Do not confide in this woman, Primus said, tripping up her tongue. However subdued she is now, she is your enemy, the enemy of all saintborn.

Isabelle swatted his apparition, splashing his reflection so violently that it would hopefully be some time before the waters calmed enough for him to return. Bitterlich was right. If she couldn’t rid herself of Primus Maximus, she must find a way to rewrite his motive.

Yet he had a point, and it needed addressing.

To Similce she said, “You call me soulless. In Skaladin, all of my kind are slaves, and yet I am your capitaine. Does that trouble you?”

Similce looked uncomfortable. After a moment, she said, “You spared my life, and then you saved my life. I owe you a debt of honor.”

“That’s one way to square a circle,” Isabelle said. Badgering Similce for a more favorable answer would only make her resentful. It was time to move on to other things. “We still have work to do. Have you finished the inventory of foodstuffs?”

Similce relaxed almost imperceptibly and said, “Yes. If you can call that stuff you eat food…”

Bitterlich and Rebecca sat on the gull’s stoop, the lowest platform on the turvy mainmast, with the whole ship above them and nothing but deep sky below, several kilometers of thin scudding clouds above the green-tinged Miasma. He’d spent the afternoon working with her on partial transformations, teasing individual strands out of the soul threads, coiling and knotting them and releasing them and twisting them back into their original shape. So far she’d succeeded in turning her lower body into a wyrm’s tail without scrambling her organs or blocking her bowels.

It was grueling work, but her training as a pickpocket had given her focus aplenty.

Yet neither the hard work nor the difficulty of the task explained the moody silence with which she sat and chewed her ration of ship’s biscuit and pork. Bitterlich was used to dealing with impulsive, reckless Rebecca, not silent, pensive Rebecca.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked in his most neutral tone.

She shook her head and continued eating the nigh-inedible biscuit with the same patient determination of a termite attacking a doorpost.

Bitterlich waited.

After a long minute she said, “Why does it matter that Djordji adopted Marie? I thought she was a nob. They all have big families.”

Bitterlich suspected that the question being asked was not the one that wanted an answer. Rebecca was quite capable of understanding the plan to get them resupplied on Flotsam, so her curiosity must concern the filial arrangement itself. “When Marie was turned into a bloodhollow, her parents treated her as if she’d died. After Isabelle revived her, twelve years later, she sent a message to her parents, but they could not bear to see her again. She found a father figure in Djordji and he found a daughter in her, so they made it official.”