brashen.’ She shook her head. ‘When you get right down to it,’ she pointed out reasonably, ‘we hardly even know one another. We have nothing in common, we aren’t—’

  ‘All right,’ he cut her off gruffly. ‘All right, you’ve convinced me. It was all a bad idea. But you can’t blame a man for trying.’ He drank the last of his beer and stood up. ‘I’ll be going then. Can I offer you a last piece of advice?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She braced herself for some tender admonition to take care of herself, or be wary.

  Instead he said, ‘Take a bath. You smell pretty bad.’ Then he left, sauntering across the room and not even looking back from the door. If he had stopped at the door to grin and wave, it would have dispersed the insult. Instead, she was left feeling affronted. Just because she had refused him, he had insulted her. As if to pretend he had never wanted her, because she was not perfumed and prettied up. It certainly hadn’t bothered him the last time, and as she recalled, he had smelled none too fresh himself. The gall of the man. She lifted her mug. ‘Beer!’ she called to the sour innkeeper.

  *

  Brashen hunched his shoulders to the dirty rain that was driving down. As he walked back to the Red Eaves he carefully thought about nothing. He stopped once to buy a stick of coarse cindin from a street corner vendor miserable in the rain, and then walked on. When he reached the doors of the Red Eaves he found them barred for the night. He pounded on them, unreasonably angry at being shut out in the rain.

  Above his head, a window opened. The landlord stuck his head out. ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded.

  ‘Me. Brashen. Let me in.’

  ‘You left the washing room a mess. You didn’t scrub out the trough. And you left the towels in a heap.’

  He stared up at the window in consternation. ‘Let me in,’ he repeated. ‘It’s raining!’

  ‘You are not a tidy person!’ the innkeeper shouted down at him.

  ‘But I paid for a room!’

  For an answer, his duffel bag came flying out the window. It landed in the muddy streets with a splat that spattered Brashen as well. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, but the window above him shut firmly. For a time he knocked and then kicked at the barred door. Then he shouted curses up at the closed window. He was throwing great handfuls of greasy mud up at it when the city guards came by and laughingly told him to move along. Evidently it was a situation they had seen before, and more than once.

  He slung his filthy sea-bag over his shoulder and strode off into the night to find a tavern.

  26

  GIFTS

  ‘THE WINTER MOONLIGHT IS CRISP. It makes the shadows very sharp and black. The shore rocks are sitting in pools of ink, and your hull rests in absolute blackness. Then, because of my fire, there’s an overlay of another kind of shadow. Ones that jump and shift. So, when I look at you, parts of you are stark and sharp in the moonlight, and other parts are made soft and mellow by the firelight.’

  Amber’s voice was almost hypnotic. The warmth of her driftwood fire, kindled with great difficulty earlier in the evening, touched him distantly. Warm and cold were things he had learned from men, the one pleasant, the other unpleasant. But even the concept that warm was better than cold was a learned thing. To wood, it was all the same. Yet on a night like tonight, warm seemed very pleasant indeed.

  She was seated, cross-legged she had told him, on a folded blanket on the damp sand. She leaned back against his hull. The texture of her loose hair was finer than the softest seaweed. It clung to the grain of his wizardwood hull. When she moved, it dragged across his planks in strands before it pulled free.

  ‘You almost make me remember what it was like to see. Not just colours and shapes, but the times when sight was a pleasure to indulge in.’

  She didn’t reply but lifted her hand and put the palm flat against his planking. It was a gesture she used, and in some ways it reminded him of making eye-contact. A significant glance exchanged without eyes. He smiled.

  ‘I brought you something,’ she said into the
comfortable silence.

  ‘You brought me something?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Really?’ He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever brought me anything before.’

  She sat up straight. ‘What, never? No one’s ever given you a present?’

  He shrugged. ‘Where would I keep a possession?’

  ‘Well… I did think of that. This is something you could wear. Like this. Here, give me your hand. Now, I’m very proud of this, so I want to show it to you a piece at a time. It took me a while to do this, I had to oversize them, to get them to scale, you know. Here’s the first one. Can you tell what it is?’

  Her hands were so tiny against his as she opened the fingers of his hand. She set something in his palm. A piece of wood. There was a hole in it, and a heavy braided cord ran through it. The wood had been sanded and smoothed and shaped. He turned it carefully in his fingers. It curved, but here there was a projection and at the end of it, a fanning out. ‘It’s a dolphin,’ he said. His fingers followed the curve of the spine again, the flare of the flukes. ‘This is amazing,’ he laughed aloud.

  He heard the delight in her voice. ‘There’s more. Move along the cord to the next one.’

  ‘There’s more than one?’

  ‘Of course. It’s a necklace. Can you tell what the next one is?’

  ‘I want to put it on,’ he announced. His hands trembled. A necklace, a gift to wear, for him. He didn’t wait for her to reply, but took it by the cord and shook it open. He set it carefully over his head. It tangled for a moment against the chopped mess of his eyes, but he plucked it clear and set it against his chest. His fingers ran rapidly over the beads. Five of them. Five! He felt them again more slowly. ‘Dolphin. Gull. Seastar. This is… oh, a crab. And a fish. A halibut. I can feel its scales, and the track where its eye moved. The crab’s eyes are out on the end of their stalks. And the starfish is rough, and there are the lines of suckers underneath. Oh, Amber, this is wonderful. Is it beautiful? Does it look lovely on me?’

  ‘Why, you are vain! Paragon, I never would have guessed.’ He had never heard her so pleased. ‘Yes, it looks beautiful on you. As if it belongs. And I had worried about that. You are so obviously the work of a master carver that I feared my own creations might look childish against your fineness. But, well, to praise my own work is scarcely fitting, but I shall. They’re made from different woods. Can you tell that? The starfish is oak, and the crab I found in a huge pine knot. The dolphin was in the curve of a willow knee. Just touch him and follow the grain with your fingers. They are all different grains and colours of wood; I don’t like to paint wood, it has its own colours you know. And I think they look best on you so, the natural wood against your weathered skin.’

  Her voice was quick and eager as she shared these details with him. Intimate as if no one in the world could understand such things better. There was no sweeter flattery than the quick brush of her hand against his chest. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she begged.

  ‘Of course.’ His fingers travelled slowly from one bead to the next, finding new details of texture and shape.

  ‘From what I’ve heard, the figurehead of a liveship is painted. But when the ship quickens, the figurehead takes on colour of its own. As you have. But… how? Why? And why only the figurehead, why not all the ship’s parts that are made of wizardwood?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said uneasily. Sometimes she asked him these sorts of questions. He did not like them. They reminded him too sharply of how different they were. And she always seemed to ask them just when he was feeling closest to her. ‘Why are you the colours you are? How did you grow your skin, your eyes?’

  ‘Ah. I see.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I thought perhaps it was something you willed. You seem such a marvel to me. You speak, you think, you move… can you move all of yourself? Not just your carved parts, like your hands and lips, but your planking and beams as well?’

  Sometimes. A flexible ship could withstand the pounding of wind and waves better than one fastened too tightly together. Planks could shift a tiny bit, could give with the stresses of the water. And sometimes they could shift a bit more than that, could twist apart from each other to admit a sheet of silent water that spread and deepened as cold and black as night itself. But that would be cold-hearted treachery. Unforgivable, unredeemable. He jerked away from the burning memory and did not speak the word aloud. ‘Why do you ask?’ he demanded, suddenly suspicious. What did she want from him? Why did she bring him gifts? No one could really like him, he knew that. He’d always known that. Perhaps this was all just a trick, perhaps she was in league with Restart and Mingsley. She was here to spy out all his secrets, to find out everything about wizardwood and then she would go back and tell them.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Amber said quietly.

  ‘No? Then what did you mean to do?’ he sneered.

  ‘Understand you.’ She did not respond in kind to his tone. There was no anger in her voice, only gentleness. ‘In my own way, I am as different from the folk of Bingtown as I am from you. I’m a stranger here, and no matter how long I live here or how honestly I run my business, I will always be a newcomer. Bingtown does not make new folk welcome. I get lonely.’ Her voice was soothing. ‘And so I reach out to you. Because I think you are as lonely as I am.’

  Lonely. Pitiful. She thought he was pitiful. And stupid. Stupid enough to believe that she liked him when she was really just trying to discover all his secrets. ‘And because you would like to know the secrets of wizardwood,’ he tested her.

  His gentle tone took her in. She gave a quiet laugh. ‘I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t curious. Whence comes the wood that can turn to life? What sort of a tree produces it, and where do such trees grow? Are they rare? No, they must be rare. Families go into debt for generations to possess one. Why?’

  Her words echoed Mingsley’s too closely. Paragon laughed aloud, a harsh booming that woke the cliff birds and sent them aloft, crying in the darkness. ‘As if you didn’t know!’ he scoffed. ‘Why does Mingsley send you here? Does he think you will win me over? That I will sail willingly for you? I know his plans. He thinks if he has me, he can sail fearlessly up the Rain Wild River, can steal trade there that belongs rightfully only to the Bingtown Traders and the Rain Wild Traders.’ Paragon lowered his voice thoughtfully. ‘He thinks because I am mad, I will betray my family. He thinks that because they hate me and curse me and abandon me that I will turn on them.’ He tore the bead necklace from his throat and flung it down to the sand. ‘But I am true! I was always true and always faithful, no matter what anyone else said or believed. I was true and I am still true.’ He lifted his voice in hoarse proclamation. ‘Hear me, Ludlucks! I am true to you! I sail only for my family! Only for you.’ He felt his whole hull reverberate with his shout.

  Chest heaving, he panted in the winter night. He listened, but heard nothing from Amber. There was only the snapping of the driftwood fire, the querulous notes of the cliff birds as they resettled awkwardly in the dark, and the endless lapping of the waves. No sound at all from her. Maybe she had run off while he was shouting. Maybe she had crept off into the night, ashamed and cowardly. He swallowed and rubbed at his brow. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing. He rubbed at his neck where the necklace cord had snapped. He listened to the waves creep closer as the tide rose. He heard the driftwood collapse into the fire, smelled the gust of smoke as it did so. He startled when she spoke.

  ‘Mingsley didn’t send me.’ He heard her stand abruptly. She walked to the fire and he heard the shifting of wood in it. Her voice was quiet and controlled when she spoke. ‘You are right, the first time I came here, he brought me. He proposed to cut you into bits, purely for the sake of your wizardwood. But from the first time I saw you, my heart cried out against that. Paragon, I do wish I could win you over. You are a wonder and a mystery to me. My curiosity has always been greater than my wisdom. But largest of all is my own lonel
iness. Because I am a long way from home and family, not just in distance but in years.’

  Her words were quick and hard as falling stones. She was moving about as she spoke. He heard the brush of her skirts. His quick ears caught the small sound of two pieces of wood clicking together. His beads, he suddenly thought in desolation. She was gathering them up. She would take her gift away.

  ‘Amber?’ he said pleadingly. His voice went high on her name and broke, as it sometimes did when he was afraid. ‘Are you taking my beads away?’

  A long silence. Then, in a voice almost gruff, she said, ‘I didn’t think you wanted them.’

  ‘I do. Very much.’ When she didn’t say anything, he gathered his courage. ‘You hate me now, don’t you?’ he asked her. His voice was very calm, save that it was too high.

  ‘Paragon, I…’ her voice dwindled away. ‘I don’t hate you,’ she said suddenly, and her voice was gentle. ‘But I don’t understand you either,’ she said sadly. ‘Sometimes you speak and I hear the wisdom of generations in your words. Other times, without warning, you are a spoiled ten year old.’

  Twelve years old. Nearly a man, damn you, and if you don’t leatn to act like a man on this voyage, you’ll never be a man, you worthless, whining, titty-pup. He put his hands to his face, covered the place where his eyes had been, the place the betraying tears would have come from. He moved one hand, to put it firmly over his mouth so the sob would not escape. Don’t let her look at me just now. Don’t let her see me.

  She was still talking to herself. ‘I don’t know how to treat you, sometimes. Ah. There’s the crab. I have them all now. Shame on you, throwing these like a baby throws toys. Now be patient while I mend the string.’

  He took his hand away from his mouth and took a steadying breath. He voiced his worst fear. ‘Did I break… are they broken?’

  ‘No, I’m a better workman than that.’ She had moved back to her blanket by the fire. He could hear the small sounds of her working, the tiny taps of the beads against each other. ‘When I made these, I kept in mind that they’d be exposed to wind and rain. I put a lot of oil and wax on them. And they landed on sand. But they won’t withstand being thrown against rocks, so I wouldn’t do that again, if I were you.’