Instead he said, “Take a bath. You smell pretty bad.” Then he left, sauntering across the room and not even looking back from the door.

If he had stopped at the door to grin and wave, it would have dispersed the insult. Instead, she was left feeling affronted. Just because she had refused him, he had insulted her. As if to pretend he had never wanted her, because she was not perfumed and prettied up. It certainly hadn't bothered him the last time, and as she recalled, he had smelled none too fresh himself. The gall of the man. She lifted her mug. “Beer!” she called to the sour innkeeper.

Brashen hunched his shoulders to the dirty rain that was driving down. As he walked back to the Red Eaves he carefully thought about nothing. He stopped once to buy a stick of coarse cindin from a street corner vendor miserable in the rain, and then walked on. When he reached the doors of the Red Eaves, he found them barred for the night. He pounded on them, unreasonably angry at being shut out in the rain.

Above his head, a window opened. The landlord stuck his head out. “Who's there?” he demanded.

“Me. Brashen. Let me in.”

“You left the washing room a mess. You didn't scrub out the trough. And you left the towels in a heap.”

He stared up at the window in consternation. “Let me in,” he repeated. “It's raining!”

“You are not a tidy person!” the innkeeper shouted down at him.

“But I paid for a room!”

For an answer, his duffel bag came flying out the window. It landed in the muddy streets with a splat that spattered Brashen as well. “Hey!” he shouted, but the window above him shut firmly. For a time he knocked and then kicked at the barred door. Then he shouted curses up at the closed window. He was throwing great handfuls of greasy mud up at it when the city guards came by and laughingly told him to move along. Evidently it was a situation they had seen before, and more than once.

He slung his filthy sea-bag over his shoulder and strode off into the night to find a tavern.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - GIFTS

THE WINTER MOONLIGHT IS CRISP. IT MAKES THE SHADOWS VERY SHARP AND BLACK. THE SHORE ROCKS ARE sitting in pools of ink, and your hull rests in absolute blackness. Then, because of my fire, there's an overlay of another kind of shadows. Ones that jump and shift. So, when I look at you, parts of you are stark and sharp in the moonlight, and other parts are made soft and mellow by the firelight."

Amber's voice was almost hypnotic. The warmth of her driftwood fire, kindled with great difficulty earlier in the evening, touched him distantly. Warm and cold were things he had learned from men, the one pleasant, the other unpleasant. But even the concept that warm was better than cold was a learned thing. To wood, it was all the same. Yet on a night like tonight, warm seemed very pleasant indeed.

She was seated-cross-legged, she had told him-on a folded blanket on the damp sand. She leaned back against his hull. The texture of her loose hair was finer than the softest seaweed. It clung to the grain of his wizardwood hull. When she moved, it dragged across his planks in strands before it pulled free.

"You almost make me remember what it was like to see.

Not just colors and shapes, but the times when sight was a pleasure to indulge in."

She didn't reply but lifted her hand and put the palm flat against his planking. It was a gesture she used, and in some ways it reminded him of making eye-contact. A significant glance exchanged without eyes. He smiled.

“I brought you something,” she said into the comfortable silence.

“You brought me something?” he wondered aloud. “Really?” He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. “I don't think anyone has ever brought me anything before.”

She sat up straight. “What, never? No one's ever given you a present?”

He shrugged. “Where would I keep a possession?”

“Well . . . I did think of that. This is something you could wear. Like this. Here, give me your hand. Now, I'm very proud of this, so I want to show it to you a piece at a time. It took me a while to do this, I had to oversize them, to get them to scale, you know. Here's the first one. Can you tell what it is?”

Her hands were so tiny against his as she opened the fingers of his hand. She set something in his palm. A piece of wood. There was a hole in it, and a heavy braided cord ran through it. The wood had been sanded and smoothed and shaped. He turned it carefully in his fingers. It curved, but here there was a projection and at the end of it, a fanning out. “It's a dolphin,” he said. His fingers followed the curve of the spine again, the flare of the flukes. “This is amazing,” he laughed aloud.