Ship of Magic characters

Appears from the start

The younger daughter of the Bingtown Trader family that owns the liveship Vivacia. She has sailed with her father since she was a girl, knows the ship and the trade better than anyone else in her family, and assumes without question that Vivacia will be hers. She is stubborn, hot-tempered, physically capable and completely uninterested in the drawing-room life a Trader's daughter is supposed to want. She has no legal standing whatever, which she is about to discover.

Appears from the start

The liveship of the Vestrit family, built of wizardwood from the Rain Wilds and, like all liveships, expected to wake into consciousness once three generations of her owning family have died aboard her. She is intensely sensitive to the people who touch her decks and takes her sense of herself from whichever Vestrit is closest, which makes her loyalties dangerously easy to shape.

Appears from the start

Master of the Vivacia and head of the Vestrit family, dying slowly and painfully aboard his own ship on the last run home to Bingtown. He is a proud, old-fashioned Trader who sailed with his younger daughter at his side for years and who has left the disposal of his ship and his family to a will nobody has read.

First appears in chapter 2

Ephron's wife and the true manager of the Vestrit fortunes, who has spent years quietly holding the family's debts and contracts together while her husband sailed. She is shrewd, tired and inflexible about Trader propriety, and she is carrying obligations, including a debt owed to a Rain Wild family, that she has told her daughters almost nothing about.

First appears in chapter 2

The elder Vestrit daughter, married to the sea captain Kyle Haven and mother of Wintrow, Malta and Selden. She was raised to run a household rather than a trading house, defers to her husband on principle, and has never had to choose between him and her mother or her sister before.

First appears in chapter 2

Keffria's husband, an able and ambitious sea captain from outside the Trader families who has spent his marriage being treated as an outsider by them. He regards the Vestrit ship as an asset being wasted by sentiment, has firm ideas about what boys and women are for, and is prepared to be as ruthless as necessary now that the ship is finally within his reach.

First appears in chapter 2

Keffria's son, taken to a monastery of Sa as a boy and now nearly finished with his novitiate. He is thoughtful, devout and physically slight, has no interest in ships or trade, and is summoned home for his grandfather's death expecting to return to the monastery afterwards. His faith has never yet been tested by anything harder than fasting.

First appears in chapter 3

Keffria's elder daughter, thirteen and furious about it. She is clever, vain and impatient to be treated as a woman, with a sharp instinct for how to work the adults around her and no experience at all of consequences. Bingtown's rules about courtship, Trader daughters and Rain Wild suitors strike her as obstacles rather than protections.

First appears in chapter 2

The Vivacia's first mate under Ephron Vestrit, a competent sailor and the disowned son of a Bingtown Trader family. He drinks, chews a drug that is eating him, and has spent years keeping himself just employable. He respects Althea, which is not the same as being any use to her, and his own prospects vanish along with his captain.

First appears in chapter 3

A pirate captain out of the Pirate Isles, elegant, controlled and quite unlike the drunks and brawlers around him. He intends to make himself king of the pirate towns, and has worked out that the way to do it is to be seen freeing slaves rather than merely taking cargo. He wears a small carved wizardwood charm on his wrist that talks back to him, and he keeps his own counsel about almost everything.

First appears in chapter 4

Kennit's first mate, a huge, scarred, straightforward pirate who was raised in the slave trade's shadow and hates slavers with his whole heart. He is loyal, blunt and much less clever than his captain, and the bargain between them is that Sorcor gets his slavers and Kennit gets whatever Kennit is really after.

First appears in chapter 6

A woman of the pirate town of Divvytown who belongs to the brothel Kennit visits and is treated by him as a convenience. Hard, watchful and used to being disposable, she begins to attach herself to him with an intensity he neither invited nor understands.

First appears in chapter 8

A liveship beached and abandoned on the shore outside Bingtown, hull up, with his eyes hacked away. He belonged to a Trader family that lost crew after crew aboard him, and Bingtown regards him as mad and murderous, a ship who rolled and drowned his own people. He is bitter, lonely, unpredictable and desperate for company, and he talks to the few people willing to walk out to him.

First appears in chapter 10

A newcomer to Bingtown who has taken a shop on Rain Wild Street to sell carved wooden beads, unsettling the Traders by being a foreigner in a city that does not sell property to outsiders. She has pale gold skin and eyes, gloves, and an evasive way with questions about where she is from. She works wood extraordinarily well, and she takes an interest in the beached liveship that nobody else in Bingtown can account for.

First appears in chapter 14

A young man of the Khuprus family of the Rain Wild settlements upriver, veiled as all Rain Wilders are when they come to Bingtown, since the river marks those who live beside it. His family holds an old debt against the Vestrits, and he begins a courtship along the formal Rain Wild lines, beginning with a gift that carries a dream.

First appears in chapter 5

The leader of a tangle of sea serpents moving north, one of the few of his kind who still half-remembers that they were meant to be something more and that there is a thing they are supposed to do. He is losing his memory and his tangle is losing its sense of itself, and he searches the sea for one who can tell them what they have forgotten.