He found it, coming up swift on their starboard.

Impossibly, it was Paragon, transfigured in death to a youth. A ghostly white serpent gamboled before the ship. More swift than the wind, unnaturally fleet, the liveship drew alongside. Completing the nightmare, his mother stood on the foredeck, her white hair streaming in the wind. She saw him. She reached a beseeching hand toward him. A golden goddess stood beside her, and a dead man commanded the crew. Kennit’s tongue clove for an instant to the roof of his mouth. The ghosts of his past came on, impossibly swift, drawing abreast of the Jamaillian ship and then veering toward it. “Kennit!” the voice thundered again. “I come for you!” Paragon put cold fury in his voice. “Yield Kennit to me! I command it! He is mine!”

“Yield!” Vivacia’s voice cracked the sky, coming from the port side of the ship. Kennit’s view of her was blocked, but he knew she was close. His heart lifted painfully in his chest. She could save him. “Yield, Jamaillian ship, or we take you to the bottom!”

The Jamaillian ship had nowhere to go. Despite her master’s frantic commands to spill wind from her sails, he could not slow her fast enough. The Paragon cut recklessly toward her bow. The Jamaillian ship veered, but it was not enough. With a terrible splintering sound followed by the groans of stressed timbers, she caromed at an angle against Paragon. His wizardwood absorbed her impact, but splinters flew from the Jamaillian ship. The Jamaillian ship slewed around, all control lost. Overhead, canvas flapped wildly. Suddenly, there was another grinding impact as the Vivacia pressed up against her other side. It was a reckless maneuver, one that could take all three ships down. The halted momentum of the ships swung them all in a slowly turning circle. Sailors on every deck roared in dismay. Overhead, rigging threatened to tangle. To either side, the Marietta and the Motley swept past, to hold off approaching Jamaillian vessels.

The deck under Kennit was still shuddering from the impacts when grapples from both liveships seized onto it. Boarders from both sides leapt over the railings. The clash of fighting rose around them, supplemented with the wild shouts of the liveships themselves. Even the serpent added his trumpeting. Their captors were suddenly intent on defending their own lives.

“Satrap! We must try to get to the Vivacia.” Kennit kept his firm grip on the Satrap’s shoulder and shouted by his ear. “I’ll guide you there,” he asserted, lest his living crutch try to go on his own.

“Kill them!” The Jamaillian captain’s roar cut through the sounds of battle. It was the furious cry of a desperate man. “By Lord Criath’s order, they must not be taken alive. Kill the Satrap and the pirate king. Don’t let them escape!”

BODIES STILL CLUTTERED VIVACIA’S DECK, THE BLOOD BEADING AND RUNNING over the sealed wood. Walking was slippery. The frantically scrambling sailors, the outstretched, pleading hands of the injured and the increased shifting of the deck made Malta’s journey to where Reyn had fallen a nightmare. She felt she moved sluggishly, alone, through chaos and insanity, to the end of the world. Pirates darted past her to Wintrow’s shouted commands. She did not even hear them. Reyn had come all this way, seeking her, and she had been too cowardly to give him even a word. She had dreaded the pain of his rejection so much that she had not had the courage to thank him. Now she feared she sought for a dead man.

He lay facedown. She had to pull another body off his. The man on top of him was heavy. She tugged at him hopelessly while all around her the world went on a mad quest to save Kennit. No one, not her brother, not her aunt, came to her aid. She sobbed breathlessly, fearfully as she worked. She heard the two liveships shouting to one another. Rushing sailors dodged around her, heedless of her toil. She fell to her knees in the blood, braced a shoulder against the dead man’s bulk, and shoved him off Reyn.

The revealed carnage left her gasping. Blood soaked his garments and pooled around his body. He sprawled in it, horribly still. “Oh, Reyn. Oh, my love.” She squeezed out the hoarse words that had lived unacknowledged in her heart since their first dream-box sharing. Heedless of the blood, she bent to embrace him. He was still warm. “Never to be,” she moaned, rocking. “Never to be.” It was like losing her home and her family all over again. In his arms, she suddenly knew, was the only place where she could have been Malta again. With him died her youth, her beauty, her dreams.

Tenderly, as if he could still feel pain, she turned him over. She would see his face one last time, look into his copper eyes even if he did not look back at her. It would be all she would ever have of him.