Pazel sanded harder, faster.
Then Hercol straightened his back and glanced at the darkening sky. “We should leave off until the morning. Teggatz will be calling us to our meal.”
“Think I’ll work a little longer,” said Neeps, his voice as cold as Marila’s.
Thasha laughed bitterly. “I’ll go,” she said. “Then you’ll all be happier.”
She pushed past them, walked to the end of the scaffold and stepped over the rail onto the topdeck. Then she turned and looked back at them.
“I’m ending this tonight,” she said. “Do you hear me? I won’t play your game anymore.”
“For some of us it never was a game,” said Neeps.
But Pazel thought, Who is she talking to?
Thasha marched to the Holy Stair and descended. Toward sickbay, Pazel realized, where Fulbreech worked.
“She’s right,” said Neeps. “I do feel better.”
Hercol looked at him with quiet regret. “You speak proudly, both of you,” he said. “Well and good: but if shame should follow, remember what you said to that girl.”
Then he departed as well. Pazel, Neeps and Marila sanded wordlessly in the gathering dark. But despite the shadows Pazel saw his two friends exchanging glances. “All right,” he said at last, “spill it. What is it you want to tell me?”
“Listen,” said Marila. “You know I tried to take her side at first. I was wrong. She’s lost her mind over him, and it’s ruining everything, and it has to stop. We should push him down a hatch.”
“Marila!” cried both boys.
“I mean it. Something terrible is going to happen-and Thasha’s helping it happen, damn it. We bumped into each other last night-really bumped, in the stateroom, it was pitch dark. I started to fall and she caught me, helped me up. But then she wouldn’t let go of my arm. ‘Let me do what I have to do,’ she said, ‘with him.’ ”
“Thasha said that?”
“There’s worse, Pazel. I said she was becoming another person, and she said, yes, she was. Then I said I liked the old one better, and she said, ‘What you like makes no difference. Just stay out of my way.’ Then I said what we’re all thinking. ‘Arunis. He’s gotten hold of you, hasn’t he?’ And Thasha laughed and said, ‘Arunis is scared to death of me. He always has been. And you should be too.’ Then she shoved me aside and I did fall, blary hard, and she walked right out of the room.”
Marila blew away more sawdust, felt the smoothness of the pine with her fingertips.
“She’s going bad, I tell you. I don’t want to believe it, but all you have to do is look at her when he walks in the room. She forgets everything else, and goes all dreamy and warm. I think she’s going to end up-you know- knitting little boots.” Pazel dropped his sanding-stone.
He swore, and they all screamed warnings down the tonnage shaft, where men were still working by lamplight. There came a loud thud and a barrage of curses. You careless Gods-damned tarboy dog! That was two feet from my head!
Time to quit, they decided. Fleeing guiltily along the starboard rail, they saw the “birdwatchers” gathered together on the quay. They were arguing, waving their hands, now and then gesturing at the Chathrand as if to emphasize a point. Tomorrow, Pazel thought. What’s going to happen to us tomorrow?
“She’s probably in the stateroom with him right now,” said Marila. “He likes to see her right after his shift.”
“There’s the dinner bell,” said Neeps.
“And Hercol,” added Marila furiously, “does nothing but defend her.”
Pazel stopped walking. Defend her. That was what he had promised himself he would always do. No matter what it took. No matter what Thasha said or did. How could he ever have allowed himself to be confused on that point? He turned and looked at his friends.
“Is there any doubt at all,” he said, “that Fulbreech is a liar?”
“No,” said Neeps.
Both boys looked at Marila. She closed her eyes a moment, thoughtful. “No,” she said at last. “Not if he really said ‘error corrected’ after you punched him in the eye.”
“I’m going to see her,” said Pazel.
“Oh, stop it, mate,” said Neeps. “You’ve tried. She doesn’t want to hear you. She doesn’t want to believe.”
“I don’t care.”
He would make her hear. He would explain word for word, and Thasha would see at last that he wasn’t simply jealous. And he would explain about the antidote, how even though Fulbreech had appeared to be chasing Alyash, as they were, he was really on the bosun’s side. No one else could have slipped the antidote through the doorway at the bitter end. It was Fulbreech who had freed the hostages, paving the way for Rose’s bloodbath.
He reached the Silver Stair and plunged down, among the crowd of hungry sailors making for the dining compartment.
“You can’t just walk in on them!” Marila shouted.
“Bet I can,” he shot back.
The sailors grinned and winked. Pazel could not have cared less. Walking in on Thasha and Fulbreech was exactly what he planned to do. Let her choose who to believe, once and for all, face to face with both of them. At least she wouldn’t be able to feign a need to be elsewhere.
Neeps’ hand closed on his elbow. “At least let Marila go first, Pazel. She’ll tell you if it’s all right to go in there.”
“Damn it all, leave me alone!”
Pazel wrenched his arm away. But as he turned he found the passage blocked by Mr. Fiffengurt. “Pathkendle!” he said. “And Undrabust too. What luck. I have a little job I need your help with.”
“Now?” said Pazel.
“Right now,” said Fiffengurt, strangely anxious. He bent closer, and spoke in an ominous whisper. “Urgent business. The hag’s cat, Sniraga. She’s alive.”
“I’ve heard. I’m sorry.” Pazel began to slip by, but Fiffengurt lurched in front of him.
“You don’t understand. She’s in the bread room. She’s slipped inside, the little monster.”
“So what?” said Neeps, briefly forgetting his own efforts to stop Pazel cold. “Best place to put her if you ask me. That’s no blary emergency.”
“We don’t even have any bread,” said Pazel.
Fiffengurt turned his gaze from one to the other. He looked confounded by their response. “Why! Anyone could tell you-a cat, loose in the-Oh, blast you both, come along! That’s an order!”
Fulbreech sat in the chair by Thasha’s writing desk, hands on his knees, his pale face troubled. “All of them,” he said, “believe that my intentions toward you are… dishonorable?”
“Yes,” said Thasha, “entirely.”
She sat cross-legged on her bed, in an old pair of red trousers and a loose white shirt of Admiral Isiq’s. “I don’t care, Greysan. I don’t care what they imagine.”
He shook his head. “You should care. They love you dearly, Thasha.”
They were sharing a glass of water and some dlomic biscuits. They had not touched since she led him into the room. The desk was cluttered: jewelry, creams, pencils, knives, a whetstone, the admiral’s flask, the Merchant’s Polylex. Behind all these, the softly ticking mariner’s clock, Ramachni’s doorway from his own world into Alifros.
The wind had risen. The night would be cool. Against the hanging oil lamp a weird Southern moth tapped hairy antennae; its huge shadow wriggled on the bedspread. Thasha was looking down at her hands.
“Not like this,” she whispered.
They were both very still. “Of course,” he said, “what I feel for you is different.”
Thasha smiled.
“But I have been blind-blind, and selfish. These evenings with you, learning of your life, hearing your dreams: Thasha, I’ve been drunk on them. But now I fear your friends are talking about us, and not just among themselves.”
