The Mad Ship. Робин Хобб

guard up, she reached out tentatively towards the cabin where Kennit shifted in his sleep. She found the pirate easily. He still struggled through his fever dreams, hiding within a cupboard while some dream being stalked him, calling his name in a falsely sweet tone. The woman set a cool cloth on his brow, and draped another over the swollen stump of his leg. Vivacia almost felt the sudden easing it brought him. The ship reached out again, more boldly, but found no one else there.

      ‘Where are you?’ she demanded suddenly and angrily. Kennit jerked with a cry as the stalker in his dream echoed her words, and Etta bent over him, murmuring soothing words.

      Vivacia’s question went unanswered.

      Kennit surfaced, gasping his way into consciousness. It took him a moment to recall his surroundings. Then a faint smile of pleasure stretched his fever-parched lips. His liveship. He was on board his liveship, in the captain’s well-appointed chambers. A fine linen sheet draped his sweating body. Polished brass and wood gleamed throughout a chamber both cosy and refined. He could hear the water gurgling past as Vivacia cut through the channel. He could almost feel the awareness of his ship around him, protecting him. She was a second skin, shielding him from the world. He sighed in satisfaction, and then choked on the mucus in his dry throat.

      ‘Etta!’ he croaked to the whore. ‘Water.’

      ‘It’s right here,’ she said soothingly.

      It was true. Surprising as it was, she was standing right beside him, a cup of water ready in her hand. Her long fingers were cool on the back of his neck as she helped him raise himself to drink. Afterwards, she deftly turned his pillow before she lowered his head again. She patted the perspiration from his face and then wiped his hands with a moist cloth. He lay still and silent under her touch, limply grateful for the comfort she gave. He knew a moment of purest peace.

      It did not last. His awareness of his swollen leg rose swiftly to recognition of pain. He tried to ignore it. It became a pulsing heat that rose in intensity with every breath he took. Beside his bed, his whore sat in a chair, sewing something. His eyes moved listlessly over her. She looked older than he recalled her. The lines were deeper by her mouth and in her brow. Her face looked thinner under the brush of her short black hair. It made her dark eyes even more immense.

      ‘You look terrible,’ he rebuked her.

      She set her sewing aside immediately and smiled as if he had complimented her. ‘It’s hard for me to see you like this. When you are ill…I can’t sleep, I can’t eat…’

      Selfish woman. She’d fed his leg to a sea serpent, and now tried to make it out that it was her problem. Was he supposed to feel sorry for her? He pushed the thought aside. ‘Where’s that boy? Wintrow?’

      She stood right away. ‘Do you want him?’

      Stupid question. ‘Of course I want him. He’s supposed to make my leg better. Why hasn’t he done so?’

      She leaned over his bed and smiled down at him tenderly. He wanted to push her away but he had not the strength. ‘I think he wants to wait until we make port in Bull Creek. There are a number of things he wants to have on hand before he…heals you.’ She turned away from his sickbed abruptly, but not before he had seen the tears glinting in her eyes. Her wide shoulders were bowed and she no longer stood tall and proud. She did not expect him to survive. To know that so suddenly both scared and angered him. It was as if she had wished his death on him.

      ‘Go find that boy!’ he commanded her roughly, mostly to get her out of his sight. ‘Remind him. Remind him well that if I die, so does he and his father. Tell him that!’

      ‘I’ll have someone fetch him,’ she said in a quavering voice and started for the door.

      ‘No. You go yourself, right now, and get him. Now.’

      She turned back and annoyed him by lightly touching his face. ‘If that’s what you want,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’ll go right now.’

      He did not watch her go but listened instead to the sound of her boots on the deck. She hurried, and when she went out, the door shut quietly but completely behind her. He heard her voice lifted to someone, irritably. ‘No. Go away. I won’t have him bothered with such things right now.’ Then, in a lower, threatening voice, ‘Touch that door and I’ll kill you right here.’ Whoever it was heeded her, for no knock came at the door.

      He half closed his eyes and drifted on the tide of his pain. The fever razored bright edges and sharp colours to the world. The cosy room seemed to crowd closer around him, threatening to fall in on him. He pushed the sheet away and tried to find a breath of cooler air.

      ‘So, Kennit. What will you do with your “likely urchin” when he comes?’

      The pirate squeezed his eyes tight shut. He tried to will the voice away.

      ‘That’s amusing. Do you think I cannot see you with your eyes closed?’ The charm was relentless.

      ‘Shut up. Leave me alone. I wish I had never had you made.’

      ‘Oh, now you have wounded my feelings! Such words to bandy about, after all we have endured together.’

      Kennit opened his eyes. He lifted his wrist and stared at the bracelet. The tiny wizardwood charm, carved in a likeness of his own saturnine face, looked up at him with a friendly grin. Leather thongs secured it firmly over his pulse point. His fever brought the face looming closer. He closed his eyes.

      ‘Do you truly believe that boy can heal you? No. You could not be so foolish. Of course, you are desperate enough that you will insist he try. Do you know what amazes me? That you fear death so much that it makes you brave enough to face the surgeon’s knife. Think of that swollen flesh, so tender you scarce can bear the brush of a sheet upon it. You will let him set a knife to that, a bright sharp blade, gleaming silver before the blood encarmines it…’

      ‘Charm.’ Kennit opened his eyes to slits. ‘Why do you torment me?’

      The charm pursed his lips at him. ‘Because I can. I am probably the only one in the whole world who can torment the great Captain Kennit. The Liberator. The would-be King of the Pirate Isles.’ The little face snickered and added snidely, ‘Brave Serpent-Bait of the Inside Passage. Tell me. What do you want of the boy-priest? Do you desire him? He stirs in your fever dreams memories of what you were. Would you do as you were done by?’

      ‘No. I was never…’

      ‘What, never?’ The wizardwood charm snickered cruelly. ‘Do you truly believe you can lie to me, bonded as we are? I know everything about you. Everything.’

      ‘I made you to help me, not to torment me! Why have you turned on me?’

      ‘Because I hate what you are,’ the charm replied savagely. ‘I hate that I am becoming a part of you, aiding you in what you do.’

      Kennit drew a ragged breath. ‘What do you want from me?’ he demanded. It was a cry of surrender, a plea for mercy or pity.

      ‘Now there’s a question you never thought of before this. What do I want from you?’ The charm drew the question out, savouring it. ‘Maybe I want you to suffer. Maybe I enjoy tormenting you. Maybe…’

      Footsteps sounded outside the door. Etta’s boots and the light scuff of bare feet.

      ‘Be kind to Etta,’ the charm demanded hastily. ‘And perhaps I will ’

      As the door opened, the face fell silent. It was once more still and silent, a wooden head on a bracelet on a sick man’s wrist. Wintrow came in, followed by the whore. ‘Kennit, I’ve brought him,’ Etta announced as she shut the door behind them.

      ‘Good. Leave us.’ If the damn charm thought it could force him into anything, it was wrong.

      Etta looked stricken. ‘Kennit…do you think that’s wise?’

      ‘No. I think it is stupid. That’s why I told you to do it, because I delight in stupidity.’ His voice was low