Ship of Destiny (Liveship Traders, #3)

by Robin Hobb

‘I know what it was! Beyond the blue sand was, oh, it was so beautiful, so wonderful, so joyous a thing to find! It was –’ He swivelled his head, his scarlet eyes swirling to be sure of every serpent’s attention. ‘Dung!’ he declared happily. ‘Great mounds of fresh, brown stinking dung! And then we declared ourselves the Lords of the Four Realms. Lords of the Earth, the Sea, the Sky and the Dung!

Then it wafted to her, unmistakable for anything else. The taste of one who carried memories locked in her flesh floated faint in the water. Shreever worked her gills frantically, trying for more of the elusive flavour. It faded, but then a stronger drift reached her.

Then, pure as light and sweet as flesh, a voice rose in the distance. ‘Come,’ she sang, ‘come to me and I will give you knowledge of yourselves. Come to She Who Remembers, and your past will be yours, and with it, all your futures. Come. Come.’ Tellur trumpeted an eager response, but ‘Hush!’ Maulkin bade him sternly. ‘What is that?’ For a second voice had lifted in song. The words were oddly turned, the notes shortened, as if the serpent who sang had no depth to its voice. But whoever she was, she echoed the call of She Who Remembers. ‘Come, come to me. Your past and your future await you. Come, I will guide you, I will protect you. Obey me and I shall see you safely home. Once more you shall rise, once more you shall fly.’

I am simply saying that you should not lock your dreams onto a child or a man. Who loves you or who you love is not as significant as who you are. Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for.

Selden, seated beside him, suddenly gripped his wrist hard under the table. When he looked at the boy questioningly, a strangely grim smile lit his face. ‘I feel it,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Don’t you?’

Were his scaling, growths, and gleaming copper eyes all that different from the tattoos that sprawled across the slaves’ faces? His mother, too, had confined her hair in securely-pinned braids. She wore trousers rather than her customary flowing skirts. In response to his puzzled glance, she said only, ‘I won’t be hampered by skirts when we attack.’

‘Tintaglia, Tintaglia! Blue queen of winds and sky! Tintaglia, glorious one, terrible in your beauty, lovely in your wrath! Tintaglia, Tintaglia!’ Her keen eyes found the small figure. He stood alone, atop a mound of rubble, heedless that his silhouetted body made a perfect arrow target. He stood straight, joyous, his arms lifted, and he sang to her with the tongue of an Elderling. His flattery spelled her, and he wove her name into his song, uttering it with ineffable sweetness.

‘The dragons did not enslave the Elderlings, and they will not enslave us. There are many ways for different folk to live alongside each other, Reyn Khuprus.’

‘I dream them,’ the boy said ingenuously. ‘When I dream that I fly with her, I know how she speaks to herself. Queen of the sky, rider of the morning, magnificent one. I speak to her as she speaks to herself. It is the only way to converse with a dragon.’ He crossed his thin arms on his narrow chest. ‘It is my courtship of her. Is it so different from how you spoke to my sister?’

‘She considers us too trivial to deceive. Trust me in this. If she says Malta is alive, then she lives. My sister will return to us. But to get this, you must let me guide you, as I let my dreams guide me.’

He was remembering the strange dreams of his own youth. He had dreamed the buried city, alive with light and music and folk, and the dragon had spoken to him. Such dreams came, sometimes, to those who spent too much time down there. But surely, such dreams were the province of the Rain Wild Traders only. Wistfully, Reyn reached down to rub a thumb across the boy’s dust-smeared cheek. Then he stared, wordless, at the fan of silver scaling he had revealed on Selden’s cheekbone.

‘In the Rain Wilds?’ someone asked in incredulous horror. ‘The water is acid; only the rain is drinkable. The land trembles constantly. Folk who live in the Rain Wilds for too long go mad. Their children are born dead or deformed, and as they age, their bodies become monstrous.

As he flung back his head to confront the dragon, a trick of the torches sent light dancing along his scaled face, making Reyn appear as dragon-like as Tintaglia.

The failure is yours, little male.

Twice before, he had touched souls with Malta. In the mystic intimacy of the dream-box, in the joining made possible by finely powdered wizardwood, their thoughts had mingled. They had dreamed well together. The memory of it still stirred his blood to heat. In the dream-box unity, he had known her in a way he could never mistake for another. Beyond scent or touch or even the taste of her lips was another sensation that was the essence of Malta in his mind.

Malta. Through the dragon he sensed her but could not touch her.

Did Jani know how much she resembled the dragon? The fine scaling on her lips and brow and the faint glow of her eyes in the torchlight all contributed to the effect. Jani knelt by Reyn’s body and stared down at him just as Tintaglia looked down on them.

Light ran across Selden’s light scaling. He, too, had stood before the dragon and begged for his family. He was still hers. In an odd way, so was Reyn. Keffria set her hand gently on Reyn’s chest. ‘Lie still,’ she bade him. ‘You’ll be all right. Just lie still.’

‘You will aid me to save Malta. And I will then devote myself to unearthing the Elderling city, not for treasure, but for dragons. That is our agreement. Your bargain with Bingtown is more complicated. The dredging of a river for the protection of their coast, with other stipulations. Would you have it set down in writing, and the agreement acknowledged as binding?’

However, I imagine the Bingtown Traders will become a ceremonial aristocracy of sorts, rather than a true ruling class any more. Moreover, Three Ships families seem to cherish the distinction of being Three Ships.

‘Are you ready?’ Tintaglia asked him irritably. Through their bond, she spoke in his mind, so that he could feel her annoyance. Resolutely, he set her emotions aside from his own. Unfortunately, that left him with little more than nervousness and dread.

Accommodating and useful. Was that truly all that was left to her life? With creeping dismay, she realized it sounded like her mother. Accommodating and useful to her Chalcedean father. What would he think if he could see her now? Would he be horrified, or would he think that she had finally learned to be graciously female? It hurt to wonder such things about someone she loved. She had always believed that he loved her best of all his children. But how did he love her? As an independent young woman, a Trader’s daughter? Would he more approve the role she played now?

‘I thought you were dead. I had forgotten that humans are not so well attached to their bodies as dragons are.

Where she clasped him against her, he was warm. He felt a surge of confidence in both of them. They would find Malta, and they would bring her safely home.

Paragon. The other half of his soul rode at anchor in the inlet. ‘Can I know him from this far away?’ he asked himself softly. ‘How? Is it a feeling in the air? A scent on the wind?’ ‘Blood calls to blood,’ whispered the charm at his wrist. ‘You know it’s him. After all these years, he has come back.’

‘You let him take all the pain for you,’ the charm breathed by his ear. ‘He said he would, and you let him.’ The charm smiled. ‘It’s all there, waiting for you. With him.’ ‘Shut up,’ Kennit grated.

muster all your ships, every one that flies a raven flag. You and they will serve as escort for us. The serpents must travel north to a river mouth they scarcely remember, but one I have entered many times in my life as Vivacia. As we move north, we will seek to gather up other serpents. You will protect them from humans. When we reach the river, I will guide them up it, while your other ships keep guard behind us. No ordinary wooden ship can accompany them on that migration. You will give to me, Kennit Ludluck, all that remains of this winter, all of spring, all your days until high summer and the sun’s full heat, as we aid the serpents in what they must do, and guard them through their helpless time. That is the price. Are you willing to pay it?’ In the naming of his name, she bound him. How had she known? Had she guessed? Then he glanced down at the small grinning charm on his wrist. Looking into features twin to his own, he knew his betrayer. The charm winked up at him. ‘I, too, was once a dragon,’ it said quietly.

‘Tell me why you want him to be gone. Say the words.’ He took a breath and met her gaze. ‘My motives are the same as yours,’ he said coldly. ‘You do not wish Althea to come aboard, for you fear she would “bring you back to yourself ”.’ He lifted his eyes and stared at the Paragon. ‘There floats a piece of myself I could do without.’

‘The anger that burns in him destroys every other emotion.’ Amber’s hair lifted slightly in the rising wind and she had spoken in a distant voice. ‘Danger cups us under its hand, and we can do nothing but stand witness to the turning of the world. Here we walk on the balancing line between futures. Humanity always believes it decides the fate of the whole world, and so it does, but never in the moment that it thinks it does. The future of thousands ripples like a serpent through the water, and the destiny of a ship becomes the destination of the world.’ She turned to look at Althea with eyes the colour of brandy in firelight. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she asked in a whisper. ‘We are on the cusp. We are a coin spinning in the toss, a card fluttering in the flip, a rune chip floating in stirred water. Possibilities swarm like bees. In this day, in a moment, in a breath, the future of the world will shift course by a notch. One way or another, the coin will land ringing, the card will settle to the table, the chip will bob to the surface. The face that shows uppermost will set our days, and children to come will say, “That is just the way it has always been.”’

‘A mere sneeze of time.’ Tintaglia stretched negligently. ‘I suspect that your years will stretch far longer than that, now that you have journeyed with a dragon.’ ‘Do you mean it will just seem that way?’ Reyn asked, attempting levity at her confusing words. ‘No. Not at all. Do you know nothing? Do you think a few scales or bronze eyes are all a dragon can share with her companion? As you take on more of my characteristics, your years will stretch out as well. I would not be surprised to see you pass the century mark, and still keep the use of your limbs. At least, so it was with the Elderlings. Some of them reached three and four centuries. But of course, those ones had generations of dragon-touch to draw on. You may not live so long, but your children likely will.’

‘And if your daughter was taken by Chalcedean slave raiders, would you approve the same advice for her? To become whole-heartedly what they made her? Would you tell her that her father would never accept her back because she was no longer his “virgin daughter”? Would it no longer matter to you how often she was taken, or by whom?’ She lifted her chin. ‘Damn you,’ he cursed her, but with admiration. Frustration glittered in his eyes but he released her. She stepped back from him with relief. ‘I will get the names from the Satrap,’ she offered him in compensation. ‘I will be sure he understands that his life depends on how much he can wring from his nobles. He sets great store on his own life. I am sure he will be generous with their coin.’ ‘He had better be.’ Captain Red had recovered some of his aplomb. ‘To make up for how stingy you are with woman’s coin.’ Malta smiled at him, a genuine smile, and allowed a swagger to her walk as she left his chamber.

Keffria surprised them all when she spoke on alone. ‘And also our private agreement regarding the liveship Vivacia, the product of both our families, and our hope that our families shall be joined in the marriage of Malta Vestrit and Reyn Khuprus.’ She took a deep breath. Her voice shook only slightly. ‘In sign of the link between our families, I offer to you my youngest son, Selden Vestrit, to be fostered with the Khuprus family of the Rain Wilds. I charge you to teach him well the ways of our folk.’ Yes. This was right. Let it all be formalized. Selden suddenly stood taller. He let go of his sack and came forwards. He took his mother’s hand and looked up at her. ‘Do I say anything?’ he asked gravely. Jani held out her hand. ‘I, Jani Khuprus of the Khuprus family of the Rain Wilds, do welcome Selden Vestrit to be fostered with our family, and taught the ways of our folk. He will be cherished as one of our own. If he so wills it.’ Selden did not let go of his mother’s hand. How wise the boy already was! He instead set his free hand into Jani’s. He cleared his throat. ‘I, Selden Vestrit of the Vestrit family, do will that I be fostered with the Khuprus family of the Rain Wilds.’ He looked at his mother as he added, ‘I will do my best to learn all that is taught me. ‘There. That’s done,’ he added.

He gave her a puzzled look. ‘Sorry that you will do what you must do? Mother, it is your own example I follow. I go to Trehaug for the same reason.’ He managed a smile for her. ‘You let me go. And I let you go. Because we are Traders.’

‘Oh, no,’ he assured her. ‘I know it is hard for you to believe that I know these things. But what I know goes beyond who I am, and back to another time. I have dreamed the city that Tintaglia spoke of, and it is grand beyond imagination. Compared to Cassarick, Frengong was humble.’ ‘Cassarick? Frengong?’ Jani asked in confusion. ‘Frengong is the Elderling name for the city buried beneath Trehaug. Cassarick is the city you will excavate for Tintaglia. There, you will find halls built to a dragon’s scale of grandeur. In the Star Chamber, you will discover a floor set with what you call flame-jewels, in a mirror of the night sky on Springeve. There is a labyrinth with crystal walls, tuned to mirror the dreams of the ones who dare it; to walk its maze is to confront your own soul. Time’s Rainbow, they called it amongst themselves, for each person who completed it seemed to do so by a different route. Wonders are buried there and may be brought back to light…’ Selden’s voice trailed away in rapture. He stood breathing deeply in silence, his eyes looking afar. The adults exchanged looks over his head. Then he spoke again, suddenly. ‘The wealth the dragons will bring to us all will surpass mere coin. It will be a reawakening of the world. Humanity has become a lonely race, and dangerously arrogant in our solitude. The return of the dragons will restore balance to our intellect and to our ambitions.’ He laughed aloud suddenly. ‘Not that they are perfect beings, oh, no. That is ou...

Worse, he was relieved. His feelings spun like a weathervane. He had not truly wanted to die, nor to kill all his people. Amber should know that. She knew everything now. There was shameful comfort in sharing the terrible knowledge, for he was glad that someone else finally knew it all. A childish part of him hoped that now she would tell him what he should do. For too long he had wrestled with these secrets, not knowing what to do with such frightening and shameful memories. Hiding them for so long should have made them go away, should have made them not matter. Instead they had festered like a boil, and just when he had a new life, the old wound had burst open and poisoned everything. It had nearly killed them all.

‘You are full of your own secrets,’ he suddenly accused her. ‘Things you have never shared with the rest of us. How can you despise me for doing the same?’ Her tone was suddenly formal. ‘The secrets I hold are mine. My keeping them does no harm to anyone.’

She took a breath, and spoke quickly, as if plunging into cold water. ‘It is hard to explain. When I was much younger, and I spoke of it, people thought that I was too full of myself. They tried to tell me that I could not be what I knew I was. Finally, I ran away from them. And when I did, I promised myself that I would no longer fear what other folk thought of me. I would keep to myself the future I knew lay ahead of me. I have shared my dreams and ambitions with very few others.’ ‘You are telling me nothing with many words,’ Paragon pointed out impatiently. ‘What, exactly, are you?’

‘In a word, I do not know how to tell you. I have been called a fool as often as I have been called a prophet. I always have known that there were things I must do for the world, things no one else could do. Well. The same is true of every man, I do not doubt. Yet I follow a path I cannot see clearly. There are guides along the way, but I cannot always find them. I set out seeking a slave-boy with nine fingers.’ She shook her head. He felt it. ‘I found Althea instead, and though she was not a boy nor a slave and had all ten fingers, I felt a connection through her. So I helped her. May the gods forgive me, I helped her seek her death. Then I encountered Malta, and wondered if she were the one I should have been aiding. I reach forwards, Paragon, through mists of time to symbols that become people and people who teeter on the verge of legend. There is a task I must do here, but what it is remains cloaked from me. All I can do is push towards it, and hope that when the time comes, I will recognize it and perform the right actions. Although there is little hope of that now.’

‘Why are there dragons in you?’ she demanded. He felt that she changed the subject, deliberately. He answered her anyway. ‘Because I was meant to be dragons. What you call wizardwood is actually a protective casing that sea-serpents weave about themselves before they begin their change into dragons. The Rain Wild Traders came upon encased dragons in the ruins of an ancient city. They killed them, but used the casings, rich with dragon memories, to build ships. Liveships they call us, but we are truly dead. Yet while memory lives, we are doomed to a half-life, trapped in an awkward body that cannot be moved without the aid of humans. I am more unfortunate than most, for two cocoons were used in my construction. From the time I was created, the dragons within me have warred for dominance over each other.’ He shook his great head. ‘I woke too soon, you see. I had not absorbed enough human memories to be strongly centred in them. From the time I first opened my eyes, I have been torn.’

‘What else do you think Paragon is, save a human veneer of memories over battling dragons? In quarrelling with one another for mastery, they allowed me ascendance. When I say “I”, I scarcely know what I mean.’ He sighed suddenly. ‘That was what Kennit gave me, and what I shall miss most. A sense of self. A sense of kinship. When he was aboard me, I had no doubts as to my identity. You see him as blood-shedding pirate. I recall him first as a wild and lively boy, full of joy in the wind and waves.

‘No. I mean, don’t repair my face. Give me a new one. One that is all of me.’ For a mercy, she did not ask him what he meant by that. She only asked, ‘Are you sure?’ He pondered a moment. ‘I think…I do not want to be a dragon. That is, I do, but I wish to be both of them, if I must. And yet to be Paragon as well. To be, as you said, three merged into one. I want…’ He hesitated. If he said it and she laughed, it would be worse than death, as life was always sharper and harder than death. ‘Give me a face you could love,’ he quietly beseeched her.

‘Always, always, I lose faith too easily. By now, I should know better. Death does not conquer. It threatens, but it cannot subdue the future. What must be, will be.’

She was dressed in Wintrow’s clothing, and with her hair tied back, the resemblance between the two was even more marked. She had his dark eyes and his cheekbones, but her face had never been marred with a tattoo. She had probably put on Wintrow’s clothing believing them less provocative than his nightshirt. Exactly the opposite was true. The rise of her breasts inside Wintrow’s shirt stirred his blood to pounding. Her cheeks were tinged pink with her earnestness, yet an unnatural glitter in her eyes showed that she had not completely cast off the soporific he had been giving her. He uncovered her food and set it out for her, just as the ship’s boy Kennit had once waited on the pirate Igrot. Strange parallels abounded, he thought to himself. He pushed down the thought and forced himself to keep his voice conversational.

‘Brashen. Brashen. Brashen.’ She could not stop saying his name, but her throat was so tight that no sound was coming out. The room swayed around her and she was choking on the word. Perhaps she could die with his name caught in her throat.

Needing to breathe took precedent over all else. She seized the wrist of that hand and wrestled it feebly. Sparks danced behind her eyes as he kneed her legs apart. He was hurting her, her head pulled back so far on her neck, but the pain was not as important as needing to breathe. His hand slipped until it covered only her mouth. She dragged in breath after breath through her nose, and then he thrust suddenly deep into her. She screamed without sound and bucked under him but could not evade him. Devon had held her so, pressing her down so hard she couldn’t breathe. The unwanted memory of that first time rushed back at her. The nightmares merged, and she struggled alone, afraid to cry out for fear someone else would see what was happening to her. She’d be disgraced, her father would know, and it was all her own fault. It was always her fault. She stood before Keffria, crying, and begged her sister to understand, saying, ‘I was frightened, I thought I wanted him to do it and then I knew I didn’t, but I didn’t know how to make him stop.’ ‘Your own fault,’ Keffria hissed at her, too horrified to feel sorry for her wayward sister. ‘You led him to it, and that makes it your fault.’ The words forced the deed on Althea, made it her own action rather than something done to her, and it all came back to her, sharp as blood, the stabbing impacts of the man’s rough body and the panicky need for air, and the desperation of keeping it secret. No one must know. She gritted her teeth and ...

Bolt would be there, and she might know what he had done. Linked as she was to him and to Althea, she might have shared it. That thought put a whole new layer onto the experience. Had she shared it? Had she wanted him to do it? Was that why he had been unable to stop? Was that why it had been so powerful?

‘You’ve crossed the line,’ a tiny voice at his wrist observed coldly. ‘What made you do it, Kennit? Was that the only way to banish the memories finally, by giving them to someone else?’

Kennit finally whispered. ‘She’s a woman. That happens to women all the time. They’re accustomed to it.’ ‘You raped her.’ He laughed aloud. ‘Scarcely. She likes me. She said I was courteous and a gentleman.’ He took a breath. ‘She only resisted because she’s not a whore.’ ‘Why did you really do it, Kennit?’ The question was relentless. Did the charm know that the same query rattled endlessly in his own mind? He had thought he was going to stop. He had stopped, until she began crying in the dark. If she had not done that, he would have been able to leave. So it was as much her fault as his. Perhaps. Kennit fumbled towards an answer. He spoke very softly. ‘Perhaps so I could finally understand why he did it to me. How he could do that to me, how he could pendulum between kindness and cruelty, between lessons in etiquette and seizures of rage –’ Kennit’s voice fell away.

Althea! The voice rang with joy. You have found me. I never should have doubted you. Vivacia? Her presence was all around Althea, stronger than a scent, more pervasive than warmth, her reality sweeter than any memory. The being of her ship embraced her. Homecoming and farewell mingled; now, she could die in peace. Althea willed herself to let go but instead Vivacia enveloped her with love and need. Althea could not bear such tenderness. It beckoned her like a light and threatened her resolve. She turned away from it. Let me go, my dear. I want to die. And I with you. For I am made of death, a travesty, an abomination, and I am so weary of being held down here in the dark. Have not you come to free me, come so deep to take me to death?

No! No, you are not! Althea asserted it fiercely. She fought the ship’s plunge to nothingness, even though to do so thwarted her own desire for oblivion. You are made of life and beauty, and the dreams of my family for a hundred years. You are made of wind and water and wide blue days. My beauty, my pride, you must not die. If all else fails, if darkness devours all I was, you, at least, must go on.