Ship of Destiny. Робин Хобб

swirled like a whirlpool, while at the centre was blackness darker than any night. Humanity left her face. Her black tresses blowing in the night breeze were more like a writhing nest of serpents. The teeth she bared at them in a parody of a smile were too white. ‘If I cannot win,’ the lips gave voice to the dragon’s thought, ‘then no one shall.’

      Slowly she turned away from them. Her arms lifted wide as if to embrace the night sea. Then slowly she brought them back, to clasp the hull of the ship behind her.

      Wintrow! Wintrow, aid me! Vivacia pleaded only in his mind; the figurehead’s mouth and her voice were no longer at Vivacia’s command. Die with me, she begged him. Almost, he did. Almost, he followed her into that abyss. But at the last instant, he could not.

      ‘I want to live!’ he heard himself cry out into the night. ‘Please, please, let us live!’ He thought, for an instant, that his words weakened her resolve to die.

      A strange silence followed his words. Even the night breeze seemed to hold its breath. Wintrow became aware that somewhere a sailor gabbled out a child’s prayer but another, smaller sound caught his ears. It was a running, brittle sound, like the noise of cracking ice on the surface of a lake when one ventures out too far.

      ‘She’s gone,’ breathed Etta. ‘Vivacia’s gone.’

      It was so. Even in the poor light of the lantern, the change was obvious. All colour and semblance of life had drained from the figurehead. Grey as a tombstone was the wood of her back and hair. No breath of life stirred her. Her carved locks were frozen and immune to the breeze’s fingering touch. Her skin looked as weathered as an ageing fence. Wintrow groped after her with his mind. He caught a fading trail of her despair, like a vanishing scent in the air. Then even that was gone, as if some tight door had closed between them.

      ‘The dragon?’ he muttered to himself, but if she was still within him, she had hidden herself too well for his poor senses.

      Wintrow drew a deep breath and let it out again. Alone in his mind again; how long had it been since his thoughts had been the only ones in his head? An instant later he became aware of his body. The cool air stung his healing scalds. His knees jellied, and he would have sunk to the deck but for Etta’s cautious arm around him. He sagged against her. His new skin screamed at her touch, but he was too weak even to flinch away.

      Etta looked past him. Her gaze mourned Kennit. Wintrow’s eyes followed hers. He had never seen a man look so grief-stricken. The pirate leaned far out on the bow railing to stare at Vivacia’s profile, his features frozen in anguish. Lines Wintrow had never noticed before seemed graven into Kennit’s face. His glossy black hair and moustache looked shocking against his sallow skin. Vivacia’s passing diminished Kennit in a way that the loss of his leg had not. Before Wintrow’s eyes, the man aged.

      Kennit turned his head to meet Wintrow’s gaze. ‘Is she dead?’ he asked woodenly. ‘Can a liveship die?’ His eyes pleaded that it not be so.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Wintrow admitted reluctantly. ‘I can’t feel her. Not at all.’ The gap within himself was too terrible to probe. Worse than a lost tooth, more crippling than his missing finger. To be without her was a terrible, gaping flaw in himself. He had once wished for this? He had been mad.

      Kennit turned back abruptly to the figurehead. ‘Vivacia?’ he called questioningly. Then, ‘Vivacia!’ he bellowed, the angry, forsaken call of a spurned lover. ‘You cannot leave me now! You cannot be gone!’

      Even the light night breeze faded to stillness. On the deck of the ship, the silence was absolute. The crew seemed as stricken by their captain’s grief as by the passing of the liveship. Etta was the one who broke the silence.

      ‘Come,’ she said to Kennit. ‘There is nothing to be done here. You and Wintrow should come below, and talk about this. He needs food and drink. He should not be out of bed yet. Together, you two can puzzle out what is to be done next.’

      Wintrow saw clearly what she was doing. The captain’s attitude was rattling the crew. It was best he was out of their sight until he recovered. ‘Please,’ Wintrow croaked, adding his plea to hers. He had to be away from that terrible, still figure. Looking at the grey figurehead was worse than gazing at a decaying corpse.

      Kennit glanced at them as if they were strangers. A sudden flatness came to his eyes as he mastered himself. ‘Very well. Take him below and see to him.’ His voice was devoid of every emotion. He ran his eyes over his crew. ‘Get back to your posts,’ he muttered at them. For an instant, they did not respond. A few faces showed sympathy for their captain, but most stared confusedly, as if they did not know the man. Then, ‘Now!’ he snapped. He did not raise his voice, but the command in it sent his men scrabbling to obey. In an instant, the foredeck was empty save for Wintrow, Etta and Kennit.

      Etta waited for Kennit. The captain moved awkwardly, shifting his crutch about until he got it under his arm. He hopped free of the railing and lurched across the foredeck to the ladder.

      ‘Go help him,’ Wintrow whispered. ‘I can manage.’

      Etta gave a single nod of agreement. She left him for Kennit. The one-legged man accepted her help without any objections. That was as unlike the pirate as his earlier show of emotion. Wintrow, watching how tenderly the woman aided him down the short ladder, felt more keenly his own isolation. ‘Vivacia?’ he asked quietly of the night. The wind sighed past him, making him aware of his scalded skin and of his own nakedness. But Vivacia had been peeled away from him as painfully as his own skin had, leaving a different kind of pain. The nakedness of his body was a small discomfort compared to his solitude in the night. In a dizzying instant, he was aware of how immense the sea and the world around him were. He was no more than a mite of life on this wooden deck rocking on the water. Always before, he had sensed Vivacia’s size and strength around him, sheltering him from the world at large. Not since he had first left home as a child had he felt so tiny and unattended.

      ‘Sa,’ he whispered, knowing that he should be able to reach out for his god as solace. Sa had always been there for him, long before he had boarded the ship and bonded with her. Once, he had been certain he was destined to be a priest. Now, as he reached out with a word to touch the awe of the divine, he realized that the name on his lips was truly a prayer that Vivacia be restored to him. He felt shamed. Had his ship then replaced his god? Did he truly believe he could not go on without her? He knelt suddenly on the darkened deck, but not to pray. His hands groped over the wood. Here. The stains should be here, where his blood had joined her timbers and united him with her in a bond he shared with no other. But when his maimed hand found his own bloody handprint it was by sight, not touch. For he felt nothing under his palm save the fine texture of the wizardwood deck. He felt nothing at all.

      ‘Wintrow?’

      Etta had come back for him. She stood on the ladder, staring across the foredeck at him hunched on his hands and knees. ‘I’m coming,’ he replied, and lurched to his feet.

      ‘More wine?’ Etta asked Wintrow.

      The boy shook his head mutely. For boy he looked, draped in a fresh sheet from Kennit’s own bed. Etta had snatched it up and offered it to him when she had staggered him into the cabin. His peeling flesh would not yet bear the touch of proper clothing. Now the lad perched uncomfortably in a chair across the table from Kennit. It was obvious to Etta that he could find no position that eased his scalds. He had eaten some of the food she had put before him, but he seemed little better for it. Where the venom had eaten at him, his skin was splotched red and shiny. Bald red patches on his shorn head reminded her of a mangy dog. But worst was the dull look in his eyes. They mirrored the loss and abandonment in Kennit’s.

      The pirate sat across from Wintrow, his dark hair in disarray, his shirt half-buttoned. Kennit, always so careful of his own appearance, seemed to have forgotten it entirely. She could barely stand to look at the man she had loved. In the years she had known him, he had first been simply her customer, then the man she longed for. When he had carried her off, she had thought nothing could bring her more joy. The night he had told her he cared for her, her life had been transformed. She had watched him grow, from captain