by Robin Hobb
I had watched the scene unfold as if I watched a puppet-play, leaning on the ship’s railing a short distance away. At Trell’s suggestion, I straightened and stepped forward briskly to help with the sea-bag. I was a bit puzzled at his request. The canvas bag was not so large that it presented any sort of a challenge. But I had given my word that I’d help sail the ship and I intended to live up to that at least.
‘Out of my way! I can manage it!’ Kennitsson declared. Captain Trell gave a small jerk of his head and I moved away. Kennitsson had strength more than equal to moving his sea-bag, but he deployed it in the sullen over-reaction of a spoiled boy. I reminded myself that he was not my problem and took myself to Amber’s cabin.
There, I found the Fool, sitting cross-legged on the lower bunk, with one of Bee’s books open in his lap.
‘I wondered if you had changed your mind and gone to Divvytown with the others.’
‘Sightseeing?’ he asked and gestured at his ruined eyes.
I sat down beside him, bowing my head to avoid hitting it on the bunk above. ‘I hoped you were regaining a bit of your vision. You’re looking at a book.’
‘I’m touching a book, Fitz.’ He sighed and held it out to me. I felt a jolt of dismay. It was her journal, not her book of dreams. Open to a page I hadn’t shared with him. Did he know? I closed it gently, found the shirt I always used and re-wrapped it carefully. I slid it back into my worn pack. I feared he might accidentally discover the Silver. But I said only, ‘We must be very careful with my pack. The fire-brick from Reyn is in here. It must always be stored upright.’
As I placed it carefully under the bunk, I told him, ‘Kennitsson has come aboard. We’ll be leaving on the change of the tide.’
‘Have Lant, Per and Spark returned yet?’
‘They won’t be late. Lant had some bird messages to send. Per wanted help to get word to his mother. Spark wished to send a message to Chade.’
‘So today we finally resume our journey.’ The breath he expelled was uneven. ‘Yet there is still so far to go, and every moment that passes is a moment that she is too long in their possession. Any moment may be the moment she dies.’
Panic rose in me. I pushed it down and denied it. Hardened my heart and extinguished hope. I tried to share my defence. ‘Fool, despite what you believe, despite what you have dreamed … If I imagine this is a rescue, not an assassination, I will lose my focus. And it is all I have left.’
Alarm claimed his face. ‘But she is alive, Fitz. My dreams make me certain of it. I wish I could share them with you!’
‘So you’ve had more than one dream of Bee still alive?’ I asked reluctantly. Could I bear to hear any more of his wishful proof?
‘I have,’ he replied and then, tilting his head, ‘Though perhaps only I could interpret them that way. It is not so much the images as the feel of the dream that makes me certain they pertain to Bee.’ He paused and grew thoughtful. ‘Possibly I could share my dreams with you? If you touched me with no thought of healing but only of sharing, perhaps?’
‘No.’ I tried to soften my refusal. ‘When we link, Fool, what happens has nothing to do with my intent. Something that feels inevitable begins to happen. Like the current of a river sweeping us along.’
‘Like the Skill-river you speak of, like a current of magic?’
‘No. It’s different.’
‘Then what is it?’
I sighed. ‘How can I explain something that I don’t understand myself?’
‘Hmph. When I say something like that, you get angry at me.’
I brought us back to the subject. ‘You said you’ve had more dreams about Bee.’
‘I have.’
A short response and a secret unspoken. I pressed him. ‘What sort of dreams, Fool? Where do you dream her, what is she doing?’
‘You know my dreams are not like windows into her life. They are hints and portents. Such as the dream about the candles.’ He tilted his head. ‘You recall how Bee wrote of it. I’ll tell you something. That’s an old dream, dreamed often and by many. It could mean so many things. Yet I think it is fulfilled in us. Bee dreams it more clearly than I’ve ever heard it, speaking of us as the Wolf and the Jester.’
‘How could many people dream the same dream?’ I pushed aside his confusing words. Without intending it, my voice had dropped to the level of a wolf’s warning growl. His sightless eyes widened slightly.
‘We just do. It’s one measure the Servants use to consider the likelihood of something happening. It’s a common dream among those who carry White bloodlines. Each one is slightly different, but they are recognizable as the same dream. I dreamed it as a fork in a path. There are four candles spaced along the path in one direction. At the end of it, there is a little stone house with a low door and no windows. The place where the dead are put. The other path is lit by three candles. At the end of it, a fire burns and people are shouting.’ He took a small breath. ‘I stand staring at it. Then, out of the dark, a bee comes, and buzzes in circles around my head.’
‘And that makes you think that the dream is about my Bee?’
He nodded slowly. ‘But not just because of a bee in the dream. It was the feeling of the dream. But it wasn’t the only dream I had.’
‘What do the dreams mean?’ I asked the question despite suspecting that his recent dreams meant no more than the dreams I had. When I had brought him back from the dead, he had told me he was blind to the new future we had made. Did his mind now play tricks on him, sending him dreams of what he desperately hoped to be true?
‘I could say, “you don’t want to know” but I would be lying. The truth is, I don’t want to tell you. But I know I must!’ he added hastily before I could speak. He cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. He rubbed them together as if remembering pain. He had a few fingernails now on his bared hand and the others seemed to be growing. I looked away from the reminder of what he had endured. The body might heal, but the wounds that dedicated torture leave on the mind always seep toxic pus. I reached across and took his gloved hand in mine.
‘Tell me.’
‘She isn’t treated well.’
I had expected that. If she was still alive, her captors were unlikely to be gentle with her. But to hear that spoken aloud was like the fist to the belly that drives all breath away.
‘How?’ I managed. Dreams, I reminded myself. Probably not real.
‘I don’t know.’ His voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘I dreamed a wolf cub licking her wounds and curling tight against the cold. I dreamed a slender white tree stripped of its blossoms and its tender branches bent awry.’
I could not breathe. He made a small sound of pain and I realized I was crushing his fingers. I loosened my grip and found air.
‘But I also dreamed a hand holding a dead torch. It was a confusing dream. The torch fell to the ground and a foot ground it out. I heard a voice. “Better to grope in darkness than to follow false light”.’ He paused and added, ‘The confusing part was that it was already dark. An immense blaze of light came up as the torch was ground out.’
‘How do you know that the dream was about Bee?’
He looked abashed. ‘I am not certain, but it might be. And it felt … uplifting. Like something that might be good. I wanted to share it with you.’
There was a hasty knock and an instant later Spark flung open the door. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed upon seeing our clasped hands. I released the Fool. She recovered herself to announce, ‘Captain Trell wants every able-bodied person on the deck. Time to weigh anchor and depart. Clef sent me to find you. He nabbed Per and Lant as soon as we came back on board.’
I was relieved to leave off our discussion of dark dreams, but the Fool’s words haunted me all that day. I was grateful for the times when the distraction of learning the ropes and how the ship moved blocked my anxiety for my daughter. No matter how I moved my thoughts, I was cut. Bee was dead, tattered away in the Skill-stream. Bee was alive and living in torment.
I worked my body as hard as I could, seeking exhaustion, then took a hammock belowdecks with the crew where their talk and cursing and laughter kept dreams away.
We were a day out from Divvytown when a downcast Per came to me. ‘Have you seen Motley?’
I had not noticed the crow’s absence until he spoke of it. ‘I haven’t,’ I admitted. Unwillingly I added, ‘Crows are shore birds, Per. There was plenty of feed for her in Divvytown. That’s not true out on the open water. I know that you shared your rations with her when we were running short. But perhaps she prefers to fend for herself now.’
‘I’d just re-blacked her feathers. What will become of her when the black wears off?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted reluctantly. She was a wild thing at heart and always would be. She’d made it clear she did not want a Wit-bond. I tried to let go of her.
Nonetheless, relief flooded me on the second day when we heard a distant cawing. Per and I were up the rigging that day, leaning on the spar, our feet braced on the foot-lines. At first she was a tiny silhouette in the distance. But as we watched, her steadily beating wings brought her closer and closer. She cawed a greeting and then landed solidly on Per’s arm. ‘Tired,’ she said. ‘So tired.’ She walked up his shoulder to nestle under his chin.
‘I swear, sometimes I am certain she knows every word we say,’ I observed.
‘Every word,’ she repeated, and regarded me with one bright eye.
I stared at her. The tip of her beak was silver. ‘Per,’ I warned him, trying to keep my voice calm. ‘Keep her away from your face. She has Silver on her beak.’
I saw the boy freeze. Then he said in a shaky voice, ‘I can’t sense magic at all. Maybe I’m immune to Silver, too.’
‘And maybe you’re not. Please, move her away from your throat.’
He lifted his wrist and the bird transferred herself to his hand. ‘What did you do?’ he asked her. ‘How did you get Silver on your beak, pretty thing? Are you all right? Do you feel ill?’
In response, she turned and groomed her flight feathers. They did not go silver but they sheened blacker than I’d ever seen them. ‘Heeby,’ she croaked. ‘Heeby share. Heeby teach how.’
Ah. Rapskal’s tonic back at Divvytown. I should have guessed. And was her time with the dragons improving her speech? ‘Be careful with your beak,’ I chided her.
She turned her shining eyes on me. ‘I am careful, stupid Fitz. But so tired. Take me to Paragon.’ She clambered up his sleeve to his shoulder again and gave me a baleful look before closing her eyes.
I heard Trell roaring at us to get a move on and stop perching like seagulls. Per looked to me, ignoring his captain. ‘Do I take her to Paragon?’
‘I doubt you can keep her away. And no matter how careful she is, I want you to be even more careful. Warn any others that she might fly to.’
Brashen roared again, and Per began his hasty descent, shouting that Motley had returned. As Per spidered and slid with the bird on his shoulder, Spark crossed the deck at a run. I began my more cautious descent.
‘Are you truly a prince?’ Kennitsson asked as I paused beside him.
I hesitated for a moment. Bastard or prince? Dutiful had made me a prince. ‘I am,’ I said quietly. ‘But due to illegitimacy, not in line for the throne.’
He shrugged that aside. ‘That lad, that Per. He was your stableboy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You work alongside him, and he never defers to you at all.’
‘He does, but not in a noticeable way, I suppose. He respects me, even if others don’t see it.’
‘Huh.’
The sound was thoughtful rather than disdainful. Even a few days on board as a common sailor had changed him. He was clever enough to know that if he were quartered with common deckhands such as Ant and Per, he’d best step down from his elevated ways. He had shed his fine clothes and adopted the same loose canvas trousers and cotton shirts that the rest of us wore. He’d braided his hair and tied it after Ant had warned him about how loose locks of hair could get tangled around a moving line and be ripped right off the scalp. He’d also bound the palms of his hands with leather; I suspected bloody blisters on them. Hemp lines are not gentle to handle.
He said no more to me, so I hastened down to await my next order.
It had been decades since I’d worked the deck of a ship, and never had I toiled on a ship like Paragon. The living nature of the ship meant that he could be an active participant in the journey. He could not set his own canvas nor take it in, but he could cry a better heading to the steersman, sense where currents ran swiftest and warn us of a line that needed tightening. He had a fine sense of depths and channels—something that he had proudly demonstrated as he guided his crew out of the harbour at Divvytown, and that he did again now as we sailed cautiously through the waterways of the Pirate Islands and finally into the open sea. As he sliced through the taller waves our diminished crew strove to keep pace with his needs.
I was not alone in marvelling at the ways of a liveship. The crewmembers we had taken on in Divvytown were openly delighted with how Paragon participated in his sailing. Before long the navigator was humbly asking permission to share her charts with the figurehead, and correcting them according to his knowledge. Given his way, Paragon himself became almost affable, and especially so with Boy-O and Kennitsson.
Even so, my transition from passenger to deckhand was not easy. I had always harboured a secret pride in how able I had remained into my sixth decade. Much of my physical strength I owed to the old Skill-healing that still coursed through my body and made unceasing repairs to it. But healthy is not necessarily hardened. Those first days were long ones for me. The calluses earned by wielding a sword or an axe are different to the rough palms that prickling hemp lines award to a sailor. In the rigorous days that followed, I ached in my legs and my back and my arms. Muscle in my limbs and a flattened belly came back to me slowly. My body healed itself, but healing can be as painful as being injured.
Despite the men we had gained in Divvytown, we still had a smaller crew, and fewer who were used to sailing a liveship. The end of my watch was no guarantee of uninterrupted rest. A cry for ‘All hands!’ might come at any moment. As Brashen had foretold, there was no friendly current to aid us in our south-western journey. Land became a smear of low cloud on the horizon behind us. When I awoke the next day, it was gone.
Spark and Per both thrived. They scampered happily about in the rigging with Ant. Clef was a good teacher, and now they had Boy-O as well, an experienced hand. Lant laboured alongside me, trying to teach his man’s body the skills it would have been happier to acquire as a boy. I pitied him, but he did not complain. All of us ate as heavily as we were allowed, and took sleep whenever we could.
There was a hearty rhythm to the days. If I had been younger and had no other goal in life than to earn my bread it would have been satisfying. The animosity of the liveship’s crew over how we would destroy the life they had always known was ground away in the day-by-day necessity of working alongside us. I avoided any topic that might remind them that, at the end of this journey, Paragon intended to become dragons.
I marvelled at Brashen’s patience with Kennitsson. More than once, the captain had paired me with him. Prince FitzChivalry, Brashen always called me, and I finally grasped that he was making the boy see that even a royal prince did not hesitate to apply himself to the humblest task. But ultimately I think Kennitsson strove for the skills of a sailor not from Trell’s orders but his own desire to be seen as equal or better at his duties than any of the deckhands. It was painful to watch. He would race a more experienced hand to a task and loudly exclaim, ‘I can do it!’ He sometimes scorned offers of help and corrections to his methods. He was not a stupid man, but he was overly proud and desperate to be right. Even more painful was seeing Boy-O caught between his parents and the man he wished to be friends with. Kennitsson treated Boy-O as if he were an affable puppy, sometimes showing scorn of the y
ounger man’s maritime skills. I sometimes saw Boy-O surreptitiously recoil a line in Kennitsson’s wake or loose a line and reknot it. I said nothing but I was certain that if I was aware of it, his father certainly was. And if Brashen was letting it go by, it was not up to me to say anything. Still, it was darkly fascinating to watch Kennitsson seesaw between a man eager to learn the skills and a prince who could not admit that he did not know something. I hoped for no disasters.
Clef, the first mate, had seen Boy-O raised from infancy, and it was natural the two would be close so I was surprised when he befriended Kennitsson. Clef had been a youngster on Paragon in the days when Kennit had raped Althea and tried to send Paragon to the bottom, yet he seemed to take Kennitsson on his own merits. And when I observed Clef correct Kennitsson, the prince seemed better able to accept criticism than when Brashen intervened. I also feared that Per might be jealous over losing Clef’s attention, but instead he attached himself to the group and soon they began to sit together at meals. When Per joined the three of them at dice one evening, I knew he had been accepted into that circle, and I let go of him. Boys seek out what they need.
Over the course of a few evenings, I saw Kennitsson move from ignoring Per to the mockery and teasing that preludes true friendship. I watched Kennitsson and Per conspire to merrily cheat Boy-O at cards until he had lost every dry bean they were using in lieu of coins. Boy-O’s mock outrage when he discovered the ploy completed Per’s initiation into that group. Clef began to pair Kennitsson with Per for some of his duties. More than once, I saw Per showing the prince the proper way to perform a task. They became friends, and I judged it good for both of them.
But it was not without missteps. I stood aside when Boy-O and Kennitsson undertook to get Per well and truly drunk. Every young man must pass that trial, and I judged that while he would suffer the next day, he would take no real harm from it. Boy-O especially had a heart for mischief rather than petty cruelty. What I had not counted on was that Per would, in his inebriation, invite them to our cabin to see the wonderful Elderling gifts the Rain Wilders had given us. When I chanced to step in, all three were well soused, and my lad was holding up one of Chade’s firepots and trying to explain what he thought it was. The Elderling brick was upside-down on my bunk and the blanket had begun to smoulder. That did not upset me as much as seeing Bee’s books in proximity to the scorched blanket.