Swarge was supposed to be on watch, but he’d sent him off to his bed. The entire crew was asleep. The river was down, Tarman was safely snugged on mud for the night, and his crew deserved a rest. It would be the first full night of sleep any of them had had since the wave hit. They all needed the rest. Everyone needed to sleep.

Even Alise. That was why she had sought her room early. She was exhausted still. He began another slow circuit of the decks. He didn’t need to walk laps around his ship. All was safe and calm now. He could have gone off to his own bunk and slept and left Tarman to watch for himself. No one would fault him for that.

He passed Alise’s door. No light shone from under it. Doubtless she was asleep. If she had wanted his company, she would have lingered at the galley table. She hadn’t. She’d vanished immediately after dinner. He’d hoped that she would stay. He faced that fading hope frankly. It would have been the first and only night that they’d been together on board his ship without Sedric’s presence as a reminder of who and what she was. He had hoped to steal this one night from her Bingtown life and possess it as something of their own.

But she’d excused herself from the table and vanished into her own room.

What did that mean?

Probably that she was a lot smarter than he was. Which, he told himself, he’d known all along. What intelligent man would want to share harness with a woman stupider than himself? His Alise was smart, and he knew it. Not just educated but intelligent.

But he wished she hadn’t chosen to be smart on this particular night.

And what sort of a man was he, that he felt Sedric’s absence as a sort of relief rather than a loss? The man had been Alise’s friend since childhood. He knew that. He might find him an annoying spoiled twit of a fellow, but Alise cared about him. She was probably wondering if he was dead or in dire circumstances tonight. And here he was, brutishly thinking only that the watchman was gone.

He finished his circuit of his ship and stood for a time on Tarman’s blunt-nosed bow. He leaned on the railing and looked at the “shore.” Somewhere there the dragons slept in the mud, but he couldn’t see them. The forest was pitch before his eyes. He spoke to his ship.

“Well, tomorrow’s another day, Tarman. One way or another, Carson will return. And then what? Onward?”

Of course.

“You seem so sure of it.”

I remember it.

“So you’ve told me. But not the way it is now.”

No. That’s true.

“But you think we ought to keep going?”

The others have no choice. And I think it’s the least we can do for them.

Leftrin said nothing. He glided his hands lightly along the bow railing, thinking. Tarman was an old ship, older than any of the other liveships. He was one of the first to have been put together from wizardwood, as it was known then. He hadn’t been designed to be a trading ship of any kind, only a simple wooden barge, given a thick layer of the only sort of wood that seemed impervious to the Rain Wild River’s acid rages. In a tradition much older than Bingtown or even Jamaillia, Leftrin’s ancestor had painted eyes on his ship not only to give it a wise expression but as a superstition that the barge would literally “watch out” for itself on the dangerous waterway. At the time, the only known properties of wizardwood were that it was hard and heavy and could withstand acid. No one had known then that after lifetimes of human presence on board, a liveship could attain its own awareness. That would not be discovered until the first sailing ships with figureheads were carved from the stuff.

But that didn’t mean that Tarman hadn’t become aware. It didn’t mean that his captains hadn’t known and felt his presence.

The sailors of Leftrin’s lineage had known there was something peculiar about their ship, especially those who grew up on his deck, who slept and played aboard him. They developed an affinity for both the barge and the river, an instinctive knack for navigating and for avoiding the ever-shifting sandbars and hidden snags of the forest waterway. They dreamed strange dreams that they seldom shared except with other members of the family. The dreams were not just dreams of the river and sliding silently through it. They had dreams of flying and sometimes dreams of swimming in a deep and blue-shadowed world.

Tarman had become aware, just as all liveships eventually did. But he had no mouth to speak with, no carved hands or human face. He was silent, but his eyes were old and knowing.

Perhaps Leftrin should have left him that way. Things had been good between them. Why had he desired to try to make them better?

The wizardwood log had been both a windfall and a complication in his life.