Brashen scowled as he spoke. "I myself noted that Lavoy did not assist us. His watch was well begun and he was on the deck, yet he did not aid us at all." Althea felt her stomach jump nervously. She should have noticed that. Lavoy had stood it out while she and Brashen fought the serpent. At the time, it had seemed oddly natural that they two would be the ones to stand before the serpent. She wondered if Lavoy's absence had any significance, beyond his being afraid. Had Lavoy hoped that she, Brashen, or even both of them might be killed? Did he hope to inherit command of the ship? If he did, what would become of their original quest? Brashen was silent again, obviously letting her think.

She took a breath. "Since the serpent attack, the first mate has tightened discipline, but not evenly. Some of the men appear to be targeted unfairly. Lop, for one. Clef for another."

Brashen watched her carefully as he observed, "I would not have expected you to have much sympathy for Lop. He did nothing to aid you when Artu attacked you."

Althea shook her head almost angrily. "No one should have expected him to," she declared. "The man is a half-wit in some ways. Give him direction, tell him what to do, and he performs well enough. He was agitated when Artu… when I was fighting Artu off, Lop was leaping about, hitting himself in the chest and berating himself. He genuinely had no idea what to do. Artu was a shipmate, I was the second mate and he did not know whom to choose. But on the deck, when the serpent attacked, I remember that he was the one with the guts to fling a bucket at the creature and then drag Haff to safety. But for Lop's action, we'd be short a hand. He's not smart. Far from it. But he's a good sailor, if he's not pushed past his abilities."

"And you feel Lavoy pushes Lop past his abilities?"

"The men make Lop the butt of their jokes. That is to be expected, and as long as they don't take it too far, Lop seems to enjoy the attention. But when Lavoy joins in, the game becomes crueler. And more dangerous. Lavoy told me to go doctor Lop when you were finished speaking to me. That's the second time in as many days that he has been banged up. They bait him into doing dangerous or foolish things. When something is amiss and Lavoy targets Lop for it, not one of his shipmates owns up to part of the blame. That's not good for the crew. It divides their unity just when we most need to build it."

Brashen was nodding gravely. "Have you observed Lavoy with the slaves we liberated from Bingtown?" he asked quietly.

The question jolted her. She stood silent a moment, running over the past few days in her mind. "He treats them well," she said at last. "I've never seen him turn his temper on them. He does not mingle them with the rest of the crew as much as he might. Some seem to have great potential. Harg and Kitl deny it, but I believe they've worked a deck before this. Some of the others have the scars and manners of men who are familiar with weapons. Our two best archers have tattooed faces. Yet every one of them swears he is the son of a tradesman or merchant, an innocent inhabitant of the Pirate Isles captured by slave raiders. They are valuable additions to our crew, but they keep to themselves. I think, in the long run, we must get the other sailors to accept them as ordinary shipmates in order to…"

"And you perceive that he not only allows them to keep to themselves, but seems to encourage it by how he metes out the work?"

She wondered what Brashen was getting at. "It could be so." She took a breath. "Lavoy seems to use Harg and Kitl almost as a captain would use a first and second mate to run his watch. Sometimes it seems that the former slaves are an independent second crew on the ship." Uncomfortably, she observed, "The lack of acceptance seems to go both ways. It is not just that our dock-scrapings don't accept the former slaves. The tattooed ones are just as inclined to keep to themselves."

Brashen leaned back in his chair. "They were slaves in Bingtown. Most came to that fate because they were originally captured in Pirate Isles towns. They were willing to risk all and steal away from Bingtown aboard the Paragon because we represented a chance to return home. I was willing to trade that to them, in exchange for their labor aboard the ship when we were preparing for departure. Now I am not so sure that was a wise bargain. A man captured in the Pirate Isles to be sold as a slave is more likely to be a pirate than not. Or at least to have a good sympathy for the pirates."

"Perhaps," she conceded unwillingly. "Yet they must feel some loyalty to us for helping them escape a life of slavery."

The captain shrugged. "Perhaps. It is difficult to tell. I suspect the loyalty they feel just now is to Lavoy rather than to you and me. Or to Paragon." He shifted in his chair. "This is Lavoy's suggestion. He says that as we enter the waters of the Pirate Isles, we stand a better chance of getting in close if we pretend to be pirates ourselves. He says his tattooed sailors could lend us credibility, and teach us pirate ways. He hints that some may even have a good knowledge of the islands. So. We could go on as a pirate vessel."

"What?" Althea was incredulous. "How?"

"Devise a flag. Take a ship or two, for the practice of battle, as Lavoy puts it. Then we put into one of the smaller pirate towns, with some loot and trophies and generous hands, and put out the word that we'd like to follow Kennit. For some time, this Kennit has been touting himself as King of the Pirates. The last I heard, he was gathering a following for himself. If we pretended we wanted to be a part of that following, we might be able to get close to him and determine Vivacia's situation before we acted."

Althea pushed her outrage aside and forced herself to consider the idea. The greatest benefit it offered was that, if they could get close to Kennit, they could find out how many of Vivacia's crewmen still lived. If any. "But we could as easily be drawn into a stronghold, where even if we overcame Kennit and his crew, there would be no possibility of escape. There are two other immense barriers to such an idea. The first is that Paragon is a liveship. How does Lavoy think we could hide that? The other is that we would have to kill, simply for battle practice. We'd have to attack some little merchant vessel, kill the crew, steal their cargo… how can he even think of such a thing?"

"We could attack a slaver."

That jolted her into silence. She studied his face. He was serious. He met her astonished silence with a weary look. "We have no other strategy. I keep trying to devise ways for us to locate Vivacia surreptitiously, then follow her and attack when Kennit least expects it. I come up with nothing. And I suspect that if Kennit does hold any of the original crew hostage, he would execute them rather than let us rescue them."

"I thought we intended to negotiate first. To offer ransom for survivors and the ship."

Even to herself, the words sounded childish and naive. The cash that her family had managed to raise prior to Paragon's departure would not be enough to ransom an ordinary ship, let alone a liveship. Althea had pushed that problem to the back of her mind, telling herself they would negotiate with Kennit and promise him a second, larger payment once Vivacia was returned intact to Bingtown. Ransom was what most pirates wanted; it was the underlying reason for piracy.

Except that Kennit was not like most pirates. All had heard the tales of him. He captured slavers, killed the crews, and freed the cargo. The captured ships became pirate vessels, often crewed by the very men who had been cargo aboard them. Those ships in turn preyed on slavers. In truth, if the Vivacia had not been involved, Althea would have cheered Kennit's efforts to rid the Cursed Shores of slavery. She would have been pleased to see Chalced's slave trade choked off in the Pirate Isles. But her sister's husband had turned their family liveship into a slaver, and Kennit had seized her. Althea wanted Vivacia back so intensely that it was like a constant pain in her heart.