Ship of Destiny characters

Appears from the start

The elder Vestrit granddaughter, adrift in a small boat with the ruler of Jamaillia after the flooding of the buried city swept her out of the Rain Wilds. She is injured, scarred, starving and entirely on her own, with a spoiled monarch to keep alive and no one coming for her. The vain, manipulative girl of the previous books is gone; what is left is a formidable negotiator who has discovered that she is the only competent person in the boat.

Appears from the start

The young Satrap of Jamaillia, kidnapped out of a burning Bingtown and carried off down a river, seasick, drug-deprived and completely unfitted for any of it. He is petulant, cowardly and self-pitying, and he is also, technically, the source of every legal authority in the region, which makes him worth keeping alive.

Appears from the start

The younger Vestrit daughter, mate aboard the Paragon and hunting the Pirate Isles for the liveship that should have been hers. She is a proven sailor now, and she has stopped caring what Bingtown thinks a Trader's daughter may do. What she has not worked out is what she will actually do when she finds the Vivacia, or what she wants from Brashen.

Appears from the start

Captain of the Paragon, sober, competent and carrying a crew of misfits into pirate waters on a mission with no legal standing and no backing. He is finally doing the job he was trained for, and is painfully aware that his authority rests on nothing but his crew's willingness to keep granting it.

Appears from the start

The refitted liveship, blind, huge and sailing again after a generation on a beach. He is proud of being useful and terrified of being abandoned, and the closer the voyage comes to the Pirate Isles the more of his own buried history begins to work its way to the surface, none of which he wants to look at.

First appears in chapter 2

The foreign woodworker who bought and rebuilt Paragon, sailing aboard him as his advocate and, at need, as ship's carpenter and healer. She speaks of the world balanced at a point where a few people's choices decide which way it falls, and she is unshakeably certain that Paragon matters. About herself she still says almost nothing.

First appears in chapter 2

The Vestrit son, now openly one of Kennit's people: priest, healer, adviser and the man who explains Kennit to everyone including Kennit. He has chosen this, and he knows what it costs him to keep choosing it. His loyalty to the ship he grew up on is the one thing in him that has never wavered.

First appears in chapter 2

King of the Pirate Isles in everything but ceremony, with a fleet, a liveship and a reputation as the liberator of slaves. He is charming, ruthless and privately convinced that the world is arranged for his benefit, and he takes what he wants on the assumption that wanting it makes it his. The wizardwood charm on his wrist knows exactly what he is.

First appears in chapter 2

Kennit's woman, now his queen in practice: literate, armed, expensively dressed and entirely committed to him. She is jealous, dangerous, and clear-eyed about almost everything except the man she has given herself to.

First appears in chapter 2

The Vestrit liveship, sailing under Kennit. What speaks from her figurehead is no longer only the accumulated memories of a Bingtown Trader family; something far older that was sealed into her wizardwood is rising through her, and it does not think of itself as a ship at all.

First appears in chapter 3

The last dragon, freed from her cocoon beneath the drowned Elderling city and now flying over the Rain Wilds and Bingtown. She is vast, vain, impatient and openly contemptuous of humans, and she is also the only creature capable of driving the Chalcedean fleet off the coast. She has one overriding purpose: to see the sea serpents up the river to the cocooning grounds so that her kind does not end with her.

First appears in chapter 3

A Rain Wild Trader of the Khuprus family, grieving the woman he believes drowned in the collapse of the buried city. He is the human Tintaglia deals with most, negotiating between a dragon, the Rain Wild settlements and a Bingtown at war, and he cannot make himself stop searching the river for a body or a survivor.

First appears in chapter 4

The Vestrit matriarch, hiding in a burning, besieged Bingtown where her family's name is under suspicion of collaboration. She is old, exhausted and better than anyone else at seeing what alliances the city will actually need to survive, and nobody in authority wants to hear it from her.

First appears in chapter 4

The elder Vestrit daughter, holding her family's Trader seat through a war with her mother in hiding, her son among pirates, her daughter missing and her husband gone. She has stopped waiting for a man to tell her what her name obliges her to do.

First appears in chapter 4

The Jamaillian Companion left behind in Bingtown when the Satrap was taken. Using his seal and his absence, she has claimed authority over the city's negotiations, and she governs from fear as much as from policy: brittle, suspicious, and surrounded by hard young Trader men who are happy to be her enforcers.

First appears in chapter 8

The youngest Vestrit child, a boy caught in a besieged city with his mother and grandmother. His encounter with the dragon changes what he is for, and he becomes her voice among people who will not listen to her directly.