The Liveship Traders Series

by Robin Hobb

  ‘You will regret this!’ Mingsley told her. He stood with a fine crash of china and cutlery. ‘You would have been carried alongside us to power! You could have returned to Jamaillia a wealthy woman, and lived out your days in civilization and culture. Instead you have doomed yourself to this backwater town and its rustic folk. They have no respect for the Satrapy here. Here you will be nothing more than just another woman on her own!’

  He stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him. Just another woman on her own. Mingsley was not to know that he had flung a blessing at Serilla in the tones of a curse.

  Kendry came back to harbour under sail, a diminished crew working his decks, but making good time nonetheless. Reyn Khuprus sat on the skeletal rooftop of a half-destroyed warehouse and watched him come. Overhead, Tintaglia circled once, flashing silver. The dragon touched Reyn’s mind briefly as she passed overhead. ‘Ophelia is your name for her. She comes, also.’

  He watched Kendry as the men brought him alongside one of the shattered docks and tied him off. The liveship had changed. The affable boyish figurehead did not wave his arms in greeting, or clap and whoop with joy at his safe return. Instead his arms were crossed on his chest and his face was closed. Reyn could guess what had happened. Tintaglia had told Kendry who and what he truly was. The last few times he’d sailed on the Kendry, he had been uncomfortably aware of the dragon lurking below the ship’s surface personality. Now those memories would have bloomed in full.

  A slow and terrible knowledge rose in Reyn. He was doomed to see this change in every liveship. With each stricken or closed face, he would have to confront what his ancestors had done. Knowingly or not, they had taken the dragons’ lives from them, and then condemned their spirits to a sexless, wingless eternity as ships. He should have been happy to know that the liveship Ophelia had prevailed in her encounters with the Chalcedeans. Instead, he did not want to be there when Grag Tenira went down to greet the ship he had loved all his life, and encountered a glowering dragon instead. It was not only dragonkind he had injured; soon he would see in his friend’s eyes the damage done to Bingtown’s liveship families.

  Too many changes, too many chances, he told himself. He could not sort out what he felt any more. He should have been joyous. Malta was alive. Bingtown had formed a solid alliance and had a treaty ready for the dragon’s mark. The Chalcedeans were vanquished, at least for now. And sometime in the future, if all went well, there was another Elderling city for him to explore and learn. This time, he would be in charge, with no plundering or hasty robbing of treasure. He would have Malta at his side. All would be well. All would be healed.

  Somehow, he could not trust it to be real. The brief sensing of Malta that he had received through Tintaglia was like the aroma of hot food to a starving man. The possibility of her was not enough to satisfy the longing in his heart.

  At a noise in the building below him, he glanced down, expecting to see a stray dog or cat. Instead, he saw Selden picking his way through the rubble below. ‘Get out of there,’ he called down in annoyance. ‘Can’t you see this whole roof could fall on you?’

  ‘Which is why you’re sitting on it, obviously,’ Selden called up to him, unimpressed.

  ‘I just needed a place where I could look out over the harbour and watch for Tintaglia to return. I’m coming down now.’

  ‘Good. Tintaglia’s gone to groom, but soon she’ll return to make her mark on the scroll the Council has drawn up.’ He took a breath. ‘She wants the Kendry immediately loaded with supplies and engineers and sent up the river so her work can be begun.’

  ‘Supplies from where?’ Reyn asked sarcastically.

  ‘She doesn’t much care. I’ve suggested that she should begin with the Kendry just taking builders up there, stopping in Trehaug to pick up folk who know the ways of the river, and then going to the place she wants dredged. They must see what needs to be done before they plan how to do it.’

  Reyn did not ask him how he knew so much. Instead, he came to his feet, and picked his way back to the eaves of the building. The winter sun woke the glints of scaling on Selden’s brows and lips. ‘She sent you to fetch me, didn’t she?’ Reyn asked as he made the final jump down. ‘To make sure I’d be there?’

  ‘If she wanted you there, she could have told you herself. No. I came myself to make sure you would be there. So you can hold her to her promise. Left to herself, she will worry first about her serpents and the possibility of other cocooned dragons surviving. If we leave it up to her, it will be months instead of days before she sets out to look for Malta.’

  ‘Months!’ Reyn felt a surge of rage. ‘We should be departing today!’ A sick certainty came over him. It would be days. Just signing the contract would probably take a day in itself. And then the selection of folk to go upriver, and the supplying of the Kendry. ‘After all Malta did to free her, you would think she would have at least a scrap of gratitude for her.’

  The boy frowned to himself. ‘It isn’t that she dislikes Malta. Or you. She doesn’t think that way at all. Dragons and serpents are so much more important to her than people, to ask her to choose between rescuing her own kind and saving Malta is like asking you to choose between Malta and a pigeon.’

  Selden paused. ‘To Tintaglia, most humans seem very similar, and our concerns seem trivial matters indeed. It is up to us to make such things important to her. If she succeeds in her plans, there will be other dragons sharing our world with us. Only they will see it as us sharing their world. My grandfather used to say, “Start out dealing with a man the way you intend to go on dealing with him.” I think the same may be true of dragons. I think we need to establish now what we expect of her and her kind.’

  ‘But, to wait days until we depart –’

  ‘To wait a few days is better than to wait forever,’ Selden pointed out to him. ‘We know Malta is alive. Did her life feel threatened to you?’

  Reyn sighed. ‘I could not tell,’ he was forced to admit. ‘I could sense Malta. But it was as if she refused to pay attention to me.’

  They both fell silent. The winter day was cold but still under a clear blue sky. Voices carried, and hammers rang throughout the city. As they walked together through the Bingtown streets, Reyn could already feel the change in the air. Everywhere, the bustle of activity clearly spoke of hopes for and belief in tomorrows. Tattooed and Three Ships people worked alongside Traders both Old and New. Few of the businesses had reopened, but there were already youngsters on street corners hawking shellfish and wild greens. There seemed to be more folk in town as well. He suspected the flood of refugees had reversed, and that those who had fled Bingtown to outlying areas were returning. The tide had turned. Bingtown would rise from the ashes.

  ‘You seem to know a great deal about dragons,’ Reyn observed to Selden. ‘Whence comes all this sudden knowledge?’

  Instead of replying, Selden asked a question of his own. ‘I’m turning into a Rain Wilder, aren’t I?’

  Reyn didn’t look at him. He wasn’t sure Selden would want to consider his face just now. The changes in Reyn’s own appearance seemed to be accelerating. Even his fingernails were growing thicker and hornier. Usually such changes did not come to a Rain Wilder until he reached middle age. ‘It certainly looks that way. Does it distress you?’

  ‘Not much. I don’t think my mother likes it.’ Before Reyn could react to that, he went on, ‘I have the dreams of a Rain Wilder now. They started the night I fell asleep in the city. You woke me from one, when you found me. I couldn’t hear the music then, like Malta did, but I think that if I went back now, I would. The knowledge grows in me, and I don’t know where it comes from.’ He knit his scaled brows. ‘It belonged to someone else, but somehow it’s coming down to me now. Is that what is called “drowning in memories”, Reyn? A stream of memories flow through me. Am I going to go crazy?’

  He set his hand to the boy’s shoulder and gripped it. Such a thin and narrow shoulder to take on such a burden. ‘Not necessarily.
Not all of us go crazy. Some of us learn to swim with the flow.’

  20

  PRISONERS

  ‘ARE YOU SURE you’ll be warm enough?’ Jani Khuprus asked him again.

  Selden rolled his eyes at Reyn in sympathy, and the Rain Wilder found himself smiling. ‘I don’t know,’ Reyn replied honestly. ‘But if I put on any more layers of clothing, I’m afraid I’ll slip out of them when the dragon is carrying me.’

  That silenced her. ‘I’ll be fine, Mother,’ he assured her. ‘It won’t be any worse than sailing in foul weather.’

  They stood in a hastily cleared area behind the Traders’ Concourse. Tintaglia had demanded that henceforth every city in the Traders’ control must have an open space sufficiently large for a dragon to land comfortably. And whenever a dragon chose to land in a city, the inhabitants must guarantee the creature a warm welcome and an adequate meal. Negotiating what an ‘adequate meal’ was had taken several hours. The meat had to be alive, and equal at least the size of a ‘well-fleshed bull calf at the end of his first year.’ When told she was more likely to get poultry, as Bingtown lacked grazing lands for cattle, she had sulked until someone had offered her warmed oil and assistance in grooming her scales whenever she visited. That had seemed to mollify her.

  Days had been taken up with such quibbling, until Reyn had thought he would go mad. The dozen or so surviving pigeons that served Bingtown and Trehaug had been flown into a state of exhaustion. The terse missives sent and received had seemed incapable of explaining all that was going on in both cities. Reyn had been relieved when a single line informed them that his stepfather and half-sister had returned to the city in good health. Bendir had left Trehaug to venture upriver to locate the place Tintaglia had indicated on the tiny river chart they’d sent. He would begin both to ponder a method of deepening the river, and to survey for signs of a buried city. Content that her goals were being advanced, Tintaglia had finally agreed to depart to search for Malta. Reyn was surprised at how many folk had gathered to watch his departure, probably more from curiosity than any deep concern for his mission. Malta’s life or death would little affect them.

  ‘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. He stepped up to the dragon. ‘I am ready.’

  ‘Very well then,’ she replied. She swept her gaze over those assembled to bid them farewell. ‘When I return, I expect to see progress. Great progress.’

  Selden broke suddenly from his mother’s side and thrust a small cloth bag into Reyn’s hands. It rattled. ‘Take these. They were Malta’s. They might help you get through.’

  Gravely Reyn poked the mouth of the small bag open, expecting some token of jewellery. Instead, he found a handful of tinted honey drops. He looked up from the candy in puzzlement. Selden shrugged.

  ‘I was at our old house yesterday, seeing what was left there. Almost everything had been stolen or destroyed. So I looked in some of the less obvious places.’ Selden grinned, abruptly a small brother. ‘I always knew where Malta hid her candy.’ The smile softened at the edges. ‘She loves honey drops. But they might keep you going in the cold. I don’t think she’d mind if you ate them.’

  It was so Malta. Hoarded sweetness against an uncertain tomorrow. Reyn tucked the bag into the top of his pouch. ‘Thank you,’ he replied gravely. He pulled a wool veil down over his face and tucked it into the throat of his jacket. It would keep his face warm, but limited his vision.

  ‘That’s wise,’ Selden observed encouragingly. ‘You’ve been changing a lot, you know. When I first saw you, I didn’t think Malta would mind much. But you’re a lot more lumpy now.’ The boy lifted an unselfconscious hand to his face, and ran his fingers over his eyebrows. ‘She’s going to have fits when she sees me,’ he predicted merrily.

  The dragon reared back onto her hind legs. ‘Hurry up,’ she ordered Reyn tersely. To Selden, she spoke more gently. ‘Move to the side, small minstrel, and turn your eyes away. I would not blind you with dust blasted by my wings.’

  ‘I thank you, Great One. Though to be blinded might not be so great a loss, if my last sight were of you, gleaming silver and blue as you rose. Such a memory might sustain me to the end of my days.’

  ‘Flatterer!’ the dragon dismissed his words, but she did not hide her pleasure. As soon as Selden was clear, she snatched Reyn up from the ground as if he were a toy. She held him around his chest, his legs and feet dangling.

  She shook out her wings and crouched on her powerful hind legs. Once, twice, she flapped her wings in a measuring way. He tried to call a farewell, but could not summon enough breath. She sprang upward with a suddenness that snapped his head back. The shouted farewells were lost in the steady thunder of her wings. He closed his eyes against the cold wind. When he forced them open again, he looked down on a glittering carpet of blue and grey, a pattern rippling slowly across it. The sea, he realized, was very, very far below him. Nothing was below him except deep, cold water. He swallowed against a rising fear.

  ‘Well. Where did you want to go?’

  ‘Where do I want to go? To wherever Malta is, of course.’

  ‘I told you before, I can sense she is alive. That doesn’t mean I know where she is.’

  Desolation swallowed Reyn. The dragon took sudden pity on him. ‘See what you can do,’ she suggested. Through her, he again shared her awareness of Malta. He closed his eyes and slipped into that sensing that was not hearing nor sight nor scent, but an eerie shadow of all three. He found himself opening his mouth and breathing deep as if he could taste her scent on the cold air. Something of himself, he was sure, flowed out to meet her.

  They merged in a warm sleepy lassitude. As they had when they shared the dream-box, he experienced her perceptions of her world. Warm. A slow rocking motion. He breathed deep with her, and tasted the unmistakable smell of a ship. He loosened his awareness of his own body and reached more boldly for her. He felt warm bedding around her. He caught the deep rhythm of her breathing and then shared it. She slept with her cheek on her hand. He became that hand, cradling the warm softness of her cheek. He caressed it. She smiled in her sleep. ‘Reyn,’ she acknowledged him, without recognizing his true presence.

  ‘Malta, my love,’ he returned her greeting gently. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In bed,’ she sighed. There was warm interest in her voice.

  ‘Where?’ he persisted, regretfully ignoring that invitation.

  ‘On a ship. Chalcedean ship.’

  ‘Where are you bound?’ he asked her desperately. He could feel his contact with her fading as his irritating questions clashed with her dream. He clung to her, but her mind pulled away from sleep, disturbed by his insistence that she answer. ‘Where?’ he demanded. ‘WHERE?’

  ‘Jamaillia bound!’ Malta found herself sitting bolt upright in her bedding. ‘Jamaillia bound,’ she repeated, but could not recall what prompted the words. She had the tantalizing feeling that she had just left a very interesting dream, but now could not remember even a scrap of it. It was almost a relief, really. By day, she could control her thoughts. Nights were when her treacherous mind brought her dreams of Reyn, achingly sweet with loss. Better to awake and remember nothing than to awake with tears on her face. She lifted her hands to her face and touched her cheeks. One tingled strangely. She stretched, then conceded she was irrevocably awake. She threw back the coverlet and stood up, yawning.

  She was almost accustomed to the opulence of the chamber now. That had not dulled her pleasure in it. The captain had allotted her two deckhands and permission to search the hold for whatever might make the Satrap more comfortable. She had cast aside all moderation. A thick rug of soft wool on the floor and brightly-figured hangings warmed the room. Candelabra had replaced the smoky lantern. Stacked blankets and furs made up her pallet. The Satrap’s bed was
lined with thick bearskins and sheepskins. An elaborate hookah squatted next to it, and a damask drapery around it curtained him from draughts.

  From behind the drapery came his fitful snore. Good. She had time to dress herself before he woke. Moving quietly, she crossed the room to a large trunk, opened it and dug through the layers of garments within. Fabrics of every hue and texture met her questing hands. She selected something warm, soft and blue and pulled it out. She held the robe against her. It was too large, but she would make it do. She glanced uncomfortably at the Satrap’s bed hangings, then pulled the blue robe over her head. Beneath it, she let her nightgown fall, then thrust her arms through the long blue sleeves. A faint perfume clung to it, the scent last worn by its owner. She would not wonder how the trunk of lovely clothing had come to the Chalcedeans. Going in rags herself would not restore life to the rightful owner. It would only make her own survival more precarious.

  There was a mirror in the lid of the trunk, but Malta avoided looking in it. The first time she had gleefully opened the trunk, her own reflection had been the first thing she saw. The scar was far worse than she had imagined. It stood up, a double ridge of pale, rippling flesh that reached almost to her nose and disappeared in her hair. She had touched the lumpy cicatrix in disbelief, and then scrabbled back from the trunk in horror.

  The Satrap had laughed.

  ‘You see,’ he mocked her. ‘I told you so. Your brief moment of beauty is gone, Malta. You would be wise to learn to be useful and accommodating. That is all that is left to you now. Any pride you retain is self-delusion.’

  She could not respond to his hateful words. Her voice was stilled, her gaze trapped in her own image. For a time she had stared in silence, unable to move, unable to think.