“No! Please!” Draquius' eyes went wide and he strove to cling to Maulkin. “Do not let go of me. You speak my name and it rings in my heart like the bugling of the Dragon of Dawn. For so long, I have forgotten myself. They kept me always with them, never letting me have solitude, never allowing my old memories to surface. Layer on layer of their little lives they spread atop mine, until I believed I was one of them. If you let me go, they will reclaim me. It will all begin again, and perhaps, never end.”

“There is nothing we can do for you,” Maulkin apologized sorrowfully. “There is nothing we can do for ourselves. I fear you have told us the ending of our own tale.”

“Undo me,” Draquius pleaded in his thin little voice. “I am no more than the memory of Draquius. If he had survived, he would have been one of your guides, to bring you safely home. But he did not. I am all that is left, this poor shell of a life. I am memories. No more than that, Maulkin of Maulkin's tangle. I am a tale with no one left to tell me. So take my memories for your own. Had Draquius survived his transformation, he would have devoured his shell and taken all his memories back into himself. He did not. So take them for yourselves. Preserve the memories of one who died before he could trumpet his own name across the sky. Remember Draquius.”

Maulkin lidded his great copper eyes. “It will be a poor memorial, Draquius. We do not know how much longer we can sustain our own lives.”

“So take mine, and draw strength and purpose from it.” He loosened his grip on Maulkin and folded his sticklike forelimbs across his narrow chest. “Free me.”

In the end, they obeyed him. They crushed and tore, splintering him into pieces. Some of his body, they discovered to their shock, was no more than dead strips of plants. But all that was silver and smelled of memories, they took and devoured. Maulkin ate that part of him that was shaped as a head and forebody. Shreever did not think he suffered, for he did not cry out. Maulkin insisted that all partake of Draquius' memories. Even those who were feral were subtly urged to the sharing.

The silver threads of his memories had dried long and straight and hard. When Shreever took her portion in her jaws, she was surprised to feel it soften and melt. As she took it in, memories dawned bright in her mind. It was as if she swam from clouded water to clear. Faded images of another time came to mind and glowed bright with color and detail. She lidded her eyes in ecstasy and dreamed of wind under her wings.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - The Launch of the Paragon

THE HIGH TIDE WOULD COME JUST AFTER DAWN SO THE FINAL WORK WAS completed in a frenzy by lanternlight. Brashen stalked and cursed through the work site the whole night. The Paragon had been laid over and nudged as far toward the water as Brashen could manage without putting too much stress on the wood. With jacks and struts inside the hull, the ship had been brought groaning closer to true. Some preliminary caulking had been done, but not too much. Brashen wanted the planking free to shift as the water lifted the hull. A ship must be flexible to withstand the pounding of waves and water. Paragon must be allowed enough freedom to allow the water and hull to come to terms with each other. The full length of his keel was exposed now. Brashen had rung it with a hammer; it seemed sound. It ought to be, it was silver-gray wizardwood, hard as stone. Nevertheless, Brashen would not trust anything to be the way it should be. His experience with ships told him those were precisely the things that went wrong.

He had a thousand worries about the refloating of the ship. He took it for granted that Paragon would leak like a sieve until his planking swelled again. Old joists and timbers, left in one position for so many years, might spring or split as they took up the tensions of a floating vessel once more. Anything could happen. He wished fervently that they had had a larger budget, one that would have allowed the hiring of master shipwrights and workers to oversee this phase of the salvage. As it was, he was using the knowledge he'd personally gained over the years, much hearsay and the labor of men who were usually sleeping off drunks at this hour. It was not reassuring.

But repeatedly, his anxiety crested at Paragon's attitude. It had shown little improvement during the course of the work. The ship now spoke to them, but his temperament fluctuated wildly. Unfortunately, the spectrum of his emotions seemed to encompass only the darker ones. He was angry or bleak, whining miserably or ranting insanely. In between, he sank into a self-pitying melancholy that made Brashen wish the ship truly was a boy, simply so he could shake him out of it.

Brashen suspected that discipline and self-control was something the ship had never truly learned. That, he explained to Althea and Amber, was the root of all Paragon's problems. No discipline. It would have to come from them until Paragon learned to manage himself. But how did one discipline a vessel? The three of them had considered that question over mugs of beer several nights before the peak tide.