“Blinded by the opportunity to do a good turn for someone.” Althea smiled and gave Amber a friendly nudge. Amber gave her a knowing smile in return. Althea knew a moment’s uneasiness.

“Do I dare ask if Lavoy could assist us here?” Amber continued softly.

Althea shook her head when Brashen didn’t reply. “Brashen’s charts are all we have to go by. With the shift in seasons, and the constant changes in the isles themselves, it becomes tricky.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I even have the correct bit of swamp,” Brashen added sourly. “This could be the wrong river entirely.”

“It’s the right bit of swamp.” Paragon’s deep voice was very soft, almost a thrumming rather than speaking. “It’s even the right river mouth. As I could have told you hours ago, if anyone had seen fit to ask me.”

The three humans kept absolutely still as if by moving or speaking they would break some spell. A deep suspicion Althea had always harbored simmered in her mind.

“You’re right, Althea.” The ship answered her unspoken words. “I’ve been here before. I’ve been in and out of Divvytown enough times that I could sail up there in the blackest night, at any tide.” His deep laugh vibrated all the foredeck. “As I’d lost my eyes before I ever went up the river, what I see or don’t see makes little difference.”

Amber dared to speak aloud. “How can you know where we are? You always said you feared to sail the open waters blind. Why are you so fearless now?”

He chuckled indulgently. “There is a great difference between the wide-open sea and the mouth of a river. There are many senses besides sight. Cannot you smell the stink of Divvytown? Their wood fires, their outhouses, the charnel pit where they burn their dead? What the air does not carry to me, the river does. The sour taste of Divvytown flows with the river. With every fiber in my planking, I taste the water from the lagoon, thick and green. I’ve never forgotten it. It is as slimy now as it was when Igrot ruled there.”

“You could take us there, even in the blackest night?” Brashen spoke carefully.

“I said that. Yes.”

Althea waited. To trust Paragon or to fear him. To place all their lives in his care, or to wait for dawn and grope their way up the fog-bound river… She sensed a test in the ship’s words. She was suddenly glad that Brashen was the captain. This was not a decision she would want to make.

It was so dark now she could scarcely see Brashen’s profile. She saw his shoulders lift as he took a breath. “Would you take us there, Paragon?”

“I would.”

THEY WORKED IN THE DARK, WITHOUT LANTERNS, PUTTING UP HIS CANVAS AND raising his anchor. It pleased him to think of them scurrying in the blackness, as blind as he was. They worked his windlass voicelessly, the only sound that of the turning gears and the rattling chain. He opened his senses to the night. “Starboard. Just a bit,” he said softly, as they raised his canvas and the wind nudged him, and heard the command relayed in whispers the length of his deck.

Brashen was on the wheel. It was good to have his steady hands there; even better to be the one deciding how he would go and feeling the sailors jump to his orders. Let them discover how it felt to have to place your life in the hands of one you feared. For they all feared him, even Lavoy. Lavoy made fine words about friendships that transcended time or kind, but in his gut, the mate feared the ship more profoundly than any other man aboard.

And well they should, Paragon thought with satisfaction. If they knew his true nature, they would piss themselves with terror. They would fling themselves shrieking into the deeps, and count it a merciful end. Paragon lifted his arms out high and spread wide his fingers. It was a pitiful comparison, this damp wind flowing past his hands as his sails pushed him toward the mouth of the river, but it was enough to sustain his soul. He had no eyes, he had no wings, but his soul was still a dragon’s soul. « “This is beautiful,” Amber said to him.

He startled. As long as she had been aboard, there were still times when she was transparent to him. She was the only one whose fear of him he could not feel. Sometimes he shared her emotions, but never her thoughts, and when he did catch a tinge of her feelings, he suspected it was because she allowed it. As a result, her words confused him more often than the others’ did. She was the only one who could possibly lie to him. Was she lying now?

“What is beautiful?” he demanded quietly. She did not answer. Paragon put his mind to the task at hand. Brashen wanted him to take them up the river as silently as possible. He wanted Divvytown to wake tomorrow to the sight of them anchored in their harbor. The idea appealed to the ship. Let them gawk and shout at the sight of him come back from the dead. If there were any there that yet recalled him.