These words were hard for him to speak. They hurt him as much as they hurt her. That was the only thing that let her keep silent.

“I don't think I can stand it much longer,” he warned her. “Something will have to give way. And I fear it will be me.” He met her eyes unflinchingly. “I've just been living from day to day. Waiting for something or someone else to change the situation.” His eyes studied her face, looking for a reaction to his next words. “I think I need to make a real decision. I believe I need to take action on my own.”

He waited for her to say something, but she could think of no words. What was he hinting he might do? What could the boy do against his father's dominance?

“Hey, Wintrow! Lend a hand!” someone shouted down to the deck.

The call back to drudgery. “I have to go,” he told Vivacia. He took a deep breath. “Right or wrong, I've come to love you. But-” He shook his head, suddenly wordless.

“Wintrow! Now!”

Like a well-trained dog, he sprang to obey. She watched him scamper up the rigging with familiar ease. That facility told as much as his words did of his love for her. He still complained, and often. He still suffered the torments of a divided heart. But when he gave words to his unhappiness they could discuss it and both learn more of one another in the process. He thought now that he could not bear it, but she knew the truth. Inside him was strength, and he would bear up despite unhappiness. Eventually they would be whole, the both of them. All that they needed was time. She had known ever since that first night together that he was truly destined to be aboard her. It was not easy for him to accept. He had struggled long against the idea. But even in his defiant words today, she sensed a pending resolution to that struggle. Her patience would be rewarded.

She looked about the harbor with new eyes. In many ways, Wintrow was absolutely correct about the city's underlying corruption. Not that she would want to reinforce that with the boy. He needed no help from her to be gloomy. Better for Wintrow that he focus his thoughts on what was clean and good about Jamaillia. The harbor was lovely in the winter sunlight.

She did and yet did not recall it all. Ephron's memory of it was a man's view, not a ship's. He had focused on the docks and merchants awaiting his trade goods, and the architectural wonder of the city above them. Ephron had never noticed the curling tendrils of filthy water bleeding into the harbor from the city's sewers. Nor could he have smelt with every pore of his hull the underlying stench of serpent. Her eyes skimmed the placid waters but there was no sight of the cunning, evil creatures. They were below, worming about in the soft bottom muck of the harbor. Some foreboding made her swing her gaze to the section of the harbor where the slavers anchored. Their foul stench came to her in hints on the wind. The smell of serpent was mixed with that of death and feces. That was where the creatures coiled thickest, over there beneath those miserable ships. Once she was unloaded and refitted for her new trade, she would be anchored alongside them, taking on her own load of misery and despair. Vivacia crossed her arms and held herself. Despite the sunny day, she shivered. Serpents.

Ronica sat in the study that had once been Ephron's and was now slowly becoming hers. It was in this room that she felt closest to him still, and in this room that she missed him most. In the months since his death, she had gradually cleared away the litter of his life, replacing it with the untidy scattering of her own bits of papers and trifles. Yet Ephron was still there in the bones of the room. The massive desk was far too large for her, and sitting in his chair made her feel like a small child. Oddities and ornaments of his far-ranging voyages characterized this room. A massive sea-washed vertebra from some immense sea creature served as a footstool, while one wall shelf was devoted to carved figurines, sea shells and strange body ornaments from distant folk. It was an odd intimacy to have her ledgers scattered across the polished slab of his desk top, to have her teacup and discarded knitting draped on the arm of his chair by his fireplace.

As she often did when perplexed, she had come here to think and try to decide what Ephron would have counseled her. She was curled on the divan on the opposite side of the fireplace, her slippers discarded on the floor. She wore a soft woolen robe, well worn from two years' use. It was as comfortable as her seat. She had built the fire herself, and kindled it and watched it burn through its climax. Now the wood was settling, glowing against itself, and she was relaxed and warm but seemed no closer to an answer of any kind.

She had just decided that Ephron would have shrugged his shoulders and delegated the problem back to her, when she heard a tap at the heavy wood-paneled door.