Assassin’s Fate

As we walked toward the bow, Trell introduced me to crew-members. They gave a nod or smile but never paused in their tasks. Kitl, Cord, Twan, Haff, Ant, Jock, Cypros … I stacked the names in my memory and tried to attach them to faces. Ant was halfway up the mast and my heart jumped when she waved at me with both hands. Trell was not amused. ‘One hand for yourself and one for the ship!’ he roared. ‘You don’t take unnecessary risks on my deck! I’ll put you right back in the tree you came from!’

‘Sir!’ she responded, and went scampering up the mast like a squirrel avoiding a barking dog. Trell rolled his eyes. ‘If she lives to grow up, she’ll be a great deckhand. But she doesn’t have a scrap of fear, and that may get her killed.’ He gestured at Trehaug. ‘When a child grows up there, the mast of a ship seems short.’

I followed his waving hand. The towering trees that held Trehaug dwarfed the naked masts of the Paragon. The swooping branches of the dense forest were as busy with foot-traffic as the streets and byways of any city. Everywhere throughout the trees were signs of human habitation. Signboards advertised a tavern while another in the shape of a basket advertised all manner of wickerwork. I saw some people veiled as I had always heard the Rain Wilders went, and others with exposed faces and bared arms that revealed scales and growths. A wicker lift was hoisted into the upper branches while pedestrians travelled up and down a stairway that spiralled around the trunk. I had stopped to gawk and realized that Brashen was waiting for me.

‘Did you grow up here?’ I asked Brashen.

‘Here? Oh, no. I’m Bingtown born and bred, from an illustrious Trader family. But I’m the black sheep and not the heir, so here I am, captaining a liveship instead of minding the family fortune.’ He was clearly well satisfied with his lot.

‘Not too different to my tale,’ I told him. ‘Amber may call me a prince, but my name tells the truth. “Fitz” means I was born on the wrong side of the blankets. So, I’m a Farseer, but a bastard one.’

‘That so? Well, that explains why you might end up on the end of an oar on a war galley.’

I grinned. ‘Yes. Bastards are a bit more expendable than princes.’ And that simply, we were at ease with each other. We strolled toward the bow. I could hear voices, Amber’s and Althea’s and the ship’s but the wind off the river and the noise of the tree city meant I could not make out their words.

‘… vengeance, then?’ Althea asked as we drew closer.

‘More than vengeance,’ Amber replied. ‘We go to break a cage of cruelty. To destroy a court that has grown only greedier and more corrupt with every passing year.’ She lowered her voice and spoke the words I had so often heard from her. ‘We go to be the rock in the cart track that bounces the wagon onto a new path.’

They could not have presented a stranger scene. Althea leaned on the ship’s railing. The ship’s face was turned toward the river, with my more youthful profile. Amber sat in the figurehead’s finger-laced hands. Her hands rested lightly on his thumbs and she swung her daintily booted feet, ankles crossed, over the empty fall to the cold, acid rush of the river. Her knitted cap allowed a feathering of short hair to frame her face. Powder and paint had smoothed her scarring and the scaling that the dragon’s blood had triggered. In Amber’s guise, the Fool became a very fetching woman.

Althea’s voice was subdued. ‘I’ve never heard you speak with such passion, not even when we were facing our deaths together.’

Amber’s face contorted with hatred. ‘They took our child and destroyed her.’

It hurt to hear Amber claim Bee that way, and I knew what Althea and Brashen must assume. The Fool might believe it was so, but to hear him speak of her that way to strangers wounded something in me. Molly, I thought fiercely. She had been Bee’s mother and no other. I did not wish these people to think I had fathered Bee upon Amber. No, Molly had been the one to endure that pregnancy, in some ways so alone, and Molly had been the one to cherish and protect a child that others would have let dwindle away. It wasn’t right for Amber to erase her. The hurt seared me, and I realized it had another source.

‘My boy is gone, too!’ Paragon burst out and I felt the surge of emotion that washed through the ship. His sense of outrage and loss were fuelling the fire of hurt within me. Trell spoke calmingly. ‘Boy-O is fine, Paragon. Vivacia would never let harm befall him. He is only gone from you for a time. He will return. You know that.’

‘Will he?’ Paragon demanded harshly. ‘He has been gone two years! Will he ever come back? Or will Vivacia claim him? He was born here, on my decks! He is mine! Or am I the only liveship without a family? The only liveship with no heir to my captaincy? For even as Althea’s brother demands my boy for his deck, he keeps from me what should be mine! Kennit’s son!’