In response, she turned and groomed her flight feathers. They did not go silver but they sheened blacker than I’d ever seen them. ‘Heeby,’ she croaked. ‘Heeby share. Heeby teach how.’
Ah. Rapskal’s tonic back at Divvytown. I should have guessed. And was her time with the dragons improving her speech? ‘Be careful with your beak,’ I chided her.
She turned her shining eyes on me. ‘I
I heard Trell roaring at us to get a move on and stop perching like seagulls. Per looked to me, ignoring his captain. ‘Do I take her to Paragon?’
‘I doubt you can keep her away. And no matter how careful she is, I want you to be even more careful. Warn any others that she might fly to.’
Brashen roared again, and Per began his hasty descent, shouting that Motley had returned. As Per spidered and slid with the bird on his shoulder, Spark crossed the deck at a run. I began my more cautious descent.
‘Are you truly a prince?’ Kennitsson asked as I paused beside him.
I hesitated for a moment. Bastard or prince? Dutiful had made me a prince. ‘I am,’ I said quietly. ‘But due to illegitimacy, not in line for the throne.’
He shrugged that aside. ‘That lad, that Per. He was your stableboy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You work alongside him, and he never defers to you at all.’
‘He does, but not in a noticeable way, I suppose. He respects me, even if others don’t see it.’
‘Huh.’
The sound was thoughtful rather than disdainful. Even a few days on board as a common sailor had changed him. He was clever enough to know that if he were quartered with common deckhands such as Ant and Per, he’d best step down from his elevated ways. He had shed his fine clothes and adopted the same loose canvas trousers and cotton shirts that the rest of us wore. He’d braided his hair and tied it after Ant had warned him about how loose locks of hair could get tangled around a moving line and be ripped right off the scalp. He’d also bound the palms of his hands with leather; I suspected bloody blisters on them. Hemp lines are not gentle to handle.
He said no more to me, so I hastened down to await my next order.
It had been decades since I’d worked the deck of a ship, and never had I toiled on a ship like Paragon. The living nature of the ship meant that he could be an active participant in the journey. He could not set his own canvas nor take it in, but he could cry a better heading to the steersman, sense where currents ran swiftest and warn us of a line that needed tightening. He had a fine sense of depths and channels — something that he had proudly demonstrated as he guided his crew out of the harbour at Divvytown, and that he did again now as we sailed cautiously through the waterways of the Pirate Islands and finally into the open sea. As he sliced through the taller waves our diminished crew strove to keep pace with his needs.
I was not alone in marvelling at the ways of a liveship. The crewmembers we had taken on in Divvytown were openly delighted with how Paragon participated in his sailing. Before long the navigator was humbly asking permission to share her charts with the figurehead, and correcting them according to his knowledge. Given his way, Paragon himself became almost affable, and especially so with Boy-O and Kennitsson.
Even so, my transition from passenger to deckhand was not easy. I had always harboured a secret pride in how able I had remained into my sixth decade. Much of my physical strength I owed to the old Skill-healing that still coursed through my body and made unceasing repairs to it. But healthy is not necessarily hardened. Those first days were long ones for me. The calluses earned by wielding a sword or an axe are different to the rough palms that prickling hemp lines award to a sailor. In the rigorous days that followed, I ached in my legs and my back and my arms. Muscle in my limbs and a flattened belly came back to me slowly. My body healed itself, but healing can be as painful as being injured.
Despite the men we had gained in Divvytown, we still had a smaller crew, and fewer who were used to sailing a liveship. The end of my watch was no guarantee of uninterrupted rest. A cry for ‘All hands!’ might come at any moment. As Brashen had foretold, there was no friendly current to aid us in our south-western journey. Land became a smear of low cloud on the horizon behind us. When I awoke the next day, it was gone.
Spark and Per both thrived. They scampered happily about in the rigging with Ant. Clef was a good teacher, and now they had Boy-O as well, an experienced hand. Lant laboured alongside me, trying to teach his man’s body the skills it would have been happier to acquire as a boy. I pitied him, but he did not complain. All of us ate as heavily as we were allowed, and took sleep whenever we could.
