Ship of Magic

Page 294

He turned away from her to sit down heavily on the deck. Did he even guess how his words wounded her? She tried to share his feelings, but the boy who had vibrated with pain the night before was now a great stillness. He put his head back and drew a great breath of the clean wind sweeping her decks. He sighed it out.

The man at the wheel tried to force her back out into the main channel. With almost idle malice, she leaned against it, weltering as he forced her over. That for Kyle Haven, who thought he could bend her to his will.

“I don't know what to say to you,” Wintrow confessed quietly. “When I think of you, I feel shamed, as if I betrayed you by running away. Yet when I think of myself, I am disappointed, for I nearly managed to regain my life. I don't wish to abandon you, but I don't wish to be trapped here either. ” He shook his head, then leaned back against the railing. He was ragged and dirty, and Torg had not taken the chains from his wrists and ankles when he left him there. Win trow now spoke over his shoulder as he looked up at her sails. “Sometimes I feel I am two people, reaching after two different lives. Or rather, joined to you, I am a different person from who I am when we are apart. When we are together, I lose . . . something. I don't know what to call it. My ability to be only myself. ”

A prickling of dread ran over Vivacia. His words were too close to what she had planned to say to him. She had left Jamaillia City the morning before this, but only now had Torg brought Wintrow to her. For the first time she had seen what they had done to him. Most jolting was her crude image in colored ink on the boy's cheek. Nothing marked him as a sailor now, let alone the captain's son. He looked like any slave. Yet despite all that had befallen him, he was outwardly calm.

Answering her thought, he observed, “I don't have anything left for feelings anymore. Through you, I am all the slaves at once. When I allow myself to feel that, I think I shall go mad. So I hold back from it and try to feel nothing at all. ”

“These emotions are too strong,” Vivacia agreed in a low voice. “Their suffering is too great. It overwhelms me, until I cannot separate myself. ” She paused, then went on haltingly, “It was worse when they were aboard and you were not. Just your being gone made me feel as if I were adrift. I think you are the anchor that keeps me who I am. I think that is why a liveship needs one of her own family aboard her. ”

Wintrow made no reply, but she hoped from his stillness he was listening. “I take from you,” she admitted. “I take and I give you nothing. ”

He stirred slightly. His voice was oddly flat as he observed, “You've given me strength, and more than once. ”

“But only that I might keep you by me,” she said carefully. “I strengthen you so I may keep you. So I can remain certain of who I am. ” She gathered her courage. “Wintrow. What was I, before I was a liveship?”

He shifted his fetters and rubbed his chafed ankles distractedly. He did not seem to understand the importance of her question. “A tree, I suppose. Actually, a number of trees, if wizardwood grows as other wood does. Why do you ask?”

“While you were gone, I could almost recall . . . something else. Like wind in my face, only stronger. Moving so swiftly, of my own free will. I could almost recall being . . . someone . . . who was not a Vestrit at all. Someone separate from all I have known in this life. It was very frightening. But. ” She halted, teetering on a thought she didn't want to acknowledge.

After a long silence, she admitted, “I think I liked it. Then. Now . . . I think I had what men would call nightmares . . . if live-ships could sleep. But I don't sleep, and so I could not wake from them completely. The serpents in the harbor, Wintrow. ” Now she spoke hurriedly in a low voice, trying to make him understand all of it at once. “No one else saw them in the harbor. All now admit of that white one that follows me. But there were others, many of them, in the bottom muck of the harbor. I tried to tell Gantry they were there, but he told me to ignore them. But I could not, because somehow they made the dreams that . . . Wintrow?”

He was dozing off in the warm sun on his skin. No one could blame him after the hardships he'd endured.

It still hurt her. She needed to talk to someone about these things, or she thought she would go mad. But no one was willing to truly listen to her. Even with Wintrow back on board, she still felt isolated. She suspected he was somehow holding himself back from her. Again, she could neither blame him, nor stop the hurt she felt at that. She felt an unfocused anger as well. The Vestrit family had made her what she was, created these needs in her. Yet since she had quickened, she had not had even a single day of ungrudging companionship. Kyle expected her to sail lively and well with a belly full of misery and no companion. It wasn't fair.