Ship of Magic

Page 55
The secret of the figurehead peg was not a widely known one. Ephron had entrusted it to Brashen shortly after he had made him first mate. Concealed in the tumbling locks of the figurehead's hair was a catch that would release a long smooth peg of the silky gray wood that comprised her. It was not a necessity, but it was believed that if the dying person grasped this peg as his life departed, more of his wisdom and essence would be imparted to the ship. Ephron had shown it to Brashen and illustrated how it worked, so that if some ship's disaster felled him, Brashen might bring him the peg in his last moments. It was a duty Brashen had fervently hoped never to perform.

He found Althea dangling all but upside down from the bowsprit as she tried to tug the peg loose from its setting. Without a word he followed her out, grasped her around the hips and lowered her to where she might reach it more easily. “Thanks,” she grunted as she pulled it free. He effortlessly lifted her and set her back on her feet on the deck. She raced back to her father, the precious peg clutched tightly in her fist. Brashen was right behind her.

They were not a moment too soon. Ephron Vestrit's death was not to be a pleasant one. Instead of closing his eyes and going in peace, he fought it as he had fought everything in life that opposed him. Althea offered him the peg and he gripped it as if it would save him. “Drowning,” he strangled out. “Drowning on a dry deck. ”

For a time the strange tableau held. Althea and her father gripped either end of the peg. Tears ran freely down her ravaged face. Her hair, gone wild about her face, clung to her damp cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, focused and caring as she stared down into the depths of her father's mirroring black eyes. She knew there was nothing she could do for him, but she did not flinch away.

Ephron's free hand scrabbled against the deck as if trying to find a grip on the smoothly sanded planks. He managed to draw in another choking, gurgling breath. A bloody froth was beginning to form at the corners of his mouth. Other family members clustered around them. The older sister clung tightly to her mother, wordless in grief, but the mother spoke in a low voice into her hair as she embraced her. The girl child wept, caught in a sort of terror, and clutched at her confused smaller brother. The older grandson stood back and apart from his family, face pale and set as one who endures pain. Kyle stood, arms crossed on his chest, at the dying man's feet. Brashen had no idea what thoughts passed behind that still countenance. A second circle had also formed, at a respectful distance outside the canopy. The still-faced crew had gathered, hats in hands, to witness their captain's passing.

“Althea!” the captain's wife called out suddenly to her daughter. At the same time she thrust her older daughter forward, towards their father. “You must,” she said in an odd, low voice. “You know you must. ” There was an odd purposefulness to her voice, as if she forced herself to some very unpleasant duty. The look on the older daughter's face-Keffria, that was her name-seemed to combine shame with defiance. Keffria dropped to her knees suddenly beside her sister. She reached out a pale, trembling hand. Brashen thought she would touch her father. Instead she resolutely grasped the peg between Althea's hand and her father's. Even as Keffria made her unmistakable claim to the ship by grasping the peg above Althea's hand, her mother affirmed it for her.

“Althea. Let go the peg. The ship is your sister's, by right of her birth order. And by your father's will. ” The mother's voice shook as she said the words, but she said them clearly.

Althea looked up in disbelief, her eyes tracing up the arm from the hand that gripped the peg to her sister's face. “Keffria?” she asked in confusion. “You can't mean it!”

Uncertainty spread over the older woman's face. She glanced up at the mother. “She does!” Ronica Vestrit declared, almost savagely. “It's how it has to be, Althea. It's how it must be, for all our sakes. ”

“Papa?” Althea asked brokenly.

Her father's dark eyes had never left her face. His mouth opened, moved, and he spoke a last phrase. “. . . let go. . . . ”

Brashen had once worked on a ship where the mate was a bit too free with his marlinespike. Mostly he used it to bludgeon fellows from behind, sailors he felt were not paying sufficient attention to their tasks. More than once, Brashen had been an unwilling witness to the look on a man's face as the tool connected with the back of his skull. He knew the look a man wore at that moment when pain registered as unconsciousness. That was how Althea looked at the uttering of her father's words. Her grip on the peg laxed, her hand fell away from it to clutch instead at her father's thin arm. That she held to, as a sailor clings to wreckage in a storm-tossed sea. She did not look again at her mother or her sister. She only gripped her father's arm as he gaped and gasped like a fish out of water.