The portholes glow, and the cabin has gone from dark to dim. Jeryon can’t disagree with Solet. I am a plodder. I’m also fairly rewarded and content. In a city like Hanosh, where one eats well, four eat poorly, and five don’t eat at all, it’s better to be hardtack than an empty plate dreaming of steak.
He feels sorry for Livion. The boy had promise before he started listening to Solet, and probably this woman. If she’s as manipulative as Jeryon thinks, Livion will count himself lucky after the Trust learns of his plotting. He won’t get another Hanoshi ship, but he’ll be rid of her.
Solet will have to return to Yness, likely a little bruised, where he’ll be welcomed with open arms and, knowing the Ynessi, open legs. Jeryon doesn’t understand why the Trust puts up with them. A wild people. A wasteful people. At least the Aydeni on board has proven trustworthy.
The door to the adjacent cabin opens. He hears the Aydeni enter, slam the door, rattle through a box of phials and slam out again. He can imagine why she’s rattling and slamming. As an apothecary, in addition to making medicine, she has to treat the rowers, and she doesn’t approve of the Trust’s new tonic. So be it. She was only contracted for this trip. In eight hours she’ll be gone too.
As the oarmaster cracks his whip again, Everlyn climbs the aft ladder from the rowers’ deck to her cabin. Dawn does its best to cheer her, but fails. The captain won’t light the lamps, worried about Aydeni privateers, as if there were any. This makes for a gloomy ship and a gloomier rowers’ deck, however much moonlight comes through the half deck above. Gloominess suits the Hanoshi, though.
Theirs is a seafaring city that has largely traded its fishing fleet for trading galleys and its nets for coin purses, whereas Ayden has always trusted the endless bounty of its mountains: the stone and ore, the trees and game. Even the ancient shadows long to be shaped into stories featuring wondrous beasts and secret caves. Hanoshi stories are about the joy of riches and the pain of their loss. They would only shape the shadows on Comber if they could be boxed for sale.
Everlyn looks around her cabin. The small room is packed with barrels of golden shield, a curative herb they bought across the Tallan Sea. She’s spent every spare moment of the last three days turning it into medicine. The Hanoshi council will give it away for free to employed citizens. The Trust, which owns Comber, is charging the city just a nominal coin for the voyage, but this is not a selfless act. The Trust wants to become a ruling company, and ruling companies realize that if the city perishes of the plague, there will be no one left to rule or employ.
Everlyn lifts the lid of a pot simmering on the small iron stove at one end of her spattered worktable. She has spent so much of the past three days in here reducing the shield to medicine, she hardly smells it anymore. This disturbs her. Fresh, the shield smells like liver. As medicine, it smells like rotten liver. Oh, what she must smell like.
It’s a small sacrifice, though, compared to the effects of the flox, which bubbles the skin as if boiled from within, then cools into a cracking black crust. The luckiest die, and most are that lucky.
Everlyn rattles through a wooden box under the table, pulls out a clear bottle of fine red powder and pockets it. From a different box she removes a larger green bottle with a skull painted on the label and takes a long pull. She swallows a belch, chases it with another, longer pull, then puts the bottle back and goes below, slamming the door behind her. Let the privateers hear that.
Tuse stalks the alley between the rowers’ benches, so tall he shifts from hunching to squatting to both beneath the overhead. He coils and uncoils a white whip. “Fifty-seven strokes that took.”
“I’ll say it again: They’ve had too much,” Everlyn says.
“I haven’t,” one rower says, grinning wildly. A bear-claw brand glistens on his shoulder. A cut from Tuse’s lash bloodies his cheek.
“Especially you,” she says.
“You’re worried about my health?” Bearclaw says. He shakes his leg shackle. “I’m not one of them. I’ll die down here. Might as well be fired up.”
“I won’t have it,” the rower behind him says. “None of us will.” Having no shackles, he looks around. Unlike Bearclaw and the other five prisoners leased from the jail in Hanosh, the rest of the rowers wear a sodden armband with the crest of their guild, the Brothers of the Oar. “Brothers don’t cheat. Look to Hume.”
Hume is a silent mountain. His eyes are closed. He may be asleep. Yet he pulls true. The brothers have looked at him in admiration before. They aren’t as inspired now.
“I need some,” a brother says. “To get the job done.”
“And me,” another says.
“Oarmaster,” Bearclaw says, “I asked first.”
“You’ll die,” Everlyn says. “And I won’t give you the means. Or let anyone else.”
“It’s not your choice,” Tuse says. “Should I tell the Trust an Aydeni tried to sabotage the trip? How many more would you be risking then?”