Ship of Destiny (Liveship Traders, #3)

by Robin Hobb

“Crowned,” he murmured. “But how can this be? Crested like the ancient Elderling queen in the old tapestries. The scaling is just beginning to show scarlet. Oh, my beauty, my lady, my queen, Tintaglia was right. You are the only one fit to mother such children as we shall make.”

“You will marry me, then?” he asked in delighted disbelief. “If you’ll have me, as I am.”

The priest-boy, small and spindly as a child, had become this slight but energetic young man who roared commands with a man’s voice. She knew, with a sudden guilt, that her own father had not seen that possibility in Wintrow. If he had, Ephron Vestrit would have opposed Keffria sending him off to the priesthood.

The open love and trust between Brashen and her was, in some ways, still new and fresh. Could it bear the weight of this truth? Her anger roiled inside her as she wondered if that, too, would be a thing that Kennit had destroyed.

“My love. Take the wizardwood charm from my wrist. Wear it always, until the day you pass it on to our son. To Paragon. You will name him Paragon? You will wear the charm?”

“Paragon is not his enemy. I give him back to his family, Etta.”

Paragon’s hands suddenly clasped Vivacia and fumbled their way to Kennit in her arms. For a long instant, the two liveships rocked in a strange embrace, the pirate between them. Then, silently, Vivacia placed Kennit’s lax body in Paragon’s waiting arms.

Paragon’s pale blue eyes opened at last. He looked a long time into the pirate’s face, gazing with the hunger of years. Then, slowly, he clasped him close. Kennit looked almost doll-like in the figurehead’s embrace. His lips moved, but Etta heard nothing. The blood from Kennit’s injuries vanished swiftly as it touched Paragon’s wood, soaking in immediately, and leaving no stain of passage. Then he bowed over Kennit and kissed the top of his head with an impossible tenderness. At last, Paragon looked up. He gazed at her with Kennit’s eyes and smiled, an unbearably sad smile that yet held peace and wholeness.

He knew the touch of the big hands that accepted him. He would have wept, but there were no tears left. He tried to make his mouth move, to speak aloud how sorry he was. “There, there,” someone said comfortingly. Paragon? His father? Someone who loved him said, “Don’t fear. I have you now. I won’t let you go. You will not be hurt anymore.” Then he felt the kiss that absolved him without judgment. “Come back to me,” he said. “Come home.” The darkness was no longer black. It grew silvery and then as Paragon embraced him and took him home he faded into white.

“Please, Vivacia. You don’t need me. I want to go to him.”

“Once I promised not to kill you. I was mad, and you knew it, and still you believed in me.” The ship looked around, scanning their situation with cold blue eyes. “I’m whole now. Now I make you both a new promise. I’ll do all I can to keep you alive.”

searched her heart and was surprised at what she felt. “Grateful. For my life, for my intact body. For a man like Brashen in my life. Sa’s breath, Amber, I have nothing to complain about.” She looked up suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare. “We’ve got to survive this, Amber. We have to. I’ve a life to live.”

When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.

Clef appeared suddenly. He stood before Althea and Brashen, and shook his head reprovingly. “In fronter the crew an’ all,” he disparaged them with a disrespectful grin.

Oh i adore him

She tugged his arms around her and stepped into his embrace. “Hold me,” she told him fiercely. “Hold me very, very close.”

For a fleeting instant, he considered leaving Paragon to follow her. But he couldn’t. No one else knew this ship as he did. No one else had endured alongside him. He could not make Paragon vulnerable to a captain that might not tolerate his uneven moods. And what of Clef? Would he tear the boy from the ship that loved him?

“He was always a part of me and I of him. For many reasons, we were bound more tightly than is usual. It was very important, to both of us, that he come back at the moment of his death. I knew that. I don’t think Kennit realized it until it happened.”

Malta had come to the shelter of his cloak. When her brother gave them an odd look, she lifted her chin and stared him down defiantly. She pressed her wet and shivering body firmly against Reyn’s. In the sheltering darkness, he held her, smelling the fragrance of her hair. Boldly he kissed the top of her head.

“I wonder what Vivacia would have looked like,” Althea said quietly. Firelight danced in her eyes as she stared at the dragon’s shadowy shape. “Or Paragon’s dragons,” Brashen inserted loyally.

“Perhaps we hope to live out our insignificant little lives as we see fit,”

A long moment later, he asked, “And you’re going to marry me? In Bingtown, at the Traders’ Concourse?” “That was the plan,” she agreed.

“You only want to show off your dress,” he accused her gravely. “Worse. I wish to flaunt my elegant partner before all of these grand ladies, before I snatch him away to immure him as mine in the distant Rain Wilds.”

“Althea seemed to believe that you cheated when she played with you,” she observed lightly. “Oh, well, that’s Althea. Nice girl, but a bit suspicious. Not the best judgment in the world, either. After all, she chose that renegade Trell when she could have had my Grag.” Vivacia laughed softly. “I don’t think your Grag ever had much of a chance. I rather suspect ‘that renegade Trell’ was chosen for her by Ephron Vestrit a number of years ago.”

She is hilarious

Don’t go mooning after the stars, when the wide sea is all around you.

“Jek is too busy living. She won’t waste time on regrets. And neither shall I.”

Selden Vestrit was fired with enthusiasm for this new life he had found. In that, she rejoiced. It surprised her that Keffria had let him go. Perhaps her older sister was finally realizing that life was to be lived, rather than hoarded against an unseen tomorrow.

“All of us have a right to our lives. But what if, for lack of guidance, we take the wrong paths? Take Wintrow for instance.