Assassin’s Fate

‘She has given me back my true nature, at least in part!’ It was Paragon who answered them. His face was changing as I stared up at him, colour rippling across the features we shared. In the dark, he gleamed a coppery bronze as he closed his clawed hands around Amber and lifted her from the deck. He clutched her possessively to his chest and added, ‘She knows me for who I am, and has not hesitated to give me what I have always needed!’

‘Please, ship, be calm. Put her back on your deck. Explain this to us.’ Brashen spoke as if he were reasoning with a recalcitrant ten-year-old. Calm but still in control. I wished I felt that way.

‘I am not a SHIP!’ The figurehead’s sudden shout startled birds from the trees and sent them battering off through the darkened forest. ‘I have never been a ship! We are dragons, trapped! Enslaved! But my true friend has shown me that I can be free.’

‘True friend,’ Althea said under her breath, as if doubting both words.

Brashen moved closer to his wife. Every muscle in his body was tensed, as if he were a hound on the leash, waiting to be released. He spared one glance over his shoulder for the gathering crew. ‘I’m handling this. Please disperse about your duties.’

They departed slowly. Clef didn’t move. He stood where he was, his face grave. My gaze met Lant’s and he put a hand on Spark’s shoulder, drawing her closer to him and gave Perseverance a nudge as he moved them away. I remained where I was. Paragon held Amber under his chin and against his chest. She looked blindly out over the water. ‘I had to do it,’ she said. I wondered if she spoke to me or to her former friends.

‘She has set me on the path to returning to my proper forms!’ Paragon announced to the early stars in the deep sky. ‘She has given me Silver.’

I scanned the deck, and saw at last the shards of a glass vial. My heart sank. Had she discovered it in my pack and taken it without asking me? Without warning me of her plan? What was her plan?

Althea’s voice was higher pitched than usual as she asked, ‘Your proper forms?’

‘You see what even a small amount of Silver has done for me? Given enough, I believe I can shake off these wooden planks you have fastened to me and cast aside canvas sails for wings! We will become the dragons we were meant to be!’

Althea looked stunned. She spoke her words as if trying to find the meaning of words spoken in a foreign tongue. ‘You will become dragons? You will cease to be Paragon? How?’ Then, even more incredulously, ‘You will leave us?’

He ignored the hurt in her voice, choosing instead to take offence at a meaning her words had not held. ‘What would you have me do? How could you want me to stay like this? Always at the whim of others? Going only where you take me, carrying burdens back and forth between human ports? Sexless? Trapped in a form not my own?’ From almost begging, his voice edged into fury. I expected his arrowed words to wound her, but she seemed immune to them.

Althea stepped fearlessly toward the figurehead, turning her face up to him in the dimming light. ‘Paragon. Do not pretend that you cannot tell what I feel about this. About you.’

He narrowed his dragon eyes at Althea until his fixed stare looked like blue fire seething in a cracked stove wall. Slowly his arms, still so strangely human despite their scaling, unfolded. He lowered Amber to the deck and wordlessly turned his back on us. Amber stumbled a little and then stood. I tried to read her stance, to see something of my old friend the Fool in her at this moment. Instead I saw only Amber and felt again the gulf of wondering who that woman was.

And what she was capable of.

Paragon had turned away from all of us, to stare out over the darkened river. The tension of the figurehead thrummed through the wizardwood hull and bones of the ship. I had the rising realization that he spoke the truth. He was not a ship. He was a dragon, transformed and trapped by men. And however much he might care for those who crewed him, on some level he had to feel resentment. Perhaps even hatred.

And we were completely in his power.

As that chill thought iced my bones, Althea advanced on Amber. She reminded me of a stalking cat that sizes another cat up for a fight. The small steps, the precise balance, the unwinking stare. She spoke in a low, soft voice. ‘What did you do to my ship?’

Amber turned her sightless eyes toward Althea’s voice. ‘I did what should be done for every liveship. What you should do for Vivacia if the opportunity presents itself.’

At the name Vivacia, every muscle in Althea’s body tightened and she knotted her fists.