That dog’s son Kennit still stood on the foredeck. He had the nerve to look down on her and smile welcomingly. He moved back from the ladder as she approached it. He probably knew that if he stood too close, she’d try to pull him down and break his neck.

“Move your other foot now,” Jek said quietly. “Lift it to the next rung.”

“What?” What was she talking about?

“Here,” she offered, and abruptly Althea felt herself lifted and shoved up the ladder. She scrabbled at it faintly, got a grip, and then Jek unceremoniously shoved her the rest of the way up it. She crawled onto the foredeck on her hands and knees, knowing that something was wrong with that, but unable to think of a different way to manage it. Then Jek was beside her, hauling her onto her feet.

“Let me go,” Althea told her plainly. “I want to go alone.”

“You’re not well,” Kennit said sympathetically. “I hold none of this against you.”

“Bastard,” she spat at him, and she thought he had moved closer. She swung at him, and then suddenly he was where he had been standing all along, the coward. “I’m still going to kill you,” she promised him, “but not where you’ll bleed on my deck.”

“Althea!”

The beloved voice was shocked with worry for her, but there was something else there too, something she couldn’t name. She turned and after a blurry moment found Vivacia looking back at her. She should have looked joyful, not anxious. “It will be all right,” she assured her. “I’m here now.” She tried to run to her, but it became a stagger. Jek was suddenly at her side again, helping her to the railing. “I’m here now, ship,” she told her, finally, after all the months. Then, “What has he done to you? What has he done to you?”

It was Vivacia and it was not. All her features had subtly changed. Her eyes were too green, and the arch of her brows too pronounced. Her hair was like a mane, wild around her face. Yet for all that, the difference was what she felt as she clutched the railing. Once they had fit together like complementary parts of a puzzle box and completed one another. Now it was as if she gripped Jek’s hands, or Paragon’s railing. It was Vivacia, but she was complete without Althea.

Yet Althea was not complete without her. The places she had expected the ship to fill were still empty and ached more horribly than ever.

“I am one now,” the ship confirmed softly to her. “The memories of your family have merged with the dragon. It had to be, Althea. There was no going back to denying her, any more than she could truly go on without me. You don’t begrudge me that, do you? That I am whole now?”

“But I need you!” The words broke from her before she could consider what they meant. Terrible to blurt out to all a truth you had never recognized yourself. “How can I be myself without you?”

“Just as you have been,” the ship replied, and she heard her father’s wisdom in the words, and an elder sapience as well.

“But I’m hurt,” she heard herself say. Words were welling from her like blood from a wound.

“You will heal,” Vivacia assured her.

“You don’t need me….” The knowledge of that sent her reeling. To have come all this way, striven so hard and lost so much, only to discover this.

“Love can exist without need,” Vivacia pointed out gently. In the seas beyond the bow, several serpents had risen to regard them gravely. Either her eyes were still tricking her, or the yellow-green one was deformed.

From somewhere, Wintrow had come to grip the railing beside her. “Oh, ship, you feel beautiful,” he exclaimed. Althea felt an odd tension run out of him. “You… you make sense now. You are complete.”

“Go away,” Althea told him distinctly.

“You need to rest,” he told her gently. Mealy-mouthed, empty courtesy, just like Kennit’s.

She swung at him, but he jerked his head back. “Go away!” she shouted at him. Tears, useless tears, started down her face. Where had her strength gone? She lurched with the realization that the ship did not reach out to her and supplement her in her need.

Vivacia spoke quietly. “You must do that for yourself now, Althea. Each of us must.”

It was as if her own mother had pushed her aside. “But you were with me. You know what he did to me, how he hurt me….”

“Not exactly,” the ship replied gently, and in those words, the separation was complete. The ship was a separate creature from her now, and just as capable of misunderstanding her as any human. Just as capable of disbelieving her.