It was his lover's voice he spoke with, small and breathless, warm with encouragement. She had never felt closer to him than now, sharing his love of the ship that he guided through the storm. Never had she felt stronger, as she clasped the wooden spokes of the wheel and held the Marietta's nose into the waves. Aloft, she could hear Sorcor calling to his deckhands. They were reefing in some sails in a pattern she still found incomprehensible, but which she suddenly found herself resolved to understand. For she could understand it. And she could do it. That was what Kennit's arm around her, his weight against her back, and his soft voice in her ear were telling her. She squinted her eyes against the driving rain. Suddenly the cold and the wet were simply a part of this, not pleasant, no, but not something to fear or avoid for their own sakes. They, like the wind, were a part of her life now. A life that was carrying her forward as swiftly as the current carried the ship, shaping her every day into a new person. A person she could respect.

“Why cannot it always be like this?” she asked him at one point.

He feigned surprise and asked in a louder voice, “What? You prefer the storm that sweeps us toward the Damned Rocks to easy sailing on peaceful waters?”

She laughed aloud, embraced by him and the storm and this new life he had plunged her into. “Kennit, you are the storm,” she told him. In a quieter voice she added to herself, “And I prefer me as I am when I race before your winds.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - DAY OF RECKONING

THERE WERE, WINTROW KNEW, SOME RELIGIONS THAT TAUGHT OF PLACES WHERE DEMONS REIGNED AND HAD the power to torture men endlessly. The ship, caught in the press of wind and rain, populated with two-legged creatures that shrieked and struggled with one another, seemed such a netherworld. The scriptures of Sa contained no belief in such a place. Men created their own torments, Wintrow believed, not the benevolent Parent of All, who only viewed such things with grief. This night on this ship, he had come to grasp in its fullness the truth of Sa's teaching. For here they were, one and all humans, each one a creature of Sa. Yet it was not the howling wind or the stabbing rain that raced through the ship shedding blood and tearing life free of bodies. No. Only the humans aboard the ship did that, and only to one another. This was not Sa's doing. There was nothing of Sa in this perdition.

From the moment Sa'Adar had thrown the lantern at Gantry, it had been out of Wintrow's hands. He had not started this carnage; this slaughter was not his doing. He could not even recall making a decision, only that he had followed Sa'Adar and helped him unshackle slaves. It was the right thing to do. More right than trying to warn his father and crew-mates? Don't ask that question, don't let that question exist. These deaths were not his fault. Over and over, Wintrow told himself that. Not his fault. What could one boy do to stop this torrent of hatred once it had broken loose? He was just a leaf caught up in a storm wind.

He wondered if Gantry had felt the same way.

He and Sa'Adar had been freeing the map-faces, deep in the bottom-most hold of the Vivacia, when they heard the yells from above. In their haste to join in the fray, the map-faces had literally trampled over him. Sa'Adar had led them with the lantern. Wintrow had been left behind in the pitch black, frightened and disoriented. Now he groped his way through the filthy holds, clambering over the bodies of slaves either too weakened or scared to join in the rebellion. Others milled in the confusion, calling to one another, demanding to know what was happening. He pushed his way through them and groped his way around them, and still he could not find the companionway up to the hatch. He knew every inch of this ship, he told himself. But suddenly the Vivacia had become a black maze of death and stench and frightened people. On the deck above him he heard running feet, and cries of both anger and fear. Screams of death, too.

Then another scream burst out, one that rang within the hold and wakened echoing cries of terrors in the churning slaves. “Vivacia,” he gasped to himself, and then, “Vivacia!” he called out to her, praying she could hear him, and know he was coming to her. His groping hands suddenly met the ladder and he flung himself up it.

As he emerged onto the deck into a driving rain he stumbled over the first body of a crewman. Mild was trapped in a half-closed hatch. In the dimness he could not tell how he had been killed, only that he was dead. He knelt by him, hearing the sounds of fighting elsewhere in the ship, but capable of comprehending fully only this death. Mild's chest was still warm. The sluicing rain and flying spray had already chilled his hands and face, but his body gave up its warmth more slowly.

Others were dying now, slaves and crewmen. Vivacia lived it all, he suddenly recalled. She felt it all, and alone.