The Ship - 3

"You want us to let her walk around," Egreall said.

"Yes."

"Just, walk around—" Egreall mimed with two fingers, "don't bother her, and see if she does anything."

"Essentially," said Alan.

Sitting behind him on a crate, Colae took a slow swipe through his hair with a bone comb. Colae didn't usually represent any of the fluid social rings on the ship in these meetings, but he liked to listen. Egreall's tense hands were flat against his thighs as he sat cross-legged on deck, fingers partially covering a hard lip of scar.

He looked up at Ashur, who stared back stonily.

"Beat sense into him," he demanded.

Ashur didn't reply, expression unchanging. Mouth tightening, Egreall looked back at Alan. "And what if she attacks someone?"

"Then defend yourself."

Alan dipped his chin as Colae combed his hair upward, showing the darker hair beneath. Mehth had been checking stores for lizard nests and wanted to hear the meeting, so they had gathered in the storeroom, door shut to the bulk of open hold hung with dozens of hammocks. He had finished by the time Egreall started protesting, and now lounged on another crate, sucking the kernels out of a leathery humaryt bladder, not offering anything to the discussion.

"Tamanhregt?Braid?" Colae asked, and Ashur's stony mood turned distinctly sour.

"Yuduch,Sure." Alan said.

"Why for the weight of three feathers d'you thinks she's not gonna try?" demanded Egreall. His opinions, and his mouth, carried influence in his ring, but Jentosh was also a part of that group, and he tended to see things from many sides. And Egreall had never felt strongly enough about his complaints to actually make a challenge. Ashur's eyes found Egreall's jagged white scar.

Kol clearly didn't see their prisoner as a threat, satisfied after a few logistical questions. He shaped a humaryt bladder with his hands at Mehth, who dug around in the basket hanging by his head and sent one sailing toward him with an underhanded toss. Splitting it open with a ripe crack, Kol passed half to Oraun, who accepted with a lift of his sharp eyebrows in thanks.

"She doesn't have the musculature of any kind of fighter," Alan replied. "She never has, I think." Tightening his scarf around the base of his skull, Colae parted Alan's hair into four chunks and began weaving them into each other like it wasn't some feat of nimbleness to keep them all straight.

"You want us to let a breeder walk around, hope she doesn't kill anybody, and not fuck her."

"She counts her relatives like the Duchies—"

"Western Duchies," Kol corrected, lean black arms crossed over his chest, his fuzzy hair beginning to separate into half-distinct strands of curl.

"—she speaks Seclednar and another language not even Ashur knows, she reads, she's my height, she has no mark, nor has she born a child. I don't want her raped for the color of her eyes, and accepting any offers only gives her opportunity if she is hostile."

The comb was Nemasd's. Ashur focused on the comb, because Alan's stilted Seclednar was pricking at him, half a dozen snappish responses floating in his head. He turned his gaze to the bulkhead.

"I haven't had a woman in four clear seasons and I would not touch that," said Colae, gathering a chunk of Alan's yellow hair and picking a strand out with the comb.

"Yapas," Oraun said, swallowing the kernels he'd been chewing. "I haven't had a woman... ever, and I still wouldn't touch that."

"Shut up." Colae pitched the comb at his head, and Oraun grinned, tossing it back.

"Didn't she ask you for a whore?" Kol asked Alan drolly.

"'Gameboy,'" Alan told him blandly.

"I thought that was maybe a yerola referee," Colae said, wrapping the tail of the plait down Alan's back with a leather lace. "They play it in Crec, and boys around the port'll referee for bead."

"This is like lizards in my hammock," Egreall said flatly.

Egreall eyed him askance as he approached, and slid open the door for him. Hannah Roverton stopped running in place, one leg still canted up. She wobbled.

Holding out his burden, he said, lifting an eyebrow, "Your request has been granted."

"Ohmygodyes." Lurching forward, she snatched the broom out of his hand. "Where do I start?"

Alan tilted his head toward the open door, where Egreall and Jormrher waited warily.

"Okie-dokie."

Swooping out of the cabin, Jormrher quickly ducking out after her, she was already lovingly scraping at the sloping sides of the hull when Alan reached the doorframe.

He watched her twirl around the broom in no particular pattern, leaving scratches of wet in the dusty light reaching through the hatch as she spread the bilge water around, singing atonally but exultantly, "Laa, la la la."

"You gave her a broom," Egreall over-enunciated. "That could be a weapon."

"Vigilance would serve us," Alan agreed in his best Donse, amused.

"Juele." When Alan just looked at him, he sighed deeply, casting his eyes toward the deckhead.

"You're cracked," Jormrher told him, and arms crossed over his chest, wandered forward to direct her up the ladder.