Brashen's eyes met Amber's. Hers glittered with unspoken horror. She and Brashen rose as one, both reaching out toward the ship. His voice stopped them. “Don't touch me!” His voice was deep and hoarse, a man's frantic command. “Be gone from me, you traitorous vermin! Feckless, dung-crawling rats! You have no souls! No creature with a soul could endure doing what you did to me!” He turned his face from side to side blindly. His huge hands, knotted into fists, swung back and forth before him defensively. “Take your memories away from me. I do not want your lives. You are drowning me! You are trying to make me forget who I am . . . who I was. I will not!” This last he roared out in defiance. Then his voice dropped low into a wild laugh, followed by a string of mocking obscenities.

“He's not talking to us,” Amber assured Brashen in a low tone, but he was not so sure. He made no move to touch the ship. Neither did she. Instead, she took his arm, turned him away from the ship and walked him down the beach into the darkness. The sounds of Paragon's rabid curses and imprecations followed them. When the light of the fire no longer touched their faces, she halted and turned to him. She still spoke in a hushed voice. “His hearing is exceptionally keen.” She glanced back at him. “He's best left alone at times like this. If you try to talk him back to rationality, he only gets worse.” She shrugged helplessly. “He has to come back on his own.”

“I know.”

“I know that you know. I think you understand that he can't take much more of this. Every moment of every day, he dreads them coming for him. He cannot even sleep to escape it. Almost every day now, he retreats into his madness. I try to let nothing trouble him, but he is not stupid. He knows that his survival is threatened and that there is very little he can do to defend himself.” Even in the dark, he could feel the strength of her gaze. “You have to help us.”

“There is nothing I can do. I don't know what the ship or Althea Vestrit told you about me to make you think I have some kind of influence, but it's not true. The truth is the opposite. Anything I support, proper Bingtowners will righteously oppose. I'm as much of an outcast as that ship. Your cause is more likely to succeed without me.” He shook his head at her. “Not that I think it can succeed at all.”

“So. I should just give up now?” she asked mildly. “Just let him spiral down into madness until the New Traders come to haul him away and chop him up? What will we say to one another afterwards, Brashen? That there was nothing we could do, that we never believed it would really happen. Will that make us innocent?”

“Innocent?” He was incensed at her suggestion he was somehow responsible for this mess. “I've done nothing wrong, I intend nothing wrong. I am innocent!”

“Half the evil in this world occurs while decent people stand by and do nothing wrong. It's not enough to refrain from evil, Trell. People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed.”

“Even when it's stupid to try?” he asked with savage sarcasm.

“Especially then,” she replied sweetly. “That's how it's done, Trell. You break your heart against this stony world. You fling yourself at it, on the side of good, and you do not ask the cost. That's how you do it.”

“Do what?” he demanded, truly angry now. “Get myself killed? For the sake of being a hero?”

“Perhaps,” she conceded. “Perhaps that. But it is definitely how you redeem yourself. How you become a hero.” She cocked her head and eyed him appraisingly. “Don't tell me you've never wanted to be the hero.”

“I've never wanted to be the hero,” he defied her. Paragon was still cursing someone defiantly. He sounded drunken and rambling. Brashen turned his head, to stare at the ship. The yellow glow of firelight danced on his chopped face. What did this woman expect of him? There was nothing he could do to help the ship, nothing he could do to help anyone. “All I ever wanted to do was live my own life. And I'm having damn little success at that.”

She laughed low. “Only because you keep standing back from it. And turning aside from it. And avoiding it.” She shook her head. “Trell, Trell. Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it.” She laughed again. Her eyes and voice seemed to go afar. “Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, and the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right.” She cocked her head and considered him. “I think you can do that, Trell.”