Mad Ship characters

Appears from the start

The younger Vestrit daughter, home in Bingtown with a mate's ticket she earned in disguise aboard another liveship and no ship of her own to use it on. The Vivacia is in a pirate's hands, her family is close to ruin, and the Bingtown Traders will not lend her anything. She is stubborn, physically capable and increasingly impatient with a city that keeps telling her what a Trader's daughter may and may not do.

Appears from the start

The Vivacia's former first mate, disowned by his own Trader family, ashore in Bingtown with a bad reputation, a drug habit he is trying to break and no berth. He is a genuinely good sailor and the only one likely to help Althea with what she intends. His pride and his self-disgust are roughly equal, and both get in the way.

Appears from the start

The blinded liveship beached outside Bingtown, said to have killed crew after crew and abandoned by the family that owned him. He is enormous, strong, lonely and violently unpredictable, with a child's temper and a great deal that he refuses or is unable to remember about his own past. He has a new owner and, for the first time in a generation, the prospect of being put back in the water.

Appears from the start

The foreign beadmaker who bought Paragon, pale gold in skin and eyes, gloved, evasive about her origins and an extraordinary worker of wood. She talks about people being poised at points where the world could go one way or another, and she is willing to spend everything she owns to get a mad liveship afloat. She is Paragon's only reliable friend.

First appears in chapter 2

The pirate captain who took the Vivacia, now one-legged and recovering, with a growing reputation in the Pirate Isles as the man who frees slaves and burns slavers. He is charming, controlled and utterly self-interested, believes without doubt that he is destined for a crown, and is unusually good at making other people believe it too. The wizardwood charm on his wrist is his least flattering companion.

First appears in chapter 2

The Vestrit boy taken off his monastery path and forced aboard his family's liveship, then left in a pirate's hands with a slave's tattoo across his face. He saved Kennit's life and is bound to him by that and by the ship he loves. He is trying to work out what a priest of Sa owes to a man who does great evil and great good with the same hand, and whether he is a captive, a convert or a coward.

First appears in chapter 2

The woman from Divvytown who has attached herself to Kennit and now lives aboard the Vivacia, learning to read, to dress as a lady and to fight. She is fiercely, dangerously devoted to Kennit, jealous of everything that draws his attention, and far more formidable than anyone aboard first assumed.

First appears in chapter 2

The Vestrit liveship, taken by pirates and now sailing under Kennit. She has attached herself to her captor with an intensity that frightens Wintrow, and something older and less human than a merchant family's memories is beginning to surface in her.

First appears in chapter 3

A young man of the Khuprus family of the Rain Wilds, veiled in Bingtown as all Rain Wilders are, and one of the diggers working the buried Elderling city under Trehaug. He is courting Malta Vestrit through the formal exchange of dream-gifts, and he spends his working hours in a chamber deep in the city where an enormous wizardwood log lies, and where something inside it reaches into his dreams.

First appears in chapter 3

The elder Vestrit granddaughter, still a girl and determined not to be treated as one. She is vain, clever and reckless, works the adults around her with real skill, and has opened a courtship with a Rain Wild suitor mostly to see whether she can. Her family is going under and she has not yet grasped that this has anything to do with her.

First appears in chapter 4

The Vestrit matriarch, holding a ruined trading house together: the liveship gone, the creditors calling, and an ancient debt owed to a Rain Wild family that they would happily settle by marriage. She is exhausted, proud and unwilling to admit to her daughters how bad it is, and she is one of the few Bingtown Traders who sees clearly what the New Traders and the Satrap's grants are doing to the city.

First appears in chapter 4

The elder Vestrit daughter, whose husband lost the family ship and whose son is in a pirate's hands. She has spent her adult life deferring to a man who is no longer there to defer to, and has to learn what her own name on a Trader council actually obliges her to do.

First appears in chapter 6

The young Satrap of Jamaillia, indolent, ill-educated and permanently under the influence of one recreational drug or another. He has been selling grants, tariffs and monopolies over the heads of Bingtown's founding charter, largely to Chalcedean interests, and he cannot understand why anyone is annoyed.

First appears in chapter 6

A Companion of the Satrap's Heart, a Jamaillian scholar whose specialist subject is Bingtown and its charter. She is intelligent, thoroughly disliked at court and entirely dependent on the goodwill of a Satrap who treats his Companions as ornaments. She sees an opportunity in the crisis and has to decide how far she will go to take it.

First appears in chapter 8

The leader of a tangle of sea serpents that has found one of their kind who remembers what they were and what they are supposed to do. He drives them north towards a river they must reach, against currents, hunger, and the fading of their own minds, and their journey depends on creatures who no longer recognize them.

First appears in chapter 20

The presence sealed inside the vast wizardwood log in the Crowned Rooster Chamber beneath the buried city, who reaches into Reyn's dreams: proud, contemptuous, ancient and desperate to be let out. She speaks of wings, of a city that was hers, and of the Rain Wilders as trespassers, and she wants the log cut open.