by Robin Hobb
“Too bad,” Sedric agreed sickly. He was silent for a time, and then he observed, “Just a few minutes ago, you were talking about how wonderful it was to be part of something big like this expedition. Mapping the river, looking for an ancient city. Why would you offer to walk away from that just to take me to Trehaug?”
Carson grinned. He met his eyes frankly. “I like you, Sedric. I really like you. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
The man’s frankness astounded him. He stared at the hunter, at his scaled skin above his bearded cheeks, his wild hair, and his scruffy clothing. Could he have been more unlike Hest?
A moment too late, he realized he should have given some response to that honest offering. Carson had already looked away from him. He gave a tiny shrug. “I know you’ve got someone waiting for you to come back. I think he was an idiot to let you go in the first place. And of course, I don’t forget the differences between us. I know what I am, and I got my place in the world. And most of the time, I’m pretty satisfied with my life.”
Sedric found his voice. “I wish I could say the same,” he offered, then knew it had come out wrong. “I mean, I wish I could say I’d found satisfaction in my life. I haven’t.” There had been moments of it, he thought. Time spent with Hest in some of the more exotic cities they’d visited, times of excellent wine and rare foods and the prospect of a long, merry evening in a finely appointed inn. Had that been satisfaction with his life, he suddenly wondered, or simply hedonistic satiation? Uncomfortably he sensed that Carson was right. The differences between them were extreme. He suddenly felt shamed but also a bit angry. So he liked things to be nice; so he enjoyed the fine things life could offer. That didn’t make him shallow. There was more to him than just enjoying what Hest’s money could buy him. Carson’s voice called him back to reality. His voice sounded resigned.
“It’s getting late. We should get some sleep. You can have the blanket.”
“There’s another blanket in the other boat,” he said.
“Other boat?” Carson asked him.
He’d relaxed too much. The truth had slipped out. Then he wondered how long he would have lied? Would he have kept his silence tomorrow, let them abandon supplies and gear that were even more precious now than when they had left Trehaug?
“It’s tied up on the other side of that big snag over there.” He tossed his head toward it, and then sat, guilty and silent, as Carson gracefully rose and crossed the mat of rocking logs and debris to look down on it. He stared at the firepot. He heard the big man thud gently down into the bottom of the boat. In a moment, his voice came through the dimness. “This is Greft’s boat and his gear. One thing about him, he’s good at taking care of what’s his. If I were you, I’d be careful with his stuff. He’s going to want it all back, and in good condition.”
A few moments later, Carson returned. The blanket was slung over his shoulder. He tossed it to Sedric, not hard but not softly either. Sedric caught it. It was still damp in places. He’d intended to spread it out to dry in the sun and forgotten.
“So,” Carson said, sitting down on the log again. “That’s Greft’s boat. And you didn’t tie the knots that are securing it. What’s the whole story? And why didn’t you tell it?” There was a chill in his voice, a cold spark of anger.
Sedric was suddenly too tired to dissemble. Too tired to be anything but honest. “I did tell you what happened to me. I saw this pack of logs here, and Relpda brought me here. Then I found out that Jess was already here. He’d been swept away, too, but he’d found a boat. And he’d got here before I did.”
“Jess is here?”
A simple question. If he answered it truthfully, how would Carson react? He looked at him wordlessly. No lie came to him and he didn’t dare tell the truth. He fingered the massive bruise on the side of his face as he tried to decide where to begin. Carson’s deep eyes were fixed on his. A furrow had begun to show between his brows, and his mouth was suspicious. Talk. Say something.
“He wanted to kill Relpda. Cut her up into parts, take the parts to Chalced and sell them.”
For a long moment, Carson was silent. Then he nodded slowly. “That sounds like something Jess was capable of doing. Sounds like what he was trying to get Greft to persuade the keepers to do. So what happened?”
“We fought. I hit him with the hatchet.”
“And I ate him.” There was satisfaction in Relpda’s quiet rumble.
The copper distracted Carson completely from what Sedric had said. His head swiveled to face her. “You ate him? You ate Jess?” He was incredulous.
“It’s what dragons do,” she replied defensively. Sedric’s own words, coming out of her mouth.
Sedric found himself justifying it. “Jess wanted me to help him trick her into keeping still while he killed her. I wouldn’t. So he stabbed her with a spear and then came after me. Carson, he was going to kill her and cut her up and sell her. And he didn’t care if he had to kill me first to do it.”
The hunter’s head swiveled back to regard Sedric skeptically. His eyes wandered over Sedric, his bruised face and battered condition, assigning new meaning to what he saw. Sedric felt his muscles tighten as he faced that gaze, fearing that soon it would turn to judgment and condemnation. Instead, he saw disbelief slowly become admiring amazement.
“Jess was one of the nastiest fellows I’d ever had to work alongside. He had a reputation for being a dirty fighter, the kind who didn’t stop even after the other fellow was willing to give in. And you stood up to him for your dragon?” He glanced over at Relpda. Nothing remained of the elk carcass. She’d eaten it all.
“I had to,” Sedric said quietly.
“And you won?”
Sedric just looked at him. “I’m not sure I’d describe it as winning.”
The comment surprised a guffaw out of Carson. Then Relpda intruded.
“And I ate him. Sedric fed him to me.” She seemed to savor the memory.
“That isn’t exactly what happened,” Sedric hastily interposed. “I never intended for that to happen. Though I’ll admit that at the time, what I mostly felt was relief. Because I wasn’t sure if anything else would have stopped him.”
“And Jess is what happened to your face, then?”
Sedric lifted a hand to his jaw. His cheekbone was still tender, and the swollen inside of his cheek kept snagging on his teeth. But he felt almost strangely proud of his injury now. “Yes, it was Jess. I’d never been hit in the face like that before.”
Carson gave a brief snort of laughter. “Wish I could say that! I’ve caught plenty of fists with my face. Though I’m truly sorry to see it happen to yours.”
Almost timidly, the hunter put out a large hand. The touch of his rough fingers on Sedric’s face was gentle. Sedric was shocked that such a slight brush against his cheek could send such a rush of feeling through him. The fingers pressed gently around his eyes socket and then the line of his cheekbones. He sat very still, wondering if there would be more, wondering how he would react if there was. But Carson dropped his hand and turned his face away, saying hoarsely, “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think. You should heal.” A moment later, he fed another stick to the firepot. “We should get some sleep soon if we’re going to get up early.”
“Jess said Leftrin was in on it.” Sedric blurted the statement out, letting it be its own question.
“In on what?”
“Killing dragons and selling off the parts. Teeth, blood, scales. He said that whoever had sent him had said that Leftrin would be willing to help him.”
Carson’s dark gaze grew troubled. “And did he?”
“No. That was part of Jess’s complaint. He seemed to feel Leftrin had cheated him.”
Carson’s expression lightened somewhat. “That seems likely to me. I’ve known Leftrin a long time. And over the years, once or twice, he’s been involved in a few things that I found, well, questionable. But slaughtering dragons and selling off their bodies? No. To Chalced? Never. There are
a number of reasons why I couldn’t imagine him getting involved with something like that. Tarman being the big one.” His brow wrinkled as he stared into his fire. “Still, it would be interesting to know why Jess thought he would.”
He shook his head, then stood up slowly, rolling his shoulders as he did so. He was surprisingly graceful for his size, catching his balance easily as he stepped down into his small boat. His own blanket was neatly stowed, folded, and shoved high under the seat out of the damp. Sedric still clutched the damp and wrinkled blanket Carson had tossed at him. He looked at Carson’s boat, at every item in a precise location, and he suddenly felt childish and ashamed. Over in the other boat, a hatchet was probably rusting from its immersion in the bloody bilgewater. Carson had arrived and had seen to every need that he and the dragon had, without a single wasted movement. Sedric hadn’t even remembered to spread his blanket out to dry.
He wondered how Carson saw him. Incompetent? Self-indulgent? Rich and spoiled? I’m not truly any of those things, he thought. I’m just out of my place right now. If we were back in Bingtown, and he came to where I was helping Hest prepare to negotiate a trade, he’d see what I truly am. Carson would be the incompetent and useless one there. Then even that thought seemed self-indulgent and spoiled, a child’s wish to show off for someone he desired to impress. What did it matter what Carson thought of him? When had he begun to care what an ignorant Rain Wild hunter thought of him?
He shook out the smelly blanket and slung it around his shoulders. Within its shelter, he sat hugging himself. And thinking.
NIGHT WAS FULL dark around Tarman. Captain Leftrin walked his decks. The night sky was a black strip sprinkled with glittering stars. To one side of the barge, the river stretched out to an invisible distant shore. On the other side the forest loomed, making the barge small. At the foot of the forest, on a narrow muddy bank, the dragons slept. On the roof of the deckhouse, laid out in neat rows as if they were corpses, the keepers slept. And Leftrin was awake.
Swarge was supposed to be on watch, but he’d sent him off to his bed. The entire crew was asleep. The river was down, Tarman was safely snugged on mud for the night, and his crew deserved a rest. It would be the first full night of sleep any of them had had since the wave hit. They all needed the rest. Everyone needed to sleep.
Even Alise. That was why she had sought her room early. She was exhausted still. He began another slow circuit of the decks. He didn’t need to walk laps around his ship. All was safe and calm now. He could have gone off to his own bunk and slept and left Tarman to watch for himself. No one would fault him for that.
He passed Alise’s door. No light shone from under it. Doubtless she was asleep. If she had wanted his company, she would have lingered at the galley table. She hadn’t. She’d vanished immediately after dinner. He’d hoped that she would stay. He faced that fading hope frankly. It would have been the first and only night that they’d been together on board his ship without Sedric’s presence as a reminder of who and what she was. He had hoped to steal this one night from her Bingtown life and possess it as something of their own.
But she’d excused herself from the table and vanished into her own room.
What did that mean?
Probably that she was a lot smarter than he was. Which, he told himself, he’d known all along. What intelligent man would want to share harness with a woman stupider than himself? His Alise was smart, and he knew it. Not just educated but intelligent.
But he wished she hadn’t chosen to be smart on this particular night.
And what sort of a man was he, that he felt Sedric’s absence as a sort of relief rather than a loss? The man had been Alise’s friend since childhood. He knew that. He might find him an annoying spoiled twit of a fellow, but Alise cared about him. She was probably wondering if he was dead or in dire circumstances tonight. And here he was, brutishly thinking only that the watchman was gone.
He finished his circuit of his ship and stood for a time on Tarman’s blunt-nosed bow. He leaned on the railing and looked at the “shore.” Somewhere there the dragons slept in the mud, but he couldn’t see them. The forest was pitch before his eyes. He spoke to his ship.
“Well, tomorrow’s another day, Tarman. One way or another, Carson will return. And then what? Onward?”
Of course.
“You seem so sure of it.”
I remember it.
“So you’ve told me. But not the way it is now.”
No. That’s true.
“But you think we ought to keep going?”
The others have no choice. And I think it’s the least we can do for them.
Leftrin said nothing. He glided his hands lightly along the bow railing, thinking. Tarman was an old ship, older than any of the other liveships. He was one of the first to have been put together from wizardwood, as it was known then. He hadn’t been designed to be a trading ship of any kind, only a simple wooden barge, given a thick layer of the only sort of wood that seemed impervious to the Rain Wild River’s acid rages. In a tradition much older than Bingtown or even Jamaillia, Leftrin’s ancestor had painted eyes on his ship not only to give it a wise expression but as a superstition that the barge would literally “watch out” for itself on the dangerous waterway. At the time, the only known properties of wizardwood were that it was hard and heavy and could withstand acid. No one had known then that after lifetimes of human presence on board, a liveship could attain its own awareness. That would not be discovered until the first sailing ships with figureheads were carved from the stuff.
But that didn’t mean that Tarman hadn’t become aware. It didn’t mean that his captains hadn’t known and felt his presence.
The sailors of Leftrin’s lineage had known there was something peculiar about their ship, especially those who grew up on his deck, who slept and played aboard him. They developed an affinity for both the barge and the river, an instinctive knack for navigating and for avoiding the ever-shifting sandbars and hidden snags of the forest waterway. They dreamed strange dreams that they seldom shared except with other members of the family. The dreams were not just dreams of the river and sliding silently through it. They had dreams of flying and sometimes dreams of swimming in a deep and blue-shadowed world.
Tarman had become aware, just as all liveships eventually did. But he had no mouth to speak with, no carved hands or human face. He was silent, but his eyes were old and knowing.
Perhaps Leftrin should have left him that way. Things had been good between them. Why had he desired to try to make them better?
The wizardwood log had been both a windfall and a complication in his life.
He’d made his plans so carefully. He’d reduced his crew to a handful of men whom he absolutely trusted. He’d found men who had worked wizardwood, men with sterling reputations for honesty and carpentry skill. He’d scrimped and saved and bartered for the tools he needed to have. And when all was ready, he’d transported them to where he had found and secured the log of wizardwood.
And he had done it knowing that it was neither log nor wood.
He’d run Tarman aground, and then with lines and pulleys he’d winched the barge up into an isolated inlet along the river’s shore. He’d lost most of a summer’s work to that project. The wizardwood log had to be cut into rough planks and blocks on site and then fastened to Tarman. The barge had to be lifted up on blocks to allow the workmen access to the bottom; the soft ground along the river meant that every day, the blocking had to be reinforced and releveled.
But when all was finished Tarman had what the barge had conveyed to Leftrin it most desired. Four stout legs with webbed feet and a long tail had been added to the hull. Tarman could now go almost anywhere he and his captain wished to go.
It had taken several weeks for Tarman to get complete motion in all his limbs. Leftrin had been terrified for him the first time the blocks were jerked out from under the hull. But Tarman had caught himself, with difficulty, and slowly dragged himself back into the rive
r. The ship’s eyes had gleamed with satisfaction as he propelled himself about in the shallows. He was equally content to swim in the river or crawl along in the shallows. His crew became more a sham than a workforce. They preserved the illusion that Tarman was a barge like any other.
Every scrip and scrap of leftover “wood” had been stowed inside Tarman as dunnage. Not so much as a sliver of the stuff had he sold; that would have been breaking faith with his ship. He respected the dragon stuff Tarman was made from. As the weeks and months passed, he had sensed the ship integrating his new material and memories. Tarman’s placid nature had changed; he had become more assertive and adventurous, sometimes even edging into mischievousness. Leftrin had enjoyed the changes in his ship just as much as if he’d been watching a child grow to manhood. Tarman’s eyes had become more expressive, his connection to his captain more eloquent, and his efficiency as a barge a wonder. If any of the other Traders suspected Leftrin’s secret, none asked about it. Almost every Trader had his own store of undisclosed magic or technology. Not prying too deeply into the affairs of others was an essential part of being a Trader. Leftrin had had no problems, and his profits had steadily grown.
All had been well until one of the carvers had flapped his mouth to that Chalcedean trader, and the hunter had come on board to threaten them, his own kind. Leftrin gritted his teeth so hard that it made a noise. Beneath him, he felt Tarman dig his feet into the mud in anger. Betrayal! Betrayal is not to be tolerated. The traitor must be punished.
Leftrin immediately loosened his grip on the railing and calmed his own emotions. The captain of a liveship always had to keep a rein on his darker thoughts. His emotions could infect his ship in dangerous ways. The strength and clarity of Tarman’s response startled him. He seldom conveyed his thoughts so directly. He had not realized the ship felt so strongly about the hunter. So now he calmly pointed out that the river had done their task for them. Jess was gone, most likely drowned.