Tim Manor is going to torture my hands again tonight. He doesn’t come every night. I’ve been getting ready to go out to dinner with my parents. I’ve changed into my nice new evening dress that Dad bought for me. My arms are bare. I come down into the living room and he’s there, talking to Mum. She sees me enter and smiles at me, but she can’t meet my eyes.

“Are you ready, teya?” he asks me.

I shake my head. “Please don’t.”

He stands and extends his hand to me. “Come along, you know we have to.”

But no-one’s ever explained to me why. No-one even says it’s for my own good. Long ago I gave up asking for or expecting an explanation. It’s just something they have to do, from time to time. He doesn’t even seem to take pleasure in it. It’s just a job.

I can’t resist, I have to go to him and let him seat me. He’s always the perfect gentleman. I have to lay my hand in his and let him draw my arm straight across the coffee table. At least I’m allowed to look away. My arms are both shaking with remembered pain and anticipation. I know Mum and Dad are behind me, watching. They don’t like it, but they never intervene.

Anticipation is answered. One by one I hear him closing the clamps, each one snapping shut with a distinctive metallic snick as the cold iron squashes my fingers tight, and my thumb and my wrist. My hand aches in the pressure and the cold, completely immobilised. I can’t jerk away when the pain comes. I squeeze my eyes shut but I can’t help but cry out as he inserts the needles under each of my fingernails. I’m sobbing and weeping, as I always do, punctuated by cries as the still-boring needles pierce nerves and work their way between the joints of my fingers and the other bones of my hands. He has to wiggle them back and forth to get them all the way in so the venom reaches every part.

It seems like an age but I know from the clock it’s only an hour later that he’s finished both hands. I still avert my eyes as he gently, carefully, withdraws the needles and removes the clamps.

“There,” he says. “The tissue’s regenerating nicely already.” A gentle hand at my chin, to raise my head. I look at him. “That’s beautiful. You’re doing so well, Tani,” he says, smiling.

Freed at last, I pull my hands up to my chest, crossed at the wrists as if bound, as if I can protect them there. They’re still twitching uncontrollably, the tremors even shaking my shoulders. Trembling, I get to my feet and run to the downstairs loo and turn the light on with my elbow. In the mirror, not daring to look directly, I can see my hands look perfectly unharmed. I know they should be twisted and broken and bloated and bruised and bleeding. Their perfection is an affront to my memory.

I look at my face. My eyes are too dark, too large. My ears aren’t nice and round like they’re supposed to be, and I rearrange my hair and clip it into place to make sure they’re covered before I go outside. My hair feels like serrated steel wire being dragged along the skin of my fingers. I open my handbag and, with my hands still shaking and nerves twanging, I start to fix my face make-up. I can hear Mum saying goodbye to Tim Manor at the door. “See you again,” she says.

And I know what will happen next. I’ll come out of the loo, and Mum will fuss around me and help me into my nice coat, and Dad will say I’m his beautiful little girl, and we’ll go out to the restaurant as if nothing had happened.

I’m sitting in the back of the car as Dad drives. Sodium street lamps slide past outside, their beams swinging across me like searchlights. I look at my dark reflection in the glass. My hands won’t stop trembling.

“Shh, Tani, Shh,” Sam says. She’s rocking me. No, that’s just the motion of the ship under my back. I open my eyes. She’s there, of course; and behind her, the cabin wall.

The dream splinters and shards, the apparent logic behind it disintegrating in my waking mind. But I can remember the pain. I can remember acquiescing to it. Where’s the sense in that? Where’s the sense in being Taniel in Paul’s parents’ house? Where’s the sense in them standing by and letting someone hurt me?

Sam takes my hand. It feels like the needles are being pushed in between the joints again. I cry out and pull my hands protectively up to my chest, just like in the dream. They’re twitching.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to–” Sam starts.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m awake.” I see the Satthei standing in the doorway, looking concerned and sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Satthei. I woke the ship–”

“No you didn’t, teya,” Fareis says. “You were only crying a little.” She steps into the cabin and puts her hand to my head.

“I haven’t got a fever,” I say.

“No,” she agrees. “It’s the same dream?”

I nod. I haven’t told her all of it, of course. Nothing about it taking place in Paul’s parents’ house. Nothing about who it is that’s doing it. I’m sure she thinks it’s Kerilas and I just won’t admit it. But I know he wouldn’t, couldn’t hurt me like that.

I can see she’s frustrated. She doesn’t know how to deal with this, and she’s not used to not knowing. I don’t react the way a Neri child is supposed to react to things. “I’ll be all right now Satthei,” I say. I just want her to go and leave me alone with Sam.

Finally she does go. Sam comes forward again and sits on the edge of my bunk and holds up my own pair of sealskin mittens. She must have dug them out of my clothes-chest. I sit up and hold out my hands, in turn, and she carefully pulls the mittens on to them. My fingers slide in through the interior fur lining. Sam ties the drawstrings at my wrists.

“Sorry,” I say. My voice trembles. “Feel so stupid.”

“Shh, don’t worry about it. Hey, d’you think she’d understand ‘psychosomatic’?” It’s a slight jolt to hear the single English word.

“Just a stupid dream.”

She puts her arms around me. My own hands automatically fold back protectively over my chest, safe between our bodies. I’m still trembling a little with the memory of pain, but she’s warm and strong. “What are we going to do with you, Tani?” she asks rhetorically.

“There’s never a shrink around when you need one,” I reply in English. I can’t steady my voice.

Sam strokes my hair and slowly, slowly, my body calms down.

It’s surprising how much you can learn about archery on board a ship. Weeks of practice, never seeing an arrow, just perfecting the technique of the draw, the balance, the patience, the smooth drawing-back of the string and visualising the line from my hand to the target. I’m growing muscles on my arms that I’m sure weren’t there before.

I am learning this. Me. Taniel had never learned archery. She had meant to be a shaman. See under Things Not Going To Happen While I’m Around.

It feels good, to learn a skill for myself in this world. It’s something for me to own and not feel that I’ve stolen.

Satthei Fareis is hunting. We’ve split off from the rest of the marketeer flotilla for a few days in search of a catch. Freed from the constraint of the slowest craft in the flotilla we set all the sails and run for the feeding grounds.

The ship is leaning so hard before the wind that water is sleeting over the gunwale on the starboard hull. I’m utterly drenched in the starboard bow rigging with Sam and Deidas and our bows. The last three dolphins, our guides, are riding the wave, their dark speckled backs darting in and out of the water right underneath us. Sam has been learning archery alongside me these last eight months. In fact, she had a bit of a head start, while my hands were still healing. Deidas at first let it be known he was humouring her, indulging her, in including her in this training; but she’s kept pace, determined not to let the human side down, I think. She’s at least as good at this as I am, and by now even Deidas accepts this. He actually said it, at dinner only the previous evening. “I will not be embarrassed to call you my student.” Exceptional praise, from Deidas.

Sam looks back at me from her position just forward. Her hair is shorter now, and plastered in — ironically — elfin ringlets against her head by the spray. She grins manically. The sensation of speed is incredible.

“Keep your gaze on the quarry!” Deidas shouts at her, and she obeys.

The quarry is in sight now; a churning region of water under a huge flock of seabirds. They’re taking shifts diving into the water, closing their wings tight into their body just as they enter, and emerging a few seconds later with a fish in their beaks. We’re getting closer very quickly now at, surely now, the fastest speed a ship like this can travel.

“They’re being chased right out of the water!” Sam yells, exhilarated. I can barely hear her. Indeed, fish are literally leaping from the water to get away from what’s happening below the surface. At least once I see one of the birds just swoop down at the right time to pluck one out of the air.

The ones doing the chasing are the pod of dolphins that have herded and corralled this school of fish into a tightly-packed shimmering ball at the surface. We’re not stealing their catch; we’re sharing it. The guides riding our bow-wave have led us here for the purpose. We’ll be delivering our side of the arrangement later.

We’re curling in, to get a perfect tailwind into the maelstrom.

A Neri familyship like Satthei Fareis is not an inanimate craft crewed by individuals. It is a superorganism. At no time is this more apparent than when it is hunting. It moves on the water like nothing made by humans ever could, a top ocean predator in its own right. Any wooden craft made by humans would shatter under the stresses of the turns we’re making, and metal is too heavy. The amount of sail we’ve set in this wind would be suicidally reckless.

But Neri ships are grown, not made, and trained to their shape with exactitude. The root is in the stern and the bole forms the keel, and sturdy branches make the ribs and the masts, all the way to the bow. As they get older they often grow a second hull, like this one, and finally a third before senesence starts to set in. The skeleton of the ship is a huge single living tree. It’s immensely strong and flexible. Its living sap and its fruit has many uses on board. The skeleton is clad and decked with more conventional carpentry, although even there, the planks of the hull are Bonded to the branches and bole rather than anything so crass as being attached with nails. As the ship grows, the cladding is continually extended and replaced.

I think of the Satthei, shaping the ship-tree’s growth over the centuries, Binding herself to it in the process with dryadic devotion. She can never leave it alive. Trees die, eventually, so she has made a real sacrifice of her longevity to be a Satthei.

We are a sea monster. It’s very hard to imagine what in this world can take on a Neri ship in the open ocean, except another Neri ship, and that’s unheard of. Satthei Encelion must have been betrayed in port rather than boarded at sea.

We’re running right into the mass of fish. Suddenly we straighten. The seabirds scream and wheel up and out of the way all around us. The starboard side tips out of the water and I hear the ventral nets deploy below, between the hulls, with a huge whumph. “HOLD FAST!” Deidas yells. We’re already tethered to the bowsprit, but I embrace the rigging with both arms and hang on, my eyes squeezed shut. With a heavy crash and a thunk of pressure in my head, we’re underwater. A tumultuous mass of fish all around me, and a cacophany of dolphin sonar, and the sonic pulses they use to stun the fish hurt my ears, then we’re clear, and more than clear. The front of the ship is lifting clear out of the water. I open my eyes and look down at the rest of the ship behind me breaching like a whale fully half-way out of the waves.

I can hear Sam whooping and hollering in sheer excitement. Fish in their thousands sleet back along the deck into the gaping dorsal nets. I can hear the larger ventral nets being hauled in fully-laden as the ship turns on its stern, all forward momentum absorbed, and crashes starboard-side down into the water. For a moment I’m underwater again, but then there’s sun and air and spray and salt in my mouth. I know behind me sails are being furled and booms are being swung with such speed and precision that it’s as if the sails are living appendages of the monster.

“Man, I am never getting tired of that!” Sam yells. Deidas laughs. The yell had been in English but the gist of it was plain enough.

“READY BOWS!” Deidas calls, clearly. That’s our job: Picking off the scattered remnants of the shoal. “Make your targets. Do not fire randomly. Do not hit a dolphin!” Sam and I laugh at that, and I hear some laughs from the young Neri on the portside rigging too.

Sam scrambles to the edge of the rigging and gets the first arrow off. Our arrows (which we make ourselves, as incentive against losing them overboard I think) are actually miniature harpoons, tethered with fine lines, like wires, to the reels mounted on the outer stay line of the bowsprit rigging. Sam is already drawing for her second shot by the time I get my first off, pulling the bow right back into a deep U shape. We keep firing until there are no more targets because we’ve swung across the field. The ship tips the other way and swings to port, to let the guys on the other side do some shooting, and we haul our lines back in. I can hear the swoosh-slish of their arrows. Meanwhile I know on deck the nets are being drawn up and emptied. I’m not under any illusions that we archers at the bow are significantly adding to the catch, but it’s fun, when from one week to the next there’s usually nothing much to do that is.

Likewise I’m sure trawling with a mile-long net is a more efficient way to catch fish than this, but as I’m sure any Neri would observe if they ever saw the technique: ‘where’s the fun in that?’ We have all the fish we need and more. More impressively, I know from the first time I watched this, before Sam and I were let up front to join the archers, there is almost no bycatch. The dolphins herd the school into a tight fishball so, when we scoop most of it up, there’s practically nothing else in the nets but the fish we want.

Half an hour later the wind has dropped and we’re in calm clean water a couple of miles away, repaying our side of the bargain to the dolphin pod. The side door has been lowered, as it was in Market, to make a platform level with the surface of the water. There dolphins approach in ones and twos for Fareis and the shaman to examine and, as far as possible, treat whatever illnesses or injuries they’ve picked up since the last time they encountered a Neri ship.

Fareis specifically asked me to help this time. Sam will be pissed off, as that means she’s up with the others processing the fish while I’m downstairs ‘playing with dolphins,’ as she’s bound to put it. I’m not sure what I can do to help, so I just stay nearby and do what the Satthei tells me. Right now this means kneeling naked by the head of the first one that came up and beached itself on the second lowest step of the opened door. It’s a young male. I’m just there to watch and to keep him calm and make sure he doesn’t get dried out while Fareis works. The dolphin has an infestation of a parasitical worm inside its ears. It will have been disrupting his sonar and making him increasingly disoriented until, eventually, he’d have got separated from the rest and got lost. Fareis is killing them and getting them out with a combination of some specialist tools including what looked like a long syringe containing something horrible, and some intercession from the Goddess I guess. It’s scary for the dolphin but he’s lying as still as possible to let Fareis get on with it, and I stroke and talk soothingly, and sing sometimes, and pour water over him, and try not to be completely grossed out by what Fareis is extracting from the side of the dolphin’s head. As she explains, the worms have formed a ball in an inner cavity. And they’re only coming out in pieces. It’s a long, difficult job even with the Goddess’s help.

Meanwhile the shaman and some other Neri are working through the other dolphins that come up with more easily-dealt-with infections and minor injuries, bad teeth, intestinal worms and so forth. They’re diagnosed by the Neri healers; as far as I can tell theres no actual language communication going on between the dolphins and the Neri. Rather, it has the feel of an ancient evolutionary partnership that both sides fulfil simply because they do, like cleaner fish at a coral reef.

The antiquity of this scene is further evoked by our nudity. All of us that are down here working with the dolphins are naked. It took me somewhat by surprise the first time, suddenly surrounded by somewhat sexless Neri bodies. Apparently it’s practical, to avoid the risk of damaging their delicate skin with a stray buckle or clasp, to be more hygeinic around potentially open wounds, to get out of the clothes that got soaked in the hunt so as to not get a chill, without getting even more clothes wet and salty in the process. I get a strong sense there’s a spiritual element to it as well, but no-one talks about it. It’s just what they do, because they always have.

Sam burps, unseen, near my head.

“Ew, that’s not ladylike!” I protest.

Sam does it again, much louder and more expressively.

“Honestly, can’t take you anywhere.”

A quiet chuckle. We’re lying on the deck head to head under the furled foresail, watching the stars through the rigging, feeling the deck alternately push at and pull from our backs.

“Gotta admit,” Sam says, “elves know how to party.”

“You made a pretty good show, I reckon. I think they liked Queen.”

“Oh God, I really did that, didn’t I?”

I chuckle.

“But of course, I was very, very, drunk,” Sam adds. “With a retuned box-harp accompaniment. God knows what they thought of that. Probably sounded all out of tune.”

“I think they liked it,” I say again.

We fall silent. Then I hear Sam’s voice, quietly singing.

There’s no place for us
There’s no time for us
There’s only one sweet moment set aside for us.

I join in.

Who wants to live forever?
Who dares to love forever?

“Elves never promise forever,” Sam says. It’s a proverb she picked up in Port Sahan a couple of months back. I can’t answer it. “Haven’t you thought about it?” she asks me. “What it’s going to be like living forever?”

I sigh. “Not really, it’s…”

“Too big,” she supplies.

“It’s not forever, it’s just a long time. Sooner or later something’ll get me.” There’s another saying. Elves don’t die quietly in their beds. Given time and nourishment we can regenerate to a full recovery from anything that doesn’t kill us outright, so when elves die, they die quickly and in violence, or of cold or starvation or thirst; and given enough time something like that is statistically almost inevitable. That’s the part I don’t want to think too much about.

Sam’s mind is obviously on a different track. “I’ll die of old age and you’re still going to be a stroppy teenager.”

“I’m not stroppy!” I strop. “I’m not, am I?”

Sam cackles.

“D’you ever feel like…” She starts, then she trails off, as if changing her mind about what she was going to say.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, come on.”

Sam sighs. “Don’t take this wrong, okay?”

“Now I have to hear it.”

It’s a little while longer before she speaks again. “Most of the time it’s nothing. I don’t think about it. It’s just every now and then I get this weird feeling, like I’m surrounded by… aliens.”

I don’t answer for a moment. Then Sam continues.

“I mean, it’s just sometimes. Funny moments, you know? The eyes, the androgynous thing, apart from you and the Satthei.”

“I don’t get that,” I say.

“No. Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“I think I know what you mean though. It must be hard for you.”

I can feel her shaking her head, where it touches mine. “On the other hand I can go days without seeing my own reflection and almost forget, you know? No-one’s shoving it in my face or anything. No-one’s saying I have to be girly-girly or anything like that.”

“Well, they expect their own kids to take thirty or forty years to figure out if they’re girls or boys. Exactly the sort of thing you want to get right before–”

“You two are still talking!” Ateis complains, suddenly standing over us. Ateis is the Neri child I saw clambering the rocks with the other Marketeer kids just outside Port Denhall.

“Talking of which, I think this one’s a girl,” Sam says, looking up at the little figure in a pretty full-skirted party dress, like a miniature version of my own. Her eyes shine in the dark, cat-like, reflecting the few lanterns still lit on deck.

“You sure?” I ask, joking. “I think it’s too soon to tell. What d’you think, littlest-one?”

“’Course I’m a girl, silly!”

“Shouldn’t you be in your bunk asleep by now?” Sam asks.

Ateis makes a noise. “So should you.”

“It’s a nice night. Cabin walls are boring. Look, we can see the Milky Way from here.”

Ateis looks up at the sky for a while, and turns around, deliberately making herself a little dizzy. She looks like a human child of three or four years, and in fact is not much older. One theory we’ve had is that the relationship of elf ages to human ages might be exponential, and the reason we don’t see any elderly-looking elves is simply because the species isn’t that old yet.

We three are the youngest people on the ship, by a large margin, and the shortest. I suppose it’s to be expected that Ateis would attach herself to us. A Neri child this young isn’t so different from a human child, and finds the ageless grace of the adults as remote and mysterious as we do, I suppose.

“Hey teya,” I say, looking up at her upside-down face, from my angle. She waves, then she drops down and snuggles up presumptively next to Sam.

“Oh I see,” I mutter. “It’s not fair, Sam. You get all the girls.”

There’s a muffled giggle from the child nestling in the crook of her arm.

“Well, come here then,” Sam invites. “My other side’s getting cold.”

I don’t have to be asked twice. I shufty round and snuggle in on Sam’s other side. One advantage of being a child in everyone’s eyes, and increasingly my own: This doesn’t have to be complicated. “Sami’s warm,” Ateis says, from the other side, summing it up.

“Sami also gets cold more easily,” Sam says, “so snuggle up tight. Hey, did we get the smell of fish off the deck or am I just too drunk to notice?”

“’Course we got it off,” Ateis says. “Satthei wouldn’t stand for it otherwise.”

“Meh. True.” Sam takes a breath. She’s so at peace tonight. I want to cling on to every moment. “You know, if you’d told me a year ago I’d be lying under the stars on a sailing ship at sea with a beautiful elf maiden on each arm… I would’ve got completely the wrong idea.”

Ateis giggles again sleepily. “Story!” She demands.

“Aw no, isn’t it Tani’s turn?”

“No,” I murmer. “I did The Little Mermaid last week.”

“Disney version?”

“What do you take me for?” I smile, hidden, and nestle in closer. “I might’ve done the song,” I admit. Someday I’m sure the Satthei’s going to start asking questions about where we’re getting all these stories.

“All right, which one do you want? I’m not making up a new one this hour of night.”

I give Sam a little poke in the ribs for that lie.

“Cinderella!” Ateis decides.

“Again? ” I complain. There’s something about that one, it seems.

Sam sighs overdramatically. “Oh all right.”

“Disney version?” I ask.

“What do you take me for? All right. Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived alone with her father, and her name was…”

Ten days later we’re anchored with the rest of the flotilla in a lagoon off the shore of a small thickly forested tropical island. It’s hot and humid. Paul’s body would have sweated and sweltered, but I’m comfortable in my lightest short tunic. Clear turquoise water and the yells of children at play beckon me, but I’m stuck in the Satthei’s quarters, sitting with her at the large desk. She wants me to help with the transfer requests.

It soon becomes apparent why.

“Master Gerat is requesting Lotan be transferred to another ship,” Fareis says.

I just sigh.

“Ongoing indiscipline, argumentative attitude, not taking anything seriously. He says Lotan is damaging the morale of the other younger crewmembers.”

“Ask Sami,” I say. “I haven’t talked to him since…”

“No, I want your opinion.”

“I wish he was dead instead of Kerilas, that’s my opinion. Satthei,” I add in token courtesy. “Cast him adrift for all I care.”

“Do you think this attitude impresses me?”

“Well it wasn’t my idea to let him join…” My objections die under her stern look.

“At the moment I’m considering putting him back onto your sloop with Samila, under Master Tehilan–”

“No! That’s not fair! Don’t drag Sami into this just to get at me.”

“What choice do I have, Tani? This isn’t vindictiveness. Samila may have the best chance of anyone of getting through to him, and putting them on a small boat with an experienced small-craft Master like Tehilan puts Lotan in a situation where his actions will make a difference to someone he cares about.”

“It’s not fair!” I insist. “You’re always trying to take people away from me!”

“Taniel–”

I burst to my feet. “If she goes I’m going with her!” I announce defiantly. “You can’t stop me!”

“All right,” Fareis says, exasperated. “I’d hoped you could advise me on the best choices for your friends, but never mind. Go and play in the water. Maybe you could explore the reef with Ateis.”

“We did that yesterday.”

“What, the whole thing? I’m impressed.”

The reef is probably fifty miles long, linking a whole series of tiny mostly-deserted islands and atolls. It could take a human generation to explore. The idea of it breaks my strop and almost makes me laugh. “We’re quick when we’re a team,” I quip back. She smiles. I know what I’ve done, again, and I’m ashamed of it. I’ve been behaving like a stupid, petulant child. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to… to behave like that.”

She smiles and beckons me back to the place next to her on the window seat. I traipse back to her side and sit.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m supposed to be nearly fifty or something,” and Paul’s twenty-two years — twenty-three now — on top of that. “Fifty year old humans don’t behave like this. Why am I so…” I sigh. “So the body’s immature, so what? I should know better. I do know better.” When I stop to think, I do. But it just takes me over. Some silly enthusiasm, or a silly slight, or some passion of the moment and my head fills up with it and I can’t see it any other way unless something shakes me out of it, and until then I shout and have tantrums and make a bloody fool of myself.

“How do you think you should be behaving?” she asks quietly.

“I don’t know. With some grace, I suppose.”

She laughs and grabs my head playfully in the crook of her arm, tousling my hair and pulling me into her side a little. That probably means I did something cute again, in her eyes, which is embarrassing in its own right. But it’s strange and familiar and oddly comforting. I still keep catching myself with a residual expectation that elves are these distant, ethereal beings with ultimate grace and dignity, and the kind of simple physical affection and playfulness I see every day was supposed to be reserved for humanity. That was supposed to be the the price of immortality, or something.

“It will come soon enough,” she says, when she’s finished. She’s stroking my hair. I think my mother used to do it the same way. “Yes, your body is immature,” she explains, “and your brain is part of your body, isn’t it? It’s still growing, shaping itself, changing, learning what it is to be you. It’s expected to be confusing and frustrating at times.”

“Am I immature for my age?” I ask. It’s a question I’ve been wondering about for a while.

“Yes,” she says. “A little. It’s of no matter.”

I sigh.

“Samila can’t stay here as long as you need her to,” Fareis says, gently. “It would be selfish. She doesn’t have the time.”

I look at her, hurting. Then my eyes sting and fill with tears and I drop my head. Sam said something like that herself, just recently. I feel her pulling me gently into her side again, her arm around my shoulders.

“All right, a little while longer,” Fareis promises. I know that means she won’t send Sam to another ship or that boat with Lotan. So I’ve won, I suppose. “But we must be careful. It wouldn’t be fair on her to keep her here with you too long. She’ll lose her best childbearing years.”

“But she doesn’t want children!” I protest.

“She is human. Her heart will ache when it is too late. Is that what you want for her?”

I don’t say anything. Sam doesn’t want me to.

“Just keep it in your mind,” Fareis says. “In the meantime I still need to decide what we’re going to do with Lotan. I want you to talk to him and report back to me.”

“I still think Sam–”

“I want you to do it,” Fareis says firmly. “Or if you prefer you can take Ateis and play on the reef.”

It’s such a backhandedway of trying to motivate me it almost makes me laugh. Of course what she’s really saying is I can be grown-up and take on this responsibility, or I can be a child, and my opinions given as much weight as Ateis’s.

I sigh. “I’ll talk to him then,” I say.

“Good.”

“I think Ateis went ashore with Sam anyway.”

A quick heliograph conversation with the deck supervisor on Master Gerat’s xebec tells me Lotan hasn’t gone ashore, so I go below to change into something more formal and pick up my bow and quiver and my never-go-ashore-without pack, because I know I’ll want to see Sam afterwards, and wander down to the jetty deck to take one of the two remaining little dinghies.

The small inshore dinghies are usually carried semi-disassembled in the hold, but as we’re spending a few days on rest, shore-leave and inter-vessel business, they were all brought out and reassembled and spend what time they’re not in use tied around the stern and the temporary ‘jetty deck’ that’s been extended for the duration of our stay in this natural harbour.

This dinghy is similar to the one Ateis and I took around the reefs the day before. That one was the smallest we have, barely large enough for the two of us and clearly designed with children in mind. Its hull was carved and painted in the style of a pink blossom petal floating on the water, with the lateen sail, when unfurled, revealed to be its pair. It was tiny and nippy and could turn like a coracle and it was almost stupidly good fun.

This one is a bit larger, with maybe room for three adults. The hull is styled like a leaf and the lateen sail like a moth’s wing. All the Satthei’s boats are like this; conventional craft of wood and canvas, but styled after things found in nature, in contrast to the generally utilitarian-looking human craft.

I don’t want to talk to Lotan. It’s still tempting to just say sod it and go and explore the reefs, as Fareis said. Be the child, unready for responsibility, and wait for problems like this to die of old age. I’d like to say it’s an elvish way of doing things, but if it was I don’t suppose Fareis would be making me do this.

So I cross the distance to the xebec. I have to do it on the bad tack, which about suits my mood. The little boat has a lateen rig, which is to say it has a long yardarm mounted off-centre and at an angle on the mast, one end pointing down towards the bow, the other lifting high above the top of the mast itself. The triangular sail hangs from this yardarm with the third corner above my head and controlled by a line. There’s no boom, which makes it easier to move about on deck or in the cockpit underneath. One downside is that it has a good tack and a bad tack; the bad tack, as now, being when the wind is blowing the sail against the mast rather than away from it. It just means the sail area forward of the mast is basically wasted.

I reach the xebec and climb aboard, and the deck super sends me belowdecks to where I’m most likely to find Lotan: On his bunk, in the cabin he shares with three other guys. There is only one other cabin on board like it, and what I suppose would be called officers’ quarters. It’s a small ship, and I can immediately see that even one person on board with a bad attitude could turn into a problem.

I find the cabin and stop in the doorway, momentarily forgetting what I’d planned to say at the sight of Lotan, lying on a bunk either asleep or just staring at the ceiling. The room smells of maleness. It’s a changing-room kind of smell, and it makes me want to turn around and run. It’s a smell that reminds me of bad things.

“What do you want?” he asks, without moving. Then he does move his head fractionally and sees me. “Oh, it’s you,” he says in English.

“You’ve grown a beard,” I say. Those were so not going to be my first words to him after all this time.

“I’m so glad you’re here to tell me these things,” he continues, insisting on English. “What do you want?” he asks again, returning to lying flat on his back.

“I don’t want anything. The Satthei sent me.”

“Ah. She wants her new toy to decide what to do with me.”

I ignore the gibe. “Not decide. Just report back.” He doesn’t say anything. “Lotan–”

“That’s not my name, Paul. ”

I can’t prevent a twitch in the corner of my mouth, but he’s not looking at me anyway. “Oh I’m sorry,” I say, feeling a little catty, “you’re still listed as Lotan on the ship’s register. If you feel strongly about it, you can get that changed.”

He doesn’t answer.

“It’s stifling down here,” I comment. “I’m going on deck. I’ll see you there in five minutes.”

“I don’t have a watch,” he says.

“One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” I reply sarcastically. I turn and leave him there, still counting, “three Mississippi…”

“You do realise none of this is real,” Lotan says, behind me. I turn as he approaches and hoist myself up quickly to sit on the gunwale. That puts us at a slightly less unequal height. “We’re going to wake up in a nice cosy mental ward, just as soon as they figure out how.”

He has at least made some effort to smarten himself up, and put a mostly-clean tunic on over his leggings. I think he’s gained weight. Well, lost some muscle tone anyway, and I think I detect a bit of a paunch under his tunic that wasn’t evident while he was lying flat.

“That’s your answer is it?” I reply. “It doesn’t matter that you killed her because she wasn’t real anyway?”

He comes up and rests his hands on the gunwale next to me. He’s tense. His fingers grip the smooth wood, whitening his knuckles. “It was an accident,” he says.

“Yes, I know.”

He looks at me, as if not expecting that answer.

“What, do you think I thought you meant to do it?” I ask. “Any one of us should’ve known it was stupid to do weapons-practice that close to the door.” He nods at that. “None of us thought of it enough to make you stop. None of us thought any more of it than that it was kind of annoying. Not enough XP,” I add. He almost smiles at that. “But you let Kerilas take the blame for it,” I say. “That’s what I can’t forgive. You let them kill him.”

“I’m not proud of what I did,” he says.

“Good.”

“They were going to kill him anyway,” Lotan says. “As soon as the Satthei set eyes on you, he was going to get it one way or another for what he did to you. Everyone says so. I still…” He sighs. “I still should’ve come back,” he admits.

We’re just quiet with each other for a little while. Me, sitting on the gunwale facing in, him standing next to me, facing out. I know what I should do, and I do it. I reach my hand forward and rest it on his upper arm for a moment. A gesture of reconciliation I don’t really feel, but I have to behave as if I do, don’t I?

I pull my hand back. “Why did you join the flotilla?” I ask, back to the business at hand.

“Sam wanted me to. Said we shouldn’t get too split up.”

I nod. That figures. “So you don’t actually want to be here.”

“I told you, I’m not here. None of us are. This is just–”

“What does it get you, Lotan?”

“What?”

“All this, ‘none of this is real’ shit? What is it actually getting you? Look at you. You look like shit, you’re living like shit. I mean, look around you. Look where we are!” The wooden sailing craft, the turquoise water, and if you look straight down you can see clear to the sand, the sandy beaches, the palm trees and forest, the reef, bursting with colour and life. It really is everything we’d ever have thought of if someone said ‘tropical paradise.’ Even the beautiful naked and semi-naked people and their kids splashing around being silly. “Have you any idea how much a holiday like this would cost back there? H-Home, I mean? And instead I find you just sulking in a smelly cabin. God’s sake, even if it is a dream, you’re allowed to enjoy it sometimes.” I managed to get a little smile out of him with that tirade. That’s something, I suppose. “You just have to be a part of it.”

“Yes, it’s all very seductive.”

I sigh. “I’m going ashore to find Sam,” I say, jumping down from the gunwale.

“Is that it? Interview over?”

I turn back to face him. “Is there any point asking you what you want to do?” I ask. “Any chance of a sensible answer?”

He doesn’t give me any answer at all.

“So you coming with, and see Sam? Or are you just going to go back to sulking in your cabin?”

I don’t know why I made that offer. I instantly regret it, but it’s too late now. Unless he chooses the sulk.

He shrugs. “Okay, why not?”

“Get your shore pack.”

“Oh I don’t believe it!” I exclaim, when we get within Sam’s earshot. I’ve been saving the exclamation ever since first seeing what she was doing on the beach with a group of the older flotilla children.

“What?” Sam calls back. I can see her grin from here, white teeth flashing. She knows very well what. She kicks the ball back towards one of the kids and comes jogging over as I run the boat onto the beach near where the little pink petal-boat is already resting. Lotan jumps out with the bow-rope and starts singlehandedly pulling the boat up the beach while I’m still in it, furling the lateen sail.

“When are you going to explain the offside rule?” Lotan asks as Sam reaches us.

“Never if I can help it. Never got it straight myself.” She grins. “Hey Lotan, how’d she get you to come out to play?”

“She used her subtle elvish magicks, of course.” He grins back. He’s cheered up already, I think, after the little time in the sun while we crossed to the shore.

“I asked if he wanted to,” I explain, finishing with the sail and stepping out of boat onto hot sand.

“Ohhhh, never thought of that.” She grins at me conspiratorally. Clearly she’s smart enough not to comment on Lotan and I being in each other’s company again, but I know she has questions waiting.

“Hey, you invented the bra!” Lotan suddenly exclaims, noticing the only upper-body garment Sam’s wearing. It’s red and styled just like a sports bra with laces at the front. I’m guessing her tunic is currently employed as a goalpost. With that and the loose-fitting linen trousers she’s got on, I think she looks beautiful. I know better than to say so though.

“Finally starting to get it right, you mean,” Sam replies to Lotan. “You do realise there’s no such thing as elastic, don’t you? Luckily I am a jay-nee-arse.” Grin.

“Don’t encourage her,” I warn Lotan. “She can talk about how she did it for two hours straight if you let her.”

“So you two joining in the game?”

“Not me!” I say quickly. I had enough of football at school. “Lotan will though.”

“What?”

“Yes you will. Where’s Ateis?” I add, to Sam.

“Went that way I think,” Sam says, pointing along the beach. “With a couple of other sprogs. Said she was going to look for buried treasure.”

“You should not have told her that story,” I admonish. “I’ll just go and check up on her then. You lot, don’t play too long. You know what they say about mad dogs and Englishmen. Just remember, if you get heatstroke we don’t have any ice.”

“Yes Mum,” Sam says.

“And put your hat back on!” I remind her, playing up to the joke now. “See? I have to too!” I add, pointing at my own sun-hat. I stick my tongue out at her and start heading along the beach.

“So what was that all about?” Sam asks later, when we finally get a chance to talk. It’s getting really hot now, and the footballers have given up to flake out in the shade of the trees at the edge of the beach. I’m trying to sort out the mess that Ateis has made of her hair in only a few hours ashore, while Ateis plays with and narrates her ‘treasure,’ which seems to comprise mostly shells and interesting pebbles. Some have been worn into rings, which at least looks a little like Jeodine coinage.

Benitese and her baby are with us too. She and Sam had become friends during the last few Market stops. I often see them spending time together. It turns out that Beni has been finding life on a small ship with Deregan, the father of her child, to be not entirely the joyous adventure she’d hoped. It’s actually the second largest ship in the fleet, but when you’re used to life ashore a ship can seem awfully small, especially when you’re one half of a failing relationship. She’s been talking about getting off when we get back to Port Denhall in a few months’ time, and wishes it would be sooner.

Right now she’s asleep, her head pillowed in Sam’s lap, her baby asleep at her breast. They look the absolute picture of contentment.

“What?” I ask.

“Lotan.”

I sigh. “Master Gerat wants him off his ship. Fareis expects me to come up with a solution.”

Sam thinks about that for a moment. “Shit.”

Lotan has taken himself off again, brooding alone somewhere.

“What are you going to tell her?” Sam asks.

“I’ve no idea. She was talking about putting him and you and Master Tehilan on our sloop.”

“Uh… Why me?”

“So he’d have someone on board he cares enough about to actually be useful, I think. So he’d actually try. I talked her out of it.”

Sam gives me a look that says, ‘now I’m really impressed.’ If I didn’t know better I’d think she was serious.

I shrug. “She’s indulging me. I kinda feel I need to come up with a better idea though. She said… She said you can’t stay on the familyship too long, you’ll lose your chance at having a baby. I told her you didn’t want children–”

“I never said I didn’t want children,” Sam says, surprising me. “I just said I couldn’t handle being pregnant; giving birth, all that stuff.” Pause. “She wants to chuck me off?”

“No. She just wanted to prepare me, I think. Wants me to be ready to let you go.”

“I’m not seeing any leash,” she says, with a smile to me.

But I can see how she’s let the baby grab onto her little finger. She will ache.

“You can see Gerat’s point,” Sam says, changing the subject back to Lotan. “No-one wants a body on board that doesn’t care if the ship stays afloat. That’s just no fun at all.”

“He doesn’t think anything’s real,” I say. “He doesn’t think anyone’s real, except us. They’re just game pieces. NPCs.”

“He’s probably not sure about us,” Sam observes. “There’s a word for this. ‘Sociopathic.’” She bites her lip, thinking. “Lotan, ” she says, carefully enunciating the name. She means the character. “Lotan is a fighter. Neutral to lawful good, superficially tortured. That’s what Dave always plays.” I feel queasy hearing Sam talk about the game, now. “Probably got a big honour thing about protecting innocents, that’s why killing an innocent was so bad… So bad the only way he can deal with it is by convincing himself nothing’s real.”

“I’d figured that much–”

“No, Lotan doesn’t want it to be real,” Sam stresses again. “We’ve all integrated traits from our… from our characters. There’s no reason to suppose Dave’s any exception. Lotan is a big part of who he is now, whether he likes it or not. And Lotan is a fighter. That’s his talent. That’s what he does best, and he does it to protect innocent people from the sort of threats that respond to a big fuck-off sword. Even without everything else that’s happened I’m not surprised he can’t hack it on a nice peaceful marketeer.”

“And Dave?”

Sam shrugs, careful not to disturb Beni. “Is there a difference? I mean, look at us. I can’t tell what’s Paul and what’s Tani any more, can you?”

“Taniel wanted to be a shaman,” I say quietly.

“Yeah, and Samila liked cock,” Sam says, even more quietly.

I give her a wide-eyed look and cover Ateis’s ears theatrically. We’ve been speaking in English, but it’s just too perfect a moment to pass up.

“What?” Ateis wants to know.

“Nothing, just a joke,” I reassure her. “Come on, let me finish your hair.” I realise I’ve long finished combing it out and I’m putting it up into bunches. “Hey, you want some more water?” I ask her, already grabbing the leather flask.

“Okay.”

I give her the flask and she drinks for what seems like ages.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” I ask her in English.

She ignores me, finally handing back the flask.

I shrug at Sam. “So, um, what? Do you find yourself looking at guys and thinking, ‘cor he’s a bit of all right?’”

“No, fuck off!” Sam says, blushing. “I’m not gay, okay?”

I decide it’s best to talk about something else. “Kerilas let himself be killed because he couldn’t let that integration happen,” I say.

“Yeah, ’cause Kerilas was an evil fucker who did things James couldn’t live with, and knew he’d do them again.”

These words have darkened my mood so much that Ateis notices and decides her job is to snuggle back into me.

I hold onto her.

“Just saying,” I say, “I hope you don’t feel as bad about being you as he did.”

Sam looks out across the lagoon thinking for a long time.

“No, I don’t,” she says eventually. “Don’t know how much of that is the oil keeping me sane.”

The oil, synthesised in the ship-tree’s fruit under the Satthei’s direction and used for almost everything; the oil whose subtle scent permeates everything on board, protects the young Neri from being prematurely induced and keeps my own maturation in check, also works on human bodies. It seems to counteract the effect of sex hormones. To Sam, this is good. It means her periods and hormonal mood swings have stopped and she’s physically unable to conceive, not that anyone else on board would have the slightest inclination, or physical ability, all of which is fine by her. She says she feels a lot calmer and more stable since coming aboard the familyship.

“Is it that bad being a woman?” I ask.

Another long pause. Sam doesn’t look away from the lagoon. “You know,” she says eventually, “coming from you, that’s a fucking stupid question.” She gives me a hard look and I realise I’ve said something horribly wrong.

“It’s not the same,” I blurt out. She just gives me that stare, waiting for me to say more. “Samila,” I explain. “Part of you always was Samila. And the brain,” I say, suddenly remembering something Fareis said earlier, and understanding what it means. “It’s like me: Why do I behave like a stupid kid half the time even though I’m old enough to know better? On both sides. It’s because my brain — this brain — is a child’s brain. Your brain — your brain is a woman’s brain. They reckon transsexuals happen ’cause the brain develops one way and the body goes the other. In the womb. But you’ve got Samila’s brain. You’ve got a woman’s brain so–”

“So my feelings mean nothing?” Sam interrupts. “So I’m supposed to just shut up and be happy?”

“No I–” But that was exactly what I was saying, I realise. “I should shut up, I’m being stupid,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Sorry. I’m really sorry, Sam. I didn’t mean to… you know.”

“Oh come on, don’t go bishoujo-eyes on me.”

“What?” I blink at her a couple of times.

“You know.”

And I do know. I remember. I shift around so Sam can’t see my eyes. Ateis is looking at me, concerned, doing her own bishoujo-eyes thing, so I can see Sam’s point. Ateis looks almost ludicrously anime now with the bunches in her hair as well. “What happened?” she asks.

“I said something stupid,” I explain to her. “I hurt Sam’s feelings.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m an idiot.” “Do you want to be alone?” I ask Sam in English.

She nods. Well, alone with Beni and the baby anyway. And that might be for the best, in the long term, I think, thinking how Fareis might approve of such a thought.

“Okay. Come on Ateis, let’s go for a walk.”

“Okay,” Ateis says, catching the necessity of the moment.

“Let’s get your tunic on,” I say first, grabbing it from where Ateis dumped it earlier. “It’s dry enough now.”

“I don’t want to!”

“Yes you do. Remember the last time you got sunburnt?”

Elves, it turns out, do get sunburn; it just doesn’t cause any long term damage because the tissues regenerate fully. (I’ve got a feeling we actually can’t get cancer.) But in the meantime it hurts, and it itches, just as badly as it does for a human, judging from her suffering last time. It turns out she does remember, because she stands and lets me get her long tunic over her head and her arms into the long sleeves. I grab her hat and mine, and put them on our respective heads and stand up.

“What have you done with my hair?” she wants to know as we walk out into the sunlight and the wall of heat. And I thought it was hot in the shade.

“I put it in bunches, do you like it?”

“It feels strange.” She shifts the hat over them awkwardly.

“If it’s a problem we’ll take them out,” I promise.