Ship of Destiny (Liveship Traders, #3)

by Robin Hobb

woman is more than mother, more than daughter, more than wife. Those are the facets of a full life, but no single facet defines the jewel.”

“I’m more hungry than I am afraid,”

“Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, any one of which may defeat you. Look only to the end.”

Be now what you must be to succeed at the end of your journey, and when the end comes, you will find it is just another beginning.”

At night, in her narrow bunk, she certainly didn’t think of Brashen as the captain. By day, she had to.

“I can’t go on pretending I don’t love you. I can’t pretend it doesn’t scare me spitless to see you in danger.”

AHHHHHHH

Damn it, a man has to see himself reflected somewhere to be sure he is real. I see myself in your face, in how your eyes follow me when I’m handling something well, in how you grin at me when I’ve done something stupid but managed to make it come out all right anyway. When you take that away from me, when…”

“Althea, I am so damn lonely. Worst is to know that whether we fail or succeed, I still lose you. Knowing that you are, every day, here on the same ship with me, and I cannot so much as share a meal with you, let alone touch your hand, is torment enough. When you will not look at me or speak to me…I can’t go on with this coldness between us. I can’t.”

“Kennit has a woman, and is content with her. But I do not.” Brashen stretched, rolling his shoulders and spreading his arms. When he rocked forward, his left hand rested on Althea’s shoulder. He inclined very slightly toward the other man, and gently confided, “What a pity. I do.” He smiled before he went back to Maystar’s conversation, but left his arm across Althea’s shoulder.

AYOOOOOOO

Better she mourn her husband’s death, Althea thought grimly, than to mourn a long life with him.

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.

“Give me back my children! Or give me my death!”

The Vestrits stood together, no matter what else might come.

It was so Malta. Hoarded sweetness against an uncertain tomorrow.

Yeah bc she’s a CHILD

but at one point I hoped that when you saw me, you would want me back. That perhaps you would take me in trade.”

“I thought perhaps when you saw me, clean and well-rigged and riding level in the water, you would want me back. I thought a Ludluck might want the rightful ship of his own family instead of one he had stolen! Then I heard from the lips of a pirate that you had said you had always wanted a ship like her, a liveship of your own. But you’d had one. Me! And you’d cast me aside, told me to be dead and forgotten. And I’d agreed to it, I’d promised to die and take the memories with me. Remember that night? The night you said you could not live with such memories, that you had to kill yourself because you could not go on? And it was I who thought of it, I who said I would take all the memories, the pain memories, the bad memories, even the good memories of times that could never come again, and I would take them and die so that you could live and be free of them. And I thought of how we could end them all. I took them all with me, everyone who knew what had been done to you. Remember? I purified your life for you, so you could go on living. And you said you would never love another ship as you had loved me, that you would never want to love another ship as we had loved. Don’t you remember that?”

“You promised and you broke that promise, just as I broke mine. So we are even.”

And someday, just as Kennit and he had planned, he would have a son and name him Paragon. Someday there would be a Paragon Ludluck who was loved and cherished.

Death could make things stop, but it could not make things right.

You are caught up in a grand sweep of events, culminating in the changing of the course of the world.” She lowered her voice and a smile touched her mouth. “Yet all you can perceive is that you are separated from Althea. A man’s loss of his mate may be the essential trigger that determines all events from henceforth. Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?”

It’s just my life, and now that I have finally discovered what I must have to be happy, I’m willing to lay down my life for it. That’s all.” She smiled. “That is all. You are right. And that is all that All ever is.”

“I find myself in the company of pirates, of men and women tattooed with the shame of slavery. Yet you are not what I was told you were. I do not find ignorance or stupidity amongst you, nor yet barbarism and savagery.

But Althea captivated Kennit as no other woman could.

Im actually so grossed out

Anger could be focused outward. Grief corroded from within.

She longed for Vivacia as she had once been, a mirror and a reinforcement of Althea’s self. She longed for Brashen, a man who had known her to her bones. She drifted in her identity with no kindred spirit to anchor her.

He had not abandoned the whore; he had simply put her aside for later.

Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you.

“The pain was just a part of all that. I had lives before this one, and they are just as much mine as this. I can take all my pasts, keep them and determine my own future. I don’t have to be what anyone made me, Brashen. I can be Paragon.”

Althea recalled ashamedly that she had once felt that some hardship would improve Malta. Undoubtedly she had been improved, but the cost had been high.

The girlchild’s elaborate dreams of a romantic future had been replaced with a woman’s determination to survive tomorrow. It felt like a loss to Althea.

“Well, hustle along then, little man, or be left behind,”

If there had been a serpent close by, Kennit would have fed him to it.

“Admit it, Althea,” she coaxed. “When you look at the scales on his face, you have to wonder about the rest of him.”

It was like losing her home and her family all over again.

In his arms, she suddenly knew, was the only place where she could have been Malta again. With him died her youth, her beauty, her dreams.

“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.”

She wanted to tear his followers’ love and loyalty away from him the way he had torn her dignity and privacy from her body.

Cursing himself for a fool, he sprang suddenly to the rail. If one woman could cross, so could another.

“I’m whole now. Now I make you both a new promise. I’ll do all I can to keep you alive.”

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. Was

“Why would I leave a rich man like you?”