Read Mad Ship for Free Online Page A

man smiled in a decidedly unfriendly way that bared the gaps in his teeth. To his left, a tall pirate laughed gutturally. He rolled his shoulders as if stretching, a subtle display of strength for Sa’Adar’s map-faces. Both the tattooed men straightened, eyes narrowing.
    Sa’Adar looked shocked. Obviously, he had not expected this. He stood straight and began indignantly, “Why should it be a concern of yours?”
    The stocky pirate poked the tall priest in the chest. His jabbing finger stayed there as he pointed out, “Kennit’s our captain. What he says, goes. Right?” When the priest did not answer, the man grinned. Sa’Adar stepped back from the pressure of his forefinger against his chest. As he turned to walk away, the pirate observed, “You’d do best not to talk against anything Kennit does. You don’t like something, tell the captain to his face. He’s a hard man, but fair. Don’t wag your tongue behind his back. If you make trouble on this ship, it will only come down on you.”
    Without a backward glance, the pirates went back to their work. Attention shifted to Sa’Adar. He did not mask the angry glint in his eyes, but his voice sounded thin and childish when he said, “Be assured I will speak to Kennit about this. Be assured I will!”
    Wintrow lowered his eyes to the deck. Perhaps his father was right. Perhaps there was a way he could regain his family ship from both slaves and pirates. In any conflict, there is opportunity for someone. His heart beat strangely faster as he walked away, and he wondered where such thoughts had bred in him.
             
    VIVACIA WAS PREOCCUPIED . Although her eyes stared ahead over the water to the stern of the
Marietta,
her real attention was turned inward. The man on the wheel had a steady hand; the crew that sprang to her rigging were true sailors one and all. The crew was cleansing filth from her decks and holds, and repairing woodwork and polishing metal. For the first time in many months, she had no qualms as to the abilities of her captain. She could let her mind be completely occupied with her own concerns, trusting that those who manned her knew their trade.
    A quickened liveship, through her wizardwood bones, could be aware of all that happened aboard her. Much of it was mundane and scarcely worthy of attention. The mending of a line, the chopping of an onion in the galley, need not concern her. Those things could not change her course in life. Kennit could. In the captain’s quarters, the enigmatic man slept restlessly. Vivacia could not see him, but she could feel him in a way humans had no words to describe. His fever was rising again. The woman who tended him was anxious. She did something with cool water and a cloth. Vivacia reached for details, but there was no bond there. She did not yet know them well enough.
    Kennit was far more accessible to her than Etta. His fever dreams ran out of him carelessly, spilling into Vivacia like the blood that had been shed on her decks. She absorbed them but could make no sense of them. A little boy was tormented, torn between loyalty to a father who loved him but had no idea how to protect him, and a man who protected him from others but had no love at all in his heart. Over and over again, a serpent rose from the depths of his dreams to shear off his leg. The bite of its jaws was acid and ice. From the depths of his soul, he reached toward her, toward a deep sharing that he recalled only as a formless memory from a lost infancy.
    “Hello, hello, what’s this? Or who is this, perhaps I should say?”
    The voice, Kennit’s voice, came to her in a tiny whisper inside her mind. She shook her head, tousling her hair into the wind. The pirate did not speak to her. Even in her strongest communions with Althea and Wintrow, their thoughts had not come so clearly into her mind. “That is not Kennit,” she murmured to herself. Of that, she was certain. Yet, it was certainly his voice. In his stateroom, the