He found Althea dangling all but upside-down from the bowsprit as she tried to tug the peg loose from its setting. Without a word he followed her out, grasped her around the hips and lowered her to where she might reach it more easily. ‘Thanks,’ she grunted as she pulled it free. He lifted her effortlessly and set her back on her feet on the deck. She raced back to her father, the precious peg clutched tightly in her fist. Brashen was right behind her.
They were not a moment too soon. Ephron Vestrit’s death was not to be a pleasant one. Instead of closing his eyes and going in peace, he fought it as he had fought everything in life that opposed him. Althea offered him the peg and he gripped it as if it would save him. ‘Drowning,’ he strangled out. ‘Drowning on a dry deck.’
For a time the strange tableau held. Althea and her father gripped either end of the peg. Tears ran freely down her ravaged face. Her hair, gone wild about her face, clung to her damp cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, focused and caring as she stared down into the depths of her father’s mirroring black eyes. She knew there was nothing she could do for him, but she did not flinch away.
Ephron’s free hand scrabbled against the deck as if trying to find a grip on the smoothly sanded planks. He managed to draw in another choking, gurgling breath. A bloody froth was beginning to form at the corners of his mouth. Other family members clustered around them. The older sister clung tightly to her mother, wordless in grief, but the mother spoke in a low voice into her hair as she embraced her. The girl child wept, caught in a sort of terror, and clutched at her confused smaller brother. The older grandson stood back and apart from his family, face pale and set as one who endures pain. Kyle stood, arms crossed on his chest, at the dying man’s feet. Brashen had no idea what thoughts passed behind that still countenance. A second circle had also formed, at a respectful distance outside the canopy. The still-faced crew had gathered, hats in hands, to witness their captain’s passing.
‘Althea!’ the captain’s wife called out suddenly to her daughter. At the same time she thrust her older daughter forward, toward their father. ‘You must,’ she said in an odd, low voice. ‘You know you must.’ There was an odd purposefulness to her voice, as if she forced herself to some very unpleasant duty. The look on the older daughter’s face — Keffria, that was her name — seemed to combine shame with defiance. Keffria dropped to her knees suddenly beside her sister. She reached out a pale, trembling hand. Brashen thought she would touch her father. Instead she resolutely grasped the peg between Althea’s hand and her father’s. Even as Keffria made her unmistakable claim to the ship by grasping the peg above Althea’s hand, her mother affirmed it for her.
‘Althea. Let go of the peg. The ship is your sister’s, by right of her birth order. And by your father’s will.’ The mother’s voice shook as she said the words, but she said them clearly.
Althea looked up in disbelief, her eyes tracing up the arm from the hand that gripped the peg to her sister’s face. ‘Keffria?’ she asked in confusion. ‘You can’t mean it!’
Uncertainty spread over the older woman’s face. She glanced up at the mother. ‘She does!’ Ronica Vestrit declared, almost savagely. ‘It’s how it has to be, Althea. It’s how it must be, for all our sakes.’
‘Papa?’ Althea asked brokenly.
Her father’s dark eyes had never left her face. His mouth opened, moved, and he spoke a last phrase, ‘… let go…’
Brashen had once worked on a ship where the mate was a bit too free with his marlinspike. Mostly he used it to bludgeon fellows from behind, sailors he felt were not paying sufficient attention to their tasks. More than once, Brashen had been unwilling witness to the look on a man’s face as the tool connected with the back of his skull. He knew the look a man wore at that moment when pain registered as unconsciousness. That was how Althea looked at the uttering of her father’s words. Her grip on the peg laxed, her hand fell away from it to clutch instead at her father’s thin arm. That she held to, as a sailor clings to wreckage in a storm-tossed sea. She did not look again at her mother or her sister. She only gripped her father’s arm as he gaped and gasped like a fish out of water.
‘Papa,’ she whispered again. His back arched, his chest swelling high with his effort to find air. He rolled his head, turning his face to find hers before he suddenly collapsed back to the deck. The long struggle was over. The light of life and struggle suddenly left his eyes. His body settled bonelessly against the deck as if he were melting into the wood. His hand fell from the peg. As her sister Keffria stood, Althea collapsed forward. She put her head on her father’s chest and wailed shamelessly and hopelessly.
She did not see what Brashen did. Keffria stood and surrendered the peg to her waiting husband. In disbelief, Brashen watched Kyle accept it. He walked away from them all, carrying the precious peg as if he truly had a right to it. For an instant, Brashen nearly followed him. Then he decided it was something he’d just as soon not witness. Peg or no, the ship would quicken. Brashen thought he already felt a difference about her; the use of a peg would only hasten the process. But the promise he had given his captain now had a different shade of meaning for him.
‘Go with her, son. She’ll need your help. Stand by her through this.’ Captain Vestrit had not been speaking about the peg, or his death. Brashen’s heart sank as he tried to decide exactly what he had promised to do.
When Althea felt hands grip her shoulders, she tugged away from them. She didn’t care who it was. In the space of a few moments, she had lost her father and the Vivacia. It would have been simpler to lose her life. She still could not grasp either fact. It was not fair, she thought inanely. Only one unthinkable thing should happen at a time. If the events had only happened one at a time, she could have thought of a way to deal with them. But whenever she tried to think of her father’s death, at the moment of realizing it, the loss of the ship would suddenly loom up in her mind. Yet she could not think about that, not here by her father’s dead body. For then she would have to wonder how this father she had worshipped could have betrayed her so completely. As devastating as her pain was, she feared even to consider her anger. If she let her anger take her over, it might completely consume her, leaving nothing but blowing ash.
The hands came back, settling on her bowed shoulders and grasping them firmly. ‘Go away, Brashen,’ she said with no strength. But she no longer had the will to shrug his grip away. The warmth and steadiness of his hands on her shoulders were too much like her father’s steady clasp. Sometimes her father would come up on deck while she was on wheel watch. He could move as silently as a ghost when he wanted to; his whole crew knew that, and knew, too, that one could never know when he would silently appear, never interfering in a man’s work but checking the task with a knowing eye and giving a silent nod of approval. She would be standing at the wheel, both hands on it and holding a steady course, and she wouldn’t even know he was there until she felt the firm, approving grip of his hands on her shoulders. Then he might drift off, or he might stand beside her and have a pipe while he watched the night and the water and his daughter steering his ship through both.
Somehow that memory gave her strength. The sharp edges of her grief settled into a dull, throbbing lump of pain. She straightened up, squaring her shoulders. She didn’t understand anything; not how he could have died and left her, and certainly not how he could have taken her ship from her and given it to her sister. ‘But, you know, there were a lot of times when he barked orders, and I couldn’t fathom the sense of them. But if I simply jumped up and obeyed, it always came right. It always came right.’
She turned, expecting to confront Brashen. Instead it was Wintrow who stood behind her.
It surprised her, and that made her almost angry. Who was he, to touch her so familiarly, let alone to give her a pale ghost