Up the coast we fled, with Per and Ant keeping watch in the crow’s nest for any pursuit. They saw two ships, but they could catch neither Vivacia nor Kendry. And when we started up the river, Brashen laughed and said the acid would protect us from any pursuit.
We sailed against the current. I watched how it was done and marvelled at it, and marvelled too at a landscape I could never have imagined. In the evenings, our little company gathered at the table. It began with Per telling me of their journey from Kelsingra down the river, and gradually other stories of their travel were shared. Lant spoke of how Per had killed Ellik, a different tale from the one Per had told. Lant’s praise made him blush. We recalled those who had died at Withywoods. Spark wept when Per spoke of how his mother had forgotten him. Boy-O remembered Paragon to us, and more than once tears were shed for the ship-turned-dragons. I heard stories of Malta, who I would meet, and her romance with a veiled Rain Wild Trader and how they had wed after many adventures. In my hesitant turn, I began to tell how Shun and I had been taken. Of Ellik. Of Vindeliar’s magic. Of the Chalcedean. I even told them of Trader Akriel and her death. But of killing Dwalia and Symphe I said not a word. Silent, too, was Beloved/Amber. I wanted to hear what that person knew of my father, of the years he said they had shared. But he gave me none of that.
Such a strange riverscape! I saw brightly coloured birds, and once, a troop of shrieking monkeys fleeing through the trees. No one asked me to do hard work, no one struck me or threatened me. I had no reason to be afraid. Yet I would wake as often as four times a night, shaking and weeping, or so paralysed by fear that I could not even cry out.
‘Come with me,’ someone said one night, standing by my hammock in the shifting dark, and I cried out in alarm, for it was Vindeliar commanding me again. But it was Beloved. I followed him up to the foredeck near the figurehead, but not on the special little deck where her family often gathered to speak to her. Vivacia was both anchored and tethered for the night, for the changing currents of the river made night navigation dangerous.
I dreaded long discussion with him. Instead, he took out a little flute. ‘A gift from Wintrow,’ he said and began to play soft and breathy music on it. When it was over, he handed me his little wooden pipe and said, ‘Here are where your fingers go. If it sounds wrong, your fingers aren’t blocking the holes completely. Try each note.’
It was both harder and easier than it looked. By the time the sun was threading through the trees, I could sound each note clearly. I ate with everyone, and then found a place on top of the afthouse to curl up out of the way and sleep. I felt like a cat, sleeping in warm sunlight while everyone around me worked. In my sleep, Vivacia spoke to me. It’s like poison working out of a wound. Let the tears fall and let the fear shake you. On my deck or within my hold, you do not have to be strong. Let go of what you had to hide.
Before we reached Trehaug I could play four simple tunes. And sleep at night in the dark. The ship helped me twice to meet with Boy-O secretly. He did not ask me. Vivacia was the one who told me that something was binding in his elbow and he could not straighten his arm completely. He worked alongside the others and did not complain, but he could not swing through the rigging as he once had. She woke me by night, and I went to him as he stood the anchor watch. I moved very softly and he startled when I reached to take his hand in mine. ‘Don’t tell,’ I whispered, and he stared at me in shock and dismay. He tried to pull his hand away, but I held him fast, and then he felt what I did. ‘The ship says it’s like loosening a line jammed in a block and tackle,’ I told him as I worked.
‘How can I thank you?’ he asked me as he flexed his arm.
‘By not telling anyone,’ I said, and slipped away to my hammock.
But the next day, he took me up in the rigging with him, to the very top, and showed me the river and the jungle. And while he named the birds and the trees we could see, I put right a place where the skin on his neck had healed as smooth and shiny as polished wood. ‘It pulls sometimes,’ was all he needed to say. And then we clambered down, and no one was the wiser save he and me.
I had looked forward to Trehaug after all Per had told me of it. He shouted to me at his first sight of one of the little houses dangling in the trees. He stood beside me and we pointed and exclaimed as we saw little children running along outstretched branches, and a man fishing from a tree branch over the river.
So, I was disappointed when our crew anchored Vivacia out of the channel but in the river, away from the docks. Another liveship, a flat black barge named Tarman, was waiting for us, and we anchored next to him. Lines were exchanged to raft the two ships together. Three little boats from the treehouse town rowed out to us, but Captain Wintrow denied them permission to come aboard or tie to us. ‘We are concluding a bargain,’ he warned them. Trader custom meant they could not come aboard or speak to us.
I stood at the railing and watched, wishing I were more a part of it, regretting what I had not learned and done. Vivacia reached for me and I lowered my walls. She suffused me with reassurance and a wave of warm gratitude for what had been done for Boy-O and his cousin Phron. What you have done, no one else could, she assured me.
The people on Tarman’s deck shouted greetings, and Per seized my hand and begged immediately to be allowed to cross to the other ship. Althea said we might, and my heart leapt with a good sort of fear as we crossed over the gap between the two ships and onto Tarman. Had Vivacia spoken to him somehow? He welcomed me, and he felt like a gracious old gentleman as he reassured me that I was safe on his decks. The captain of Tarman saw me touching his railing and as he hurried by me he muttered, ‘I should have guessed that would happen!’
On both vessels, the work was swift and frantic. Vivacia’s boats were moved and tied off to Tarman. Up from the hold and out of the captain’s stateroom came everything of value or sentiment. Charts and chairs, glasses and bedding, all manner of things came across the gap and were stowed in Tarman’s hold. At the same time, heavy casks were hauled up from Tarman’s hold and arranged in a row on his deck.
Captain Leftrin and his red-haired wife were much too busy to meet anyone new. He told Per to put me up on the flat roof of the deckhouse. He did, and then Per darted away to be helpful. I felt strange to be the only one idle. But from that perch, I could hear snatches of conversations. Several of the crew on Tarman joked with Spark and Per that they had feared the casks would leak. ‘We’d be trying to sleep, wondering if we’d wake up in a dragon’s belly instead of inside Tarman,’ one man called out to Lant. He was greeted with a chorus of shushes. ‘Sound carries across the water,’ a plump woman warned him, and he grinned and fell silent.