Assassin’s Fate

Amber nodded gratefully. ‘I thank you for your warnings. A careless tongue can do much damage.’

It was hard to sleep that night. A different ship and the next leg of our journey loomed before us. I’d be going deeper into territory unknown to me, and taking people little more than children with me. I spoke into the darkness of our cabin. ‘It’s in my mind, Perseverance, to ask Captain Leftrin if he might not take you on as a ship’s boy. You seem well suited to this trade. What think you of that?’

Silence followed my words. Then his voice came out of the dark, tinged with alarm. ‘You mean, afterwards? When we are homeward bound again?’

‘No. I mean tomorrow.’

His voice was lower when he said, ‘But I vowed my service to you, sir.’

‘I could release you from that vow. Help you set your feet on a brighter and cleaner way than the one I must follow.’

I heard him draw a long breath. ‘You could release me from your service, sir. Indeed, if you chose to turn me out, I could no longer claim to be yours. But only Bee could release me from the promise I made to avenge her. Turn me off if you wish, sir, but I will still have to follow this to the end.’

I heard Lant turn over in his bunk. I had thought him asleep and his voice was so thick that perhaps he had been. ‘Don’t even bring it up to me,’ he warned me. ‘It’s as the boy said. I gave a promise to my father, and you can’t ask me to break it. We follow you, Fitz, to the end. No matter how bitter.’

I said nothing, but my mind went to work immediately. What would constitute ‘the end’ for Lant? Could I convince him that he had done his duty and could honourably return to Buckkeep without me? I did not judge it safe to put Spark and Per on a ship home without a protector. I could claim I’d had an urgent Skill-summons from Dutiful for Lant to return home to Chade. By the time he found out it was false, he’d be home. Yes. I pulled up my knees to fit better in the small bunk and closed my eyes. That part, at least, was settled. A small but convincing lie in Bingtown and I could get him onto a ship home. Now I just had to find a way to pry Perseverance loose from me. And Spark.

The next day went as Leftrin had predicted it would. The crew began to say their goodbyes to us at breakfast. ‘Oh, I shall so miss having you aboard,’ Alise exclaimed to Amber.

Bellin had left shell earrings next to Spark’s plate. The dour deckhand had grown fond of the girl. Per made the rounds of the various crewmen, making his own farewells.

We spent our last hours on the roof of the deckhouse, for the day was almost calm not chill at all, as long as one’s coat was closed. The weather had broken and there was a stripe of blue sky over the river. We passed the dragon’s hatching beach, as Skelly pointed it out to us, and then the treetop city of Cassarick. We did not pause nor did Leftrin return any of the greetings shouted down to us. In the stretch of river between Cassarick and Trehaug the little hanging dwellings were as thick as apples on a tended tree, and I did not know how he could tell where one settlement ended and the next began. But at some point, the captain began to return the friendly waves of folk from their treetop homes. We began to see floating docks tied up to the tree trunks, and small vessels moored to them. There were people out fishing, sitting straddled on the tree trunks that overhung the water and letting their lines drop straight down into the river. Tarman swung wide of them to avoid the dangling lines. I was fascinated by the hanging walkways and the well-travelled branches that functioned as footpaths. Spark sat beside Amber and me, pointing up at the trees and exclaiming over how some children ran heedlessly along a branch she would have thought too narrow to traverse with care.

‘Trehaug docks are just around the next bend!’ Skelly shouted up at us as she passed by the deckhouse. Big Eider was guiding Tarman in closer to the thickly banked trees. The water ran quieter and shallower, and soon the crew unshipped their poles and began to slow the Tarman and then to guide him. It struck me that something felt odd, as if more was at work than merely the crew with their poles. The ship seemed too responsive. When I commented on it, Spark said, ‘But Tarman is a liveship. That means he helps the crew get him to where they need him to be.’

‘How?’ I was intrigued.

She grinned. ‘Study his wake the next time we dock for the night.’ At my puzzled look she added, ‘And think of a frog’s legs, kicking.’

We rounded the bend and my first glimpse of Trehaug put Tarman’s ‘legs’ out of my mind. It was the oldest of the Rain Wild cities. The immense trees that over hung the wide, grey river were festooned with bridges, walkways and homes of all sizes. The swampy, flood-prone land beneath the branches of the ancient forest allowed no permanent dwellings. The city of Trehaug was built almost entirely in the branches of the trees that lined the river.