“That worries me, too,” Althea agreed. “We have struggled so hard and come so far, all in uncertainty, only to have a dragon suddenly decree, This is how your life will go.’ I don’t like her directing our actions, saying who will go where. And yet,” she shrugged and almost laughed, “in an odd way it would almost be a relief to have those decisions snatched away. A lifting of a burden.”

“Some might see it that way,” Brashen replied sourly.

“Hey, Bingtown!” A hail from Sorcor distracted her. “Watch the current,” the pirate captain warned them as he descended to his boat. “It runs tricky here when the tide is changing. Better check your anchors, and leave a good man on watch.”

“Thank you,” Althea answered for them. From what she had seen of the burly old pirate, she liked him. She watched him now as he annoyed Etta by watching her get safely into Vivacia’s boat. Malta leaned on Reyn’s shoulder as they waited for Wintrow. Althea frowned at that, but something stranger claimed her attention. To Althea’s surprise, Amber was also in Vivacia’s boat.

“I overheard her tell Wintrow that she had something important to discuss with him. He was reluctant, but she was insistent. You know how unnerving she can be when she gets that look on her face.” These tidings were from Jek, who had appeared at Althea’s shoulder.

“Then it’s only we three returning to Paragon for the night?”

“Two,” Jek corrected her with a grin. “I’ve been invited to stay aboard the Motley.”

Althea looked about and saw a handsome pirate leaning against a mast. Waiting.

“Two,” she agreed, and turned to exchange a glance with Brashen. He was gone. She looked over the side to see him fitting the oars into the oarlocks of Paragon’s boat. “Hey!” she cried in annoyance. She more slid than climbed down the ladder, and deliberately rocked the small boat as she dropped into it. “You might have said you were ready to leave,” she informed him snippily.

He stared at her. Then he looked over at the Vivacia’s boat. “When Amber climbed down, I assumed you were both going.”

She looked after the boat, and then to where she knew Vivacia rocked at anchor. It was too dark even to see her profile. A last night aboard her ship before she bid her farewell? Perhaps she should have. She suddenly had a strange echo of memory as if she had made this decision before. The day Vivacia had first awakened, she had quarreled with Kyle and stormed off the ship, to spend the evening getting drunk with Brashen. She had had no last words with her ship then. She had regretted it ever since. If she had spent that first night with her, would all that followed have turned out differently? She looked back at Brashen, sitting with the oars suspended above the water. Would she go back and change that, if it meant she would not end up here with him?

That was the past, however. Vivacia was not her ship anymore. They had both recognized that. What was left to tell her, save goodbye?

She cast off from the Motley, then clambered through the boat to sit down beside Brashen. “Give me an oar.”

He silently surrendered one to her, and together they pulled for the Paragon. Sorcor had been right to warn them. The current was tricky, and it took every bit of Althea’s remaining energy to keep the small boat on course. Brashen evidently felt similarly taxed for he did not speak a single word all the way back. A sleepy Clef caught their line, and Semoy welcomed them gruffly aboard. Brashen passed on Sorcor’s warning about the current at tide change and told him to put two men on anchor watch and get some sleep.

“We’re going north,” Paragon asserted immediately.

“Most likely,” Brashen agreed wearily. “Escorting sea serpents. The last thing I ever expected to be doing. But then, little of late has turned out as I expected it to.”

Paragon burst out, “Are you going to say nothing of the dragon? Your first close look at a dragon and you say nothing of her?”

A slow smile spread on Brashen’s face. As he often did, Althea realized, he gripped the railing when he spoke to the ship. He spoke fervently. “Ship, she is beyond words. As a liveship is beyond words, and for much the same reason.”

Pride swelled Althea’s heart. Tired as Brashen was, he had the wisdom to acknowledge the link between the dragon and the liveship, but carefully said nothing that would make Paragon feel more sharply the loss of his true form.

“And you, Althea?”

Not Kennit. Not Kennit. Paragon. Paragon who she had played upon as a child, Paragon who had brought her so far and endured so much for the sake of her mad quest. She found words for that Paragon. “She is incredibly beautiful-her scales are like rippling jewels, her eyes like the full moon reflected in the sea. Yet, in all honesty, her arrogance was intolerable. Her calm assumption that our lives are hers to order is hard to take.”