Ship of Magic

That was only how her withdrawal had begun. She had by turns sulked or raged, thinking of all she would say if Kyle dared come to her door, either to be sure she was obeying him or to say he had repented his command. While waiting for that, she read all her books and scrolls again, and even laid out the silk and considered making a start at dressmaking herself. But her sewing skills were more suited to canvas than silk, and the fabric was too fine to take a chance on botching the job. Instead she mended all her ship-board clothes. But even that task ran out, and she had found she hated the empty, idle time that stretched before her. One evening, irritated at the confines of her too-small bunk, she had flung her bedding to the floor and sprawled on it as she read yet again Deldom's Journal of a Trader. She fell asleep there. And dreamed.

Often as a girl, she would catnap on the decks of the Vivacia, or spend an evening stretched out on the deck of her father's quarters reading his books. Dozing off always brought her vivid dreams and semi-waking fancies. As she had grown, her father chided her for such behavior, and saw that she had chores enough that she would have no time for napping on deck. In recalling her old dreams, she put them down to a child's vivid imaginings. But that night, on the deck of her own stateroom, the color and detail of her childhood dreams came back to her. The dream was too vivid to dismiss as the product of her own mind.

She dreamed of her great-grandma, a woman she had never known, but in her dream she knew Talley as well as she knew herself. Talley Vestrit strode the decks, shouting orders at the sailors who floundered through a tangle of canvas, lines and splintered wood in the midst of the great storm. In an instant, sudden as remembering, Althea knew what had happened. A great sea had taken off the mast and the mate, and Captain Vestrit herself had joined her crew to bring order and sanity back with her confident bellows. She was nothing like her portrait; here was no woman sitting docilely in a chair, attired primly in black wool and white lace, a stern-faced husband standing at her shoulder. Althea had always known that her great-grandma had commissioned the building of the Vivacia. In that dream, however, she was not just the woman who had gone to the money lenders and the ship builders; she was suddenly a woman who had loved the sea and ships and had boldly determined the course of her family's descendants with her decision to possess a liveship. Oh, to have lived in such a time, when a woman could wield such authority.

The dream was brief and stark, like the image etched in one's vision by a lightning flash, yet when Althea woke with her cheek and palms pressed to the wooden deck, she had no doubt of her vision. There had been too many details too swiftly impressed upon her. In the dream the Vivacia had carried a fore-and-aft rig, or what remained of one after the storm's fury. Althea had never seen her so fitted. She instantly grasped the advantages of such a rigging, and for the interval of the dream, shared her great-grandma's belief in it.

It was dizzying to awaken and find herself Althea, so completely immersed in Talley had she been. Hours later, she was still able to shut her eyes and recall the night of the storm, Talley's true memory shuffled in with hers like a foreign card in a deck. It had come to her from the Vivacia; there could be no other way.

That night, she had deliberately composed herself to sleep on the deck of her stateroom. The oiled and polished planks were not comfortable, yet she put no blanket or cushion between herself and them. The Vivacia rewarded her trust. Althea had spent an afternoon with her grandfather as he carefully negotiated one of the narrower channels in the Perfume Isles. She saw over his shoulder the sightings he took of the jutting rocks, witnessed him putting out a boat and men to pull them the more swiftly through a place passable only at a certain tide. It was his secret, and it had led to the Vestrit monopoly on a certain tree sap that dried into richly fragrant droplets. No one had been up that channel to trade with the villages there since her grandfather's death. Like any Captain, he took to his death more than he could ever pass on to his descendants. He had made no chart. But the lost knowledge was not lost, but stored in the Vivacia, and would awaken with her when she quickened. Even now, Althea was certain that she could take the ship up that channel, so completely had its secrets been passed on to her.