Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment - McJohn (2024)

Chapter 1: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book I

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book I

The camera tracks across a run-down wharf in a seaside town with no pretensions to worldliness: this is a place where smugglers, pirates, fugitives, and the generally lost congregate in an ill-fitting glob of hapless, hopeless, luckless, forlorn humanity. Dingy building succeeds seedy hovel in a straggling row of unplanned pseudo-development, a minor-key symphony of sagging timbers, burned-out hulks, dark holes where once were doorways, kicked in with thoughtless, short-term malice or rotted out in the indifference of time.

The camera stops before the only lighted window, a sullen, unglazed gap in the crumbling masonry. It's a tavern, but a tavern devoid of the boisterous pleasure or thumping jollity such places often have. This is a place where desperate runaways go to drink cheap, powerful liquor in a feeble attempt to make the forgetting of their banal miseries permanent. The shot establishes the moment, then a dark-gloved hand reaches into frame to undo the latch on the door next to the pitiful window.

Inside, the dedicated drunks look up, welcoming, as much as they ever do, a slight respite from their grinding self-loathing. The tavernkeeper, a grizzled old many-scarred veteran, leans on the bar and swivels his one eye in the direction of the door. Next to him is a beautiful young girl refilling a bottle. Even she can't lighten the place any, and the dead, dull mood is reinforced when the door opens.

The figure who steps into the rude little bar is small, draped in a hooded cloak. About the only detail visible in the shifting light of the feeble hearth is a glitter from the pommel of a sword slung across the figure's back.

"You walk in with a sword, you'll do your drinking elsewhere," the barkeep announces gruffly. "Weapons and liquor don't mix."

The figure in the doorway doesn't so much as pause. "I don't mind taking your head with it." It's a woman's voice, and the startled patrons break the abrupt silence with a chuckle.

The woman in the cloak makes her way to what there is of a fire and throws the hood back with a sigh. She shakes her head, loosening her neck muscles. Her hair is as short as a Roman legionnaire's, and a bright blonde. She's very pretty, although exhausted-looking, and the dead-souled men in the tavern begin to feel stirrings they thought they'd long since burned out of them. The woman in the cloak drops bonelessly into a chair by the hearth, puts her head back, and ignores everything around her.

"Here, girl," the barkeep says to the youngster at his side, "fetch the warrior something to drink."

"Me?" hisses the girl. "But--she--"

The barkeep raises his hand, and the girl hastily grabs a mug, picking up the newly-filled bottle. She makes her way to the hearth with hesitant steps. The warrior doesn't so much as twitch a finger. The girl puts the bottle and the mug down carefully at the warrior's left hand--a tidy consideration, that--and flees with quiet speed back to the bar.

One of the men at the table nearest the door, fueled by the silent contest of machismo of his compatriots, gets quietly to his feet. He nods in an it's-done gesture and moves without a sound to where the exhausted woman reclines, her throat exposed in the flicker of firelight. He's just about to do something--grab for a breast, draw a knife and hold it to her shapely throat--when he freezes with animal quickness. His hands shoot skyward, and that's when the other patrons detect the gleam of the knife pressed none too gently into the crotch of his trousers.

They haven't seen her move; she doesn't raise her head, doesn't even open her eyes, but there's a knife poised to unman him just for getting within two cubits of her.

"Pardon, warrior," he says in a rusty, little-used voice. "Just wanted to see to your comfort."

"I'm perfectly comfortable," she drawls, still reclined. "You?"

"I must confess, Lady," he says with life-preserving respect, nodding toward the knife pressed into his crotch, "me an' Rufus here has been in softer circ*mstances where a beautiful woman is concerned."

A brief smile lights her lips; otherwise, she's doing a good imitation of sleeptalking. "Take yourself off," she offers, "and I'll see to it you and young Rufus don't part company this night."

"Lady," he says, backing away with studious caution and settling himself back at the table, next to his fellows. The woman by the fire makes the slightest of movements, and the knife disappears. The woman puts her arm on the armrest of the chair, her knife hand dangling carelessly into space. It's a lovely hand, a woman's shape and a man's power, and it looks like it can kill without the slightest effort on the part of its owner.

The girl at the bar is round-eyed and shivering, fear warring with fascination. The barkeep turns his baleful eye in her direction and harrumphs with disdain. When he turns his back, the girl ducks beneath the bar, seizing a different bottle and making her way across the room. The barkeep sees what she has and opens his mouth to protest, then thinks better of it and shuts up.

The girl approaches the warrior. The knife has vanished, and the girl considers uneasily; is it better when you can see the weapon, or when you can't and it could be anywhere? She makes her decision, goes to one knee, and sets the bottle carefully next to the first. It takes all her courage to speak. "His finest, Lady," she murmurs.

The warrior lifts her head finally, and intelligent green eyes come to rest on the girl. The tavern wench gives a little hasty bow, graceful in its gracelessness, and adds, "It ain't right you should drink what that lot is drinking. You're finer than that."

There's a moment of silence. "Am I," says the warrior softly, not looking away.

"Aye," says the girl, encouraged that she's not yet spilling her life onto the dirty straw on the floor. "Quality tells."

The warrior's gaze goes over the girl like a flash of lightning. She notes the leather bond bracelet on the girl's wrist before her eyes come back to the girl's face. "You'd know that, would you?"

The girl has to clear her throat to answer. "Aye," she whispers.

The warrior's mouth quirks in what would be a smile in a woman with a heart. "You remind me of somebody I once knew," she tells the girl. An imagined softness goes out of her eyes as she adds, "I buried her ages ago."

The girl's heart leaps, and it shows in her strangled gasp. The warrior's lip curls cruelly. "I thank you for your kindness," she remarks, "but I don't touch liquor." She gets to her feet, and the girl throws herself hastily back onto her hands. "No matter how fine," the warrior adds, looking down in evident contempt at the frightened tavern wench.

In an instant, the warrior has made it to the door, the hood back in place over the fine gold hair. The door opens and shuts like a knifestroke, and she's gone.

The men turn to one another. After a moment, one of them remarks, "'Tis a fine sword."

"So it is," agrees another. "And there's only one of her."

The only man to speak to the warrior shakes his head with a feeble grin. "She'll slit you gullet to gut."

"She can't get us all," points out another of the men. They shrug, considering, and arise. A couple of coins jingle onto the rickety table, and the men move with surprising stealth through the door.

The stupefied girl hauls herself off the floor, moving for the door like a sleepwalker.

"Hi! Serafina," calls the barkeep. "She'll murder thee."

The girl opens the door and turns to face him. "It's a death more glorious than this pitiful little life," she retorts. Then she's into the feeble, deceptive starlight of the dark night.

* * *

When she gets outside, Serafina runs noiselessly away from the street and toward the wharf, a skill she's spent some time and effort acquiring. She slips around barrels and crates, avoiding anything she could slip on along the noisome docks, slick with fish guts and rotting vegetables. She knows the route the men will follow, and she's taking a faster, riskier path. She slides from shadow to shadow like a ghost, tracking an equally quiet target.

She swings feet-first through a burned-out doorway like the unremembered, unmourned child she once was and lands on her feet, fighting for breath in an alleyway so run down it seems abandoned even by the gods of destruction. Her reward is a soft footfall, recognizable only because the girl has spent a wasted life cradled by the sounds of the eternal sea beyond this dismal, dilapidated town. She flattens herself against the wall near the street and whispers, "Warrior."

The footsteps cease for a heartbeat, then start again, faster. By starlight-adjusted eyesight she detects a hooded figure. It's on her before she can move, pressing her against the filthy wall, a gloved hand against her throat. Green eyes burn at her with cold fury, and the warrior's voice is a livid hiss.

"Lead me into a trap, eh, girl? They throw you at my head, those tavern braggarts? Eh?" The hand shakes her painfully, and she begins to shake her head no, no, no, you're wrong. "You rubes think I'm after a pretty piece of girlflesh, is that it?" Serafina shakes her head twice as hard. "Give me a comely girl and you can take anything you want?" The warrior's voice has begun to tremble with anger. "What your duck-brained pimps fail to realize is that, of all the people on this earth, I've the least. And the least to lose."

"They're after you," the girl manages to gasp around the implacable hand. The warrior plucks her away from the wall without apparent effort and pitches her into the darkness of the alleyway with no more thought than if she'd tossed aside a rotten apricot. Serafina lands on her hands and knees, and the sound she hears after that is the slithering hush of a drawn blade.

The warrior takes up a stance in the street, facing the men she can now hear approaching. Their stealthy cover gone, they break into a run, closing the distance, and their swords clang against the warrior's. She's sent her blade through two of them in as many strokes, and one of them crawls away, moaning his last breaths through a bellows that soon won't hold enough air to give voice to his agony.

Serafina stays down, flinching away from the savage blows. It's something like ten to one, but one of the men stumbles into the alleyway and goes down, clutching his throat and wheezing. His eyes meet hers, and she shrinks into the darkness. She's seen plenty of violence in her short, unhappy life, but this is different: this is a man she was serving ale to not a candlemark before, a man who was trying good-naturedly to grab her ass as she went by, and now he's gurgling, reaching for her in desperation as he chokes to death on his own blood. As if she could do anything. He falls into feeble twitching, his eyes still fixed on her, and her head spins with a dizzy, sick feeling.

The warrior is whirling like a tree in a gale, and the fight has moved into the open street, a couple of still bodies lying in filth, a fitting end. One of the men gets a lucky parry in, and a bright line of blood starts across the warrior's knee. He loses his life for the presumption, head split like a melon fallen from the roof, but there's no undoing the change in the warrior's fortunes. This is how it begins, and the pack knows it: one small wound, then another, then another, and soon your prey is exhausted, ready to take down, no more fight left in her. The warrior battles on, but all of them, attackers and attacked alike, know now that it's just a matter of time.

Something she is never able afterward to identify raises the hair on Serafina's neck. A brief gust of wind blows down the street, scattering dust and detritus before it, and the warrior has a sudden shadow, another, taller sword-bearing figure whose spinning blade catches the starlight. One, two, three, the men drop to the newcomer's death-dealing dance, and the warrior herself sends her sword, with a beautiful acrobat's thrust, into one of the last standing. The two warriors face the last remaining man, who makes a decidedly unmanly whimpering noise before turning. The warrior has produced the knife again, and she sends it with skill and speed into his back. He falls, curls up, shudders his last. The warrior treads heavily to his body, bends with effort on her bleeding knee, and wrenches her knife free. She cleans it on his tunic, slips it into its hiding place, and stands, turning. The dripping sword is still in her other hand.

Serafina looks back down the street; the other fighter has vanished. Moving with care as fast as she can, she emerges from the alleyway, skirting the still-throbbing body of her throat-slit patron. She approaches the warrior, her eyes going first to the gleaming sword and then to the now-soaked trouser leg. She hisses and goes to her knees to touch, as carefully as she can, the wounded flesh.

A gentle hand descends into her hair, almost stroking, and Serafina looks up past the blade into eyes that might be weary and might be indifferent to life. "I wish I could thank you for your timely warning, girl," the warrior says, her voice as soothing as her hand, "but you do me no favor keeping me this side of Tartarus another day."

Serafina's eyes fill with tears, and the warrior's form blurs before her. "Please," Serafina whispers, "Let me care for you."

"No one cares for me," says the soft voice, devoid of human feeling. "I don't give a tinker's damn whether I live or die."

"I do," Serafina says instantly. "I do. Please--"

The warrior stumbles forward, and the blade loosens in her hand. Serafina is on her feet instantly, taking the warrior's unoccupied arm and hauling it over her shoulders. "My house is this way," she says, urging the warrior to walk. The warrior moves, and Serafina sighs mentally with relief.

Halfway down the street, something occurs to her, and she asks timidly, "Would your friend like to come with us?"

"I have no friend," the warrior mumbles under her breath. She sounds drunk, thick-tongued and moody, and Serafina tightens her grip, hurrying both of them away from the carnage.

* * *

The wind has risen, and the air gets colder as Serafina and the warrior make their way awkwardly into the doorway of what was once a nice house. The warrior disengages herself gently, and Serafina, after a moment of anxiety over whether she can stand on her own, eventually lets her go. Then she turns, holding her skirts up so she won't trip, and begins to ascend the stairs. She looks back, again anxious, but the warrior climbs up after her, gore-clotted sword catching random gleams along the expensive-looking blade. The warrior keeps her eyes nailed on Serafina's face; if climbing the steps on a wounded leg is an effort, nothing in her expression betrays it.

They reach the top of the stairs, and Serafina turns to the side, opening the door to a spacious room. The warrior enters carefully, pulling the hood from her bright blonde hair and scanning the gloom for threats. She finds none: the room holds only a substantial, comfortable-looking bed, a couple of chests, some tables, a chair or two. They look suspiciously fine to belong to a barmaid.

Turning, the warrior watches Serafina stir up the fire in the hearth; the girl is self-conscious as she feeds the fire some kindling, tending it until it catches, then uses a sliver of firewood to light an oil lamp.

When Serafina faces the warrior again, the sight of her glower and the mess on the sword almost makes her drop the lamp. She sets it carefully on a sturdy, highborn table, then crosses the room to fetch a flask of water and a little bowl. Next, she opens the chest at the foot of the bed, reaches within, and emerges with a set of clean, neatly-folded cloth pads. She stands irresolute for a heartbeat. Where to start? She gestures toward the warrior's knee, murmuring something barely below the threshold of speech. The warrior sits, carefully propping up the hand with the sword on the table so that it's not a threat to the girl while she works.

Serafina lays out her tools on the table and kneels before the warrior. She parts the severed trouser leg and gets her first good look at the knee. It looks horrible. She reaches up for the flask, and the warrior catches it up in a practiced hand, levering it open and pouring a couple fingerwidths of water into the bowl with efficiency and no waste. The only sound is the water gurgling quietly. Serafina picks up a pad with care, dips it into the water, and bends to her task again.

Her hands begin to shake. Her mouth tightens into a firm line, and she wills herself to stillness. She begins to sponge away the blood, and in the light of the lamp, she begins to ascertain that perhaps the leg hasn't been severed after all. The warrior's breathing is steady, controlled. She hasn't taken Serafina's head, and the girl begins to concentrate on her task.

"Does it hurt?" Serafina murmurs, surprised at her boldness.

The warrior shakes her head quickly. "You've a light touch."

"My mother was a conjure-woman," Serafina remarks conversationally.

"How nice for you," the warrior replies with courtesy.

"They hanged her for a witch," Serafina adds.

"How nice for you," the warrior shoots back. Serafina glances upward unwillingly, blinking, and the warrior grunts, "You've nothing more they can take from you."

The shock is heavy and powerful, and this from a stranger...! After a moment, caught in that furious green gaze, Serafina drops her eyes to the wound again. It's cleaning nicely, no fresh blood running through it. She finishes her sponging and gets to her feet, turning.

The warrior catches her wrist with the strong hand not currently holding a blood-smeared sword. Serafina looks away, not willing to face her. "I've treated you with scant courtesy, lady," says the warrior in a barely audible voice. "I should thank you for your kindness to a foreigner."

Serafina pulls her wrist away gently, not wanting to, and the warrior opens her hand. There's a mark of blood on Serafina's wrist, perhaps the warrior's and perhaps one of her victims', and the nausea hits her abruptly. "I must fetch salve," Serafina says, her mouth gone dry.

She crosses the room and opens the chest by the bed again. This time, it takes some rummaging before her hand closes on the box she knows by touch. She draws it free with care and returns to the table, kneeling. The little box, with its closely-fitted lid, gives her some trouble in the opening, and she wonders what the warrior will think of her competence. Eventually she gets it open, taking up some of the salve on the next folded cloth.

As she strokes the salve onto the wound, touching as lightly as she can, the warrior draws a breath and shifts. Serafina freezes in mid-move, not looking into the warrior's face, and the voice that answers her stillness is abrupt but intimate. "I ask your pardon, lady. It's no lack of skill on your part, but I must clean the blade." Serafina raises her eyes. The warrior is holding a supple piece of leather and a tiny bottle.

The warrior lays the leather in her lap, unstoppers the bottle with her teeth, and peels her hand from the hilt of the sword with a sickening little sound. She pours something thick and oily from the bottle onto the leather, repositions the sword, and begins to stroke it with the leather, as tenderly as Serafina has cleaned her knee. After a moment, watching the oil spread along the blade, polishing the gore free, Serafina bends to her own job again.

The sword is a handsbreadth from her face, and the warrior tends the blade with what looks like a lover's touch. Serafina finishes applying the salve and places another folded bit of cloth gently against the wound. She unfolds another cloth and contrives to tie it around the warrior's leg.

"Thank you," says the warrior, again that intimate murmur, and Serafina's eyes fill again, for no reason she can decipher. She blinks the tears away and nods, not trusting her voice to reply, then raises herself to her feet. She tries to move quietly, with a woman's grace, and knows she can never be that kind of woman.

Now what? Give her guest instructions not to use her knee for two days? Serafina doesn't even know if she's dressed the wound correctly, and she has no idea what to say. She misses her mother, who would have known precisely how to handle an injured swordswoman landing as a stranger in her house. Perhaps Serafina can hide her--it might work, as the wharf rats are still so frightened of this place that not one stick of her mother's costly furniture has passed through the doorway, to theft or mindless destruction, since her death.

Something else occurs to her. The warrior has left near a score corpses cooling in the street. Serafina thinks, hard. Whom does she know who can help? No one. No one.

The warrior's sword gleams in the lamplight, perfectly pristine. One-handed, the warrior levers and unfastens and unties until she can pull the shoulder scabbard free of her cloak. She slides the now-shining blade home with a delicate little hiss and runs her hand over the shredded remains of her trouser leg. "You ponder something, lady," says the warrior, looking up at her with concentrated attention. "What?"

Serafina has to try a couple of times to get enough moisture in her mouth to speak. "The bodies. I have to go back for--"

"There'll be no bodies," the warrior growls, savage and hard again.

"No--no bodies?" Serafina asks, uncomprehending. "But--but I saw--"

"The war god will claim them for his own," the warrior spits, turning her head to stare into the little gleam from the lamp.

"Which war god?" Serafina asks.

"Ares," says the warrior, contempt dripping from her voice like the gore from her blade.

"You're Greek," Serafina says instantly.

The warrior turns her head and nails Serafina with a shrewd look. "I was once," she says, "but no more." She gets heavily to her feet, the cloak falling into the chair but the scabbard firmly clenched in her hand. Serafina moves out of her way hastily. The warrior shakes her head in dismissal. "To follow those gods is too hard a path."

"I thought they were all dead," Serafina says.

The warrior moves with ponderous stealth to the window. "Some gods are hard to kill." She wipes her forehead with her forearm and leans against the windowsill, looking down into the featureless night. "No matter how much they've asked for it," she adds bitterly.

"So are you, it seems," Serafina ventures, twisting her hands together nervously.

"Oh, aye," snorts the warrior, with a mirthless chuckle, gesturing with the scabbard. "Left pithed like a papyrus stalk, fit only to carve the deeds of heroes on, wandering the world with only a voice dinning in my ears to name me madwoman, and even that fading with time, to leave me solitary in my madness..." Her voice trails into a whisper, and she rests her head on the forearm propped against the window. Her face contracts with visible agony, and she squeezes her eyes shut and murmurs into the cold cosmos, "Oh, Xena..."

* * *

The awful moment stretches into endlessness, and Serafina is swept into a fresh sorrow, thinking of the death of her mother. She tries to block the sight from her treacherous memory: the creak of the rope, the inhuman angle of the neck, the hoarse caw of the impatient ravens. Perhaps this is why she's risked her life for a dangerous stranger: grief stamps itself on you, carves you through and through, and some folk endure while others bear soul-deep scars, stumbling their way through empty years of misery with eyes blinded by the tears they are too stricken to shed.

Like this one. Serafina's heart is hammering as she approaches the warrior. What would her mother say? Something soothing, no doubt. Something of comfort. And yet, was her mother ever shattered by something as big as this, an injury that kills but leaves you standing, able to walk and talk and slit others nave to crop as if you weren't minting that horror on the soul of some other innocent?

She remembers kneeling in that field, eyes dry but burning, picking up rocks to shoo the birds away, her aim growing more feeble over the days, until she was tossing pebbles a handspan in front of her, the birds having lost all fear and long since making their grisly feast.

"Why should a... dog," she murmurs, staring floorward but far from this quiet little room, "a horse, a... a rat have life... and thou no breath at all?"

The silence goes on, and still she cannot weep. Not weep for her dead mother, nor for the thoughtless presumption of the ravens who ripped her to a skeleton in the space between market-days, nor for the all too-evident grief of the terribly wounded warrior standing at her window. Serafina raises her eyes. The warrior is looking at her, a flicker of life in those dead green eyes.

When she speaks, it's unexpected. "That's poetic," the warrior says with a sardonic note, as if she's commenting on a spell of bad weather. "Where did you get it?"

Serafina raises her head. Degraded daughter of a hanged witch that she is, she is proud of her mother, and this one has no right, no right to mock. "I had some time to consider it, sitting by her gallows."

The warrior turns from the window, looking at Serafina as if for the first time. She takes her time to study the girl, and Serafina's face grows hot as she keeps her head up and her eyes on the warrior's. "A bard as well," the warrior says finally, laughing a nasty-sounding laugh. "Goddess Kali, totem of my hollowed soul, is this what you send to preserve my worthless life for another sunrise?" She shakes her head. "It seems there's still sport in playing tricks on me."

"I'm no trick!" Serafina spits before she can curb her tongue to wisdom.

The warrior shrugs in weariness. "As if that man at the tavern hasn't sold your innocence a dozen times over."

"He hasn't," Serafina says. Her compassion for the warrior has fled, leaving an ashen, bitter anger behind.

"It's no shame," the warrior says, in what might be an attempt at apology. "It's not as if a child has much choice, and you'd fetch a premium from an old man with a liking for unfledged girls--"

"He hasn't!" Serafina repeats through her teeth, clenching her fists.

The warrior looks a bit surprised. "He's missed a chance at some easy money, then--"

"Nobody wants the daughter of a witch," Serafina tells her in a low voice, not meeting the warrior's eyes.

The warrior makes a brusque gesture with the hand not holding the sword. "To a man who'd pay, flesh is flesh," she remarks in dismissal. "Witch, priestess, whor*, wife, girl, woman, queen, empress, it's all one."

"A witch hexes the manroot," Serafina says by way of explanation, "and it shrivels, blackens, and falls off."

The warrior bursts into a full-throated laugh, and a sparkle leaps to her eyes. It's the first sign of merriment Serafina has seen out of her. "By the gods," swears the warrior, "can there be a place on this weary old earth that still believes such things?"

Serafina shrugs, feigning the warrior's diffidence. "It's come in handy more than once."

The warrior regards her with what might well be dawning respect. "I can see where it would. My compliments on your cleverness, girl." She turns to the window again, gazing into the depths of the night, and adds, as if to herself, "Though innocence, when you come down to it, isn't so much of a loss..."

Serafina searches the warrior's form, outlined in lamplight against the darkness outside. "You don't believe that." She spoils what might be a moment of prescience by adding uncertainly, "Do you?"

The warrior sighs into the black starlit sky. "I'm trying."

Serafina turns away, gathering the stuff from the table. She gathers her courage and remarks casually, "Your friend may also be wounded."

"I have no friend," the warrior grunts, not turning from the window.

"The other warrior," Serafina adds, for the sake of clarification.

"Hm, hardly a warrior. A common tavern ruffian, braver by the pack than as a man--"

"Not them," Serafina says, waving her hand in the air as if to smooth a wax tablet. "I mean the woman who fought by your side."

The warrior spins, and the look she gives Serafina awakens her fear all over again. "What woman?"

"The woman who fought at your side," Serafina says, not understanding. "The one who moved like... like the smoke of Death herself. Did you not see her?"

The warrior takes the three paces across the room slowly enough to give Serafina time to send her soul to the gods. "There was no other woman."

"There was," Serafina says.

"There was no other woman," says the warrior through her teeth.

"There was," Serafina insists.

"You lie, girl." The glove is on her throat again, and she's against the wall, nowhere to flee. There's pure poison in the warrior's hiss. "You lie."

"I'm sick of lies," the girl whispers in terror, "and though I die for it, there was another woman there!"

The warrior's eyes are close enough for Serafina to see the madness smoldering within them. A muscle contracts in the livid face, and Serafina closes her eyes, vowing not to open them till her dying quivers force her eyelids apart. The warrior's horrible laugh, devoid of any hint of humor, is the last thing she expects to hear this side of the grave.

* * *

Serafina becomes aware that a few moments have passed. The hand has not tightened on her throat, nor has it shoved her back against the wall. Her heart still beats--she must be in danger, as it beats quickly, treacherously, thumping a painful music against her ribcage. She opens her eyes.

The warrior is looking away, and there is an astonishing look of shame in her face. She draws the glove from Serafina's throat with deliberation. Serafina's eyes close again, slowly.

When she opens them, the warrior has moved away, looking pained, stooped, and old. "I ask your pardon, lady," she whispers, almost too low even for Serafina's keen ears. "You've done nothing to deserve violence at my hands." Serafina runs trembling fingers over her throat; she's uninjured, and not even in pain. That's the kind of touch that could tickle a trout from a streambed, and she wonders where the warrior acquired such a skill.

The warrior seats herself again and props the wicked sword against the table. A silence takes over the room, and Serafina fancies she can hear the lampwick hissing. "You see," says the warrior abruptly, not looking at her, "there's one thing can shatter the heart quicker than grief. Aye, a thousand times quicker, and harder, too. And that's hope."

Serafina, unbalanced and dizzy, retorts without thinking, "And this is what you're like when you're not drunk?"

The warrior's smile holds the midnight weariness of a legion of mothers sitting by their children's deathbeds. "I deserve that, and worse besides." She lifts her head and gives Serafina a sane, haggard stare. "I'm not certain you aren't a prank of the gods, at that." She shrugs, eloquent killing hands waving with grace, and mutters, "Probably Artemis. That moldy-dugged hyena has had it in for me since the thing with the crows and the belt and whatnot at Brauronia..."

This is sound but no meaning to Serafina, and she fears the warrior is losing her grip on reality again. She crosses the room to kneel before the warrior and dares to lay a gentle hand on her uninjured knee. "If the gods were still living, surely they would strike you dead for blasphemy."

The warrior leans forward, moving slowly with touching consideration, and places a tender hand to Serafina's cheek. "How very young you are," she murmurs, searching Serafina's face with those keen green eyes. "And how virgin your faith. They've killed me a hundred times, girl, a thousand or more, killed me so often and so hurtfully that all I want now is a morsel of earth in a deserted square-dug garden where I can rest my bones till they crumble to dust. But that," she says, drawing back again, "is a fate reserved for those more fortunate than I."

Serafina prepares a response that leaves no doubt as to her opinion of the unattractiveness of self-pity, but then she recalls the bodies in the street and the warrior's evident skill. Before she knows it, she has decided; the words that leave her mouth surprise her even as she recognizes them as confirmation of her intent. "Something's been chasing you, no doubt," she says with a hint of her mother's hard-headed practicality. "My physick is rest."

The warrior gives her a disbelieving look, but Serafina is up and bustling, a thing she well knows how to do. She collects the cloths she used to clean the warrior's wound and sets them to soak in a small earthenware crock next to the door, then picks up the little box of her mother's ointment and returns it carefully to the chest. Girl, are you mad? her mind shrieks at her, but she commands it to clap its alehole shut. She considers for a moment before closing the lid of the chest, then reaches in and pulls out a soft sleepshift. Holding it out casually, she says without looking at the warrior, "This will be more comfortable than a travel-stained cloak and slashed trousers."

The shift doesn't leave her hand, and Serafina does not withdraw it; instead, she closes and latches the chest. Eventually, the shift slips softly from her hand, and Serafina busies herself with things that will keep her back turned a few more moments. When she turns, the warrior is standing barefoot next to the chair, wearing Serafina's mother's night-dress.

It suits her; she looks years younger, and it is possible now to believe she was indeed once a girl, not much older than Serafina. The battle-ready shoulders have softened, and the blonde hair has taken up glimmers from the lamp. Serafina pulls her headscarf from her hair and begins to unlace her bodice. The warrior turns and folds her clothing. Not looking at Serafina, she remarks, "I see you've only the one bed."

"Aye," Serafina says, not wanting to spook her, "but that'll do s'long as you refrain from attempting to murder me in the night." Or anything else, she is far too streetwise to add.

The warrior's answering laugh is gentle and self-mocking. "I promise you."

Serafina is in her nightshift now, and she moves the lamp to a table next to the bed, then turns down the covers. "Chamber-pot yonder in the corner, water in the pitcher by the window," she says easily. The warrior hasn't moved. "Yes?" Serafina inquires.

"You'd share your bed with a woman who tried to kill you?"

Serafina studies the slight, dangerous figure before her. "You've given your word," she says finally. "Did you not mean it?"

The warrior seems struck by this; she raises her chin with pride and regards Serafina solemnly. "Aye," she says. "Aye, I did."

"Well, then," Serafina says, climbing into the bed and patting it. "There are no bed-bugs, I can tell you; my mother wouldn't stand for 'em, nor will I."

The warrior hesitates again. Serafina is beginning to grow uncertain; the warrior is still much too close to the sword, and perhaps her madness is tidal or something. "What is it?" Serafina asks, not adding the word now.

"I've... I've a nighttime ritual," the warrior says, as if ashamed.

"Oh, is that all!" Serafina exclaims, relieved. "No matter, I do too, but I can give it up for a night if it disturbs y--" She sees that the warrior is looking first astonished, then highly entertained, and the blush creeps over Serafina's face, to her horror. "I--I mean... never mind what I mean."

"I'd wait all night, lady, for you to finish such a promising sentence," says the warrior, but the gleam of amusem*nt is back in her eye.

"Get in the damned bed before I make you sleep on the floor," Serafina growls, mortified.

The laugh that greets this only makes her more embarrassed. "You've no idea what it means to me to meet a girl with a spark of life in her," the warrior remarks. "That's not it," she continues gently. "It... it involves..." She gestures feebly, then finishes, "Music."

Serafina co*cks her head, looking much like a puzzled bird. "Music? What sort of music?"

"It's a... a sort of hymn," the warrior says.

"So you do follow a god," Serafina says, narrowing her eyes in assessment.

"Not a god," the warrior answers with swift softness, "a friend."

"I thought you didn't have one," Serafina shoots back before she can consider the wisdom of it.

"Not any more," says the warrior, and the cost of that is plain on her face.

She carves up ten men, Serafina thinks, yet honors a lost friend. This one may not be a threat after all. "Well," says Serafina reasonably, "you shall have to hymn your friend for the both of us, then."

The warrior nods brusquely and moves to the window. She stands looking up into the stars, then begins to sing. At first, she is hard to hear, but the voice grows in quiet power as she goes on. It's a song Serafina has never heard, captivatingly beautiful, and although the words are in a language she does not speak, she knows it instantly for what it is: a requiem.

Ah-weh, ah-weh nasree ahlee-ghahn

Todo noraban na mai non

Inyo

Ah-weh, ah-weh nasree ahlee-ghahn

Todo noraban na mai non

Trabian-eh nomion na lelaton

Tede dhe ghe-de na

Mai

Transfixed, Serafina listens, and when the hymn is finished, the warrior stands a moment at the window, looking upward, then turns, gathers the sword, props it carefully by the bedside, and climbs in next to Serafina. When she is settled, Serafina cups the little flame in tingling fingers and gently blows out the lamp.

* * *

She awoke to birdsong, and wondered at it. Usually, the monotonous cry of seabirds, which she'd heard lifelong to the point of obliviousness in her seaside village, was the accompaniment to her day. But this, a sweet and charming warble from a tiny throat, was something she couldn't remember having heard in a long time.

Serafina sat up, looking toward the song, and froze before her mind was able to tell her why. Sitting in the window was the warrior, fully dressed in dangerous black leather, and perched on her finger was a small songbird with a stellar pair of lungs. That wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was that the warrior was smiling.

It seemed impossible, but the terrifying vision of the night before was reclining in the windowframe, at ease, leaning a little bit over the mightily twittering songstress and stroking its tiny breast with a gentle, highly non-homicidal finger. The bird wasn't very colorful, the dull gray of a cloudy winter sky over the harbor, but its song made up for that. Its eye was like a little drop of pure onyx, shiny and purposeful, and Serafina held her breath lest she disturb the unexpected concert.

Serafina was unable to stop her mouth from stretching wide in a smile, though, and a sweet, unfamiliar feeling pierced her as she watched the warrior, whose only purpose in life at the moment seemed to be providing a perch from which the little bird could sing. After a few more moments of pure, joyous music, the songbird co*cked her head as if studying the warrior for suspicious intent, then launched backward off her finger and disappeared into the clear new air of the morning.

The warrior turned her head to watch, and the sunlight tangled its bright beams in her soft blonde hair. She betrayed no trace of pain from her injured leg, but Serafina noticed that the fearsome sword was near the warrior's hand, scabbard reclining at the ready against the wall. It looked twice as dangerous by daylight. The warrior turned back to the bed, and Serafina was terribly afraid she would glower, but her smile didn't dim as she said to her host, "Good morning. I hope I didn't wake you."

"Good morning," Serafina replied. "And it wasn't you, it was her. Do you charm the birds, too, in addition to your other talents?"

The warrior laughed. "No, no," she said, holding up her hands. "Sometimes they come. I don't know what it is."

"I do," Serafina retorted with a girl's stubborn confidence. "It means you have more friends than you think."

The warrior's smile vanished, and Serafina cursed her treacherous mouth, striking herself in the forehead. "Stupid, stupid girl," she whispered to herself, but the sight of the bird and the warrior had brought her woefully close to inexplicable tears, and she turned away to hide them, throwing the covers wide. Best to get this day started... When she turned, the warrior was standing right in front of her, and Serafina had to swallow a startled gasp.

"Not stupid," said the warrior in a soft voice, reaching for her shoulders. Serafina was terribly afraid this was going to end in a kiss, and at about the same time, she was struck by a sudden need for the chamber pot. The warrior appeared oblivious to her distress. "Not stupid," the warrior repeated. "Kind." Her hands were warm on Serafina's bare skin, and the pressure of those hands on her shoulders made her pulse race. "And courageous. A tiger's heart, wrapped in a poet's hide."

"Hm?" said Serafina, resolved to put off her emergency as long as she could, for this looked as to where it could get interesting.

"Well," replied the warrior with diffidence, "you sleep all night next to a woman with a sword."

"Oh, that," said Serafina, moving past as gracefully as she could on her way to the corner. The warrior saw where she was headed and turned away with unspoken courtesy, giving her her privacy. So she's well reared, too, Serafina thought, putting clues together. She continued, "You'd given your word, and if you'd killed me in the dark, 'twould have meant the end of my loneliness, and your own broken vow to settle with yourself."

"Are you so lonely, then?" asked the warrior, not turning from where she was studying something on the night table.

It was rather an intimate question to answer, considering the circ*mstances, and Serafina hesitated before replying. The warrior evidently took her silence for reticence rather than embarrassment, and said hastily, "I've a bigger mouth than our feather-covered visitor, lady. Please forgive me."

"Perhaps you could save the questions for breakfast instead," Serafina said, her face growing hot, and what she could see of the warrior's face split in a grin.

"Agreed, lady."

Serafina was happy to move on to washing her face and combing her hair, and she took care of that while the warrior was bundling up her cloak. There was no longer a bloody slash in the knee of her trousers, and Serafina marveled at it; why, she must have been up with the songbird, mending so well Serafina couldn't tell there had ever been a tear. That didn't explain how she'd contrived to wash the blood out, though; the cloth looked bone-dry. The warrior stopped this speculation by sliding the sword out of its scabbard and inspecting it closely in the light from the window, and Serafina's heart raced again, this time for quite a different reason.

Serafina took up the vessel in which she'd put the soiled rags she'd used the night before. She peered into the vessel, half expecting to see pristine cloth, but the mess in the crock convinced her she hadn't dreamed the dreamy scene of cleaning the wound the night before. She turned, and the warrior was making the bed with care and precision. The sight of it, the dangerous stranger occupied in such domesticity, rattled her, and she spoke before she thought it through.

"We ought to look at your knee," Serafina said. The warrior threw a sharp look her way, and Serafina inquired meekly, "Oughtn't we?"

The warrior spread her hands. "You're the physician." She sat on the newly-made bed and pulled the end of her trouser-leg from her boot. Serafina put the crock on the floor again and drew near the bed, bending to untie the bandage and peel the dressing carefully from the wound.

It looked sore and puffy, a real strike from a capable swordsman, but the ointment had done its work, and it was well on the way to healing. Serafina sighed a sigh she didn't know had escaped her, and the warrior caught up her hand. When Serafina raised reluctant eyes to the warrior's face, the warrior murmured, "Thank you. I've seldom been so well tended."

Nearly a-drown in the warrior's lovely green eyes, Serafina whispered, "You're welcome."

The warrior didn't let her go, though. She ran her thumb along the leather of Serafina's bond bracelet. "Is this what I think it is?"

"Yes," Serafina said, shame flooding her chest.

"Who holds your bond?" the warrior asked, but her voice was mild and kind, and she might have been commenting on the weather.

"Harrel," Serafina said, staring at the floor. "The man who owns the tavern."

"You're freeborn?" the warrior asked, and Serafina nodded, dreading the next question. It wasn't long in coming, and when it did, it was accompanied by the warrior's hand on her chin, turning her face toward the light. "And how did this come about?"

"He... he was my mother's lover," Serafina said, looking up into those wise eyes, "and he paid for her funeral. And her taxes."

"Ah," said the warrior. And that was all. She opened her hand, and Serafina pulled away.

Serafina went back to the chest for more dressings and the box of her mother's ointment. It was a relief not to have to talk about it any more. Cleaning and dressing the warrior's knee occupied some minutes, and Serafina kept her eyes on her task. When she was done, the warrior rolled the trouser-leg down again and tucked it into her boot. Serafina reached out as if on a dare and ran her hand across the fabric, lightly.

"Yes?" inquired the warrior.

"I--I was wondering how you mended it so quickly," Serafina said, face a-flush with heat.

"I didn't," replied the warrior, nodding toward the bundled-up cloak in the corner. "I've another pair."

Serafina goggled at her like a fish. "Why, you're rich!"

The warrior's face registered astonishment, then she broke into a sumptuous singer's laugh. It sounded like she'd laughed a great deal in her life, and as if she was badly out of practice. "If that's what passes for wealth in this bottomless pit of unfulfilled need," she said easily, hopping up from the bed, "then I think it's past time for us to get out of here."

"'Us'?" Serafina asked.

"Aye," said the warrior, as if everything had been long since decided. "Unless you'd care to stay?"

Serafina looked around her. It was her mother's house, true, and she did have some lovely things, but...

She saw herself abruptly, a much older-looking woman, Harrel's second wife after the apoplectic death of his harridan first, his half-stranger brats swinging from her skirts as she swept the tavern offal into the gutter of the street that was all she had known for years and years, and would be all she would ever know if she didn't do something now. She looked around the room again, and the warrior was picking up her bundled cloak, tidily slipping her arm into the harness about the scabbard, reaching for a tightly-packed bag she slung over her shoulder.

She might kill me, at that, Serafina thought, but that thought quickly gave way to another: but to be the victim of a warrior like this is better than to be a tavernkeeper's wife, a hundred times over!

"No," she said, and the warrior was moving toward the door.

"Well, then," she said. "First off, we go redeem your bond."

As she went out after the warrior, Serafina remembered to snatch up the crock so she could set it by the washtub.

* * *

The warrior had a ground-covering stride not often seen in a port town, where life beyond the docks was breeze-kissed, sea-lapped, and decidedly mellow. The warrior didn't seem interested in adopting the local pace; she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, moving with purpose. It looked as though she'd had a lot of practice striding across deserts and the like. Serafina wondered, while she struggled to keep up on the familiar walk from her mother's house to the tavern, what a desert was like. Recalling the various details she'd heard from wayfarers at the tavern kept her occupied during what would otherwise have been a distressing trip.

She had no trouble following the warrior with her eyes; the short blonde hair and the hilt of the sword drew her on like a needle to a lodestone. Why did someone of her obvious wealth and strength not have a horse?

They turned the corner, the warrior moving with unerring, uncanny precision toward the tavern. Serafina had been making the walk twice a day for many seasons, but the warrior appeared far more sure of the way than the little barmaid. Serafina put on a burst of speed and caught up just as the warrior seized the handle of the door and threw it wide.

Inside, Harrel's wife Johanna was sweeping up the last of the evening's leavings, her habitual sour expression firmly in place on a discouraging face. She didn't look up as she snapped, "Not open for custom till--"

"Get your man," interrupted the warrior.

Johanna's head turned, and her eyes widened as she took in the sight of the black-clad menace in the doorway. Then she saw Serafina, meek and mute at the warrior's side, and her mouth tightened in a thin line. Johanna gave the warrior another look, this one more assessing, and Serafina's face flooded with heat.

"He's in bed," Johanna said brusquely. "He works hard."

"I don't care if he's in bed with the Empress Theodosia, giving his pitiful little pickle the workout of a lifetime," replied the warrior. "I asked for a report on neither his location nor his work habits. Fetch your man." The cheerful seducer of songbirds had vanished under a visible anger cold as a sword blade.

Johanna lifted the broom as if thinking it over.

"Woman," said the warrior, "you'd better be as good with that broom as I am with this blade." She made no move for the sword. Serafina sidled away a couple of steps, not daring to stay close, but not bold enough to run for the constable.

Johanna set the broom on the table with a profound sigh, then lifted her head to the warrior. "D'you mean to kill him?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said the warrior. "Do you want me to?"

"Johanna," said a sharp voice, "don't try wits with her. She's dangerous." Harrel entered the room from the back door, and the warrior settled into an easy stance, hands at her belt.

"You can leave us now, Johanna," said the warrior, nodding toward the back door. Hesitantly, Johanna left the room, throwing one last poisonous glare at Serafina.

The warrior turned to Harrel. "You sent a crew of assassins after me last night."

"I did no such thing," Harrel said with quiet self-possession, and Serafina wondered if the scars on his face came from following the same profession as the black-clad Fury before him. "I don't command those men."

"You didn't stop them," the warrior pointed out.

"No," Harrel agreed instantly. "They number a dozen. I couldn't have stopped 'em if I'd a mind to."

"Nor did you issue a warning," the warrior said. There was no warmth in her voice, for all her conversational mien. "For that I had to rely on this girl." She jerked her head toward Serafina, who badly wished she was anywhere else just that instant. "She did me the life-saving courtesy you denied me."

"Will you take my head for it, lady knight?" Harrel asked bluntly. Serafina tried to hide her horror.

"I've something else in mind," said the warrior. "You hold this girl's bond."

"Aye," he agreed with mild agreeableness, and Serafina had an insight as to how this rough little spot in a tumbledown tangle of wharf rats so seldom got violent.

"How much is it?" asked the warrior.

"Twenty-three crowns," he said.

The warrior's eyebrows shot up, and Serafina swallowed her shock. How could her mother have ended up owing such a sum to the tax collector? As if she'd heard Serafina's thoughts, the warrior asked, "How so?"

"Taxes," said Harrel.

"On what?" the warrior inquired, implacable.

"The... the house she lived in," Harrel said, reluctant for the first time, "plus the doss-house, the brothel, a couple of the wharves, two storehouses, and... and the tavern."

Serafina's mouth fell open, and the warrior too seemed stunned. "Well... then..." blustered the warrior, attempting to gather her wits, "which of those properties, if sold, would have satisfied the tax collector?"

Harrel sighed, the weight of years coming off him. "Any of 'em," he said.

"Did you know of this?" the warrior demanded, fixing Serafina with a furious eye.

Serafina shook her head, hard. She turned on Harrel. "My mother... owned... the brothel?"

Harrel nodded, and the rage began to rise behind Serafina's eyelids.

"So," said the warrior in summary, "instead of telling this lady she was a wealthy woman, and caring for her as the wise adviser her mother's lover should be, you put her under bond and claimed her property?"

Harrel said, "You see, my wife--"

The warrior chopped the air with a black-gloved hand. "Lay none of this at the feet of your lady, whose sole concern was that I should leave you alive, misguided though that goal strikes me. The decision was yours, man, and you went along with it." She glanced at Serafina, who could feel the hot blood climbing into her cheeks. "We'll leave till later the question of how you could do such a thing. For now..." The warrior opened a little square purse at her belt and began hauling out bright golden coins, which she stacked on the table.

Johanna crept back into the room, and the warrior seemed pleased to see her. "Ah, excellent. Johanna, I charge you with this: pay this girl's bond and have it recorded, then manage her properties with care until her return."

"Aye," said Johanna, her eyes on the coins.

"I'll know if you've kept faith," the warrior warned her.

"You may count on me as you count them coins," Johanna said stubbornly, looking her straight in the eye. (Which took some courage.)

"Is she reliable?" the warrior asked Serafina.

"Yes," Serafina said instantly. "Tough, but fair."

"And now to you," the warrior said venomously to Harrel, who looked ready to wet his pants. "You've some important things to learn about responsibility, little man. Starting now." The warrior drew a knife, and Serafina shied away from the imminent carnage, but the warrior approached her and held out the hand not currently burdened with a knife. "Give me your hand," the warrior commanded.

Serafina held out her hand, and the warrior took it. "Do you trust me?" the warrior asked softly, looking her in the face.

"I have, and with more than my hand," Serafina murmured, and the warrior smiled, slipped the knife down her wrist, and slit the bond bracelet. She gathered it up as Serafina lifted her wrist, which now felt as if an anvil had been removed from it.

The warrior turned and tossed the bond bracelet to Harrel. "That's yours from now on. You serve at this lady's pleasure," she said, nodding at Serafina, "and when she is no longer pleased, then you die." Serafina caught her breath; the warrior ignored her. "Do you require any additional clarification?"

"No," Harrel said.

"Let's go," said the warrior.

* * *

The warrior turned as if she were on a Roman parade ground and vanished through the doorway. After one horrified moment staring at one another, Serafina and Harrel hurried out the door after her.

The warrior hadn't so much as glanced over her shoulder. Serafina found herself gasping as she tried to keep up. The idlers and wastrels watched them with curiosity as they passed.

"Lady Knight--" called a voice from behind them, and the warrior spun on one heel. Her face was pleasant enough, and she said, "Yes?"

Johanna caught up with them, and Serafina was sourly pleased to see that she too was out of breath. "I've a question," she said, twisting her hands together.

The warrior gave her no encouragement, and Johanna sputtered for a while like a careless mule who's misjudged the distance 'twixt trough and nostril. "Wh-when will you return?" she managed at length.

The warrior put out a hand and clapped Johanna on the shoulder. "You won't know the day, nor the hour," she replied.

Johanna didn't look happy, but she did have the virtue of persistence in the presence of arms. "And... and Harrel travels with you?"

The warrior nodded once in confirmation. "As this lady's bondsman."

The idlers paid more attention. Johanna turned to Harrel, and deep in her eyes Serafina thought she saw both pity and contempt. "And so my gods win after all," she said. "Serve her well and perhaps they will have mercy on you."

"You worthless hag-spawned--" Harrel spat. How he would have finished the sentence remained a mystery, for the warrior had him on his knees in an instant, and by a method no more remarkable than a handclasp. (At any rate, that was what it looked like to Serafina.) The crowd began to murmur, and a number of them made the little hand movements that told Serafina the wagers were starting. Harrel, caught in the warrior's grip, commenced to tremble, and thereafter to sweat, but the warrior, with a cheery look, gestured with her free glove, and Johanna paid him no more mind.

Instead, Johanna turned to Serafina and took her hand with the gentlest touch the girl had felt in a long time. "I'm sorry, my dear," Johanna said. "Your mother--such a beautiful woman--she was always kind to the ugliest little girl in the school, and for that, I've repaid her memory ill. I'll make this place something for you to return to with pride."

Serafina's brain went like the breeze, scattered here and there and unable to frame a coherent response. "Sell that damned cat-house," she heard herself say.

"Aye, it'll be done," Johanna said. She glanced at Harrel. "I'm sorry for you too, former husband, but if you'd behaved like a man you needn't now be yoked like an ox."

"Tell her thank you, bondsman," the warrior said.

"Thank you," Harrel ground out, though his teeth chopped the words to bits. The crowd laughed.

Johanna gave him one last eloquent look, then marched away with her shoulders high and her back straight. She whistled between her fingers, and a number of idlers turned her way. She flapped a hand at a man Serafina knew slightly, a strong fellow with a good brain between his ears. "Hi! Wolfrum, I've need of thee and thy strong back. We're going to be working together..." Wolfrum fell in beside her, and Johanna's first set of instructions faded into the laughter and chatter of the crowd.

The warrior smiled at the retreating form, then took her hand from Harrel's. He caught his breath with a shudder and squeezed his wrist with his uninjured hand. The warrior, ignoring his evident agony, jerked her arm upwards in Serafina's direction. "Off we go."

"But--but--where?" Serafina asked, hurrying after. Harrel scrambled to his feet and stumbled in their wake.

"Why," said the warrior, "to my ship." Serafina, struck dumb by this, noted only that the warrior seemed to be enjoying herself thoroughly.

* * *

Afterwards, when she thought of that short walk to the docks, Serafina remembered it as a procession. She was wearing the day gown she wore for housekeeping and other chores, neither so low-cut nor so high-skirted as what Harrel insisted she wear at the tavern. She also had her tattiest headscarf on. But in her memories, she held herself like a queen, like royalty, and the warrior acted as honor guard at her side, Harrel a careful two steps behind and to her left, and people hastened out of their way and shot them envious glances. The patched and faded skirt, little holes left by sparks spit from the hearth and stains here and there, fluttered through her remembrance like the costliest, most sumptuous silk. As they went, she fancied she heard music.

It must have been the ship.

Yes, that was it. For when they rounded the street running past the import houses (two of which, she had recently learned, were hers), the ship attracted her sight for the first time.

The air of magic surrounding her on her walk from obscurity into something quite different radiated outward with the waves quietly sent forth from the hull. The bow was pointed toward the open sea, and the stern faced the row of buildings fronting the harbor. The ship rode high but looked fast, and she was stylish and foreign and very clean. Her sails were furled, but a bright pennant snapped and fluttered in the fresh breeze. On it was a design she didn't recognize, something approximating two crossed battleaxes and what looked remarkably like breasts (but surely couldn't have been) in a circle. On the stern were letters like the ones the Romans made, and she was able to puzzle out, but not understand, the name: AMAZON QUEEN.

What seemed like dozens of people were on her decks and in her rigging, moving with purpose on errands she was easily able to identify after a lifetime at the docks: repairing sails, inspecting cargo, stowing provisions, mending lines. As they approached, a head popped up out of the rolled-up canvas at midmast, and a strong, youthful voice called, "Boooooooard!"

Whoever it was doing the yelling leapt nimbly over the yard and snatched up a line, then dropped into empty space. It was a man in a white shirt and dark trousers, and on his head was a tightly-knotted scarf, much like Serafina's, that covered most of his hair. She had a brief impression of muscles and athleticism, but that was all she had time for. She caught her breath at his recklessness right about the time she spotted the barrel rising into the air as the person on the other end of the line sped toward the deck.

Up on the yard, two other sailors caught the barrel on its flight upward, and the man landed lightly on the deck with the grace of a cat. He handed the line behind him without looking; another of the well-trained sailors took it, and together she and the sailors on the yard carefully lowered the barrel back to the deck.

Meanwhile, the man in the headscarf had approached the rail and was looking down at the warrior and her two guests. It looked as though a wave of relief went over his face, but it vanished in an instant, leaving Serafina wondering if she'd really seen it. "Good morning!" he called to the warrior, raising two fingers to his forehead to salute her with relatively casual respect.

The warrior held up a hand against the sun and grinned up at the man. "A fine morning to you too. How goes it?"

"Excellent well," he said, moving down the rail to the gang, which ran out to the dock. "We're about re-provisioned and should be ready to leave tomorrow morning." He co*cked his head to the side and looked at Serafina with a welcoming, curious look and a thoroughly unthreatening smile.

Her first thought was that he was very handsome, and her second that he seemed friendly. The warrior noted the look he gave Serafina, and said, "This lady will be traveling with us." She jerked her head at Harrel, adding, "And her bondsman." Her voice sounded dry and flat.

"Welcome aboard the Amazon Queen, finest ship on the seven seas." The man bowed with elaborate courtesy, one leg well to the fore and his hand sweeping behind him into the air. She noticed that he was barefoot. "Not that I'm partial or anything," he said, striding down the gang to join them on the dock.

As he got closer, Serafina could see his eyes, which were a deep, rich green. His hair was curly and black, shading into a lovely eye-catching silver at the temples. She couldn't decide whether the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were the result of squinting into the seaside sun or laughter; she hoped it was the latter. Her eye drifted from there to the muscles beneath the sun-kissed skin of his shoulders and arms, and she almost missed his next words.

"And the lady's quarters?" She knew he was talking to the warrior, but she had the oddest impression that he was paying attention only to her presence.

"She can take the cabin next to mine," said the warrior.

"Excellent," he said, nodding. "And how does Her Ladyship prefer to be addressed?"

It was a thoroughly ridiculous question, seeing as how she was in the dress she used to clean the house, and she had a brief suspicion that he was laughing at her. He seemed to be waiting for an answer, and it seemed as though the whole world would wait while she gathered her wits, so she said, "Serafina."

"An honor," said the man, holding his hand to his chest and making a less elaborate but no less courteous bow. "My name is Alcibiades."

* * *

"Serafina," murmured the warrior, turning to her. The warrior's eyes were a little less hunted, a little more peaceful, and Serafina thought, Of course, she's home. "Here I've spent a night and a morning with you, and I didn't think to ask."

"It's... that's all right," Serafina said, flustered. She turned to the preposterous acrobat in the headscarf, and he had a pleased grin on his face, bright white teeth agleam in his tanned face. The blood rushed to Serafina's face, and she wondered what he was thinking.

"And now you're coming with us," he said, right on the spot, and Serafina ducked her head.

The warrior laughed. "The one adventure you've not yet had in my company, eh, Alci?" she said easily. "A pretty girl at the taffrail, warbling a soprano counterpoint to your tenor melody?"

He held up a finger as if testing the air. "Aye, remind me to thank you for that."

The warrior nodded in Serafina's direction. "She's poet enough for us all, but I haven't asked whether she can sing."

"Can you?" Alcibiades asked her, all attention.

She got self-conscious again, blushing like the girl she suddenly no longer wanted to be. "I... I haven't learnt anything of music, not temple-like music."

He shrugged, but he looked as if he was considering this seriously. "Temples aren't the only place to make music," he said, and her face grew even hotter. "But there's time to try your pitch." He turned to the warrior. "Shall I show Her Ladyship to her cabin?"

"Yes, do that," the warrior said. "She hasn't had breakfast yet, either."

"But I--" Serafina said. The two of them, the warrior and the acrobat, regarded her attentively, and she wondered if she would ever stop blushing. "I ought to go home for a bit and get--"

She didn't quite know how to finish the sentence. She'd left the laundry by her washtub, and she probably ought to pick up some clothing for the journey, not that she had anything worth wearing... and then... then there were her mother's things. Which to take? Which to leave? It was only at that moment that she realized she really was intending to follow the dangerous stranger away from the only home she'd ever had, and the prospect made her a little dizzy.

"Quite right," said the warrior, snapping her fingers. "Alci, have you seen to things well enough here?"

Alcibiades swung round and studied the busy sailors on the deck of the Amazon Queen. "I think they've got it well in hand," he said. "I can always threaten 'em with a thrashing."

"Don't worry," said the warrior, leaning to murmur close to her ear, "Alci only blusters, it hasn't happened yet."

"Don't tell them," said Alcibiades, wagging a finger at her. "They've little enough respect as it is." He went back up the gang, gathered the sailors with a handclap, and spoke to them for a bit.

"Bondsman," said the warrior abruptly, and Harrel, who hadn't made a sound, tensed. "You're to do all the porting. Whatever she wants." Her voice and eyes alike had gone cold again.

"Aye," said Harrel, quietly enough.

Alcibiades came back down the gang and joined them on the dock. In one hand, he was carrying stockings and boots, and as Serafina watched in delight, he juggled the boots one-handed while slipping the stockings onto his feet, then dropped each boot in turn and slid a foot into it, finally stamping them into place with an adroit little dance. "Shall we?" He indicated the end of the dock with a conjurer's wave.

"Alci, see to it this cur learns some manners," the warrior said.

"It'll be done," Alcibiades replied instantly, and Serafina noted in apprehension that he had laid his hand on the hilt of what she was certain was a highly effective knife in a leather case at his hip. He gave Harrel a look like a cat watching a mousehole. "She'll not have cause to complain of thee, will she, bondsman?"

"No," Harrel said. Serafina glanced at him, and his lips were ashen. She almost felt sorry for him.

"Your Ladyship?" said Alcibiades courteously, and she fell into step beside him, the sullen, silent Harrel following two steps behind.

* * *

The walk to her house had never sped by as it did that last morning before her departure. Beside her, the handsome, voluble fellow in the headscarf kept up a running commentary liberally spiced with respectful compliments.

Just now, he was commenting on something she'd said in answer to one of his frequent questions. "Lived all your days by the sea, and never sailed her?" He shook his head in sorrow. "Now, that is a pity. Ah, you'll love it--the freshness of the air, the sparkle of the sunlight on the waves, the rush of water bubbling up under the keel--"

"Suppose I get sea-sick?" she asked, smiling just a little in the face of his relentless optimism.

"Sea-sick? Your Ladyship?" He shook his head again, and she noticed for the first time a small gold ring in his earlobe glittering in the strong sunlight. "No, you've a healthy look and a strong constitution. Sea-sick? Not a chance!" He smiled at her once more, as he'd done frequently during the walk, and she wondered if she would ever get tired of seeing it. "Lethe told me before she boarded that she got horribly sea-sick, and so far, I've seen no sign of it..." He knocked at his head with his knuckles, a gesture she didn't recognize, even though it made her laugh. "Must be the sweet rocking of the Amazon Queen, who slips over the waves with the grace of a gull--"

"Lethe?" interrupted Serafina with eagerness. "Is that the captain's name?"

"I take it you two wasted little time talking," he said wryly, and Serafina blushed again, not certain how to answer so he wouldn't get the wrong idea. "Aye, well, it's my mistress's name," he said with a shrug, "but not the captain's. The ship's mine."

Serafina came to a halt in the middle of the road, and Harrel, plodding like a donkey behind them, almost bumped into her. "Have a care, bondsman," Alcibiades said in warning, and Harrel stuttered some form of apology and backed up, his eyes on the blade. Alcibiades turned to Serafina, saying, "This bondsman of yours seems a bit clumsy for a lady. Are you certain you wouldn't rather have another?"

Harrel gave her a beseeching look that almost made her laugh. "He hasn't been a bondsman long," she said, waving a hasty, dismissive hand, as if to banish an uninteresting subject. "The Amazon Queen belongs to you? You're her captain?"

"Indeed, Your Ladyship," he said, nodding a nod that would have looked smug in someone without such pretty green eyes. He held out a hand in their direction of travel, and Serafina began walking again. "I've been tossed out of so many places in my life that it seemed wise to make a home only Athirat the Sea Goddess herself could pitch me from."

"Temper?" she asked, quirking an eyebrow at him, and he laughed.

"No, no. A life in the bosom of Athirat leaves no one so foul-livered as to take up the hobby of tavern-brawling." His tongue ticked deliciously over the name of his goddess, and Serafina wondered what he would sound like singing. "The sea accepts those the land won't abide."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

His only answer was a shrug, and she grew embarrassed at the thought that she might have brought up something he didn't care to discuss. Perhaps he was a lover of men; that was enough to get a man jumped in her town, and she couldn't believe that the sailors she'd known, who were so rough in Harrel's tavern, would behave any better elsewhere. But if he was, that didn't explain the warrior's comment about his delight in sailing with a pretty girl...

Lethe. The name sang in her head. She'd never heard of anyone called Lethe and had no idea what it meant. Lethe. Alcibiades. And now Serafina.

She straightened her shoulders, lengthened her stride, and walked beside him the rest of the way to her house.

* * *

It seemed that day as though they climbed through fields of green and gold, which, in truth, were just the same sea-grasses and perky little flowers that had marked the path to her mother's house forever. But today there was adventure in the air, sudden wealth, a strong warrior for a friend, the promise of a future. And him.

She hadn't been prey to the girlish fancies of the friends she'd left behind as they took a far different path. While she learned to scrub barware, they'd continued their handclap games, skip-rope, pinching their cheeks into flushed life like the subtle cosmetics of the fancy women they weren't permitted to discuss, giggling behind their hands as handsome passersby threw them daring looks they didn't yet understand. The imaginary lovers, the speculation about wedding nights, the improbable fantasies of romance. It struck a chasm between them like the bolt from a god's trident. First she envied them, then she tired of their prattle, then she missed them. It would have been good to have a friend.

Like Alcibiades, walking easily by her side, talking even more easily. He made her laugh, and she tried in return to make him laugh, rewarded again and again by the sight of his crinkle-eyed grin. He hadn't so much as touched her shoulder, a distinct departure from the men at the tavern, who often left her bottom black and blue at the end of a weary evening of threading her way around them, as if she were a coney and they setting casual snares, as if she existed for no other reason than to feed them her flesh.

He became more formal as they approached the house, and he drew aside at the steps to let her go first. She held her skirts at a careful angle, trying not to seem flirtatious, and preceded him up the steps. Behind them, Harrel stopped with his hand on the rail. She turned and nodded to him, a little flustered, and he joined them on the porch.

She opened the door and went in, heading past the stairs in the direction of the kitchen behind the house. She didn't hear anyone behind her and halted, peeking around the corner. Alcibiades was standing in the doorway, and he looked like he might wait for a hundred years.

"C-come in," she said, waving a nervous little gesture in his direction. He stepped through the doorway and was in her house for the first time.

"This is lovely," he said, turning his head this way and that.

"I--I have washing," she said, and instantly wanted to slap herself for her foolishness.

Alcibiades lifted a shoulder. "So have your man fetch it to the ship and we'll do it there." He wandered to her mother's worship corner and looked it over curiously without touching anything. "You'll love it," he said, a little absently. "We pitch it into a fish-cage and trail it seaside from a line till it's clean. No scrubbing..."

He turned toward the doorway, where a shadow showed her Harrel peering in cautiously. "Not till you're bid, bondsman," Alcibiades said.

Serafina remembered the times Harrel had crossed that threshold in the past, and the nausea perked in her a bit. "I'll fetch my... mother's..." But he had turned to her with his easy smile and his dark curly hair, a little more curled with the sweat he'd accumulated on the walk, and her mouth quit working. She harrumphed a little and made for the stairs.

"May I help?" Alcibiades inquired.

"Yes," she said, little more than a whisper.

He turned to lift a finger at Harrel, waiting outside. "In. Port as you're intended to, bondsman, or between Lethe and me we shall see which you lose first, your only working eye or your less than gorgeous head."

Harrel didn't look happy, but he came in and joined them at the foot of the stairs. "This way," she murmured, as if there was more than one path upstairs. Alcibiades walked up the stairs behind her, Harrel behind him, crowded as far to the left as he could get without falling off. The prospect of Harrel doing himself an injury cheered her more than she thought it would.

They turned at the top of the stairs and she opened the door. Inside the room was as she remembered it not three hours ago: the open window at which Lethe had sung the night before, and where she'd heard an answering song this morning; the chest with the rags she'd used to tend the wound; the neatly-made bed, Lethe's unspoken gift to her host.

The ointment. She needed the ointment. She went to the chest, opened the lid, and pulled out the little box. In the chest were also her mother's blanket--surely they had blankets aboard the ship--and her lovely soft boots, which Serafina hadn't been able to bring herself to wear, but they might come in handy on a ship. And then there was Serafina's night-dress, hanging on a hook beside the bed. She'd need that... Irresolute, she held the lid of the chest open and stared across the room at her night-dress.

Impossible. I can't pack this to take on a ship, and I don't know what to take...

But she looked into the chest, picking up this and that and putting them down again. She placed the little box atop her mother's blanket and drew out the boots, weighing them in one hand.

I cannot, I cannot. I shall have to tell Lethe I cannot go with her...

That didn't seem right; what was left to her in this town? But perhaps she was no longer a barmaid... except that Harrel would never leave her in peace after this, not after losing her properties and having everyone on the docks see him as her thrall. It would seem that, perhaps, she didn't have a choice about leaving.

Something at the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she turned her head. Alcibiades was approaching, and she lowered the lid of the chest hastily. He caught it with one hand, and she quit shoving.

"Would you like to take the whole chest?" he asked in a voice loud enough only for her to hear.

She lowered her eyes, which made her instantly aware of a trim, well-muscled abdomen where his shirt met his wide belt. She looked up into his face, which was even worse. The kind, generous smile, just a shade weary, the silver at his temples, the tanned skin... His green eyes, dark in the gloom of the quiet bedroom, were framed by lovely lashes as long as a girl's.

She was unable to utter a sound, and after a moment he slipped his hand out of the lid of the box and turned. "Hi, bondsman," he said, "see if you can find a cart."

It was an eminently practical suggestion, and Harrel left the room with a brusque nod. Alcibiades clasped his hands behind his back and set to wandering around the room. "'Tis a beautiful room," he commented, "fit for Her Ladyship's comfort. But I can see that not all of this wonderful gear will quite fit in your cabin."

"Yes," she said in a rush of relief, "I was thinking that same thing..."

"Aye," he agreed readily, "that's always the thing with a ship. Never enough room for all the wonderful things you might bring. Well, I've some experience in this, and would be glad enough to act as your advisor." He faced her again with a wink that made her heart flutter. "I'm the only one who knows how big your cabin is, after all."

"What about my night-dress?" she asked. It made her blush again: what a thing to start with!

But Alcibiades considered it seriously, pointing at the wall. "This one?" She nodded, and he put a hand to his chin and studied it. "I'd say yes. The nights are occasionally cold, and you'll be well able to use it then." He appeared to think of something, and turned to her. "Although most of the sailors don't really bother. Will Her Ladyship be troubled by a bunch of half-naked louts tumbling about? Because I can give orders that they're not to offend by waggling their dangles before the gentry."

At first, it was the expression that made her laugh, then the idea, then the images it gave her. Serafina had to close the chest and lean against it. It was the oddest laughter, almost like weeping, and she grew light-headed, staring at him. His smile became a laugh in turn, and the two of them became helpless slaves to merriment. He wiped his eyes finally, caught his breath, and inquired, "I take it that's a yes?"

She shook her head, unable to do anything else.

"I meant, 'a no,'" he said, shaking his head with vigor as if to erase his words. "Or did I?"

She laughed all over again. When she was able to draw a lungful of air, she said in a weak and tiny voice, "No, nothing much offends me."

Alcibiades nodded decisively. "S'long as they show respect to you, that's all I'll ask, then. But," he added sternly, forefinger in the air, "I'll insist on that."

"Thank you," she murmured, putting her hands on the chest. She felt all of a sudden a hundred years old and as if the weight of the earth itself had pulled at her.

"Are you well?" he asked. His voice was low and tender, and it made her stand up straight.

"Aye," she said in haste. "Though I can see being around you is going to give my bellows quite a lot of exercise."

The cheery expression was back on his face. "Come, that's all right. What have you in the coffer there?"

"My mother's things," she said with ease, and wondered at it. "Her clothes and boots and... and stuff."

"Found the cart," Harrel said laconically from the doorway.

Aye, 'cause you knew right where it was. She had quite forgotten him, and his reappearance was a nasty shock after the quiet friendliness of the past few minutes.

"Here you are, then," Alcibiades said, bending to lift the chest without effort. The muscles of his arm popped into prominence, and Serafina turned to look out the window until she could collect herself.

Alcibiades turned to hand the chest to Harrel, who had stepped with caution into the room. "Take it carefully, mind," Alcibiades told him, and Harrel cradled it like the twins Romulus and Remus. It looked a lot heavier in Harrel's arms than it had in Alcibiades's.

"Oh, wait," Serafina said, remembering the little box. She opened the chest and her hand went right to it. She pulled it free of the chest with a thankful little sigh. Alcibiades jerked his head at Harrel, who left the room obediently. A moment after, they heard him clomping down the stairs.

Alcibiades nodded at the little box. "That's something special. What's in it?"

"Ointment," she said. He glanced at her in evident disbelief, and she held the little box to her bosom protectively. "My mother made it. It's sovereign for most any wound. It's done a good job on Lethe's knee--"

"She's wounded?" he exclaimed. His face had gone from merriment to worry in a fingersnap.

"Yes... but..."

"She didn't say anything," he said, gazing out the window at which Lethe had sung the night before. His reaction deflated her, for some reason she was unable to fathom. "I should have known. I should have asked."

"She's much better," said Serafina, defending the efficacy of her mother's ointment.

"I've no doubt," he said, putting his hands on his hips and gifting her with his easy smile again. "I'm beginning to think Your Ladyship could cure a typhoon."

"They saw her sword," she said, abruptly tired again. "They wanted it."

"Who?" he asked.

"The... the men from the tavern. The ones who attacked her." His eyebrows shot roofward and he took a breath to ask another question. She rushed on before he could make so much as a squeak. "There were ten, twelve, must have been. But she took them all, all of them, Alcibiades. Not a one left alive. But she... she said there'd be no bodies and there aren't and I don't get this, not at all, and there was another woman with her, but she says there was not, and--"

He was before her, and she hadn't seen him move, but she did what she'd been longing to do since she first saw him, which was burst into noisy girlish tears. He did precisely what he was supposed to, put those powerful arms round her and held her while she gasped for breath and wept out her fright and unhappiness and got his shirt all wet. He murmured to her, soft soothings and gentle wordless nonsense, and she calmed like a skittish filly. All the time, she didn't dare get too close or hold too tight lest he be married or Lethe's or a man-lover, or something she already knew she couldn't handle. After a time, her misery settled into something manageable, and she pulled away from his strength.

"Your Ladyship," he said, not needing to raise his voice because he was within a cubit of her, "let us get enough for you to be comfortable aboard the Amazon Queen, and then we shall go back, and you shall talk and I shall listen. All the way."

* * *

She washed her face and chose some things, then went downstairs, at Alcibiades's suggestion, to do a thing she had never done: bury the rags she had used on Lethe's knee deep in the privy. It gave her a reckless feeling to be disposing of perfectly good cloth, and she wondered if Alcibiades had had a rich mistress who could be similarly careless. She was cautious, because of the delicacy of the task, but it was with relief and no extra stains on her dress that she made her way back upstairs.

Between them, Alcibiades and Harrel had packed away everything she'd selected. Harrel was just leaving with another box of her things, and Alcibiades was tying up a neat bundle of clothing. He nodded casually toward the bed. "I thought perhaps Her Ladyship would welcome a change of clothing?"

Laid out on the bed, as if it had been placed there in ostentatious display by an Oriental silk merchant, was her mother's richest gown. Serafina stared at it for a moment, then became aware that she had wrapped her arms tightly around herself.

"Unless you'd rather not," Alcibiades said. There was the most adorable--disturbing--expression of puzzlement on his face. She opened her mouth to speak, shut it again, and took a hesitant few steps forward.

She laid her hand gently on the well-remembered cloth, smoothing and stroking. A gift from a long-ago friend of her mother's, a beautiful bright green, with mossy shadows wherever it made a fold. Her mother had worn it only once or twice, and Serafina had fallen in love with the color, the feel. It meant love to her, love and loss. She barely remembered the story of the friend, and as she grew older she grew in the conviction that it was a gift for services rendered, but then she remembered one day that her mother's friend had been a woman...

Lost in memory, she didn't hear him approach. He put a respectful hand on the post at the end of the bed, and she looked up quickly, through rain-washed sight, to see the same green of the gown glowing in his eyes.

"Did I do wrong, Serafina?" he inquired, his voice a murmur. "I wouldn't hurt you for worlds and worlds."

"No," she hastened to assure him. "It's not that... this is... this is not mine." It seemed she would cry again, in the warmth of his sympathy, so she looked at the gown again, running her hand over it. "It belonged to m--my mother."

He didn't say anything for a moment, and the awful loneliness swept her, deep enough to drown her, swimming in her eyes. "'Twould be a way of taking her with you," he offered, "to wear the gown she must've loved. 'Twould do honor to her memory."

She chuckled, with a shade of a gasp, and the water spilled from her eyes again. "Do you always know what to say?"

He grew reflective, looking at the gown, and one of his sculpted shoulders rose a fraction. "Surely you can't be the only one who longs for a mother lost too soon."

The force of it was like a wild ocean wave on a stormy day. She opened her mouth to answer when Harrel spoke abruptly from the doorway. "Cart's loaded," he said. Then, as if he'd forgotten, he added, "Milady."

She didn't want him to see her, so she turned away a bit. "That's fine," she said, trying to school her voice into banality.

"Here, bondsman," Alcibiades said, turning and moving toward the doorway, "Her Ladyship will need some water. She's going to freshen before we go back." Serafina kept her back turned, but she smiled a little, without seeing, at the beautiful gown. "While you're in the kitchen," Alcibiades went on, "see if you can find something to feed us."

"There's half a loaf," she said, turning to Harrel with a light-headed sense of command, "and some cheese in the larder."

"It'll be done, Milady," Harrel said.

By the triple-balled God of Chaos, she thought, it's as though he really thinks me royal.

* * *

Harrel was as good as his word, deeply respectful and quietly efficient, and she was bathed, dressed, and fed by the time she latched the door to. Alcibiades fell in next to her as she descended the steps into the bright afternoon, and Harrel pulled in behind them with the cart.

On the way back to the ship, she and Alcibiades drew away from Harrel so they could talk, and Serafina told him the whole story. They kept their voices low and their heads together, he bending a little to get his ear near her. His eyes narrowed when she told him of the tall woman who had fought at Lethe's side.

"Do you know who she is?" Serafina asked, and he shook his head soberly.

"I've no idea," he murmured. "She went out alone last night. A local woman, p'raps?"

She shook her head in turn. "We've no swordswomen here. We've barely any warriors above the level of footpad."

He jerked his head back in Harrel's direction. "Like your bondsman?"

She laughed. "I expect he's a lot more adept than either of us suspects."

He snorted. "If he'd been all that skilled," he commented, "he'd still have both his eyes." She stumbled over a root, unfamiliar with her soft new boots, and Alcibiades shot a hand to her elbow. "Careful, Milady," he said, withdrawing his hand when he saw she was right on her feet. "Your bondsman has that look of an old soldier to him."

"And a hard-minted rogue," she said, still angry.

"I could contrive to slit his throat for you," Alcibiades offered.

She stopped, staring at him in shock. "You what?"

He shrugged, and she was distracted by the acrobatic grace of him. "I'm hardly experienced at it," he said, "but if it would please you..."

"You'd do murder?" she asked, gaping at him. "Out here on the open road, with not a shred of cloud between you and your Athirat? For me?"

Harrel began to look distinctly uncomfortable.

"Aye, and with a good will," Alcibiades said in a firm voice.

"Why..." She clasped her hands before her. "Why... nobody has ever offered me such a thing before, Alcibiades. Thank you."

Harrel commenced to look round him for a hiding-place. She kept him in sight out of the corner of her eye as she said, "I thank you, but it's not necessary." Harrel drew a breath, and she added maliciously, "Yet." She was rewarded by his immediate tensing.

"Say the word, Milady," Alcibiades assured her, "and I'll free you of this pestiferous bondsman."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said. She turned toward the harbor and began walking again, fitting her fingers to her mouth and giving a raucous whistle of the type that had called her a hundred times a thousand times to a table at the tavern. "Hi! Bondsman," she called over her shoulder, "get thy stumps astir. We've a tide to catch."

* * *

By the time they got back to the Amazon Queen, Serafina was cheery, dry-eyed, and feeling remarkably prosperous. Harrel trudged with doleful docility behind them, hauling the cart, and she and Alcibiades kept up a steady stream of enjoyable chatter. As they moved through the now-crowded streets on their way to the dock, passersby stared at the elegantly-dressed girl, resplendent in green silk, who had been serving them ale at the rough dockside tavern just the night before.

They approached the pretty ship, tossing restlessly against her moorings as if longing to be away from this unpromising blighted place, and two figures detached themselves from the mob on deck and descended the gang, moving through the crowd of idlers staring at a finer vessel than usually came to rest at their docks. They got closer, and Serafina could see that both crewmates were women.

Alcibiades greeted them with handclasps. "How goes it?"

"All well," said the first, giving Harrel a suspicious look.

"They're nearly loaded," said the other, jerking a thumb back at the ship.

"Your Ladyship," said Alcibiades formally, "I should like to introduce two members of my crew. This is Ranger."

Ranger was wearing a green tunic and brown leggings that looked soft and comfortable. She was taller than Serafina, but her eyes were kind and her manner seemed mild. She had short brown hair, with one long braided lock curving over her right ear, to fall in a curl over the green tunic. Ranger pulled off a glove that bore some type of sigil Serafina didn't recognize and held out a hand, palm down, toward the dock. Alcibiades made a gesture with his hand, and Serafina, hesitating slightly, placed her hand gently atop Ranger's.

The power and strength of it were immediately apparent; Ranger seemed like the type of person who'd spent a long time working with horses. With her hand atop Ranger's, Serafina had an impression of muscles moving under fur, arrows speeding toward targets, guided strength, power controlled to a purpose. "At your service, milady," Ranger said, her voice low and quiet.

"Th--thank you," was all she could think to say.

"And this," said Alcibiades, "is our physician, Pyra."

Pyra was wearing a white belted dress that looked roomy, cool and comfortable. She stuck out a hand, and Serafina took hers from Ranger's and placed it in Pyra's. The doctor shook it vigorously, not a gesture Serafina was especially familiar with, and a torrent of eloquence poured from her. "A pleasure, Your Ladyship, a distinct pleasure. You'll let us see to your well-being? I know it's not common to find a woman who physicks--" (And here Alcibiades snorted and smiled) "--but I assure you, I've studied extensively the indigenous flora of the area. Healing herbs, tidal fevers mostly, they're the most common malady of the region--"

"Doctor," Alcibiades said.

"--and there are some efficacious plants, some little yellow flowers that grow wild along with the sea-grasses--"

"Pyra," said Alcibiades.

But Serafina's mind had caught fire, and she jumped in eagerly. "D'you mean the Maid's Purse? The little ones with the five petals?"

"Indeed," said Pyra, equally enthused. "You know of them?"

"My mother used them in a tea for the cold shivers preceding the sinking sickness."

"That sounds like the symptoms of what we call 'malaria'," Pyra said. "It's--"

"Beg pardon," Alcibiades interjected, "but if you continue to invoke Eshmoun, we'll miss the tide."

"It's not precisely as though Eshmoun gets a lot of worship in this part of the world," Ranger said unexpectedly. "Are you certain you want to risk interrupting the service?"

Alcibiades laughed. "Very well, very well, let's get aboard and you two can continue to trade professional qualifications. I've grown lonesome for thy bothersome little twins, anyhow." He clapped Ranger on the shoulder and led all of them toward the gang.

Ranger jerked her head at Harrel. "That's the bondsman?"

"Aye," Alcibiades said, his voice low.

"If I may, Your Ladyship?" Ranger asked courteously, and Serafina nodded with a bit of trepidation.

Ranger approached Harrel, whose face was covered with sweat from exertion and the sun. "Bondsman," she said, "follow me. Thou'lt stow Her Ladyship's things. Thou'rt sleeping outside her cabin, on the deck."

He nodded wordlessly, but Serafina saw apprehension in his scarred face. Ranger stepped aside, inclining her head a little, and Serafina set her foot on the gang for the first time.

There she was in a beautiful gown, an actual physician by her side asking about herbs, while behind her a silent guard kept an attentive eye on her personal servant, who was wheeling a cartful of her things onto the ship. Watch thy head, girl, Serafina told herself sternly, with the type of command she imagined a real lady would use, and thy tongue.

She didn't have a good chance to study her new home as she came aboard, for Alcibiades inclined his head toward the doctor. "Pyra," he murmured, "Lethe is wounded."

"Wounded?" Pyra exclaimed, turning from Serafina to look up at the tall captain. "But--she said nothing to me of it, and I'd no--"

"I know," Alcibiades said, "she didn't mention it to me either. I think we'd best see to her. Your Ladyship, would you come with us?"

"Er... sure thing," Serafina said, then closed her eyes in despair. She wasn't doing a very good job acting like a lady. Alcibiades coughed a little laugh into his fist, a light of amusem*nt in his eye, and she wanted the deck to open and swallow her up.

They crossed the deck, sailors stopping their various mopping and stowing and weaving to give them a moment of courteous, deferential attention before they passed by. Alcibiades stopped before a cunning little door set back of the mast and knocked.

"Come in," said a voice she recognized as Lethe's.

"I'll see your things stowed," Ranger said, and Serafina, a little distracted, told her, "That's fine." Ranger raised a hand, and Harrel set the cart in place on the deck, then gingerly lifted a bundle from it.

The cabin door swung open, and Lethe stood in the doorway. She registered a bit of surprise when she saw Pyra, Alcibiades, and Serafina. "Yes?"

"We'd like to speak with you," Alcibiades said in a low voice. "Inside."

"Certainly," Lethe said, and Serafina vowed to remember the expression, as it sounded like one a lady would use. Lethe swung the door wide, and the three of them went in. Alcibiades shut the door after them, each of the visitors having to shuffle a bit to get out of the way, and Lethe looked surprised again.

Inside, it was unexpectedly spacious, considering. A tiny shelf protruded from the wall, and on it were brushes and inkpots in a wooden stand. A holder above it contained rolled parchments. Beneath the shelf and holder was a little leather-lined desk, and on it was a length of papyrus half-filled with characters Serafina thought might be Greek. The ends of the papyrus were weighted down with small leather bags that might have had stones in them.

Along the opposite wall was a narrow, sturdy bunk with a neatly-rolled leather blanket at one end and a folded length of cloth at the other, over a linen-wrapped feather ticking. Another holder affixed below the bunk held the scabbard of Lethe's lethal blade, the pommel of which glittered and winked in the sunlight pouring through the open porthole, along with a wisp of refreshing sea air.

It looked comfortable enough, but Serafina wondered how confined this place could get on a lonesome night. It certainly wasn't large enough for four...

Her ruminations evaporated like smoke when Alcibiades spoke. "You've been wounded, Her Ladyship tells me."

Lethe gave her a quick, pointed glance, and Serafina felt like bursting into tears again. "I--I'm sorry, I'm just concerned--"

"Settle, child, settle," Lethe said, with another already-familiar abrupt chopping motion from her hand. "You've done no wrong."

"Indeed not, we're in her debt," said Alcibiades, with a sharp note Serafina knew was directed not at her, but at Lethe. "So is it somewhere you can show without havin' to be betrothed to me?"

Lethe laughed. "Aye, friend captain, you'll not need to anchor yourself in matrimony if I let myself be tended." With little fuss, she raised her tunic and dropped her trews, then hopped without drama onto the bunk, her bandaged knee readily apparent.

Pyra knelt and undid the bandaging, unwrapping the wound carefully. Alcibiades put his thumbs in his belt and watched as Pyra studied the slash on the warrior's knee.

The puffiness was greater, and Serafina's brows drew together. Was that better, or worse? The wound hadn't bled much, but she didn't know whether that was good or bad, either.

Pyra put a cautious finger on either side of the wound and pressed experimentally, and Lethe caught her breath. It sounded loud in the tiny, quiet cabin. "Painful?" asked the doctor, and Lethe shrugged briefly.

"When did you get this?" Pyra asked.

"Last night," Lethe said.

That seemed to puzzle the doctor, and she went on, "Who tended it?"

Lethe nodded in Serafina's direction. "She did," she said with an easy smile.

Pyra turned to her in astonishment. "Your Ladyship did this?"

"I--I suppose I must have," Serafina said, badly confused. "Did I do wrong?"

"No," Pyra said, holding out a hand to forestall her anxiety. "No indeed. I've seldom seen such powerful healing." She directed her attention again to the warrior's leg. "No sign of redness, which is an early indicator of putrefaction... the edges drawing together already, even without suturing... bleeding practically ceased. 'Tis as if she knew the recent advances in healing they're working up among the students of Herophilus in Alexandria, but that's a long way from here..." She looked up at Lethe. "Did she ensorcel it?"

"Did you?" Lethe inquired across the top of Pyra's head, her smile broadening.

"No," Serafina snapped. "Of course not. I haven't the--" Alcibiades raised an eyebrow, and Serafina's face flushed. "I mean merely... it was my mother's salve."

Pyra got to her feet, nodding at Lethe's knee. "A salve did this?"

"Indeed," Alcibiades said with a grin, "and she's kept it close to her heart all the way here."

Self-conscious, Serafina put her hand to her bodice, where she'd tucked the little box of ointment. Pyra held out a hand. "May I?"

Serafina glanced at Alcibiades. "I trust her," he grunted.

"And I trust you," Serafina said stoutly, showing more bravery outside than she could quite contrive to muster inside. She drew the little box forth from between her breasts and placed it into Pyra's outstretched hand.

"I'd treat that with considerable respect," Alcibiades remarked, "seeing where it's been."

Serafina didn't have far to reach to sock him in the arm. She did so lightly, but he grabbed it with his other hand and said, "Powerful lady, you've fair shattered my bones! Now I'll need some of that ointment to mend me." Being very unladylike, Serafina stuck out her tongue at him, and Lethe laughed.

Pyra was occupied in studying the little box. "Hmm." She popped the top and sniffed the ointment. "Do you happen to have your mother's receipt for this?"

Serafina shook her head soberly.

Pyra turned eagerly to Lethe. "I don't suppose we could put off sailing until I can consult with Her Ladyship's mother, the healer?"

Her voice was full of hope, and Lethe's eyes met Serafina's. "I fear she's passed beyond the ken of any physician, Pyra," Lethe said, her voice gentle and kindly.

Pyra deflated at once. "A great pity," she said, studying the salve in the box. "My regrets for your loss."

"Thank you," Serafina said shortly.

"If this is the last of it--" Pyra said, holding out the box to her. It looked like a sacrifice to do so.

Serafina waved a hand at it. "No, go ahead," she said. "Best it get some use before it sours."

"Does it sour?" Pyra asked instantly.

Serafina shrugged. "I've no idea." She felt horrible, useless and worse than useless. Well, maybe they'd let her do their laundry...

Alcibiades favored her with a warm smile, and for a moment, Serafina had the sense that he and she were the only people on the face of the earth. "We should let the doctor tend her patient while you see to your cabin."

"Aye," said Pyra, hands on her hips and attention on Lethe's knee. "I'll need to fetch my antiseptic and apron, plus some other bandaging." She glanced at Serafina. "I'd like to consult with you when I'm done here."

"But I don't know anything," Serafina protested.

"I hate to disagree with you, Your Ladyship," Pyra said, gesturing toward Lethe's knee, "but there's better than algebraic proof to the contrary."

"Come," Alcibiades said, reaching for the door.

"Serafina," said Lethe sharply, and Serafina's distracted gaze snapped toward her.

"Aye?"

"You've done me a great service," Lethe told her, "and I'm grateful. Despite what I said last night."

She thought for a time before answering. "Well," she said finally, "if you only feel like living when the sun is up, then I'll just have to watch you twice as hard by moonlight."

"Agreed," Lethe told her. "Alci, please see to Her Ladyship's complete comfort."

"It'll be done," Alcibiades replied. "Your Ladyship?"

Serafina nodded in a queenly manner and sailed through the door, only to come to an abrupt halt just outside.

Sitting before her was a sleek, huge panther with sleepy, attentive yellow eyes and blue-black fur. It swiveled its head in her direction, then licked its whiskers with a powerful, rough-looking tongue that had some trouble sweeping over its enormous bright white fangs.

Serafina put a hand protectively to her throat. "Oh," she said in a tiny voice.

* * *

The first thing Serafina noticed after that was a strong arm that slid slowly around her waist from behind. As she tried to control her heartbeat, lest she give the panther ideas about how lively she was, the arm tightened protectively.

"Hi! Ranger," said Alcibiades in a controlled voice, "thy pet's loose." His mouth was right next to her ear, and his words tickled at her.

Ranger was standing on the deck with her arms folded, watching Harrel struggle to pick up the heavy wooden chest. She turned her head, then made an exasperated noise and took two steps toward the animal, who hadn't taken its eyes off Serafina. Ranger knelt before the panther and gave the top of its head a firm caress. The panther ducked its head to reach Ranger's hand, and Serafina grew a little faint. She leaned backwards into Alcibiades and concentrated on locking her knees so she wouldn't fall, as she was certain to land in the open maw of the beast.

"Blackie," said Ranger patiently to the panther, "this is Serafina. She's a special friend o' the captain's. She hasn't seen a beautiful creature like thee before, and it's natural she'd be a bit shy. But thou'rt not a threat to thy friends, art thou? Eh, girl?"

The panther commenced to purr, a sound like distant thunder that rattled through Serafina's overstressed chest. Then, with sinuous grace, Blackie flipped over onto her back and curled her paws in the air. Ranger rubbed her belly, and the cat's head lolled lazily in Serafina's direction.

"That's good, Blackie. Thou'dst never frighten Serafina, here." As Ranger continued to stroke her, the panther slid her eyelids shut in bliss and yawned. Serafina turned her face away for a moment, trying to draw strength from Alcibiades behind her. "She's thy new shipmate, and thou'lt care for her as thou dost for the rest of us." The panther licked her chops again, regarded Serafina benignly, and blinked once.

"D--does she understand you?" Serafina asked.

Ranger gifted her with a quick smile. "Aye, but I wasn't talking to her just then."

"Sweet Mother Goddess," Serafina breathed, and Alcibiades laughed, the sound sweeping over her in a wave of relief. The panther rolled over and put a paw on Alcibiades's boot, purring like Serafina's panicky heart.

"Blackie, Her Ladyship has work to do here," Alcibiades said. "Thee'll let us pass unmolested?"

The cat's reply was another ostentatious blink. Then Blackie rolled over, turning her back to them. Serafina melted against Alcibiades, closing her eyes with a sigh. The chuckle that greeted this made her shoulder blades tingle, and she turned, giving Alcibiades an annoyed look. This only made him laugh harder.

Blackie could not possibly have ignored them any harder if she'd worn ermine and a crown. Alcibiades drew his arm with deliberate care from Serafina's waist, and she stepped cautiously around the cat, whose belly Ranger was still stroking. Ranger had a little smile on her face, and her eyes were only for the panther.

Harrel was standing before the other door, feet frozen to the decking, eye on the panther and the icy-nerved woman petting its tummy. Alcibiades took a larger step to get around Ranger and the cat, reaching to push open the other door. "This is Her Ladyship's cabin," he said.

She stuck her head in cautiously, and the sight that greeted her made her mouth stretch in a delighted smile. Inside it was trim and neat, like Lethe's cabin. In one corner stood her mother's chest, and the cloak her mother had worn when midwifing in the hollows far from town hung on a peg in the wall. The same little bunk, the same feather tick, the same portholes, through which a golden afternoon sunlight was now pouring.

"Lovely," she murmured.

"And Her Ladyship's," Alcibiades said from the doorway.

No, not this. Not mine. It belongs to a real lady, not a barmaid... But if they really thought her royal, it was a great compliment, no matter how the misunderstanding arose. She turned and, with an impulse she could scarce believe, much less explain, she threw her arms about his neck and reached far, far up to kiss his cheek.

"Thank you," she murmured, then the shyness struck again and she turned away, making a show of studying the view out the portholes.

"My pleasure," he replied, his voice so low she wasn't certain she'd heard him. Then he added, "I'll let you and your bondsman put your things to rights. Join us when you're settled."

* * *

Many, many leagues to the east, so far that even the fabled dromedary could not reach it between crescent moons, a woman stood in an opulent room. Her robes were silk and her face was cruel and her fingers, accentuated with nails like the talons of a hawk, fanned out upon a map.

"You are certain?" she asked in a mild voice long accustomed to command.

"Indeed, Lady," said the man beside her. "The girl with the scrying-glass has confirmed it."

She traced idly with one horrid finger the outline of the coast. "And the ship is on its way here?"

The man nodded. "They have concluded on the course. The navigator and weapons-master alone are awaited, and that by sunset."

She lifted her head and regarded the man for the first time. "The scrying-glass, it was worth what we have lost, was it not?"

"Indeed, Lady," he said simply.

She lowered her eyes to the map again, and her smile grew fierce. "Fetch her to me, my heroes," she whispered. "Long have I waited for the day when she will kneel to me, in chains, before I have her arrogant head struck from her body."

His face was utterly impassive. She glanced up at him again, her eyes flinty but beautiful. "I want this place prepared for our guests."

He bowed. "It shall be done, Lady Marcia," he replied.

* * *

Serafina stood for a moment, turning around in a slow circle and marveling. Her own cabin. Aboard a ship that seemed to be at her command. Captained by a handsome, virile man who only touched her when he intended to protect. Paradise, she whispered in her head, then aloud, "Paradise."

She ran her hands cautiously over the lovely green silk, then took an experimental stride across the floor of the cabin. She reached the porthole within a step and a half, putting her hands to either side of the lovely little open window and peering outside at the harbor, where little rose-gold ripples sparked by the late afternoon sun danced along the quietly restless water lapping at the piers.

Delighted, she watched for a time before retrieving herself from her reverie and turning to look around at the cabin again. She let the magnificence sink in, then put her hand to her hip and thrust an imperious finger in the general direction of the bunk.

"You forget yourself, sirrah!" she told it. "How dare you lay a hand on royalty? By the gods, sirrah, I'll teach you to know your place! Guards, have this knave stripped and flogged. Now, at once." She lowered herself regally onto the bench opposite the bunk, placing her forearms with hauteur on the arms of an imaginary throne, and let a slow, cruel smile spread over her face. "While I wat--"

The door flung open, and Harrel staggered in under the burden of a huge pile of stuff over his shoulder, stopping stock-still when he saw her, with his mouth open and an amazed look in his eye. Serafina leapt to her feet, uncomfortably aware of how much she looked like she was crouched over the chamber pot.

She had no time to think up a convincing story, for a voice from the doorway bellowed, "Hi! Bondsman, knock!" This announcement was followed by Ranger, who appeared over Harrel's shoulder, raised a gloved hand, and gave Serafina a pointed glance with a question in it. Horrified, Serafina shook her head decisively, and Ranger lowered her hand, looking a bit disappointed.

Instead, she turned to Harrel, who hastened to set down on the bunk the bundle he was carrying. "Bondsman," she said, braid a-quiver with fury, "hast no idea how to serve? I've seen some incompetent rascals in my time, but thou hast yet to do a single thing correctly in my presence. If I find thee in Her Ladyship's chambers again without knocking, I'll feed thee to yonder cat, in pieces! This is never to recur. Is that clear?"

Harrel stuttered something, but Ranger turned to Serafina, courtesy smoothing her features. "A thousand pardons for interrupting your solitude, Your Ladyship. I can have this knave flogged, if it be your pleasure."

The flush started somewhere near Serafina's kneecaps. "I--uh... no, that... that won't be necessary, thank you, Ranger." She felt it her duty to add something in his defense. "He hasn't been a bondsman long."

"And may not be much longer," Ranger muttered, favoring him with another sharp expression as she stalked out, closing the door with far more gentleness than he had opened it.

Harrel turned away, the tips of his ears flaming red, and began fussing with the bundle on the bunk. Serafina looked at the floor, which was rocking gently beneath them, and bit her lip. She wasn't certain what to say to him. After a moment, it occurred to her that perhaps he'd rather be alone, and she got to her feet. "I'll be outside, Harrel," she said, moving toward the door.

"Aye, Your Ladyship," he replied quietly.

She was frowning in puzzlement as she stepped out onto the deck. Blackie sat like a sphinx before the mast, glancing up inquiringly at Serafina, then ignoring her when it became apparent that neither rabbits nor caresses were apt to fall from her hands just then. Ranger nodded politely in her direction without speaking, then went back to sharpening a long, wicked-looking dagger. Pyra emerged from Lethe's cabin carrying a tray of used bandages, and gave her a quick, pleasant smile on her way past.

Serafina looked around for Alcibiades and found him at the stern by the sweeps, talking to a woman with blue eyes and light brown hair, streaked with some gray. Alcibiades said something to her, grinning, and her face lit in a laugh. She was holding something heavy-looking in one hand, but she put the other on his shoulder and made some reply that caused him to laugh. His wife? His sweetheart?

It's only right that he have one, she reminded herself, trying to dash cold reality over her silly romantic fantasies. Men who look like that don't sleep alone. Alcibiades spotted her and waved her over, and she picked her way carefully around what seemed like a thousand thousand ropes to join them.

Along the way, she encountered an alert-eyed bird of prey seated atop a stand on the deck. Its yellow eyes looked fierce, but the feathers on its sleek body were a mix of soft brown and rich gray, like the hair of the woman Alcibiades was talking to. It was wearing jesses, which she'd heard about from idlers at the tavern but had never seen. She decided the hawk probably belonged to Ranger, but gave it a wide berth anyhow. It paid not the slightest attention to her, instead fixing its gaze on something probably seventeen leagues from this very spot.

Serafina held up her skirt to climb the steps leading to the sweeps, and Alcibiades and the woman waited for her. Serafina noted the gown she had on and the woman's highly practical trousers and tunic. Was she the only woman aboard wearing a dress? Should she make some trousers for herself?

"Your Ladyship getting settled in?" Alcibiades asked. Serafina nodded. "Anything you need?" he asked, and she shook her head, smiling a little.

He put a powerful hand on the woman's shoulder. "Your Ladyship, I should like to introduce yet another crew member. This is our navigator, Skittles. And a fine one she is, too."

Skittles bowed, like Alcibiades had when they met, and Serafina bowed too, a little nervous. When they were both upright again, Serafina noted the woman's bright blue eyes. A Northerner, she thought, feeling like a woman of the world. And a navigator? A woman?

"A pleasure to meet Her Ladyship," said Skittles, transferring the heavy whatever-it-was to her other hand. Serafina caught a gleam of brass from the object. "I hope you'll be happy among us rough folk."

"I've lived with far worse," Serafina assured her. When were they going to figure out that she was a tavern wench? "What's this thing you have?"

"Ah," Skittles said, warming to her topic and gesturing to the object, "this is a talisman of good fortune from Alci's Athirat." Serafina liked her immediately. "'Tis what the Nabataeans call a 'compass'."

She held it out, and Serafina bent over, brows furrowed, to get a good look. It was a shallow circular brass dish with straight sides and a close-fitting lid with a round hole in it, and it had arrowhead markings at the bottom which had been enameled. It had a peg in the center, and on the peg was a cup that rotated freely, and on the cup, at the top, was a straight length of some form of metal, probably iron, as it was coated with a light surface rust she was familiar with from the ill-kept weapons she collected for the night from the men who drank at the tavern. The thing looked like it was powerfully magic; at the same time, it was forlorn and neglected.

"What does it do?" she murmured.

"See this gizmo atop it?" Skittles said, pointing to the cup-and-needle structure. Serafina nodded, engrossed in the fineness of the construction. "This shows you north."

Serafina raised her head doubtfully. "Don't you always know north?"

Skittles nodded vigorously, then leaned over the compass again, her head nearly touching Serafina's. "Aye, in a sunny clime like this, 'tisn't a big mystery, Your Ladyship. But what about when it's cloudy?"

"It's hardly ever cloudy," Serafina pointed out.

"It is where we're going," Alcibiades added unobtrusively.

"And where is that?" Serafina asked.

Alcibiades gave a diffident shrug. "Somewhere east, is all I know. Ask our navigator."

"India," Skittles said with reverence and controlled excitement, "then Qin."

Serafina straightened, blinking in astonishment. "Qin? Qin? Why, that's... that's farther than the moon!"

Skittles laughed. "I'm delighted you didn't say what I've been hearing our whole trip," she replied. "'Qin? That's a mythical land, lassie, you've been taken in by reprobates.'"

"It's certainly beyond the clouds, sounds like," said Alcibiades with another attractive white-toothed grin at his friend. "However, the moon, not being on our list of ports, is out, so Qin it is." He nodded at the compass. "So how much d'you end up paying for this thing? Ten crowns?"

Skittles shook her head. "Only four kings, two groats."

"Aye, well," Alcibiades said, giving the little needle a gentle flick with his finger that set it a-spin, "tisn't as though it's exactly proved its worth. Your little brass friend has no idea where north is."

Serafina bent over it again. "You must fill it with a clear alcohol," she heard herself say. "Something distilled, something like that wheat hooch that's clear as the air. You can't use water; it rusts the needle. So you grease the needle, both for protection and to make it swing free."

The only sound after that was the cawing of the seabirds and the creak of the ropes. When Serafina looked up, Alcibiades and Skittles were staring at her. Her face flushed, and she ducked her head.

"Your Ladyship," Alcibiades said in a low voice, "how d'you know that?"

Serafina kept staring at the little needle. "Because... because I know what this is. I didn't until you told me the price." She sighed. "Skittles, you got this from a dirty one-legged man in a blue and green caftan, didn't you?"

"Aye," said Skittles, with a note to her speech that said, tell me more.

"Four kings and two groats. That's his last offer, always. He's... his name is Petronius, though we all call him Pegfoot. He's a fence."

"What's a fence?" Alcibiades asked immediately, damn him.

"He... he receives stolen goods." Serafina's heart was thudding at the very bottom of her chest. "The man who owned this, he came here two years ago, during the time when we had those terrible storms that went on month after month." Skittles nodded encouragingly, but Alcibiades looked clueless. "He'd been blown far off his course and he had to stay till the winds shifted." She had to make them understand. "He was a foreigner, and he was rich... and alone..."

Alcibiades tucked his hands into his armpits as if he had taken a chill. "What happened to the man?"

She shrugged, giving up her adventure even as it began. "The wastrels at the tavern, they... they found out where he was staying, and one eve when he returned from seeking news o' the weather, they were waiting for him."

The silence stretched out longer this time. "And?" Alcibiades prompted gently.

Serafina raised her eyes to his kindly green ones. "They stuck a dagger in his belly," she said steadily. "But they missed his vitals. It took him two days to die." She remembered well the pounding at the door, her mother's hurried conversation with Harrel, the storm blowing outside the house. Her mother had taken up her cloak and gone to see what she could do for him, Serafina trotting beside her, slipping in puddles and wet as a fish when they came to the lamplit deathbed, which seemed ghostly, unreal. Serafina's eyelids had grown heavy as she sat in the corner, and snatches of conversation drifted in and out of her consciousness. The man was in pain, great pain, and Serafina's mother sent Harrel for a bottle of the distilled wine into which she would mix her relieving decoction. The dying man recognized the smell of the liquor and, as much to distract himself as anything else, spent some time explaining what he did with it to Serafina's mother.

Serafina also remembered her mother calling her from sleep close to daybreak. "Fee," her mother had called, her voice sharp and loud, "wake thee. It's over." Her eyelids flew open; her mother was sitting on the bed, holding the hand of a corpse still twisted in its last agony, clouding eyes trained on her mother's face.

"Like Lethe's sword," Alcibiades murmured. Serafina closed her eyes and put a hand to her mouth, willing herself not to weep. "Which would've ended up at Pegfoot's, no doubt," he added, "without her Ladyship's most fortunate interruption."

Serafina opened her eyes. Alcibiades was looking at her with profound and unmistakable respect. "Your Ladyship," he said, "we'll never be able to thank you sufficient enough for the warning. 'Twas a thing of great courage, that, and you've no idea what you've been the instrument of saving."

"Your Ladyship," Skittles interjected eagerly, "would you have a notion where to find such a distilled alcohol?"

"Aye," Serafina replied, still feeling a little otherwordly. "But we'll need Harrel."

Alcibiades held up a hand. "Oh, Your Ladyship," he said with relish, "do permit me to fetch your bondsman."

* * *

Along the way, Lady Marcia, accompanied by her oiled-muscled and nearly naked body-slaves, sent two vassals ahead for her sisters. As they approached the door to the alchemy-room, it opened to reveal a tall, thin woman in robes the color of a moonlit desert midnight. She was removing a thick leather apron and matching gloves. Marcia held up a hand, and the woman, whose face was alike down to the arrogant sneer, fell into step beside her.

"It goes well, Angelica?" Marcia inquired, but not as though she were really interested in the answer.

The woman in blue-black nodded curtly. "Well enow. And with you?"

"Let's get along," said Marcia, not sparing a glance at her, "and away from long ears."

They were silent all the way to the screamery, at whose entrance more nearly-naked slaves bowed low while reaching for the door handles. From inside, a puff of noxious, hot yellow smoke roiled sluggishly across the stones of the floor, accompanied by the shrieks of a soul in mortal agony.

"Lady Marta," called Marcia into the red fire-lit gloom, "we've need of thee."

"I've just got the pincers hot," growled a voice bracketed by screams.

"We've need," Angelica repeated, a little louder and even more imperious, and a disgusted murmur ensued, followed by the clang of something glowing hot being set on the lip of the brazier. A woman stepped forth from the foul fog in the room. She bore Marcia's face, and Angelica's; they were as alike as triplets, and that was not difficult to credit, for that was precisely what they were.

"What is it?" asked Marta with little patience.

"To the orrery," Marcia said, jerking her head toward the eastern part of the building. They swept down the corridors, and the only way to tell them apart was the color of their clothing. Angelica was in an indigo so profound as to be nearly black, Marta wore a bright crimson useful for concealing spatters from the hobby at which she'd been interrupted, and Marcia's gown was a delightfully flattering bias-cut drape of sunny yellow that made her resemble a vengeful, ambulatory daffodil.

The orrery was a specially constructed stone tower across the court from the living and working quarters. It too was guarded, and the armed slaves salaamed after the fashion of the Arabs as they swept open the heavy doors.

The three sisters strode past the complex mechanism ticking with profundity in the middle of the orrery and stopped before a built-up section of floor containing a large iron ring with a huge piece of gleaming, nearly invisible glass in the center. Bolted to the flagstones were numerous staples through which ran substantial chains, which terminated at the neck and wrists of a woman who had once been young, innocent, and lovely. Now, the chains weighed at her, and her eyes had the sleepy, vacant look of profound intoxication with powerful drugs.

"Scry for us, girl," Marcia said, her voice echoing harsh and loud across the undraped stones of the orrery. "Tell us where she is."

The girl stretched a languid, weighted hand toward the glass, and as they watched in fascination and excitement, the glass grew cloudy, then opaque, with a midnight sheen.

"I see," drawled the girl in a voice like the sound a bucket makes when it hits the bottom of a drought-dried well.

"What?" asked Angelica.

"What?" echoed Marta, with more of a snarl.

"By the unholy masters of the Pit, what?" shrieked Marcia, out of patience.

The girl settled herself on her knees before the glass and began to tell them.

* * *

Thus it was that, close to sunset, Serafina found herself again sweeping through the streets of the town, this time with Alcibiades next to her and Lethe next to him, with the attentive physician Pyra at her side. Behind them were Harrel, carefully carrying an empty leather satchel for the liquor; Skittles, carefully carrying the precious brass compass; and Ranger, carefully carrying the hawk on her leather-covered arm. It swiveled its head to follow the people they passed, and more than one ducked back into doorways or hustled children away from the fascinating procession. Serafina had a tickle in the middle of her back, which, despite Ranger's obvious easy relationship with animals, she half expected the hawk to strike at some point during the walk.

As they went, the awestruck, envious glances continued to come her way, and she knew the whispers and bets were starting just outside her hearing. Whose mistress is she? Which one of 'em's touched her, tasted her, gifted her with that pretty gown? Her face grew warm, and not from the sun or the exertion of matching Lethe's rapid walk and Alcibiades's long, easy stride.

She longed to tell them, but then lifted her head high and walked like a woman who owned half the town, which she was still having trouble trying to convince herself was the case. She risked a glance behind; the hawk had transferred its baleful glare to Harrel, and was watching him like... well, like a hawk. Ranger was watching him too, with a similar expression.

The wound appeared to be causing Lethe no discomfort whatsoever, and Serafina thought, She must be very brave. She took a surreptitious glance at Lethe's knee.

"That's because it doesn't," Lethe said unexpectedly.

"Doesn't what?" Serafina asked.

"Hurt," Lethe replied. "Whatever is in this ointment, your mother charmed it well."

"At all?" Serafina asked, astonished.

"At all," Lethe assured her.

"'Tis the mark of a gifted herbalist, that," said Pyra with audible satisfaction. "To combine healing with pain relief. It's not a common skill."

"I begin to suspect," Lethe said to Alcibiades, "that's there's nothing common about this young lady."

"I begin to grow certain that's the case," he agreed, winking over her head at Serafina. Her face became hotter as a result, and Lethe and Alcibiades laughed.

Within another few heartbeats, they were at the tavern, but a transformed one. People were bustling in and out--not the people she was accustomed to, lowlifes and cutthroats, but respectable-looking merchants and prosperous matrons. She could have sworn she saw the Roman legate leave as they arrived, but surely that couldn't have been possible. She hung back a bit, partly out of shyness and partly out of fear, but when two more turban-wearing traders whom she knew to be legitimate emerged from the open doorway, she squared her shoulders. Remember, you own this place.

She took a couple strides inside, immediately overwhelmed by the noise and movement. The place was full of people, and each was talking to another, raising their voices to be heard over the din. Wolfrum sat at a table in the back, carefully and laboriously counting out coins before a woman in a silk robe. Johanna, standing beside him with her arms crossed, nodded as each coin went deliberately onto the table. The woman likewise swept through the coins rapidly with a gloved finger, nodded at Johanna, and leaned over the table to make a mark in a ledger.

Johanna saw them in the doorway, unfolded her arms, and came forth rapidly through the crowd to meet them. She reached for Serafina's hands and said, in a kindly voice with more than a little satisfaction to it, "My dear, I've sold the cat-house."

* * *

"Er..." Serafina glanced at Alcibiades. "That's... that's very good, Johanna, thank you."

"Yes," Johanna went on, "made an excellent deal for it, just excellent."

"Very good," Serafina said, watching Alcibiades out of the corner of her eye. He was following the conversation avidly.

"In fact," Johanna said, obviously inclined to be expansive, "I sold it to Deborah the Larger."

"D-Deborah the Larger?" Serafina asked, stunned. "But she's--"

"The madam," Johanna said, nodding vigorously. Alcibiades raised his eyebrows, and Serafina closed her eyes for a moment in despair. "She'd been trying to get that place from your mother for years and years."

"But--"

"Oh, and Deborah said to tell you not to worry, that she was going to keep to the agreement she made with your mother, even though she owns the place now."

"The agreement with my m--"

"Aye," Johanna said with satisfaction. "She said nothing would change about that."

By now, all of her new friends were crowded about, leaning forward to hear amid the noise and bustle of the tavern. Lethe was giving Johanna the once-over, clearly impressed by her business acumen. Ranger's brows were lowered in a glower that made her look like the hawk's sister. Harrel was standing as far from the hawk as he could get. Pyra's face bore a slight, polite smile, Skittles was grinning openly, and Alcibiades looked seconds away from bursting into laughter.

Serafina took Johanna by the elbow and led her hastily away from the group. "What agreement with my mother?" Johanna took a breath to answer, and Serafina burst out, "By the life-bestowing breasts of the Goddess, tell me this wasn't a profit-sharing deal!"

Johanna lowered her head and spoke in a confidential murmur. "Oh, no, my dear, that was the first thing I asked."

"You asked her that?"

Alcibiades called over the heads of the crowd, "Is everything in order there, Your Ladyship?"

"Yes," Serafina told him hastily, then turned back to Johanna to whisper, "You asked her that?"

"I'm looking out for your interests, my dear," Johanna said, patting her hand in reassurance. "Deborah the Larger wouldn't tell me. I assumed you would know."

Serafina shook her head like an ox that's just run into the side of a barn.

"Well, no matter," Johanna said, with a brisk dusting of her hands, as if to dismiss the topic of the brothel altogether. "Wolfrum's got your settlement."

"A-all right," Serafina replied, allowing herself to be hauled over to the table. She cast a worried look over her shoulder at her new friends, and Lethe and Alcibiades instantly detached themselves from the group to shoulder through the crowd. They met up at the table, at which Wolfrum was counting out coins.

"I think thee'll be pleased, Fee," he said, plunking the last of the coins onto the table with his thumb. "We figgered thee'd need money for thy trip, so we liquidated much of thy holdings."

"You still own the doss-house, the wharves, and one of the storehouses, plus your house," Johanna said by way of clarification. "But the other storehouse is rotting into the sea, and Thomas the Ball-Squeezer offered double so's he could have the land to put up an artists' studio."

"A what?" Lethe inquired, leaning in between Alcibiades and Serafina.

"An artists' studio," Wolfrum said. He had the loveliest smile, and his eyes shone with joy as he looked at Serafina. "Says he's tired o' runnin' a lendin' house and wants to set beside the sea and paint."

"Paint what?" Serafina asked, befuddled.

"Apparently," Johanna told her dryly, "it's 'the view the gods themselves never tire of, and the perfect light besides.' Or something like that. Or it will be once he feeds the rest of that rat-trap to the sea."

"Thomas the Ball-Squeezer," Serafina said with a giddy giggle, "the man who'd chop off your finger for a three-groat debt overdue by a day and a half, is becoming... an artist?"

"Which leaves an openin' for a lender," Wolfrum said, jerking his thumb with pride at Johanna. "Like me new boss, here."

"The new lending-house," Johanna said, folding her arms and looking abruptly twice as tall, "will be right here."

"That's wonderful!" Serafina exclaimed.

"And we owe it all to thee, Fee," Wolfrum said. "No more thugs threatenin' those who've took sick and can't pay. No more beggarin' folk when the fishin' nets come back to port empty. A chance for good people to move back here and make the town what it was b'fore it got gifted to evil."

"So," Johanna said, gesturing to Wolfrum, "here's what we've done today."

He took what looked like a very large leather pouch from his lap and set it on the table. Lethe straightened and took a rapid glance around, warning the onlookers to stay back.

"You'll want to count it, of course," Johanna said, "but far's we've totted up, it comes to three groats, fifteen kings, and forty-eight crowns."

Serafina's knees went, and she would have hit the dirty floor had it not been for a pair of strong arms about her waist. "Steady on, there, Your Ladyship," Alcibiades murmured in her ear. "Wealth, sudden or not, implies a certain standard of behavior."

His voice rang in her head, and she wondered for one horrible moment if she were about to faint. Then her brain cleared of its fog, and she opened her mouth to answer.

"By the enlightened balls of Ahura Mazda," said a strong voice from the door, "what do you mean the tavern's not serving?"

Serafina turned. Standing in the doorway was a Northern-looking woman of medium height and build, with eyes the color of a storm at sea and exotic-looking blonde hair pulled back into a plait accessorized with beads. Her gaze had the look of either profound nearsightedness or habitual intoxication, and she was dressed in a loose, roomy tunic and trousers. She had her fists on her hips, and she strode through the door as if she owned the place, betraying no surprise that it was standing room only, even though the sun was up.

"Which one's the tavern-master?" asked the woman. "I have immediate need of a flask and a rousing intellectual argument."

Alcibiades extended the hand not currently holding Serafina upright. "Your Ladyship," he said with a magician's flourish, "let me introduce you to another crewmate, Dogmatika."

"An honor," said Dogmatika, putting a hand apiece to her belly and her back and bowing to Serafina.

"More than you're quite aware," said Alcibiades in an amused murmur, giving Serafina a glance as if they shared some highly entertaining secret. He drew his hand from her waist, and she felt abruptly bereft.

Dogmatika straightened, and her eye fell on the stuffed-looking leather money pouch that had materialized in Lethe's sword hand. She flicked her gaze from Lethe to Serafina, and a quick leer flashed across her features. "And an heiress, by the jewel-encrusted prick of Lord Balaji--"

"We've heard far finer words from you, bard," Alcibiades interrupted. His voice was light, but his eyes fierce. "Her Ladyship ain't accustomed to the yap of sea-mongrels."

"Yes, I am," Serafina told him, a bit baffled.

"A thousand pardons, Your Ladyship," replied Dogmatika instantly, teeth flashing in an impressive smile that looked suspiciously like she was trying to avoid unseemly laughter. "I'll try to avoid any expressions that might be offensive to aristocratic ears, such as the croc-nibbled pole of Osiris or the twin-spawning single-eyed one-hander of Atun--"

Skittles' booted foot crunched onto Dogmatika's toes, and Dogmatika hissed in pain and grabbed her foot, hopping to retain her balance. "Weren't we here to get something?" Skittles put in, ignoring Dogmatika's reaction.

"Oh... yes," Serafina said, idly wondering who Osiris and Atun were. She looked around. "Harrel knows where the--"

Alcibiades put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, following it up with a loud, "Hi, bondsman!" that carried over the noise in the tavern.

Harrel shouldered his way gloomily through the crowd, looking particularly out of place in the newly bright, newly cheery, newly lively tavern. "Your Ladyship?" he inquired, and not as if the words tangled in his teeth on their way out of his mouth.

"That distilled hooch you had--" she began.

"Aye, the clear stuff for the profoundest o' sots?" he asked.

"Yes, that's the one I meant," she answered, a bit dizzy again at the thought of Harrel--Harrel--being respectful. "Can you get us a bottle?"

"Aye," said Harrel grudgingly, "but--"

"Ranger!" called Alcibiades. Ranger approached with the hawk on her arm, and in an instant had a cleared circle a pace wide around them. Harrel looked even unhappier as Ranger stopped beside him, she and the hawk paying him close attention.

"Well, bondsman?" inquired Alcibiades.

Harrel didn't so much as glance his way; he was too busy studying the air vaguely to the right of Serafina's elbow. "I'll have to get the keys from Johanna," he muttered.

This time yesterday, this place was his... Serafina found an unfamiliar emotion flooding her heart, and recognized it, after an astonished moment, as pity. "Never mind," she said. "I'll get them."

She pushed her way through the crowd again to where Wolfrum and Johanna bent over the ledger, talking as quietly as they could and still make themselves heard over the racket of the crush of patrons. Serafina touched Johanna's elbow lightly and murmured to her, and Johanna nodded and reached for her belt. A moment later, Serafina was handing the keys to Harrel.

Pyra drew close to Serafina and spoke in a confidential tone. "Your Ladyship," she said, "might I request an extra bottle? Distilled alcohol is an excellent disinfectant."

"Certainly," Serafina answered. She turned to Harrel and bellowed over the crowd, "Harrel, bring two bottles--Pyra needs--"

But Pyra had seized Serafina's wrist, and Serafina turned in astonishment. Pyra shook her head. Just behind her, Lethe was standing, and her face had gone to marble. "Excuse me," Serafina murmured, disengaging herself from Pyra's grip and forcing her way again through the knot of people to Harrel's side. Alcibiades swam the crowd right behind her. "Two bottles, please, Harrel," Serafina said, keeping her voice quiet.

"Ranger," Alcibiades put in, "why don't you go along? Keep an eye on the bondsman. Possibly four of 'em."

"Gladly," said Ranger with a smile that looked nearly as predatory as the expression on the hawk's face. Harrel sighed again and disappeared down the stairs to the cellar. Ranger followed, the hawk on her arm radiating sternness.

Serafina kept her eyes on the door to the cellar and her voice pitched low, directed at the captain. "Is it the case that liquor isn't to be mentioned aboard the Amazon Queen?"

"No," he replied, his face registering incomprehension. "Wherever did you get that idea?"

She tossed her head a bit, indicating Pyra and Lethe, and the captain's expression changed. "Ah," he said. "Well--"

Harrel climbed up out of the cellar holding two thick, cobwebby glass bottles with leather caps tied tightly over wooden stoppers. Ranger and the hawk were a step behind him, and the bird ruffled her feathers into place as she emerged from the gloom.

Harrel held up the bottles. His gnarled, filthy hands were black at the nail-beds and the awful scar of the blow that had taken his eye stood out sharply in the sunlight she had never before seen in the tavern.

"Your Ladyship," he said quietly.

* * *

"Thank you, Harrel," she said, moving to take the bottles from him.

"Your Ladyship," Ranger interjected, "why not have the bondservant port that for you?"

The hawk glared at Harrel as if approving the idea, and Serafina nodded, turning to look for Lethe. "I--I'll need--" Serafina glanced at the pouch in Lethe's fist, and Lethe's face softened into a smile as she held it out.

Serafina took the pouch with a nervous little bow, then fumbled with the cord holding it closed. She pulled out a beautiful little silver coin, a Greek minting with a large-eyed bird on one side and a helmeted head on the other, and turned to Johanna. "For the hooch," she said, holding it out.

Johanna's response was a hearty laugh. "Fee!" she exclaimed, clearly delighted. "Thee has no need to pay for thine own stock!" She folded Serafina's hand over the coin and patted her fist. Johanna hesitated for a moment, and Serafina saw the honest eyes filled with tears. "And have no fear, my dear. Wolfrum and I'll make this place a place you can be proud to say you're from. Like it was when your mother--"

Serafina swallowed past a sudden constriction in her throat, nodded, and drew her hand back. She dropped the coin into the pouch, drew the lanyard tight, and handed it to Alcibiades. "Well, then..." she said vaguely.

Johanna's eyes drifted to her husband's face. "You learn somethin' from these people," she ordered him, her voice shot through with venom. "They're good people, like you once could've been." She turned to Serafina, and her face went tender and excited all at once. "Good journey with your new friends, and fair winds at your back. Go, dear girl, and have the life the rest of us kept from you."

"Thank you," whispered Serafina, and to her own surprise, she threw her arms about Johanna and kissed her on the cheek. "Be well, be happy," she told Johanna, and meant it.

* * *

When they departed the tavern, the sun hung fat and smug with unspent crimson heat over the harbor, and ominous blue shadows were beginning to creep toward their nightly capture of the sad little buildings of the town. It might be the last sunset I see here, Serafina thought, walking toward the docks between the Lethe and the captain, who had the pouch holding Serafina's new wealth securely tucked into his tunic.

"Night passage?" Lethe asked the captain.

He shook his head. "Not this harbor. I believe we may be spendin' the night after all."

"Have I made you miss the tide?" gasped Serafina.

"No," chuckled Alcibiades. "Of course not. It ain't every port that's equipped for a night launchin', though, and--" But his attention had gone to a figure walking toward them, another stranger, another woman. "...and here's another of our company now," he said.

As the woman got closer, Serafina could tell she was of the age of the elders of the town. She was wearing a worn dark blue overtunic and trousers far too warm for the climate, and her silvery hair framed lively, intelligent eyes whose weakness of sight was clearly evident. Her boots were old but oiled, her fingers were spotted with ink, and she looked as though she cared not a fig for anything other than good company and good conversation. Serafina liked her immediately.

"We've a new shipmate," said Alcibiades, and the woman turned to Serafina with a courteous curiosity. "Your Ladyship, I'd like you to meet Makionus, scholarly scribe, keeper of histories, recorder of discoveries, memory messenger, prize in warrior tussles, bard-at-large, and possessor of the most powerful sail-raisin' voice gracin' any vessel on the sea."

"Your Ladyship," replied Makionus, in not a very powerful voice after all. She put a hand to her chest and bowed. "And I hope you'll give me a chance to undo the disappointment the captain's generous introduction is bound to provoke."

Lethe shooed them on toward the ship, and they started down the docks again. "Her Ladyship is sailin' with us, as a guest o' Lethe," Alcibiades remarked.

"So I heard," replied Makionus, keeping her attention on Serafina. "The town is alive with the story of it. A classic tale of hidden, though noble, origins, and you as the heroine. Congratulations."

"Thank you," said Serafina, not at all certain that that was the correct response.

"And speakin' o' that," said Makionus to Dogmatika, "I've a riddle for you, my thirsty colleague. When is a tavern no longer a tavern?"

"Droll," muttered Dogmatika. "Very." She turned her head to study the furled sails or something equally intriguing, and Serafina noted, with interest, that what she had taken for a full plait was a small ribbon of braid much like Ranger's. The rest of her hair was cut even with the back of her neck. Were they tribeswomen? A religious ritual?

"Where've you been?" Alcibiades inquired, turning to the new arrival.

"Ah, there's a tale," replied Makionus, while the others groaned and directed their eyes to the various quarters of the skies. Lethe turned to march up the gang to the ship. "I found some cliffs outside of town, and--"

"That's all you need say," Ranger interrupted with a charming smile. "I know just what you were up to."

"What?" asked Serafina, looking from one to the other.

"She goes up to the cliffs and takes notes," Skittles explained, "which she sells to the young scholars in town."

Serafina burst into giggles. "Scholars?" she exclaimed, putting her hand over her mouth and attempting to get herself under control. "There are no scholars here."

"So I discovered, Your Ladyship, to my sorrow," Makionus replied ruefully. "And I could use a few groats extra." She held out her arm, and Serafina spotted a small, neatly-mended hole in the dark blue sleeve of her overtunic.

"Alci," called Lethe in a sharp voice. The captain started up the gang instantly.

"What is it?" Serafina asked. Ranger followed Alcibiades swiftly up the gang, the hawk fluttering its wings as it tried to keep its balance. Skittles murmured something and hastened to join them on the deck. Pyra, Dogmatika, and Serafina exchanged looks for a moment, then boarded. Serafina remembered to beckon Harrel, and he swarmed up the gang after her, the precious liquor carefully stowed in the crook of his elbow. After him scrambled Makionus, stuffing notes into the cloth pouch over her shoulder.

Up on the deck, they found Lethe in hasty conversation with the captain and the navigator, with Ranger just returning to the discussion after placing the hawk back on its perch.

"She's not here," Lethe said, and Serafina heard the same sort of tension in her voice as she had the night before, when Lethe was by turns murderous and despairing.

Alcibiades's tone was conciliatory. "Perhaps she's--"

"I tell you, she is not here!" Lethe snapped, and Alcibiades drew himself to his full height, the easygoing acrobat vanishing under a mask of professionalism. Ranger stood within a pace, not moving a muscle. "That is all," Lethe told the captain, nearly shouting. "We cannot sail without her." A tiny frown appeared between Pyra's eyebrows, and she stepped forward, catching Lethe's wrist in her hand. She pressed her fingers to it, as Serafina had seen her mother do to diagnose fever. Pyra's frown deepened.

"This ship does not leave harbor," Alcibiades said, "without your weapons-master aboard." He spoke as if he'd taken a blood vow, and Serafina exchanged another look with Dogmatika, who shrugged, but in a tiny and unobtrusive fashion. Makionus stared at the decking, then lifted her eyes to watch the argument amidships.

If argument it was. Lethe lunged for Alcibiades, catching the front of his shirt in her fists, and Pyra deftly caught her hands. "She must come," Lethe panted, and her knuckles went bloodless as she clutched his shirt. "She must."

"She shall," he said gently, not making a move to get away from the madwoman with his shirt in her rigored hands. "I promise you, we shall not leave this harbor a'thout her here by the sweeps."

Lethe closed her eyes and trembled, seeming on the edge of collapse. Pyra kept her hands over Lethe's but made no move to free Alcibiades from her grip. Serafina watched in bafflement. Lethe turned her head, and there was a barely audible sigh from Dogmatika, watching with what seemed remarkably like pity in her foreign eyes.

Serafina took a step forward, gathering her skirts in one hand. "Lethe..." she said, and a flash of fear struck the face of Alcibiades as he turned his head toward her. "Whoever it is you are waiting for..."

Lethe raised her head, and the haggard look Serafina recognized from the night before was back in her eyes.

"I feel certain," Serafina said carefully, "that whoever you are waiting for is on her way."

Lethe pulled her fingers from the captain's shirt with an effort, and Pyra moved her hands to Lethe's shoulders. "It is... it is the girl from yestereve, is it not?" Lethe inquired, her voice polite but ragged.

"Aye," Serafina said softly, "'tis I, Serafina." She moved forward another step and placed a gentle hand on Lethe's wrist. "Your friend."

"I have no friend," Lethe said, shaking her head stubbornly.

"You have one," Serafina insisted. Ranger caught her eye and fed her an undeniable strength, and Serafina found it easy to keep her hand on Lethe's arm. "Aye," Serafina went on with a bit of humor, "and more than one if it'd please you to open your eyes to the color of the sky once in a while!"

"A... a friend?" Lethe said. The look in her eyes was like the look of one drowning.

"More than one," Alcibiades interjected in a warm tone. "We all want to see you well, friend Lethe."

"I also," said Ranger.

"Me too," said Pyra.

"And I," Dogmatika added.

Lethe's eyes cleared, no longer terrified, but with a visible fear. "Where is she?"

"On her way," Serafina assured her.

"Look," said Makionus unobtrusively, gesturing to the street beyond the dock.

There, striding through the crowd on the way to the ship, was a tall dark-haired figure attired, like Lethe, in quietly gleaming jet leather from top to toe. She was bare-headed, and her hair, dark as her leathers, lifted slightly in the late-afternoon breeze. As she stepped from shadow to shadow, it seemed as though she melted into and out of existence. She was the tallest woman Serafina had ever seen, broad-shouldered and visibly powerful, and a thrill of fear and excitement went through the girl standing on the deck. As the woman stepped onto the dock, she raised her face, and a swift gaze from startling blue eyes seared Serafina down to her very soul.

"It's she," Serafina whispered, barely able to breathe.

* * *

The tall woman in the dark leathers stepped onto the gang of the ship, moving far more lightly than anyone with that sort of musculature had a right to. Serafina followed her movements, avidly drinking in each swing of boot and sway of cloth from the cape that fell from her shoulders, swirling about the pommel of a businesslike sword at her hip. The woman took the gang in half a dozen steps, looking neither left nor right, her gaze trained, Serafina knew without having to turn, only on the quietly trembling Lethe on the deck.

A warrior. Powerful. Secretive. No doubt deadly. Her features spoke of instant death to enemies, godlike protection to her friends. If she had any.

As she passed Serafina, taking rather less notice than she might of a gnat, a sense of dizziness swept over the girl. The blue eyes and dark hair were not those of the woman she had seen fighting at Lethe's side the night before.

Confused, Serafina blinked hard. How could she not--? But... but two such women could not exist in the same space and time. Could they? Could they?

The woman stopped before Lethe and, without making a sound, opened her arms. Lethe slipped into the embrace like a lost and frightened child, Pyra and Alcibiades loosening their hold as the blue-eyed giant encircled her in strength.

"You--you--" Serafina could barely hear Lethe's gasping words as they dissolved into tears. Lethe threw her arms about the woman's neck as if that were the only thing keeping her from falling off a mountain. "You left--"

"Shh, shh," said the other, stroking her hair with a gentleness Serafina found vertiginously unbelievable. "I'll never desert thee. I'm thy protector."

"I was frightened," Lethe said, then buried her face in the giant's chest and broke into sobs. "So frightened..."

"I'm here now," said the giant, placing a hand over Lethe's and bending to set a soft kiss on her forehead. "I'll keep thee safe until she returns for thee."

Serafina, abruptly terrified, backed up to the rail and groped behind her for something to hold on to. Alcibiades noted her movement and sent her an encouraging smile she had no way to interpret.

It's not she. I don't know who this is but this is not the woman who saved Lethe's life last night.

"Come," said the giant, cupping Lethe's face in her comfortingly capable hands and raising her chin, "thou'rt weary, and I am here now."

Lethe closed her eyes and nodded briefly, and the other woman swung her into her arms. Ranger hastened to get the door of Lethe's cabin, and the giant maneuvered with ease through the doorway. Lethe seemed barely awake, clinging to the giant's neck with what seemed like desperate strength. Serafina barely recognized the dangerous, despairing, murderous woman of the previous night in the small, huddled figure.

The giant disappeared into Lethe's cabin, and Ranger shut the door, turning her back to it and folding her arms as she stood guard. Blackie got up, stretched, and curled herself before Ranger, gazing at the humans around her with great lazy eyes.

Serafina had trouble catching her breath. The next thing that happened was far more surprising yet. Harrel took a step forward, face set and eye glittering in the cold anger she knew only too well. "Captain," he said harshly, "what does that woman aboard your ship?"

Alcibiades narrowed his eyes, stuck his thumbs in his belt, and took a step forward. "What's it to thee, bondsman?"

"I know that woman," he said, gesturing toward the closed cabin door with a hand that shook. "She is... she is pure murder on two legs."

The vertigo swam in Serafina's brain and little pink dots swarmed over her vision, buzzing like honeybees. A surge of energy went through her shoulders. "Shut your misbegotten, dung-thieving, sh*t-licking, goat-f*cking flytrap, you thoroughly worthless waste of a woman's labor!"

Every eye on the ship turned toward Serafina, and most of them looked stunned. She had a terrible headache, and her hands felt odd, as though she'd caught lightning in them. She stumbled backward, knowing she was about to fall over the side into the water, and had only a moment to cuss herself roundly for not practicing her swimming more before an ignominious and highly ironic death by drowning. As it was, she came to an abrupt stop and found herself sitting lopsided on a pile of rope and sacking.

"You heard Her Ladyship, bondsman," Ranger said, her voice registering great satisfaction.

Serafina stared at Harrel, open-mouthed, as Alcibiades pushed past Skittles and Pyra with a muffled exclamation. "Serafina!" he called, skidding to stop on his knees at her side. "Art injured?"

"No," she said, testing her hands cautiously and attempting to sit up. "I--I don't think I am..."

Alcibiades was not doing a great deal to help the project of Serafina regaining her feet, as he had slipped an arm about her shoulders, which only tempted her to slump against him. Dogmatika was watching Serafina with great interest, as though she had finally done something impressive, while Makionus looked vaguely guilty.

Serafina looked up at the awestruck Harrel from her comfortable perch on Alcibiades's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Harrel," she said in contrition. "I don't know what came over me."

"I can rid you of His Worthlessness now," Alcibiades murmured, jerking his thumb toward Harrel and gifting her with one of his easy crinkle-eyed grins, which was twice as powerful at close range.

She had to hide her eyes with her hand. She shook her head and giggled, exclaiming, "No, no, no. He's--"

"Not been a bondsman long, aye," Alcibiades said with a vigorous nod. "So you've mentioned." He maneuvered himself cautiously away and inquired, "Does Her Ladyship think she might be able to stand?"

"If she must," Serafina said, smiling at him, but a little disappointed. He helped her to her feet with all the decorum of a court dancer, and she dusted off the seat of her beautiful green dress, checking ruefully for damage. Her hands didn't feel funny any more and her head was clear. "Alcibiades," she said in a low voice intended for him alone, "I would speak with you later."

He nodded without replying, and Serafina glanced briefly toward the door of Lethe's cabin. "Who in the hell is that?"

"Lethe's weapons-master," he replied simply, "Bladewalker."

* * *

Alcibiades gave her half a salute (which tempted her to another giddy giggle), then moved away to confer with Skittles at the sweeps.

"Harrel," Serafina murmured.

He was at her side instantly, and it brought back the dizzy feeling for a moment. "Aye, Your Ladyship?"

She nodded toward Skittles, gesturing to the sky as she and Alcibiades talked. "They'll need that liquor."

"Right away, ma'am," he said, nodding brusquely and moving for the sweeps. His steps were precisely timed to cross the deck of the gently swaying ship without mishap, and she shook her head, thinking, There's much I don't know about him, tho' he once owned me. She smiled without really seeing him and added to herself, And now I him.

It seemed a miracle: last night the hopeless bond-slave of an angry and powerful man, and today deferred to by the entire crew of a shipful of heroes. Plus she was rich. Forty-eight crowns! She knew right where it was; tucked safely inside Alcibiades's shirt, close to the wide belt about his waist. She had a moment's imaginary image of herself teasing the bag from him, her hand hidden under the cloth as she groped ineffectually, and his warm smile as he looked down into her face.

Speaking of warm... she turned from the sight of Alcibiades accepting the bottles of liquor from Harrel and propped her elbows on the rail, looking out into the harbor. Girl, she told herself severely, get thy head out o' his trousers. You've no right, and he's been so kind... Kind he was, knowing she'd been a tavern wench mere hours before they met and yet showing the deference he'd give a monarch. She didn't know the first thing about him; he was probably married. Probably to Skittles; they had the kind of easy, effortless camaraderie she'd always wished for in a friend and never found. And that kind of a man, once he finds his woman, stays faithful to the death.

She sighed and turned toward the town, leaning against the rail. And so she was to leave her home, everything she'd ever known, bitter and hopeless as it had been, to follow these strangers to--what? Where were they going and what were they doing? Merchants? Smugglers? Pirates? They certainly fought well enough, it seemed; she and Harrel were the only two aboard who weren't bristling with weaponry. Spies, perhaps. But for whom? And what could they find out from such an obvious perch?

Her head spun with questions. Who was Lethe? Was she mad? Ill? Possessed? Who was Bladewalker, and why was Serafina convinced that the woman who'd spitted Lethe's attackers wasn't the same woman who'd just taken her into her cabin? It was dark in that alley, dark and the violence had taken them over. How could she be certain?

And then to grow faint and quarrelsome when the striking, dangerous giant in black walked into her life. Her face grew hot with embarrassment. Sinking spells, like the silly girls of the town! Shouting obscenities at the company, when she was doing her best to act like the lady they thought she was! Taking a tumble in her mother's best gown! She ran a hand over the deep green cloth of the dress with a sense of shame. She'd no right to this, either. Best to keep it safe from her clumsiness. Well, she could do that, at least. Get back into her workaday clothes and try to be useful to the crew. Perhaps she could cook for them.

But that meant going into the cabin next to Lethe's, and Athirat alone knew what was going on in there. Perhaps Lethe and Bladewalker were lovers, and perhaps Lethe could only be comforted the one way; she could see that happening. (Her face would never stop flaming, she decided, nor would she ever be able to think of something a little more lofty.)

She gave herself a mental shake. Idiot girl, she thought severely, it matters not what thou hear'st, but what they hear of thee. Aye, that was it; if she could move like the tiniest beetle, no sound, that was what was important. Leave 'em their privacy, which she knew, to a sailor aboard a tiny ship, was precious and guarded.

Decision made, she spun on her heel to act before she could talk herself out of it, and damn near whacked right into Alcibiades. He held up his hands to fend off her sudden movement just as her muscles locked. She found herself staring up into his lovely long-lashed green eyes, and for an instant, she had the insane conviction that he was staring back.

"Your Ladyship?" he asked gently.

You're the most beautiful man I've ever clapped eye to, her mind answered, and she had the sense to clamp her treacherous jaw shut before it let the words free.

"I should have moved with less stealth." He laughed a little, sounding embarrassed, and she wondered if he could see into her head. The thought made her blush fiercely again. "I--I meant to tell you that we've missed the light and the tide and will be mooring here for the night."

"Yeah," she said. She caught herself and said, "That is... I see."

"So... we'll be having a last meal on land before it's hardtack and beer for the next few weeks."

"Ah," she said, trying not to sound like she had a turnip for a head.

"If you'd care to join us," he added with haste.

Her head began to buzz a bit again, the annoying honeybees returned, and she tried to wave them away long enough to frame a coherent answer.

"But perhaps a bunch of rough sailors--"

"No," she said in desperation, schooling her tongue to speech. "That is, I'd be delighted. I'm--I'm honored, Alcibiades, truly I am. You've all been... so kind..."

She sounded like an idiot, stammering her half-sentences, but he smiled, and she fancied there was a look of relief in it. "Well, then," he said, gesturing in a confused sort of fashion, "that's all right. And it's we who're honored by your presence, Your Ladyship, not t'other way round..."

She didn't exactly feel like setting him aright about that, so she made an equally tentative gesture in the direction of her cabin. "Then... I'll just get changed..."

"Oh, aye," he said quickly. "Join us when you can, and we'll go in together."

She nodded with what she hoped was dignity and crossed the deck, praying she wouldn't trip over any of the infernally many tricky things on the deck and do her mother's gown a fatal injury. Ranger reached for her door and whistled for Harrel in one economical gesture, but she shook her head as her new bondsman approached, and he gave her a beseeching glance as the door closed, almost as if he were begging her not to leave him alone on deck with a panther. It almost made her laugh.

* * *

After Serafina had disappeared into her cabin, Harrel ruffled up his shoulders and took up a position as guard before her door. He was standing practically at Ranger's side, trying not to look at Blackie, curled in silent menace before Lethe's cabin.

Skittles, stowing compass and liquor carefully in the tool-coffer at the sweeps, chuckled. Alcibiades crossed the deck and joined her, his relief evident even in the twilight. "And how went your latest mission, brave warrior?" she asked.

"Shut up," he answered with a grin.

"Oh, aye," she said, nodding with the wisdom she knew he found infuriating, "trolls and ogres, pirates and storms, that's one thing. But askin' a pretty girl to dinner--!" She whistled. "Thy courage knows no bounds, my brother."

"I believe I told you to shut up," he said, but his smile didn't dim.

"Haven't you noticed by now that I never, ever listen to you?"

"Indeed, that has developed into our habit," he replied, "but I'm the captain, and due your respect."

"I'll work on it, Alci," she assured him. She nodded in the general direction of Serafina's cabin. "That's a beautiful girl."

Alcibiades found an object of fascination in something across the harbor.

"A girl like that could give a sailor something to come home to."

He grunted and leaned on the railing on his hands, staring out to sea.

"Thine endless jibber-jabber tires my ears," Skittles said with a smile. "Alci... have you never seen that look on a woman's face before?"

He turned to her. "Skittles, I don't suppose I could plead that your words cause me no little pain tonight?"

She studied the planks of the decking. "I'm sorry," she said finally. "I'll not bring it up again."

"I didn't say that," he said, leaning on his elbow. "'Tis very flattering of you."

She thought for a moment, considering what this might mean to him. "Alci, my brother," she said, "there's someone for everyone. And here we are at the end of the earth, before we sail for t'other end. Dost think, in all this wide, wide sea-bounded world, that it might not also be true for thee?"

He straightened and put a hand to his chin, looking down at her face. "Thou'rt a good, good friend, Skittles," he remarked. "And that's all that keeps me from pitching thee into the harbor."

"You're too curious to see if Her Ladyship can get the compass working," she retorted, "and if she's within a league, you won't be able to hold it steady."

"Aye, that's another reason I need thee," he agreed. "Your clothes stay dry another night, my sister."

She patted him on the arm, a riot of emotion swirling through her. "Aye, well, think on it, will you?"

"I'll think on it," he told her solemnly. "Let's get this crew rounded up and fed, what say you?"

* * *

When Serafina emerged from her cabin, finding Harrel largely ungnawed save by his fear of beasts with fangs, the ship was as active as it had been when she first came upon it provisioning. Skittles and Ranger were filling a leather harness with bottles, Dogmatika had two large panniers affixed crosswise over her hips, and Pyra was struggling into a rucksack that looked heavy, with another on the deck next to her.

"Her Ladyship joins us again!" cried Alcibiades from the prow, where he was loading some tarry goop onto the ends of unlit torches. Makionus slung a bundle of prepared torches over her shoulder and set forth down the gang, staggering just a bit.

"Where are you going?" Serafina called to the prow.

"Dinner," Alcibiades called back, heaving a huge bundle of torches to his shoulder as if they were mere tinder. He threaded his way through the lines of the ship with his dancer's grace and joined her amidships. "Hi! Bondsman," he said to Harrel, "make thyself useful." Harrel hurried to Dogmatika and relieved her of the panniers. Dogmatika shook herself back into place and slung another rucksack to her back.

Serafina glanced about her. Pyra had gotten her rucksack settled, and she paced carefully down the gang, setting off after Makionus. Next came Dogmatika, then Harrel, who went in the same direction, panniers loaded, with the stubborn insistence of a two-legged donkey. Skittles and Ranger, having got the bottles sorted, followed, and Blackie got to her feet and slipped silently after. All of them were walking in the direction of a deserted stretch of beach Serafina knew well.

As they went, a pair of eyes shrouded in the gloom watched them. The eyes were dark, accessorized with a wicked-looking scar over one eyebrow, and above them tumbled a mass of black and silver hair similar to that of Alcibiades. The watcher, concealed in the darkness near the taxing-house, bore, moreover, a cruel-looking smile upon her lips. When they had passed, the figure melted into the shadows, then felt its way with large, capable hands in the direction of the beach.

Meanwhile, "The hostel is yonder," said Serafina, pointing up the alley that led into town, "and anyhow, they'll have dinner there, you needn't bring it with you."

Alcibiades laughed. "We shan't be troubling them. Something about this place raises my hackles. Something about the way they treat their royalty."

She chuckled, a bit uncertain, and dropped her gaze to some complex web of ropes used to steer something or other aboard the ship.

Alcibiades jerked his head toward the gang. "Shall we, Your Ladyship?"

She looked around her again. "Is... is Lethe coming?"

His smile was gentle in the gathering dark. "I think not. Nor Bladewalker."

She nodded and preceded him down the gang. "To be honest," she said in a low voice, "she scares me half to Hell." She added hastily, "Bladewalker, not Lethe."

"Either of 'em would make a formidable enemy," he replied agreeably, turning onto the beach. "'Hell'?"

She nodded again. "Sekhmet's queendom, where the damned dead congregate and are eaten, flesh and bone, by demons from the Lake of Fire, until the Hound of Hell swallows their hearts and their shadows and they perish forever in torment."

He winced.

"Your people don't have a Hell?" she asked, honestly curious.

He shook his head. "We have a land for our dead. It's called Urs Rahmen. But they're not tormented. We built them a temple."

"Was that Athirat's doing?"

"Mostly," he said, shrugging as much as he could under the bundle of sticks over his shoulder. "It's under the care of the God of Death, Mot. He was defeated by Athirat's sons and made to see reason and now the dead are well cared for."

"It sounds very nice," she sighed, thinking of her mother in the warm embrace of his kind-sounding Athirat instead of having her liver chewed in perpetuity by a giant hound. What was also nice was walking by his side through the sand as the last glow of the sun faded from the sky, leaving little brilliant pinpoints aglitter on the waves to mark their way.

Up ahead was a half ring of brightly flaming torches with a fire-pit in the center, surrounded by logs as seats. Makionus was doing her best to shove a lit brand into the sand, and Alcibiades held out a hand, accepted the torch from Makionus, and thrust it deep into the sand one-handed. Makionus murmured something low and grateful, and his teeth flared in the torchlight as he grinned at her. He proceeded round the circle, lighting torch after torch, which he shoved into place with economical strength, and soon the fire-pit was alight.

She saw that, as if by magic, the fire-pit held some fresh skewered bread and two spitted roasts that had obviously been cooking for some time, even though everyone before her had been on the ship a few minutes before. As the breeze sent the scent to Serafina's nostrils, her mouth commenced to water. Goat, and not the stringy elders, neither: this was fine, tended by an expert. She looked about her, but no cook appeared. Ranger and Skittles were unpacking the provender, while Dogmatika and Pyra handled the wine. Blackie stretched out before the fire, gazing into it from time to time as if deep in philosophical thought. The rest of the big cat dissolved into the shadows, save where the firelight struck a deep blue streak along her fur.

Dogmatika unstoppered the first bottle and approached the fire-pit. "For Artemis!" she called into the night sky, and then poured a little of the wine at the edge of the fire, where it sputtered and hissed into steam that rose in the evening breeze.

"For Artemis," the others echoed. Serafina was a little surprised that Alcibiades would salute a foreign goddess, but she repeated the invocation dutifully. Pyra handed Alcibiades a bottle and a couple of cups, and he raised his eyebrows and gestured with the wine in Serafina's direction. She settled onto the nearest log, and, feeling daring, patted it with her hand to encourage him to sit next to her. He did, unstoppering the bottle as he sat. He poured her a cup of wine and handed it to her, then got his own and set the bottle firmly into the sand, rapidly cooling from the day's heat.

Makionus turned from the fire, two lengths of fragrant bread balanced crosswise over a bowl. She handed the bowl to Alcibiades, who turned to Serafina and held out the bowl as if this were an everyday thing. She accepted a piece of bread, tore off a bit, and dug it into the bowl. What was inside was some form of ground nut paste flavored with olive oil and herbs, and Serafina's hunger awakened abruptly.

The wine was equally good, rich and flavorful, and it glinted a subtle red in the torchlight. It had been some time since she'd had anything but the thin, watered-down horse piss Harrel had seen fit to provide his bondservant with, and she sipped, watching him thoughtfully over the rim of the cup. He was serving the people in the circle, moving from one to the other with unobtrusive deference. He could get away any time just by plunging into the sea and swimming for the caves she knew were not far off; what was his game? Following the heiress? Spying? Looking for vengeance against the woman who'd turned him overnight from master to slave?

Alcibiades refilled her cup, and she nearly spilled it with surprise. She'd quite forgotten he was sitting next to her. By firelight, he was even handsomer; the golden earring glittered and his teeth, which were on frequent display as he chattered back and forth with the others, positively gleamed.

Pyra and Dogmatika sat next to one another, comparing notes on the wine, while Ranger and Skittles discussed some complex point of navigation. Makionus handled the roasts and the bread, handing out slices to the company, Harrel and she last. She set an impressive plateful of roast goat before Blackie, then sat on the log next to Ranger. The panther began to eat her own dinner, licking her chops from time to time with her eyes fixed on an increasingly nervous Harrel, seated in the sand just to Serafina's left.

They talked as the crescent moon rose higher and a spell settled over Serafina's soul. They all seemed to be good friends, and even Dogmatika's teasing and the others' ripostes were more in the spirit of enjoyment than anything else. She would have been content to drowse on the log next to Alcibiades for a year and a half, but she noticed that Ranger was patting her knee and smiling across the fire-pit at him.

He set his well-used cup in the sand and got to his feet, bowing, with his acrobat's grace, to the assembled company. Then he began a little step-step-step through the sand. Skittles and Pyra commenced to clap in rhythm with Ranger. Alcibiades danced about the fire-pit, then made another bow to Ranger and held out a hand. She laughed and got to her feet, then the two of them were dancing.

Skittles, Pyra, and Makionus added a tune to the clapping, and Alcibiades and Ranger, still dancing, wove their voices together.

Sweet Mother Goddess

Rising in the sky

Will you take me with you

Would you see me fly

Their voices, sweet and harmonious, wove together under the moonlight, and Serafina was ensorcelled again.

Will you let me worship

By your pure white light

Will you hold your children close

And grant your magic flight

Ranger and Alcibiades had obviously spent some time singing together, and the others provided a sturdy floor for the music. Dogmatika got up and got a pair of sticks from the bundle next to the fire, keeping time by thumping them in rhythm against the log. The two circled the great cat, and Blackie twitched her tail now and then as she paid intermittent attention to the two foolish humans capering and serenading the moon.

I have wandered far from home

And sailed the boundless sea

Goddess, will you grant this wish

Something just for me

The song had an odd, foreign inflection, and Serafina struggled to understand the words. There were more verses, having to do with yearning and the search for rest, an endless journey. There was some sort of loss behind it. Perhaps a sailor's song, longing for home and knowing he was so far away he might never see it again.

I could be your home, she thought at the handsome man dancing in the moonlight, then stared at the sand, blushing and afraid all over again.

* * *

She was drawn out of her purposeless embarrassment when Alcibiades concluded the song with a flourish, escorted Ranger back to her seat beside Skittles, and turned to Makionus.

"More story?" he said. "Please? Pretty please?"

Makionus laughed. "I would've thought you'd had enough of my foolishness."

He pretended to pout. "And here I've danced and sung for you."

"There's a difference," she said, holding up a hand. "That's entertainment."

"Please?" Ranger asked quietly.

Makionus nodded. "I'm outnumbered," she said, getting stiffly to her feet as Alcibiades settled his sweaty, muscular, and terribly distracting self next to Serafina. "Very well, then. Would you care for one of mine, or one from the cargo?"

"Cargo! Cargo!" they shouted, while Serafina wondered if they'd all got addled by the moon.

"Cargo it is," Makionus said, putting a hand to her chin and staring into the fire for a moment. "Let's see... when we left our heroines, the evil one had just threatened the Warrior Woman and her friend--"

"That's not how you start," Dogmatika interrupted. Makionus's eyes lit with amusem*nt, and Alcibiades half-heartedly tossed a handful of sand at Dogmatika.

"I'd rather hear a cargo story than another disquisition on the Triple-Bearded Goat God," Skittles said irreverently.

"The Triple-Aspect Goddess," Dogmatika said with dignity. "And it was not a disquisition, it was a dissertation."

"Such scholarly effort calls for the classic opening, then," Makionus said with a one-sided grin, co*cking her head at Dogmatika. She drew herself up into a pose Serafina knew instantly had been rehearsed a thousand thousand times.

"Sing to me, Muse, of the trials of the Warrior Woman, adrift abroad on the wide ways of the world, and the girl whose faith redeemed her, body and soul." Her voice had gotten deeper and louder. A lot louder. "Sing of their friendship, ripening to love with each challenge faced, threat defeated, innocent life preserved. Sing to us of the triumph of love, grasping the hand of the beloved, snatching a morsel of good from the bloody jaws of evil, the honor and purity and faith of love itself."

The cadence sounded like music and the words like a magic spell. Makionus drew sigils in the air as she recited, the firelight flickering against her dark coat and boots, hands and face alone clear as she wove them a tale.

It was something about an evil woman, a villainous and unpleasant character who threatened the hero and her lover, a villain all the more horrendous because the Warrior Woman had fashioned the twisted soul and vengeance-driven heart herself. The Warrior was a rare thing, a conqueror who saw the world laid at her feet and yet gave up cruelty forever. Something had happened to turn the Warrior: she met a girl, and her life would be wrenched into a new course, for now she had a reason to act with honor. Instead of risking death for a paltry bag of gems or parcel of land or sumptuous castle, now she would give her life in the service of justice, because the only unbearable thing left in this world, and the next and the next and the next, was disappointing the girl who meant more to her than the blood coursing through her veins.

The words blazed in Serafina's head as though the fire itself had spelled them out.

When will this end? Somebody has to say no to this lust for revenge.

That is so hard to do.

The girl leaned toward the Warrior Woman, who stared unseeing into the fire. Serafina thought of her mother and caught her breath.

If something happened to... you...

...You promise me. If something happens to me, you will not become a monster. There’s only one way to end this cycle of hatred, and it’s through love... and forgiveness.

Don’t you go changing, Gabrielle. I like you just the way you are.

Finally the Warrior Woman was looking at the girl, paying attention to her. It was as though the Warrior and the girl sat beside them at the fire-pit, talking quietly but of a terribly important thing, the most important thing there was, how far you would go to protect the people you loved, no matter what it did to your soul. Serafina could see the Warrior curling her arm round to bring the girl's head to her shoulder. And the stubborn girl, not to be put off, seeing through the gambit and striking to the heart.

No... no, you promise me.

The Warrior, for the first time in her life, making a vow she had every intention of keeping, though it cost her everything, even if all she had left was the bitter, cold satisfaction of vengeance.

I promise.

And then the girl's swift, tender move to wipe a tear from the face of the woman she loved, and the Warrior's even swifter evasion, the two sitting close but still alone, in agony. Serafina's heart swirled with the pain of it.

Go... go on.

Serafina closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in the welcome darkness. The silence stretched out, and finally she came back from the fathomless place she'd been to see Makionus standing with her hands still at her sides, looking at something behind Serafina.

Serafina turned. There, pale in the torchlight, stood Lethe.

* * *

That wasn't the worst of it. Behind Lethe was Bladewalker, looming with menace against the night sky.

For a brief, breathless moment, nothing moved but the waves of the sea and the breeze rushing by Serafina's ears. Then Bladewalker spoke.

"You go too far, feeble scribbler."

The warrior took a step forward. Serafina glanced at Makionus, whose eyes lit with what might have been fear. Serafina leapt to her feet. "You can't slaughter her for... for telling a story!"

"This isn't your quarrel, girl." Bladewalker didn't so much as glance her way as she paced slowly toward Makionus. "Stay out of it before I take you out of it."

Harrel and Alcibiades were in front of Serafina in an instant. "You'll go through me first," Harrel growled.

Bladewalker turned her head, looking him up and down with contempt. "You're not even armed."

"And I know that makes a difference to you," Harrel shot back. Alcibiades drew his knife and took up a stance Serafina knew all too well. Skittles crossed the circle to stand with Alcibiades. Ranger, Pyra, and Dogmatika made their way with cautious steps to Makionus, and the panther raised herself to her feet, tail waving and eyes on the warrior.

Murder. This means murder. Serafina looked at Lethe, who was standing just outside the ring of light as if she'd grown there. "Lethe... do something! They'll listen to you!"

Lethe's lips parted. "Blade."

The warrior stopped in her tracks, turning reluctantly, not quite facing Lethe. "Aye, lady."

"Take your hand from your hilt."

The warrior frowned up at the moon, then raised her hand off her sword. Makionus blinked and ran a hand over her face. Bladewalker turned and took the few steps back to Lethe's side at a processional pace. She and Lethe stood for a moment looking into one another's eyes.

"You told me," Lethe said with care, "that you would destroy them."

Dogmatika's eyes narrowed, and the sound of Pyra's gasp was loud in the stillness.

What happened next was dizzying and unbelievable. Bladewalker went to one knee in the sand, looking up into Lethe's face with an undeniable attitude of pleading. "Forgive me, Your Grace," she murmured, her voice thrumming with emotion, "but I could not. I could not summon the courage to obey."

"You gave me your word," Lethe hissed.

"You gave me your legacy!" Bladewalker cried, raising a hand in supplication. She pointed to the group gathered within the ring of fire. "You see them there. A weak-eyed little bardling spins a fireside tale for a gaggle of outcasts and they're bespelled, caught up in the arms of the Goddess herself. Would you have me put a torch to the dream they never knew they hungered for?"

Ranger turned and nodded at Blackie, who took a few steps, gaining in speed with each, until she had melted into the night, dark against darkness.

"She's right," Dogmatika said, and Serafina was impressed by her guts in opening her mouth. "We've lost Sappho to those intolerant newcomers who put fire and sword to anything not marked with a cross. Must we lose this too?" She spoke directly to Bladewalker. "She doesn't know, does she?"

"Know what?" Lethe snapped.

"Why Qin," Skittles said, "and with what."

Bladewalker got to her feet. Lethe glanced her way, looking confused or uncertain, Serafina wasn't sure which. Serafina found her voice. "It's like... like childbirth, Lethe, d'you see?"

Lethe co*cked her head with a puzzled look that said Go on.

"What's agony to you," Serafina said, enlightenment bursting over her, "is life to us. And you can't call it back once you've sent it forth. Once it's out of you, it's not yours any longer. The best tale belongs not to the teller, but to the hearer."

Alcibiades and Dogmatika turned to her simultaneously, and both of them looked impressed. Serafina crossed her arms over her breasts and looked down so they wouldn't see her infernal, eternal blushing.

Lethe took a few steps toward Serafina, and the protectors moved with wary caution. Lethe laid a hand that shook with chill on Serafina's shoulder. "You remind me, Serafina, of something I'd long ago forgotten." She corrected herself. "Someone. Someone to whom tales were important. Someone who knew why."

She turned to Bladewalker. "I'll be more careful in the future, commanding thee. Thou hast served me better by thy disobedience than thou wouldst as a slave."

"I am grateful," Bladewalker said, bowing her head, "for thy mercy."

Lethe laughed, but it sounded a little shaken. "Go on with your tale, then. With my blessing." She nodded to Bladewalker. "I'd walk with thee and talk of this mysterious mission to Qin."

Bladewalker replied, "As you wish, Your Grace."

The two of them strolled out of the circle like sweethearts looking to make a casual break. When they were out of sight, Skittles turned. "All right, feeble scribbler, on with the st--"

But Makionus had turned an odd color and was a-tremble. "Sit," Pyra commanded, and Makionus sprawled gracelessly in the sand before the fire. Pyra grabbed the nearest wine bottle and handed it to Makionus, who took a huge mouthful while Pyra seized her wrist and studied her pulse.

Alcibiades asked, "Where's Blackie?"

Ranger answered, "Guarding the cargo."

"Good move," Dogmatika said, eyeing Makionus, who was doing her best to drain the bottle. "Easy on that, you long-winded donkey, it's liquid vengeance when you're not used to it."

Ranger knelt before Makionus and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "I thought Bladewalker was going to spit you like a fowl."

Makionus paused in mid-swallow to remark, "I'm rotten glad she didn't."

Serafina couldn't help the laugh that burst from her. "Makionus," she said, "by Athirat, are you all right?"

"Aye, and thank you for asking, milady," Makionus replied, "but now you know why bards wear dark clothing."

* * *

It had been a long, long time since Lethe's last aimless ramble along a pretty moonlit beach, and she tried to recall exactly when that last one had been. It surprised her that the effort was not more painful; still, after the shock of coming across her girlhood spilling from the mouth of a thoughtless tale-spinner, she supposed nothing would hurt quite that much ever again. Perhaps it meant that the numbness she had sought for so long was creeping well into her heart, encasing it in ice, as she'd prayed that it would times without number to gods who lived no longer.

It certainly wasn't difficult to walk without thinking along the deserted sands with her companion, tall, silent, handsome, like and yet so unlike that Lethe herself sometimes had difficulty remembering where one left off and the other began. The chief difference was that nothing she had ever done or said had unlocked the sorrow of the woman walking at her side.

Well, we all of us had troubles, mortal and immortal alike, and she shrugged mentally with bravado, dismissing hers as unimportant. Those days were long gone; even the memories had faded. Even those memories.

"Soothing," she said, nodding toward the rolling waves sparkling in the moonlight. Bladewalker's answer was a noncommittal grunt, and Lethe took advantage of the darkness to smile.

The breeze fanned gently against her skin, and she remembered that she had a body instead of a disconnected spirit. For all the use it was; it still had to be fed and bathed and whatnot, but it seemed like it had been a millennium since a lover had run her hands over it, whispered hot and urgent in her ear, taken life from her life until their very pulses quickened alike. She looked back on it now from a distance shrouded blue-black with time. It almost seemed as if she'd dreamed it all, but the proof that it had happened, happened for real and not in the world of Morpheus, had tripped off the tongue of an ignorant bard not half a candlemark before.

She turned to Bladewalker to ask a question that had her genuinely curious. "Would you really have killed her?"

"I find her annoying," Bladewalker replied, her words clipped.

Lethe lifted a shoulder and pursed her lips. "Last I heard, t'wasnt a hanging offense."

"She showed you disrespect," Bladewalker said.

"Did she know she was doing so?" Lethe inquired lightly.

"No." Bladewalker halted and turned to face her. "But I did. And I didn't forbid her to tell what she'd seen. The fault is mine, and I was tempted to kill to cover it."

"Aha," said Lethe. "Diogenes, you can stop with that lamp right here." She stabbed toward the ground with a finger, laughing softly. Bladewalker put a hand on the hilt of her sword and waited until Lethe's amusem*nt had passed. "You'll apologize?" Lethe asked.

"Aye."

"And tell her she's safe from fits of misdirected temper?"

"Aye," said Bladewalker, seething a bit. "But she's still annoying."

"Stipulated. Shall we?" Lethe held out a hand, and the two continued their walk. "It's as Serafina said. After the arrow is loosed, you have very little control over where it will strike." She thought for a moment, then added, "I'd forgotten how good that story was."

"It should be a prayer, not a shallow little amusem*nt for a supper on the beach," Bladewalker ground out between her teeth.

"Aye, t'was a casual reaction they had," Lethe remarked idly. "'Bespelled', you said?"

"I can never win with you," Bladewalker sighed, shaking her head.

"I think," Lethe said carefully, hooking her thumbs over her belt, "that it has been a long time since either of us won at anything."

"Save barren survival," Bladewalker agreed.

"Does that give us the right to eclipse their happiness?" Lethe asked.

The question went unanswered, and after a while, the two turned simultaneously without speaking and headed back, through a midnight made for lovers, toward the ship.

* * *

The crew on the beach had gathered up the supper things and extinguished the torches, and now they were making their way back to the dock. Skittles, Pyra, and Harrel carried the remains of supper. Dogmatika and Ranger, somewhat burdened with empty wine bottles, were supporting between them the now fairly plastered Makionus. Behind them, Alcibiades and Serafina hung back a bit so they could talk.

"Your Ladyship, you needn't fear for your safety," he assured her. "Blade has... well, she hasn't spent a lot of time around unarmed folk, and bein' a warrior tends to make a person edgy."

"She could benefit from some valerian tea," Serafina remarked absently. "P'raps a bucket and a half at every meal would be a start."

"I'll let Pyra prescribe for us," Alcibiades said with a chuckle. "She listens to our physician." He settled the pannier more easily over his back and gave her a look she could feel in the darkness. "There's something on your mind."

"Aye," she sighed. "I've a big mystery spinning about in my head."

"Yes?"

"Who was that woman?"

"The one who fought with Lethe." He nodded as if she'd confirmed a suspicion of his own. "I must confess, when you told me the tale, I didn't think of Bladewalker."

She glanced sidelong at the captain. "Aye, why is that?"

"She was with us," he murmured.

It startled her more than she had thought it would. "With you? Doing what?"

"Going over the cargo."

She thought back. Lethe had come in toward the end of the evening. "In the darkness? How can you 'go over the cargo' in darkness?"

He shrugged. "Lamps. We hit a storm a day out and wanted to make sure it was all safe."

She chose her next words with care. "That must be a mighty important cargo."

"Oh," he hastened to assure her, "that it is. Most important."

She trod even more delicately. "And what--"

Up ahead, Makionus had reached the point of her drunkenness that involved sharing her talents with the world, and so she began to bellow a tune:

Come an' lissen to m'story 'bout a bardling fair

With her pretty green eyes and her bright blonde hair

With her tale-spinnin' voice, such a lovely lass,

Firm young breasts and a shape-a-lee--"

"Peace, scribbler, peace," Dogmatika groaned. "T'is a long way back to the ship."

"That," Alcibiades said sheepishly.

"What?" Serafina asked in incomprehension.

"That's the cargo," he said by way of clarification.

"Bawdy songs brayed by an idiot?" she asked.

His laugh was charming, but hardly enlightening.

* * *

"Hello."

"Hey, sweetie."

"Holy sh*t. Out of all the cellies in all the metropolitan statistical areas in all the probability densities in this quadrant, she calls mine."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, been a long time. Surely it can't have escaped you that I'm a bit of a sh*theel?"

"But a sh*theel with a killer rack. Where the f*ck are you, sweetheart?"

"You're not gonna believe this--"

"I bet I will. There's an echo like the space between an evangelist's ears."

"Saigon."

"You're right. I'm having a little trouble with that. What's in Saigon?"

"A killer rack?"

"Other than that. And I doubt you need to flash it to get a taxi late at night, you exotic creature, you."

"Didn't want to provoke an international incident. Listen, I'm gonna need your help."

"You got it, gorgeous."

"Can you come to Hong Kong? ...Hello?"

"You know, Saigon prepaid leaves something to be... I could have sworn you just asked me to go to Hong Kong."

"Yeah. Yeah, I did. Can you get away?"

"Are you in jail, sweetie?"

"No... no, it's nothing like that. Look, I--"

"You're not even making a crack about being too pretty for jail. This is serious."

"Just... as soon as you can get here, OK?"

"You in trouble?"

"No. Not at the moment, and I don't know that I will be."

"Need some muscle? I'm sure I can find somebody who--"

"Will you shut up a second and listen to me?"

"Shutting up now, gorgeous."

"I just need to see you here. I... I found something."

"OK, baby, got the ElectroLeash on scan now with the travel site. Hang on. I'll be there."

"Oh... oh, good. Do me another favor."

"Anything."

"Get a scrambler phone for the next time you call me."

"OK... I'm gonna ask you a serious question, and I want a serious answer. Am I bringing a gun?"

"No."

"That laugh doesn't sound like you."

"I'm... I'm not even sure who I am any more."

"Can you talk to me?"

"Not now. Get the phone and the flight and call me back."

"OK, honey. You just hang tight and tell the girls I'll be seeing them soon."

* * *

"Scrolls," Serafina said, considering.

"Aye," said Alcibiades.

"With stories on 'em," she added.

"Aye," he said.

She slung the rucksack with the bread into a more comfortable position. They were approaching the dock, and little lights swayed a-glimmer from the deck of the Amazon Queen. As she watched, Ranger and Dogmatika shepherded Makionus up the gang, followed by Harrel, Pyra, and Skittles.

"Still thoughtful, milady?" Alcibiades asked, a little hint of teasing in his voice.

"I must confess," she replied, "I'd thought it would be easier to figure after they got Makionus to quit singing." He laughed, and she went on. "Scrolls?" He nodded. "You're not pastin' your speech in barnyard manure?"

"No," he said, the laughter bubbling from his throat. "I've seen 'em myself. Many a time."

"Isn't gold and jewels more customary?"

"We're neither pirates nor vagabonds nor thieves, Your Ladyship, though I can see where that'd be the only kind of sailor you knew." He glanced about at the tumbledown harbor and added, "Considering."

"Well," she said, giving vent to a bit of relief, "If you'd see royalty in a tavern wench..."

"Tavern wenches are most royal of all," he replied. It sounded like some kind of private joke, but if so, he didn't explain what he meant.

"Scrolls, then," she mused. "And they're Lethe's?"

He shook his head soberly. "Bladewalker's."

She stopped and turned to him in frank disbelief. "Bladewalker's?!"

"Aye," he said. "Up till tonight, Lethe's been pretending she wasn't even aware the scrolls existed."

They were standing by the ship, alternately bathed in weak moonlight and shadow as it swayed gently against its moorings. "Then why was Lethe so upset that Makionus was tellin' that story?"

He directed his gaze back up the beach a little. "I've no idea. Unless..." He turned back to Serafina, and the smile had vanished, leaving a cold neutrality in his face. (He was still handsome with a stern gaze, she thought, damn him.) "Unless those stories are Lethe's own."

She tried to puzzle it out, and looking at him didn't precisely lend her any aid. She stared beyond the ship into the harbor. "Bladewalker owning scrolls that bear Lethe's story, yet Lethe doesn't know, or doesn't care... That doesn't make sense."

"But did you hear what she said?" he asked. "That Bladewalker had promised to destroy 'em?"

"Aye, t'would fit, that little cluelet," Serafina said, crossing her arms and putting a fist to her chin. "Why destroy the scrolls?"

"P'raps they're too painful to hear."

She faced him again. "Then why preserve 'em?"

"'Cause they're thunderin' great stories!" he exclaimed. "Makionus has kept us perched on spearpoint for days tellin' 'em. Every once in a while, she takes a break at one she doesn't care for, and Dogmatika has to fill in. We're afire to know what happens next to the Woman Warrior and her bard."

"Great stories are common enough," Serafina murmured. "Why these?"

"Listen, Serafina, you haven't heard but a few minutes of the saga," he said, bending closer and lowering his voice. "But these tales... there's something building in them, something that threatens powerful people. The two, the Woman Warrior and her bard... they're in love."

She raised her eyes to his, startled, and he went on. "Can you see some Roman dandy who's taken a beautiful, intelligent woman to wife? You know what they do to their women. He's got everything she hears set so she thinks of him as a god on earth, and she draws his bath, cooks his supper, pares his nails, bears his children... suppose you told her instead her destiny could be at the side of a powerful, passionate woman who lives just for her every breath?"

She thought it over. "You'd give her a choice. And he'd have to fight to keep his throne."

"Aye," he said, nodding slowly. "And who could compete with that?"

She put a hand to her temple. "My head is awhirl."

"So was mine," he replied, "when I began to put this together."

She looked into his eyes again, and remarkably, remembered what she was going to ask. "What's in India? And Qin?"

"I don't know," he said forthrightly, "but that was Bladewalker's first question to me when she was looking for a captain. I've been to both places and know the route. What may be there is... safe harbor for the scrolls."

"So," she said slowly, "if we've got something that could fire a revolution, we've got something dangerous to them. And if we're dangerous to them..."

He murmured, "They're dangerous to us."

She shivered suddenly, and to her astonishment, he reached round her. His arms were gentle, but the muscle under them iron-bound. "Let's get you to your cabin, Your Ladyship," was all the more he said.

* * *

He delivered her up the ghostly gang across the night-shrouded deck into Harrel's hands. Harrel took up a small lamp and opened the door to her cabin. Inside, her night-dress was laid out neatly on the freshly-made bunk. Next to the bed, a small covered pitcher stood in a leather loop attached to the wall so it wouldn't spill, and next to that was a basin, and next to that was the night-jar. On the little table was a wooden chest with a lock from which depended a key, and she knew it contained her forty-eight crowns.

She looked back, a little surprised, to see Harrel's face uncommonly soft in the lamplight. "Th--thank you," she said simply, and he nodded without speaking and removed himself from her cabin.

"Good night, Your Ladyship," Alcibiades said softly from the doorway.

"Alci--" she said on an impulse, and he turned with an inquiry on his face. She launched herself across the dark cabin and threw her arms round his neck. "Thank you, too," she whispered. "For everything."

This close, he felt warm and alive, substantial, with arms like tree trunks and an abdomen like a marble statue that could breathe. She buried her face in his shirt and inhaled, a rush of dance, sweet wine, bravery, acrobatics, protectiveness, sea and salt and adventure all rolled into one. His arms went round her, and all she wanted in this life was to stay there with him forever.

"My pleasure," he murmured, a sound she heard in her ears and her head and chest and elsewhere, the honeybee buzz going all through her again. It felt like excitement, like the music of a new life.

Too soon, he extricated himself from her grip, and she moved out of his comforting embrace, clasping her hands together to keep from throwing herself at him again. "Sleep well," he said, then added with a wink, "Your Ladyship."

She was still too full of the wonder to answer. Then he was vanished, and she shut the door on the abrupt emptiness in her heart. And elsewhere. She had to laugh at herself as she got out of her second-best gown and put on her night-dress, but it was a sad and pitiful little thing, that laugh. Soon enough, her wordless self-mockery gave way to jaw-cracking yawns, and she climbed into the surprisingly comfortable little bunk, turned her face to the moonlit porthole, and ended the most active day of her life in slumber.

* * *

Alcibiades awakened from a pleasant dream of a beautiful young woman's caress. It turned out that it was the freshening wind through the porthole of the crew cabin, and what it meant was the tide changing, and sunrise. He closed his eyes, turned his face to the ceiling, and smiled into nothingness for the space of ten heartbeats, filling his mind with images of her. Then, as befitted the captain of an important vessel on an important mission, he rolled out of his bunk to start his day.

The other bunks were still filled with the bodies of excitement-exhausted sailors, save that of Makionus. Alcibiades judged the dim light tiptoeing meekly through the porthole and thought he might be able to give them another few minutes. He picked up his boots and left the cabin noiselessly, prowling through the belly of the ship past the cargo hold on his way to the earth closet.

It was one of his few vanities, and he'd built it into the ship when he came into possession of her. It was set well forward, with a hatch opening to the decking over the prow for ventilation, and was equipped with a composter, a water barrel, shelves, and lots of hooks for towels and clothing. He washed his face, freshening after a long day and night with more wine than he was accustomed to, then took care of the other effects of celebration.

He slipped into his vest, fastening it tight enough to keep his shirt from billowing while they were working on the sails, then got into his boots for the climb up the ladder to the deck.

Upstairs, the fresh air hit him in the face, and he closed his eyes again, letting the breeze dance past his ears like her laughter. He hopped the last two steps and landed on the deck with a flourish no one saw.

Today they would get under way.

Alcibiades walked past the uncomfortable-looking but asleep form of her bondsman, wrapped in a cloak against the night chill off the water. He turned to the sweeps, where a still figure crouched, arm on the rail and chin propped on hand, watching the gray sky fill with blue in anticipation of sunrise. He recognized her by her dark coat and short gray hair and approached cautiously, having been fragile himself from time to time. He got to Makionus's side in time to see her open her eyes and give him a slight smile.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, pitching his voice low in consideration of her ears.

The answer was something between a groan and a chuckle, and it gladdened him to hear it. He didn't know her well; she'd joined them in Alexandria, at Bladewalker's suggestion, and had spent so much of her time belowdecks, cataloging the cargo, that he half suspected her short-sightedness was the result of being born part mole.

He'd not before witnessed her imbibing anything strong, and thought the night before might represent some kind of vow broken, so he leaned on his elbows at the rail beside her and stared out in the direction of the sea, watching the hypnotic movement of the waves. "I've not seen you drink wine," he remarked, "ever. To say nothing of being at the guzzle like you were."

She smiled, probably at herself, and turned to him. "Yes, well, I'd not had the piss scared out of me by a four-cubit iron-pointed menace. I had to replenish the stock."

He laughed, but low, in case he awakened the others. "A suitable introduction for Her Ladyship, don't you think?" Makionus went on. "Still, she didn't appear to object."

He winced, not really caring to explain why that might be.

Makionus shrugged and stared seaward again, a little smile on her lips. "Then again, she seems not to have had eyes for much more than one of us."

"You and Skittles," he told her, "have been a-plot where my bunk size is concerned." She started to say something, and he held up a hand. "I'd rather not hear your reasonin', which is probably irrefutable and topped up with strong rhetoric." He sighed, and it seemed a little grim to him. "Girls like that don't sleep alone."

"You're not considering the possibilities," she said unobtrusively. He quirked an eyebrow at her, and she added, "Such as the possibility that the Goddess fashioned her just for you."

"Don't you have some other fanciful thing you ought to be immortalizing on parchment just about now?" he asked with a smile.

"That's the end of that, then," she said. He turned to go, and she put a hand on his forearm. He stared at it a moment in surprise. "It'll not happen again, Alcibiades," she said softly.

She wasn't talking of the teasing about Serafina, and the relief went over him like an ocean wave. He'd wondered how he was going to ask if this was something that she did from time to time; it was far too dangerous on a little ship. He'd known drunkards to lie (though he held them largely blameless, being possessed), and he hoped she wasn't one of the cursed. He'd grown fond of her and wouldn't have lost her lightly.

"Good," he said with a decisive nod. "You're up early. Need a pass on furling-duty today?"

She glanced at him as if he'd startled her. "No, indeed. I'm just giving my eyes time to adjust to what's certain to be another annoyingly beautiful day."

"All right, then," he said, levering himself away from the rail. "You're calling cadence for me when we leave the harbor." She opened her mouth to protest, and as he forestalled her, he grinned with more than a little enjoyment of her discomfort. "I've heard that bard's timbre you can summon, and I want Her Ladyship's friends to know that a group of strengthy sailors is takin' her away from this cesspit."

Makionus got to her feet, and it looked like it hurt a little. "I'll go ask Pyra for some willow-bark," she sighed.

He chuckled as he watched her pick her way cautiously through the lines toward the hatch. He heard Makionus say good morning to someone--probably Harrel--then heard her say, "He's at the stern. That's thataway."

The smile fled from his face. As the sun burst into life over the town, Serafina appeared, putting a hand on the rail and walking toward him.

* * *

He'd been too distracted to take a good look at her the day before, but now he couldn't help it: she was moving toward him slowly, walking with the grace of the women who spent years carrying water on their heads, and he could no more have looked away than an ox can weave a breadbasket. She was again wearing what she'd worn the night before, something she assured him was the best dress she had (that wasn't her mother's, presumably). It was a soft drape of skirt in a mossy green such as this dry southern clime never saw on a tree, with a bodice that was a rich gold, laced and cunningly sewn and so form-fitting that he wondered how she could breathe. As it was, he was the one who was having trouble breathing.

For all her evident youth, she had the voluptuous curves of the women of Africa, and the lovely, flawless olive-brown skin he'd come to associate with this place, where dark Southerners, fairer Mediterraneans, and light Northerners mingled their blood. She wasn't wearing a kerchief, and glossy black hair tumbled in waves over her forehead, down her back, and across her shoulders, framing a strong-jawed face and a delicate, shapely neck. He tried to be a gentleman and not look any lower, challenging as it was, and returned his attention to her face.

Her large, dark eyes reminded him in shape of almonds, and in softness of a quiet, trusting doe. Unlike the shy women he'd known in this part of the world, she had a way of looking right at him that unnerved him, as it seemed she was looking under his clothing into all his secrets. It reminded him, oddly enough, of Bladewalker's direct gaze; he felt, however, looking at Serafina's eyes, as though he could trust her never to betray him.

She approached, she smiled, and dimples darkened in her cheeks as her full lips parted to reveal strong, even white teeth. He couldn't help it; he smiled too, wishing he was as handsome as she was beautiful, that he had something he could offer her in return for her youth, freshness, intelligence. Any Greek sculptor would have sacrificed countless sheep to have her as a model for a statue, with her exquisite form, graceful carriage, shapely lips, and large, liquid eyes. He'd had her arms about his neck just hours before, and her lovely body pressed against him, too--

"Good morning," she said, her voice as rich and full as the lips it issued from, and he contrived to say something similar in response without stammering.

She joined him at the sweeps, leaning over the rail on her elbows and looking out into the harbor for a moment. Tendrils of her hair, caught up in the breeze off the sea, danced playfully about her face and shoulders, and he thought, 'Tis going to cause her endless trouble unless she keeps it bound. But that seemed sacrilege, an affront to the Goddess who had fashioned her. He told himself to quit thinking about her hair and pay attention to her person, but as he did so, he happened to glance at the full, firm breasts evident above her low-swept bodice.

He had an abrupt image of himself lying against her naked breasts with his eyes closed while she stroked his hair, and thought immediately, This will not do. Get aholt of thyself. It didn't work, as it was really her he wished to get hold of.

He leaned on the railing at the sweeps next to her, resolving to be brotherly rather than loverly, and affected a man-o'-the-world air that was three-fifths balderdash. "Sleep well, Your Ladyship?"

She raised her head and took a deep breath, which didn't make his attempt to feign courtesy any easier. "Dreamlessly," she replied.

"Surely a young lady has dreams?" he asked her sidelong, telling himself to watch the boldness.

"You mean of lovers," she said easily, teasily, and he damn near swallowed his tongue. "No, I haven't one. Not even any prospects."

Surely she wasn't announcing her status to him...? She couldn't be, he would never be so lucky. "The people of this town," he said, shaking his head in mock condemnation, "have no eyes at all."

She gave him an assessing look, her lips still curved in a smile. He wondered, before he could stop himself, just how spectacular a kisser she would be. She didn't answer, and instead changed the subject without preamble. "Are we getting under way this morning?"

"Aye," he said, relieved that the conversation had left treacherous waters and returned to the mundane tidal flats. "Directly the crew awakens. We'll be well on our way by noon."

"Letting them sleep?" she inquired.

"Aye--well, not exactly," he said, feeling the grin grow over his face. "I thought it'd be a good idea to wait till your friends in town could bid you good journey."

"Friends?" she asked, co*cking an eyebrow at him, and he laughed.

"And a better one to wait till your enemies are out o' bed," he added.

She laughed, her shoulders moving and her bodice wiggling in a manner he could all too easily imagine as being the result of some other amusem*nt.

"Aye," he said with haste, "directly the crew is up, we'll be away." And Lady Athirat, he added silently, preserve me so long.

* * *

Serafina thought later that that whole morning of their departure passed like a happy dream: bustle, laughter, activity, food and drink during their hasty breakfast, shipboard friends working well together, a panther and hawk watchful from the deck, people she knew (some tormentors and some kindly) waving from the docks, the astonishing respect and efficiency of the port authorities. And him.

She got a good look at Alcibiades on numerous occasions when she didn't think he knew she was looking. He studied the sails, tightened the lines, handed this and that to various crew members, called orders. Every once in a while he would duck under a line or leap something on the deck without apparent effort, and her heart would give a little jump when he did.

Serafina knew it was really going to happen when the launch boats arrived with long poles whose ends had been wrapped in cloth; they were to push the Amazon Queen out of her berth and farther into the harbor, where she could capture the wind. She had time for one last fervent wave to Johanna and Wolfrum, standing on the docks with their arms wrapped unselfconsciously about each other's waists. Harrel gave them a single brusque nod that might have meant anything before turning back to coiling ropes like an expert.

Alcibiades was occupied in managing the castoff, the launch boats maneuvering near as the dock lines came off, when the door to Lethe's cabin opened, and Lethe and Bladewalker emerged. When she saw them, Serafina could only stare. Instead of matching black leather, they were both wearing loose sleeveless shirts with wide belts holding them into roomy trousers. Bladewalker was wearing boots, but Lethe was barefoot, and finally looked like she belonged. They joked with one another, but there was a visible distance between the two of them and the others.

The dockworkers on the launch boats set to with the poles at the sides of the ship, and slowly, so slowly at first that Serafina felt a little deceived, the Amazon Queen began to move.

Ranger slipped a glove onto her hand and carefully removed the hawk from her perch, undoing the jesses and stowing them in a pocket. She stood next to the rail amidships, held out her bird-bearing arm with care, and murmured something that sounded affectionate to the hawk before sending her arm upward in a quick move. The great bird launched from her arm, spread its wings, glided low over the water, then began to climb, beating her wings. She swept around two vessels and vanished into the bright morning sun.

As they got away from the buildings, the light began to grow stronger, objects on the deck melting into shadow or coming into stark relief, almost as if the sunlight were drawing them into existence. The sky, a lighter complementary shade of the deep blue of the harbor, arched over them like Nut the sky goddess, and Serafina could imagine her pleased smile as she looked down upon the ship and its crew.

The excitement grew in her as the launch boats moved them into position, and a fresh breeze caught her unawares, ruffling her hair. She reached into her bodice for her kerchief and put it in her teeth as she reached back to plait her hair into a long, thick braid, which she tied at the end with the kerchief.

They were facing the open water beyond the harbor when Alcibiades gestured to either side of the mainmast, and two lines of people formed. To port were Lethe in front and Bladewalker behind her, with Ranger and Pyra behind them, and Harrel, surprisingly, at the back. At the starboard were Skittles, Alcibiades, Dogmatika, and Makionus. Alcibiades swung his head around and said to Serafina, "Best to stay out o' the way, Your Ladyship, there'll be ropes landin' like a rain of snakes for a bit."

She had started to protest when the hatch from below banged open, and another person scampered out hastily, shutting it tight against any windblown waves. "Decided to join us, eh?" Alcibiades called, and the newcomer smiled bashfully.

"Here, Willow," called Dogmatika, gesturing to starboard, "join us. Tisn't as though Bladewalker needs the help, nor welcomes the interruption."

Willow dashed to starboard, standing behind Dogmatika, and Serafina saw another thing she'd never expected; the quick grins that flashed between Lethe and Bladewalker.

Alcibiades's strong voice rose again. "Looooooose!" He and Bladewalker reached for one of the seemingly uncountable pieces of rope that dangled from the masts and unfastened them, passing the ends behind them to the others in line.

"Ready?" Alcibiades asked, and a chorus of affirmative voices answered. Serafina took a rapid look around: all was blue, they were tossing on a fresh sea with the wind blowing, and something amazing, she was certain, was just about to happen.

"Caaaaaa-dence!" Alcibiades bellowed, and Makionus answered with something that sounded like a metric rhyming spell set to music: "Ah-theeeeeee-na, Ah-theeeeeee-na, Ah-theeeeeee-na."

The fourth time, she pitched her voice above the wind singing through the lines. " Ah-theeeeeee--"

The others called, "Na!" and gave the rope they were holding a mighty haul. From the yards, the sail unfolded and jerked up the mast.

" A-theeeeeee--"

"Na!" The sail moved up a bit more.

Serafina watched, spellbound, as the two lines, chanting the name of a goddess, raised the sail on the mainmast. "Athena, Athena, Athena," strengthy voices and straining, shining muscles moving as one, and the task was done. When the mainsail was extended, Makionus and Ranger made the lines fast to the pins set into the side rails of the ship. Alcibiades ducked under a rope and tapped Skittles on the shoulder, and the two trotted past Serafina to the sweeps. Serafina moved to the front of the line with a wink to Makionus, who made no objection, but gestured to Harrel. He got behind Serafina while Dogmatika and Bladewalker moved to the next of the lines.

" A-theeeeeee--"

"Na!" Serafina put her back into it, hauling for all she was worth, and the sail above the mainmast climbed for the sky. Beside her, Bladewalker had her long arms wrapped round Lethe's, the two of them moving like a pair of Roman racers. "Athena, Athena, Athena!" The second sail was set.

The ship was moving faster, and she glanced behind her as they got into position at the foremast. Alcibiades and Skittles were hauling on the whipstaff, and the Amazon Queen, scenting the wind, began to put the tatty little port town astern.

They set the rest of the sails to music and gymnastics, and Alcibiades and Skittles made the whipstaff fast where they wanted it. The hawk swooped in from the clear blue bowl of the sky, flying in majestic crossing-loops high above the mainmast, her shadow crisscrossing the deck. As the sailors dropped panting to the deck, taking a bit of the new-minted air, Alcibiades hopped nimbly from barrel to crate to yard and checked the lines. He got a good grip on one of the mainmast lines and leaned into the wind, kerchief and shirtsleeves flapping wildly about him, and then hallooed a joyful greeting to his Athirat.

Serafina couldn't take her eyes off him. He was simply beautiful, and she was on his ship, and she could not help a fluttery little feeling that her life had begun, at long last.

End of Book I

Chapter 2: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book II

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book II

We made good time that first month, moving roughly along the coast through the Sea of Africa. I learned that my little corner of the vast and watery world was called "Mauretania" by some foreigners and "Iberia" by others, and that our little port town, impressive though it seemed to me, was rather a poor substitute for some of the grand, vast coastal cities. As my lessons with Dogmatika (who, rough-tongued tho' she was in her rivalries with the others, proved a patient and capable teacher) gave me more of a grasp of my letters, I began to write down the places Skittles and Alcibiades said we were passing. A narrow gap of water between two large land masses was the gateway to the Sea of Iberia, with my homeland to the south and a completely unknown land called Hispania to the north, with the port town of Tingi acting as gracious welcome to Africa.

There was enough time on board to learn to read and write, for Alcibiades and Skittles between them steered and set the sails and tacked with such skill that most of us had plenty of hours on our hands. I soon solved the mystery of how Ranger contrived to feed a beast such as Blackie: she was a fisher and hunter, albeit one who seemed to take no joy in slaughter. Ever and anon, while I worked laboriously at copying out my letters in white softstone on a heavy slab of rock in my lap, Blackie would sit quietly a few arm's-lengths from me, snacking on a dolphin. (I should point out here that that name is also applied to a sea creature we call "porpoise", but Blackie's meal was a large fish, native to the seas in that region and plentiful, and Athirat knows we had it often enough ourselves that I became familiar to the point of weariness with it.)

The hawk, whose name was Klokir (which is a word in Ranger's language for a rocky place), did her own hunting, and it was a thrilling thing to see her soar her to a great height, then stoop, falling like one of the stones for which she was named, to plunge into the sea. More often than not, she came up with a struggling fish, which she bore back to the ship and dropped at Ranger's feet. Klokir wore no jesses nor any harness all during the voyage; indeed, I saw Ranger hood her only on two occasions, when it grew stormy and the seas were rough and Klokir became agitated trying to keep her balance. The rest of the time, the two of them worked as a team, which was indeed characteristic of all her animals.

I had an opportunity to meet the other two in the menagerie on our second day out, when Alcibiades was peering from the deck at something on the mainmast close to the Amazon Queen's banner. He had a hand up, shading his eyes, and of a sudden something dark plopped onto the back of it. He lowered his hand in amazement, looked at the object, and immediately bellowed up at the mast, "That was one of my last honeyed dates, ye worthless little rodents!"

To my astonishment, he leapt for the ladder leading up the mainmast, scrambling with nimble sure-footedness and dashing back and forth across the yards. (Fortunately, it was a calm day, or we might've lost him to Athirat then and there.) As I strained my eyes against the glimmer of sun on wave, I perceived two small creatures darting in and out of the rigging, moving like snakes but faster, twining themselves about ropes and wood like magical beings. It sounded like they were laughing, or scolding, in tiny eldritch voices. They led Alcibiades a chase through the rigging that had my heart in my mouth, though the others merely stopped what they were doing and watched with smiles on their faces.

By the aftmast, he made a sudden lunge and ended up with two handfuls of wriggling fur. He leapt lightly back to the deck, approached Ranger, and held out his loose fists with a brief comment: "Hi! Aeron, thy little demons need leashin'."

She accepted the tiny creatures into her outstretched hands with a laugh. "Many thanks, Captain, I don't know what I'd have done had either of 'em fallen to the deck."

"Had 'em for dinner," he growled, then shook his finger in warning and turned away.

I, meantime, had drawn closer, mesmerized by the creatures. They were about the length of my hand, covered in sleek dark fur and bearing a bushy tail for balance. Their little eyes were bright black and tiny ears set close to their heads twitched a bit as Alcibiades grumbled.

"What are they?" I asked, nearly breathless at my closeness to the exotic little things.

"They're called 'squirrels'," Ranger explained, setting one lightly on her shoulder and holding out the other, one gentle finger stroking its small head. "They're from my part o' the world, Your Ladyship."

"They're marvelous!" I exclaimed, captivated by their strange beauty.

"They're rats in nice coats," Alcibiades corrected. "And they're pestiferous little scoundrels, these two, with a delight in tormenting us clumsy two-footed oxen and a decided preference in targeting."

"And they love honeyed dates," Ranger said. The gentle smile didn't leave her face.

I reached out to touch the small paw, like a clever hand. The wee animal was breathing rapidly, and I wondered if it was exertion or its usual way. "Have they names?"

"That they do, Your Ladyship," Ranger said, "tho' I can't pronounce 'em with my thick human tongue. This one's called Ro," she said, nodding toward the squirrel on her shoulder, "and this one's Jerseygirl."

Often after that I was to see them gliding fast about the ship, stopping once in a while as if conveyed to wood by a curious god. They had a great fondness for playing tricks on Alcibiades, whom they appeared to consider a sort of dimwitted overgrown squirrel himself, and I was to prove the unknowing accomplice in many of their jests (not that I minded later, considering how they turned out).

Bladewalker and Lethe we saw seldom, and of a truth, Bladewalker was by far the more frightening of the two; I tensed whenever the broad-shouldered warrior made her way on deck, and soon found myself inventing reasons to go below and help Pyra with her stock of medicines or listen to Dogmatika attempt to commence an argument with Makionus. Lethe had no more fits of madness on the journey that I knew of; Skittles didn't know what caused them, but thought them alleviated by the presence of Bladewalker. Still, there were times we watched Lethe carefully. She got in no more fights, either, mainly because Bladewalker would not let her leave the ship alone.

Harrel continued to serve as my bondsman with conscientiousness and dispatch, and indeed became an excellent servant, surpassing nearly every one I've had since. The puzzle of how he'd so readily gone from owner to owned occupied me much, and I often watched him about his tasks, attempting to solve yet another of the mysteries that seemed to float about my head. He worked harder than anyone else aboard the ship, hard as they all worked, and would barely speak except to ask a courteous and respectful question, at which he always addressed me as "Your Ladyship." I was to have no reason whatsoever to complain of his service, and his devotion lasted the length of his life.

We remained a-sail throughout the inland sea that had been Alcibiades's home for longer than he could reckon, and in every way his crew of unusual friends made a half-lettered girl feel not only welcome, but royal. I shall never forget their gracious introductions to the great cities of the coast: Carthage, Sabratha in Tripoli, Kyrene (in all of which they paraded and cared for me as if I were some costly jewel instead of a barmaid), and the fabled scholarly haven Alexandria, which was home to Makionus and Dogmatika. There we halted for a few days, hosted in graciousness and comfort at the home of Makionus, while she and Dogmatika engaged in errands that had them away from the house most of the day and into the night.

I did not know then what their mission was, or what precisely they planned to do with the honeycombed archive of rolled-up pieces of parchment in the hold of the Amazon Queen; had I known in Alexandria what was to happen later in the journey, I would have offered what help I could, and paid more attention to what Makionus, in particular, had to say, for I was to find that, if one heard her out with patience, her meanders generally came, sooner or later, to a point, and she could be very interesting if one could remain awake long enough.

We sailed the eastern tributary of the Nile from Alexandria to Memphis, then turned to the westernmost tributary and came out in a little lake. I was afire to know how the ship was to pass from this point to Clysma, the northernmost port on the Red Sea, making the boundary with Palaisteine. Alcibiades's childhood home, he mentioned casually, was not far from there, but we were not to see it, neither then nor any other time; for reasons I was to understand later, he and his family were estranged.

I found the passage from the lake to the Red Sea utterly fascinating, for what happened was that the entire vessel, masts, cargo, and all, was loaded onto a great land barge drawn by more oxen than I would have thought existed in all the world and conveyed overland by those tireless and amazing beasts until it was set down gently in the water at Clysma. We had little time to appreciate this miracle, as Alcibiades took the opportunity to ready the ship for her long voyage to India and Qin, and we were busy from morn till night scraping and pitching the hull. It was hot, injurious, dull labor indeed, and only the sight of Alcibiades's strong arms prising sea creatures loose with his flat-knife kept me at the pitch-brush.

I was already aware, with a girl's self-centered belief in the inevitability of romance, that I wanted those arms to pillow my slumbering head for the remainder of my days, and would probably have taken the pitch-brush to anyone who suggested that my path might not be smooth.

* * *

The uniformed woman at the Customs kiosk had the most unreadable face she'd ever seen, and it figured; they had the image of the inscrutable East to uphold, after all.

"You may proceed," said the woman finally, holding out her passport. "Enjoy your stay in Hong Kong."

"Thanks," she said, taking it and shoving it back into the inside pocket of her jacket. She tightened her grip on her messenger bag and walked away, turning back for a rear-view glance at the Customs agent, who was surprisingly shapely. She smiled. Inscrutable they might pretend to be, but some women were born for scruting.

She turned and made her way down a corridor thronged with people. Sophisticated ads were everywhere, lights blinking to call attention to this or that technotoy. The new LG Cruz'r was making inroads, and she knew the uplink to the Web was solid; nothing, however, could match the rig nestled in her inside jacket pocket, next to her passport. It was the latest eavesdrop-proof iPhone, a solar-powered babe magnet that handled music, video, video games, Web access to multiconferencing, applications and files (she'd long since pitched her last thumb drive in favor of encrypted storage on her own server bank), and the newest geekazoid must-have, a see-through 3D heads-up display that flipped down over a pair of eyeglasses. It was called the iPatch.

The airport was filled with beautiful women; even so, she spotted Xenalicious right away. She was standing at the end of the corridor, scanning the passersby. Her dark hair was short and styled in a low-maintenance way that made her look even hotter than usual, which was saying something. There was a new look of purposeful concentration on her face, and her arms were brown with sun.

Xenalicious saw her an instant later, and the two of them moved toward one another like lovers long parted. She'd expected a couple of practiced whoops, but Xenalicious just threw an arm around her neck, pulled her close, and whispered, "Welcome."

She pulled back a little and planted one on Xenalicious's lips, which was a thing she'd been longing to do for what seemed like three decades. Xe always made her a little dizzy. None of the people passing paid them the slightest attention. "Hey, gorgeous," she said, "it's nice to see your sorry vanishing ass." She looked around Xe, appreciating the view. "'Cept it hasn't vanished. Good to see."

"I've missed you," Xenalicious said, taking her messenger bag without fuss and slinging it over her shoulder so she could put an arm around her visitor and tuck a thumb casually in the belt loop of her jeans.

"Me too, beautiful." She put her arm around Xe's shoulder and took a breath to ask what she'd been up to when a blonde woman approached them.

"Hi, sweetie, d'ja have a good flight?" asked the blonde.

"AngelRad?!" she exclaimed. "What the hell are you doin' here?"

AngelRad stuck out a well-shod carefully-manicured foot. "Yes, it's a new designer named Lisa Harp, thanks for noticing. This gal gets women's feet. I feel like a walking fetish."

"Darlin', you are a walking fetish," she said fervently, pulling AngelRad in for a quick kiss. Xe was grinning at the two of them. "I'm just a little surprised to see you."

"Hong Kong? Please," AngelRad said, as if this explained everything. She and Xe nodded soberly. Amid the noise of the airport, a little tune began to drift toward her: "I Enjoy Being a Girl". AngelRad held up a hand with flawless nails. "Hang on, that's our driver." She dug an iPhone out of a tiny purse. It was one of the smaller, more ladylike models, and AngelRad flicked her fingers across the surface. "On her way," she said with satisfaction.

They made their way out of the terminal, dodging the incredible crush of humanity and trying to keep the what-have-you-been-up-to conversation going amid a chaos of flight announcements, ads, and pay-per-view screens in the bars. There were suspicious little gaps in the answers from AngelRad and Xe, and she wondered when she was going to hear the story. As they got to roughly the sixth Starbucks she'd seen since getting off the Dreamliner from L.A., she stopped short, her mouth dropping open.

Walking toward her was another familiar vision of feminine pulchritude. Her face bore a visible excitement, like there was something she was just dying to say and had to keep her mouth shut about.

"JLynn...?" she ventured.

The woman gave her a broad, charming smile and fitted herself around Xe and AngelRad for a big, sustaining hug. "Hey, Maggie," she murmured. "Welcome to Hong Kong."

* * *

The Red Sea was even more crowded than the southern shores of the Mediterranean, stuffed with boats of all descriptions filled with smugglers, merchants, adventurers, navymen and -women, fisherfolk, and the pleasure-seeking rich. Passing vessels often hailed the Amazon Queen, and it seemed they could not proceed a league without having a drink with some group of Alcibiades's oldest and dearest friends, a suspicious number of whom were women bearing identical enraptured expressions, not unlike a meadowful of besotted cows. At first, Serafina doubted him; then, after a while of watching him handle the women deftly without stepping aboard their vessels to while away an hour or two, she began to doubt herself. The women with whom he surrounded himself were universally beautiful, though each in a different way: this one an oval-faced muse of love, that one a voluptuous charmer whose body made a private promise of joy, the other animated by a fierce intelligence, yet another with a wit and humor that made Serafina laugh despite her jealousy. She felt herself young and uncouth, lacking anything that could interest a man of the world, and took to spending time belowdecks, working on her alphabet next to the constantly busy Makionus and Dogmatika with a resigned dedication that afforded her great progress in a short time.

Harrel hovered always nearby, close enough to assist her with anything, but never approaching the worktables or scroll-holders, apparently fearful that he might damage something. Serafina had no idea whether he suspected the nature of the cargo, nor the reason they were traveling from one end of the world to the other. What's more, he never asked: not so much as a hint.

They were a day's sail out from the ancient port of Berenike, and Alcibiades was on deck entertaining a lady friend, another in an unending series of spectacular women she felt herself inadequate even to be near. This one, a silken, perfumed beauty with a veil and eyes even darker than Serafina's, had apparently known him in the fabled red-stone city of Petra, where she was some sort of influential courtesan or politician, Serafina wasn't certain which. They began to talk as his ship and her ship sailed with graceful lethargy side by side. As soon as she could graciously after the introductions, she left them talking over old times and gossiping about people whose names she didn't recognize, then fled to the scriptorium. Harrel opened the door to let her in, then shut it behind him and took up his accustomed spot in the corner.

Makionus smiled as she came in, indicated a seat, and handed her her tablet and chalk. Dogmatika didn't even look up; occupied in the passage that had absorbed her for days, she was scowling down at the parchment she'd weighted with leather-covered stones. Serafina settled on the bench against the side of the ship, propped the tablet where the light from the upper-deck ports could hit it, and began to draw her letter.

She was working on Xi, about halfway through the Greek alphabet. The version used for the commencement of a word was not a particular challenge, being more or less an open box with a horizontal line through the center, but the version used in mid-word squiggled in incomprehensibly, nonsensically, frustratingly directionless meander down the page, and it had defeated her up to now. The scrolls had lovely calligraphed Xis, cascading down the parchment like a waterfall, and she had no hope of reproducing the grace of the original scribe. Makionus was sympathetic, telling her that she couldn't draw the blasted things either, and it was true; Makionus had a terrible hand, blocky and unimaginative. Dogmatika's calligraphy was much better.

The door opened abruptly, and Harrel went to alert as Serafina and Makionus looked up at the same moment. It was Lethe. Makionus's mouth opened a bit, and Serafina tensed. Then Makionus got hastily to her feet, almost braining herself against the beams of the little room, and stammered something welcoming.

"Am I interrupting?" Lethe asked, observing the flustered Makionus with a smile.

"N--no, not at all, Your Grace, of course not. We're honored. Please, have a seat."

Makionus gestured to her own three-legged stool, which was pretty much all there was room for in the tiny scriptorium, but Lethe shook her head, the smile still in place on her lips. (She had a nice smile, one that made her look like a girl.) "I'm small enough to wedge into the corner beside our Serafina, here." Lethe brushed past Serafina, moving with graceful stealth, and sat at Serafina's right hand. Harrel turned his attention to the door again, and Lethe pointed at the tablet. "What's that you're working on?"

"Xi," Serafina sighed. "The little one."

"Oh," Lethe said, tracing the letter with her finger, "yes, that one's a tough one, for certain. Takes a lot of practice." She shrugged. "No matter, you'll get it after you've drawn it about five thousand times." The smile became an unexpected grin. "The next one's Omicron. A lot easier, it's just a circle."

Serafina laughed, and Dogmatika harrumphed in annoyance. Serafina put a hand over her mouth, mortified, and Lethe laughed silently. She leaned forward, put her hands on her knees, and directed her next words to Dogmatika. "And what does our concentrated scholar there, t'other side of the table?"

"Attempting to work." Dogmatika slapped her wax tablet onto the table and tossed her stylus on top of it.

"I have interrupted," Lethe said, but she didn't make a move to get up; she just kept grinning across the table at Dogmatika.

"She's been working on that one for days," Serafina said, pointing with her chalk toward the weighted parchment. "It's tougher than Xi."

"I'd be a lot farther along," Dogmatika said in open annoyance, "if my thought-cart weren't being constantly upended by interruptions."

"Aye," Lethe said in placid agreement, "carts tip so easily if they're but lightly loaded."

Harrel's chuckle was loud and vengeful in the small space. Serafina tried to choke the laugh, but didn't manage to stifle a truly unfortunate chortle. Makionus had a merry light buried deep in her eye, but turned a face of blandness on Lethe.

"P'raps Your Grace would care to try?" Dogmatika said with well-feigned courtesy, detaching the parchment from the weights and passing it across the table to Lethe.

The warrior took it with what looked like reluctance battling curiosity. She studied the carefully-drawn letters and shook her head, murmuring, "Such a beautiful hand..."

Makionus sat back, propped her elbow on the edge of the scroll-stand, and rested her cheek on her hand. "Sophia, great-granddaughter of Miriam the Recorder. Have you been to the scriptorium at Cape Artemisium?"

Lethe nodded, but her attention was all on the parchment. "A time or two." She stirred herself, adding, "But this is one I haven't seen."

Serafina gave Lethe a startled look. She'd have to tell Alcibiades about this later. But Lethe's lips had begun to move, and what started silent became a whisper, then a murmur, then full-voiced.

Thus it came to be that the day passed over and over, betimes in horror and betimes in absurdity, and the Woman Warrior could contrive no way to break the spell that caught them all, she alone aware of the passage of time from sun to moon to sun again. All about her raged or loved, fought or kissed in ignorance of the Titan Chronos Himself, and the day went back and back and back until she had long since passed from sanity to madness to clear-eyed sanity again.

Lethe lowered the parchment into a profound silence. Makionus was watching her intently, and Dogmatika's face bore a look of astonishment.

"So what's the problem?" Lethe asked. Dogmatika and Makionus exchanged a look, and Lethe took advantage of the break to lean over and point out to Serafina a spot on the parchment. "Look. 'Chronos.' It's a Xi, there at the beginning. Too bad it's not a small one you could practice on, but this is the name of a god, so you use the large letter as a sign of respect and fear." Serafina nodded, all nerves, and Lethe raised her eyes to Dogmatika. "Well?"

"It's clearly an allegory," Dogmatika said.

"It is not an allegory," Makionus replied in a weary voice.

"The Hebrews do it all the time in their literature," Dogmatika argued.

"This is a Greek author," Makionus pointed out.

"They've been having this discussion for days," Serafina murmured to Lethe, who replied, "Ah."

Dogmatika said, "If you had been trained in literature, rather than picking it up in the streets--"

"Illiterate though I am," Makionus interrupted, "this is not allegory."

"Yes, it is," Dogmatika insisted.

"For what?" Makionus demanded.

"That's what I don't know yet," replied Dogmatika, folding her arms. "But it has to be."

"Why is that?" asked Lethe softly.

"Be--because," Dogmatika blustered, gesturing to the parchment, "time doesn't... doesn't stop and days don't repeat."

"Don't they?" Lethe asked.

"That's an excellent question," Makionus said. "How do you know it didn't happen?"

Dogmatika made a pfft noise and flapped her hand. "'Tis a tale."

"Yes, it is," Makionus said, "and a tale has certain requirements. One of 'em is, when you're in the midst of a thrilling series o' swordfights, you don't halt the action to drag in some creaky steam-powered impenetrable clanking monstrosity of an allegory."

"According to the bard o' the alleyways and laundromats," Dogmatika said stubbornly. "Allegory."

"You've been starin' at the spaces between the letters too long," Makionus told her. "The rabbis have spoilt you for a rattlin' good story."

"It's an allegory," Dogmatika insisted, "and by the damp balls of Neptune, I'll find it." Lethe handed her the parchment, and Dogmatika said, "Thank you, Your Grace. At least one person on this voyage appreciates scholarship." She gave Makionus a pointed look.

"Very well, then," Makionus said, raising her hands in surrender. "You can go on tellin' Gabrielle's tales your way, and I'll go on tellin' 'em her way."

Lethe burst into laughter, and the rest of them looked at her in astonishment. It took her some time to get her mirth under control, and when she did, she was wiping tears from her eyes. "Thank you, both of you," she said with what sounded like absolute sincerity. "I can see I've missed some stimulating discussion. Same time tomorrow afternoon?"

And with that, she got up and left the scriptorium, Harrel catching the door with unobtrusive haste, while the other three looked at one another in bafflement.

* * *

Berenike proved sheer magic, as befitted the jumping-off port for the vast ocean that would take them to India. A more active city could scarcely be imagined, and after half a day trotting through its markets, counting-houses, trading stores, warehouses, gaggles of strolling street performers, repair shops, and taverns at Alcibiades's side, Serafina's head was awhirl with wonder.

Their first stop was at a place that made glass. Serafina had heard of it, but never seen any. She watched in incomprehension as the furnace steamed, at its center a glow red like sunset over the sea they'd been sailing, but fierce as the noontime summer at her home. They took up molten fire from the furnace on long smoking poles, little globs that hissed and spattered dazzling demon's tears upon the floor of the shop, and rolled the glowing things back and forth on long rails set at intervals along the floor, roughly at breast height. The men and women who worked there wore loincloths and leather aprons, for the material could kill or cripple if it touched, and their skin gleamed with sweat and oil through the steam.

She could spend only a few moments there before she had to flee for the cool of the outer room, where Skittles was negotiating something and paying a large amount of coin for it. Slung over her shoulder was the precious compass, nestled securely in a wooden-framed leather-covered pouch whose crafting had occupied almost all of Skittles' free time on the voyage from Serafina's home.

They left Skittles in the workroom, seated on a bench with her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist, staring intently at the workers, then accompanied Pyra to the apothecary. Soon, they withdrew from Pyra and three elderly women taking test tastes from the precious pot of Serafina's mother's salve, arguing loudly about the percentages of antimony and myrrh.

Dogmatika was next, and they threaded their way through a series of cloth-roofed open-air stalls selling a bewildering variety of inexplicable things before stopping at the stationer's. In a trice, Dogmatika was disparaging the quality of what the merchant assured her was the continent's finest parchment, although it looked to Serafina exactly like the material they'd been using in the Amazon Queen's scriptorium the length of the voyage. The merchant was making preposterous claims of virgin lambs with flawless hides, and Dogmatika answered with a scoff and a remark that she couldn't possibly bring such flea-ridden spotty tubercular excuses for scratch pads back to her colleague at the ship, who was notably picky about her parchments and had a foul, fearsome, and violent temper, besides.

Wise to the game, Serafina jumped in to assure the merchant that Dogmatika's life wasn't worth a quarto of one o' them nasty, smelly, diseased parchments if she brought such inferior stuff back to Makionus. The merchant ruffled up with great offense and made a few pointed remarks about young eyes being immune to quality, but she'd have expected better of the obviously older Dogmatika. Before the argument with the merchant could break into fisticuffs, Alcibiades hauled Serafina away by one elbow, and the two of them continued on their way, pausing to smile at one another when they were safely around the corner.

Harrel joined them far too soon, a relieved look in his eye as he caught sight of them. He led them to the practice-yard next to the gymnasium, and as they approached the wooden-fenced circle, they saw many idlers crowded about the top, watching what was going on inside. An Arab doorkeep salaamed as they approached and swung open the gate.

As they walked through, Serafina realized who was sparring. In the center of the ring, hidden now and then by the dust kicked up by the partners, Lethe and Bladewalker were sword-dancing.

Indeed it was like a dance, for here a smooth attack from Lethe had Bladewalker retreating step by solid step, meeting her sword without apparent effort, and there Bladewalker pressed the advantage against a panting Lethe, driving her toward the edge with a flurry of strokes Lethe parried easily.

As the newcomers moved cautiously around the outside of the circle to a small, cool dugout with an overhang, Serafina tried to keep her fascination allayed at the same time she attempted not to trip over anything and brain herself on the shields, pikes, and swords affixed to holders in the walls. When they were ensconced on a bench in the dugout, Alcibiades and Harrel, following the contest avidly, commenced to yip and groan softly as first one, then the other combatant gained or lost a point.

They halted frequently between essays to catch their breath and get a drink of water from a leather flask they were sharing. Then it was back to the contest. Bladewalker had by far the longer reach and the greater strength, and Serafina could not see how Lethe contrived to keep from being pounded into the sand like a tent-stake; however, Lethe's attacks had the look of long practice. They must have been sparring-partners a goodly while, she thought, appreciating the fluid, deadly movement. Alcibiades and Harrel occupied themselves with cryptic comments Serafina thought were probably connected with a sort of bet as to the victor, and she shook her head mentally; it must be some kind of boy thing that made them wager on the outcome of a practice match.

The movement was indeed hypnotic, as well as everything else: their muscles shone with effort and sweat through the dust, and Lethe's face and Bladewalker's face alike showed deep concentration and their swords glinted and sparked in the bright sunshine. Serafina sank deeper and deeper into those faces, and the rest of the ring, the rest of the world, shrank into dark obscurity as she joined them in concentration. She fancied she could almost hear the thoughts flowing from the one to the other.

There's a stroke!

Aye, but thy blade is right there to catch me.

I'll catch thee any time.

I rely on it.

Another hammering and sawing of blades, then a whirl as each probed for chinks in the other's defense.

I've not met many opponents as skilled as thee.

And as for thee, only one, my friend, only one.

She taught thee well, then.

Lethe's sudden grin was wolfen, and she lunged. Bladewalker took a hasty step back, turned her sandal, and went to the sand; an eyeblink later, Lethe's sword was at her throat.

There's one road thou canst not walk.

Thou'rt my one weakness, lady.

The two of them were frozen, staring into one another's eyes through masks of sweat-streaked grime, and Lethe raised her sword out of target range in a gesture of acknowledgement of a good bout.

Fret not. I'll keep it from anyone.

Lethe held out a hand and hauled the giant to her feet, then handed her the water bottle. Bladewalker saluted her with it, a look in her eyes Serafina thought was not entirely composed of respect for an opponent, then drank in huge swallows. When she was done, she gave the bottle to Lethe, who upended it, drank her fill, and poured the rest over her hair (not that she could have made it any wetter, soaked as it was with sweat).

Alcibiades looked disgusted and handed Harrel a coin. Her bondsman was looking far more satisfied with himself than any bondsman should.

"Hi! Alci," called Lethe across the circle, "I think 'tis time we found us a bath-house, what say you?"

Serafina shivered suddenly in the sunlight as something passed over her like a shadow from a bird's wing, and Alcibiades's cheerful call of agreement almost passed her by.

Her knees were a bit shaky as she arose from the bench and walked with them a ways, and she couldn't have found her way from the practice-yard to the bath-house again if someone had had a stiletto to her throat. By the time they got there, the whatever-it-was had passed, the odd feeling only a momentary puzzle.

A bath-house, which she had always considered positively decadent, was a rare treat after weeks at sea, and she had to admit that, whatever their ambitions to conquer the globe, it was one thing the Romans did better than nearly anyone else. They divided up at the women's entrance, and Serafina turned to ask Alcibiades, "Will we meet you in the center pool?"

It was an innocent enough question, but Alcibiades turned an intriguing shade of crimson under his tanned skin and stuttered, "Er... well, Your Ladyship, I had really intended to meet Skittles, see how her project was going..."

"Aye," she said instantly, hoping to hide her mortification and disappointment. "Well, I only hoped our hardworking captain would have a bit of a chance to relax, is all."

"You'd have me go Roman on you?" he asked with a sly hint of teasing.

"Indeed not," she answered with a shudder, "I prefer your hair long!" After a moment, it struck her that this was quite possibly the worst thing she could have allowed to emerge from her mouth, and she felt the flush crawl into her face until both of them were doing a fair imitation of pomegranates. He muttered something and half-saluted, then turned with an awkward little un-Alcibiadeslike gesture and made speed for the glass shop.

Serafina turned, and the look in her eyes provoked a burst of laughter from Lethe. "Curious, little flower?" Lethe asked with a grin, and Serafina retorted, "That's not funny!"

"Keep a civil tongue to Her Grace, girl," Bladewalker snapped.

"Oh, leave her alone, Blade," Lethe said with a weary-looking gesture. "It's not as if we haven't all been standing in her sandals from time to time." She gave Bladewalker an insightful sidelong glance. "Even thee."

"My apologies," Bladewalker said politely, bowing a little, and Serafina almost fell to the dust with astonishment.

She tried, while they were a-soak and a-wash, to think about what exactly this all meant. He was reluctant to visit a bath-house, but that could be a distaste for everything Roman. And he'd been meeting a lot of his girlfriends, true... though he didn't seem inclined to leave the ship, and hadn't brought any of them to a private spot aboard the Amazon Queen, whatever that meant... The melancholy quite took her, and she dropped a few tears into the bathwater. Fortunately, Lethe and Bladewalker were fairly much paying attention only to one another, being naked and enshrouded in hot water and fragrant steam, so Serafina was free to indulge a powerful loneliness without anyone attempting to jolly her out of it.

They dressed just as the sun was bloodying the Red Sea, a remarkable and interesting sight, but one she longed to trade for, say, something like an Indian spice ship crossing their path far out in the ocean. They walked, much refreshed, back to a dockside restaurant to have one of their last dinners before embarking across the sea.

* * *

There, the crew had again assembled at an outdoor table with a good view of the twilit sea: Ranger, with an attentive and curious Blackie at her side, Klokir perched on her fist, Ro on the opposite shoulder, and Jerseygirl curled up in one of Ranger's capacious tunic pockets; Pyra hung with little bags and baskets 'round her shoulders and bulges in the pockets of her apron; Dogmatika and Makionus discussing some abstract point of doctrine from some Eastern religion Serafina had never heard of; Skittles and Alcibiades cradling the compass-holder as if it were a child; and Bladewalker and Lethe sitting in the corner, Lethe's green-eyed gaze alive with curiosity as she watched the others, and Bladewalker's serious blue eyes only on Lethe.

While the servers set bottles of wine and mugs on the table, Alcibiades sat on the bench next to Serafina as if this were not a big thing, and Skittles sat on the other side of him. "Your Ladyship," he said eagerly, as the servers set down bread and peppered oil before them, "we've made an important modification to your compass."

"It's hardly my compa--"

"You have to see this, Your Ladyship," Skittles interrupted. "This is true genius."

"Very well," Serafina shrugged, giving in to her mood of deflation, "if I must." She sketched a clueless gesture at Alcibiades, but he favored her with an eager, eye-flashing grin, his earring catching the light from the torches.

Skittles opened the pouch as though it contained six and a half of the Seven Wonders, then slid the compass carefully from the heavily-padded recess. She placed it with care on the table, and Serafina stared at it, still unenlightened after a lot longer than she had thought the two navigational toy fiends would let her go on.

She shifted uncomfortably on the bench, not wanting to tell them she didn't get what the deal was, and her attention was captured by a brief glint from the top of the compass. She reached out with a tentative finger, and her reward was a huge two-part smile from Alcibiades and Skittles. "Go ahead," he urged her quietly.

She slid her finger into the open space in the bowl of the compass, and it... stopped. She put her hand on top of it, and while she felt warmth and smoothness, she could see right into the bowl. She traced the lines with her eyes, then her finger, then leaned over to study it close at hand.

There was crystallized air atop the bowl. Her breath stopped, and she remembered just in time that ladyships didn't shriek like spooked little children when confronted by science. After a moment, her curiosity overcame her fright, and she co*cked her head, trying to figure it out. There was definitely something there, and the something was definitely warm and smooth, but it was as if the compass were suspended in a stream in which the water had stopped.

But water wasn't this clear. "This," she breathed, nearly unaware she was speaking, "is glass."

"Aye, Your Ladyship," Skittles said. There was no misunderstanding the pride in her voice. "An' what this means is, we can fill the compass with the distillation of alcohol, and it won't spill in a high sea and we can still read it through the glass."

"It appears to stabilize the needle, too," Alcibiades said eagerly, leaning over the compass and placing a gentle, strengthy, protective hand along the gleaming brass side. "It seems as though the volume of the fluid when trapped within the vessel by the glass lid prevents it from overswinging." She nodded, just as if she had more ability to follow this than a grain of millet. "Of course, glass is very fragile, so Skittles here had the bright idea of having a half-dozen of these covers made, not that it didn't cost us a ransom..." His hand was a mere couple lentil-widths from hers, and Serafina looked up half-reluctantly into his face, which had never been this close. His eyes were the pure, dark green of a rainy-season moss, fringed by the lovely long dark lashes, and his lips were so close that she could have reached for them with hers by moving only a tiny fraction.

"That... that's wonderful, Alcibiades." She pulled her hand free of the fascinating glass beneath her fingers and sat back. He quit talking, looking a bit mystified and more than a little uncertain, and she wondered if she were going to burst into tears in front of everyone. Fortunately, the server set a mug of wine before her just that second, so she was able to direct her attention to him with a smile and a murmur of thanks.

"We owe it all to you, Your Ladyship," Skittles said softly, taking up her mug. "We'll be able to navigate so precisely with this that it'll cut a quarter of the time off our tacking. Faster ships mean quicker trips."

Serafina glanced away, unable to meet Alcibiades's eyes. In the abrupt silence, Dogmatika leaned forward. "By the flaming foreskin of Agnis," she said, studying the compass, "that's a clever thing."

"Some time I'd like to discuss with you," Pyra remarked, "your habit of swearing by the nether parts of the lesser gods."

"Very well," said Dogmatika instantly. "By Ninkasi's beer-soaked yo--"

Ranger caught her arm with the hand not currently burdened by raptor. "Hold, there, scholar," she said, her voice pitched low in an effort at preserving Dogmatika's dignity. "Some things are too sacred to use in an everyday oath."

"You're a follower of Ninkasi?" Dogmatika inquired, arching an eyebrow.

"I'm a follower," Ranger replied, "of the divinity of women."

"Well spoke!" exclaimed Makionus, raising her mug of water and saluting Ranger. "To Artemis!"

All of them raised their mugs and Makionus carefully poured a little wine from the bottle into a shallow dish on the table. It looked a lot like what they would do to the compass. Serafina took a sip, and her unprepared mouth turned down as she tasted it. She glanced across the table at Harrel, who had just set his mug down and met her eyes with a dissatisfied look. It was thin and weak, and she wondered what had happened to it; perhaps the last batch had spoiled and this had had to be watered.

"Problem, Your Ladyship?" Lethe inquired.

"Oh, no," she hastened to say, knowing that the servers might be beaten if she were displeased. "It's just... not what I'm used to."

"I'll wager that's truth," Dogmatika said behind her hand to Pyra, who looked seaward instead of replying.

"Tell you what," Alcibiades said, setting his mug down, "after supper, let's go do some real celebratin'."

* * *

Makionus pleaded work at the ship and set off for the dock, but the rest of them meandered down the street toward a tavern, appreciating the last shreds of fire going indigo over the water. The colors reminded Serafina of the lava-bright glow at the center of the glassmaker's furnace, and the thought made her smile, low down though she was.

"That's good to see," Alcibiades said in an intimate voice next to her ear.

"What?" Startled, she turned her head.

His smile was gentle. "Her Ladyship's been a bit quiet this evening."

She took refuge in what her mother called "Anansi's Smile," an insincere comment designed to conceal a truth you didn't feel like letting loose just then. "I'm thinking," she told him, "about glass." He nodded and dropped it, and she breathed a little more easily. You couldn't really call it a lie, but then again, she wasn't eager to tell him she was unsettled and didn't really know why, except it had a lot to do with him. Anansi was a trickster, likely as often to play a prank as to perform a miracle, and his smile could mean either. A lonely girl had had occasion more than once to call on his ability to put up a mask; she considered him a weapon in her arsenal.

Alcibiades stuck one hand in the pocket of his trousers and aimed his thumb in the general direction of Skittles, walking beside him. "Aye, that's a substance, isn't it?" he said. Serafina could almost see his chest swelling with pride. "Too bad it's so fragile... you could use it for a thousand thousand things aboard if it weren't so apt to break."

"And so expensive," Skittles added. She and Alcibiades shook their heads with simultaneous sorrow, and it only made Serafina feel more left out. What did she know about glass? Nothing. Nothing. She'd behaved like some provincial moron. She wasn't the slightest use to any of them. She didn't fit with these people. She'd never be a part of their crew...

As they made their way down the starlit street, she watched the gleam play along Blackie's rippling fur. Why, one of their number traveled with not only a panther, but also a hawk, and two squirrels! She bet Ranger was the only person on the planet who could say such a thing. Ranger held her arm firm; Klokir might as well have been perched on a stone column. It must take time to be able to work so closely with someone you couldn't talk to.

And Makionus and Dogmatika could both read and write! Aye, and in more than one tongue, besides. And then there were Bladewalker and Lethe, skilled warriors; even Harrel was a better swordsman than she could ever hope to be. Skittles and... and Alci: there was no place they couldn't take the ship. And Pyra, a physician who had read about cures in books and used that knowledge to mend what was broke or rent. She realized suddenly that she'd not gotten her pot of ointment back from Pyra, and after a moment thought, Aye, but it's right that it go to someone who can do something with it, not some ignorant girl who can't even--

Her mother's voice leapt into her head, nearly as clear as if she'd been beside her. Daughter, if thy horizon gets to be a barleycorn's breadth before thy nose, raise thine eyes and look at the creation about thee. It was useful advice, and she looked into a sky spangled with bright, sparkling stars. Serafina looked up at them with a smile, and although she wasn't aware of it right then, Alcibiades turned his head and thought instantly, Beautiful girl, you shine as much as they.

They reached the noisy, crowded tavern, and Alcibiades hastened to the door, holding it open and bowing with a particular flourish to Her Ladyship, who favored him with the smile she'd been loosing on the defenseless stars. He smiled in his turn to hide the sudden hitch in his heart, then followed the party into the building.

None of them perceived the quiet figure in the street, a soft round woman whose large hands meant business. Her jetty hair was shot with silver, and her smile turned up on one side, and the scar on her brow glowed ghostly in the starlight.

* * *

Inside, the tavern was bright with glowing oil lamps and a merry fire in the brick-lined center pit. Around the pit were tables with actual chairs, and in the chairs was a riot and boistery of people from all over the seas: sailors, merchants, the dissipated sons of noblemen, rich women looking for a bedwarmer for the night, traders, soldiers, priests, and a fair smattering of men she knew, by their short hair and their arrogant attitude of commanding the very air about them, to be Roman officials. Long open unglazed windows set midway up the walls looked out on the gleaming of watchlights from the decks of the ships crowding the harbor, and the water glimmered and rolled under a fresh, sweet-smelling sea breeze. Serafina caught Harrel's expression as he looked around with his one good eye: What I might have made of myself with a place like this. She had to admit he had a point: in a big port town like Berenike, a good tavern could be better than a coin mint.

Alcibiades moved through the crowd clasping hands here, slapping shoulders there, his lovely smile much in evidence. Serafina was glad to see that he seemed to have plenty of friends, although she determined to keep a close watch on one or two of the wealthy women, who had a proprietary glint in their eyes when they spied him.

She didn't think they'd make trouble, but something else made her uneasy. She'd developed a vigilant air where men and drink congregated, and a thing she could sense but not pinpoint in the crowd had her on edge. She took a rapid look about her. If any of the other patrons thought anything untoward about the presence of a panther and a hawk, as well as two warriors bristling with blades, they kept it to themselves. That wasn't it. Everyone had blades, usually the knives they used for everything from mending nets to eating, and most of the time, they weren't a threat. The room was as crowded as her tavern had been back home when the big merchants came in, but she didn't spot anyone brooding silently into a tankard of strong drink, which often turned into an abrupt, explosive rage.

Skittles and Pyra were trading murmurs about Alci's glad-handing, and Lethe too was watching him with her arms folded and an easy grin on her face. Bladewalker, as was her wont, didn't look at anyone save Lethe. Dogmatika stood next to Ranger, on the side Klokir and Blackie were not. Harrel was at Serafina's shoulder, standing protectively close, but he didn't seem especially wary--no more than usual, that is.

"No, no," Alcibiades was saying to about the twelfth person, with a laugh, "the crew and I have a powerful thirst, and the wine at dinner was too weak to slake it. Let me get 'em settled and I'll come back to see you." He pushed his way toward the bar, and the crowd opened up to let him in.

He stopped abruptly, and it was a moment before Serafina saw why. A huge man at the end of the bar had just gotten to his feet and was staring down at Alcibiades with evident loathing. The man was broad as he was tall, muscled and substantial, and old, fearsome scars rippled down his arms. She could scarcely see his face under shreds of long, matted locks and a filthy, food-crusted beard.

Alcibiades, to his credit, went utterly still. Three men got up from behind the hulking, dirty giant and took up poses of belligerence, hooking thumbs in their belts (except for the fellow who had none) and sneering at Alcibiades. The volume of conversation in the room began to drop. Serafina's eyes went to the huge knife in the giant's belt, and her heart began to hammer between her breasts.

"You can't drink here," the giant announced to Alcibiades. It surprised Serafina a bit that he could speak.

"That's not your decision, Marius," Alcibiades told him.

"I'm makin' it my decision," the man said.

"You've made a lot of decisions for Adrah," Alcibiades said. "Without consulting her."

The skin she could see under the tangle of hair went scarlet. "No ball-less boy-f*cking eunuch dictates to a man!"

Serafina's hand was on Alcibiades's shoulder, arresting him before he got launched. "Don't mind this privy-smear, Captain," she said, pitching her voice to carry across the crowded room. "He ain't worth the time of a real man." She kept her fingers dug firmly in Alcibiades's shoulder and held up the little finger of her other hand in an insulting gesture recognized everywhere. "'Tis always the brainless braggarts who're hung like a meal-worm."

Snickers and guffaws broke out all over the room. Alcibiades laughed, and it sounded genuine. Marius swiveled his eyes to Serafina, and she set her jaw, although her knees were a-tremble. "Well, little girl," he said, reaching down past his belt buckle to give himself a rude squeeze, "this meal-worm's ready to turn into a rampant lion just for you--"

He got exactly that far before flying backwards to crash heavily into the wall just beyond the bar. Skittles went to her knees, tucking herself around the compass case. Marius's friends took a step forward, but stopped at the glitter of the unsheathed blade in Lethe's hand.

Bladewalker waded through the crowd, plucked Marius from the floor, and wrestled him into a crouch. Blood was streaming down his face.

"You owe this lady an apology," Bladewalker said, the words forced out of her throat past pure anger. "And the man as well."

It didn't seem to take her the slightest effort to hold Marius in place, although he probably outweighed her by five stone and had a head in height against her. "I'm sorry, miss," he said, spitting it out around loosened teeth and swollen lips. "And you, Captain. I meant no offense."

"Like holy hell you didn't!" Serafina exclaimed, incredulous.

"Do you want her to kill him?" Lethe asked casually.

A slow, cruel smile spread over Bladewalker's face, and Serafina's stomach turned. "No!" she said. "Just... just get rid of him."

"Listen, you stupid git," Lethe said, lowering her voice with menace. "My friends and I want to enjoy a quiet drink without the stench of garbage in our nostrils. Get you gone, and if we find you or your friends within a league of this place, we'll be polluting the harbor with your carcasses by daybreak. Get it?"

His nod was immediate and painful-looking, and Bladewalker took her hands from him with evident disgust. Marius's friends seized his arms and hauled him to his feet, and Serafina was secretly pleased to see he was having considerable trouble staying upright.

As they passed, Lethe called out, "Behold the exemplar of manliness. Stinks, tipples, insults little girls, and then gets his worthless ass handed to him by a woman." The tavern burst into raucous laughter again, Lethe sheathed her sword, and Marius's friends hustled him out.

Alcibiades and Serafina turned to one another. "Are you all right?" they exclaimed in unison. Serafina nodded, but she was close to tears, and he put his arms about her. "Shh, shh, Your Ladyship," he murmured, giving her a brief, sustaining embrace. "You're a brave woman, and I'm proud to be at your side."

She caught her breath, resolved not to cry, and the rest of them clapped her on the shoulder and praised her courage and her wit. Pyra tapped Skittles on the shoulder, and Skittles opened her eyes, looked about her, and got to her feet carefully, peering into the pouch that held the compass. Her expression was like she'd escaped the noose.

"Once more," said a woman at Alcibiades's elbow, "you play the savior for me."

"Adrah!" he exclaimed, taking her in a hug and lifting her off the ground. "Indeed, 'twasn't me, but my friends. Adrah, this is Serafina and Bladewalker."

Adrah had magnificent black eyes and a seriously shapely form under a bodice as tight as Serafina's, and she might not have been so irritating if she hadn't had a casual arm draped across Alcibiades's shoulders. "Pleased to meet you, and to know you're exactly like my friend Alcibiades, here." She stuck out a hand, and Serafina took it. "And you," she said, extending a hand to Bladewalker. "You look dangerous." Bladewalker bowed over Adrah's hand, and she flushed.

"What's the thing with...?" Alcibiades jerked his thumb in the direction of the door.

Adrah shrugged. "Nothin', 'cept in that thick skull o' his. You know he's always been the jealous type, and a man like that's got to imagine whatever romance he gets."

"Comforting to know there won't be a second generation," Bladewalker remarked, and Adrah looked her up and down, making no attempt to hide her interest.

"That one?" Adrah laughed, putting her hands against her attention-getting hips. "Not a chance. Now, you, on the other hand--Bladewalker, is it? Taken?"

Bladewalker spread her hands. "To my deepest regret, lady."

Adrah sighed, "The best ones all are. Ah, well, it won't keep you from playin' jungle explorer in my dreams, if you've no objection?"

"None whatsoever," Bladewalker assured her with a hearty laugh Serafina realized she'd never heard before.

Whatever had felt wrong didn't any more, and Adrah's starry-eyed reaction of lust toward Bladewalker was a relief. "Harrel," Serafina called as the tension drained from her like a tide, "would you choose us some wine?"

"My cellars are open to you, Harrel," Adrah said courteously, "compliments o' the house."

"Thank you, lady," he said.

"We'll be right over here," Adrah told him with a wink, "at the best table in the place."

* * *

The rest of the evening passed in toast after toast, and Serafina later remembered little of it save conversation liberally dolloped with laughter and the warm glow that suffused her heart when she was with her friends. The scare was over, her mind sent her no more boogey-men, and she was able to relax. Adrah's wine cellars were excellent, and Harrel's regret that he couldn't sample more freely was one of the clear things she could recall afterwards.

The wine had the effect she might have expected, and she had occasion to visit the jakes more than once. As befitted a busy tavern, it was just off the back door, and the host of people coming and going, most of them in a merry mood, kept it safer than many public comfort stations. Still and all, her friends took good care not to let her go alone, and their concern touched her. It was a Roman-style place, the pit-holes spaced within handspans of one another in a long row, and her companions were conscientious about not letting her out of their sight. Serafina was surprised to find the jakes clean and airy; the holes didn't dump directly into the water, either. She could see Harrel as the gracious if firm host of such a place.

Most of the other patrons had left, the night winding down into quiet starlight and murmured conversation, on her return from her third trip. She glanced about the table and discovered Alcibiades missing.

Moreover, so was Adrah.

* * *

He came back from the water-closet just off Adrah's spacious bedroom to find her pouring him a basin of water from a Roman-style ewer. He washed his face with one of her excellent cosmetics, an Egyptian concoction of lemon, sweet almond oil, and wood ash that foamed like the sea as he scrubbed. She handed him a towel, and he took a grateful breath of the air sweeping into her room as he dried his skin.

"Better?" she said with a smile, and he nodded in gratitude; she'd respected his requirements for privacy even before her surprised discovery of why he was so insistent. Her enthusiastic pursuit of him after that astonished him at first; now, he was humbled and grateful. Adrah was one of his best friends, and the key to it was she took him as he wanted to be.

She had taken advantage of his absence to change into a loose shift belted at the waist, something that was easier to get past than a tight laced bodice, and he grew a little uneasy, wondering how he was to explain.

She moved to the bed and sat at the foot of it. He looked out the window, which faced the open sea, remembering. He'd spent many and many a pleasant hour here, whiling away the time in that bed while they talked, watched the boats entering and leaving the port, made love, drank wine and ate supper and talked and made love again. A little harbor for his soul.

She leaned back against the bed on her hands and crossed her legs, which the shift didn't quite cover. In any other woman, it would've been blatant; with her, it was the easy gesture of an old friend and occasional lover.

"I'll have to get back to my crew," he murmured.

She sighed, but not sadly, and co*cked her head to the side, studying him with a slight smile illuminating her face. "Ain't my night for a strong lover splittin' me open till daybreak, I can see."

He laughed. "Bladewalker's caught in the net, gill and fin entire. I'm sorry about that."

"Not half so much as I," she replied fervently, drawing another laugh from him. She patted the bed beside her, and he hung the towel on the peg next to the basin and went obediently to sit next to her. "Let me guess," Adrah said. "Serafina?"

Alcibiades commenced to blush, and she said, "Aha. I could tell; it's in the way you two gaze at one another like moonstruck calves." She studied him, and he had the odd impression he'd had more than once that Adrah was looking right through him. "Well, well. Think your new lover can spare you to your old for a few moments?"

"She--she's not--"

"You haven't told her?" Adrah interrupted. She found this part of his life fascinating, even more so than the Roman politics she followed with the avidity some reserved for gladiatorial contests. "Why the flaming hell not?"

This was the one part he could never make her understand. "You don't just... just come right out with a thing like... like..."

"You're not makin' any allowances for her sense of adventure," Adrah said with a smile, wagging a finger in his face. "How d'you know that'd stand in her way?"

"Because a--a woman wants--"

She waved her hand in dismissal, interrupting him again. "You're on with that tiresome thing again," she said. "I can take you down to the farmer's market again and show you acres o' cucumbers and bananas. And yams, even, for those who enjoy a challenge. Alci, I've lain here many and many a time breathless, cross-eyed, an' unable to remember my own name because o' where you've taken me."

"Aye," he protested, "but that's--"

"And sat with you in the tavern while you lifted my glasses in your hands and complained with your tongue all night about how you had nothin' to offer a woman, and me all the time watching those hands and that tongue and wonderin' when I could get you alone in this bed again."

He took her hands gently in his, and to his great relief, she shut up. "Children," he said softly. "A woman wants children."

"Aye," she said quietly, pulling a hand free to play with a strand of his hair. "That's why I've got twelve of 'em, as you'll see." She shook her head. "I swear, if I'd ever doubted your manhood, your cluelessness about women woulda been the last fact I needed to make your case for you. Did it ever occur to you that maybe she don't want a passel o' suckling brats spoilin' them pretty tit*?" He raised startled eyes to her face, and she went on, "She's got beautiful breasts, Alci."

"I'd noticed," he said in misery, turning his face away.

"Is it 'cause she's royal?" Adrah asked, her curiosity evident. "You'd no trouble tellin' me."

"I didn't have to tell you, witch," he said with a laugh. "You probed me with those lovely eyes."

"And got a lot of lovely probing myself in return," she pointed out. He smiled, thinking of the truth of it. "Alci," she said seriously, "give that girl a chance. I see somethin' in her, somethin' big, somethin' great. And I see the two of you together, side by side."

His mouth had gone dry and his heart had sped up. "So everyone keeps tellin' me."

"There's another thing a man has," she said unexpectedly. "And I've seen it in you time and again. Courage. The courage to be open about what's in his heart."

He looked at her, unable to answer, and saw the face of a friend. Something he'd done, possibly the respect she wasn't accustomed to out of her other men, had awakened her loyalty and affection, and he knew now he'd not lost it, and never would. "Thank you," was all he could think of to say. He leaned in, and she closed her eyes, and they sealed their friendship with one last passionate kiss. They stared into one another's eyes for a moment, and he saw the unmistakable message in hers: I'll be thy friend forever. He knew he was making the same promise to her.

"Well, then," Adrah said, slapping her too-naked knees and getting up, "it's back to your lover with you. And for me, another night in a cold bed."

He took her hand and got off her bed for the last time, then the two of them walked back into the tavern.

* * *

Serafina told herself ever after that it was unwise to make important decisions about her life when she was slumbering in the arms of Obtala (who had created humans while hammered on palm wine, and it showed). She never forgot the lesson, which is remarkable in a person of the age she was then, and her later behavior was characterized by civilized restraint in the consumption of spirits and exceptional patience with those who didn't share her view; this part of the tale, though, concerns the night she came to such a philosophically excellent conclusion.

She was sitting at the table (and if the truth were to be told, standing would have been more of a challenge than she suspected just then) when a door behind the long enclosed counter they used to set out the liquor opened, and Alcibiades and a nearly-naked Adrah emerged. They shared a quick embrace behind the bar, then he turned with a smile and made his way back to the table, while she disappeared back to what was probably a sumptuous, and very fast, bed.

A poisonous mist, as green as his eyes but far less pretty, swirled through Serafina's head, and she was on her feet by the time he reached them. It is true that she had her hands spread out on the table and was largely maintaining her balance through her fingertips, but standing she was, and as he opened his mouth to speak, she called in a loud and careful voice, "Are we ready to return to the Amazon Queen, Captain?"

It was well that she'd been careful with her words, for the first of what was to be a series of waves of dizzy wretchedness hit her then, and she had no intention of opening her mouth again, lest something far more unfortunate than a rain of frogs occur. Her seated shipmates gazed at her in various stages of comical befuddlement, and the pomp went out of Alcibiades's shoulders like a deflated sheep's bladder.

"Aye, Your Ladyship," he murmured, and the shy sadness in his voice would probably have ripped out her heart had she not so thoroughly convinced herself that he deserved it.

The way back was largely silent, except that Serafina distinctly recalled having tripped over something and unleashing upon it the full fury of her tongue in a multi-syllable extravaganza she had heard her mother use once when an inattentive child-watcher let her wander too close to the blacksmith in mid-shoe. The legend arose that whatever Serafina said that night was so effective that nothing grew at the spot forever more. That might not have been surprising, as she'd merely lost her fume-soaked footing on the dock, but the fact is that not three centuries after The Fearsome Curse, as it came to be called, the entire harbor at Berenike had silted over and the place was abandoned, to be followed, a few centuries later, by being completely forgotten.

Alcibiades, for his part, had completely gotten over his dreamful, romantic wish that Serafina use her tongue on him. Pyra and Dogmatika were doing their womanful best to hold one another up. Blackie was weaving from side to side, and occasionally Ranger reached down without looking to pull her back to the vertical. Klokir hunkered down on Ranger's arm and ended up with her eyes closed, curled up against Ranger's shoulder. Ro swayed back and forth as Ranger attempted to keep her balance; Jerseygirl was rolled into a loose, unobservant furball in Ranger's pocket. Skittles kept a death-grip on the compass case, watching every step with eyes ill-equipped to remain steady. Harrel marched grimly behind Serafina, hands shoved in his pockets and a scowl on his unhandsome face. Bladewalker and Lethe alone strode sure-footed, but they too were beset, not so much by unsteadiness as wineborne memories.

When they got to the lamplit ship, Makionus was leaning against the rail, looking down at them. The gang was out, and several of them studied it with no little apprehension. "You've been to Adrah's, I take it?" Makionus called. They tried to fit their tongues around an answer, and Makionus continued, "Aye, that's some powerful magic she weaves. Come aboard, then."

Pyra and Dogmatika were the first to brave it, and they got up safely, wobbling in relief toward the crew cabin. Skittles dashed up the gang, heaved a sigh when the compass got aboard safely, and followed Pyra and Dogmatika. Bladewalker and Lethe got aboard with little drama and disappeared into their cabin. Ranger made her way up carefully, holding Blackie by the scruff of the neck. Four feet made her no more certain of attaining the deck than Ranger.

Alcibiades put out a hand for Serafina to take, but she swept it away and lowered her eyebrows, glowering like a petulant child.

"She's angry," Alcibiades said by way of excusing her.

"She's hurt," contributed Ranger from the deck.

"She's neither; she's drunk," said Makionus. "As are all of you, save perhaps little Ro here." She tickled Ro gently under the chin, and Ro took that moment to utter a gibbering little squeak, followed by a delicate chirruping hiccup. She tumbled backwards off Ranger's shoulder, and Ranger caught her deftly with one hand behind her back and tucked her, already fast asleep, into the pocket beside her sister.

"Scratch the squirrel, then," Makionus sighed, striding down the gang and sweeping Serafina, with remarkably little ceremony and some evident effort, into her arms. "Go ahead and see to your crew, Captain."

Alcibiades bit his lip, then nodded and marched up the gang. He looked back from the door of the crew cabin. Serafina's head lolled against Makionus's shoulder, and Makionus staggered a bit, but made her way carefully up the gang without dropping either of them into the water. Alcibiades gave Serafina a half-salute she had no hope in Tartarus of perceiving and vanished into the crew cabin behind Ranger and her sleepy companions.

"Harrel, my excellent friend," Makionus said, slightly out of breath, "I take it you've dealt with this before?"

He nodded and opened the door of Serafina's cabin. "Aye, but never with this one."

"Delighted to hear it," Makionus said, making her way with clumsy caution into the cabin and placing Serafina on the bunk. "Might I trouble you, then, for some warm water and a couple of handfuls of salt?"

Harrel winced and nodded again, then left to fetch. Makionus set a lamp beside Serafina and brushed the hair out of the girl's damp face, studying her with what might have been regret, or even guilt. "And you in your second-best gown," she murmured. Serafina stirred restlessly and opened her eyes, fixing them on Makionus.

It was a long time till daybreak, and whatever unburdening Serafina chose to do, Makionus kept it to herself.

* * *

A rare break in the canopy of green overhead let Maggie watch a bird soaring in the sky, gliding effortlessly far above the truck struggling and coughing along the primitive road toward a spot she was certain would qualify as the ends of the earth. Her exhausted eyes couldn't do much more than track the bird as it traveled. It was the weirdest thing, but she'd been checking her watch for some time, and that damn bird had been flying in the same direction as the truck for over two hours.

Her hands were folded over the backpack in her lap, filled with a bunch of very expensive, inactive gear in battery-saving mode. They had solar panels on the roof of the truck, but they'd been traveling through deep forest long enough that the solar panels had pretty much given up in disgust. The gloom quieted them all; it had been quite some time since she'd heard anyone speak, and JLynn and AngelRad were asleep in the back of the truck, sacked side by side on a small mattress surrounded by equipment cases and packing crates.

The landscape made Maggie rethink her position that the Chinese painters of antiquity were making it all up: the gorges plunged at angles she didn't think were possible on this planet, and the forest had both a delicacy and a vigor she couldn't remember having seen anywhere else. You could see where travelers thought it mystical and captivating. Land like this would turn people into very different people.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Maggie turned her head at the murmur next to her ear. Xe was kneeling between the front seats, leaning on her elbows against the backrests with her hands loosely clasped together. She had no apparent trouble maintaining her balance, despite the cratered surface of the road and the truck's continual shuddering.

Maggie lifted a hand in inquiry, and Xe nodded to the bird. "That one. You see them here occasionally." She turned to the driver and asked a question in rapid, fluent-sounding Chinese, and Maggie was pretty goddamned impressed all over again.

The driver, a beautiful young woman named Erming, made a lengthy reply, and Xe translated for Maggie. "It's a Saker falcon, one of the endangered species. It's made a comeback in the past few years as a result of the conservation programs they've been running. They're native raptors. Used to be plentiful from Turkey to Siberia. Before they got serious about controlling PCBEs, it looked like they were going to lose them all."

Maggie's face must have shown her disbelief. Xe smiled and inquired, "Questions, class?"

"Yeah," Maggie said. "How the f*ck do you say 'raptor' in Chinese? And how come you know that?"

Xe laughed quietly, then studied the bird again through the windshield. "Amazing, aren't they? We usually pick up one or two on the way in. It's almost like they're guiding us back..."

She fell silent, and Maggie took the opportunity to take a good long look at her profile. Xe's eyes had always been a captivating swirl of green and brown, but now there was a new directness to her gaze, almost as though she were really looking at things. There were a few silver strands in her dark hair, and Maggie was surprised that it gave her some pain to see them; they'd been apart for far too long. Xe's arms had gotten tanned and strong, the thick band of the utilitarian watch highlighting some nicely-defined forearm muscles. She favored simple t-shirts and work khakis; maybe she'd left the good duds back home in Europe.

Except Maggie had the unreal impression that, for Xe, this was home now. Xe turned her head and treated Maggie to one of her loveliest expressions, the small, intimate smile she reserved for shared jokes with close friends. "I gotta say, hon," Maggie told her, "you look like you belong."

Xe turned her attention back to the falcon. "I feel like it," she murmured.

"Now, what planet is it on, again?" Maggie inquired wearily.

Xe gave her a soft laugh. "It won't be long now. And we won't get lost; the road leads straight to it."

The truck jounced against a rough patch just then, and JLynn stirred uncomfortably in the back. "Yeah, well," Maggie said, "while you were learning the Chinese for 'raptor', you appear to have forgotten the English for 'road'."

* * *

As it was, my fit of jealousy, born of a profound misunderstanding of the nature of a girl's first womanly love, did not survive the voyage--indeed, didn't survive my hangover. If I'd bothered to cease bending my elbow long enough to bend an ear, I might have had my beautiful, wise, lovely-eyed Adrah as a friend a lot sooner; she was sustenance and grace to me, as she'd been to Alcibiades, and never failed to cheer my darkest moods. When plague swept Berenike and took her from us, she breathed her last with her hands clasped in ours. As much death as I'd seen, I knew enough to know that she, good soul that she was, had had the gentle passing she deserved but few attained, and had gone ahead to straighten out Athirat's Beyond in preparation for the arrival of her many friends.

Adrah also taught me to drink without making a fool of myself or courting anything like my first hangover. And that was a good thing, for I was in agony that next day.

Makionus had tended me with unobtrusive care (not the first, nor the last, of the services she was to render me in the difficult journey from my troubled, lonely girlhood to my intensely interesting, if not precisely restful, life as a woman), and I was able to see later in others that her approach to dealing with a girl awash in liquor was effective in palliating many of its less appetizing effects. Still, I had an odd sensation that day that my skull was filled with mischievous apes, banging with rocks 'gainst this ear for a bit, then throwing themselves to t'other side to unbalance me when it palled. It was difficult to walk without falling, and the dizziness made eating an ordeal I could not face. I recall drinking many dippersful of water (some of which actually stayed where I'd put them) and hiding from the sun.

The rest of the crew was as profoundly affected (tho' it wasn't as much of a surprise to them as to me), and later Ranger told me this was why we always arranged that the big night in port would be two nights before the ship's departure; she said one voyage out of Potidaea, they'd spent the night drinking, then sailed with the dawn, whereupon their shriveled marinering nearly sent the Amazon Queen to an anonymous death at the bottom of the Aegean, and moreover none of them would have cared a lick.

Toward nightfall, fortified with Pyra's willowbark-and-opiate tea (which might have cured death, had we had enough initiative that day to hunt up a corpse to experiment on), I'd gone from wishing for oblivion to not caring to live to thinking that perhaps this self-inflicted wound was not mortal after all, to being glad of it.

That left the mortification of what to say to Alcibiades. I remembered just enough of my arrogance and condescension of the night before that my face grew hot with embarrassment. I was desperate to find a way to avoid him, but as the ship was small and I was hiding in my cabin and flight would have involved opening the door, I felt unable to accomplish it.

It was Pyra, my gentle and philosophical healer friend, who talked me into a different course quite without ever saying that was her intent. She had just fed me some vile concoction involving beef tea, a raw egg, and some herb that I thought surely grew only in Hell, so hot it was, and while I lay back in my bunk fanning the fire from my face, she told me of the towering follies even the greatest people had committed whilst in their cups. She had me laughing within moments, and I was surprised to realize that it didn't hurt. Her moral, moreover, was clear enough for an addle-headed, embarrassed girl: they had lived through their public humiliation and gone on to do great things, and how much luckier was I that my humiliation had played out only 'mongst new friends who already cared for me?

My confidence was supported (or, equally likely, she'd distracted me while I was having trouble fitting two consecutive ideas into my ape-sodden brain), and I was up and out of my cabin before I could think of a reason to stay hidden. He was up by the sweeps, studying the twilit harbor, but turned when he heard my foot on the steps.

He glowed when he saw me.

I thought I was imagining things. (Especially considering how rude I'd been.) But I made whatever apology a stuttering, mortified girl can make to a gentleman, and he was gracious and waved aside any notion of taking offense. I felt better instantly, and told him so; as horrid as the day had been, the worst of all possible consequences would have been a rift with my friend.

He took my hands in his and leaned toward me, his green eyes distractingly close, and for a moment I thought he would kiss me; while I would not have objected, my vanity would have preferred to have it happen when my breath was sweeter and my hair properly dressed. But he merely spoke, beautiful shapely lips forming beautiful shapely words, every one of which impressed itself on my brain. I can hear them now: "You'll have no need to fear a rift with me, Your Ladyship, for I am ever your devoted friend."

It was so like what one would hear from a guileless child declaring his heart (and indeed, I was to have basis for comparison many years later) that my restless, aching soul quieted instantly. We stood at the sweeps at sunset facing one another, holding hands, I a battered wreck of a hung-over girl and he perfection in manliness, for what seemed like half a day. Eventually, though, we drew breath and realized where we were and drew apart from one another. I lowered my head, for I had much to think about just then, and he happened to murmur, "We're sailing in the morning 'cross the Indian Ocean, a perilous and lengthy journey, and I was thinkin' you'd be a luck piece for us if you were to grace us in that sea-green dress while we raised the sails."

I agreed instantly, thinking vaguely of carven figureheads and standing in a heroic pose to provide inspiration.

Neither of us knew then the trouble this simple suggestion would cause. I ask myself from time to time if I would have decided differently, and from a perspective of years filled with as much sorrow as triumph, I have determined that the answer is no.

* * *

It was well before dawn when an excited Serafina finished dressing by lamplight. She'd done her hair especially to fall in soft waves over her shoulders, though it was with a combination of shyness and laughter that she realized the breeze would instantly make a mockery of her efforts. The green silk glowed with purpose, turning the light into a living jewel as she ran her fingers over it, smoothing, tucking. She had no mirror in which to check herself, but if she had been able to see her eyes and her face, she would have seen that the glow of life was not confined to her dress.

She was ready just as the sky began to lighten. She blew out the lamp, opened the door to her cabin without the slightest sound, and slipped into the fresh air. She had some nebulous idea of standing at the prow where the sail-raising crew could see her, and perhaps she would even have the courage to sing cadence for them. She picked her way across the deck, avoiding the lines, shrouded in the predawn dimness, with a half expertise she didn't yet realize she had acquired.

The prow held the first of the shocks of that day, but not the last, and certainly not the worst. As she lifted her head from her cautious way forward, she saw Bladewalker. The warrior was standing at the prow, one hand up grasping a line, the other folded behind her back, spine straight and head bent. She was staring down into the water rippling quietly about the keel.

Serafina's heart, wiser and more cautious than she, commenced to pound, and she ceased movement and breath, intending to move back to her cabin. She could not have said why the sight frightened her so, but when Bladewalker turned her head, her instincts proved sound.

Bladewalker's face first held an attitude of resentment, possibly at Serafina's intrusion. Then her eyes swept Serafina's outfit, and the warrior lifted her head. A flash of anger lit the cold blue eyes, then she was in motion, moving faster and more surely than Serafina had ever seen anyone move.

Serafina shrank back against the rail, paralyzed with terror. There was nowhere to flee without jumping over the side of the ship into the harbor, and she could not do that to her mother's dress. Bladewalker halted a hand's-breadth from her, her face a mask of fury. "Girl," she hissed, "you've no right to wear that."

Serafina's hands tightened on the rail behind her. "It's mine," she whispered.

"You pollute it by laying your eyes on it, you little thief!"

"It's mine!" Serafina insisted, sure she was going to die, whether of a burst heart or torn apart by Bladewalker's murderous hands.

The banging of a door made Bladewalker turn toward the cabins. "Blade," said a flat, deadly voice. Serafina dared to look away from the face of her death, and saw a sick-looking Lethe standing barefoot on the deck in a loose nightshirt, fists on her hips. "Step away."

Bladewalker's teeth set. "I'll see her in Hell first."

"I said step away," Lethe replied, her voice promising annihilation for the slightest disobedience.

The door to the crew cabin opened, and Alcibiades and Ranger tumbled forth. Harrel appeared out of nowhere, a knife in his hand. Bladewalker kept her eyes on Lethe as she took a pace back. Serafina closed her eyes, and a couple of tears spilled forth under her eyelashes.

Something encircled her, and she opened her eyes hastily. Alcibiades was putting his arms about her, but he was looking at Bladewalker. "What is this, warrior?" he asked, his voice low and shaking. "Would you offer violence to a guest aboard my ship?"

"She's a thief," Bladewalker said with quiet contempt. Serafina caught her breath with a gasp and grasped Alcibiades's arms with her hands. Harrel crossed the deck with his knife pointed at Bladewalker and took a position to Serafina's right. Behind Ranger, Blackie emerged on the ledge at the sweeps and watched the little drama on the deck.

"Explain," Lethe snapped.

"That... dress," Bladewalker said, gesturing toward Serafina's outfit.

"I asked her to wear it," Alcibiades said, tightening his arms about Serafina and turning her a bit to interpose his body between her and Bladewalker. "What's it to you?"

Lethe commenced to laugh, a high-pitched hysterical sound that only made this horrible moment more unreal to Serafina. "Aye, I know what this is about," Lethe said, approaching Bladewalker. She stopped and looked up into the warrior's face. "You vow a mighty vow of protection, and... you fail." Bladewalker looked stricken, but Lethe continued with little remorse. "And this artless girl steps in and redeems your promise by caring for me. When you would not." Bladewalker's jaw set, and Lethe went on in a calm, angry tone. "That's reason enough to kill her." She turned away with a last murmur. "You are a savage."

There was silence after this, and Serafina's sobbing was loud, but she discovered herself unable to control it. Alcibiades's next words were directed at all of them, but he was looking at Bladewalker. "I want you all to listen to me," he said, not stopping for an agreement. "You could carve me into hash, but this is my ship, and I make the rules aboard her. This lady is my guest, and she'll be treated with courtesy while she's aboard, and anyone who disagrees with that can depart before we sail." He looked around, and added, "Now."

Bladewalker nodded once, not taking her eyes off Lethe. "Serafina," she said, a sound like a whip snapping, and it made Serafina weep even harder. "My apologies. Lethe is right, and you'll suffer no more at my hands." Bladewalker turned to Alcibiades, and bowed a little as she murmured, "Your servant, sir, not in recognition of your position but for your judgment. 'Tis a perilous journey with an uncertain outcome, and your crew is well worth protecting. Make of me what use you will."

"The prow is yours," Alcibiades told her, "and we'll keep the rest away from it while you're there. Meantime, work on civilizin' yourself."

Bladewalker nodded again, then reached slowly for the belt of her scabbard, unbuckled it, and handed it, and her sword, to Lethe. "Look after this for me," she said, "until I earn it back." Lethe accepted it and looked out to the distance, where the sun was just rising. It looked like she had lost something, and not for the first time.

* * *

When the truck came to a stop, Maggie didn't quite believe it. She was certain they'd be filling up with gas and setting off again, like they'd been doing for three days, but Erming pulled the key from the ignition, opened the door, and dropped stiffly from the seat to the ground. Xe scrambled out between the front seats, got out of the truck, and turned to Maggie, winking.

JLynn sat up, and Maggie looked around into the back of the truck. JLynn scrubbed at her hair with her hand, then leaned over the curled-up AngelRad with a grin. "Wake up, sleepyhead," she murmured, giving AngelRad's shoulder a gentle shake. "It's the anti-mall."

"Mochaccino," AngelRad sighed, and Maggie laughed. AngelRad opened her eyes and began to lever herself upright. Her khakis still bore their original creases and were wrinkle-free, and Maggie suppressed a smirk. "I was having this great dream," AngelRad said, yawning hugely and stretching her arms out.

"Seventy-five percent off in the Garment District?" JLynn asked. The back door of the truck swung open, and light flooded the interior. JLynn made a Frankenstein-type gargling noise and put an arm over her eyes. Xe took a couple of duffel bags from the back, swung them over her shoulders, and walked away toward a little stand of trees.

Maggie worked the door handle with stiff fingers, then undid her seat belt and lowered herself cautiously to the ground, backpack in her free hand. "This can't be it," she remarked.

"Sure it can," JLynn said, crawling out between the front seats and leaping out to stand next to Maggie. She reached up without drama to help AngelRad alight from the cab. AngelRad's hiking boots were pristine-looking, and the cunning little socks atop them were neatly rolled. She was wearing shorts, and her legs were shaved.

"You mean it it?" Maggie inquired, looking around her.

"It it," JLynn assured her. She went around to the back of the truck and hefted a couple more duffel bags, then set off behind Xe.

They were in an open, grassy circle ringed by dark green conifers. The road came to an abrupt end just in front of the truck's grille. The falcon had disappeared. There was nothing apparent except the truck, and Maggie grew a little apprehensive until she saw AngelRad's reassuring, insightful smile.

"You look fabulous," Maggie told her, as much a compliment as a question: Tell me what the f*ck is going on, will you?

AngelRad reached out and patted Maggie gently under the chin. "So do you, Pumpkin," she said. "It's been a while."

"Yeah," Maggie said, heaving her backpack to her shoulder and following AngelRad around to the back of the truck. "So long I didn't know you'd taken up primitive camping on the planet Zembar." AngelRad chuckled and handed Maggie a duffel bag. Maggie slung it over her shoulder and went on, more than a little put off, "You might've written me about, you know, your new hobby."

"Couldn't." AngelRad slipped two of the duffel bags smoothly over her shoulders, the straps crossing over her chest like bandoliers.

"Didn't," Maggie corrected stiffly.

"Shoulda, woulda, Prada," AngelRad replied, shrugging as best she could under the bags and picking up an equipment case.

"Hey." Maggie shot out a hand and caught AngelRad's arm. "You've called me halfway across the goddamn world and I get to East Bumf*ck, PRC and you're not talking but you've given up heels and caffeine and you don't seem to give a damn."

AngelRad's bemused look went serious. Maggie regretted her harshness instantly; AngelRad serious always meant trouble for somebody. "Maggie," she said, without even adding a diminutive like sweetie or poppet. "We're your friends. We've been your friends for a long, long time. We've seen each other through lovers and breakups and deaths and diseases and mortgages and all that bullsh*t. Have we ever given you the slightest reason not to trust us?"

Maggie's mouth worked for a moment before she was able to admit it. "No."

"Then when I say we couldn't tell you, what does that mean to you?" She co*cked her head and looked at Maggie, awaiting an answer.

"That you couldn't tell me," Maggie said finally.

"Right," AngelRad said with a decisive nod. She turned on her heel, years of practice with stilettoes making her graceful in Timberlands, and began to walk toward the trees. She balanced the duffel bag and the equipment case with a bewitching stride, and Maggie's brain snapped to lustful awareness.

"Hey," Maggie said, snatching another equipment case from the truck and breaking into a run. When she caught up with AngelRad, she said, "OK, fair enough. But when do I start getting some answers?"

"Right now," AngelRad said, nodding toward the trees.

Maggie peered into the gloom beneath the greenery, where Erming, Xe, and JLynn were standing, hung with duffels and holding cases. A few paces into the trees was a wall of solid rock framed in some kind of fringy fern, and inset into it was a square. Erming slid the square aside and reached into her shirt for a long chain, at the end of which was a key. She slid the key into a slot and turned it, and the rock wall moved aside with a subtle grinding noise.

Xe turned, and Maggie thought to shut her mouth. "Welcome," Xe said unexpectedly, "to Aladdin's cave."

* * *

In a tiny cabin in a trim little ship skimming across the Indian Ocean, a woman had her eyes squeezed shut. She was breathing hard, and sweat ran in rivulets down her fair skin, plastering her short blonde hair to her brow. She clenched her teeth, trying not to make any noise, but the rhythmic panting was nearly uncontrollable, and it broke into cries before she could stop it. In the moonlight pouring through the porthole, her hands curled into fists above the larger, stronger hands of the figure looming over her, pinning her wrists to the bed.

* * *

Alcibiades was true to his word, and Bladewalker found the prow reserved for her when she needed a bit of air, which generally happened along about daybreak. She would leave Lethe asleep in the bunk and step into a soft morning, before the harshness of the sun awakened the harshness of her thoughts.

Because the prow pointed east, and because whatever destiny she could still claim was in that general direction, she would face the sunrise, marking the nearly imperceptible changes in the color of the sky. Just before dawn, the waves would change from vague misty shapes to sharply-outlined edges of water, for all the world like lines of soldiers. She would follow them with her eyes from the horizon to the keel, watching as they got closer and closer, to be swallowed and smashed and crushed by the brutal wooden point of the prow.

It was a fate she herself might have known, and indeed had faced for more years than she knew what to do with. Some days, the burden was light, and those days had most recently been because of the blonde at her side; the darkness could not be kept at bay forever, and she thought she was communicating it to Lethe, as though the evil of her very breath poisoned Lethe's air like the fever that ran from one to another throughout the Mediterranean and was known, in fact, as mal aria.

In a world that considers women not proof of the divine but beasts or burdens, some girls are born to ill luck, and Bladewalker had always considered herself one of them. Her story began when a god crippled by the slow destruction of his family wandered through her mother's village, retaining nothing of his immense power save bitter memories, a charming manner, and a weakness for dark-haired blue-eyed mortal women. By the time Bladewalker drew her first breath, her mother had already sunk into the lethargic, self-pitying despair that occasionally flared into violence before ending in a howling madness that saw her throw herself from a cliff. No one cried at her burial, so the girl didn't wonder at her own calm. She was used to feeding herself, after all, and felt little sense of loss.

The god had chosen his paramour with a discerning eye, and as the rootless girl grew, she found herself the center of attention from men who could not possibly have understood the evil that caught them body and soul when they looked at her. She was introduced to it far too young, as powerless as her unknown father, and handled it the way he might have, by scheming and plotting a secret revenge when she was alone with her thoughts. She used her spectacular beauty, which no amount of corruption could touch, until the day when she found herself with a naked dead man at her feet, his blood still smoking off the blade she'd taken from him.

She had long since left her village (remaining after a murder being a bit awkward) when she offered herself to a warlord, not as a plaything, but as a sword. His soldiers laughed throughout the pretty kid's challenges and counterchallenges, but she didn't back off. Finally, bored, they offered her a disposable housecarl belonging to a captive they were keeping for a fat ransom still under negotiation. She had time enough to whisper to the terrified man "I'm doing you a favor" before sending her blade unerringly between his ribs into his heart. She was just a shade past eleven summers old. The soldiers didn't laugh at her after that.

Nor did they trouble her in other ways, though half of them were dying of lovesickness and most of the others eager to scheme for her hand. By her thirteenth year, she had twenty-three kills to her credit and a bleak hole where any other girl would have grown a heart. She had never willingly taken a lover to bed, and didn't plan to.

There were times, though, when she feared the loss of her sanity, as had occurred with her mother, and in those times, all that would mean strength and safety to her was fresh, hot blood running from her blade. A kill was a kill, it didn't really matter who the target was, and she sold her skill to the highest bidder, often returning to a village she had once protected in the service of another warlord who paid her well to burn it to the ground.

Her rise was as unsettling as it was rapid, as beautiful girls did not normally seek out a profession that found them ungizzarding armed men on a regular basis. Any army that she led seemed composed of monsters and freaks of nature, and their victories were the easier for the reputation she regarded with disdain. On a swing through Greece, where she commanded the east wing of one of the armies at the age of fifteen, she heard a whisper that she was the second coming of a warrior whose legend had sunk into obscurity, a dark-haired blue-eyed she-demon whose name she was not to hear again for a time.

She returned to Greece two years after that, this time as the chief lieutenant and war-leader of a man determined to ensure his own safety by conquering every acre of ground between Macedon and Rhodes. They were about midway through this ambitious project, and their latest target was Cape Artemisium, chiefly notable as the site of a nearly great battle completely overshadowed by the presence of legendary battlefields in proximity, and the somewhat embarrassing fact that the Greeks had ended up losing.

Along with her travels had come a certain sort of empty worldliness useful for determining what was most likely to break local resistance to her armies. Rape was an avenue she would not consider traversing personally (although she had great respect for its utility), so she settled on a truly demoralizing alternative: laying waste to their holy sites. Violating their women and children was effective, true, but nothing said "f*ck you" like the smoking ruin of a temple whose god had once kept his people from harm. She most often attended to this personally, and so found herself standing in a pretty columned marble edifice with a drift of incense rising from a tidy little altar covered with images of women in long white gowns.

The first indication that her soul had tumbled into the hand of a being more powerful than herself, had she been wise enough to recognize it, had come that morning, when her army attempted to toss the city's cast-bronze Poseidon (or perhaps it was Zeus; she found their gods irritatingly numerous and nearly indistinguishable) into the conveniently-placed Aegean. The statue was damned heavy, and rooted well to the earth. Once such a thing was begun, there was no going back, lest the people see gravity as some kind of miracle, find their misplaced backbones, and drive the invaders off their island. She left the king looking on in dissatisfaction as his sweating, grunting soldiers attempted to budge the statue (which was almost twice as tall as many of them, and heavy as Mount Pelion) and rode her swift black mare out to the temple. If they didn't get that damned statue dumped into the sea before nightfall, at least she could get something accomplished along the lines of dominating the locals.

Had she not been alone, she might not have met her destiny, but a little thing like burning a temple was easy enough for one person, and she'd done it dozens of times before, so it didn't precisely seem like an unattainable quest. She walked up the steps, blinding white in the dappled sunlight filtering through a tidy copse of trees they probably considered sacred or some-such horsesh*t. There wasn't a door--there never was, stupid Greek bastards--so she went in and took a look around her.

Benches. Ah, good: fuel. Pots of oil for the lamps, which would do nicely to set the benches alight. The stones wouldn't burn, but she could always have her men chip off the sculptures on the outside above the columns and turn it into a brothel. There was some expensive-looking carpet on the floors, naked woven goddesses playfully tweaking each other's nipples; that would burn well.

But first to smash all that crap on the altar. That made a huge difference, their most sacred objects, etc. etc. etc., lying in shards under a thick blanket of ash. She'd seen men fall fatally on their bread-knives when they found some holy trinket in flinders in the ruins of a temple. She unsheathed her sword and raised it above her head, intending to send it sweeping in the arc they considered her signature move. When the blade carved a hole in the air over the altar and the noise reached them, they would know their god was dead.

"Warrior."

It was a mere whisper, but it echoed off the marble, and she whirled, sword at the ready. Standing at the side entrance was a woman in one of those eternal white gowns wealthy Greeks so favored, a rich blue length of cloth falling over one shoulder. The woman in the gown was as rich as her robe, smooth chestnut-colored skin, almond-shaped eyes with irises so dark they were nearly black, a beautifully formed nose, and full lips in a face that was a perfect oval. She didn't wear a headdress, and her hair, dark as her eyes, was elaborately braided and coiled atop her head. It was a bit startling to see an African woman standing in a Greek temple wearing the robes of a priestess, but her beauty needed no justification.

Beautiful though she was, her face was very serious. Serious though she was, there wasn't a trace of fear in her.

The warrior smiled a slow, cruel smile. Fearless though the woman was, she wasn't carrying a weapon, either. Watching the blood flow over the white robe, puddling in the folds of the sumptuous blue cloth, would be a pleasure.

The lovely lips parted, and the woman spoke. "The choice," she said unexpectedly, "is yours."

The warrior stood at attention for a moment longer, studying her in suspicion and puzzlement, then lowered her sword.

* * *

"What?"

The eyes trained on her face were unnerving, dark and direct. "You've already made one choice," the priestess went on. "You decided to spare my life, even though I've challenged you."

"Not enough meat for my blade," blustered the warrior. Her voice didn't exactly sound steady to her.

"Would you have spared me with a ring of your soldiers about you?"

The warrior's eyes snapped from the point of her sword to the face of the priestess. "No," she said grudgingly. "You'd have been dead in seconds."

"You don't hesitate to strike when you're with your soldiers," remarked the priestess. "You must maintain your men's fear of you to counter their greater fear of marching into battle at your side."

It didn't sound precisely like another challenge, and yet the warrior thought she was being played. "You've been a soldier?" The thought was preposterous. The gown left the shoulder of the priestess naked, and there wasn't a scar in a place that normally accumulated many wounds; the warrior's shoulders were covered with seams, but this woman's skin was smooth, unmarked, and a bewitching color.

"Greece has been invaded again and again," the priestess replied. "The arts of war are not unknown to these people."

The warrior swung the sword to the side and took a step toward the priestess. "You're not Greek?"

The priestess lifted a shoulder--the naked one--in a graceful gesture. "Not originally."

The warrior turned to the altar and lifted her blade. "Then you won't give a sh*t about me busting this up."

"The choice," said the priestess again, "is yours to make."

The warrior swung the sword up for a second time and turned to face her, livid. "Will you shut your ugly face, woman? What is the matter with you? Do you have no sense, confronted by naked metal? Do you seek a violent and ugly death, or what?"

The priestess took several slow steps forward and curled a hand toward the warrior's blade, taking the end of it gently in her palm. A tingling feeling went through the warrior's hand, wrapped round the hilt. "A woman carries a sword," said the priestess softly. "A blade she knows better than her own hands, a partner with whom she dances more gracefully than she ever will with any lover. They sing one another to sleep at night, a hymn to life snatched from death, the bare truth behind the barren myth of glory. This brutal length of metal is loving mother, protective father, playful sister, ardent lover all in one. It has kept her safe and given her reason to preserve her life in the midst of death, and all it asks is to be fed. And she feeds it gladly. The only thing she does gladly. Or ever has. Or ever will."

The warrior's mouth had gone dry, and she was unable to look away from the unreadable eyes. There was no anger, no fear in those eyes, only a sense of sorrow. The warrior had the dizzy sense that the priestess was sorry... for her.

"The two are legend," continued the priestess, her voice now a murmur, "the woman and the sword, and all fear them. And all submit. She lays waste to everything she touches, an automaton of destruction, and they are right to fear and to submit."

The priestess tightened her hand about the shining metal blade. The warrior knew precisely how sharp that edge was; she'd spent years with the blade, honing it keen in uncountable strokes by thousands of campfires. She swallowed and held her sword-hand steady. "And yet," said the priestess, "this fearsome woman is wounded unto death... by a stranger armed with nothing but words."

The warrior could not possibly have moved; the slightest movement would have taken the hand of the priestess clean off her arm. The thought of blood spurting from that hand sickened her, and the dizziness rocked her like an earthquake. She managed to lock her knees and keep her hand steady, the priestess looking into her eyes the whole time.

"P--please," whispered the warrior, closing her eyes against the sickness climbing into her throat, "take your hand away. Before I hurt you."

The priestess took a step back and released the blade, and the warrior's eyes snapped open. She was on her knees in a moment, the sword falling from numb fingers to clatter to the floor, and she held herself up on trembling arms as the cold sweat sprang to her brow. She emptied her nausea onto the shining marble floor of the temple.

A headache pounded behind her eyes, and she was having trouble catching her breath. When she could move, she crawled carefully away from the mess like a crab and sat with her back to the altar, gasping and watching the priestess with eyes that stung. The priestess had a hand on her chin and was studying the sword lying on the marble. A line had appeared between her eyebrows.

"Perhaps I was wrong," murmured the priestess. "Perhaps you're not partners, you and this blade." She lifted her eyes to the warrior, who wished she hadn't. "Perhaps this thing keeps you in its thrall, as you keep others in yours. Through fear."

"When I can get up," rasped the warrior, "I am going to burn this place to the ground."

The priestess walked toward her with rapid, noiseless steps, kneeling next to her. The warrior found her knife in her hand, aimed at the heart of the priestess, but if the sword was no threat, a little thing like a knife would be even less, and the priestess brushed it aside like a fly and reached for the warrior with her smooth, unmarked arms. The warrior found her skin to be as soft as it was smooth. She gripped the arms of the priestess with her powerful leatherbound soldier's hands, and the grief of a terrible lifetime burst from her mouth and her eyes and her soul at the same moment.

Thus it was that the priestess's robe was drenched not with her own blood, but with the warrior's first tears.

* * *

Soldiers are a superstitious lot, and she had been through hundreds of ceremonies beseeching this god or that for victory, for luck, for fortune, for booty, or merely to emerge from a fearsome opponent's clutches with all the dangly bits still in place and working. She considered it all so much horsesh*t: this clod of dung a different shape than that, but ultimately all it was good for was growing pretty flowers in a window-box, while a soldier relied on her good right hand and a shining length of bronze.

But now, walking down the steps next to the priestess, she felt light and clean, as if rituals really did work, as if there really were such a thing as a god who would listen, as if tears could wash away bitterness like the ocean washed away promontories. Her armor was light on her shoulders and her feet felt like they could fly. She had considered, and dismissed, the idea that she had been enchanted for some evil purpose; indeed, it seemed as though the evil had loosened the grip of its talons just a little, for the first time she could remember. She was not inclined to question the feeling. She was even able to smile, and she did so as she looked down on the face of the priestess.

"Who are you?" she asked, in a voice that held no hint of command.

"Bellaster," said the priestess, and her own eyes lit as her lips curved upward.

"Brightstar? That's... that's not a name," Bladewalker said, gesturing feebly. "That's a title."

The priestess looked into the distance, where the sun was sinking below the tops of the trees (which might very well have been sacred, if it came to that). The smile stayed in place, and she murmured, "Jessamyn."

It thrilled Bladewalker, that simple soft sound, in a way that no battle-trumpet or war cry ever had. Her heart filled with the beauty of it, and, overwhelmed and not knowing how to handle it, she took Jessamyn's small hand in her large one, bowed over it, and pressed a gentle kiss to the back. She'd never done such a thing before and could not have explained what prompted her to it now; her pulse was a-gallop and her knees felt unsteady.

"And you?" Jessamyn asked.

"Hm?" Bladewalker replied, which was about as coherent as she was capable of just then. Then her mind registered the question, and she replied, "Bladewalker."

"That's not a name," Jessamyn said, teasing just a little, "it's a title."

Bladewalker shrugged, the heavy armor rising and falling. "I had one once, but I don't remember what it was."

"No?" said Jessamyn, putting her head to the side and regarding Bladewalker with beautiful, puzzled eyes.

"No," Bladewalker said, unwrapping the reins of her mare and leading it few paces to a good mounting-spot. Jessamyn followed, approaching the horse without fear.

"How old are you?" she asked unexpectedly.

Bladewalker turned to look at her. "Older than I look," she replied. "A lot older."

"Seventeen?" Jessamyn guessed. Bladewalker froze, and Jessamyn laughed. "Nothing too terribly mystical," she said. "You have the look of a girl becoming a woman." Bladewalker narrowed her eyes, and Jessamyn said lightly, "I was seventeen once. It seems like a long, long while ago."

"Why, then, Jessamyn the Ancient, Feeble, Crack-Boned Crone," Bladewalker said, "how old are you?"

"Twenty-three," Jessamyn replied. Her eyes swept Bladewalker. "Seventeen, and a war-leader." She mused for a moment, then added, "A capable one, by the look of you. But I wonder what attraction a life spent in the service of Cer holds for a beautiful woman."

"Well," Bladewalker said, swinging herself into the saddle, "perhaps you'll know the answer some day."

"Yes," Jessamyn replied, "and perhaps you will, too."

Bladewalker willed herself not to react, and instead pulled the horse into position and looked down on Jessamyn. She took the opportunity to change the subject. "I'll try to keep them from this place, but I can guarantee nothing." Jessamyn's robe looked fresh and unspoiled, and Bladewalker was relieved, but her next words held no little regret. "I doubt I'll see you again, Jessamyn."

In answer, Jessamyn gave her a soft smile and reached up with her hand. Bladewalker leaned in the saddle to take it, wrapping her own hand round Jessamyn's, and for a moment she had a wild, fantastical notion of pulling Jessamyn into the saddle before her, throwing an arm about her waist, and fleeing this island to a place of safety.

Instead, all she did was open her hand. Jessamyn pulled back, and Bladewalker nodded brusquely, wheeled the horse, and cantered away from the temple. In her heart, relief and regret warred, but it was a different war from any she had ever fought before.

* * *

Bladewalker took the road back to camp at an easy lope, a thing she almost never did. Her horse could travel at this pace for a day and a night, and she let the mare find her way along the cart-track while she had a little bit of a think. Eventually, the road began to broaden, and she started seeing her soldiers, first in ones and twos, then in groups. They saluted briskly, like the well-disciplined lot they were, then went back to whatever they were doing: patrol, foraging, cutting tent-poles, watering horses.

Another league put her in sight of the camp, a huge conclave of tents on one of the flatter spots on this hilly island, next to the sea where their boats lay at anchor. She pulled her horse to a trot, scanning for the king's tent. When she spotted the pennant waving from the top, she turned her horse. They moved cautiously through the bustle of camp, her practiced eyes scanning for slackers or problems. All looked trim and tidy, and she saluted here and there, glad of their discipline; however, it was as if she were watching someone else, a different war-leader, a thing she felt alien to her.

Before his tent she leapt from the saddle and handed the mare's reins to a horseman stationed outside. He took them without a word and led her mare toward the cooling paddock while Bladewalker saluted the soldiers guarding the entrance.

She walked in, and the king, surrounded by his senior staff, glanced up from the map-table, where the entire island of Euboea lay spread out, painstakingly re-created in clay. "Ah, Bladewalker," said the king, "you're back. We finally managed to heave that goddamned hunk of bronze into the sea. How did it go with you?"

"We'll have no trouble with them," she said, putting a hand on her hip and studying the map.

The king gestured toward the map with his dagger. "We're just talking over staging possibilities. The seas are shallow this time of year, and the drought is making Eretria even more attractive as a crossing-point. Teofil here is pitching hard for a bridge to Delium."

"It's the sensible alternative," Teofil said. He was a sallow fellow with an unattractive beard, and his teeth were half rotted out of his head. He made a great show of fidelity to his wife, the king's sister; however, that hadn't kept him from pitching other things, such as his bed-skills to a disgusted Bladewalker. "Near Athens. Control Athens and you control all of southern Greece."

"Too far south," grunted Evgenyi, a taciturn pot-bellied veteran who ran her cavalry, and quite well. "Too heavily populated. People up in arms."

"Leave the thinking to people who don't spend their whole day inhaling horsesh*t," snapped Teofil.

"'Tis a cleaner smell than other men's wives--" commented Evgenyi.

"Leave it outside, both of you," interrupted the king. "Blade, what do you say?"

She pointed at the map. "Right here."

"Cape Artemisium?" Teofil laughed. "We stop here? Walking got to be too much for you, or is it that time of the month?"

Evgenyi glanced at the map, then at her. He pulled at his lower lip. "You sure?"

"Yes," she told him.

The king grinned at her. "Artemis thanked you for torchin' her temple and asked you to tarry awhile?"

"I didn't burn it," she said.

"You f*cking what?" Teofil asked. "There is a woman's brain in there, after all. And soft as a puppy's sh*t."

She stepped forward until she was only a hand's-breadth from him. She was a bit taller, and she enjoyed staring him down. "Some day, little man," she told him, "I am going to string my battle-spear with your guts." The look he gave her back flamed so with fury that she thought he might explode. Ignoring him, she drew her dagger and plunged it into the map, then pulled a lace from her glove and wrapped it about the hilt.

"Cape Artemisium," she said, stretching the leather to the west. "And fifteen leagues away, by sea or by ford... Thermopylae."

"The gateway to southern Greece," said the king, thinking.

"And the nemesis of the Persians," Teofil pointed out.

"They didn't let it slow them down any," she reminded him.

The king clapped her on the shoulder. "Hell, we have Bladewalker. She's smarter than the entire Persian Empire. We stage at Cape Artemisium."

* * *

What with preparation, setting up quarters, and negotiating with the local populace for the provision of food and services to the army, it was two days before Bladewalker could get away. Since it had been her idea to use Cape Artemisium as their staging area, she spent considerable time organizing their presence at the northern tip of the island, and it was after little sleep and much difficult effort that she called for her horse and freed herself from the rigidity of the camp.

Her lieutenants didn't question her when she said she was going alone and would not return before at least nightfall. At the time, she was grateful for their lack of curiosity, but later she was to wonder if she'd been too obviously eager, seemed to have too clearly another purpose for their presence on the island.

That day, as the horse made the most of her chance to run unchecked, it seemed she moved freely for the first time she could recall. She noted the road's gentle rise into the hills and the trees framing it, lush and heavy with summer, not as a soldier would, mindful of tactics and spots for ambush, but as some kind of feeble-brained bard, all childish eyes alive to color, ears attuned to the burble of falling water and full-throated birdsong, a body that breathed in the perfume of a mild, beautiful afternoon bursting with sunshine, greenery, and life.

The horse's hooves slowed only when she approached the temple, still and tranquil in the summer air. Two robed priestesses were sweeping the steps as she trotted up on the ebony war-charger, armor a-clank and harness a-jingle. Neither of the women, she saw to her disappointment, was Jessamyn.

As Bladewalker was about to speak, one of the women lifted a hand to her mouth and called into the temple, "Lady!"

Moments later, Jessamyn stepped to the door, pausing a moment in mid-stride when she saw the visitor. Bladewalker found it impossible to tell what she was thinking. She came halfway down the steps and turned to talk to the women sweeping. They picked up their brooms and walked around the outside of the temple to the back, and Jessamyn came the rest of the way down the steps, stopping by the off side of the horse, like someone who knew dressage. Bladewalker dismounted, gathered the reins in her hand, and stood looking at Jessamyn.

Today, instead of the robe, she was wearing a simple gathered shift that left her arms bare. On her head was a circlet of oiled olive wood, framing her hair, which spilled and spun down her shoulders in a curtain of brilliant black. Her dark eyes held the same soft, knowing look that had bedeviled Bladewalker's occasional attempts to sleep the past couple of days.

"Peace, warrior," she said.

"Good afternoon," Bladewalker said, trying not to get dizzy and knock-kneed. She gestured toward the steps recently occupied by acolytes and remarked inanely, "I didn't know you had a staff."

"I didn't know you had one either," Jessamyn replied, and a smile began to tease about her lips like the words about Bladewalker's heart. "Why do you not ride at the head of a troop?"

The question caught Bladewalker off guard. "I--I told them I was riding out alone."

"Why did you come?" Jessamyn inquired simply.

Excellent question. I've been wondering myself. Bladewalker didn't say anything for a moment. Answer her, idiot, lest she think all of your people are feeble. "To see you," she blurted out.

Her heart began to hammer, but Jessamyn merely considered it for a moment, her eyebrow lifting in a graceful curve. "I'm honored when the king's war-leader takes the time to visit," she said. "Shall we?"

She turned and started along a path that ran from the front of the temple and disappeared a little bit of the way into the woods. Bladewalker obediently set off, horse in tow, and caught up with her after a few paces.

"We hear you'll be staying a while," Jessamyn remarked.

Bladewalker nodded brusquely. "It's a good staging area."

Jessamyn glanced at her quickly. "You'd tell me your plans?"

Bladewalker shrugged. "It's not as though the king's objectives are unknown."

"You're very confident," said the priestess.

"One never knows where a warrior's path will lead," Bladewalker said, aware that she sounded both inane and pompous.

"Have you come to any conclusions about yours?" Jessamyn asked.

The memory of weeping like a lost child in the arms of the priestess crashed upon her with the force of an ocean wave, and her face flooded with heat. Bladewalker stuttered silently for a moment, then looked into the trees.

"No." Startled, Bladewalker looked at her arm, where a delicate hand rested. "No," Jessamyn repeated. Bladewalker lifted her eyes, and Jessamyn was looking at her face with intensity. "No shame, no flight, no denial. Don't hide. Don't hide from this. Don't hide from yourself." She took her hand away and added softly, "And don't hide from me." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I beg you... don't hide from me."

Jessamyn's beautiful dark eyes searched hers, and in them Bladewalker saw tenderness, an offer of friendship, and more: an adamantine conviction to be honest, even if it cost her everything. She could see the tension in Jessamyn's face, the expectation, Tartarus or Elysium, and Bladewalker's soul soared for the sky as she thought, She's right. This is my choice.

Nothing of her eloquence made its way as far as her tongue. Instead, she stammered, "I--I don't think I can." The line appeared between Jessamyn's eyebrows again, and Bladewalker continued, "Not any more. I was done with fleeing the moment I saw you..."

Jessamyn lifted a cautious hand, and Bladewalker watched, with heart galloping, as it closed the distance between them. Jessamyn's fingers came to rest with a mothy lightness on Bladewalker's face, and the knowing touch, the accepting tenderness, nearly sent her to her knees.

Bladewalker closed her eyes. She'd been a target all her life, soul stripped away, piece after piece, by uncaring and brutal masters, and the ugliness of that had imprinted itself on her. She'd thought herself ugly, monstrous, her face unmarked because the man whose blade reached for her face paid with his life, but some scars are deeper than wounded skin, and no one had reached for her with anything other than a weapon in so long she couldn't remember if it had ever even happened.

She opened her eyes and looked down, her breathing hard and her brains thoroughly rattled. After a lifetime of violence, a beautiful woman was reaching for her with a visible yearning in her face, and more besides: a sense of wonder, a shimmer of miracle misting her eyes as she looked up into Bladewalker's face.

Bladewalker reached out with her own hand, trembling and unsure, and touched Jessamyn's cheek gently, running her fingers over the smooth, lovely skin, sure of nothing on earth, in heaven or hell, except that Jessamyn wanted her, and she was welcome.

She tried to move slowly, gently, to impose on her body a discipline it had no way to comprehend, but the hunger was too much, and she pulled Jessamyn to her quickly. Jessamyn moved into her arms as if she belonged there, and when Bladewalker lowered her head, Jessamyn lifted her face to meet her lips.

Jessamyn's touch filled her with glory, and Bladewalker closed her eyes again and tightened her hold as much as she dared. She wanted to weep, dance, sing, paw the ground like a snorting stallion and bellow her passion to the skies, but instead she surrendered to the feeling of wanting Jessamyn, and the unreal sensation of Jessamyn wanting her back.

Bladewalker, bastard child of divinity and madness, her life a wasteland lit only by endless storms of violence and pain, had felt the first touch of destiny.

* * *

Overcome, Bladewalker drew back a bit, and Jessamyn opened her eyes, blinking a little as Bladewalker made an effort to haul herself back from the stars. Not knowing what she was doing, Bladewalker ran her calloused soldier's fingers slowly over Jessamyn's flawless shoulder, moving across the cloth of her shift to the spot where her shoulder became her throat. She was trying to teach her stiff, brutal hand a different way to touch, and it took all her concentration to move with a feathery lightness. A pulse as light and rapid as the beat of a butterfly's wings ran above Jessamyn's collarbone, and Jessamyn caught her breath in a subtle gasp. Bladewalker placed her hand with instant protectiveness over the spot, trying to calm her, trying to soothe, a thing she had no idea how to do.

Jessamyn's hand lifted and settled over Bladewalker's, and the warrior's eyes roamed her face. Jessamyn's skin had grown warm under her fingers, and Bladewalker's hand trembled under Jessamyn's. Bladewalker's lips moved in what might have been a prayer.

"Yes," Jessamyn breathed, and Bladewalker could feel the air moving through her throat.

"What?"

It seemed a remarkably clumsy thing to say, considering that a beautiful woman was in her arms, but Jessamyn laughed subtly, a sheen of magic coming across her face. Jessamyn tightened her fingers over Bladewalker's hand. "You asked me if I wanted you," she said.

"Oh," Bladewalker replied, feeling about as intelligent as an ox's left foreleg. "And... and what was your answer, pray?"

Jessamyn's laugh was low, musical, knowing. She ran her hand up the front of Bladewalker's armor, an assessing look on her face. "Come on," she said, nodding to the east.

"Where?" Bladewalker said.

Jessamyn took a breath to speak, her throat moved under Bladewalker's hand, and Bladewalker forgot the question again, staring at the spot where Jessamyn's hand rested atop hers. "Somewhere safe," Jessamyn said.

"Safe?" Bladewalker asked, a sharp note in her voice. "Safe from what?"

"Eyes. Ears." Jessamyn shook her head and took her hand away. "Others. Anyone else. Come on!"

She seized Bladewalker's hand and turned. Bladewalker pulled her back by the hand, took her into her arms, and pressed her lips to Jessamyn's again. Jessamyn's arms went up, tightening around her neck, and she broke the kiss long enough to murmur, "Yes, yes, after so long, you're finally here..." The murmur became a gasp as Bladewalker buried her lips in Jessamyn's throat.

Bladewalker came up for air, then turned, gathering the horse's reins in one hand and Jessamyn in the other, and leapt for the saddle, damn near killing both of them in the process. But after a breathless moment of what might have been flight, Bladewalker was firmly in the saddle, Jessamyn seated across one knee with her arms around Bladewalker's neck. "Oh," Jessamyn said, registering how far away the ground had gotten.

Bladewalker tightened her arm around Jessamyn's waist and chirruped to the horse, who tossed her head and broke into an immediate trot. "Where?" Bladewalker asked, and Jessamyn pointed to a break in the trees, then pulled herself close to Bladewalker's chest and paid no more attention to navigating.

Bladewalker saw that the break concealed a footpath and sent the horse in that direction at a canter. Jessamyn had started to run her mouth down Bladewalker's face, and the feeling nearly knocked her from the saddle. "Ah, God, ah, God," Bladewalker whispered, daring to close her eyes for only an instant lest the excitement end abruptly in broken bones and a lamed horse.

The path broadened into a lane lined with sun-dappled oaks, and Bladewalker was able to give the horse the rein command that meant, Find your own way. She added wryly to herself, And I'll be finding mine, then turned to Jessamyn. She balanced easily against the gait of the horse, Jessamyn not being much in the way of a burden, and they kissed, exploring one another, as the horse bore them deeper and deeper into the woods. Jessamyn's fingers tightened against Bladewalker's sleeve. Bladewalker would sooner have lost her own life than let anything hurt her.

The canter became a trot, then a walk, and finally the horse came to a stop. Bladewalker, occupied in kissing Jessamyn, didn't open her eyes until Jessamyn whispered, "Look."

She pulled away with an effort and glanced about her. The horse had come to a stop before a still, deep pool set like a dark topaz against the brilliant green of mossy turf and the gnarled brown of the tree trunks. At the opposite end of the pool, where a boulder-strewn cliff climbed upward, a fall of water tumbled into white spray, sending ripples across the pool that caught the sunlight in bright glimmers. It was one of the most beautiful places she'd ever seen, and a sense of peace descended on her.

"What is this place?" Bladewalker asked, keeping her voice low.

"It's sacred to Athena," Jessamyn said; her own voice had taken on a note of deep contentment, and Bladewalker thought, She's home. Bladewalker put her arms around Jessamyn and sighed.

Then something occurred to her. "Athena?" she asked. "I thought the temple belonged to Artemis."

"It does," Jessamyn said.

Bladewalker shook her head, trying to get some blood to her brain, which wasn't easy. "Are they the same?"

"No," Jessamyn said with a soft laugh. "No, indeed, they're not."

Bladewalker shrugged in apology. "Well, don't judge by me. You Greeks have so pestiferously many gods I can't keep 'em all straight." She saluted the trees and the pool vaguely. "No offense, Your Worship."

"I'm certain she didn't take any," Jessamyn said, laughing again. Laughing made her jiggle deliciously against Bladewalker's thighs, and Bladewalker longed to make her laugh for about the next century and a half.

"Well, then," Bladewalker said idiotically, "I suppose we ought to contrive a way to get off this horse."

"What, you haven't been practicing?" Jessamyn teased her.

"At gallopin' all over the countryside with a beautiful lady in my lap?" Bladewalker asked. Jessamyn smiled, her eyes alight. "No, I must say," Bladewalker went on, aware of just how much she sounded like an ass, "I can't say as that was part of the manual of arms. Now, of course, I'm thinkin' of adding it to my training regimen..."

She halted the nonsense, closed her eyes, and leaned in again, and Jessamyn's mouth met hers. She was never going to tire of this.

"Be brave, Blade," she sighed, then moved delicately out from underneath Jessamyn and dropped from the horse. She held up her arms, and Jessamyn slid into them, throwing her arms around Bladewalker's neck. Bladewalker swung her up, holding her as she marched toward the nearest tree. She looped the reins over a branch, securing them a little awkwardly one-handed, then said to Jessamyn, "Beggin' your pardon, lady, but I'm going to have to put you down."

Jessamyn threw one arm over her eyes and fell back in a nicely-feigned swoon. "Tragedy!" she exclaimed.

"Make me laugh," Bladewalker warned her, "and you'll hit the ground sooner than you planned."

Jessamyn put her arm around Bladewalker's shoulder and leaned toward her. "You'll never drop me," she whispered, and they kissed for a while.

Bladewalker returned from her sojourn through the land of Jessamyn with a start. "Horse," she said apologetically.

"Horse," Jessamyn agreed, nodding. Bladewalker set her down on the grass, then turned to the horse. She got the bit disengaged and pulled the rein-stake from her saddlebag, then sent it into the ground with a sudden shove. She tied the rein to the stake, and the horse leaned her long neck to crop the grass as Bladewalker took off her saddle.

"Here," Jessamyn said, and Bladewalker turned back. Jessamyn was holding a twisted wisp of grass, and a startled Bladewalker took it and began to wipe the sweat from the horse's neck and flanks.

"Thank you," Bladewalker said. "You know horses?"

"My parents traded horses in Egypt," Jessamyn said, just as Bladewalker's horse raised her head and blew at Jessamyn. Jessamyn caught her bridle like an expert and patted the side of her face gently.

"How d'you come to be a priestess, then?" Bladewalker asked, wisping the last of the sweat from the horse's legs.

Jessamyn shrugged. "Seems like perfect training to me." Bladewalker laughed, and a pleased smile came over Jessamyn's face.

"There, that ought to do her," Bladewalker said, pitching the wisp and dusting her hands together. She walked a few steps to the pool to wash the smell of hot horse from her hands, then returned to where Jessamyn stood watching her. Her heart froze as Jessamyn reached for the clasp on Bladewalker's cloak. She swept it up over her arm and laid it gently over a branch of the oak.

"Allow me," Bladewalker offered, picking up her cloak and spreading it out along the grass. Jessamyn didn't stop with the cloak; she put her hands up for the straps on Bladewalker's armor.

"How does this work?" she murmured.

"Allow me," Bladewalker said, her hands gone cold and clumsy. She unbuckled her armor and shrugged out of it, then arranged it carefully over the branch they were using as a clothes-chest. Jessamyn unlaced her sandals and set them on the grass next to the cloak. It didn't seem right to stand in her leathers while Jessamyn was wearing only a shift, so Bladewalker swallowed her heart back into her chest and took off her jacket and boots.

Jessamyn sat on the cloak and looked up at Bladewalker, determination and shyness coming and going in her expression. Bladewalker lowered herself carefully next to her. Jessamyn put her palm to Bladewalker's cheek, and Bladewalker thought she was going to drown in the love she saw shining from Jessamyn's eyes.

Jessamyn leaned forward, exactly as Bladewalker had been terrified and hopeful she might, and their lips touched. Jessamyn put her arms around Bladewalker's neck, drawing her down onto the cloak. Bladewalker ran her hands over Jessamyn's body, feeling for the first time, and when Jessamyn pulled away to squeeze her eyes shut and catch her breath, Bladewalker followed her hands with her mouth. Jessamyn tightened her fingers in Bladewalker's shirt, and Bladewalker growled a little against the skin of her neck. Don't hurt her, don't hurt her, Bladewalker's brain sang urgently, and Bladewalker hauled herself back with a soldier's discipline.

"You won't," Jessamyn whispered. "Don't worry."

The chills that ran over Bladewalker's skin might have had three or four causes. She looked at Jessamyn, whose hair spilled in a soft dark blanket over her cloak. She knew she would never wear that cloak again without thinking of this moment.

"Are you here?" Bladewalker asked, running her fingers over the hair at Jessamyn's temple. "Really here?"

Jessamyn nodded. "Really here. Really with you. And you're here. At last." She closed her eyes briefly and murmured, "I should have had more faith..."

"You mean... you mean you were... waiting for me?"

Jessamyn's lovely eyes met hers. "I've been waiting for you for longer than my whole life," she said simply.

It was too much, too much to handle without being able to touch, so Bladewalker ran her hands over Jessamyn and took her lips and gave her what she had to give. The two of them settled closer and closer together, and Bladewalker found her hand roaming the strength of Jessamyn's legs, reaching for the hem of her shift.

* * *

In the endless days and nights of emptiness that had been what she had of a life before that very hour, Bladewalker had never considered the possibility of miracle. Yet here it was, yanking her by the collar, pulling her onward, pulling her down, pulling her in. She felt herself at once divine and flesh, like the woman beneath her, whose presence meant both madness and exaltation. Jessamyn's name sang in her head like her body beneath Bladewalker's hands.

She wished she could have come to this gift clean and pure, not a scarred, half-strangled murderer who excused her barbarity by dressing it up in pretty, intimidating black leather. She longed to have spent her life in the service of a goddess who valued a sacrifice of something other than blood: it made Bladewalker's mere presence in the glade the foulest blasphemy, to say nothing of her unforgivable arrogance in daring to lay a hand on Jessamyn. She was overwhelmed, head a-spin with the preciousness of Jessamyn's touch, and it was some time before she realized that she did indeed have something to offer in return.

Although her intimacy with others had been savage before that afternoon, she found a way to turn that horror into something exquisite. A stroke here, a thrust there, the tension of a muscle, the quick turn of a hand, transformed from the brutal moment-by-moment calculation of battle into a form of worship as pure as flowing water, as rich as the green of their mossy bed. They lay on that bed entwined, cradled in soft peace, as Bladewalker transmuted the dross of a wasted life, drop by drop, into pure gold, offering it in worship to the woman who had touched her heart well before her lips, changing both forever. Jessamyn had reached past the scars, under and through her skin, and it surprised Bladewalker to discover what she found there. There would be no return to savagery after this, no more mindless, soul-sucking carnage, and had she not been drowning in adoration, Bladewalker might have wondered how she was to survive.

Her survival was a bit of a question as it was; she was moving in ways she had not expected, trying anything she could think of (and more than a few that required no thought at all) to climb into Jessamyn's body and head right for her soul. She wanted to curl up next to her forever, making love to her until the end of the world, and Jessamyn's soft, sweet music convinced Bladewalker she wanted nothing more herself.

She swam in and out of delirium, finding herself kissing, tensing, moving, running her hands and mouth and legs and tongue over wonderfully variable skin, here soft as silk, there firm and yielding. She was more alert than she had ever been in training, anticipating the next move and getting there in time to be what Jessamyn needed, wanted, craved. Jessamyn turned the tables on her once in a while, and to be truthful, Bladewalker was glad of the rest, the time to catch her breath and clear her head before she had to endure the almost unbearable feeling, the magic of the same things she was doing to Jessamyn. They said barely a word to one another, both because the feeling was too wild for words and because language was too precise, too mundane, to capture the shimmer of glory surrounding them.

It seemed to Bladewalker as though she held Jessamyn's tender, beating heart in her hands, and she knew she would never suffer anyone to harm her. Jessamyn cradled her very soul as closely, and the two of them moved closer, ever closer, until some barrier of skin and bone and distance melted away, leaving them spirit to spirit, dancing in pure air, until there was no way to decide which was which and who was who.

It took everything she had, everything she was, turning it into a bridal hymn like none other ever sung, two voices melding and blending until there was only one, its only melody pure love, a celestial music that was heartbreak and redemption all in one.

When she finally returned to that place, she was surprised to note that she had a body, and that it was naked, breathing, and drenched. She was lying against Jessamyn's skin, a lovely, wild scent perfuming them both, and after a moment, it occurred to her that perhaps Jessamyn would welcome her own chance at some air.

She levered herself up on arms she wasn't certain would still work and leaned in, closing her eyes and knowing she could still find Jessamyn's mouth. The kiss was deep and lasting, sealing them together, and it said, We know what we are to one another, and always will be. The vow Bladewalker made in answer had no words.

"Rest," Jessamyn murmured against her shoulder, and Bladewalker lowered herself onto her back, gathering Jessamyn into her arms. Jessamyn settled against Bladewalker's shoulder and picked up her hand, lacing her fingers into Bladewalker's. For a long time, they didn't speak.

Jessamyn raised herself up on one elbow and looked into Bladewalker's face, the gentle smile Bladewalker had come to recognize playing about the lips that had recently driven her out of her mind. She swept the damp hair from Bladewalker's forehead. "What are you feeling?"

Bladewalker sighed with contentment, put one hand under her head, and ran her hand along Jessamyn's shoulder, lost in the late-afternoon sunlight against her dark skin. "I hardly know," she said, her voice sounding slow and drugged to her. "Are you a dream?"

"No dream," Jessamyn said firmly, lowering her mouth to Bladewalker's breast. Indeed, it didn't seem as though a dream could do what Jessamyn did next, and Bladewalker shut her eyes, her head falling back as her hands cradled that lovely head with its richness of flowing hair. Her fingers slipped over the circlet of olive wood around Jessamyn's brow.

"Mercy," she gasped, and Jessamyn's mouth let her go. Her eyes swept over Bladewalker's body, starting at her face and moving down her torso and coming back up, and by the time she was looking into Bladewalker's eyes again, the smile had gone a little wicked, a little wild.

"I'd like to get into the pool with you," Jessamyn said.

For a moment, this seemed like an invitation to something Bladewalker didn't quite recognize, but then she realized that they were lying next to the water, which rippled and murmured with the last ghosts of the violence of the waterfall some distance away. The thought of water slipping over their flesh as her lips slipped over Jessamyn's skin awoke in her a ravening want, and she got to her feet, somewhat unsteadily, and pulled Jessamyn up in one swift motion. They stood naked for a time, kissing and running their hands over one another, and then Bladewalker lifted Jessamyn in her arms, planted her lips on Jessamyn's mouth, and walked her into the pool.

It was warmer than she had expected, and soothing after the air, which had grown chilly. She held Jessamyn to her, buoyed by the water, and the two of them kissed for another while. Jessamyn began to move again, and Bladewalker considered it impolite to hold her in place, so she put her down.

Jessamyn sank to her neck in the water, smiling up at her lover, then took a few lazy strokes backward into the pool. Bladewalker dove with a splash and followed her, and they chased one another through the warm softness of the pool, intuiting each other's position and reaching with hands and feet. Strength flooded Bladewalker, and when she reached out with a deft hand, she caught Jessamyn's ankle, pulled herself up, and found her mouth again. They broke to the surface kissing, and Bladewalker gathered Jessamyn up into her arms, swirled her through the water, and lifted her onto a ledge of rock near the waterfall. She hauled herself out of the water on newly powerful arms and lowered herself over Jessamyn's body, absorbed in her newest task: finding out how Jessamyn's skin tasted wet.

* * *

Had Bladewalker been able to think, it would have come as a surprise to realize that there was a world outside this little grove, and anyone else on it other than the two of them. They had long since left the everyday behind, abandoning clothing and speech and all the other trappings of civilization. Bladewalker cared nothing for starvation or thirst or fatigue: nothing mattered but the woman whose body twined along hers as though they were twin coiled branches of the oaks surrounding them. Just when she thought it would finally be possible to get close enough, truly become part of Jessamyn, she would find herself tumbling back to awareness of the differences between their bodies, and her desperation to return to that place of perfection, that twinned oneness, would awaken an answering hunger in her lover. It took them quite a while to work it out, pulling this way and pushing that, but finally she groped for the hand she knew would catch hers, and the two of them melted into one another in the easiest fall she had ever taken.

She never wanted to move, but then she became lonely for a look and raised herself. The sunlight coming through the trees glittered in sharp droplets in Jessamyn's lovely, wild hair, now barely restrained by the circlet of olive wood. Bladewalker, balanced on an elbow, combed through Jessamyn's wavy tresses with her fingers.

"Beautiful," she sighed, a butterfly of a word, disturbing not so much as the air around her.

"So are you," Jessamyn whispered, reaching up to put that astoundingly skilled hand to Bladewalker's face once more.

It confused her, Jessamyn being so aware in other ways, and Bladewalker's brows knit as she asked, "D'you really think that?" Her tongue felt thick and her speech sounded clumsy.

"Yes," Jessamyn said, the look in her eyes leaving no doubt of her conviction. "Very."

She despised herself for doubting, but it was so strong she had to ask. "All beat up like I am?"

"Better so," Jessamyn murmured, "for it means you were willing to do whatever it took to get you here."

"I never thought to thank the Goddess for sparing me," Bladewalker said. She tried a diffident shrug, which came off tolerably well, and added, "Never had a reason..."

Tears flooded her eyes, and she swallowed hastily, lest Jessamyn see. But Jessamyn gathered Bladewalker's face in her hands and kissed her tears away slowly, deliberately. Bladewalker put her arms around her lover and captured her lips again.

The frenzy was stilled for the moment, however, and Bladewalker, feeling that her emotion might break out afresh if there was nothing to distract it, pulled back slightly. "I brought you something," she murmured to Jessamyn.

"You certainly did," Jessamyn said, lifting an eyebrow.

Bladewalker burst into laughter, and her body rejoiced, the glory swirling around the two of them. "I meant something else. Wilt let me up, lady?"

"I'll think it over," Jessamyn replied. Eventually, after another set of kisses and soft touches, she opened her arms, and Bladewalker got to her feet, feeling both light and unsteady, and fetched her saddlebag. She sat beside Jessamyn and began to unstrap it, and Jessamyn leaned up on an elbow to help her. When the flap was opened, Bladewalker nodded, and Jessamyn reached in and pulled out a thick package wrapped in linen.

"Go ahead," Bladewalker said with another nod.

Jessamyn pulled the package open, and a flash of green appeared beneath the linen at the same time she gave a soft gasp. She moved carefully, unfolding and tucking, and eventually she was holding a folded length of exquisite silk balanced in her palms. It was the exact color of the soft, mossy turf on which they had made love, and Jessamyn's breathing quickened as she looked at it.

"You don't like it?" Bladewalker asked.

"No... no," Jessamyn said, shaking her head in a swift movement. "It's... it's lovely. I--I don't know that..."

Bladewalker caught Jessamyn's chin in her hand. "That you're beautiful enough for it?" Jessamyn lifted her huge eyes to Bladewalker's, looking frightened and young for the first time. "Hell, if this beat-up old boot of a soldier is beautiful, then you..." Bladewalker cupped her face and leaned in close to catch her lips again, murmuring, "You're a goddess."

It was some time before they got back to the matter at hand, and Bladewalker glanced toward the sky, where the shadows spoke of imminent twilight. She turned to Jessamyn. "Would it please you to put it on while there's still light enough?"

"Willingly," Jessamyn said, but the way she stood and moved was shy and modest, and Bladewalker got to her feet, watching with a hunger deep in her soul. Jessamyn drew the dress over her head and laced up the bodice, then pulled her vibrant hair free of the collar. She turned to Bladewalker, holding her arms out. She looked like the goddess of spring, fresh and lovely and alive in head-to-toe green silk. "D'you like it?"

"Lovely. Let's take it off," Bladewalker said, reaching for her.

Jessamyn laughed and danced out of her reach, holding out a hand and bending so that Bladewalker caught a tantalizing glimpse of what the bodice had leashed within it. "Come on, I want to show you something."

"Lady," Bladewalker told her with some fervor, "it may have escaped you that's exactly what I'm attempting."

Jessamyn caught Bladewalker's hand and moved close for a quick kiss, then turned and made her way toward the waterfall. Bladewalker gave up and let herself be led, snatching up the cloak one-handed as they passed it and throwing it over her shoulder.

As they got near the waterfall, Bladewalker saw a little shadow on the rocks. It led to a small passage she had to duck to get into. Another few steps, and they had come to a chamber walled in stone and rushing water.

Jessamyn turned to her. "There's a cave behind the waterfall. At midwinter, the sun comes right through here and lights it right up."

"I don't need the light," Bladewalker assured her, pulling her close. The silk molded to Jessamyn's flesh, and Bladewalker ran her hands appreciatively over it, the cloth having added a new dimension of unavailability to Jessamyn's sweet skin. Jessamyn moved away far too soon, walking into the waterborne gloom and returning with a lamp, which she lit with unobtrusive skill and set on a ledge. That a lamp would burn here must mean that the cavern kept dry, in spite of the water thundering past the opening.

As the light grew, Bladewalker looked about her. The cavern was spacious, the floor dry and level, the walls smooth. Passages led away at either end; there must be a honeycomb of caves in these hills. Before her was a stone table-looking structure with bronze lamp sconces set at each corner.

"Is this Athena's temple?" Bladewalker asked.

"No," Jessamyn said in a low voice.

Bladewalker drew the cloak about her, for the air was chill and it raised the hairs on her forearms. "What, then?"

"It's a library," Jessamyn replied.

* * *

The look on Bladewalker's face made Jessamyn burst into laughter. "My darling," she said, and the affection in her voice was plain. She approached with rapid steps and placed her hand gently to Bladewalker's face again. "Have I confused you completely?"

Bladewalker considered it. "Not completely, perhaps. I think I'm still capable of bangin' two thoughts together." She reached for Jessamyn's shoulders and pulled her close. "So if total idiocy is what you're after, we'd better try again."

The two of them slid into each other's arms. Jessamyn was silk and iron, the gossamer of a spider's web and the mightiest fortress. Bladewalker wanted nothing in life as badly as she wanted to stay here, in this place, in this moment, until she had tasted everything of Jessamyn, learned her conception and babyhood and prattling and stumbles, held her hand while she learned to walk and run, cradled her as life brought her hardship and sorrow, wrapped protective arms round her through her tears of joy. Everything that had brought her here. Everything she had been, and was, and ever would be.

Jessamyn caught her breath and pulled away slightly.

"Did I hurt you?" Bladewalker murmured, abruptly, terribly afraid.

"No," Jessamyn whispered, turning her face away. "You wouldn't."

It was spoken with simple faith, like a child's, and the heavens opened up for Bladewalker as the gift laid itself gently at her feet. She was humbled and awestruck, looking down at Jessamyn's bent head and strong, slight shoulders, the wonder and divinity she never expected to see, revealed in three whispered words. Here, for the first time she could remember, was someone who, despite ample reason, did not fear her.

Jessamyn expected to be touched with love, and she expected Bladewalker to do the touching. Guard, warrior, Bladewalker told herself, and make yourself worthy. Reverently, she put her hand to Jessamyn's chin and turned her face up.

"Did I frighten you?" she asked soberly.

"No," Jessamyn said, closing her eyes and shaking her head, a beautiful movement. "No, you didn't frighten me."

"I wouldn't hurt you if they gave me the world and everyone on it for my personal plaything." Bladewalker bent to press a gentle kiss to her lips.

Jessamyn gave herself to it, then pulled away again and buried her face in Bladewalker's shoulder. "I know. I know that. You don't frighten me. This does. What it's doing to my heart. It's... it's so strong in me, I didn't expect it to get so strong so fast..."

Bladewalker moved by instinct, drawing Jessamyn closer to her, holding her up. "There's nothing to fear. I'll hold you until you feel safe."

They stayed for a while, swaying gently back and forth, until the rhythm of the water rushing past the mouth of the cavern suggested a little song to Bladewalker. She hummed and crooned without words, letting Jessamyn know how safe she was, that Bladewalker would never, ever let anything bad happen to her again, and Jessamyn rested her lovely head on Bladewalker's shoulder and wept. Bladewalker, borrowing a wisdom not native to her, let her.

Jessamyn got herself under control after a bit. The waterfall had become a curtain of indigo, sealing them away from the night. She lifted her eyes to Bladewalker's face, and Bladewalker laid her lips gently against Jessamyn's eyes and kissed away the salt water.

"I--I want to read you something," Jessamyn said shyly.

Bladewalker drew back a bit, not taking her arms from round Jessamyn, and lifted an eyebrow. "You want to read."

Jessamyn laughed, covering her mouth with her hand.

"Would it... would it make it easier?" Bladewalker asked. It had just occurred to her, and Jessamyn's little nod was all the response she needed. "Very well," Bladewalker said, furling the cloak about her and sitting on the floor of the cavern. "I'm all ears."

Jessamyn took the lamp and went a bit of a way down the left-hand passage into the hill. The light went with her, and Bladewalker watched as the little glow bobbed in time with Jessamyn's footsteps. When she returned, she had two more lamps and what looked like a leather quiver tucked under her arm. She lit the lamps and placed them carefully in the holders at the corners of the stone table, then placed the quiver with reverence onto the surface, opened it, and drew forth a rolled-up parchment with a deft, expert motion.

It looked very old to Bladewalker, old and charged with magic. Jessamyn unrolled it onto the table, placing the quiver on one side and holding the other with her hand. She was standing with her back to Bladewalker, the green dress aglow in the lamplight, and as Bladewalker studied her hair, her back, her shoulders, and the rest of her, Jessamyn began to read.

Sing to me, Muse, of the eleventh battle of the Warrior Woman and her companion, wounded unto the brink of death by a Persian's poisoned shaft. Tell me of their desperate race to save Athens, and the woman the Warrior loved.

Bladewalker raised her knee, rested her elbow on it, and put her chin on her fist. Jessamyn's voice was low and melodious, with none of the artifice of a market-day bard calling above the bustle, hunting coin. She told the story simply, without embellishment, letting the words convey it.

In the tale, the Warrior Woman and her consort had been set upon by an invading army. Persians. A different people from those of the king Bladewalker served, but invaders as well, halted in their march by one determined, desperate woman. A woman who, it became apparent as Jessamyn went on, wore Bladewalker's face and aspect. Bladewalker's spirit sank. Jessamyn was trying to convince her to call off the invasion.

As if the king would agree. As if she had a choice. Bladewalker's eyes aimed for the floor, and she resolved to keep them nailed there. Played. Played for a fool by a beautiful woman, just like every lovestruck fool in history. She had a brief moment of despair, glory become vainglorious, when what Jessamyn read next struck her.

The bard told her, I know what you intend to do. You cannot. If you do not prevent the Persian army--

The Warrior Woman interrupted, I am not going to let you die. I can still take you to Thessaly and to a physick for the poison.

The bard noted her pride and replied quietly, And then? What becomes of Athens? What is the worth of my life then?

The bard struck with a slow, mortal wound, growing more ill as the Warrior grew more frantic to save her, every option closed off one by one, until the two of them were encircled in a dilapidated barn, the Warrior setting traps while the bard hallucinated.

Bladewalker raised her eyes and resolved to listen.

The bard summoned her failing strength and fed it into her voice. The first thing is the greater good. This is the lesson you have taught me. You taught me that there are things in life worth dying for, things that hold a higher meaning than our own existence.

The Warrior Woman shook her head and tears glimmered in her eyes as she replied, Not your existence.

The bard asked, Why? Because I am your friend?

The Warrior Woman, out of patience, raised her voice in a powerful shout. Yes!

The bard said, Then honor my memory. We both know that I am right. This is right. Promise me... promise me that you will not leave this battle because of me, Xena.

The name was a shock, returning after an absence Bladewalker could measure in years.

The bard's voice was the merest whisper. We have too little time left to argue with one another! I know that I am to die. I have accepted it. Why can you not? A long time ago, I accepted the consequences of our life together, that one day it might come to this. It has, and I am unafraid.

The Warrior Woman placed a hand upon the bard's fevered brow. You always said that I was the brave one. Look at you now. If this is to be our destiny, let us see it out together. Even in death, Gabrielle, I shall never leave you.

The bard drew a painful breath, the poison working its way into her heart. When we were in Qin... I hope you know that I never intended to harm you. I did only what I thought was right.

The Warrior Woman would have given her the very breath from her lungs. That is all past and gone. All I desire of life is to be here with you now. You are friend, family, beloved. I love you.

The eyes of the bard grew misty as the poison seeped through her veins. I love you, Xena.

The Warrior Woman murmured, Until the other side, then. We remain together.

Until then, gasped the bard.

The Warrior Woman lifted her head, listening. She said, They come.

Then there was silence as Jessamyn rolled up the scroll and slipped it back into its case. Bladewalker stepped without a sound to within a hand's-breadth of Jessamyn, looking at her back, outlined in silk the color of life itself. Such slender shoulders, to bear so much weight! And yet she looked strong enough.

"I can feel you behind me," Jessamyn murmured, not turning.

"You always will," Bladewalker replied. It was a short distance to reach, and she turned Jessamyn and put her arms round her, bringing her closer. Jessamyn put her hand on Bladewalker's chin and drew her close for a kiss.

Whether Jessamyn had intended it or not, Bladewalker knew to her core what the story meant. Two more have known what we have. Two more have faced what we have faced. And two others have found the bravery to endure. But could she muster that type of courage? Was she that type of hero? Was that what Jessamyn expected of her? Bladewalker pulled back a fraction. "I am not that woman," she said firmly.

Jessamyn looked bewildered a moment, then she replied, "No, you're not. She lived a century a-gone, maybe more. What makes you say that?"

"I cannot stop it, Jessamyn," Bladewalker told her, trying to be gentle. "The invasion. He is determined on it."

Jessamyn looked away and ran her hands over Bladewalker's forearms. "Then... then we have, perhaps, only this one night." She looked up, and the despair was evident in her lovely face, outlined in the soft lamplight.

"If we have only one night, then let us spend it in one another's arms," Bladewalker answered, reaching for the cloak. She laid it out along the floor of the cavern, reaching for Jessamyn's hand and drawing her down. They knelt and kissed before the lamplit table with the scroll, at first slowly and with intent, then with abandon.

It was important to show Jessamyn who she was. Bladewalker had herself in hand at last, and she felt capable of showing Jessamyn everything, good and evil, with no shyness, no hesitation. The clumsy wartorn girl of the afternoon had burnt away in the fire of their passion, leaving a mature, confident lover. She gave as much pleasure as she took from Jessamyn, sweet body and sweeter soul, directing her hands and eyes and mouth and thighs as much to what she wanted as what Jessamyn wanted. The two of them spent hours pouring one another full of love, enough to last, enough to sustain, enough to see them through whatever was coming, because neither of them could have imagined what that would be.

* * *

Lovers who have the good fortune to spend time together know that love is organic, living, growing, changing, a thing that combines constancy and change. Those who do not have the luxury of time learn a different lesson: that love, if it does not have the chance to grow, can also be made.

Making transforms both the maker and the material she shapes; neither are the same afterwards. Making is labor, whether enjoyable or painful, and after the labor must come rest.

* * *

After moonrise, outside the cavern, a woman walked. Her armor and skin shone with the glow of phosphorescent ocean swells, and in her ghostly hand she carried a sword that seemed carved of moonlight. She walked across the pool, her footsteps never quite reaching the surface of the water. Past the waterfall, to the other shore, turn. Across the water, to the other shore, turn. Her steps were slow and measured, and a military cadence drove her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, without apparent fatigue or boredom.

The moon had risen in the sky when another woman, animated with the same faint blue-white glow, crossed the mossy turf where, earlier, Bladewalker and Jessamyn had lain. She wore a sleeveless white robe with a dark length of cloth thrown over one shoulder, and a diadem sparkled in her hair.

She waited for the swordswoman to make another circuit across the surface of the pool. The swordswoman stopped a pace from the shore, regarding the other woman from beneath the visor of her helmet.

"Is it done?" asked the warrior.

"Not done," replied the priestess, "but well begun. They're asleep."

The warrior nodded, looking away from the waterfall, eyes searching the trees and hills.

"Together," added the priestess.

"I'll give them what time I can," said the warrior. She didn't sound confident.

The priestess regarded her for a moment in silent sorrow. "We're not completely powerless," she said at last. "There are still little things we can grant them--quiet, solitude, rest. Not to be disturbed until dawn. These small gifts are ones we can still give."

The warrior asked abruptly, "Will it work?"

The priestess favored her with a gentle smile.

The warrior inclined her head toward the waterfall. "That is my child, in there asleep."

"And mine," the priestess assured her swiftly. "You must remember that I have some experience in these things."

The warrior didn't seem convinced. A tiny breeze stirred the trees in the grove, and she lifted her head to it. "As powerless as we are now, what can we do?"

The priestess said, "We'll have to have faith."

The warrior scoffed, "In fallen gods and ruined temples?"

"In them," said the priestess.

The warrior turned to her, her face grim but determined. "Thank you, Athena."

"Quiet watch, Artemis," replied the priestess, turning to leave her.

* * *

They had awakened in one another's arms.

The lamps had nearly guttered out and the cavern was shrouded in a soft, protective darkness. They lay for a while, kissing, touching, wordless. Then they got to their feet and clasped hands as they moved to the mouth of the cavern, engulfing themselves in the water, each a little reluctant because she did not want her skin or tongue to lose the flavor of the other. They spent no energy on speech, but occupied themselves with trying to memorize one another, by touch, by sight. Her breasts, her belly, her legs, her skin, her hands, her face, stilled now but with the aftermath of passion painted across it, sleepy eyes and languid movements and sudden memories that brought the blood to her face and stilled her breathing for an instant.

Jessamyn got into the beautiful green silk dress, and Bladewalker assisted with a care and tenderness no lady's maid could have matched. They left the cavern hand in hand, Jessamyn leading and Bladewalker following, and Jessamyn untied the horse (who seemed to have passed a quiet, uneventful night), leading her to the pool for a long-overdue drink while Bladewalker got into her clothes and shrugged her armor into place. She checked her sword: dry and free of pitting or water damage, although she could not bring herself to care overmuch.

They saddled the horse, pausing now and then for a kiss or a caress, and then Bladewalker lifted herself into the saddle and held out a hand for Jessamyn. Jessamyn took it, and Bladewalker lifted her gently up before her. Jessamyn turned in her arms to give her a kiss, and Bladewalker put her arms about Jessamyn's body, picked up the reins, and turned the horse's head away from the waterfall.

They made the trip back to the temple mostly in silence, gentle smiles and careful touches. They were terribly in love. Jessamyn's skin took on a luminous cast in the growing dawn, and she folded her hands across Bladewalker's, curled around her belly.

"What are we going to do?" Jessamyn asked at last.

Bladewalker reached up to brush a strand of Jessamyn's wild hair from her calm eyes. "We'll think of something."

Jessamyn nodded over her shoulder, closed her eyes, and reached for Bladewalker's face. The horse, fresh from a night's rest away from the noise and bustle of a camp, broke into a canter, carrying them back along the path that led to the temple.

They were a quarter-league from the temple when the skin on Bladewalker's neck began to prickle. She pulled herself gently away from Jessamyn and took up the slack in the reins. Jessamyn sighed and tucked herself under Bladewalker's chin, lying along as much of Bladewalker's body as the armor would allow.

As the horse approached, she lifted her head with a snort, and Bladewalker was on alert, sitting up straight and setting Jessamyn upright. The road widened, and they saw a horse-troop before the temple, with armored guards posted at all the entrances, swords at the ready.

Teofil.

* * *

The horse trotted up to the temple and stopped. Jessamyn shivered suddenly, and Bladewalker touched her hand for an instant. "Stay here," she muttered, then swung her leg wide and dropped from the horse.

As she approached the guards, who were on high alert, watching her, Teofil appeared at the doorway of the temple. He made his way down the steps, meeting Bladewalker in the road.

"What is the meaning of this?" Bladewalker demanded.

"We've been waiting for you all night," Teofil said, his eyes sweeping Jessamyn with an assessing look that made Bladewalker want to slit his throat.

"Permit me to guess," Bladewalker said. "The king inquired about pickets and you were too stupid to answer. Why didn't you ask a soldier?"

He didn't rise to the bait. In answer, he gave her a slow, cruel, rotten-toothed smile, and the sweat started down Bladewalker's neck. It was full daylight now, and the sun was going to be hot.

"Desertion is a hanging offense," he drawled. His reptile gaze went over Jessamyn again. "Though I must say I understand the temptation..."

Bladewalker's sword was in her hand. "Agapimo," Jessamyn gasped, "no!"

"You," Bladewalker said, keeping her eyes on the king's lieutenant, "to my left."

"Aye, War-leader," said one of the guards.

"Take her away from here."

"Aye," said the man, moving to Bladewalker's horse and taking the reins. Jessamyn fought him for an instant, and Bladewalker could see the struggle out of the corner of her eye.

I will not watch her die, nor let her see me breathe my last. She thought of the stories, the thing that, for some inexplicable reason, Jessamyn had given her life to. "Priestess," Bladewalker called, not looking toward her. "Protect your children!"

It was the only thing she could think of that wouldn't lead Teofil right to the scrolls. It seemed to work; Jessamyn went still. The guard vaulted into the saddle, taking the reins from her.

Teofil had drawn his sword. "They don't leave. Do you hear me? No one is to let them leave."

"Promise me," Bladewalker called.

"I promise!" Jessamyn shouted. "I love you."

"I love you," Bladewalker said, raising her sword. "I'll come after you."

"You'll find me waiting, agapimo," Jessamyn said, then her voice broke and she took the reins from the soldier and turned the horse's head northward. In two heartbeats, they were galloping down the road.

"After them!" Teofil called, sweeping his sword in the direction of the departing horse.

"Hey!" Bladewalker shouted, clanging her blade against his. "Forgotten about me? I'm the woman who's going to kill you, you little licksh*t!"

The soldiers drew around them in a circle, and none of them pursued Jessamyn and their mounted comrade, who were out of sight in moments. Teofil's eyes blazed with fury, and his sword came round in a practiced arc. Bladewalker caught it easily, throwing him back. "You f*cking c*nt," Teofil hissed, pressing the attack and driving her up the steps. "Too good for a soldier's woman. A soldier's sword in your hand 'stead of a soldier's blade in your belly."

She skipped lightly backwards. "A woman who don't belong to you. Smarts, does it?" She led him into the temple, parrying his strokes with her own, and the knot of soldiers followed at a safe remove. Her arm was beginning to shake a little, the result of an active night and little rest. "You wizened little weasel," she snarled, her hatred flaring suddenly. "Pay or steal, but you'll never know a free woman's body. I might use your tongue to wipe the horsesh*t from my boots, but no more. Find you a little girl to rape, maybe she'll think you a real man."

She knew that would strike him, and it did; he lunged with a horrifying oath, the hot hatred in his face equal to the blackness in her belly. Her sword slid along his side, under his armor and through his shirt, and he grunted as she peeled a strip of flesh from his ribs.

"You're not even sport," she told him scornfully. He hauled a bench up by main force and tumbled the end toward her, and she leapt onto it, driving him toward the altar. An elementary error, wasting his strength when his blade could have done the job for him. His shirt darkened where she'd struck him, and blood began to drip from his wound onto the tapestried goddesses on the floor.

"You're nothing but a weak woman's hole," he panted, "demon take you."

"Too late," she said, with a nasty laugh. "Too late for you, limp-pricked eunuch." He sent his blade in an erratic swing, and she parried it without thinking. "Memorize this face, for it'll be the last thing you see before you head to hell."

The soldiers had gathered round them in a circle, but not one lifted a blade to interfere. She knew they wouldn't. Teofil's strokes swung wide, and as she danced out of his way, one of them caught her, hissing through space for her face, opening a gash above her eye.

The blood coursed down her face and into her eye, stinging. "You die for that, little man," she told him. Her blade swung shining and deadly through the air, chopping at him, and he bled from half a dozen places in a span of moments.

He was having trouble lifting his sword now, and Bladewalker could see it; it was too heavy, required more skill than his exhausted, bled-out muscles could muster. "Mercy," he murmured in a voice only she could hear.

"Mercy?" she shouted, loud enough that the soldiers heard. "A war-leader cries for mercy? Godsforsaken coward, go to the fate you've earned." She was in position, and she took the strike, sending her sword into his throat with shocking suddenness.

His blade hit the floor at the same time as her hand shot out for his collar. She swung his dying body to the floor, bending over him. Their faces twitched, his in his final agony and hers in fury. She looked him right in the eye. "I win, little man," she growled into his face as she freed her sword from his flesh. He kept his eyes on her as the blood gushed from his throat, and his muscles went all at once.

Bladewalker tossed his limp body to the floor, which was a sodden mess. His eyes hadn't closed. She was having trouble catching her breath, and the pain hit her brow. She was terribly thirsty, and her tongue peeled from the roof of her mouth. "None," she said, "is to interfere with the women at this place."

The soldiers stirred. A sergeant she barely recognized except as a shadowy presence at Teofil's side took a step toward her, a risky and brave move, considering. "War-leader," the sergeant said gruffly, "we'll tell the king the truth."

She glanced at him, then down at Teofil's body, the unnerving open eyes staring into hers. "And what is that?"

"He--he attacked you," said one of the others.

"Without provocation," added another.

She lifted her head to them. Gore dripped from the end of her blade onto the carpet. "What of his order to pursue the priestess?"

She got through the sentence without stumbling, and the men looked at one another. "You command now," one of them said simply.

Bladewalker stepped away from Teofil's body on legs that would scarcely hold her, sweeping the men with a cold commander's gaze. "You hated him so much?" The silence told her what she needed to know. She paced a bit, then stopped before one of the columns, thinking. They had made a generous offer, and one she was hardly in a position to refuse. But the consequences could be terrible to them, and a skilled interrogator could get from them all he needed to know to go after Jessamyn and her pestilential fairy tales.

"Here," she said, gesturing with her sword. "When the shadow reaches the corner of the altar, I want all of you to leave this place and follow my track." She looked around her, repeating it. "All of you. Is that clear?"

"Aye, War-leader," said the sergeant.

She left the temple, went down the steps, and took the reins of a war-charger she recognized as Teofil's attention-getting stallion. She leapt for the saddle, turned the horse, and headed south at a run.

* * *

The first night, she was shocked, silent, grief-stricken. She held herself more like a queen than a priestess, an unreal breathing statue in a beautiful green dress. He watched her carefully, lest she do herself some injury, but she sat on the saddle-blanket with her ankles crossed and her hands on her knees. She spoke not a word.

The second night, she wept.

The third night, he had to fight their way past the ferry-keeper and his sons, and the knife-wound to his eye closed it, making him jumpy and vigilant.

The fourth night, he felt the first touch of fever.

He did not recall the fifth, six, or seventh nights, save for a light touch smoothing something over the rotting flesh of his face and her attempts to feed him enough to keep him alive.

The eighth night, the fever left him, and he found in the intervals between sleep that she had dragged him into an out-of-the-way stone cabin where they were safe.

The ninth night, he discovered that he had lost the sight in his wounded eye.

The tenth night, she showed him how she had saved him from death by gangrene, not that he was particularly in a position to feel gratitude. She held a little pot of some salve in her hand, and he sniffed it, wondering what was in it that his face had started to heal so quickly. He thought that perhaps she was a witch, and he resolved not to become entangled in her snares.

The eleventh night, he learned that she was not at all interested in taking him to her bed.

The twelfth night, she showed him that she had discovered a substantial sum in silver tetradrachma coins tucked into the horse's saddle. They bore the head of a helmeted goddess and changed everything.

The thirteenth night, they boarded a ship in new clothing, his face newly tended by a physician. The ship was called the Amazon Queen, and her barrel-chested black-bearded green-eyed captain, a Phoenician named Ba'altasaar, gave them his cabin and set forth without fuss toward her home in far western Africa.

The fourteenth night, she asked his name, and he told her, "Harrel."

The fifteenth night, she told him hers.

* * *

The invasion of southern Greece was fatally wounded by the loss of the king's unusual female dux bellorum, whose name has not survived to reach us in the modern era. The honor of the royal house and military discipline, if not tender feeling for the king's brother-in-law, demanded the head of the traitor, and clattering troops of armed horsem*n crisscrossed the island in what seems to have been an intricate, if curiously spiritless and ultimately unsuccessful, hunt.

When an ally with more guts than sense asked the king what had happened to lead to the death of his brother-in-law and the flight of his war-leader, his answer was remarkable enough to be recorded by a chronicler. "It was a fight over a woman," the king is said to have replied with a sigh. "It is always a fight over a woman."

This one comment provoked a fistfight at the 1986 Dresden conference of the Society of Military Historians of the Ancient World, with one camp maintaining that the brother-in-law had confronted not the king's war-leader, but in fact his sword-toting mistress, and another, smaller faction adamant that the remark was exactly what it sounded like: the commanders, one male and one female, battling for possession of their own Helen.

In any case, the war-leader escaped, both from the pursuers and from the recording hand of history, and the king's plan for the conquest of all of Greece, although he did proceed with it, was doomed. The Greeks pushed the invaders north through Thermopylae, trapping them in the pass in a reverse of the Persian-delaying strategy of the Spartans, and cut the king's army to ribbons. He himself was protected until the very end by the leader of his cavalry, but when that worthy horseman perished after numerous feats of bravery even the enemy noted with approval in their records, the Greeks swarmed the king. His head was taken as a trophy to Athens, a place that seems to have been so accustomed to continual warfare that the invasion that came so close to succeeding (and thus changing the course of history) went little remarked outside of the time in which it occurred.

* * *

October 2002

The time to see southern Europe is when no one else thinks to go. Off-season hotel rates are deeply discounted, and people who might not otherwise have been able to can afford decent rooms, scuba-diving excursions, island-hopping cruises, and smaller, intimate tours from guides who relax when they aren't shepherding gaggles of demanding mainlanders through the tumbledown ruins of a great civilization.

And scooters. It's possible to rent a scooter in the off-season for as little as seven Euros a day, and the adventure of seeing an ancient place on questionable and dangerous transportation is nearly irresistible, especially for women to whom adventure in Xena country is bread and meat.

So that was what Xe and Maggie were doing: zipping about northern Evia on a powder-blue Vespa. Maggie piloted and Xe played bitch, and Xe delighted in trying to make her laugh, which caused the usually unflappable Maggie to wobble the handlebars in an attempt to scare her. They had nearly wiped out four times already, and Xe had finally done what Maggie hoped she might: thrown her arms around Maggie's waist from behind and hung on. Xe turned her head and watched the sea passing, while Maggie imagined those dreamy mixed-hazel eyes gazing into sun-sparkled blue, thinking deep thoughts of history, generations, and the war-provoking breasts of Helen of Troy.

"I want a drink," Xe hollered into Maggie's ear. Maggie grinned and took the next turnoff, heading upwards along a cool, forested track.

"Where are we going?" Xe demanded over the noise of the scooter.

"I'm gonna find you a bar," Maggie tossed over her shoulder. "That has Boutaris."

"You do love me," Xe sighed as well as she could over the putt-putt-putt.

The road narrowed to little more than a goat track, and Maggie slowed the Vespa while she negotiated some spots where gnarled tree roots invaded the blacktop. The trees nearly met overhead, and a narrow beam of white sunlight bladed down through the open spots. It quit looking quite so much like a Greek island and began to remind Maggie of the Brothers Grimm.

She was studying the tops of the trees, wondering how much farther the road went, and was just about to turn around when Xe tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the left side of the road. Maggie followed Xe's hand with her eyes. A small wooden sign stuck into the ground at the base of one of the menacing trees said, in blocky Greek capitals, ARTEMISION, with an arrow.

"Oh, Christ," Maggie groused.

"Wrong religious tradition," Xe replied, and Maggie waggled the handlebars again, taking great delight in how close Xe came to tumbling off. It wouldn't have hurt her. Much.

They took the next left, and the Vespa bumped and rattled over a dirt road that was little more than the dual tracks of car tires. The trees thinned as they drove, going slowly. The road headed down into a little valley, and at the very bottom was a small, square ruin whose outline Maggie could barely make out through the undergrowth.

She stopped the Vespa, and in the sudden silence, Xe unstrapped her helmet and got off the back. She propped the helmet onto the seat and walked toward the scattered stone square.

Maggie stayed on the bike and pulled a bottle of cold water from their thermal bag. She took a swig and kept an eye on Xe. The ruin was barely visible, four lines of intersecting crumble-edged stone blocks with a stone floor. Weeds grew through the cracks in the stone and the far corner was the only spot where there were more than two stones sitting atop one another.

Xe turned in a slow circle, studying the ground. Then she lifted her head and turned again, looking around her. She shaded her eyes against the sun and turned north. There was an interested, speculative, hungry look on her face, and something about it raised the hair on Maggie's forearms.

"Hey," she called. "Girlfriend. What are you finding out there?"

Xe's lips parted, but she didn't answer. She stood for a moment as if posing for a statue of Vasco de Gama, then turned on her heel and scuffed her shoes along the floor of the ruin.

"Xe," Maggie called.

Xe knelt quickly and brushed her hand along the stone. Maggie got off the bike. Xe swept something from the floor and peered at it, then got to her feet as Maggie approached.

"What is it?" Maggie asked.

Xe held out her hand. Cradled in her palm was a small disc made of what looked like ebony. Carved into it was a tiny, realistic picture of a huge-eyed owl.

* * *

They had dinner at the hotel, then headed out to the place they'd been the night before. It was still early, and in the lovely red-orange sunlight, they climbed a little hill across the deserted road from the hotel and stopped before the door, where a blonde woman with a cigarette between her lips was changing placards in a heavy steel frame.

"Hey, Lena," Maggie said.

"Come back, have you?" Lena pulled the cigarette from her lips, gave Maggie a peck on the mouth, and embraced her with the hand holding the placard. "It's good to see you." She slid out the placard in the frame, which said GIFT SHOP TEA ROOM.

"Good to see you too," Maggie said, appreciating the view as Lena bent over.

"Where did you two end up today?" Lena asked, sliding in the replacement placard, which said BAR DANCE CLUB.

"Several millennia from here," Maggie said, casting a glance at Xe.

"Ah," Lena said, throwing an arm around Xe's shoulders and planting a kiss on her cheek. "Herstory." She stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and beckoned them toward the door.

Xe laughed, sounding a little shy, and it was buried under Maggie's guffaw. "Where the hell did you hear that expression?" Maggie grinned.

Lena shrugged and led them across the floor to the bar. "I have lots of American girlfriends."

"Yeah, but you're married," Maggie pointed out.

"That was before I knew you were coming." Lena's dark, soulful Greek eyes sparkled as bright as the Aegean, and she leaned on the bar on her elbows to give Maggie and Xe a good long look at the rack that could have launched a thousand ships. She turned to Xe. "You're kind of quiet tonight."

"She's sober," Maggie said.

"Shut up," Xe told her.

Lena's husband, Anatole, appeared in the back of the bar and waved at them. They waved back.

"She got weirded out about something today," Maggie said, jerking a thumb at Xe.

Lena looked an inquiry at Xe, who flushed and tried to explain. "Not... not weirded out, exactly. We just found something we didn't expect to find."

"An ancient Athenian dild*," Lena guessed.

That got a smile from Xe. "That wouldn't have been that unexpected," she said.

"Yeah, all those Athenians are perverts," Lena said, pitching her voice so Anatole could hear. He made a flapping gesture next to his ear and paid no further attention, and Lena and Maggie exchanged a smile. Lena drew a pitcher of the house retsina, then filled glasses for Maggie and Xe. She laced her fingers together and turned to Xe, speaking easily. "So. What?"

"We... we found the temple of Artemis," Xe said in a low voice.

"Really?" Lena said, sounding surprised. "Are you sure?"

"It's not that hard," Maggie said, intrigued. "There's a sign and all."

"Hey, Anatole," Lena called over her shoulder at him, "they found the temple."

"The temple is a myth," he answered.

"That thertainly thoundth reathonable," Maggie said, "theeing how it'th Artemith."

"I'm going back to Frankfurt alone," Xe told her.

"You mean it?" Maggie asked Lena. "It's supposed to be tough to find?"

"Yeah," Lena said. She turned her head and called to Anatole, "Told you. Gay girls can do anything." Anatole paid as much attention to this as he had to the remark about Athenians, and Lena turned to Maggie and Xe. "Some of the island people, they don't even think it exists."

Maggie spread her hands. "We can take 'em out there tomor--"

"Don't," Xe and Lena said instantly.

Maggie looked from one to the other, speculations running through her mind. "Okay... forget I brought it up."

"I found something out there," Xe said, digging in her pocket. She emerged with the little disc, and Lena held out a hand. Xe laid the tiny trinket into Lena's palm.

"Hm," Lena said, propping her elbow on the bar and leaning over to get a good look. Maggie took the opportunity to take a good look of her own.

"I think it's ebony," Xe said.

"No, olive wood," Lena said, flipping it over.

"It's black," Maggie pointed out. "Even through all the dirt."

"Olive wood darkens as it ages," Lena said, taking up another glass and pouring a finger of retsina in it. She took a drink, then dipped her finger in the retsina and began to rub away at the disc.

"Hey," Maggie said in protest, "the patina--"

Lena gave her a look designed to stop the protest before it got started. "You people have been ruined by Antiques Roadshow. Ruined. There you go."

She dropped the disc into Xe's hand, and Xe held it up to examine it closely. "What is it?"

"Temple token," Lena said.

"Artemis Bus Lines," Maggie said with a grin.

"Oh, this one doesn't belong to Artemis," Lena said. "That one, that's Athena's."

Xe raised startled eyes from the disc to Lena's face. "Athena's?"

Maggie tried to remember what she could of Edith Hamilton. "What's Athena's token doing in the temple of Artemis?"

Lena shrugged. "Those girls were close."

"It must be really old," Maggie said, bending over Xe's hand and flicking the little disc with her finger.

"I have to give this to the authorities..." Xe murmured, sounding regretful.

"What the hell for?" Lena asked.

"It's part of the cultural heritage of Greece," Xe said, managing to sound matter-of-fact instead of pompous. "It belongs in a museum."

"Bullsh*t," Lena said. She pronounced it boooooooul-sheet, and they had found out the night before that it was one of her favorite expressions. "Listen, Aida, you give this to some stuffy old professor and he'll stick it in a box and put it in the basem*nt. They have thousands of these things."

"I can't take it out of the country!" Xe protested.

"Aida," Lena said patiently, "this thing is maybe two thousand years old. And Artemis--or Athena, it's hard to keep those two straight, not that either of them was--has been saving it all this time, just for you. Don't spit in Her milk. She doesn't like that."

"We'll try that speech in front of the judge when we're arrested for smuggling," Maggie offered.

"God," Lena said painfully, "you two are so young." She held out her hand with the imperiousness of the Goddess Herself, and Xe dropped the little disc into it. Lena crossed the room to the gift shop, and Maggie and Xe ambled after her with their glasses of retsina. Lena slicked up the disc with a little olive oil, then set out one of the little cotton-filled boxes she used to pack jewelry. She picked up a statue of Apollo and peeled off a sticker on the bottom that said MADE IN CHINA. She applied the sticker carefully to the disc, then placed it with care into the little box and made out a receipt, which she laid on top. She closed and taped the box, then stuck it in a small, cunning white paper bag and handed it to Xe.

"There you go," Lena told her in a no-nonsense way. "Happy smuggling."

* * *

Everywhere they went, if they had even a portion of a day at a dock, Jessamyn would go ashore, find a priestess (of Artemis or Athena, if she could), and leave a message, along with a coin of an eye-opening value.

If a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed warrior woman passes this way, tell her I got here safely. And tell her where I have gone.

In Alexandria, though, they proved difficult to find, priestesses of the Greek gods: the followers of Ra and Amun were plentiful, many Yahwists and Mithraists, a few claimed of Zoroaster, and everywhere the Roman pantheon, as befitted the conquerors of the globe, but none of the devotees of her own religion, no one he could trust with her coin, let alone her message. The dizziness had crept over her through the weeks, and now she knew why: whichever corner of the planet she traveled, she was growing ever farther from home.

Harrell having respected her wish for privacy only insofar as nightfall found her safely aboard ship or he, sick though he was, would go a-hunting her, she prowled the streets with a thirst she could not slake and a gnawing in her brain. Twilight saw her desperate, roaming, until finally, out of options, she seized the arm of one of the young, threadbare, skinny scholars who haunted the outskirts of the famed library.

The stranger turned to her, a look of mild surprise beaming through nearsighted eyes. To her shock, the short-haired tunic-clad scholar was a woman. Her weak eyes went over Jessamyn, assessing as well as they could, and she said, "Was it me you wanted, milady?"

It was Greek. She spoke Greek, and Jessamyn's tongue turned to her favorite language in babbling relief. "I'm sorry, please forgive me, I--I just need--"

"No need to worry," interrupted the stranger, picking up her hand and tucking it firmly into her elbow. "You're not alone." The stranger led her into a shady alleyway, and Jessamyn hung back a little, until the stranger gestured toward a bench. Jessamyn sat, watching her warily.

"You're not alone," the scholar repeated, standing before her with her arms folded in a nonthreatening manner across her breasts. Her clothing was cheap, worn, and covered in inkblots. "You see? You've already found someone who speaks Greek. Not at all well, of course, but I hope that with much practicing on beautiful women, I--"

"You speak Greek," Jessamyn whispered, and the relief nearly knocked her over.

"Hi! milady," said the scholar, reaching for her elbow hastily, "perhaps we ought to take you to the healers--"

"There's no time," Jessamyn said, pulling herself back to alertness. "I'm due on a ship by nightfall." She looked the scholar dead in the eye. "I need to leave a message."

"Go ahead," the scholar said, settling herself into a stance Jessamyn recognized as practiced attention.

"If a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed warrior woman should come inquiring," Jessamyn said in a rush, "tell her that the priestess of the dual goddesses made it to Alexandria safely, and that I've gone home. To find it, sail far to the west along the African coast, well past Carthage and Camarata and Tingi, even, turning south along the coast, until you get to a port called Sapphi. That is where I will be waiting for her."

The scholar nodded. Jessamyn murmured, "Repeat it?"

The scholar unfolded her arms and spoke in a voice both powerful and schooled to artificial gentleness. "If a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed warrior woman should come inquiring, the priestess of the dual goddesses made it to Alexandria safely, and she's gone home. To find it, sail far to the west along the African coast, well past Carthage and Camarata and Tingi, even, turning south along the coast, until you get to a port called Sapphi. That is where she will be waiting for her."

Jessamyn blinked the dizziness from her brain. "That... that's very good."

The scholar shrugged and smiled, and seemed even younger. Jessamyn reached for her pouch and pulled forth one of the tetradrachmas. The scholar stared at it, baffled. Jessamyn held it up before her eyes, and they got wide. "Oh, no, milady, not for a simple thing like an errand that I might not even live to--"

Jessamyn's free hand shot out to catch the scholar's sleeve. "What good does it do me if you starve before she gets here?" she hissed.

The scholar's good nature warred with her need, and finally she admitted, "Your logic is impeccable, milady." Jessamyn handed her the coin and got to her feet, a bit lightheaded. The scholar caught her elbow again, unobtrusively, and murmured, "I'll see you back, milady. Which is your ship?"

"The Amazon Queen," Jessamyn said faintly. She felt a little as though she might throw up.

"Is there someone there who'll care for you?" asked the scholar.

"Yes," Jessamyn said. "I'm with a friend. A good one."

The scholar seemed satisfied with that, and steered her out of the alleyway. "Deep breaths. You concentrate on the breathin' and I'll concentrate on the walkin'."

They were at the docks in a remarkably short time, the trim little vessel lying quietly at anchor. It made Jessamyn dizzy all over again to see it, and she leaned on the scholar's arm even harder. They drew near, and she saw Harrel worriedly pacing the rail. He spotted her and descended the gang immediately, coming toward them.

While they were making their way down the street, getting no more than the occasional glance from the cosmopolitan inhabitants of the great city, Jessamyn spared a breath to whisper, "And who is it carries my message in Alexandria?"

"My name," said the scholar in a low voice, "is Makionus."

* * *

The day after a powerful storm cleared, a sailing vessel arrived at Sapphi, a port town south of Casablanca on the western coast of Africa. It carried a passenger with a familiar face and name, but if they found her much changed from the girl who had departed with her family long years before, she found the town more changed still.

In truth, she had not seen it since her girlhood, and had remembered it as a golden land of laughter, love, and friendship. Indeed, this was not a trick of childish memory; the town had a history of both prosperity and civilization, a busy port that took its share of the bounty the gods showered on its people and returned graciousness and hospitality in gratitude.

Her parents had been horse-traders here, one of the family businesses of a clan that had proven itself capable, intelligent, adaptable, and resourceful. Although the presence of the desert made horses less useful, and thus more rare, than the ubiquitously ill-tempered foul-smelling camels the salt-traders favored, the fact was that they did not lack for trade, being on the coast where horses could be provisioned easily, and made for a more comfortable journey than lalloping along perched atop a hump. They did well enough, in fact, that their services were in demand to maintain a network of mounted messengers who traveled the coasts from far south of Sapphi all the way to Greece, unimaginably far to the northeast. The girl, who had learned to ride as soon as she could walk, dreamed of the day when she too could traverse the roads at a gallop, bringing news of the fabled far-off land of Greece to the people of Sapphi.

It was just such a message that called her parents away from her birthplace. They were living in a large clan that included Jessamyn's mother and father, her aunt and uncle by marriage, and a couple of cousins to provide biddable muscle when her mother was working with one of the powerful dish-faced stallions she was famous for taming. The message came from Greece, the magical land of which Jessamyn had heard stories since her babyhood, and came from an aunt of her mother's, who ran a place called a "scriptorium", whatever one of those was. The message was that Greece was desperate for experienced horse-handlers, and that would give the family a chance to be together again.

After much talk, they decided to go, and took an emotional leave of the rest of the family at Sapphi, heading northward on fine mounts. The journey occupied many months. They ended up leaving her uncle, caught by a pestilential fever that carried him away in mere days, in a grave at Hadrumetum that took the rest of the family most of the day to dig. One of the cousins was mortally wounded saving the family's lives, and Jessamyn's girlhood, from armed bandits; he was buried with honors and grief in Oea, in Tripoli. The five who were left made it onto a ship that would carry their horses, and the calm nature of their mounts at sea attracted the attention of a war-leader who got to talking to Jessamyn's parents. When they landed in Greece, the war-leader hunted up a cavalry commander of his army, and their fortune was made.

Her other cousin, dazzled by armor and marching, went for a soldier. Jessamyn and her aunt accompanied her parents to a small Greek island called Euboea, where Jessamyn discovered that a "scriptorium" was the most magical place on that magical isle, a long, low building with many windows to let in light they used to copy letters onto papyrus and parchment. The marks on the parchment translated into thrilling stories, the most thrilling part of which was that they never changed: no matter how long you had been away, or what had happened in the meantime, the story was precisely the same as you remembered it. She felt instantly at home, so instantly that she never wondered at it.

Her parents followed the armies, working with their horses and growing rich, while Jessamyn stayed safe at the scriptorium, learning her letters and becoming quite adept. She had lived on Euboea longer than she had not when she took an afternoon to follow a subtle track she'd noticed while out on the spirited little mare her parents had presented her during one of their increasingly infrequent visits. The tree-lined track led down a gentle slope into a valley, and in the valley was a small building made of stone so white the sunlight dazzled from it. She tied her horse to a ring just outside, went in, met an old woman in a toga, and left when the sun was low in the sky, knowing she had found her fate.

Her birthplace had a less happy outcome. The loss of an important oasis in the desert, along the gold-and-salt trading route, pushed the incessant armed conflict over these valuable commodities to the west, and Sapphi became the battleground for rival tribes of brutal desert-haunting slave-owning merchants. The war decimated both the town and the precious wheat fields surrounding it; battleborne devastation preceded famine, which was followed by plague, and most of the families who had means fled, including Jessamyn's large clan. The place was taken over by brutes and scoundrels, and although the port was still relatively safe (since nothing could be permitted to threaten the only source of material wealth the town could muster), none dared to venture farther than the docks after nightfall.

It was to this once-proud, now ruined port, a faded spot with a fabled past and an uncertain future, that the Amazon Queen sailed, bringing a fallen priestess and her one-eyed protector to a future quite as unpromising as that of the town. She descended the gang like a queen, with a haughty look in her eye (as a cover for shock and the dawning realization that she had made a very big mistake, but none of the dock wastrels knew that). The rough-looking reprobate at her side had a vivid scar running through where one eye had been, and he walked like a man who had known battlefields. The little girl most of them did not remember, who played in pigtails, laughing with delight among great stamping horses, had become an arrogant, coldly beautiful, high-nosed woman who arrived rich, reserved, and visibly pregnant.

* * *

Harrel never did quite believe the preposterous story she told him about that. His time as adjutant to a king's man had brought him into contact with royalty in a way other men didn't have the advantage of, and he thought he knew why she would hazard such a feeble excuse. Women who were highborn and wealthy were expected to behave differently than, say, Harrel's mother, who shrugged philosophically about blow-bys, which were about as preventable as the weather anyways, and set to collecting nappies against their arrival. Royals were the ones who told fanciful stories about finding babies in baskets in the bullrushes, and even a child could see through them. It was one more reason to be grateful he'd been born a man.

She insisted that he accompany her to the midwife, and he protested in vain. It wasn't something a man did; she'd replied absently that it was something her man did. That she meant "man" in the sense of "servant" rather than "lover" struck him as unfair, but she paid him well and so he went.

They threaded their way through the market-day crowd haggling for vegetables and assassins, ending up at a nameless room in a long stone building just beyond the marketplace. The midwife, a sturdy-looking rainbow-draped woman with blue-black skin and powerful hands, looked him over severely. "Send your man outside," was the first thing she said.

"He's not 'my man'," Jessamyn replied, as sternly, "and he stays."

The midwife turned unreadable dark eyes on Jessamyn. Something passed between them, and the midwife shrugged, indicating a hammock stretched on a frame in the corner. Jessamyn took the two steps with the hauteur of an empress.

"Undress," said the midwife.

Jessamyn halted with her back to Harrel, but he could see her shoulders stiffen. She turned her head, not really looking at either of them. "Is that necessary?"

"That's why I wanted your man to stay outside." Jessamyn turned, and her clenched hands registered a helpless fury. The midwife continued, "When you look at me, do you see a rival?"

Another little silence unreeled, and Harrel's face grew hot. "I'm to trust you," Jessamyn replied finally, but the words seemed forced through bitterness and anger.

Harrel turned his back and stared at the wooden floor of the room. He could hear the soft sounds of clothing being removed, and he felt Jessamyn shiver in her nakedness, despite the heat.

"Lie down," said the midwife mildly. The livid woman before her stretched out carefully, as though the room were not quite clean enough for her taste. The midwife approached the bed and looked her over. She was remarkably beautiful, smooth skin over firm muscle, with a face that might have tempted a god to claim her for a lover. Her manner, reserved and controlled, nearly concealed the fear deep in her eyes. The only wild thing about her was her luxuriant hair, bursting from a series of combs and bindings to trail in erratic waves over her shoulders.

Her belly and breasts were swollen with life, tender-looking, as if the skin were stretched to thinness. Her milk would be starting soon, if it hadn't already. She must be feeling sensitive, particularly her breasts. And vulnerable. She looked like a girl, but the midwife could tell she was a great deal older than most first mothers.

"This is your first?" inquired the midwife, keeping her voice low to avoid frightening her patient. Jessamyn nodded, keeping her eyes on the midwife. She'd never met a woman so shy around another woman, and wondered at it. The midwife crossed the room, thinking, then pulled a batik hanging from a shelf and unfolded it carefully across her patient, who sighed and closed her eyes.

The midwife pulled a stool up to the hammock. "When did you conceive?" she asked.

"A hundred and seventy-three days ago."

The midwife's eyebrows shot up. "You're certain."

"Yes."

A quip about memorable nights never made it as far as the midwife's lips; she stopped herself with the image of the patient running naked through the streets, fleeing her levity. You couldn't joke with all of them; there was no womanly camaraderie with this one. Instead she said, "I'm going to touch you."

Jessamyn gritted her teeth and held her breath. The midwife's fingers crept slowly under the colorful covering over her belly and descended with a light touch onto her skin. The memories flooded her head, nearly drowning her, and she gasped in shock. The fingers stilled instantly. "Does it hurt?"

Her head wanted to scream Yes, yes, yes, but the last time she could remember doing such a thing was in Bladewalker's arms, and the grief threatened to suck her under its fatal waves. She would not weep in front of this woman, she would not. She whispered, "No."

The hands descended on her belly again, probing, examining. The touch was different from the lightning quickness of her lover's hands, the all-involving fire licking over their skin, and Jessamyn was able to relax a bit.

"Well," said the midwife after a time, "I hope you're prepared for a lot of work."

"I know how much work a child is," Jessamyn informed her.

"Aye, but this is twins."

"Twins?!" Jessamyn exclaimed. Harrel whirled, staring at her in astonishment. His mouth worked, and she had no idea what he would have said, as he made a slight gagging noise and turned his back again.

"Twins," confirmed the midwife. "I'm feeling two little heads. That lover of yours is a strengthy one."

"You've no idea," Jessamyn said, warming herself infinitesimally over a candle-flame's worth of humor. Her mind spun in dizziness for a second, then righted itself, placed firmly, and she knew she could do this. "Are... are they well?"

"They seem healthy, active... should be no reason why they don't continue to flourish. And you're healthy. Your women have rarely had trouble in labor, and I don't expect you will either."

"What?" She was still a bit lightheaded, and this made no sense to her.

The midwife smiled a smile of wisdom and age. "I don't expect you recall this, Jessamyn," she said, "but I birthed you." She smoothed the cover into place and trained the smile on Jessamyn, and it was a mother's comfort to her sore soul. "You weren't nearly so shy about bein' naked 'round me then." She got up from the stool and took a step away from the hammock, nodding toward Jessamyn's neatly-folded dress. "Come see me next week. We'll talk some more."

* * *

Outside, Jessamyn was clothed again and breathing more easily, and she marched at a pace Harrel found difficult to match. They went back through the crowd at the marketplace, and everything was going well until Jessamyn ducked into an alleyway. She put an arm up against the stonework, buried her face in the crook of her elbow, and began to choke with sobs.

Harrel had no warning and didn't know what to do. He glanced about him; there was no one here, although there might be any second, and he wasn't certain he wanted anyone to find them here. He put his hands up to her shoulders and began to pat at her clumsily. "Jessamyn," he said in a low voice.

"I can't," she whispered. "They ask too much of me, it's too much without her here..."

"Jessamyn," he hissed.

"I haven't anyone--"

"You have me," he told her.

She raised her head, and tears spangled in her long lashes. "Aye," she spat, "you don't even believe me! Some friend I have!"

"Jessamyn," he said, "I can't. And you can't expect me to. I'm a man. If Mithra Himself were to descend and assure me it was true, I wouldn't be able to believe it! Who would?"

"A Christian?" she offered, but he didn't get the joke.

He shook his head with impatience and leaned over her, hoping to shield her with his body. "I want you to listen to me. If... if you're mad, which I wouldn't doubt, you're the most sensible madwoman I ever saw. I've no trouble followin' you, even so. If it's somethin' like rape, I want you to know I don't hold the woman resp--"

"This was no rape," she assured him, a low, deadly note in her voice. "Never, ever think that. This was love. The kind most will never be fortunate enough to know." Her sight went somewhere out beyond him as she added, "And I hope it's enough for a lifetime. For the both of us."

Harrel shrugged in misery. "Then I'm out o' explanations that make sense to me. But I can offer you one thing."

She straightened, over her crying fit, and asked wearily, "And what is that?"

"I vow solemn to you," he said, "that I will never challenge the story you tell your children."

She studied his face with the eyes he'd long since fallen in love with. "You'd do that for me?"

"Try me," he said, his voice a lot more gruff than he had intended.

"I think," she said, wiping her face on her sleeve and rubbing her forehead, "that we'll both be tried, tried hard and long, and we'll see, both of us, just what we're made of."

"Pure gold," he said instantly. "I know you. I know you."

She smiled wistfully. "If I'm the best they've got, then they really are in trouble."

"Let me get you home," he said. "Rest. Your attitude'll change. You'll see."

* * *

The enormity of what she was facing grew on both of them as the days went on. Harrel, from being steadfast, loyal, and dumb, soon progressed to reasoning with her, and, when that didn't work, outright argument. "These people hate you, and the war could turn this way any time."

"I've given my word."

"Let's go back to Greece."

"And find me on horseback leagues from the nearest town when the pains come? No, thanks."

"We could take a ship--"

"Harrel, use some sense."

"Then when the babies can travel--"

"No."

"But, Jessamyn, I don't see why--"

"Because this is where I told her she could find me!"

He opened his mouth a couple of times, then shut it again. "You couldn't have tried Alexandria?"

She laughed, a tired sound that belonged to a much older woman. "Alexandria's not far enough away."

"Far enough for what?"

But she wouldn't answer. She went on using her lover's tetradrachmas, valuable in their own right but exotic so far from their minting, to put together a place for her children that was as safe as she could make it. She bought an airy house swept by the sea-winds about half an hour's walk out of town and spent money on a crew of workers, guided by a capable ship's carpenter, to furnish it in costly satinwood and ebony, hard in the working but impervious to sea-rot and insects alike. She was not to see the house for a few months, as she had decided to remain in town rather than sending Harrel to fetch the midwife when her time came, which would mean leaving her alone for an least an hour under the best of circ*mstances.

She bought two wharves and spent more refitting them to handle ships from the Mediterranean, then added a couple of warehouses nearby. Harrel watched in bafflement until she explained that silver can be stolen, but land and wharves are a lot harder to boost. He had to admit that her thinking was sound, right up until the moment that she bought the brothel. They had a blowup over that one, and her explanation--that she was going to give it to the madam in exchange for a say over who could and couldn't visit, and what they could demand, made little sense to him.

The other thing she did was to revive the courier network that had fallen into disuse after her parents' departure. Harrel thought this was another way to make money. She didn't tell him that being able to get back to her messenger network was now more critical than ever: scattered goddess-magic had dropped into her life, and there were things Bladewalker had to know.

* * *

Vusimuzi in Emporicus

Jabari in Banasa

Baako in Tingi

Sidra the Astronomer in Utica

Virgilio in Iol Caesarea

Philippa the Weaver in Hippo Regius

Tabari the Horse-Trader in Carthage

Agathon in Lepcis Magna

Cyrilla in Cyrene

Makionus the Scholar in Alexandria

Galinthius in Pelusium

The priestess of Artemis in Tyre

The Parthenia of Athena in Laodicea

The priestess of Artemis in Helicarnassus

The Parthenia of Athena in Naxos

The priestess of Artemis in Delos

The priestess of Artemis in Demetrias

One by one, the messages headed north, then east, borne by strong women and men on powerful horses.

The priestess of the dual goddesses, strengthened by their protection, has arrived safely at Sapphi. The first one made it as far as Demetrias, whose priestess, an old friend, excused the messenger to the nearest bed to rest, then went to her own room and wept with joy.

The goddesses in whose hands we lay cradled have chosen us to bear their newest magic into the world. That message was clear enough to the first carrier, who was able to see the evidence with her own eyes, but it caused many puzzled ruminations among the others, lying on the shore next to the sea with hands beneath their heads, studying the stars for clues to its meaning. It was passed along without comment or embellishment, as the sender intended, and made it to Laodicea.

The two have arrived and are thriving. One is like the priestess, and is named Serafina. One is like the warrior, and has been named Theadora, the gift of the goddesses. You will meet them one day. This message was interrupted by the robbery and murder of the courier just outside Lepcis Magna.

The two are strong again, as is the priestess of the dual goddesses. The cryptic communication, issued after a severe and terrifying bout of sickness, reached Naxos, where the new Parthenia, who inherited the task of storing the messages from her predecessor, wondered at it.

Of the two, one has my mother's eyes, and the other yours. Galinthius, who had no one with whom to discuss the messages, gathered what he could of the phenomenon of prophecy from the ramblings of an old woman who had spent many years at Delphi.

The flight of the priestess was on the advice of the dual goddesses. She remains yours, along with the two, of whom there can be no doubt. This message halted in Carthage, interrupted in its journey by the loss of the messenger to a fever then sweeping the Mediterranean.

Theadora is taken, and I need you. This message, which arrived three years into the existence of the network, struck Makionus with fear, although she was incapable of interpreting its meaning.

There was never an answer.

* * *

The whole process had sounded terrifying from outside the room, but the midwife assured Harrel that things had gone as well as they ever did, and her two infants were likely to live. When he was finally allowed in to see her, she was lying on the bed in which she had given birth to her daughters, one cradled in each arm. She looked exhausted, the type of exhaustion one might never recover from, but lit from inside with joy. He sat cautiously on the bench at the side of the bed, unsure what to say to her.

"Look," she whispered, folding back a corner of the blanket to show him one of the girls. "Her name is Serafina. My little angel." The tiny scrap of human waved her fists in the air in protest, mewing a cry. Jessamyn laughed softly and covered her again.

"Beautiful girl," he said past the lump in his throat. "She looks just like you." He shrugged. "Shorter, o' course..."

She lifted the blanket on the other side, and the joke died in his mouth. The other girl was far more alert than her sister, with skin as fair as Harrel's and hair that was nearly black. She gave him an unsettlingly direct look out of bright blue eyes.

"And this is Theadora," she said. He spoke enough Greek that she didn't have to explain it to him, and his eyes darted to her peaceful face. "Well?" she asked with a hint of her usual defiance. "Do you believe?"

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He got up from the bench and walked to the door, opening it and going through, then closing it after himself. He didn't think she would call him back, and he was right.

* * *

When he spotted the lone woman riding at her ease along the track, he could not at first believe his luck. It had seemed too easy, and as he and his fellow swept down upon her, he learned that he was right. She had her sword out and through his fellow in half a heartbeat, and he was on the ground with that sword aimed at his throat like Zeus's thunderbolt before he could draw another breath.

She grabbed him by the collar, and the sword-point looked a league wide beneath his terrified eyes. "I want you to listen to me," she hissed without preamble, an impenetrable anger blazing from her dark blue eyes. "Get up and go from this place and give up this life and make somethin' good of yourself." She gave him no chance to respond. "And every morning you go on your knees and thank Bellaster for what's left of your life." She shook him by the collar. "Agree or you spill your worthless blood out here."

"I p-promise," he whispered. The sword drew away from him, and he squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to send himself very far away in preparation for the stroke.

When he opened them, some time later, she was gone, along with one of the horses. His fellow's body lay on the ground, crumpled and lifeless. He scrambled into the saddle and swept away from the place.

It sometimes struck him as surprising, years later, to reflect that he'd kept his word, but he had a prosperous farm, a good wife, and five healthy children to show for it. It occurred to his wife one day to ask who this Bellaster was that he prayed to each morning, and he had to tell her that he honestly didn't know.

* * *

It's impossible to say which twin a mother loves best. Jessamyn considered it a trick question, something unworthy of the rigor of a Greek-trained mind. Because they were two different people, she loved them differently, but there was no way to put her love, separate and intertwined, onto a scale and say a hair more for this one, a shade more for that. All she could say to people who dared to ask was, "You'll never understand."

She loved Serafina for a charming baby giggle, a habit of reaching for her with both arms from the time she was very young, and the way her long eyelashes would lie along her cheeks when she slept. Serafina, who quickly became "Fee", was a child of light, a bubbly, precocious girl whose charm drew every other child and every adult in the vicinity to her. She was like a tiny version of Jessamyn, but with none of her mother's reserve, and the people about her enjoyed her beauty and her vivacity without compromise. Fee trusted, and those about her did nothing to betray her trust; not for the longest time was her charmed life shadowed in any way.

Theadora she loved for her lover's eyes. They never changed color, staying a bright blue that attracted attention from across the room, and whatever was going on around her, most of the time Theadora had those eyes trained on her mother. She seemed far more alert and observant than a baby should be, and although she tended toward solitude, sitting in the corner watching life pass, she could be counted upon to come to the rescue of her mother or sister if either suffered an injury. As the girls grew and learned to walk, Fee would stumble or bump her leg, and would sit to cry; Theadora would come to her immediately, enfold Fee in her arms, and hold her until she was comforted. Her sister was the only one who could be counted on to still Fee's wailing, and it struck many of Jessamyn's acquaintances that she was a strange little thing. Many of the people of Sapphi treated Theadora, despite her pretty name and beautiful mother and sister, like a changeling, and where none hesitated to pick Fee up or give her a horsey ride through the great room of the lovely windswept house perched over the sea, only the strongest and bravest dared to approach Theadora.

One of them, oddly enough, was Harrel. He had come to whatever accommodation he needed to remain part of Jessamyn's household, and he and Theadora came early to a wordless understanding based on protecting the two women in their lives. Harrel could cradle Theadora in his arms for hours at a time, talking to her mother, and as long as Theadora could see both Jessamyn and Fee, and get down when one of them was to be tended to, she had no problem being with him.

If Theadora did not sleep half as much as Fee, neither did she fuss or get tired, so her mother grew accustomed to sitting with her at night, going over her accounts by lamplight and looking up across the table from time to time to see Bladewalker's eyes studying her in grave fascination. "Aye," she would laugh, reaching for her daughter's dimpled, pale-skinned hand and squeezing it softly with affection, "I see thee looking out of her face. Tell her I'm well and happy, raising our daughters, but I'll be happier when she finds us."

Harrel's closeness to Jessamyn, and her continued firm conviction that Bladewalker would come for her, became a source of gnawing frustration. Countless times he thought to leave Sapphi, where the people treated him as a foreigner, and one owned by the town's richest woman, at that. But a life at the side of the woman you love, even if she doesn't love you back, is a lot to give up, and he swallowed his resentment and bitterness and went on doing what he could for her, proving his love in practical ways that she returned in kind, except without the love.

He thought her conviction that Bladewalker would come for them insane, but if it was, it was the only insane thing about her. Eventually, pushed so far he could no longer abide it, he began a flirtation with the daughter of a tavern-keeper, a girl named Johanna. She was ferociously ugly, but she babysat Fee and Theadora from time to time, which made her convenient, and where Jessamyn ignored the fact that he was a man, he could see Johanna flutter with nerves when he walked in. Her father discovered the affair and thundered that Harrel would marry her; Jessamyn tried to talk him out of it, but was unsuccessful, and in the end Harrel agreed to it. He spent his wedding looking not at his bride, but at Jessamyn, playing in the corner with the girls, tapping her feet to the music and firmly refusing all offers to dance.

That night, he poured a lifetime's worth of love for another woman out into his wife, and for the longest time, Johanna believed his passion was for her. But marriage has a way of opening a girl's eyes, and soon Johanna came to notice that when Jessamyn was about, Harrel barely paid attention to her at all, and none that was positive. While she didn't blame him for his enthusiasm--Jessamyn was everything she was not, except his bed-partner--she soured on him quickly, then turned her antipathy to Jessamyn. The girls didn't understand why Johanna would no longer play with them; it was only the first of a series of estrangements.

But they had each other, and being with Fee and Theadora (who never did acquire an affectionate nickname) brought Jessamyn a deep contentment she thought would sustain her until Bladewalker was able to follow the yarn-trail back to her famiy.

* * *

Despite the Roman attempt at municide a couple of centuries before, Carthage had survived. It wasn't the city it had been, a global center of commerce, the area's most influential port, a giant in the affairs of the Mediterranean, and a seat of sophisticated living, but it was still there, still defiant, still thriving, a gigantic "f*ck You" to the imperialists and their feeble, self-deluding notions of their own omnipotence. Carthage welcomed all comers, tolerant of differing religions and ways of life, with one exception: Roman ships were not allowed in the port, Roman ways were frowned on, and Roman visitors had to disguise themselves as, say, Greeks to be able to conduct business there. Even then, their short haircuts and military bearing usually gave them away, and the Carthaginians treated them with scorn. Roman jokes were common in the marketplaces and salons, and they generally tended toward the barnyard variety, with a strong undercurrent of impotence and stupidity thrown in for spice. A Roman, it was said, would f*ck anything for preferment in the government, even another Roman; the wild stories of the Caesars and their romances gave the Carthaginians the only encouragement they needed to defy the savagery they had undergone with a more genteel verbal version of their own.

As long as you weren't Roman, then, you stood a good chance of being treated cordially, and when the ship from far-off India landed at the port, no one thought anything of it.

Until the passengers descended. They were three armed women, tall and dressed in colorful silk robes. Their hair was dark, their features stamped with the delicate porcelain impenetrability of the distant East, but with one difference: their eyes were the blue of sapphires. No one knew it, and they were not about to let the Carthaginians in on the secret, but they were there on a mission from their father.

He had dropped back into their lives after an absence measured in decades, a dark-haired Western-looking stranger cantering easily on a massive stallion, black as night, whose blood told in its fine, quivering muscles and prominent veins. His smile was as casual as the way he controlled the horse, and for the three sisters, vividly recalling his last visit when they were children, it was as if he'd been gone a night and a day.

He found their fortunes changed from the poor village girls they had been: they now ruled a vast area of the rich agricultural plains from an impressive stone fortress, and even the Mongols detoured around their lands. He approved; he flattered; he even remembered their names.

"Marcia. Angelica. Marta." To each in turn he gave a gift: his dazzling smile, a wink, a look that combined admiration and lust. Naturally, they invited him in, and when he'd spent a night under their roof, he told them what it was he wanted. He had sired three strengthy daughters, and in return, they were to help him regain the position of power he had lost with the burning of Olympus, generations before their time.

They had had a long voyage on a small ship, and they were thoroughly sick and tired of one another's company by the time of the landing at Carthage.

Find the priestess. She has something I need.

They cast about for a time, until by happy inspiration Angelica suggested that they visit the horse-fair. As all of them enjoyed a fine display of horseflesh, they agreed.

I only need one. You'll know which one.

They wandered the fair, tall dark-haired blue-eyed warrior women casting a critical eye on the livestock, and Tabari the Horse-Trader, walking with his sons, drew up short at the sight of them.

If the priestess gives you any trouble, kill her.

Tabari counted out coins from his purse and gave them to his sons, sending them to get sweet melon slices and give him time alone until the sun hit quarter-mast. They went away happily, leaving him staring in fascination at the three identical, exotic strangers. He murmured to himself, "She did not tell me there would be three of them." Then, animated by a sense of his involvement in an enchantment greater than any in his life, he went to give them the messages he had accumulated.

* * *

They swept in from the north, guided by an indifferent drunkard at the docks who revealed her location for a gleaming gold coin with a delicate rose embossed on it. They were on matched mares, each gleaming dark like obsidian carvery. They caught her and her daughters on a promontory some distance from the house, enjoying a lovely, temperate day by the restless deep blue sea. Jessamyn raised herself on tiptoe when she saw the distant cloud, shading her eyes from the sun, and her heart commenced its own answering gallop. Long before they arrived, she knew it was not what she had hoped for these long months, and she turned, snatched up her daughters, and ran for safety.

But there is no way a woman afoot, burdened with two children in her arms, can outrun three sleek steeds, and so she stopped and turned, panting, and set the girls behind her as well as she was able. Theadora faced the oncoming threat, her eyes straining toward a flash of hoof, a swirl of cloth.

Jessamyn drew her knife, crouched, and bared her teeth.

Serafina had begun to cry, and Theadora moved with thunderbolt quickness to shield her sister from danger. The horsewomen approached, circling them with deadly, quick moves. Each was wearing a silken robe and had a length of bright metal in her hand. They were porcelain-skinned and almond-eyed, and black hair eddied about their faces, and their eyes were the piercing blue of Theadora's.

Jessamyn lunged, and they laughed, their horses dancing out of the way without effort. The woman in crimson bent low in the saddle and reached for Theadora. The fear exploded in Jessamyn's soul. Her stroke connected with the arm of the horsewoman, who hissed and hauled at the reins.

"Give her to us," called the horsewoman in yellow, in heavily-accented Greek, "and we let the other live."

"Stay away from my daughters!" Jessamyn cried. She wasn't even aware of the strike, but the speaker darted away, a blossoming of blood staining the silk robe over her knee.

The third attacker, her robe a rich indigo, threaded her horse past Jessamyn's wildly waving knife-hand and swooped low, pulling Theadora into her saddle by one arm. Serafina wailed, and Jessamyn scooped her up in her free arm and ran for the horse. Theadora was struggling in the woman's grip, and it gave Jessamyn a flash of satisfaction when Theadora sank her teeth into the woman's arm.

"Give her to me!" Jessamyn screamed through a dry, aching throat.

The woman in crimson wheeled her horse, blocking Jessamyn from reaching Theadora. "Her grandsire has need of her!" she called. Jessamyn gritted her teeth and sent her knife across the flank of the horse. It shrieked and lashed out at her with its hooves. She swung Serafina out of the way and slashed again.

"Kill that c*nt," snarled the woman in yellow, and she and the woman holding Theadora turned their horses and galloped northward. The woman in the crimson robe circled Jessamyn, who was doing what she could to keep Serafina away from the edge of the blade. In the end, the horsewoman darted the blade toward her with a quick snap of her wrist, and fire pierced Jessamyn's shoulder. She barely noticed the knife dropping from her numb hand, and with her remaining strength, she set Serafina down carefully on the ground. Serafina screamed her sister's name, but the horses were already disappearing into a haze of dust.

Jessamyn sank to her knees, watching Bladewalker's child vanish, and the last thing she heard was Serafina's heartbroken wailing.

* * *

To lose a child to fever or drowning is one thing, the elders of Sapphi agreed, but to lose a child to nameless, faceless bandits is quite another. During her mother's long convalescence, they gathered to tend her wound, feed her daughter, and keep her house. If they drew any conclusions from Jessamyn's half-conscious muttering, or harbored any resentment that they, followers of the ancient gods, were called upon to care for the children of another deity, they said nothing of it. Instead, they consigned her to Yzabel-Amiri, the Mermaid, who had long lived in the waters beside their town and granted her gift of healing.

There were things the Mermaid could not mend. Serafina cried herself into exhaustion and illness, and for a time her situation was even more grave than that of her mother. When she recovered, she tottered about the house on soft baby legs, searching, searching. At first, she wept and stormed when she didn't find what they knew she would spend her life looking for, but after a while she seemed to slide into a stunned sort of acceptance.

Jessamyn's wound led, pretty directly, to a virulent brain fever, and there were long nights of raving and shrieks from the beautiful house, lit by one small lamp in the bedroom. On those nights, one of them would take Serafina away, bundling her against the seaborne night chill, to sleep beside her own grandchildren. Serafina would whimper herself to sleep, the other children forming a barrier to harm, forbidden even to say that Serafina had a sister. They became fond of her, and slowly she returned to life.

Whatever she might have wished, so did Jessamyn, and the time came when she was able to return to town, looking to gather what information she could to send through the messenger network. The townspeople had resolved on a campaign of silence, fearful of more damage to Jessamyn's now-delicate mind, but that ended when she walked unerringly to a shambling figure in the square, looked the drunkard directly in the eye, and spoke the first complete sentence they had heard from her in weeks.

"You led them to my daughters," she said, her voice shaking with venom.

They found him hanging from a beam in the barn the next day, and it was then that the whispers began.

* * *

The nights were the cruelest, because she had time to think.

She lay on her bed, hands behind her head, staring alternately at the ceiling or at the child sleeping a worn-out sleep beside her. Serafina was so tired that Jessamyn dared not reach out with a soft hand to brush away the hair tumbling into her tear-swollen eyes. The lightest touch might awaken her, and Serafina needed rest. Besides, it hurt so much to touch her that it made Jessamyn breathless.

The copious tears Serafina shed called no response from her mother. The water was burned out of her eyes, and without that film of tears, she was able to see clearly.

You... you can't, Jessamyn. You can't do that to her.

I've lost one. I won't lose another.

He had moved into her house, completely disregarding his wife, and spent his nights with a dark lamp in the next room, bristling with armament and spoiling for slaughter. She could have told him the threat would not return with a sword, but she was so tired and they spent most of their time arguing any more anyway. Harrel found so much of what she did inexplicable. But he didn't understand. He couldn't. He was a man. And a soldier. He had cared for her as well as he could, but there were roads he could not walk.

The loneliness was something she could feel, like a corpse in the bed beside her, and she knew she would shoulder that burden and walk under it for the rest of her life. Loneliness and despair and a sense of miserable inadequacy.

I've failed you, Blade. The goddesses gave us a gift, a miracle, and I've lost her.

Why was Bladewalker not here? How could they have entrusted one weak woman with this kind of destiny? Did they not know how feeble she was, how little she could be counted on? And yet she'd never questioned it. If her faith had been a little less strong, she might have wondered if the warrior (whom she'd met, after all, only twice) was largely a chimera constructed within her imagination. But the proof of it, the love they'd felt, that shook not only them but a world that had yet to realize it, had grown in her body, parted from her flesh, nursed at her breast. It was solid and real and had slept beside her in this bed and could not be denied.

She would turn and study Serafina, sleeping uneasily, as if the girl knew what her mother was planning. I agree with Harrel. It's cruel. It's so cruel, little one. You'll grow denying the most important person in your life. The other half of you.

But if she could not have kept safe the child whose name she could no longer bear to utter, she was determined not to put this one in harm's way. Even if it meant remaking her into something she was never meant to be. Jessamyn slid a cautious arm around her daughter's shoulder, trying not to jostle her awake.

Serafina had every right to know where she came from, and who had been torn from her side. And Jessamyn would never be able to tell her. Because Serafina could not let slip, in a moment that didn't look particularly threatening, something she didn't know.

And when she asked, as she would one day, as the sun rises and the tide creeps toward the shore? Sister? Jessamyn tried it out once or twice. What a pretty fancy, little one! Have you been lonely, all by yourself out here? Look here, what you're thinking, it's just this. It's called a mirror. You used to reach for it when you were little, fascinated by your reflection. That must be what you're remembering.

Jessamyn closed her eyes and prayed for the strength to look into the face of the only daughter she had left, and lie.

* * *

Although she left the island of Euboea handily enough, drawing the soldiers away from pursuing Jessamyn, it took Bladewalker months just to get out of Greece. She was always one step ahead of the king's troops, searching for her. Some nights she would be close enough, even in the sparse scrub and low hills, to hear what they said to one another around their campfires. In and among the longings for wine, women, and home, they would toss her a morsel.

"You ask me, she did him a favor, riddin' him o' that worthless maggot."

"Why d'you think he's lookin' for her? He owes her a f*ckin' laurel wreath."

A round of guffaws. If they'd been her men, she'd have notched their ears for making so much noise while tracking a fugitive.

"Hey, Barnabus, you was there. What of that woman?"

"What woman?"

"The priestess. That pretty little piece. The one that ran."

"What woman?"

They pressed him, and he refused to yield: there was no woman save Bladewalker there (if one could consider that a woman). One of the soldiers said genially, "Barnabus here's after a soft post protectin' a lady of court."

"Aye," said another, "keep her secrets and you'll get it, too. Might even be one of 'em."

They seemed competent enough, but no matter how close she got to them, they never got close to her. It occurred to Bladewalker that perhaps they had orders to chase her all over the peninsula, but not to catch her: one last bit of consideration from the king.

That the invasion would collapse she had no doubt, although she could not have said why. When the rout was complete, the king dead, and disorganized survivors scattered over the whole of the area, she booked passage on a ship leaving for the north and paid for it with Teofil's money. Before the ship sailed, she sat in a dockside bar and eavesdropped on the conversation of two men, a bitter, drunken soldier with a heavy bandage wrapped round his arm and another with a handmade crutch propped next to him against the table. From his comments, the man with the bandage had been part of the final desperate defense of his king, and one thing he said struck her. "The last thing I heard him say was, 'Just like the warrior she was, she decimated my army without liftin' a blade.'"

That night, she lay on the deck of the ship, staring up into the hard glitter of the stars and thinking. North. She and the soldier went north. The easy ford at Chalcis is south and was being watched, so they would have crossed at Hisiaea. Where from there? Demetrius? Larissa? Delphi? Larissa was landlocked, and Delphi would have taken them farther south, into the teeth of the fighting; she couldn't see a soldier recommending that to Jessamyn. Demetrius was a good choice: it was a port, and they could have caught a ship. But to where? Thessalonica? Amphipolis? Lesbos? She could be anywhere. Bladewalker could be searching for months. Years.

How long would it take to find her?

It doesn't matter. I'll never stop.

So the place to begin, then, was with the dockworkers at Demetrius.

* * *

A woman. An African woman. About this tall. Beautiful.

The clueless looks, the headshakes nearly drove her mad.

She might have been traveling with a man. They had a horse--a mare, a warhorse.

Shrugs. Incomprehension. A few claimed not to understand her.

She's beautiful.

One man, perhaps knowing, perhaps not, offered her his dark-haired, dark-eyed daughter; sickened, she turned the horse and made her way to the next dock. She tried every taverna, every hostel, every shipfitter's. Nothing. No African woman, traveling with or without a man, had appeared here in Demetrius about midsummer or afterwards. Or if she had, she'd remained well hidden. A soldier was looking for her; they might have been told, or might have guessed, that it was a bad idea to let a soldier know where she was.

I'll come after you.

You'll find me waiting, agapimo.

But where?

* * *

Two fruitless days in Demetrius led to some sharp questions from the constabulary, still wary after the recent threat to the sovereignty of Greece. Bladewalker's black leather armor, trained war-stallion, and quality weaponry did little to allay their suspicions, and the third day found her getting less from the locals than the little she'd gotten the first two. She rode a little way out of town, picketed the horse by a stream that tumbled from the steep hills, and removed from Teofil's saddlebag her great treasure: a hand-drawn map of the peninsula.

She could have drawn it herself, had she paper, ink, and skill. A spill of volcanic rock moving southwestward into the Aegean, a jumble of mountain, river, scrub, tree, anything from flat featureless plains to steep cliffs enlivened by caves. A scent of ancient magic grown stale seemed to hang over the whole place, a poisonous miasma of power and loss, and Bladewalker's eyes went back again and again to one spot on the map.

Olympus.

She mounted the horse again and set its course toward the northeast. She would see what Jessamyn's gods could tell her.

She was never to know what happened after she left Demetrius. An acolyte of Artemis returned to the temple from the dockside spice-seller's with myrrh, cinnamon, and licorice (which they used in the preparation of a healing salve of local renown) and brought with her a bit of gossip: a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed warrior of surpassing handsomeness--a woman, no less--had spent the past two days inquiring after a lost friend.

The priestess sent her out again immediately, with all the other acolytes, but by the time they fanned out along the docks, seeking news of her, the warrior had vanished into the air.

* * *

It had taken Bladewalker many weeks to reach Olympus, and only fortunate accident provided her with a guide immune to the consequences of blasphemy. The trip up the mist-circled mountain, rich with dark green conifers and capped with snow, was a three-day ordeal. Every step seemed to drive more warmth from her lungs. They passed ancient temples, shuttered and shrouded in abandonment. The higher they got, the more difficult it was to breathe, and she stumbled over the scree, catching herself with hands that bled from the gashes cut by the rocks. The narrow threads of blood dried quickly in the chill. The guide asked if she wanted to turn back, and she got enough air into her lungs to rasp, "No. We go on."

On the third day, under a winter sun and in the thin, bitter air, they could see it: beyond a long, sloped meadow, covered in frozen bright-green turf and light drifts of blue-white snow, was a huge gray stone outcropping at the summit of Olympus. Beneath a sky so blue it might have been a bowl of lapis, the broad plain of forbidding rock in the center was flanked by two taller outcrops, one on each side. It looked like what it was called: the Throne of Zeus.

"We make camp here," said the guide.

"No," she whispered, not taking her eyes from the giant's throne. "We go on."

He made a few objections, the higher they got, but she pulled coins from her belt and shoved them wordlessly into his hands. The sun rose as high as it was going to, and they pulled themselves by main force over the rocks and, finally, into the throne itself.

It was sheer rock as far as she could see: no grass, no trees, no sign of habitation, past, present or future. Desolate. Silent. There wasn't enough air to raise a breeze, even, and her ears drummed with the stillness.

She gathered some of the sparse air. "Where is she?"

There was no answer, and she clenched her bruised, shaking hands and turned in a circle. The rock mocked her.

"Tell me where she is!" Bladewalker screamed, her voice thin and high at this unaccustomed altitude.

A hand descended on her shoulder, and she whirled, hand finding her weapon without thought. The guide was looking into her face, and painted on his features was an unmistakable look of pity. "These gods," he said to her in a gentle voice, "are dead."

She unwrapped her hand from the hilt of her sword.

"Been dead this century and more," he murmured. His voice was hard to hear in the cold, empty air. "There's nothing left of them."

She frowned, her eyes darting this way and that around the barren throne of the dead god.

"Been dead since the birth of the child who brought them to ruin," he went on. He pulled his hand from her shoulder and shrugged. "Or so they say."

Bladewalker looked around. Her eyes stung and her lungs ached and her mind was as bare as the mountaintop. "Tell me," she gasped. "Tell me!"

But nothing answered: not the cold air, not the azure sky, not the pitiless rock.

And certainly not the gods.

* * *

From Demetrius, she took her search in directions bounded by the sun and stars: northeast from Olympus to the coast, some two and a half leagues distant, thence northeast to Thessalonica, Amphipolis, and Phillippi, turning south again on board a trader for Thasos and the Hellespont. She caught a small fishing boat at Lemnos for Lesbos, putting in at Mytilene. Something about the spirit of the place called to her, something in the fresh sea breeze and clear air, but in the end, it proved as empty and hopeless as the subsequent voyages to Chios, Samos, Ikaria, Naxos. Cnidus and Rhodes yielded no information, and neither did the massive island of Crete at the far southern tip of Greece.

She could not have said why she was so certain that Jessamyn had fled by ship, but she was convinced of it, and it kept her from despair when she lay alone in an alien bunk, tossed by the uncaring sea, gritting her teeth against the loneliness and vowing never to weep until Jessamyn was there to dry her tears.

Frantic, desperate weeks became lonely months when she plodded from place to place, forgetting, in her exhaustion, her one mission until she met another person in her journey and rasped or whispered or shouted or pleaded the only question under heaven that she wanted answered. She could have repeated the question had her throat been choked of breath and her heart dry of blood. Most everyone told her no; those who spied her fine leathers and blooded horse and answered yes found themselves, as often as not, at the point of a sword, the greed and lies chased from their soul.

The tales began of a ghost driven by an unholy love, seeking a woman. A woman. It was always a woman. And she was always a beautiful woman. Many women along the way, some of them quite beautiful indeed, sought to replace the chimera in the lonely, handsome warrior's quest; they were turned away, sometimes politely and sometimes brutally, but always in such a way that they realized there was no use in making a second offer.

"Last midsummer" became "five summers past", then "ten summers gone". Bladewalker learned to get along on little sleep and next to no food, rarely spending a night indoors unless the weather was too foul for the stallion's health. The horse served her well for years until he grew too old to traverse desert and mountain, and she left him in the care of a trader, taking on a sturdy gray dish-faced mare whose stamina made up for her lack of fighting skill.

She drifted south, acting occasionally as a guard for some of the spice traders heading to and fro for the east, depositing her charges unharmed at the next station in return for a handsome fee. And to every trader, whether he or she had come from the north, south, east, or west, she put her question. And kept hearing the insincere "yes" (which she took pains to correct) and the honest "no".

When she decided they had nothing more to tell her and began to move north again, Bladewalker had little need of her sword any longer, and thought many times of burying it, along with her armor, deep in the anonymous woods of the nameless places through which she passed. It seemed, though, as if every time she began to dig a hole wide enough for her breastplate and harness, some hopeless cry would reach her ears, and she would shrug back into it to go off and see what use someone who was once a warrior could be. She prevented many a rape, robbery, and murder that way, but no matter how grateful the intended victim or dead the intended perpetrator, she left them all with a suggestion that they thank Bellaster for their deliverance and went her way alone.

She subsisted on the takings from the robbers she met, but she usually ended up giving most of it, in lieu of her body or her soul, to some pretty young thing with a pathetic tale of orphanhood, farm foreclosures, burnt fields, or brothers lost in war. All the while, the image of Jessamyn's face, enraptured in the holy communion Bladewalker could still taste, burned brighter and brighter before her closed eyelids. No other woman had a chance past that vision, no chance at all. Beside that image, which she knew she would summon as her last on her deathbed, the real world grew as insubstantial as smoke.

Until the day she found herself paying attention to something. She was at the trough in the town square watering the mare when she heard the voice of a man next to her, talking to the Arab trader next to him, a woman whose eyes burned with a quiet, dark fire in her strong-featured face. They were evidently old friends who ran into one another from time to time on the trade routes. He was telling her about Greece, and he was telling her it was at war again, and a name she never expected to hear came from his lips.

"Aye," he said, "Euboea's pretty well burnt. The Romans have found the Greeks a pestilential lot, what with their better art and their better philosophy and their better dramas, and they're after wipin' the place from the surface of the earth, like they did at Carthage."

Bladewalker lifted her head.

"There's a place to the north of the island," he went on, "a place called Cape Artemisium. They've reduced it to a ruin."

Jessamyn's scrolls, thought Bladewalker.

"They've even torn down the temple of Artemis," said the man, shaking his head in sorrow.

"You've had a long ride, friend, and probably a powerful thirst," Bladewalker said, borrowing the courteous form of address of the Arabs. "I'd hear your story. Would you and your friend care for some wine?"

* * *

They took their horses to the best stable at the town, and Bladewalker paid for their care. All three of them remained until they were confident that the horses would be well tended, then they adjourned to the hostel for supper and some wine. She told them her name was Polymistos, and the man spoke enough Greek to whisper to his friend, "Warrior."

The hostel-keeper made excellent bread, and Bladewalker paid for supper as well. The wine was even better. The man, who had introduced himself as Ioannes, nodded in approval at his first sip.

The woman, Rahi'dah, trained her magnificent dark eyes on Bladewalker. "To what do we owe your courtesy, Warrior?"

"To Bellaster," Bladewalker answered, raising her cup in a Greek gesture. Rahi'dah did the same, and Ioannes followed suit, both of them repeating dutifully, "To Bellaster."

Ioannes marked his second mouthful of wine with an appreciative grunt. "Your coin is good, Polymistos, and your taste in wine equally adept. So what would you like to know of your homeland?"

"My homeland?" she inquired, raising an eyebrow in his direction.

In return, he sat back and gave her a broad smile, gesturing toward her outfit. "You bear a Greek name and are asking about how Euboea fares in the war; what can you be but Greek?"

His delicacy would have touched her if she'd had anything left to touch. "Perceptive of you," she said.

"Let us speak of your homeland, then," said Rahi'dah. "Ioannes was there just two moons ago."

"Aye," he said, his face becoming doleful, "and it's bad enough there that I'll have to transfer my trade elsewhere for a year or two."

Bladewalker's mouth set in a grim line. Rahi'dah, affecting not to notice, turned to Ioannes. "Then can I convince you finally, my friend, to join us in our journey across the desert?"

He shuddered. "Camels make me seasick," he said, and she grinned broadly, a flash of strong teeth in the dark face. "Besides," he added, turning to her, "you've so many wives that a man would just get in the way."

Bladewalker, in the act of conveying her cup to her mouth, coughed and spilled some of the wine on the table. The two turned to her, Ioannes surprised and Rahi'dah with a knowing look in her beautiful desert eyes, and Bladewalker cleared her throat unobtrusively. "Wives?" Bladewalker inquired.

"Yes," Ioannes said, throwing an arm about Rahi'dah's shoulders, "the most of anyone in her tribe, as befits their leader. How many are you up to now? Thirty? Forty?"

She laughed a low, seductive sound, and when she answered, she spoke directly to Bladewalker. "Only five. Two of them were my brother's. When he died, I inherited his trade and his family."

"They let you inherit?" Bladewalker said, taking another sip and beginning to become interested.

"They would not," Rahi'dah said, "if I had had another brother."

"You should have seen the alternatives," Ioannes said, fluttering his hands in the air as if banishing horror. "None of the other traders on that route have Rahi's looks. Or her brains. Or her kindness to women."

Rahi'dah nodded in his direction with the dignity of an emperor. "You're courteous to me, my friend."

"I've seen how happy your wives look," he pointed out. He jabbed a thumb at Rahi'dah and remarked, "Polymistos, you are looking at the tribal leader of one of the most prosperous spice-trading families in the world."

"My felicitations," Bladewalker said, raising her cup. Rahi'dah inclined her head with grace. "Doesn't that mean a lot of fighting to defend your position?"

"All the time," she said quietly. "Like you, I am never unarmed."

"Until some pretty third daughter from another caravan approaches Rahi at the oasis with a fresh skin of water," Ioannes said, a teasing note in his voice. "And then her wives get together to beat the interloper without mercy."

"Ioannes!" she protested, but she was laughing.

Bladewalker had forgotten the simple pleasure of sitting in a tavern with friends, and these two accepted her without reserve, sharing everything they knew with no trace of hesitation. She pumped Ioannes for anything she could learn about the war, and came away with a good idea of the situation: Euboea, which had apparently been a haven for Ioannes on his frequent trips to trade olive oil, mastic, and a special type of medicinal sumac that grew on the island, was desolate and damaged, but not difficult to get around. Cape Artemisium had had the worst of it, and the temple of Artemis had been razed to the ground.

She asked with circ*mspection if anything else noteworthy had been found or destroyed, but he didn't know anything more.

At the end of the evening, she got up and gathered her cloak from the bench beside her. "I thank you for the evening, and for the news from home," she said easily.

Rahi'dah was on her feet instantly, and Ioannes had to make a bit more of an effort, as his eyes and feet had begun to point in several different directions. "Thank you for the wine," he attempted to say, and Bladewalker laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, telling him she understood. She pushed him back onto the bench, and he sank gratefully into his warm spot.

Rahi'dah accompanied her to the doorway, where a brilliant spill of stars enlivened the pitch-black, cloudless night. The two of them studied the stars for a moment, then Rahi'dah remarked quietly, "You will find her, Gray Ghost of the Trade Routes."

Bladewalker gave her a quick glance, not certain she had heard correctly.

Rahi'dah turned her eyes, no less beautiful than the stars, to Bladewalker. "You have heard that the Romans put to the torch every building in Carthage and put to the sword every man, woman, and child. And then they burnt the fields and after sowed them with salt so that their ability to wreak utter destruction would resound in legend for generations."

Bladewalker nodded soberly.

"And yet," Rahi'dah said softly, "Carthage still stands."

Bladewalker put a hand to Rahi'dah's shoulder. "Thank you."

Rahi'dah nodded, then studied Bladewalker with those lovely, dark, insightful eyes. "Would you welcome a companion on your journey?"

"Are you after a sixth wife?" Bladewalker asked. "For I warn you, I'm no good at weaving."

Rahi'dah laughed her low laugh. "I would know what drives a ghost to a quest measured in decades. Ioannes knows the place, and I can fight."

"Thank you for your generous offer," Bladewalker said. "But I'm done puttin' others in danger for my hide. And I know the way."

* * *

By mid-summer, she had threaded her way past the Roman guards looking after Euboea with their usual fear-driven efficiency and was on the road she remembered well. She came across the ruins early in the afternoon. They had done a job, these Romans, a good one, performed with their usual purposeless thoroughness. Only the foundation stones remained upright, the rest scattered in the seared grass or dumped next to the fragments of the carved figures from atop the columns. Layers of ash coated everything, plumes of it drifting aimlessly in the breeze.

Distracted by the specter of destruction, she did not at first notice the horse picketed near the tumble of blackened stones. Someone was already here. Her heart began to thump in her chest, coming to life for the first time in what seemed like a century.

As she drew near, she spotted the visitor, a slight yellow-haired figure in leather armor. Bladewalker cursed herself wordlessly for her futile, feeble moment of hopeful idiocy. The visitor heard Bladewalker's horse trotting along the path and turned, and Bladewalker could see that she was a woman. She dismounted and tied her horse next to the visitor's, then approached the ruin, pain squeezing at her heart. The woman was small, but lithe and spare, muscles visible in her wrists and what Bladewalker could see of her neck beneath the armor. The hilt of a sword rose over her right shoulder. The woman had green eyes, and what looked like desperation trembled deep within them.

"Greetings, fellow traveler," Bladewalker said, intending to follow it up with a handclasp.

The last thing she expected was the woman drawing her sword from the shoulder scabbard and taking up a stance. Bladewalker found her own sword in her hand, her own feet planted amid the uncertain rubble, but the words on her lips were, "I come in peace--"

She had no time to complete her sentence before the warrior was on her.

End of Book II

Chapter 3: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book III

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book III

They saw her from time to time, the scribes at Cape Artemisium, from the time of Daniel, its founder, and Miriam the Recorder, up to the moment the scriptorium met its end generations and generations later. No one was certain whether it was the same woman, or if each generation had its own protector, but she was always blonde, always lithe--and always armed, though they seemed to feel no danger from her. She kept them and the scriptorium safe for the longest time, longer than any natural life. She came once a generation or so, and she stayed a while, and each time she brought them enough money to keep the scriptorium going, far beyond the occasional letter or sacred text the scribes were asked to copy out.

When the Romans finally moved against that island, destroying everything of the Greeks they could get their hands on, they did not stop with their gods, but also burnt their legends. Suspicious of anything scholarly lest it nibble at the edges of their omnipotence, the Romans laid waste to an entire literary heritage. And that is how the archive at Cape Artemisium, the great repository of Greek storytelling, was lost to the world forever.

War always attracts its hangers-on, the people whose lives cannot contain enough excitement and who get an unholy life-denying thrill from shattered corpses and burnt-out shells of once-proud buildings. It is also easy, in a place traumatized by carnage, to find vessels for one's excitement, whether that be poor, handsome women without the freedom to say no or hopeless suicidal men who can be convinced to take up a blade if it means a quick death with little lasting pain. To a Roman soldier, often enough having gone without salt-money while in the field, the dilettantes were a welcome source of supplemental income, and they were happy enough to let them in.

The small, sharp-eyed blonde with the sword strapped to her back moved quickly through the still-smoking streets, picking her way through a haze of destruction with the all too-familiar reek of death in her nostrils. She'd seen bodies before, and the disconnected lumps of meat, fly-blackened and swelling in the sun, did not deter her, or even slow her down. She had a destination in mind, and for many reasons, she had nothing to fear from the mechanism of death the Romans had built.

She did have a difficult time identifying the streets: Cape Artemisium had changed since her last visit, a quarter-century before, and the few landmarks she thought she might recognize had been pulled down brick by brick, until only heaps of alien rubble remained.

If she had still had much of a soul, it would have bothered her, this colonization of death and chaos: she had reason to know how difficult and fragile it was to build civilization in the midst of a hostile wilderness, and the Romans seemed to pursue it with a single-mindedness of purpose that convinced her they were being guided by their cruel and insatiable gods.

Eventually, though, after a few false turns, she found the scriptorium again.

It was a sluggishly smoking blood-splashed ruin, the spirit of the place already fled. Where once were busy scribes unloading parchment and working at long tables under mirrors that caught and redirected the sunlight, there was a sooty hole leading to a long, low pile of stone heaped with smoldering ash. She kicked at a couple of the stones, still hot from the fire, and wondered what to do next.

"No one's allowed in," said a rough young voice, and she turned, not making a hasty job of it, to see a young captain whose tunic and armor still bore scorch marks and spots of gore. She pulled off her glove, reached into her belt, and came out with a pair of good silver coins, which she handed to him without speaking. They vanished into his own belt, and he put his hands to his hips and studied her with mock belligerence, as if she hadn't just rented the spot on which she stood.

"What was this place?" she asked, affecting the bored tone of a world traveler from Rome.

"Scribblarium," he said dismissively. "Old women begging their children in the city for money and vain poets looking for immortality for their verse."

"Ah," she said. "Why'd you burn it?"

"Could have been a haven for seditious writing," he said.

"I see," she said, looking around her in feigned disbelief.

"Besides, our orders were to burn everything," he added.

This was more likely the truth, as they understood it, and she turned over another of the hot stones with her boot. "Pity. I could've used a scribe or two--have some letters to be sent. Where are they?"

He pointed toward the town square. "Should be hangin' the last of 'em now," he said, baring his teeth in a rictus of unconcealed excitement.

"Strikes me as a waste of someone who's learned to draw letters," she said. "Could be usefully employed as a slave in the government at Rome." He looked a little pissed at that. She stepped carefully over the rubble and made her way to the town square.

He was right: a line of carelessly laid-out bodies stretched out next to the gallows, and though she knew none of them, she recognized the family resemblance: they'd never lost the cast of Africa in their faces, their skin. They were just putting the last two, both women, into nooses, positioning them over the trap. She wondered if the proud, tall woman with the bound hands and the sackcloth shroud was someone she'd met as a baby her last trip.

The woman's eyes darted round the square, which was half-filled with Roman soldiers largely ignoring the impending execution. Her gaze lit on the blonde, and she looked immediately to the north, shouting, "Artemis and Athena, receive my words--"

The springing of the trap snapped her neck as it ended her last message. The blonde watched until the unnatural coiling and wriggling had ended, then made her way back to where she'd left her horse.

She paid the groom, collected the reins, and swung herself into the saddle, pointing to the road that led north and asking casually, "What's up yonder?"

He shrugged. "Temple."

"Whose?" she asked.

He spat on the ground. "Artemis. Athena. One o' them. No matter, though--we've trashed it."

"Any bodies?" she asked, putting an eager note into her voice.

"Maybe a couple," he said reluctantly, taking a step back.

She spurred her horse northward, and soon had less foul air in her lungs.

* * *

The horse's hooves thudded a rhythm on the packed dirt trail north from the city, and as she climbed into the hills, her brain began, as if by reflex, to fit together syllables she had no intention of committing to parchment. The arrows swept into the air/The savage rain fell everywhere/The whim of gods, a bitter breath/Precursor of swift-flowing death.

It was a sight she herself had seen, so many years ago that there were no longer numbers enough to count. Sometimes it troubled her, lying awake nights staring up into the clouds or rain or snow and wondering how it all stayed up with no one left to hold it, that she seemed to have no soul remaining to her, not enough to fill a thimble. Then again, it hadn't been her choice.

In the same way that Zeus never scrupled to ask permission of the women he took and abandoned to raise the consequences of his whimsical lusts, so the other gods thought nothing of burdening a human with blindness, madness, withered limbs, rape, leprosy, loss, and then laughing as they watched their feeble creations stagger under the weight. She was not alone, and she knew it; that only increased her fury to a pitch that choked her.

Why not offer her the mercy they had shown to the scribe whose death she had just watched with no emotion evident, even to herself? At one time, she would have battered herself against the throne of Zeus Himself to save an innocent woman from hanging; now the only reaction of which she was aware was a naked, appalling envy. The pain of the scribe's life would soon be gone, snuffed like a guttering candle, while she--she alone would go on, pain piling atop pain until every sunrise was a fresh new agony with no hope of escape.

Even the gods who had decreed her immortality had died. They did not leave instructions on reversing the spell they'd set on her, and that, more than anything else, was what she could not forgive.

If she could not rejoin her beloved, at least there could be oblivion. She had chosen the name she now used as much in forlorn hope of that unlikely fate as anything else. But they had denied her their mercy, and she had repaid them by growing slowly mad.

The mania took her sometimes, and despite years of experience, she had no way to determine when it would happen. Sometimes it would grip her when she really needed her wits about her, and at other times it would swoop upon her from a bright, soft sky caressed by the sun.

There were still some levels of Tartarus she hadn't traveled, and perhaps that was what they wanted: she had never slaughtered an innocent, never attacked anyone who hadn't attacked first, never assassinated the undeserving, never thrown the unarmed into a war zone. That she knew of. Perhaps she had to earn her destruction. When she was willing to try it, on the off chance that she would offend whatever gods were still around to take offense, she would know that everything she had once been was gone forever.

For as much as had changed, there were some things one could count on: misery, chiefly, but also sunrises and birdsong and the gentle hush the surf made when you were far enough away that it couldn't touch you. And tracks worn in the weary, ageless earth by uncounted generations of frail humans. It was easy enough to follow, and she found herself approaching the remains of the building, a jumble of cracked stone in the middle of a blasted, blackened meadow.

She leapt lightly from the saddle--one thing she'd finally overcome was her fear of horses--and picketed her mount at the northern corner, leaving it to nose through the ashen remnants of the summer grasses for some blades that had escaped the fire.

She set her hands to her hips and wandered aimlessly about the ruin, trying to find something: an iron ring set in the floor, a heaved-up corner of stone, a seam unlike those of the rest of the pavings. She sighed, a lungful of stale smoky air, and wondered how she was to find it. It wasn't a great deal to go on: Artemis and Athena, receive my words... That must mean they were still here somewhere, unless they made the mistake of assuming that her unchanged appearance granted her greater power than she could command. Still, the scribe had recognized her, and had sent her a last message before the trap snapped open. And it wasn't precisely as though she didn't have the time to look. As long as the Romans didn't interfere. And if they did... well, she would see if carving a legion into hash would give Caesar's successor the chance to prevail where her old enemy had failed so dismally.

She heard the horse before she saw it and turned with the prescient vigilance of prey. She was proof now, inured to the leap of the heart that it gave her to see a solitary dark-haired horsewoman galloping toward her, and when the stranger stopped, tied her horse, and stepped over the foundation stone into the square that once was the temple, she noted the blue eyes and whipped the sword from the scabbard at her back.

* * *

Bladewalker tried to make a conciliatory gesture, but it wasn't easy with a heavy sword in her hand. The stranger's eyes grew murderous, and she advanced, sword at the ready. Bladewalker protested, "I mean you no harm--"

The sword clanged against hers, and Bladewalker was catapulted into the fastest swordfight of her life. Three exchanges had passed before she had a moment to think. The stranger had driven her back a few paces; Bladewalker didn't recall taking the steps. The next pass moved like water, swords flashing in the sunlight, and Bladewalker tried to feel her adversary's next move through the length of metal in her hand. Whoever the woman was, she was strong and quick. Bladewalker judged her a serious opponent, well trained and obviously determined. That only left one question: why was the stranger trying to kill her?

The stranger moved like a panther, all grace and flow, and Bladewalker moved backward again, dancing about the uneven foundation of the ruined temple. Every attack she deflected drew an immediate riposte; the stranger didn't so much as pause between blows. Who was she? A Roman? An assassin? The next lunge was barely visible, and only a spit of ash her boot kicked up told Bladewalker she wasn't a ghost. She almost didn't meet the attack in time, and her chest began to heave as she tried to snatch enough air to meet her foe's blade.

The stranger's blonde hair and green eyes marked her as a foreigner. She hadn't said a word. She began her strokes high above her head, possibly the result of fighting taller, heavier opponents. Her sword curved toward Bladewalker, who caught it with her own, fumbling in desperation for her knife with her other hand. Whatever this was, it was backed by fierce determination to see her dead, and Bladewalker thought of Jessamyn's legacy, lost forever if the stranger succeeded. "What in the name of goat-eyed Hera d'you think you're doing?" Bladewalker shouted across the cracked marble at the stranger.

The answer was a cruel smile. "I know who you are," said the stranger. The attack went a bit wide, and Bladewalker turned, the stranger's blade sliding down the length of her own, and slipped past her opponent to a temporary safety. The stranger turned, sweat on her livid face, and raised the sword again. "You're one of his daughters!" she bellowed.

Mad, Bladewalker decided, risking a quick reach with her knife hand to dash the sweat from her brow. She was abruptly aware of a terrible thirst. The stranger just kept coming and kept coming, never slackening the lunges and arcs, her sword beating against Bladewalker's with the monotony of a drum. Bladewalker's arm muscles were starting to quiver. A breeze began, and the ash around them, stirred by their feet, began to rise sluggishly into the air. It settled in her throat, a foretaste of death, and Bladewalker began to feel something she didn't quite recognize: panic.

"You look like her," the stranger growled, "you move like her." Her sword flashed around Bladewalker's ears, and Bladewalker gave more ground. "You even fight like her." The stranger was close enough that she didn't have to raise her voice, and sweat slid down her flushed face. "But I'm not so mad yet that I can't tell the difference."

The ash had risen, a cloud that tricked Bladewalker into thinking she saw someone out of the corner of her eye. It was a novice's mistake, and she pulled herself together with a quick curse for her cowardice. She met each stroke of the stranger's blade with a swift move, marching steadily forward, and the stranger began to step back, stumbling a bit on the uneven pavement. Bladewalker sent her sword in a diagonal sweep, and the stranger fell back, blood spotting her left sleeve. "I don't want to hurt you," Bladewalker whispered.

"You can't!"

The attack that followed this pronouncement was savage; it could have killed a lesser warrior. As it was, Bladewalker had to deflect it with both her sword and her knife. The stranger's sword moved in extravagant arcs, but no woman that small should be able to swing a heavy sword anywhere near that fast. Demon? Possessed? She couldn't possibly be drunk, not and fight like--

Their swords met again with a grinding slide, and Bladewalker knew she was looking her death in the eyes. Something shoved her sideways, hard, and she hit the stones with one shoulder as the stranger's blade smashed into the pavement Bladewalker had just been standing on. When the stranger raised her sword again, there was a deep chip on the side of the blade. Bladewalker sent her own sword high, catching the stranger's blade, which snapped at the point, the tip shooting past Bladewalker's head to skitter along the stones.

"Hold your hand," Bladewalker called, getting to her feet again. The ash was still swirling about them, and it made it hard to see. The sweat had gotten into her eyes, and it made the dusky cloud look like a ghostly figure whose movements matched her own. "I'll give you quarter," Bladewalker added.

In response, the stranger bared her teeth and swung her blade wide in an entirely unpracticed move, and Bladewalker stumbled back a few steps. "Damn you, leave off!" she snarled. "I don't want to kill you!"

The stranger's answer was an insane laugh, a high, eerie sound that brought up the hair on Bladewalker's neck. The stranger danced lightly up a pile of tumbled stone, lifted her broken sword and reversed it, then plunged it into her own body.

Bladewalker drew a shocked, ragged breath, dropped her weapons, and made for the stranger, who drew the sword from her body with no more drama than if she were plucking a splinter from a finger. Blood and bits of stringy tissue clung to the ruined blade, and the stranger stumbled forward, falling from the stones into Bladewalker's arms.

She had, perhaps, only seconds to live, and Bladewalker set her down gently on the broken pavement, covered with scuffed, ashy bootprints. The stranger was gasping, and Bladewalker tore open her tunic. The sight of the wound, beneath a welter of gore, nearly made her sick; it was obviously mortal, and she couldn't last long. Bladewalker turned unwillingly to stare into the crazed green eyes.

"Why?" Bladewalker hissed in incomprehension.

The stranger's head fell backwards, and she began to laugh. Bloody froth flecked her gums. Bladewalker turned her head to look at the wound again.

As she watched, the edges of the wound drew together, as if drawn into place by an unseen hand. The horrendous hole filled in and the bleeding quit with the suddenness of a fingersnap. Bladewalker nearly fell swooning. Before she could have counted fifty, the wound was healed, leaving only a bloody mess and a broken blade behind.

Reeling, Bladewalker looked into the stranger's face. The stranger was studying her, her eyes roving Bladewalker's features.

"What are you?" whispered Bladewalker.

The stranger opened her mouth, her teeth still stained with blood. "I'm the cursed one, the one who can't die."

* * *

The stranger began to struggle to her feet. Bladewalker made a move to hold her, and the stranger snapped, "I'm not going to hurt you." There was a weary, ages-old tone to her voice, a deep bardic note of tragedy, and Bladewalker got stiffly to her feet, watching the stranger warily.

The stranger bent to pick up her sword, turning it this way and that in the hot, bright sunlight. Her warm blood ran in rivulets down the edges of the shattered blade, and she tossed it clanging back onto the stones with a grunt of disgust. Ash eddied and puffed up from where she'd thrown it, coating the blade in a layer of adhesive grime.

"Your sword's broken," Bladewalker pointed out.

"Swords are easy enough to get," the stranger said dismissively. She turned to Bladewalker. "Do you have any water?"

Bladewalker's brain fought to make sense of the question. "Aye," she said finally, "I do." She picked up her sword and knife from where they had fallen and went to her horse, returning with a leather bottle. She handed it to the stranger, who opened it, set it to her mouth, and tipped her head back.

Bladewalker took the opportunity to inspect her weapons. Other than a few scuff marks she could polish out, they were unchipped. She'd always had respect for this particular sword, which could go through the most ferocious fights without showing wear, but she hadn't realized the knife would stand up so well. Her hand commenced to tremble, and she stilled it, looking up at the stranger, who had just finished her drink.

The stranger handed the bottle back. Bladewalker shook it a bit; it was empty. It occurred to her to say Thank you for leavin' me some, but then she reflected on what she'd just seen.

"Dry work, leavin' half your blood on the stones of the floor," Bladewalker commented.

The stranger grinned, a quick girlish expression under the blonde hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. "We'll have to find some for you. I'm sorry I took all of it."

Bladewalker shrugged as best she was able, slinging the empty bottle to her belt. She hadn't sheathed her sword, and had no intention of doing so. "Am I gonna live?"

The question surprised her as it came out of her mouth, and the stranger surprised her even more by treating it as an everyday thing. "Insofar as I have any influence over the matter. But I'm not sure; you're one of the few who's lived." She gave Bladewalker a speculative look. "You wounded?"

Bladewalker went over herself mentally. "No."

The stranger remarked, "That's even more unusual." She walked toward Bladewalker and held out a hand. "Lethe."

Bladewalker studied the hand before her. Small, slight, unscarred, but muscled, powerful. And covered in her own blood, rapidly congealing into a sticky mess. Not a hand to f*ck about, or f*ck about with. Bladewalker held out her own hand, and Lethe took it in a warrior's clasp, that strong hand closing about her wrist in the ancient sign of checking for a wrist-scabbard. "Bladewalker," she said, wondering why she was willing to talk.

Lethe peeled her hand away from Bladewalker's wristband, leaving a glop of blood behind. "An honor," she said unexpectedly. "They don't usually live long enough for a handclasp. You a warrior?"

"I was once," Bladewalker said unwillingly, "but I've turned from that path."

Something about this struck Lethe with visible force, pushing her back a step. She stared up into Bladewalker's face. "Dark hair," she murmured, "blue eyes, tall, a warrior who doesn't fight..."

Bladewalker sighed, thinking, Best end this right here. "I've heard the legends," she said, "and I assure you, I ain't her."

"Oh," replied Lethe, quietly fervent, "I know you're not." Bladewalker took a breath to reply, but Lethe held up a gore-spattered hand to interrupt. "What I'm wondering now is if he's tried to do it right this time." She laughed, a low, disturbing sound with nothing sane in it. "It'd be like him, to try and try until he got it to come out different this time. But he doesn't realize that not even Hephaestus could make a killin' blade out of that kind of metal."

Lethe turned and began to kick and scuff at the stones, pausing from time to time to throw a comment over her shoulder at Bladewalker. "Not that he hasn't made the attempt." She knelt to pry at one of the tiles in the floor, and it popped free in a cloudlet of ash. "Your sisters have tried to kill me time out o' mind." She peered beneath the tile, evidently not finding what she was after, and let it drop again with a grunt of disappointment and a jet of smoke. "He's got a lot of 'em. Randy old goat, sprayin' his ji*zz all over the continents, leavin' blameless mortal women to raise his spawn and lose 'em when he sends 'em after me." She got to her feet again, wandering erratically over the floor of the ruined temple, making random comments that made no sense. "I probably make it harder on myself. I keep feedin' him the bodies--did you know? There are never any bodies." She swept her booted foot through the ash, bent to examine the floor, and straightened, moving on. "The first time I carved up one of his minions, stamped with her face, it goddamn near killed me." She laughed, as if this was amusing. "I wish it had."

Bladewalker was becoming seriously creeped out. "What are you?"

Lethe turned to her. "Oh, you're thinking I'm an ekmetalleftis, aren't you?" It was an expression Bladewalker didn't recognize. "No," Lethe said, shaking her head, "that's mere legend. There aren't any, and I'd know." She gave Bladewalker a speculative look. "Your blood's safe in your veins."

"Good to know," Bladewalker said. "What are you lookin' for?"

Lethe shrugged and went on with her minute examination of the floor. "Seam, crack, ring, loose tile. Something with a hole underneath it. I was hoping the place wouldn't be so trashed that they'd found it. I forgot I was dealing with Romans."

She exhaled, put her hands on her hips, and glanced northward over Bladewalker's shoulder. "I wish she was still here. I'm beginning to think my last hope just dangled from a noose in Cape Artemisium, and I let 'em do it."

"What?" Bladewalker asked, chill moving in waves over her arms.

"The last two from the scriptorium," Lethe said, as though Bladewalker would have the faintest idea what she was talking about. "I think the one who called to me was Sophia. I think. She was a baby when I was last here, too small to hold a brush, though they had the devil's own time keepin' her out of the ink-pots. I've never known anyone whose hunger for words was so great..." Her voice fell to a murmur, and she studied the stones with eyes that didn't see. "Except, possibly, myself..."

Bladewalker took a step forward, daring to place a hand on Lethe's arm. "What, exactly, are you lookin' for here?"

Lethe turned and nailed her with a serious, intent gaze directly into her eyes. "Parchments. The originals of the archive at Cape Artemisium. The ones they were copying. They'd copied 'em dozens of times, sent 'em dozens of places. But the originals... the originals are someplace here. The last I knew, they'd given 'em for safekeeping into the hands of the young priestess in charge of... of this." She gestured about her, taking in the ruined temple, the blackened stones, the drifting clouds of ash and wisps of smoke, the waste. "Her name," said Lethe softly, "is Bellaster."

* * *

The tip of Bladewalker's sword was pointed between Lethe's breasts in an instant, and Lethe looked at it in surprise.

"If you're here to harm her," Bladewalker growled, "we'll see whether losin' your head can kill you after all."

Lethe lifted her eyes slowly from the blade. "I've no intention of harming her."

"Make me believe it," Bladewalker hissed, not giving a barleycorn's width. "You let those Romans bastards hang the women at the scriptorium."

Lethe shrugged and turned away. "It was quick."

"Quick?" Bladewalker whispered. "What kind of monster are you?"

"The kind that's more dangerous than any ekmetalleftis or vrykolakys or Bacchae." Lethe faced her with a brief smile. "The mad kind." She nodded pleasantly at the sword poised a finger's length from her throat. "After what you've seen, do you really think you've got a chance? Against the gods?"

"I'll do what I can," Bladewalker said.

Lethe laughed. There was a ragged gash in her tunic, and the blood soaking the hole was stiffening the cloth as it clotted. "Stubborn, as well as beautiful and deadly. How come no one's snapped you up?"

"Taken," Bladewalker grunted.

"Let me guess," Lethe said, making a great show of crossing her arms and putting a sticky hand to her chin. "Cleopatra. She loves fine swordplay. No, no, wait. Medea. Got a thing for knives. Hold a bit, I've got it! Artemis. That attitudinous armored jackass is perfect for you. You whet your swords around the campfire at night and compare sharp edges. How sweet!"

The longer she talked, the less likely she was to go after the priestess; Bladewalker was more than willing that the banter go on for decades. "Aren't you afraid that your gods will strike you down for blasphemin' 'em?"

"They might, if there were any of them left to give a goddamn," Lethe said, then chortled. "God-damn. That's good." She looked at her hands and wiped the crusted blood off on her tunic. "One more guess."

"You're crazy," Bladewalker said. Her legs were starting to shake and she wasn't certain how long she could keep this up, but the sword never wavered.

"One more?" Lethe begged her, putting a relatively clean finger to her face and pressing a dimple into her skin. The madness had settled in her eyes for what looked like good. "One tiny little guess?"

"Whatever pleases you," Bladewalker replied.

"Jessamyn."

* * *

The cold that went over her wasn't the wind. "Leave her alone," Bladewalker choked. "I'm tellin' you to leave her alone or we'll see right now whether I can make a hole deep enough to end your rotten, worthless life."

Lethe took a step back and held up her hands. The madness had fled from her face. "I told you, I'm not a danger to her."

"I'll split you in pieces and burn the pieces," Bladewalker rasped, circling Lethe slowly with her sword at the ready. "I'll chain you up and throw you in Etna. I'll trample you flat with a hundred times a hundred elephants and throw what's left into the sea so far from land it would take you a century to swim to shore. I'm tellin' you, leave her alone."

"I'm not after her!" Lethe shouted, balling her fists in frustration. "Will you listen to me? She's protecting the last thing I have left!"

"And what's that?" Bladewalker asked.

"The stories!" Lethe spit at her. "The stories. My stories. Mine."

"What makes 'em yours?"

"I wrote them," Lethe said, holding out a hand in desperation. "I wrote them and they're in danger and I have to get them back before the Romans burn them."

"I saw those scrolls," Bladewalker said, shaking her head. "They were old. Hundreds of years old."

"Why do you think I'm still here?" Lethe hissed. "I'm responsible for them."

"I thought you said the scriptorium had copied 'em all."

"And most of the copies have been destroyed. I don't know that there are any left."

Bladewalker kept the sword aimed at her. "Why are these stories so damned important, anyhow?"

"Because they're about her." The last word was spoken with a hushed reverence.

Bladewalker nodded. "Xena," she said.

Lethe's eyes snapped toward her. For the longest time, the two of them looked at one another, and Bladewalker assessed and measured and cogitated and mulled. The woman before her was an immortal--and crazy, at that. But something in her convinced Bladewalker that Lethe too had known loss, and she found herself, to her astonishment, trusting that every word she had said was absolutely true.

And if it was? Then what? Could she lead a madwoman who couldn't be harmed into the grotto? Did she dare? Were the scrolls still there? What if, against all common sense, Jessamyn had returned to Cape Artemisium, to terrible peril from the Romans? What if, even now, the gods Lethe considered dead had steered them all into the same place at the same time?

Preposterous.

It couldn't be.

But what if it was?

Finally, Bladewalker lowered her sword and snapped, "We'd better get going."

* * *

They watered the horses, and themselves, at a little stream running by the side of the road. The water tasted of smoke. Lethe took off her tunic and scrubbed the blood from it. Her skin was smooth and unmarked; there was no sign of the wound Bladewalker had inflicted on her arm. She put the wet tunic back on. The blood was still visible, a stain that darkened the cloth even more than the water had.

"I'll need a sword," Lethe said, climbing back into the saddle.

"We'll see," Bladewalker replied, turning her horse's head back to the road.

They guided the horses north from the temple. Debris scattered everywhere along the road: clothing, broken melons, rusting tools, shattered wagons, the occasional body of a donkey or a dog, swarming with flies and puffing like a rising loaf in the heat. Some of the thin grass by the side of the road was still burning, and the trees bore dark scorch marks. Shreds of smoke drifted past; Bladewalker thought she would never clear the taste of ashes from her throat. The longer the horses walked, the more important it became to find something that hadn't been destroyed. The only buildings they passed were smoking shells or roofless ruins.

"They'll have nothing to eat, and no way to grow it," Bladewalker murmured. "There'll be starvation here by winter."

Lethe shrugged. "You expect different? They're Romans. They'll take what people have hoarded and leave them to die."

"I've heard Rome's a great city," Bladewalker said.

"Because this is all they leave," Lethe replied, gesturing to the devastation. "Rome's greatness is built on things like this."

"I'd think they'd want to leave a place prosperous and growing. More to exploit."

Lethe turned in the saddle and studied Bladewalker. "They're Romans. They don't care. They don't have to."

"I begin to see your point," Bladewalker commented.

She had thought it would be difficult to find the turning that led to the grotto, but it was easy: she recognized the break in the trees, and moreover, there was a fresh cart-track running over the seared grass.

"They've found 'em," Lethe said. "We'll have to fight for 'em."

Underneath the grimness, she sounded nearly cheerful.

* * *

They followed the track through a blasted landscape, arid and devoid of greenery. Everything was the same color: rocks, earth, grass. The tops of the trees were still incongruously green, but their leaves had withered in the heat and many of them would not survive.

The path she remembered had been burnt. Ice swept through her mind. She could have closed her eyes and returned to it: galloping her well-trained mare down this same track with Jessamyn's lips on her face, hurrying to get to someplace where she could get off the damned horse and eat a woman alive.

Could Jessamyn possibly have come back here? Was she, even now, fending off a legion? The cold reached for Bladewalker's skin, and she started to turn her heels into the horse's side. A hand descended on her arm. Startled, she looked to Lethe, who murmured, "At a walk. At a walk. Give them nothing."

"She may be there," Bladewalker growled.

"She's not," Lethe assured her.

"How do you know?"

"I know," Lethe said. "Walk."

The first soldier they spied was a young fellow, sitting on a rock with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in his hands. He looked glum, bored, like a little hand-slapped boy scolded and sent from the kitchen.

"Good afternoon," Lethe said in Latin. He looked up at her in incomprehension, and she tried it again in Greek.

"You can't come through here," he said, the piping voice of a boy becoming a man. He'll have a hell of an example of it, Bladewalker thought, growin' up in a Roman camp.

"This is our land," Lethe said. "We've come to see what you've left us of it."

"You'll have to see the garrison commander in town," he replied. "I can't let you through."

Lethe got off her horse, slowly enough that he could keep an eye on her. She handed her reins to Bladewalker, who took them, watching avidly from her own perch. Lethe approached the soldier and spread her hands, showing them empty. "I'm unarmed," she told him.

Like that makes her any less dangerous, thought Bladewalker.

"What happened to your shirt?" he asked, sounding as though he didn't really want to know.

Lethe shrugged and reached for her money belt. "There's a war on." Her gloved hand emerged with two silver coins, which glittered in the sunlight filtering through the wilted leaves of the trees that would soon be dead. She held out the coins on her palm. "Let us through?"

Her voice was soft, intimate, the note of a lover shyly asking for something in bed.

"Can't," he said, not taking his eyes off the coins.

"Ah," she replied. "Still believin' it. You must be new. The irresistible might of the Empire. Six months with a Roman garrison and you'll be happy for a little extra--"

"They said nobody," he interrupted, shaking his head and drawing his sword.

Lethe's first response was to throw her hand, palm up, in Bladewalker's direction, but she never took her eyes from the soldier's face. "Listen to me, boy," she said. "They got you here with a dream of glory, but there's no glory in this. There's nothing but death and waste, spilled guts, the bleakness that follows fire, and smells so bad you wish you hadn't been born with nostrils."

Bladewalker glanced down the path. No one was coming, and she wondered what was happening at the grotto.

"Seein' the world brought down to smoke and ash--there's nothin' exciting in it," Lethe went on. The boy had backed up a step, his sword held at the ready in a stance Bladewalker recognized as the first one a Roman soldier learned. "Nothin' good in war... except to people who are sick. Lame. Crazy."

She took a step toward him, her foot falling soundlessly onto the path. He backed up half a pace. "People like me," she went on, her voice growing lower and lower. "You'd have to be insane to want any of this. But... the stale smell of a burned town... the gore that spews from a speared horse... crows pecking at carrion, the solid noise the beak makes when they strike..." Her eyes were shining, and the boy was starting to breathe hard. "The way a woman weeps when they bring her son's body home from the field? That keening sound?" He shook his head, horror growing in his face. "I love it," Lethe hissed.

"Stay back," he whispered. Bladewalker looked toward the grotto again. What was going on? Did they have Jessamyn? If so, what was happening to her? Her hands tightened on the reins, and she thought about running down the fool and making for the grotto at a gallop.

"Oh," Lethe went on in a seductive tone, pursuing the terrified boy in a slow circle around the path, "not you. Not an untried boy, believe me. Not a member of the garrison. I want a man, one who's been bloodied like I've been bloodied, one who's had blood running over his boots, one who'll understand. I'm after... your commander."

"Witch!" he screamed, whirling his sword over his head. She stepped neatly into his guard, turned his arm, and took the sword from him. In an eyeblink, she was standing behind him, and his own blade was pressed to his throat.

"Swallow," she murmured happily, "and off comes your Adam's apple."

"Tie him to a tree," Bladewalker grunted, "and let's go."

"They'll hang you, boy, when they find out you've let an unarmed woman past you," Lethe said. "I can make it quick."

"Let's go," Bladewalker urged her.

"Which?" Lethe asked. "Quick, and at my hands, or slow, with time all over to get scared?"

"You," whispered the boy, closing his eyes.

When it was done, the corpse concealed, and Lethe back in her saddle, Bladewalker tried to swallow the sickness down. "Did you mean all that?"

"All what?" Lethe asked, scanning the pathway for other threats.

"'Bout lovin' war," Bladewalker said.

Lethe shrugged. "You do what gets them off guard."

"He died with that thought in his head," Bladewalker told her.

Lethe shrugged again, an eloquent dismissal. "Shouldn't have joined the army."

"D'you hate the Romans so much?"

Lethe turned to her, and the murderous madness was back in her eyes. "Aye," she said firmly, "I hate 'em so much. I know them. And if you knew 'em, you'd hate 'em as much as I do."

They said nothing else, walking their horses in toward the grotto. It felt dizzying, unreal, to be here again, changed though it was, like a half-remembered landscape from her desert days, the winds arranging sand grain by grain to remake the face of the earth.

As their horses plodded endlessly, the sound of falling water began to grow in Bladewalker's ears. They reached the grotto not long after. A group of soldiers stood around a horsedrawn wagon, and one of their number, wearing the armor of a commander, had a lit torch and was making his way toward the waterfall.

They know, Bladewalker thought, appalled. They've found them. She scanned the grotto; there was no sign of Jessamyn.

The commander turned his head as they approached, then reversed course and walked down the pathway past the wagon to meet them. As he passed the wagon, he lifted the hand not holding the torch, and two of his men fell in behind him. They were all tall, taller than Bladewalker.

The commander stopped before them, holding his torch and looking up at them. His men ranged themselves on an angle just aft of the commander's shoulders, heads lifted like his. The three of them stared without speaking at Bladewalker and Lethe. Their shoulders were broad and their hair was dark and each one had bright blue eyes.

* * *

"Where's the boy?" inquired the commander pleasantly.

Lethe lifted a shoulder. "Boy that age shouldn't be away from home." She gave the commander a wolfish grin. "I sent him back to his master."

The commander nodded, not as if he were surprised--more like satisfaction. "Off the horse."

Lethe's grin grew broader.

"So much for easy." The commander gestured to his men, who drew their swords and advanced on the horse.

Bladewalker's sword was in her hand, and she used the reins and her heels to send her horse into a move she prayed it understood. The horse reared, then came down in mid-strike on one of the soldiers, whose shoulder collapsed under its weight. Bladewalker sent her sword down into the other, his scream dying as the air whistled from his unseamed neck.

Lethe kicked her horse into a gallop, running after the commander, who was pelting toward the waterfall. Jessamyn's scrolls, thought Bladewalker. "Stop him!" she bellowed, spurring her own horse. As they dashed down the path toward the waterfall, two more soldiers ran forward to meet them. Lethe sent her sword through one, barely slackening her gallop as she shook his howling body free of her blade. The other, a little more experienced, fenced with Bladewalker for a few precious heartbeats before she was able to slash him deeply across the face. He dropped his sword with a low moan and grabbed for his head, and Bladewalker urged her horse onward.

The commander had disappeared behind the waterfall. Bladewalker and Lethe galloped around the wagon, where the path became too narrow for horses. Four soldiers waited for them, swords drawn and faces taut with concentration. Lethe pulled her mount up sharply, gauging the width of the path.

"Come on!" shouted Bladewalker, swerving her horse for the pool. Lethe turned her horse's head, and both mounts plunged into the pool, making for the waterfall. The soldiers scrambled for the entrance to the cave, behind the tumbling spray. Bladewalker held her sword before her and rode through the waterfall, parting the thunderous curtain, and Lethe's horse scrambled through right next to hers.

From her perch atop the horse, Bladewalker first noticed that the lamps had been lit. The two passageways were as she remembered, leading deeper into the hill. The stone table was still there, but there was no sign of a scroll, much less all of them. The commander stood at ease before the table, his hands clasped behind him. Torches fluttered and spit from random spots in the cave: shoved into the sand, thrust into cracks in the walls. The place looked like she remembered it from ten and more years gone, except a little dustier, a bit more lonesome, a shade forlorn. And a wedge-shaped phalanx of soldiers stood between them and the commander. Bladewalker counted seven of them. She would have to kill them all just to look for the scrolls. She thought of Jessamyn and found she was willing to do just that.

In a wordless silence, the waterfall rushed past just behind them and water dripped from their clothing, the horses, and the blades of their swords, held at the ready. Lethe was the first to speak.

"Five of your men lie dead or dying out there," she told the commander in a conversational tone. "Your odds aren't looking so good."

His reply was a smirk rich with attitude. He jumped to the top of the table, and his men didn't so much as twitch. He stood in the light from the lamps, and Bladewalker got a good look at his outfit: a hammered metal breastplate in that exaggerated musclebound style the Romans were so fond of, a rich crimson cape falling from his shoulders, a scabbard for his sword balanced by a scabbard for a knife on the other side. She had no doubt that the blades would be fine and keen.

He spoke to Lethe, nodding in Bladewalker's direction. "You brought the coward, I see. She ran from a king. She tell you that?"

Bladewalker's hand clenched on the reins, but she kept her face impassive. "We were too busy killin' your men to get much past the how-d'you-dos." Her horse chose just then to sneeze a huge cloud of watery snot on the soldiers, and the man who got the most of it wiped his face with disgust. Bladewalker patted her horse on the neck appreciatively.

The commander studied her briefly with eyes that might have been her own, then turned to Lethe again. "And yet you were trying to slit her open not four hours ago."

Lethe laughed that soft, dangerous laugh. "It was the family resemblance." She rested the blade of her sword against her shoulder. "So you were watching."

"You know I was," he replied.

"What did you think?" Lethe asked. Her voice held an aura of confidence, but so low that Bladewalker could hardly hear her over the waterfall.

"I thought you were... magnificent," he told her.

Lethe shrugged. "Good teacher."

They were both speaking in quiet, intimate tones, and it was right about here that Bladewalker began to wonder if she'd ever get out of the cave alive. Then she reflected that this was the last place she was really happy, so it wasn't a bad place to die, anyhow.

"Especially against her," the commander added, nodding to Bladewalker again. "You know what she is?"

"Variation on a theme," Lethe parried. "And yet another woman you can't have, old man." (He didn't look particularly old, and if Lethe was telling the truth, she probably had a dozen times a score years on him.) Lethe co*cked her head to the side like a curious bird. "Why are you still alive, by the way?"

Hatred flared in his lovely blue eyes. "Strigkla," he hissed. It was a Greek expression that caused Bladewalker's eyebrows to hike upward. "Epitetheite!" he bellowed, his voice ringing off the stone walls, and the soldiers went into motion.

When she had a moment, Bladewalker was going to think about why a Roman would issue a command to advance in Greek, but right now she had to shoulder her horse in between Lethe and the soldiers. She swept her blade downward, and three blades arrested it in mid-stroke. The men reached for her arm. They would cripple her horse or pull her off, one. She launched herself off the horse sword-first, taking down two of them in a welter of blood that blinded her for an instant.

As she rolled to her feet, she heard someone screaming, a horse or a man, and wiped the blood from her eyes, sword at the ready. Lethe appeared through a curtain of red, the angelic smile in place as she gutted one of the soldiers and turned to the other two. Bladewalker lifted her sword without looking to catch two blades. She rounded on her opponents' swords, sending one downward and one to the side. She stepped forward and shattered one soldier's nose with the heel of her hand, then moved neatly into place to catch the return stroke from the other, throwing him back against the wall.

The horses, affrighted by the close quarters and the sounds of battle, fled back through the waterfall. Four men lay dead or incapacitated in the cave, and that only left three soldiers and their commander. Bladewalker stepped carefully around bodies, making her way to Lethe's side. The commander still hadn't drawn his sword; he stood by the table, arms folded, watching like it was a chariot race.

The soldiers had caught their breath, and as they made a second rush, Bladewalker and Lethe took up back-to-back stances.

Bladewalker could feel Lethe's effort at her back, little grunts and muscles tightening, sweeps of her arms and the occasional edge of a boot touching hers. She herself was moving the same way, a liquid combat as impossible to stop as the water thundering past the opening of the cave. The blades touched and zinged and swung, glitters thrown against the walls in the torchlight. Bladewalker opened a cut on the arm of one opponent, then swept the edge of her blade across the other's thigh on the return stroke.

The next two passes scored both men again, and Bladewalker's face drew into the mask she thought she'd forgotten. It was like knowing a dance, or traveling a path so often, rain or shine, that even a snowstorm was no threat that you'd wander lost. One of the soldiers was panting, loud in the enclosed space. He was bleeding from half a dozen wounds, yet he fought and fought and fought, long past the point of exhaustion, until Bladewalker growled, "Give, you stupid bastard, give, it ain't worth your life." He didn't seem to have heard her, so she stepped inside his guard and drew her blade across his throat, and he finally went down, strangling in what was left of his blood.

That left her and Lethe with an opponent apiece. Lethe's man was taller and stronger, with a long reach, and gradually the fight moved toward the wall of the cave. Lethe was beginning to tire, and Bladewalker herself could feel the effects of two ferocious firefights in one day; her arm was beginning to quaver.

The soldiers, however, seemed just as tired, and they drew back a bit, swords at the ready, trying to glower Lethe and Bladewalker into submission. Lethe stuck her tongue out at them.

"Do that again," her man spat, "and I'll cut it off."

"Do it," Lethe retorted, "and I'll moon you. What'll you do then?"

"Er," Bladewalker began, lifting a hand in warning at her.

"Oh, for my sake," muttered the commander, taking a step toward the combatants and drawing his sword. It flashed on its way out of the scabbard; when he raised it, the light ran in streams of gleam down the blade, which looked like fresh-minted, impossibly smooth gold.

Bladewalker didn't have much time to admire it, as it came down immediately, and she and Lethe were fighting for their lives. His sword swept toward theirs, and the swords of the soldiers seemed to follow in its wake, as though his sword was drawing theirs on. Bladewalker couldn't keep her eyes off that sword: it was pure death fashioned into a beautiful killing length. Her arm moved without thought to counter his strokes, and she pushed him toward Lethe, who sent him back, the two of them trading blows.

Little erratic movements crept into the soldier's following strokes, and Bladewalker knew what was happening. She and Lethe, mesmerized by the strokes of the commander's sword, were supposed to lower their guard enough for one of the soldiers to get to them. Ingenious. Clever. Impossible to counter.

Could she nudge Lethe aside, knock her toward the waterfall, convince her to run for it? Lethe's next exchange was like the flight of a hawk, graceful and deadly, and Bladewalker abandoned the idea of getting her to make a break for it.

The tremor in her arm was apparent to her, and she had only seconds before the others could tell. The air rasped along her windpipe. She wouldn't be able to last more than, possibly, three or four more exchanges before they got to her.

One of the torches guttered, and in the abrupt gloom, Bladewalker hallucinated a shadow between her and Lethe. She caught the last of her energy up and parried with surprising vigor, and the shadow moved with her arm as her blade took off the lower jaw of one of the soldiers.

She had no time to react; instead, she passed the commander's pretty golden blade to Lethe for safekeeping and swept hers in an arc across theirs to the man Lethe had been fighting. He saw her and moved to parry, but got there just in time to lose his hand at the wrist instead. He stumbled back a pace, staring at the blood jetting out of the stump in time with his heartbeat. His severed hand quivered against the grip of the fallen sword.

The commander was the last one standing, and Lethe and Bladewalker began to drive him toward the opposite wall. He stepped around the bodies without having to look, and Bladewalker began to suspect that there might be the slightest possibility that he wasn't quite what one might consider mortal.

The shadow, whatever was causing it, had moved with them, and a filmy black shroud clung to their arms as they whirled their swords against his. The blade of her sword caught against the hilt of his, and he snarled, baring his teeth at her. In that instant, his blue eyes flashed dark, and his face took on the look of another's, a powerful, handsome, cruel man with a beard and a disdainful expression. "You're mine, little one," he whispered. She blinked, and the face that might have belonged to her brother swam into her vision again.

The shadow swirled around Lethe's arms, almost like a shawl, or an embrace, and her sword moved in a close arc, catching the commander's blade. One touch--two--three--she was pressed against him, and she whipped her sword round in a tidy move and buried it in his neck.

The commander gagged against the metal, and Lethe, with a nasty smile, drew the blade deeper into his throat, as if she were carving a fat roast goose. Bladewalker could hear the edge of the sword grinding against his backbone. He toppled sideways, twitching, and the life fled his face with the blood from his gashed neck.

Bladewalker kicked the gorgeous sword into the corner as the commander's body cooled. She bent over him, studying his changeable face, but he was just a dead man on the floor of a cave in east middle-of-nowhere, Greece.

She straightened, fighting still, but now for air and energy. She looked at Lethe, who was watching her face with concern. The shadow was gone. She turned, gasping, to look around her.

The cave floor was splattered with fresh, smoking gore, but there was no one there, save the two of them. She whirled. The commander's body had vanished.

* * *

"Sit," Lethe grunted. Bladewalker didn't really have an alternative plan, so she did, collapsing where she stood like a sack of barley. She leaned back against the wall of the cave. Getting her breath back was an effort, like breathing water. Lethe unhooked the water bottle from Bladewalker's belt one-handed and took it to the waterfall, filling it with liquid thunder. She brought it back and handed it to Bladewalker, who tried to gasp out a note of thanks.

"Drink," Lethe said. Her voice was gruff and graceless. Bladewalker tipped up the bottle and emptied it.

The last time she'd had water from this place was when she was with Jessamyn, and the memories poured deep into her mind with the water down her throat. That lovely skin, the keen intelligence in those eyes, a warm, variable body moving against hers, now soft, now tensed, an endless worship of motion, a journey right to the heart of godhood. The frenzy and the quiet, two halves of a whole that called back and forth across a chasm to one another. The sense of this place as a cocoon, keeping them safe. Her fascination with another woman, she who had been so contemptuous of the entire race, and the burst of enlightenment that nothing would ever be as important as being worthy of that one woman's love. Except for one interlude of pure divinity, her life had been one big cheat, and the anger she felt now at that was not that she had loved and lost, but that the gods had seen fit to waste half her life in wretched ignorance of Jessamyn.

She lowered the bottle, panting only a little, and looked up into Lethe's eyes. Lethe crouched before her, hands clasped loosely around the hilt of the sword she'd taken from the boy she'd killed. Her face was guarded but attentive. "Better?"

Bladewalker nodded. She felt stronger. It must have been the memories. She levered herself up on one hand and whispered, "Why--"

But the effort to speak had been too sudden, and she choked and coughed against the back of her hand. Lethe, with a small, comforting smile, took the bottle and went to the waterfall again. She brought the bottle back to Bladewalker, whose thirst, she discovered, raged still within her throat. While Bladewalker drank, Lethe spoke.

"I lost her," she said. "They took her from me. They took her because she was the vessel of their destruction. Not because of anything she did, not really. They did it to themselves. But because of who she was." By the flicker of the torches, Lethe turned her back and folded her arms, studying the water rushing from the sky to the earth. "She proved that it was possible to turn from darkness toward light, to make your own life a hymn of redemption, to become a force more powerful than all the evil in the world... all without swearing allegiance to any god." Lethe raised a hand, then let it drop. "Not even mine. Not even the Muse. The one I once promised everything to. But that was before I met... her."

Lethe turned her head and spoke directly to Bladewalker. "That's what they couldn't forgive, you see. That she could live that kind of life, undo every twist they kinked into the fabric of innocent lives, and not swear fealty to any of them. She did it herself. And in return..." Lethe went back to watching the waterfall. "They cursed her."

"How?" Bladewalker rasped.

"By giving her a child," Lethe said grimly. "A daughter."

Bladewalker raised herself cautiously to her feet.

"It wasn't us," Lethe murmured, eyes tracking the falling water in its endless, restless motion. "It was nothing we'd done. Or didn't. They played with us like... like we were some kind of... of a child's toy, some primitive little wooden doll."

Bladewalker took a few steps toward her.

"I--I just couldn't..." Lethe shook her head and looked at Bladewalker, standing at her side. "If the Romans had done it, you'd know it was because they hated you. They're very good at turning hatred to cruelty, the Romans. I've had reason to learn that well..." The mist swallowed Lethe's deep green eyes. "But this... I don't even think it was hatred. I don't think they ever wondered how to treat us with... wisdom. Compassion. I don't think it ever entered their minds. They were so far superior, you see. Immortal. All-powerful. Nothing in common with us. I... I think they just thought we... we belonged to them. And that was the way it should be."

Bladewalker reached out with her left hand, placing it gently on Lethe's shoulder. Lethe's eyes grew clearer, and she took a quick lungful of air.

"It meant their own destruction. The gods of the Greeks. They tried to get back at her, and they engineered their own annihilation. One by one, her daughter led the Romans right to them. They're all gone now... Aphrodite, Hera, Zeus, Hermes, Hephaestus, all of them cracked, broken, replaced by tarnished mechanical simulcra that now go under Roman names, not that any of the Romans have the slightest connection with anything outside their own foolish greed." She closed her eyes. "And I've been here to watch every moment..."

Bladewalker slid a cautious arm around Lethe's shoulders, and Lethe threw her arms around Bladewalker's neck, burying her face in Bladewalker's shoulder. Bladewalker could feel the weight of the dead boy's sword against her back. She held her own sword, still sticky with the blood of their vanished opponents, well out of the way, but she tightened her left arm around Lethe, offering what comfort she could muster, and stared without seeing out into the thunderous wall of water.

* * *

No sobs shook Lethe's shoulders; no tears fell upon Bladewalker's jacket. The misery was there, though, the weight of decades of sorrow too heavy to squeeze out water. Bladewalker's own eyes burned.

They left us here. Left us alone to go through whatever life is left to the gods' playthings when the gods themselves are dead. Who was keeping the sky up? What kept the water liquid? Why was earth still earth and fire still fire? How come humans and oxen and goats and buildings didn't float into the air? Why was it that a dropped sword still fell toward the ground?

Could it be that they had never needed gods at all?

We ain't that wise yet, Bladewalker realized, with a wisdom forged from a decade and a half beneath her own burden of grief. And maybe the reason we don't have the gods any more is that they weren't wise enough either. Even with a warm woman in her arms, she longed for Jessamyn just then, the feeling familiar from years of practice, but still just as painful. Jessamyn could have explained it to her. Jessamyn could have made this all make sense. Probably in a sentence or two. The gods know we could use it right about now. Bladewalker considered the absurdity of the thought and chuckled to herself.

Lethe raised her head. Her green eyes were calm. "You're so like her sometimes," she whispered. It was an offer and a promise, delivered in the tone one used with a lover, and Bladewalker tried to smile in a way that would comfort without encouraging.

"I can't be her to you," she said, pitching her voice low, "and you can't be her to me." To her credit, Lethe didn't deny that that was what she had meant, nor did she move from Bladewalker's arms. "And if there are no gods and if my heart is dead ash in my chest because she's missing, then there's still somethin' I can do."

"What's that?"

"It occurs to me," Bladewalker said carefully, "that the example of a villain who turns to good without the prompting of a god is going to be very useful in a world empty of the divine."

Lethe drew away, considering it. The sword dangled from her clenched fist. She kept her gaze trained on Bladewalker.

"Think of it," Bladewalker said. "A decision she made herself, no flash of insight, no message from on high, no whispers in her ears to guide her to one path or another. Her own decision, hers alone, and she chose the light 'stead of the darkness. We're gonna need to know how to do that."

"They orphaned us because it was time for us to... to become our own gods?"

Bladewalker shook her head. "I don't know. But it was important to the wisest woman I ever knew."

"Bellaster."

The pain hit her just below the breastbone. Bladewalker turned on her heel, studying the stone table, the lamps, the torches. "We were here," she murmured, slipping along the stream of time to the last moment she could remember feeling an iota of joy. "Here's where we were. I knew her for a day and a half. She made me weep and she made me cry out in love and she made me happy and she made me holy. She made me." She took a few slow paces toward the altar and placed her hand on the stone. It was cold and hard, empty and lifeless. "And protectin' what's in yonder was the most important thing in her life."

She whirled on Lethe. "Are they comin' back?"

Lethe shook her head. "Not right away."

"Then we have to get the scrolls to safety," Bladewalker said. She placed her gory sword carefully on the stone altar and took up one of the torches, holding it up and peering into the gloom of the left-hand passage. She could see nothing; no opening, no cleft, no seam, no shelf, no box. She went a few paces into the passage, studying it carefully for anything that would tell her where the scrolls were.

Nothing.

She had begun to panic a little. "I can't find them," she called back to Lethe.

"They have to be here," Lethe shot back. "Otherwise the troop wouldn't have been looking for them."

"Maybe they were too late. Maybe somebody else took 'em."

"No," Lethe replied. "He'd know."

Bladewalker clenched her teeth and waved the torch this way and that. Still nothing, other than featureless, bare, gray rock. Then she happened to think of what she was holding.

She went back through the passage and stopped by the waterfall, studying it. "Water," she murmured, "and fire."

"What is it?" Lethe asked.

"Something she said," Bladewalker replied. "The midwinter sun comes through the waterfall and lights up the cave."

"The midwinter sun," Lethe said, musing. She too ran her eyes over the waterfall, then gestured with the sword. "Here. Here's where it would be."

Bladewalker thrust the torch into the sand and stood back a bit. "We can't make enough light," she murmured. "It'd have to come through the waterfall."

"We can make a line," Lethe said, placing the dead boy's sword on the altar next to Bladewalker's and seizing another torch. "A line toward the back of the cave."

Bladewalker looked behind her. The light at midwinter would fall in a line toward the left-hand passage. So far, so good. She took the torch from Lethe and jammed it into the blood-soaked sand. Lethe gathered each torch, and Bladewalker set it into the sand, and they worked their way to the back of the cave, going a distance into the left-hand passage.

In the end, it took every torch and all four of the lampstands from the altar, and the entrance was shrouded in gloom, but the passage was brightly lit. Bladewalker took up a sight line by the wall, squinting back along the line of torches and lampstands. She lined herself up, then turned toward the rock face.

There was a tiny crack in the wall, an irregular square she could barely see. She gestured to Lethe. "We need somethin' to pry with."

Lethe went back to the altar and returned with the dead boy's sword. Bladewalker took it and fitted it into the crack, working it back and forth until the square of stone moved out of place a hair's breadth. Bladewalker set the tip of the sword into the seam and shoved sideways on the hilt, and the stone slid free, thudding to the sand floor of the cave, directly on the spot where Bladewalker's boot had been an instant before.

Bladewalker thrust her bare hand into the hole, and it collided with something that felt like leather. She put her hand around it: round, smooth, chilly. She drew out the object. It looked like the kind of quiver an archer of Artemis might use, a strong cylinder of cowhide, sealed at both ends. She held it out to Lethe, unable to speak.

Lethe popped the top off the quiver like an expert and reached into it with cautious fingers. Her hand emerged with a scroll, and she unrolled it rapidly, reading in the strong light of the lamps.

"Sing to me, Muse, of the Warrior Woman. Strong and powerful, brave and courageous, clever and wise." Bladewalker's back went icy. "This is the tale of the Warrior Woman and her third battle with the War God--" Lethe gasped a few times and stopped reading, and Bladewalker enfolded her in her arms just as she sank to the floor of the cave on her knees, cradling the parchment delicately, weeping without shame.

* * *

It took them three weeks to get the scrolls out of Greece, three weeks of desperate fighting in which the Romans, alerted to the determined attempt to smuggle out something that must have been of great importance to the Greek vermin, stopped and questioned every wagon attended by two women. The unlucky soldiers who managed to find them disappeared, leaving nothing but a trampled, bloodstained ground and the signs of ferocious fighting.

As they moved from Cape Artemisium north across the ford to the mainland, then crisscrossing the Aegean, whispers began among the sore oppressed of Greece. The whispers became rumors and grew to legends: two Furies appeared at the hour of need of Greece, swallowing barbaric Romans whole and granting them a thing they had not had in years: hope. Some considered them partisans of Artemis, hiding in the hills to swoop down upon the invaders and drive them into the sea; some thought them children of Ares, soaking the ground in the blood of Romans as a sacrifice to Him so He would return to cleanse His land; some, the quiet, observant old women in the hills, told a less well-known legend, the legend of a woman whose savage violence had laid waste to the countryside centuries before, until she, proud, cruel, arrogant, and coldly beautiful, turned her sword in the defense of innocence, prompted by the love of a blonde-haired green-eyed girl who made up stories.

They landed, eventually, at Amphipolis, a harbor town that seemed to hold disturbing memories for Lethe. It was peopled by handsome men and women with dark hair and blue eyes, and while Bladewalker spent several days in a jumpy state of alert, waiting for them all to go crazy simultaneously and attack, all that happened was that she was assumed to be a distant relative and greeted in the patois of the harbor as often as not. The third day, while they were still casting about for a ship to take out of Greece, a lovely little two-master sailed into the harbor, with a green-eyed protective sigil on the bow and the name Amazon Queen scrolled onto the stern. "Perfect!" exclaimed a giddy Lethe, clapping her hands like a child instead of a murderous half-mad warrior, and they went to talk to the captain.

His name, he told them with a courtly bow, was Alcibiades. He was Phoenician, as was his navigator Skittles, and they carried cargo to and fro along a line that led from Greece in the north to Egypt in the south. They had been, in their time, as far as India, and even Qin, he told them in response to Bladewalker's questioning. They were headed to Alexandria with a load of fine olive oil in amphorae for the Greek expatriate colony that had settled there, guarded by an unorthodox but undeniably effective security team of whom only one was human. The Amazon Queen had room for a wagonload of whatever it was the two were carrying, along with a private cabin not currently occupied.

"Alexandria," Lethe said, elbowing Bladewalker subtly in the ribs. "The home of the library. Perfect."

The trim, tidy vessel skip-hopped from Greek isle to Greek isle as far as Rhodes, where they took a northeasterly route hugging the coastline, passing Kypros, then through the Sea of Phoenicia south toward Judea. The voyage was balm to both, an interlude of peace in which they stood at the bow for long hours at a stretch, letting the breeze blow the thoughts from their heads and appreciating the sparkle of the low fall sun on the blue waves. Often, Bladewalker, turned away from Cape Artemisium for the second and probably last time, would wrap her arms around Lethe from behind, and the two of them would stand together, Lethe's hands clasped over Bladewalker's about her waist, her head reclining on Bladewalker's shoulder.

Seeing the two a-bristle with blades, and noting the drills they performed on whatever section of deck was not woven in rope like a spider's lair, Alcibiades and Skittles would speculate in low voices about their unusual passengers, for the hours at a ship's wheel are long and a bit of gossip lightens the time considerably. If they were friends, they were friends of great closeness, barely speaking--nine times of ten, Lethe was the one to answer any questions--and if they were lovers, well, a musclebound, battle-carved warrior was not to the captain's taste, nor to Skittles', but in that case it was as well they had found one another.

The contents of the cargo they had brought aboard occasioned some speculation, but not much: they were not the first to drag some mysteriously valuable thing aboard the Amazon Queen, and Alcibiades had a live-and-let-live philosophy useful to a ship's captain of that time and place. They seemed to be in little hurry, as long as the cargo continued to move without delay or molestation toward Alexandria, and that suited everyone on board.

Ranger, watching them drill on the deck, quickly determined that they were two exceptional talents with a blade; this made her wonder, but aside from recommending caution to Willow (who had no intention of getting nearer to them than could be avoided by staying at the extreme opposite end of the ship from wherever they were), she kept her thoughts to herself. Blackie tended to salute Bladewalker, in particular, when she passed, but Bladewalker, like most two-footed warriors, had no way to recognize the gesture of respect.

While they were at the bow, in the endless hours of peaceable sailing, Bladewalker and Lethe planned their approach to Alexandria, as carefully as ever Bladewalker had planned a siege. They had to find a trustworthy Greek-speaking scholar, someone who could take over the task of getting the scrolls copied all over again. Bladewalker objected that this would be costly; Lethe waved the objection away as if it were so much air. How were they to find a capable Greek-speaking scholar in Egypt? Lethe replied that if they could not locate their quarry in Alexandria, the world home of scholarship, they never would. What if the scholar wasn't in the mood for a project that would probably occupy the rest of his days?

"Hers," Lethe murmured dreamily into the caressing air of a Mediterranean fall afternoon.

"Excuse me?" Bladewalker said, drawing her arms a bit from around Lethe's waist.

Lethe seized Bladewalker's hands and wrapped them about her belly again. "Hers," she repeated firmly. "We're looking for a woman." She sighed into the sunlight. "And a broad-minded one, at that."

"A woman?" Bladewalker stuttered. "A scholar? A woman? Who speaks Greek and knows how to write?"

Lethe grunted in affirmation.

"They don't let women study," Bladewalker argued. "They can't be physicians or scholars. Nor senators nor advocates or judges. Nor priests, 'specially amongst the Jews."

"You've little faith," Lethe said.

"There's nothin' left to have faith in," Bladewalker muttered, resting her chin atop Lethe's head and studying the waves grimly.

"Bladewalker," Lethe said patiently, "do you know what will happen if we ever once show one of those stories to a man?" She tossed her head, and Bladewalker picked up her chin. Lethe turned to look her right in the eyes from a distance the width of a sword blade. "A woman hero. Someone taking the place that rightfully belongs to them. They'll string us up by our guts."

"T'ain't like it'd kill you," Bladewalker pointed out.

Lethe laughed softly. "It'd hurt, and believe me, I'm not eager for it. Listen to me." Bladewalker inclined her head in assent. "No man I've ever met is going to take kindly to stories of an apostate woman who leaves over her trade of warrioring to defend the weak. And scholars are worse than soldiers or priests--scholars don't have a sense of manhood anyhow."

"It'll be impossible to find," Bladewalker said with a stubborn set to her jaw.

"You've done the impossible before," Lethe reminded her, "and so have I."

So when they landed at Alexandria, Alcibiades and Skittles engaged the offloading crew for the olive oil, and Lethe stayed to watch the scrolls while Bladewalker went off in search of a scholar. As she stalked the bustling streets, she fumed. Lethe had so damned many preconditions to engaging a scholar; she should be the one doing this. But she had pointed out, rightly or wrongly, that it was probably better to have someone who didn't know the whole story make initial inquiries. The Romans were crawling over this place, and even if Lethe didn't make an offhand remark that landed them galley-bound in chains by nightfall, they would capture a prize indeed if they captured her and were able to identify her. Bladewalker was certain to have had a price on her head by this time, but it was sure to be less than Lethe's.

The first few men she talked to sent her to the midwife, the next to the devil. A gaggle of students sitting at the feet of a Pharisee refused to believe that a woman could be a scholar; she left them arguing the point loudly, with more heat than a coastal Egyptian city should be expected to endure. The Greeks shook their curly locks in incomprehension; the Romans she avoided entirely; the Egyptians looked down their noses at her, sniffing with disdain as if she smelled more like horse-clods than their noisy, crowded, polluted city by the docks.

It was while she was casting about fruitlessly among the scribblers in the marketplace that a mild-eyed Persian happened to set down his tally-board, giving the question some serious thought. He was a Zoroastrian, by his dress, and Bladewalker had heard good things about their exotically religious approach to reasonableness. "A woman, schooled in Greek," he mused, staring at a spot just above the crown of Bladewalker's head for a few heartbeats. He roused himself to ask her, "Which is more important to you, esteemed one, credentials or competence?"

It took Bladewalker a moment to sort out the question. "Competence."

"Ah, excellent," he said, seeming to warm to her a fraction. "In that case, I believe I can make a recommendation."

He gave her a name she protested must belong to a man. He assured her that the person to whom he was sending her was indeed a woman, offering the parting advice that she move up close, as the woman had gone profoundly nearsighted (all that squinting at documents). Bladewalker would find her in a taverna two streets over and three streets south, writing letters home for the Amazon gladiators currently the rage at the arena. Bladewalker left him a silver coin, which he attempted to refuse with gallantry until she insisted, a practiced haggle the exact opposite of what she was accustomed to.

She walked through the streets, located the taverna, and stepped inside, her foul mood somewhat tempered by her hope of finding this pseudo-scholar who seemed to know a great deal about the documentary requirements of tough, musclebound women.

A fancy-man in a lovely embroidered blue-and-gold robe looked up at her in inquiry when she walked through the door. "Something to drink, warrior?"

She shook her head. "I'm lookin' for Makionus."

He indicated the back of the tavern with a graceful wave of his hand, and she clomped past in her boots.

At a table in the back, next to an open window that poured in bright Egyptian sunlight, a gray-haired woman bent over a parchment, carefully drawing letters on it with a goose-feather quill. There couldn't possibly be two of them, so Bladewalker made her way to the table and leaned over it on her hands. Her shadow blocked the sunlight, and the woman stopped writing and lifted her eyes to Bladewalker's face.

"I'm in need of a scholar," Bladewalker told her.

The woman looked startled, staring up at Bladewalker as if she'd never seen anyone with blue eyes before, which was possible. Then she pushed the hair out of her eyes with an ink-stained hand and began to speak. "The Priestess of the Dual Goddesses made it to Alexandria safely, and she has gone home. To find it, sail far to the west along the African coast, well past Carthage and Camarata and Tingi, even, turning south along the coast, until you get to a port called Sapphi. That is where she will be waiting for you."

* * *

September 18, 2007

They had traveled through husks of forest, past hollowed-out homes and crisped fields. The roads were deserted and the smell of burnt wood came in waves through the open windows of the car. The landscape was either blackened or accentuated with piles of gray timber and heaps of ash. It made you think about gagging. Not a way to see Evia on your first trip.

Xe parked the car and was out, slamming the door, before JLynn got her seatbelt off. She hurried across the road, carefully looking both ways, but Xe plunged ahead with forceful strides, paying no attention to traffic, as if she knew the little sedans would leap out of her way.

"Hey!" Xe shouted, hauling off her sunglasses to reveal grim eyes. "Lena!"

From a doorway across the road, a blonde woman emerged. She was wearing capris and flipflops, and her shirt was knotted just below her breasts. She ran toward the road as gracefully as is possible in loose rubber soles, then threw her arms around Xe's neck. Xe took her into a tight embrace, and the two of them rocked back and forth for a few moments. JLynn studied the blonde. This was the woman who had gotten her to fly all the way from California?

"You OK?" Xe asked. Lena nodded against her neck. "Anatole?"

"He's fine. I sent him north because he wouldn't stop crying, that asshole," Lena said. "Serves him right; it's flooding there." She pulled away and took a good look at Xe. "You look skinny, damn you. Who's feeding you?"

"My mother," Xe said shortly. "Maggie sends her love and she's sorry she can't be here. What the f*ck happened?"

"The English papers, they call it 'arson'," Lena replied.

JLynn, remembering what they'd seen on the drive from Athens, caught her breath, and Lena turned to her with a friendly, questioning look on her face. She got herself under control and stuck out a hand. "JLynn. I'm Xe's friend. From California."

"Girlfriend?" Lena inquired.

JLynn blushed and Xe grinned, "Not exactly."

"You ought to have a girlfriend by now," Lena scolded Xe. "World-class tit* going to waste in a one-woman bed. Haven't we lost enough?" She swept both of them up and turned them toward the doorway. "Come in, come in, I'm sorry we don't have any retsina, but all the government will send is beer. They say it travels better. Pfft! Beer doesn't travel worth sh*t. Not real beer."

Inside, JLynn saw Xe sigh with relief as her eyes lightened. It seemed like a regular enough room, but if you'd watched your entire island burn, she guessed having a place with no scorch marks felt like a win. Lena nodded in the direction of the bar, and Xe and JLynn obligingly took seats. "Seems like it was pretty bad around here," JLynn commented.

"Hell," said Lena, pulling two cans of beer from an Igloo and handing them to Xe and JLynn. "That's what it was, hell. I can see why they said fire was what hell was made out of. All the olives are these sad little lumps of charcoal and everyone's lost goats and sheep. A lot of the people are elderly, and now they haven't got sh*t. No home, no food, no money."

"The funding ought to be coming through shortly," Xe said unobtrusively, sipping her beer.

"Yeah, to those same worthless f*ckers who stole it all the last time," Lena said. She remarked helpfully to JLynn, "The government is boooulsheet." JLynn nodded in enlightenment, and Lena went on, "Ruined the economy, f*cked us over with graft and corruption, left us to die in the flames, and then these cheesebrains went and reelected them." Xe reached for her hand, and Lena gave her a weak smile and patted it. "And this in the goddamn cradle of democracy. I'm so pissed."

"Happens to us too," JLynn said sympathetically. She thought a moment and added, "A lot."

Xe sat back and set her beer onto the edge of the bar. "What can we help you with, Lena?"

Lena's eyes went soft. "Listen, one the neighbor guys... old guy, you'd've liked him, he reminds me of Maggie... he didn't make it."

"I'm sorry," Xe said. There was an odd note of neutrality in her voice, and JLynn wondered what was happening.

Lena leaned forward and lowered her voice. "He was trying to protect the temple."

JLynn could see Xe's jaw tighten.

Lena looked Xe right in the eye. "We have to get back there."

"So go," Xe snapped.

"We can't find it."

"Small island," Xe shot back.

JLynn leaned to the side and tapped Xe on the arm. "Hey, Xe, lighten up a little." Xe's muscles were tight enough to snap. "These people have lost their houses."

"We've lost a helluva lot more than that," Lena said, not looking away from Xe. Xe turned to stare out the window, and Lena's hand shot out. Xe's head whipped around, and she stared at Lena. Lena's fist closed around Xe's necklace, a beautiful little wooden disk JLynn had noticed her wearing constantly since about five years before. "Listen to me, jerk," Lena said. "That place is thousands of years old, thousands. It's been swept clean hundreds of times. Invaders, looters, kids. And in all that time, this just happened to keep getting overlooked? Uh-uh. She left it for you. Because She chose you to find that place. Have you maybe got a f*cking clue why?"

She was keeping her voice low, but it shook with anger or fright, JLynn wasn't sure which.

Xe shook her head. "Not possible. Not possible."

"Damn you, Aida," Lena growled, "to you this is just some TV legend. To me, it's my goddamn history. And only a gay girl can find it."

JLynn wondered if it would be possible to get back to the Athens airport by herself.

Xe stuck her elbow on the bar, closed her eyes, and stuck her chin in her palm. "This is not happening," she whispered.

Lena leaned back and sighed, "Yeah, well, I suppose it came as a surprise to Wonder Woman too." She added mischievously, "And when she'd gotten used to being gay, there was that whole saving-the-world thing..."

Xe laughed, shaking her head. "OK, OK, you've talked me into it." She turned to JLynn. "I'll apologize right now, OK? It'll save some time."

* * *

Lena didn't lock the door. "What the hell for? It's only government beer, and it's--"

"Boooulsheet," Xe told her with a grin. "So you mentioned." She opened the back door of the little sedan and Lena took her hand as she lowered herself into the seat like Greek royalty. JLynn lifted an eyebrow at Xe across the top of the car. In return, Xe tossed the keys over the roof to her.

"But--"

"You get to drive," Xe said, opening the passenger-side door.

"But--"

"This is Greece, JLynn," Xe interrupted. "Technically, they drive right, but as I've pointed out, this is Greece, so it's not like there really is a 'side'."

"But--"

Xe patted the driver's seat with a charming co*ckeyed smile. "Get in, sweetie."

She's European, she's European, it's no big deal, just get behind the wheel and do what she says... JLynn gave her a smile that felt sickly, then opened the door and slid in. She spent a couple moments checking where everything was, on the car as well as her person, and slipped the key into the ignition.

Bravado was called for. "So, ace," she said to Xe, "where we headed?"

Xe spread her hands. "No f*ckin' clue. Athena's in charge. Isn't it great?"

"Oh, I'm reassured, all right," JLynn muttered, pulling the car into the road.

* * *

Xe slipped her sunglasses on and leaned forward, arms folded over the dash, studying the road. JLynn caught Lena's eyes in the rear-view and smiled at her. Lena smiled back.

Navigating the road wasn't too bad; there didn't seem to be any goats out wandering loose, and as long as she went slowly, she felt like she could handle it. There wasn't a lot of other traffic on the road. It occurred to her that checking with the navigator was a good idea. "We going the right way?" she asked Xe.

Xe shrugged, not turning her head. "Far's I know. Maggie's the one with the GPS in her brain."

"Maggie's not here right now," JLynn said.

"Thanks for the reminder," Xe said, flashing a quick smile. JLynn felt a little like a jackass, but the point was that this whole thing had a very odd vibe and no one was telling her anything. Where were they going? She checked the gas gauge, a little nervous. It had what looked like three-quarters of a tank. Small sedan, three passengers, the island wasn't very big and they were close to the northern end... maybe if they got into trouble they could walk away from it.

She glanced at Xe, who was still leaning forward, the seatbelt curving around two reasons Lena didn't think she should be sleeping alone. JLynn could certainly understand the sentiment--she redirected her attention out the windshield, puffing a little sigh.

JLynn had noticed a change in her, an air of determination, something more serious than her fun-loving buddy from the early days of the Wall. Xe now had a purposeful look, unlike the shy, beautiful girl she'd been when they first met. It seemed almost as if the chaotic fog that swirled about her life had receded, leaving a new clarity to her thought, a new confidence in her step. Womanhood looked good on her.

They were headed north along the road that ran parallel to the sea, and blue water danced with sunlight to their left. To their right was devastation, the evidence of fiery destruction going on kilometer after kilometer.

"Up here," Xe murmured abruptly, and JLynn almost went through the roof of the sedan. While she tried to swallow her heart back into place between her lungs, Xe added, "This right. The next right."

JLynn turned the car down what looked like a single-lane pathway with haphazard blacktopping. The turn became a hairpin, and JLynn hastily hauled on the wheel, turning the car like a horse and sending it up an incline. The car slewed a bit, and JLynn slowed down. She caught her breath as the car came under control again.

"Maybe you ought to move here," Lena recommended from the back seat. "You already drive like a local."

JLynn muttered an apology, glancing into the rearview mirror just in time to catch a wink from Lena. She chuckled, relaxing a little.

The road had seen some damage from the fire; the tree trunks were scorched to a height almost her own, and many of them had faded, half-dead leaves. Blackened roots stuck up through cracks in the road. The undergrowth was charred. A haze clung to the road in spots, an almost greasy-seeming fog. The smell of burning was acrid, and the urge to gag hit her again.

"Here," Xe said, her low voice nearly a purr.

This time, JLynn was prepared, and she hit the brakes cautiously. The car came to a stop. "Where?" she asked, turning to Xe, who pointed toward the left side of the road. JLynn turned. A little wooden sign, nearly black from smoke and flame, leaned drunkenly against a tree trunk. For a moment, they stared at it, the car purring quietly.

"That?" Lena exclaimed from the back seat. "That's just the sign for the old Owl's Roost Tavern. It's not there any more."

Xe turned in the seat with a mischievous smile. "Lena, tell me something. Would you do Brad Pitt?"

"Would I?" Lena's eyes brightened, and JLynn could see her reaction in the rear-view. "And leave nothing for that skinny bitch with the collagen!"

JLynn was certain Xe would paste her one for blaspheming--Angelina was serious business--but all Xe did was laugh. "Then leave the navigating to Athena's gay girls, hm?"

"I know when I'm licked," Lena muttered. "Or not." She favored JLynn with a regal wave of her hand. "Onward, driver."

"You got it," JLynn grinned. She was starting to enjoy herself, and something else had crept in under it: excitement.

The next left turn hardly surprised her when it appeared, and she took it without prompting, glancing a question at Xe, who nodded. The quiet smile didn't leave her face.

JLynn regretted her choice when the road narrowed, heading down into a little valley. The damage was appalling: she couldn't see anything green here at all. The road grew ruts, and she struggled with the wheel. The car bumped and rattled, and JLynn began to fret about the damage waiver on the rental.

"OK," Xe said, her voice barely audible, and JLynn brought the car cautiously to a stop on what appeared for all the world like a path for goats. Xe turned to give her a look, eyes unreadable beneath the sunglasses. She spent a few seconds studying JLynn, who got nervous under the scrutiny and opened her mouth to say something.

"Herstory," Xe whispered, then popped the door handle and got out smoothly.

JLynn turned off the car and climbed from the driver's seat. Lena emerged from the back, and both of them turned to stare at Xe, who was crunching through the blackened undergrowth with steady steps, heading into apparent wilderness.

"Hey--" JLynn called, grabbing Lena by the elbow and hurrying to catch up. By the time they'd gone ten yards, they saw where Xe was headed.

It was a square of tumbled rock, ancient wear and fresh scorch marks, the blocks of worn stone arranged and rearranged over centuries by marauders, wind, rain, pilfering, fire. Stories told in what was missing, history written in the spaces between the letters.

And Xe was headed right for it. JLynn started to tell her not to despoil a treasure of the human race. That was when a hand crept over her mouth. JLynn looked at Lena, eyebrows raised and mind churning, but Lena just shook her head briefly and took her hand away.

JLynn stuck her hands in her pockets and watched.

Xe stepped over one of the stones like she owned the place. She walked along the inside of what was left of the square, her footsteps crunching against what was assuredly loose charcoal. JLynn took a few steps closer, moving past rubble and scattered blocks of what looked like marble. The grass was completely destroyed. Xe shaded her eyes with her hand, looking into the distance. As far as JLynn could see, in the valley shaped like an amphitheater, there was nothing other than what used to be vegetation and was now toast.

JLynn lifted a foot cautiously over the stones and maneuvered herself into the square. The floor, some kind of marble, was intact. Mostly. The lines between the tiles were impressively straight, if you discounted the crumbling edges. Maybe they'd known about chalk lines. She walked across crispy wisps of grass, certain she was annihilating some archeological marvel with every step.

She caught up with Xe, who was standing with her hands on her hips, looking around her. JLynn studied her for a moment, then touched her arm, ready for whatever she might say.

"I can't find it," Xe murmured. She glanced behind her, sighing in self-disgust. "So much for the mystical powers of lesbianism."

Lena was standing outside the square, hands folded, watching them with intent casualness.

"What is it, exactly, that you're looking for?" JLynn asked in a low voice.

"Hell," Xe snorted, "if I knew what it was I'd know where to find it." She turned her back on the square and peered into the distance.

"Maybe you're not quite gay enough," JLynn offered. Xe gave her a look she recognized from the old days, and JLynn smiled with relief. "Let's go back to the bar in Athens and do a purification ritual with that blonde from Oslo." Xe chuckled and rubbed her chin with her hand. "Come on," JLynn said, the excitement rising in her, "you're Wonder Woman. You think flashing Athena would help?"

Xe grinned at her and took off her sunglasses. "More than any of your suggestions so far." She shook her head ruefully. "Damn it, I was so sure when we got here..." She looked into the distance again, frowning with concentration.

"Is it... it is over there, maybe?" JLynn asked, pointing vaguely in the direction Xe was looking.

* * *

They were back in the car moments later, and Xe was leaning forward against the dash again. JLynn took the car carefully along the bike path, trying not to jostle the passengers or the suspension, and they began to climb out of the valley.

"Where does it go?" JLynn asked Xe in a murmur. She didn't get an answer; Xe's eyes were scanning the landscape, and it didn't quite seem as though she had enough available attention for her ears. JLynn pitched her voice to reach the back seat. "Where does it go?"

Lena leaned forward and put a hand on JLynn's arm. "I'm not sure. I've lived here all my life and I've never seen this place."

"That's reassuring," JLynn muttered.

The car coughed and growled its way up the path, which was obviously meant for footed vehicles. Lena put her hands on the headrests and hauled herself toward the dash, peering out at the hill up which the car was struggling. Everything in sight had been burnt, and the sound of the tires jouncing and crunching over the ashen undergrowth was audible over the noise of the engine. They neared the top of the hill. JLynn began to calculate how much a small sedan was worth to a Greek car rental agency.

None of them spoke until the car had bounced onto a wide gravel pathway at the top of the hill. JLynn pulled the car cautiously onto the gravel, then turned in the seat to look at where they'd just been. She regretted it instantly. She turned back to Xe with a bright, artificial smile.

"Where to?"

Xe pointed out the windshield, and JLynn turned. The gravel path led into some charred woods, and at the very end, tumbling over the rocks of another hill, was a misty little waterfall set in the greenest patch of mossy clover JLynn had ever seen.

* * *

JLynn pulled the sedan forward slowly enough that she needed the sound of the tires crunching on the gravel to convince herself that it was really moving. After a few moments, she stepped softly on the brake. Xe gave her a questioning look, and JLynn shook her head with a frown. "I don't think it's right," she whispered.

Xe put a hand on JLynn's. The warmth was comforting. "Listen, Jay, it's all right... we're supposed to be here--"

"Not that," JLynn interrupted, keeping her voice so low that Lena leaned forward to hear her. "The car. We're not supposed to bring a car in there."

Xe turned to look at Lena, and Lena looked at Xe, then opened her door, making hardly any noise. Xe nodded to JLynn, and she put the transmission into Park. She turned off the engine and took out the key, breathing silently in relief.

"Ready?" murmured Xe.

JLynn nodded, conveying more certainty than she actually felt, and opened her door. Her heart raced like she'd been running. Xe opened the door and got out without a sound. The three of them closed the doors gently, and JLynn, feeling absurdly American and young and idiotic and inadequate, locked the car.

Around them, everything was silent but the distant thunder of the waterfall; no birds, no rustle of leaves, no waving of grass. The burned area extended a bit of the way into the woods, but only a bit; ten paces beyond where they were standing, the greenery began, as abruptly as if the grass and trees had been spray-painted.

Lena nodded toward the little waterfall. Xe opened her mouth to say something, but shut it and turned. They walked away from the car. JLynn turned to give it a glance as they went.

Their feet landed on the greenery. It was springy and soft. The three of them walked down the path shoulder to shoulder, with JLynn in the middle. Lena reached up and unfastened the delicate little necklace that held her crucifix, then folded it into her hand.

"Sure you want to do that?" Xe whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

Lena nodded, not looking away from the waterfall. "Someone else claims this place," she murmured, slipping the crucifix into the pocket of her capris.

JLynn's hands began to tingle, and she shook them a little. The noise from the waterfall grew louder as they approached. The grass was soft and short, liberally interspersed with some soft moss and what looked like cups of clover, green as Ireland. The waterfall tumbled into a lovely pond comprising several clear little pools, the water eddying past enormous semisubmerged moss-covered boulders into glassy dimples here and there. They stopped before the pond, the three of them standing in a line, and looked around them.

The pond was framed by a half-ring of irregularly-spaced oaks, stubby and majestic, like sentinels standing watch over this peaceful little spot. From here, they could see no evidence of a fire.

"Why didn't it burn?" Xe murmured, removing her sunglasses and studying the landscape with a frown of attention.

"I'm not so sure it's really here," JLynn whispered.

"Or us," Lena added in a mutter.

"Oh, we're here, all right," Xe said, still scanning for something. She took a few slow, cautious steps toward the pond, then crouched in the grass and stuck her fingertips into the water experimentally. She looked up at the waterfall.

JLynn and Lena looked at one another, then joined Xe, hunkering next to her. "Feel it," Xe murmured, running her fingers through the water. "It's cold. And... soft." JLynn reached for the water. The cold shocked her fingertips. Beside her, Lena was swishing her hand through the water and grinning at Xe. The waterfall drummed in their ears and under their feet, and JLynn had a brief, abrupt auditory hallucination of a choir of women's voices.

"That sky," murmured Xe, lifting her head. The sunlight glowed on her skin and haloed her hair. JLynn looked up, not really wanting to take her eyes from Xe. Far above them, a clear bright blue sky arched like a bowl. "What time does the moon rise?" Xe asked.

"You're asking me?" Jlynn grinned, and the two of them chuckled softly.

"What are we... what are we supposed to do?" Lena asked.

Xe looked at JLynn, who smiled back at her. "I don't know," Xe said finally. "What does the bard think?"

"You're asking me?" JLynn replied, and the three of them giggled like little girls. JLynn got to her feet and rubbed the last few drops of water over her hands. It was cold and refreshing. "What's over there?" she asked, pointing toward the waterfall.

"A lot more of this," Lena laughed, squinting up at her as she waggled her hand in the water.

"OK," Xe said, getting to her feet, "so there's our next stop." She leaned over to offer a hand to Lena and help her to her feet, and Lena murmured a thank-you of some variety, flushing a bit and not meeting Xe's eyes. Xe nodded toward the path that led to the waterfall, and the three of them trooped across the soft, clover-spotted grass.

The greenery gave way to a smooth path of rock that must have been very inviting to walk on barefoot during hot weather. They followed the curve of the pond. The waterfall got louder as they approached, and finally they were standing beside it. JLynn followed the tumbling rush of the water as it free-fell, smacking into white-lace spray against the rocks and splattering into the pond. The ripples went all the way across, nervous and jittery close to the waterfall, calm and stately by the time they got to the other side of the pond.

Xe ducked under the water. JLynn gasped and reached for her, and her hands closed on air. Something grabbed her wrist, and she fought for a second before getting pulled forward.

She found herself standing on sand, and the sound of the waterfall was very loud. Her eyes adjusted to dimness, and she looked around at a little dry-floored cave. The air was soft, motionless, and sweet. Xe was standing by the waterfall, hands on her hips, grinning.

"All right, you two, not funny," Lena called. Xe and JLynn broke into another fit of the giggles.

Xe stuck her hand out and waved it. "Here, Lena, take my hand." She pulled back, and Lena popped into the cave. Lena looked around, her mouth dropping open.

The three of them wandered around for a while. The water passed a surprising amount of light through to the cave, and as they grew accustomed to the odd water-filtered light, they found they could see. "Amazing," JLynn breathed.

"Incredible," Xe whispered. "Magic. Pure f*cking magic."

"What a place to neck!" Lena exclaimed. JLynn and Xe stared at her, and Lena blustered, "I thought you people were supposed to be the last romantics."

"You know," Xe said conversationally to JLynn, "this is the real reason she invited us here. See Greece, have a hot girl-on-girl three-way in a mystical cave behind a magical waterfall."

"Life isn't so much without impossible dreams," Lena shrugged. JLynn blushed to her hairline. Lena stuck her hands in the pockets of her capris and walked around, looking at the walls. Xe went to the other side of the cave and began scuffing the sand with her feet.

"What are we looking for?" Jlynn asked. The chorus of women's voices wafted back to her for an instant, and she thought she saw Xe co*ck her head a little, like she was listening.

"This isn't a place to neck," Xe murmured, "it's a place to fall in love. Real love, the kind that persists past distance and sorrow, that lasts lifetime after lifetime and changes the destiny of the race..." JLynn watched Xe warily; she didn't sound much like an international financier. She sounded, in fact, a lot like JLynn when she was writing a romance.

"Look here," Lena said. Xe and JLynn turned. Lena was standing near the back of the cave, where two passages split off and traveled back into the hill. Lena was standing next to a hollowed block of stone that looked uncannily like a table. Xe and JLynn joined her. JLynn ran her hands over the surface, which was dry but a little dusty.

"How long has it been since anybody's been here?" JLynn asked. Xe shrugged and crouched, steadying herself with a hand on the table as she looked underneath it. She moved abruptly deeper under the table, and JLynn nearly jumped out of her skin. "Jesus, Xe," she hissed, "be careful! There could be spiders under there!"

"Ugh," Lena said from the heart, "spiders."

"Oh, don't be such cheerleaders," Xe said scornfully, her voice a little muffled by the stone. "Found something."

She emerged from under the table with a handful of something white. She took it to the waterfall, and JLynn and Lena followed her. Xe rubbed the sand from the whatever-it-was and turned it back and forth on her palm. It was a solid ivory-colored mass, flat on one end and rounded on the other, and it fit comfortably in Xe's curved hand. Designs were etched on the surface in delicate black lines: on one side a circle inside another circle, with a pattern running in between, and on the other a set of delicate elongated characters that looked like, of all unlikely things, Chinese.

"What the hell is this thing?" Xe whispered, turning it over and over in her hands. Lena shrugged and shook her head.

JLynn put out a finger and touched it. It was warm from Xe's hand. "I know what it is," JLynn said softly. "It's scrimshaw."

* * *

It was two days and many hours of discussion later when the car passed its inspection back at the rental agency. The clerk handed JLynn her receipts with a cheerful farewell. She waited until they got to the terminal to wipe her forehead, and Xe grinned at her.

Lena put a hand softly on the carryon JLynn had slung over her shoulder. "Take care of it, will you?"

JLynn folded her hands over the strap of the bag and nodded. "Thanks for everything, Lena. We'll let you know what we find out."

"And look after her, will you?" Lena said, jerking a thumb at Xe.

"I will," JLynn assured her.

"This one takes a lot of looking after," Lena said with a gleam in her eye. Xe started to protest but shut right up when Lena stuck her thumbs in Xe's belt loops, pulled her close, and gave her the kind of goodbye kiss that convinces you to give up your citizenship and stay. Xe's eyelids fluttered closed, and she swayed backwards a bit. JLynn held up a hand to keep her from falling and enjoyed the show.

Lena pulled away, gave Xe a knowing smile, and announced, "'Bye." She turned and walked down the hallway, soon swallowed up in the crowd.

JLynn turned to Xe with what she was certain was a wicked look. "Shall we get aboard before you have a chance to seduce every other woman in Greece by dancing backwards?"

Xe ran shy fingers over her mouth, staring down the hall in the direction Lena had disappeared. "She has been married a really long time," she whispered.

JLynn put a hand on Xe's shoulder and spoke ruminatively. "Maybe she's not so straight after all."

Xe's head whipped toward her. "Don't frighten me."

JLynn laughed, scooped her friend into some semblance of coherence, and got her onto the plane.

Some weeks later, JLynn was in a green drop-top Saab, driving toward a Chinatown antique shop with the precious piece of ivory in a well-padded shoulder bag and Blackie bellowing "Hey Ya" along with Outkast. For a hip hop-crazed San Franciscan, she drove very well, and JLynn leaned her head back on the headrest and grinned into the soft blue sky.

* * *

The little bell on the door jingled as they walked in. Blackie shut the door cautiously behind her, and JLynn kept her hand tight on the strap of the bag as she looked around. The shop had a lovely polished wood floor, and odd bits of fussy, delicate, carven furniture with gilding and bright paint stood grouped in simulations of the sorts of living rooms in which only the best-behaved people could sit without destroying something priceless and irreplaceable. Gleaming display cases of glass and wood held a selection of the kind of things you could only put on a Nob Hill mantelpiece: figurines, cloisonne dragons, miniature musical instruments in exquisite detail, tasseled hangings with unreadable inscriptions in gorgeous jewel-bright embroidery. Blackie wandered around, peering into the display cases with unobtrusive curiosity. JLynn was afraid to move: the stuff looked like it would crumble if you breathed on it funny.

"Can I help you?"

JLynn whirled, nearly realizing her apprehension. She stumbled away from the ornate marble-topped table with the carved dragon legs, trying not to knock anything over. Blackie had her hand out and was approaching the counter. "Hi, you must be Chen-chi. I'm Blackie."

"Good to meet you." The girl standing before them was tall, willowy, and dressed in a formfitting gown of sumptuous cerise silk, accessorized by a faceful of piercings, chic wire-rimmed glasses, and wildly spiked hair whose tips matched her dress. She looked like she'd stepped off a Milan runway, and her speech marked her as thoroughly American. She took Blackie's hand and shook it firmly, then looked a question at JLynn.

"JLynn," she murmured, holding out a hand. Chen-chi's grip was strong, and JLynn wondered if she might be a videogamer.

"You had something to show us?" Chen-chi inquired.

JLynn wasn't certain about etiquette, but this sounded pretty direct coming from the proprietor of a Chinese antique shop. "Yeah," she said, putting the bag carefully on the counter and opening it. Chen-chi reached for a little black velvet pad, laying it out next to the bag, and JLynn pulled out the piece of scrimshaw and laid it on the cloth.

"Hm," said Chen-chi. Her eybrows went up--it looked like an effort, because of all the rings--and she leaned over to study the ivory, looking like a neon-pink crane. She picked up a pair of white cotton gloves and drew them onto her hands, then gestured to the ivory. "May I?"

"Be my guest," Jlynn said.

Chen-chi picked up the piece and studied it. "Sperm-whale tooth, obviously. Very well preserved--I'd almost say it's a repro, 'cept the designs are in India ink and the fakes usually use soot with a wax coating. This one's clean, though. Where'd you get it?"

"Greece," JLynn said flatly.

Chen-chi looked at her over the tops of her glasses. "How'd you get it past Customs?"

JLynn gave her a conspiratorial smile. "I told 'em I'd brought it with me, part of my medicine bag."

"Religious piece," Chen-chi said, looking impressed. "You'd need it when you were getting on the big scary airplane. Nice!"

"Where'd you get that one from?" Blackie asked, leaning on the counter on one elbow and grinning at JLynn.

"Bladewalker," JLynn said, and Blackie laughed.

Chen-chi flipped the piece over, and Blackie leaned in closer, pointing at the lettering. "What does it say? Can you read it?"

Chen-chi shrugged. "Not a frickin' clue. It's not Chinese."

"Korean?" JLynn guessed, and Chen-chi and Blackie favored her with looks that were pitying and astonished. "Not so much, then," she muttered, feeling the blood creep into her face.

"NP," Chen-chi told her. "It's not anything I recognize. Lemme get Grandma on this." She turned to bellow into the back, "Grandma! Consultation!"

Blackie mouthed "Grandma?" at JLynn while Chen-chi's back was turned. JLynn tried not to laugh.

A curtain at the rear of the antique shop parted, and through it came an elderly Asian woman bent nearly double with age and infirmity, which made her about the height of Blackie's kneecap. She was wizened, her eyes nearly invisible beneath a lifetime of wrinkles, and she was wearing a simple short-sleeved white blouse, black slacks that hung from her tiny frame, and slippers.

"You sound like an ox," she said dismissively, waving a gnarled-knuckled hand in Chen-chi's direction. "Girls don't know how to talk sweet any more. No suitor marry a girl sound like she drive trash truck."

"She sounds like my grandmother," JLynn whispered to Blackie.

"Complete with heterocentrism," Blackie agreed.

Chen-chi had obviously heard the rap before, and she ignored it with patient grace. "Hey, Grandma, look at this." She laid the piece of scrimshaw into the old woman's cupped hands. Grandma peered at it, bending even lower toward the floor. JLynn was afraid she would topple and break herself, and the ivory, into a million pieces.

"Huh," said Grandma. She looked up at JLynn and Blackie, searching their faces with sharp dark eyes. "Where you get this?"

"Greece," JLynn said, her face flushing all over again.

"You no steal?" asked Grandma suspiciously.

"Of course not," Chen-chi snapped. "Do they look like Enron management?" JLynn and Blackie exchanged a look. Holiday dinners must've been interesting at Grandma's house.

Grandma studied the circle inside the circle, then shrugged, a movement like bird's wings. "I do not know the design." She turned it over, and her hands froze. JLynn's heart sped up.

"Huh," said Grandma softly, looking down at the elongated characters. She balanced the scrimshaw in one hand, dug in her pocket, and emerged with a cellphone. She flipped it open one-handed, framed a shot, and squinted at the result. Then she turned over the piece and took another quick shot. She dialed one-handed, sending the pictures somewhere, then punched in a number and had a rapid-fire conversation in Chinese. "Yah, yah, I call you later," she nodded, then snapped the phone shut and gazed up at JLynn and Blackie. "My researcher take a look. You take piece to university?"

Blackie looked at JLynn, and JLynn looked back at her. "Ah--no," she admitted. "We didn't think of that."

"Good," grunted Grandma. "Keep away from them. They only want get publish, get tenure."

"We'll keep that in mind," Blackie said, obviously warming to Grandma, who shrugged.

"I do you favor," Grandma said, as if this were no big deal, "you do me favor. Yes?"

"If we can," JLynn said cautiously.

"My Chen-chi," Grandma said, reaching far up to pat the hand of the granddaughter who was twice as tall as she, "she earn good living, smart, pretty. Real catch."

"Grandma!" Chen-chi cried, scandalized.

"She a little loud," Grandma said, waving a hand dismissively, "but means healthy lungs. You maybe find good girl to introduce? No bi-curious, just gay girl, yes?"

Blackie's face split in a grin, and JLynn and Chen-chi blushed shiny scarlet, gesturing helplessly in a semaphore of embarrassment. "It's possible," Blackie told Grandma, then turned to Chen-chi. "What are you doing Friday night?"

"Killing an evil old woman," Chen-chi muttered.

* * *

Three days later, JLynn's cellphone rang while she was in the middle of the checkout at the grocery store. It was a San Francisco number, but it wasn't Blackie, and she stared at it in puzzlement before answering.

The voice on the other end was mature, cultured, unhurried. It belonged to a Mrs. Tan, who had gotten her name from Mrs. Chen at the antique store, and she wanted to know if JLynn and her friends were free for tea that weekend.

Mrs. Tan turned out to have one of the most intimidatingly nice homes JLynn had ever seen, all French Provincial, spotless floor-to-ceiling windows, and moire silk, and Mrs. Tan was a perfect match for it. She was in the only honest-to-God Chanel suit JLynn had ever laid eyes on--they really were pink and black, just like in the movies--and it was accessorized with a simple, elegant strand of pearls. JLynn found herself wishing that AngelRad was there; she'd have known how to handle the teacups, and the veneer of sophistication, without breaking either.

JLynn wasn't even in a skirt, and something about the delicate furniture and the fragile handles on the teacups convinced her that it would have been a good move tactically. Blackie, having not really gotten the idea that she was supposed to dress up, was in a pair of Dockers and a roomy hooded sweatshirt. RangerGrrl, who had come with them right from the airport, wore a pair of jeans and a button-down Oxford.

Mrs. Tan, however, greeted them as cordially as if they weren't dressed like her pool boy. She had lovely frosted hair that swept back in wings from a round, ageless face, and her speech and manner betrayed no sense of urgency. JLynn wondered if she'd gone through Northridge.

She sat them in her parlor--she had a parlor, unlike everyone else of JLynn's acquaintance up to that point--and asked each of them in turn idle-sounding questions. Mrs. Tan was deceptively casual; it turned out she remembered everything they told her, and made some educated guesses about the rest.

Eventually, the small talk meandered around to the topic at hand. "May I see the piece?"

JLynn opened her shoulder bag and took out the ivory, handing it to Mrs. Tan. "I see," she said, turning it over in her hands and studying the designs closely. She paid particular attention to the indecipherable characters on the back. "My, this is interesting," she said. She was entirely blase about what looked very much like the theft of an artifact from a world heritage site; JLynn had clammed up about the circ*mstances of Xe finding the scrimshaw, and she just knew Mrs. Tan thought they'd stolen it.

If she did, she didn't say a word about it. "Am I correct in assuming that you haven't been able to determine how the piece came to be where you found it?"

JLynn shook her head solemnly. "It was just there. The rest of the place was completely empty." RangerGrrl, sitting in a wingback to one side of the marble-topped mantelpiece, followed the conversation avidly, dark eyes alert and intent. Blackie, equally somber in a wingback to Mrs. Tan's left, leaned forward in her chair, fist cupped in her palm.

"It's a very rare piece," Mrs. Tan said. "Scrimshaw this old has generally yellowed and cracked with age, but this is still white." She was sitting upright, legs crossed at the ankles, and the sweet, nearly expressionless expression on her face made her look like an Asian version of Queen Elizabeth. "Mrs. Chen didn't recognize this circle design, and neither do I."

"What about the writing?" Blackie asked softly.

"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Tan, "I know exactly what it is." She lifted her face from the scrimshaw and beamed quietly at JLynn. "This is extremely rare. It's called Nu Shu."

* * *

"'New... Shoe'?" Blackie asked, waving a hand at her sneakers.

Mrs. Tan laughed. "Yes, it does sound like it, doesn't it? Shu is 'writing', and it's a word that forms the base of many more complex nouns. Nu is an adjective meaning 'belonging to women'."

RangerGrrl's eyes narrowed. "Women's... writing?"

Mrs. Tan nodded at her. "It's a form of script, very rare and almost obsolete, that was used exclusively by women to communicate with their friends. It originates in a lovely, rich place called Jiangyong County in Hunan province, in the eastern portion of south central China."

"Where Hunan food comes from," Blackie offered.

"Yes," said Mrs. Tan. "The most visible Chinese influence in America is culinary; there are more Chinese restaurants here than any other single type."

JLynn appreciated Mrs. Tan taking the comment seriously. "Why did they use it? The women?"

"That's an interesting story." Mrs. Tan turned the piece of scrimshaw over in her hands. "Jiangyong, like much of Hunan province, is a combination of mountainous terrain and fertile plains good for farming. It's always been a prosperous place, agriculturally, and the Han and Yao people who live there have historically led lives of relative comfort, with abundant and varied food." She turned to Blackie. "Hence the excellence of Hunan cuisine."

Blackie nodded, and JLynn was impressed all over again with Mrs. Tan's gracious, low-key sense of inclusion. Mrs. Tan handed Blackie the scrimshaw and continued. "Jiangyong, before the revolution, was a place where the division of labor between the genders was rigidly observed."

She didn't say "sexes", JLynn noted. "The men worked the fields," Mrs. Tan told them. "The area would grow crops so well that there was little need for the labor of every hand. So girls and women would stay at home doing nuhong. Hong means an art or a craft, and nu--" Mrs. Tan looked at JLynn.

"Women's crafts," JLynn said, startling herself.

"Excellent," Mrs. Tan replied, with another serene smile. JLynn sat forward, fascinated. "Nuhong meant spinning, weaving, tapestries, sewing, shoes. Usually, textiles--the sort of thing that's ephemeral."

"Welcome to women's art," RangerGrrl interjected. "Men usually build the things that last, like buildings and weapons, and that's why women's contributions to civilization are so easy to overlook."

"Precisely," Mrs. Tan told her, inclining her head in RangerGrrl's direction. Blackie lowered her head, studying the script on the scrimshaw closely. "The Jiangyong girls and women who did these crafts didn't do so alone--they had groups of friends who would work with them."

Blackie lifted her head. "Like a quilting bee or a sewing circle," she offered. "Like American women did on the prairie."

"Yes. It's characteristic of preindustrial societies that people gather to do crafts. It makes the work much easier if you have someone to share it with. Most crafts are collaborative. Learning to spin or weave isn't easy, and there's a lot of frustration until you acquire a level of skill in which you can have confidence," Mrs. Tan said. "The girls, especially, grew very close. In fact, they had a ritual recognizing their friendships. It was called jiebai zhimei, which is roughly translated as 'sisters of the heart'."

The three of them were paying rapt attention, and Mrs. Tan went on. "These friendships were analogous to the close companionships that arise between men in a battle zone. They persisted for an entire lifetime, and girls would remain heart-sisters as they grew into women."

"It sounds like heaven," JLynn murmured. "Women friends for life, getting together and forging art out of the raw material of a beautiful, rich landscape."

"I get that impression," Mrs. Tan told her. "It was the sort of place you'd never leave if you didn't have to."

"But they had to?" RangerGrrl asked quickly.

Mrs. Tan's face grew solemn. "Jiangyong girls most often married outside the community. They would go from that place, with their friends surrounding them and a life spent making soul-spanning art, into an entirely different form of Chinese culture, one that was far more common--arranged marriages with men they'd never met, bearing children and doing difficult labor under the heel of a bitter, dictatorial mother-in-law who ruled the roost and made their lives miserable."

"That's horrible," Blackie murmured, looking at the carefully-incised characters on the scrimshaw.

"Especially when your experience of women up to then was supportive," JLynn added, thinking hard. "It would've seemed like a complete betrayal of the way you'd lived your life."

"They gave vent to their misery," Mrs. Tan said, "in song. Music was the only way to fully express what they'd lost."

"Like 'Miss Celie's Blues' in The Color Purple," JLynn said, putting her elbow on the arm of the chair and resting her chin on her fist.

"I hadn't thought of that connection," Mrs. Tan said, looking enlightened, "but you're quite right--it's the same idea."

"So that's where this comes in?" Blackie asked, gesturing to the writing on the ivory.

"Indeed," Mrs. Tan said. "Chinese character writing is about the most challenging form of orthography known to the human race. It's not phonetic, it's representational. Nothing about it is easy, and it takes years to master. In the West, children learn penmanship until they're about ten; at that point, they've most probably mastered both block printing and cursive, and acquired the skill to make their handwriting legible to practically anyone. In China and Japan, it's a lifelong study. Here, writing is considered a basic skill all students can acquire, but in China, and to a lesser extent in Japan, it's seen as magic, and only the most gifted, dedicated students ever attain true mastery."

"So you could either learn to embroider," RangerGrrl mused, "or you could learn to write."

Mrs. Tan nodded. "It makes sense that if you're weaving or sewing, you don't have a lot of time left over to learn the difficult art of Chinese pictorial writing. But there's another aspect to this. Access to the art of pictography was highly controlled in pre-revolutionary Chinese society, and girls weren't permitted to learn it."

Blackie looked up from the scrimshaw with a grin. "Hell with that crap," she said brightly. "We'll just invent our own damn language."

JLynn covered her mouth with her hand and blushed, but Mrs. Tan broke into genteel laughter and rocked back in her chair, clasping her hands together. JLynn took her hand away. Mrs. Tan was looking at Blackie with a merry smile. "That's exactly the idea," Mrs. Tan told her. "The heart-sisters invented a script they could use to embroider the love songs they composed onto tapestries. They would send them to their friends, and that was how they kept in touch."

RangerGrrl stared unseeing into the fireplace. "You'd get a letter from your heart-sister and it would have this beautiful, heartbreaking song about how lonely she was without you..."

"Must've been hard to get one of them," Blackie said.

"And yet," JLynn added, "there's nothing you'd treasure more..."

The four of them were silent for a moment, thinking. Blackie and RangerGrrl exchanged a serious look, and JLynn knew exactly what was going through their minds: If I couldn't be with my clone, it'd damn near kill me. They were rich, modern women, able to extend their friendships with one another to love and even sex, and all they got was the occasional dirty look and continuing societal resistance to the idea of marrying one another. The girls of Jiangyong had made a little paradise for themselves, and losing paradise would have been too hard for JLynn to bear.

"Pre-revolutionary e-mail," JLynn blurted, without thinking. The others swiveled their heads in unison, looking at her.

Blackie was the first to break into a smile. "That's right," she said.

RangerGrrl held her hands up and made typing gestures as she spoke. "To Blackie at Jiangyong.com," she said. "I made up this song about you. 'Well, since my baby left me--'"

"'I found a new place to dwell,'" Blackie said, picking up the tune. She and RangerGrrl sang, "'It's out at the end of lonely street, that Heartbreak Hotel--'" Both of them stopped there, and the silence took them over again. The enormity of it hit JLynn: to be separated from one another, probably for life. Never to hear that voice again: no telephone, no meetings at airports, no hugs, the only remnant of the friendship a horribly sad piece of music you'd sing only when you were alone with your thoughts. Mrs. Tan looked from Blackie to RangerGrrl, a solemn sympathy in her eyes.

"That's so sad," RangerGrrl murmured. "I feel sorry for them."

"At least they found a way," Mrs. Tan said. "And look at it this way: you're living the lives they never had a chance to lead."

"That's a hell of a privilege," Blackie said.

"And a hell of a responsibility," RangerGrrl added.

"Do you know about the Chinese concept of futurity?" Mrs. Tan asked. The three of them shook their heads. "Well," said Mrs. Tan, "in Chinese folk religion, there's an idea that you can send messages back and forth through time. You don't even have to know who's going to get it; you just launch it somewhere and the right person will get it eventually."

"Like a time capsule?" JLynn asked.

"Precisely," Mrs. Tan said. "Also a privilege, and also a responsibility. It's an idea that has great power among the rural Chinese. So the proper response to that would be to find out what they're trying to tell you. May I?" She held out a hand, and Blackie gave her the scrimshaw. "So far, every piece of Nu Shu anyone knows about is on textile. I've never seen it used on whale ivory. I would imagine that that implies permanence."

"Can you read it?" JLynn asked quickly. She'd meant to ask a lot sooner, but the story had distracted her.

Mrs. Tan looked at the characters nestled in her palms and shook her head, not speaking. The room deflated.

"Do you know anyone who can?" RangerGrrl asked.

"I do, in fact," Mrs. Tan said, running her finger softly over the surface of the carving. "But I'd handle this with great care. You have an artifact a lot of scholars would be very interested in. The last native practitioner of Nu Shu died a few years ago at an advanced age. The Chinese government considers the rediscovery of Nu Shu an excellent propaganda piece. The bad old days, when women weren't permitted to follow their destiny, and aren't things better under the Maoist system, and so forth. There's a great deal of interest in the script now, and this piece is unlike anything we know about."

"So we send pictures," RangerGrrl said, lifting an eyebrow at JLynn in inquiry.

JLynn nodded, and Mrs. Tan replied, "A tracing would be even better. Scan the piece, trace the letters, and transmit only the tracing. I'd send only the minimum information. Not because of the scholars, but because of the government's interest in anything having to do with Nu Shu."

"We could always use an e-mail address just for that," Blackie offered.

"An excellent idea," Mrs. Tan agreed. "I'll put you in touch with a scholar I know. She's very capable and she specializes in Nu Shu studies."

"Is she here in town?" Blackie asked.

Mrs. Tan lifted her head with a beatific smile. "No," she said. "She lives in Jiangyong."

* * *

Mrs. Tan saw the three of them off from her doorstep, smiling and waving as though she were bidding farewell to three granddaughters who had dropped in to say hi on their way to a concert. Her elegantly casual air was in stark contrast to the last thing she'd said to them: I think it would be best if you were to avoid contacting me in the future.

Blackie took them to Home's in the Castro for some high-end mac-and-cheese. By unspoken agreement, each of them avoided suggesting a Chinese place. JLynn's hand was sweaty on the strap of her shoulder bag, in which nestled the priceless piece of ivory.

When the waitron had taken their order, Blackie and RangerGrrl regarded one another with identical serious expressions. "Wow," said Blackie, and RangerGrrl nodded.

JLynn put her elbow on the table and put her forehead in her hand. "What the hell are we gonna tell Xe?"

"How the hell are we gonna tell Xe?" Blackie said.

"That's right," RangerGrrl said, turning to JLynn. "I wouldn't put this in an e-mail or a phone call."

"Too easy to trace," agreed Blackie.

JLynn lifted her head and froze. There was an Asian woman at the next table, and she was looking directly at JLynn.

"Calm down," Blackie hissed out of the corner of her mouth. "Jesus, you act like you just killed somebody."

"Calm," JLynn whispered. "Right. I'm carrying a centuries-old mystery in my purse, a message engraved on a hunk of an extinct species in a completely indecipherable secret language used only by women. And one of my friends just happened to pick it up in a goddamn cave I suspect doesn't really exist, halfway around the world from where it was made. And a Communist government would be very interested in getting it so they could prove to the world that despite their track record of slaughtering millions of their citizens, they're really the most enlightened rulers on the planet. All that's left is sending my family the bill for the bullet. Yeah, calm. Sure."

While JLynn was speaking, RangerGrrl and Blackie rested their elbows on the table and their heads on their fists, turning to her like mirror images of one another. They heard her out patiently, then RangerGrrl said to Blackie, "Hopeless."

"Yeah," Blackie agreed. "She's no good at sneaky."

"Liberal parents," RangerGrrl said by way of speculation.

"We need somebody crafty," Blackie said.

"Secretive."

"Tricky."

"Underhanded."

"Sly."

"Who's the most devious person we know?"

Blackie grinned like a wolf. "A lawyer." She dug her cellphone out of her pocket and scrolled through the numbers, then selected one and held the phone to her ear.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" JLynn hissed.

Blackie gave her a smile that wasn't very reassuring. "Hey," she said into the phone. "This is Blackie in California. Yeah. Yeah. Good to talk to you too. Listen, I'd like to ask you something. Is the wife at home?"

* * *

It took a couple of months and much arranging, but eventually the three of them were waiting at the airport for the flight from Houston. It was, by coincidence, the winter solstice, and two women in black robes disembarked.

"Christ," JLynn whispered to Blackie, "that's not them, is it?" Blackie waggled her eyebrows, and JLynn shut her eyes and groaned at the ceiling. When she felt safe enough to look again, two other women were walking down the jetway through the crowd, moving toward them. The taller one was in jeans and a dark blue blazer, while the smaller one wore khakis and a featureless black polo shirt. The taller woman nudged the other and said something to her.

"That's them," Blackie said, her voice a little edgy. She led the way, and the two women stopped before them.

"Hey, you guys," said the taller woman, reaching for Blackie.

"Hey, McJohn," said Blackie, pounding her lightly on the back. "This is JLynn and RangerGrrl."

"Pleasure," said McJohn, giving JLynn a hug. "At long last." She turned to RangerGrrl and shook her head. "Whew."

"You guys look like sisters," Blackie said with a smile.

"My younger, prettier sister," grinned McJohn, enfolding RangerGrrl in a hug. "I didn't quite believe it."

"This is pretty spooky," RangerGrrl agreed.

"And this," said McJohn, turning to the silent woman next to Blackie, "is Story Doc."

"Welcome to San Francisco." Blackie put her arms around Story Doc. "From the way McJohn talks," she remarked, "I figured you'd be about seven feet tall."

Story Doc considered it. "I wish I had been," she said. "I wouldn't have to check the stepladder."

It seemed to JLynn as though Story Doc had been tempered by fire, as if continual illness and its attendant management had burned all the bullsh*t right out of her. For all her soft, round appearance, she was like a pillar of titanium. Intelligence roosted quietly in her blue eyes. She had a keen mind and a fearsomely insightful manner, and it would have been seriously intimidating if she hadn't also been funny as hell.

JLynn began her story in the rental car, with McJohn driving (awkwardly) and Story Doc listening. They had taken a hotel a half-mile from the airport, one with a good restaurant, so they didn't have much of a drive. Blackie and RangerGrrl met them at the hotel. McJohn accompanied the bellboy up to the room with the bags, and the others camped in the lobby, waiting for her to return.

JLynn filled Story Doc in on the rest. Story Doc listened with concentrated attention, arms crossed and hand on her chin, her eyes never looking away from JLynn. She had just gotten through the visit to Mrs. Tan when McJohn came back downstairs. Story Doc nodded to her, then turned back to JLynn. "So you don't know what it says?"

JLynn shook her head. "Mrs. Tan said we'd have to send a tracing to her professor friend in China."

"Hm," grunted Story Doc.

McJohn reached for her hand. "Ready for supper?" she asked.

The five of them ranged around the table, Blackie nursing a glass of excellent pinot noir and the others with iced tea and club soda. JLynn did a lot of the talking, which was just as well, because she was too nervous to eat much. It made her self-conscious to tell the story at all, much less to someone with the cerebral firepower of the quiet blue-eyed woman who listened with utter seriousness.

"So there's where we are," JLynn said by way of a wrap-up. "Xe begs me on her knees to go to Greece, of all weird things, when they're right in the middle of floods and forest fires and God knows what all, and we find a carved piece of whale jaw in some possibly imaginary spot, covered with a variant of Chinese pictography and with this weird circle-in-a-circle logo. Xe seems completely unsurprised that it's there--seems to know that she was gonna find it, in fact--and then just hands it to me and tells me to ask around Chinatown, like it was nothing. And the only person we've shown it to who has a faint idea of what it is tells me I'm carrying a state secret."

McJohn was leaning back in her chair, elbow on the armrest and chin on her hand. "If Xe had begged me for something on her knees, I don't know that I'd have been able to turn her down," she said with a smile. "Why didn't Maggie go with her? Those two are sutured together at the brain."

"Maggie's busy taking over Broadway," JLynn sighed.

"She is?" McJohn asked blankly.

"Yeah," JLynn said, with an admirable double-take. "She was understudying Lara Flynn Boyle in the revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Lara had to drop out and Maggie's been tearing it up. Didn't you know about that?"

McJohn and Story Doc looked at one another. McJohn turned to JLynn. "I have got to start spending more time on the Wall."

"OK," said Story Doc, "here's what you do. You have someone who knows how to engrave." She turned to RangerGrrl. "Find a place that'll let you make a porcelain tablet."

"Me?!" yelped RangerGrrl.

Story Doc nodded decisively. "Make a flat tablet, preferably in whatever they make porcelain out of. My guess would be some form of clay." Blackie raised an eyebrow, then nodded, with a makes-sense air. "Reproduce the marks on the scrimshaw and glaze them in black. Flip it over and do the same thing with the design of the circles."

"It's not the same shape as the scrimshaw," Blackie pointed out.

"You don't want it to be," Story Doc said. "There's always a possibility that what's important about it is the whale tooth itself, but you won't know until you get the writing translated. Score the tablet in quarters, like a soda cracker. Fire it, break it into four pieces, photograph each of the pieces, both sides. You can lay them out on a piece of printer's dummy paper, with registry circles, then whoever gets them can assemble them using the registry marks."

"Registry marks?" RangerGrrl asked.

"I'll send you some," Story Doc said. "You end up with eight photos, and you send each one to China separately."

"If the censors open the mail and find a photo of a piece of Nu Shu--" Blackie began.

"You don't send the pictures," Story Doc said. "You send files."

JLynn leaned forward. "JPEGS or TIFFs or something." Story Doc nodded. "What, you mean e-mail them?"

"By no means," said Story Doc. "It's too easy to trace files through e-mail servers. You'll have to find a way to get the files there physically."

McJohn was looking at Story Doc in admiration. "The first one comes in in someone's iPod. The next one on a CD of ancient Phoenician love songs. After that, you bury a flash drive in... in a pack of gum. You bring in a digital camera with three spare data cards, and one file's on one of them. And so on."

"Suppose Customs seizes them?"

Story Doc shrugged. "You send another one. One at a time, until they're all there and can be reassembled."

The three of them considered it. "How the hell do you get all eight files into China?"

McJohn folded her arms. A speculative look came over her face. "You would need a mule. Someone... someone special. Someone whose idea this was in the first place. Someone whose cleavage is so spectacular that she'll have been in the country for three days before it occurs to the Customs agents that they should have looked in her bag."

"I think," said JLynn ruminatively, "that I may just know someone who would do."

"Attagirl," grinned Story Doc.

* * *

It was a long winter for RangerGrrl, who was accustomed to long winters; this one seemed longer, because of the task she'd set herself. Story Doc had automatically assumed her competence, but RangerGrrl wasn't quite so certain about herself. "Of course you can," Story Doc told her. "We've got two pieces you engraved in the bookshelves in our office." McJohn, who had considerable experience with tackling things for which she had no native ability, advised RangerGrrl to start with a lengthy period of experimentation. That was what she had done, ordering clays and inks and tools over the Web from an online art-supply house against a prepaid account that was generously replenished on a regular basis, she never knew by whom.

Instead of porcelain, she had decided on a polymer art clay that would remain soft (and, thus, easy to work with) until it was baked, which she could do at home (and, thus, avoid awkward questions if she took pieces to the university's kiln). She spent several weeks of cold evenings by the picture window in the living room, experimentally pressing letters into the clay using a variety of tools and techniques, until she felt confident that she was ready for a trial run at the actual piece.

She finished her first try at two a.m. on a Sunday morning in January, while snow fizzed and spat against the window at her elbow and the valley laid out below was a mystical lumpy blue shadow through the frost on the glass. RangerGrrl blinked the blur from her tired eyes and got to her feet, her knees creaking and the ache in her shoulder settled into permanence. The flat sheet of clay lay in the baking tray, protected from the metal surface by a sheet of baking parchment, and looking up at her was an India-ink version of the circle-in-a-circle design she'd become intimately familiar with over the past few weeks. On the other side, nestled snugly against the bottom of the baking tray, was a series of Nu Shu characters; she could also have drawn those in her sleep.

RangerGrrl shoved her glasses out of the way and rubbed her eyes, sighing with fatigue. When she settled her glasses into place and took another look, she realized that the circle-in-a-circle design was as exact a duplicate of the original as anyone could have made. Frowning, she picked up the scrimshaw, holding it next to the sheet of art clay, as she'd done hundreds and thousands of times in the past few weeks. It was exactly the same size, exactly the same shape, each etched line precisely copied with painstaking care. She placed the scrimshaw carefully on the jeweler's velvet she had bought from the art house, then put her hands on her hips and stared down at the design on the sheet of clay.

RangerGrrl was too tired to congratulate herself. She felt oddly unreal, and a momentary hallucination of her body as a character balloon in the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York swept through her. To combat it, she whispered to the clay, "I'm gonna turn on the oven. Don't let the aliens steal you while I'm gone."

After all her practice, she could have found the right temperature setting on the oven dial blindfolded--this was a good thing, as she was swaying with sleepiness--and she set it, watching the needle rise in the new temperature gauge inside the oven (a gift, along with some badly-needed ego boosting, from Story Doc). While the oven was heating up, she poured the last of the coffee she'd made that afternoon into her mug and swallowed it, the bitterness and sand against her tongue awakening her a bit.

When it was ready, RangerGrrl went back to the living room and picked up the tray with vivid caution. Now that she was actually handling it, she felt far more awake. She moved with cautious steps into the kitchen, holding the baking tray as if it were the Hope Diamond. She didn't trip over any of the cats on the way, and she didn't scuff her shoe against the floor. She reached the oven, opened the door, and set the tray cautiously onto the rack. She turned on the vent fan; she'd learned that the stuff stank while it was baking. Then she set the timer and sat down at the kitchen table, watching it tick.

The ding of the bell brought her awake, and she sat upright at the table, looking around her wildly. The kitchen was quiet, and except for the sharp odor of baking clay, nothing had changed. Her heartbeat quieted. She got up and went to the oven, peering into the window.

There, lying quietly on a cookie sheet, was a thin slab of shiny white clay with a jet-black design in the center. RangerGrrl's hands tingled. She reached for the temperature knob and turned it off, then got her oven mitts on and opened the door. A little puff of hot, acrid air emerged. She reached in cautiously and removed the baking sheet, setting it atop the range. It didn't shrink or crack as it cooled, as some of her experimental sheets of clay had done until she figured out that backing off the oven temperature and extending the time was the trick.

When the clay had cooled enough to touch, RangerGrrl took a look at the clock. It was just past four in the morning. She touched the little slab with the back of her knuckles, cautiously testing its firmness. It felt like porcelain. She picked up the edges of the baking parchment and lifted it from the cookie sheet. She turned it over into the palm of her hand and peeled the parchment from the back.

A set of familiar, unreadable jet-black characters stared up at her from the surface of the clay. Overcome, she sank into the chair by the kitchen table, turning the little slab of clay from side to side and looking at it. It was perfect.

She took it back to the living room, obsessively comparing it to the scrimshaw. Her fingertips were rough from weeks of working with the polymer clay, and she handled the scrimshaw with care. She could find no differences between the ivory and the clay.

By the time RangerGrrl finished examining the little clay tablet, it was nearly six a.m., her foot had gone to sleep, and her shoulder was throbbing. She slipped the scrimshaw into its padded bag and put it back into the locked drawer in the sideboard in the dining room. Then she came back to the table, marveling at the little tablet before her.

"I did do it," she whispered. "Story Doc was right." She could just hear McJohn's laughter: Yeah, she usually is. "Man," RangerGrrl murmured, "am I ever gonna hate busting this thing up."

The tablet rested comfortably in her left hand. She picked up the phone with the other and hit the speed dial. The person on the other end picked up after half a ring.

"Hey, cloney," said Blackie. "I bet you're done, aren't you?"

RangerGrrl smiled with relief. "Good morning, sweetie. Have I ever told you how much I rock?"

* * *

The first file was delivered on a handmade compilation CD of the greatest hits of the quartet of Japanese pop stars who starred in the proto-CSI miniseries Kira Kira Hikaru, a favorite of Story Doc's and McJohn's from when they had cable. The courier who brought it into China was a thin young chainsmoking Japanese pop guitarist who was studying traditional Chinese musicology in Beijing, and he loaned it to a new buddy he'd met in the park, a young woman who tracked him down at school two days later to return it, with courteous thanks.

The second file arrived in a decade-old translucent dark green Apple eMate, a standalone flash-based notepad with a keyboard, clever technology abandoned along with the CEO who had championed the Newton project. That one came in in the backpack of the daughter of a German business executive whose chain of big-box retailers relied on cheap Chinese suppliers to duplicate in Europe the success of Wal-Mart. She loaned it to a new schoolmate who had a paper to finish and no computer to work on, and was not entirely surprised that it was never returned to her.

The third file was on a flash card stored with assorted computer detritus scattered through the cases of a French wildlife photographer assigned to document the panda-breeding program at Wolong. The photographer gave the card to the Chinese environmentalism journalist she'd arranged to meet for dinner before she left Cannes.

The fourth and fifth files entered China on matching iPod Shuffles carried by two reluctant international travelers, the eight-year-old twin sons of a noted Argentinean paleoarcheologist. While the boys were asleep in the hotel their second night there, the archeologist delivered the iPods to an Argentinean colleague in China looking for a translator for some important research in indigenous fungi. The mycology professor took the iPods to her own hotel room and returned half an hour later, handing them back to her colleague without comment, whereupon the two of them returned to their interrupted conversation about the dissemination of Japanese whaling artifacts throughout the 19th-century Far East.

The sixth file was in the expensive new digital camera of a retired married couple from Wyoming, sent on an unexpected dream trip to China and ordered strictly to enjoy themselves until they were approached by another couple of retirees, two women who had taught geography, cartography, and history for decades at a well-known military college in the Hudson Valley of New York. They told the couple from Wyoming that they had gotten curious about whether everything they'd told their students about China over the years was true, and had been captivated by continuing photo essays in National Geographic that showed a landscape quite unlike any other on earth. During the course of a lengthy evening, the women expressed curiosity about the camera, and the couple from Wyoming demonstrated how easy it was to transfer files by uploading pictures of the four of them from the camera to the cartographer's cellphone. The attached file went along for the ride. That night, the Wyoming couple sent their daily travel diary to their daughter via e-mail, mentioning their new friends. When she got the e-mail, RangerGrrl almost swooned with relief.

The seventh file crossed the border in the BlackBerry of the frantically busy Egyptian administrative assistant to a Saudi oil-ministry representative in the country to discuss technology sales to the Chinese petroleum industry. While cooling her heels in the corridor of a hotel conference room she, as a woman, was not permitted to enter, she got into a carefully casual conversation with another woman, a South American professor on a break from an archeology conference. The admin showed her BlackBerry to the professor, who flipped it over, performed a deft flash-card swap before the admin's dazzled eyes, and handed it back to her with an offhand comment about how remarkable technology had become. The admin could do nothing but agree.

The eighth and final file came to China in the armful of scattered possessions of a dark-eyed Bosnian economist with the EU, clearly jet-lagged by a long journey involving a great deal of pre-work, as she was absent-mindedly juggling a sheaf of bound articles in one hand and a nearly empty backpack in the other. She was there, she told them, to attend a conference on building microcredit programs in rural China, and she had the official invitations to back it up. The Customs agent who scanned her for suspicious signs of Western-style wealth found none; she was wearing a well-traveled many-pocketed camp shirt and simple jewelry that ran high to black cord rather than diamonds; he looked at the pendant at her throat and became distracted by the form it rested on.

Unable to identify what it was about her that made him so wary, the official asked to see the stack of articles she was carrying. She set them onto the table with a relieved sigh, and he flipped through them rapidly. There were articles on indigenous African reforestation projects, the growth of the microcredit movement in impoverished Latin America, the labor-intensive organic farming industry in Cuba, the revival of suttee in India, efforts to preserve bonobo habitat in the face of human encroachment, the economic effects of the high rate of minority male American imprisonment on their families, recent research into the rediscovered Nu Shu women's script in Hunan, and several others he had trouble identifying. Each of the articles was highlighted in wavy lines that spoke of rough flights, and the highlighter itself was shoved carelessly into the top pocket of her shirt, the tip pointing toward the shadow between her remarkably beautiful breasts.

It was no crime to have a social conscience, or to be gorgeous enough to attract the attention of a Chinese Customs official, so he wished her a pleasant journey and told her she was free to go. She smiled for the first time, a smile outlined in fatigue, and shoved the articles into her backpack, hefting it to her shoulder and walking away. Had she been less comely, it might have occurred to him to ask to see the highlighter that had been her faithful friend along the journey; if he had, he might have found, tucked into the barrel, a tiny flash card with a space for a clip-on USB socket.

Two days later, Xe e-mailed a picture of herself to eight of her friends. She was at the panda research center at Wolong, and she was smiling, although she looked exhausted. She was holding up a handful of plastic keychains she'd gotten in the Wolong gift shop, and she captioned the photo, "They wouldn't let me bring any of the pandas home, but they have these cute little keychains, so I got each of you one of those instead."

Blackie read the e-mail and grinned, "In like Flynn." McJohn read the e-mail to Story Doc, who was watching a new episode of Most Haunted on the BBC website. Story Doc paused the video long enough to remark, "And you call me devious." RangerGrrl read the e-mail and crossed her fingers, hoping that her Nu Shu orthography would prove legible. JLynn read the e-mail and knew Xe would be in China a long time, which was worrisome. Blade read the e-mail and thanked the powers that her ceremony had worked; she got ready to do another for Xe's protection. AngelRad read the e-mail and gave Xe a thumbs-up through the ether.

Maggie read the e-mail several weeks later, in a rare break from the show, and muttered, "China?!"

* * *

What followed was a delicate courtship worthy of the most subtle Chinese opera, a dance in which the suitors changed from moment to moment. One day, the authorities would welcome her interest in history and promise her any assistance they could render; the next, doors slammed in her face, and the officials who'd promised their help were curt and defensive, when they took her calls at all. Xe never knew what it was that made them blow hot, then cold. She spent long hours in the hotel, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, going back and forth herself about whether to offer them money. On the one hand, that might get her to Jiangyong quicker than anything else she could do; on the other, it might give the authorities reason to detain a Westerner who must, by now, be ringing every alarm bell they had.

They couldn't understand why an economist would skip Guangzhou and Shenzhen, asking instead to go to an obscure county in a place only the hardiest ecotourists were likely to visit. A buddy at the office e-mailed her to tell her that the Chinese liaison office in The Hague had called asking for verification of her identity and purpose in visiting China. The warning was clear, even though it was absent from the e-mail: Watch yourself, Xe, because they're watching you.

She wished Maggie had been with her. Maggie would turn on the Southern charm and have every person in China oozing besottedness in a flash. Xe didn't have that particular talent; she was shy around strangers, and stuttering through the four Chinese expressions she knew (bathroom, breakfast, Nu Shu, hotel) gave her a headache. In New York, to get a cab late at night, she'd have opened her blouse and flashed the street, but that would probably get her arrested here. She would have to think her way through.

The problem was that she knew next to nothing about this country, what the people were like, and what the government was up to. It occurred to her that she had no idea what she was doing here, either. They could have ordered a copy of the Nu Shu dictionary and deciphered it themselves. They could have done what Mrs. Tan suggested, scan the letters, trace the scan, e-mail it to some China studies professor at Stanford. Instead, she was stuck in a hotel, trying to think her way to a place where women wrote only to women...

The phone rang, and she nearly fell off the bed. She scrambled for it and said hello.

"This is the front desk clerk, Ms. Zhao," said the voice on the other end, in English. "I wondered if you would be free to attend a lecture at the university this evening."

"I beg your pardon?" Xe asked.

"The lecture is by one of the most prominent modern scholars of Nu Shu," said Ms. Zhao.

The hall was packed, and Xe's heart was hammering by the time the lights went down. Ms. Zhao sat next to her, smiling a gracious, vacant smile whenever Xe looked at her. A man in a Western-style suit made some introductory remarks she didn't follow, but then Ms. Zhao leaned over and whispered, close to her ear, "He is introducing Professor Li to the audience."

Xe nodded, but Ms. Zhao didn't move away. She was so close Xe could smell the shampoo she used. "Professor Li has just returned from starting the research branch of the Nu Shu Museum in Shangjiangxu Township. That's in Jiangyong County, which is in--"

"Hunan Province, I know," Xe whispered back, thinking, There's a museum--!

Ms. Zhao smiled approvingly; she was so close Xe could practically feel her facial muscles moving. "I see you are something of a scholar of China."

"Only 'something of'," Xe assured her.

Professor Li had quite the c.v.: she'd been practically everywhere and done practically everything. But by the time the man finished his introduction and Professor Li walked onstage, Xe was surprised to see that the professor didn't look much older than she did. All through the lecture, Ms. Zhao huddled close to her ear, translating in a voice so low not even the people around them could possibly have objected. Around the hall, other attendees were doing the same; must've been a local custom. Xe, distracted by the presence of a woman at a distance she usually associated with lovers instead of acquaintances with an interest in obscure linguistics, kept losing the thread of Professor Li's presentation.

At one point, Professor Li picked up a remote and pressed a button. Characters flashed onto a large screen behind her. Xe held her breath. They looked just like the characters on the scrimshaw. This was it. This was the real deal. Professor Li circled the characters with the remote's laser pointer, making comments Xe couldn't follow, even with Ms. Zhao's unobtrusively competent but terribly intimate translation.

The lecture came to an end, and Xe was startled when the audience applauded politely and began to get to their feet, collecting purses and bookbags. Xe turned to Ms. Zhao in desperation. "Listen, I--I know I've taken a lot of your time, but... do you think it would be possible to meet Professor Li?"

Ms. Zhao was obviously a professional customer service person; the smile never wavered, and all she said was, "Let us find out, shall we?"

She set off across the crowd, which parted for her, and Xe hopped and skittered along in her wake, trying not to cause an international incident by going against the flow of traffic. Ms. Zhao spoke to a couple of people toward the front of the stage, and one of them, a man, bowed and gestured toward stage left. Ms. Zhao sailed up the stairs serenely, Xe stumbling after her.

Professor Li had her purse over her shoulder and her briefbag in her hand when Ms. Zhao approached her, speaking rapidly in Chinese. Professor Li turned to Xe inquiringly. "Professor," Xe began, in English, "we haven't met, but my name is Xe. I'm here from Europe and I'm looking to find out about Nu Shu. It's... it's something that's fascinated me for some time, and it's... very... important..."

She trailed off, feeling foolish. The professor probably didn't even speak English. Professor Li gave her a warm smile and stuck out her hand. "Welcome to China, Ms. Zhe," she said in excellent English. "To meet a European scholar of Nu Shu is a pleasure. How can I help you?"

"I--I want to know everything," Xe said simply.

Professor Li turned to Ms. Zhao again, asking a question in Chinese of which Xe understood only one word: Starbucks.

* * *

The Starbucks was part of a complex of businesses and shops set in a humongous university building that surrounded a packed public square on three sides. It was late evening, but hundreds of people milled about, walking and talking as they strolled slowly in a large rectangle, like a casual square dance with no steps.

Ms. Zhao stuck around while Professor Li and Xe got their coffee, although she declined to get anything herself. Xe, reeling at the idea that she was standing in a Starbucks in China, wondered all over again if everyone around her was a spy. Xe insisted on paying for both of them, and Professor Li acknowledged her courtesy with a practiced bow, then subtly directed Xe how many of which bills to pass across the counter.

Xe raised her eyebrows at Ms. Zhao and gestured toward the board. Ms. Zhao said, "Thank you for your courtesy, but I am afraid I will be not able to sleep if I accept."

"You are day shift, Ms. Zhao?" inquired Professor Li, lifting her flavored latte for a sip. Xe could smell the sharp citrus in it; the barista had loaded it with something that looked like neon-orange cough syrup.

"Yes," said Ms. Zhao. "And it is a delight to close out the day with such a wonderful talk."

"Thank you," laughed Professor Li. "I have had great pleasure in meeting you as well." She turned to Xe, who was beginning to feel more and more unsettled at their purposeless inanity. "I am at the Marriott. Where are you staying?"

"At... at the Marriott," Xe said. This had to be a coincidence. It had to.

"Excellent!" exclaimed Professor Li. "We can take a walk and discuss Nu Shu, and Ms. Zhao can catch her train home. When we are finished talking, I can walk you back to the hotel."

Xe tried to figure the odds that she'd been played by a pair of agents for whatever the Chinese equivalent of the KGB was. The math eluded her, and she studied Professor Li's open, friendly face. What did a secret agent look like? She became self-consciously aware that Professor Li and Ms. Zhao were waiting for her answer, and would probably wait for another three hours if she didn't say anything. "That sounds great," she said lamely.

"I'll bid you good evening, then," said Ms. Zhao, presenting her hand. "It has been a great pleasure to attend the lecture with you, Ms. Zhe."

"Likewise," Xe said, shaking Ms. Zhao's hand. "Thanks for your help."

Ms. Zhao shook Professor Li's hand, then hurried out the door in the direction of the train station. Professor Li watched her go, murmuring into her coffee, "That poor child. She will probably be on the train for another two hours."

"Pardon?" Xe asked.

Professor Li turned bright eyes on Xe. "She lives in the suburban area, the commuters' region. She told me she has been longing to attend the lecture, but was unable to get the time granted to her. She had the clever notion of calling you, and to her delight, you accepted, which meant she could escort you without question." Professor Li raised her latte in what might have been a salute. "You've made a friend, Ms. Zhe. Shall we?"

They left the coffee shop and joined the crowd ambling around the square. A young woman was sitting against one of the pillars with a single-stringed violin balanced on her lap; she was playing something sweet and sad, the first thing Xe had run into in days that was recognizably Chinese to a Westerner. Xe stared into her espresso, asking herself idly if it had been drugged. "It is a great honor," Professor Li said, "to be able to bring the story of Nu Shu to so many Chinese women." She gave Xe a sideways glance. "What do you know of Nu Shu, Ms. Zhe?"

"Not a lot," Xe admitted with a shrug. "I know that it's a form of Chinese pictography, but phonetic instead of representational." It was a complex description she'd gotten from RangerGrrl's recap of the discussion with Mrs. Tan, and she decided on the spur of the moment to test Professor Li with it.

The professor nodded. "It differs from traditional Chinese orthography in that it is based on a single dialect, the Jiangyong dialect Chenguan Tuhua. Nu Shu characters represent syllables, rather than concepts as in Hanzi, the standard form of writing."

Nicely volleyed, Xe thought. "So it's a spoken language?"

"No," said Professor Li, "sung."

Xe gave her a questioning look. The hypnotic sound of the violin sailed through the air, accompanied by the quiet murmur of hundreds of conversations around them.

"Nu Shu was used to record songs," Professor Li said. "The songs the women sang together while they were working in the upper rooms. Are you familiar with the ethnographic distribution in Hunan Province?"

"You mean the population?" Xe asked, taking a sip of her espresso. "No."

"Mm," said Professor Li, drinking from the cardboard cup with the horrible orange concoction in it. "The people of Yao were the original inhabitants. They tended to live in a more gender-egalitarian society than was common in feudal China. Then the Han arrived to set up a military base for the Emperor. They were conquerors, and they brought with them their customs, one of which was arranged marriage."

"So the Yao women--?"

"Never knew what hit them," Professor Li said, smiling sadly. "These simple peasant women, used to running their farms, raising their children, and gossiping with the neighbors, thrust into a world of concubinage, foot-binding, complex household politics..." She sighed. "Then again, I have been accused by my colleagues of taking an unnecessarily tragic view, and not without reason..."

"What about this sisterhood they established?" Xe asked.

Professor Li roused herself from her reverie. "Ah, yes. They would vow themselves to one another as sisters for life. They had a beautiful saying in Nu Shu: 'You cannot die of thirst next to a well, and you cannot die of despair next to your sister.' There were two forms: jiebai zhimei, "sworn sisters", and laotang, which is difficult to translate. We may have lost the key to understanding it, but I did once hear an American expression that has a similar tone: 'same old, same old'."

"Excuse me?"

Professor Li chuckled. "It probably doesn't mean the same thing at all. Jiebai zhimei meant you could get married and move away from your village, but still keep your family of women close, in your writings and your heart. Laotang is a different vow: you and I are the same, two halves of a unique whole, and we exist that way in eternity, and no one else will ever separate us. The laotang writings--those are the authentic ones, the letters. Most laotang never married."

"They didn't?" Xe asked, watching Professor Li closely. "I thought you couldn't exist without being part of a man's household...?"

"Not if you were laotang," said Professor Li. "We find reflected in the writings that the laotang sisters considered themselves married to one another."

Xe caught herself just before she tripped on the pavement. "Interesting," she huffed.

"The laotang sisters--they were the ones who left us the real Nu Shu." Professor Li laughed, but it sounded sad. "According to me, and there is much controversy on this point. They would inscribe sayings on fans and embroider them beautifully on pieces of material, lovely poetic expressions of yearning, and leave them in the temples. Other women would find them, pick them up, carry them home to dream over, dream of a different world, one in which they mattered. Some of them were quite political: 'How can we flee our enemy on bound feet?' Some were songs of loss and longing. Others were recastings of folk legends of strong women, often disguised as men and having adventures in the world."

"Sounds familiar," Xe grinned, thinking of the fan fiction she'd enjoyed for a decade. They'd been all the way around the square and were facing the door of the Starbucks again. The girl with the violin was still playing. "Tell me something. Why is this something no one wants to talk about?"

Professor Li gave her a quick, assessing look. "A number of reasons. A challenge to the authority of the government, and of men in general. Girls' games, with all the derision that phrase implies. Most Nu Shu writings were buried or cremated with their owners, to provide them comfort in death as they had in life, so authentic writings are quite rare. After the change in 1949, the government burned Nu Shu writers and their works. A scholar whose aunt wrote Nu Shu began to study the form in the 1950s. In the Cultural Revolution, when they were purging anything feudal or decadent from society, his research was destroyed and he was imprisoned."

"How long did it take him to make bail?" Xe asked.

"Twenty years," Professor Li replied. The shock went through Xe; to cover it, she lifted her espresso to her lips. "It was regarded as a secret code used by spies, or lesbians."

Xe's espresso splashed her shirt. "sh*t!" She brushed at the fabric, babbling an incoherent apology.

"Ms. Zhe, did you burn yourself?" asked Professor Li, gazing at her in concern.

"No... just got tired of the color. Dammit. I'm sorry. Please, go on."

"Perhaps it is time for us to return to the hotel?"

"Good idea."

They left the square and walked down a well-lit sidewalk toward the hotel whose blazing neon sign beckoned from a couple of blocks away. There were few cars in the streets, but there were a lot of people, all hanging away from one another in careful, casual little knots just out of earshot.

"You were saying?" Xe murmured.

Professor Li nodded. "The script was rediscovered in the 1980s and is now becoming well known all over the world. Unfortunately, the last authentic Nu Shu writer died a few years ago, and the new crop of writers are not part of the culture that gave rise to the form. It is a lucrative business to an impoverished part of the new China. Forgeries, recreations, versions written by men..."

"Can you write it?"

Professor Li shook her head. "Not well. And as far as reading--I am unfamiliar with the Jiangyong dialect, so I reach a point where I must have assistance."

"So," Xe said carefully, "if you wanted to know real Nu Shu, where would you go?"

Professor Li glanced at her again. "I should go to Jiangyong," she said, adding unexpectedly, "but I should not rely on the museum."

"Could I get to Jiangyong?" Xe asked in a murmur.

Professor Li nodded. "I could send you with a letter of introduction to my colleague, Ms. Yu. She is a teacher of Nu Shu to the girls of the town. Capable and dedicated." Professor Li lowered her voice, but gave it a peculiarly memorable emphasis. "There is little she could not tell you about the history of Nu Shu."

"That," Xe said, exhaling in gratitude, "sounds ideal."

* * *

The trip to the village of Shangjiangxu took three days. Xe used it to practice saying "Shangjiangxu." She'd added some other jaw-fracturing expressions to her Chinese vocabulary, things like It is a pleasure to meet you and I regret I do not speak better Chinese. Between that, "bathroom," "hotel," and "breakfast," she figured she had a chance of surviving the trip. With a bravado entirely unlike her, she had been trying her Chinese out on every train conductor and bus driver the entire trip, for the pure sad*stic pleasure of watching them freak. She wasn't certain if it was her accent or her looks that got her so much attention. Children flocked to her, not that she had any way to communicate with them. The trip passed in a dreamy haze of little trusting smiles turned up toward her, and she found herself reaching out with a cautious hand and an answering grin to caress a little head or tweak a button nose.

In her backpack, next to Professor Li's letter of introduction, was a bulletproof laptop, a small bubblejet printer, paper, some flash drives, and a solar panel to power it all. The eight precious scans were scattered on the flash drives and throughout the hard drive of the laptop. She'd done practice runs at reassembly over and over back home; it was a lot like a Marine learning to strip a rifle blindfolded. She slept with her head on a padded part of the backpack; while it made for mornings doing careful neck stretches, she didn't lose anything to pilferers, and began to forget the prospect of being robbed the more rural the landscape became.

The mountains pitched at impossible angles, concealed by a profusion of tropical greenery. The weather wasn't unbearably sticky, and the nights were cool and pleasant. She gave up looking for restaurants or food stores; wherever she went, people just automatically included her in mealtimes, and she ended up trying a lot of the local cuisine, which ran high to fish and rice. The tea they made was exotic to her Western tongue, and uniformly excellent. They seemed to want nothing other than her appreciation, and she learned to smile and nod with approval. On the rare occasions when her tongue hit something and rebelled, it showed in her face, and that just made them roar with laughter.

Shangjiangxu Township was a wide spot in the road on the valley floor, with breathtaking expanses of lush green mountain to the west and lovely little tendrils of river doing some serious meandering outside of town. The local architecture was nothing much, lots of square, squat buildings in featureless gray, but the landscape, those vision-inspiring mountains, behind which a rosy sun was setting as she arrived, made up for the lack of Buddhist temples or prerevolutionary estates.

She found the hotel--not much of a challenge, as the village square was well within her navigational capabilities--and got to her room just as the shadow of the mountains crept across the town. The place had a flush toilet, to her surprise, and the water coming out of the tap wasn't freezing. She cleaned up, packed all her gear into her backpack, shouldered it, and went out to look for some supper.

Tomorrow she would spend the day on a face-saving visit to the Nu Shu museum, and when it closed late in the afternoon, she would hunt up the school, and Ms. Yu.

* * *

Come into me, breathe my breath

As I breathe yours, the two of us

Become one

It was always quiet after the girls had left for the day, the green of the hills darkening in the approaching twilight. A time to go home to family: mother and father returning home to greet the girls, brothers and sisters tumbling underfoot, smiles and hugs and the warm smells of supper being prepared.

Closer than sisters, closer than heart-sisters,

We two, whom no distance can separate,

No misery touch

She had no family, and no one to go home to, but she had her classroom, calm and silent save the sound of her pen delicately carving the surface of the paper so the ink would flow into the spaces, a tiny river in a broad, featureless landscape, marking her passing, marking her existence, marking her.

For the secrets we keep

From all others, the quest

We undertake, the mission

of the Guanyin, to which we whispered

Yes, then cried Yes, then shouted Yes,

I do not keep from you

Nor you from me

For we are laotang,

The same heartbeat, the same blood, the same spirit

For we are laotang

The pen skipped and fled lightly over the paper, like a dancer, like a skater. She loved this script, loved the freedom it gave her, loved its ease and expressiveness, the physical pleasure of guiding a pen with a trained, capable hand. She loved too the bonding of art and poetry, the way she shaped the letters and they shaped her.

I could as soon deny my right hand to my left

As I could say you are no part of me

Not sister, lover, colleague, friend

Her name was Erming, and she had just turned twenty-four, and she was trying an experiment.

No measurement of leagues can part us,

No burden of years distance us from one another

I breathe you and you breathe me

Warriors both, continuing the quest

We honor above all else

Although you have never seen my face

Nor I yours

"Ms. Yu?"

Startled, Erming lifted her pen and her head. Someone was knocking on the open door of her classroom, leaning halfway into the room. In the half-gloom of early twilight, she could see the face of a woman, a Western woman in a bush shirt and travel trousers. Her hair was short and brown, tumbling in curls around a strong face. Her skin was a sun-caressed brown, and her hands looked powerful. Her eyes were large, expressive, a wild dark green fringed by long, luxuriant lashes, and right now they looked terribly uncertain.

"I'm sorry," said the woman, in English. "I was looking for--"

"Yes," Erming said, leaping to her feet and putting down her pen. "I beg your pardon, I am Ms. Yu. May I help you?"

The woman stepped into the room. She was holding a large backpack slung over her left shoulder. It looked heavy, but it didn't seem as though it was giving her trouble. She held out her right hand. "My name is Xe, and I met Professor Li in Guangzhou a few days ago."

Erming took a few steps forward to take the woman's hand. "Indeed, indeed, I am pleased to meet you, Ms... Ms. Zhe, is it?"

The woman smiled, full lips parting to show a row of even, strong teeth, startlingly bright in her tanned face. "Yes, that'll do." Her dark green eyes drifted momentarily in the direction of Erming's table, and the little scrap of paper lying beneath the pen. "It seems as though I've interrupted you working."

"Not at all," Erming assured her, returning to the table and folding up the poem. "Merely practicing my handwriting." She stuck it into the pocket of her smock and gestured toward a chair. "Please."

"Thanks." Ms. Zhe took a seat. She looked tired, and a little as though her bones hurt. "That, what you're working on." She nodded toward Erming's smock. "Is that Nu Shu?"

"Yes," Erming said.

"May I... see it?" Ms. Zhe asked. The uncertain look was in her eyes again, and her voice had the shy tone of a girl.

Erming looked around the room, trying to think of something to say. Finally, her eyes rested on Ms. Zhe's face, half-hidden in the gloom, and she thought of the perfect question. "Do you read Nu Shu?"

Ms. Zhe shook her head soberly. "I only just found out it even existed."

Erming tried to conceal her profound relief. She pulled the piece of paper from her smock. "I must tell you," she said, as hesitantly as the stranger, "this is not real Nu Shu. It is not merely the script, but the songs that are written in it. This follows neither the form nor the intent of Nu Shu." She imagined she saw a flash of disappointment in Ms. Zhe's large, liquid eyes. Reluctantly, she handed Ms. Zhe the piece of paper.

"Oh--hell, hang on," said Ms. Zhe, setting the paper on the table with care. She put her backpack carefully on the floor and unzipped one of its thousand and five fasteners. "I've got a letter from Professor Li for you."

Erming didn't know Americans believed in hell, but perhaps things had changed since she left. She glanced out the window, where the purple dusk had advanced well toward night. "Excuse me, Ms. Zhe," she said hastily, moving to the doorway to switch on the lights. "There. We can read better this way."

She returned to Ms. Zhe's side, and Ms. Zhe handed her the letter. Erming opened it with a murmured apology, and Ms. Zhe gestured to her to go ahead, with that brusque, egalitarian courtesy she remembered from California. While Erming unfolded the letter, Ms. Zhe did the same with the scrap of poem Erming had been working on, leaning against the table on one elbow and resting her hand on the edge of the paper to hold it down while she studied the penstrokes. Erming was charmed by the image of Ms. Zhe, who could find her way across the ocean to her little schoolroom, only to be defeated by little dark marks on a piece of paper. After a moment, it occurred to her that she was intruding on Ms. Zhe's examination, and she bent her head to Professor Li's letter.

Honored Scholar Yu Er-ming:

With this letter I am honored to present Ms. Zhe Aie-dah of the European Union. Ms. Zhe is an economist gathering data on modern Chinese society on behalf of a governmental agency of the European Union. She has requested information on the history of Nu Shu, and as your scholarly knowledge of this important historical artifact is unparalleled, I have recommended to her that she take advantage of your proximity to learn as much as she can from you....

As Erming read the last sentence, the blood left her brain and pooled somewhere near her heart. She lowered the letter, her mouth open in shock, and her eyes happened to drift to the open collar of Ms. Zhe's shirt, where a small carved wooden pendant hung from a black cord around her neck. The light caught the edge of the design: a large-eyed owl. Erming knew exactly what was on the other side, and it robbed her of the last of her air.

"How does--" Ms. Zhe raised her eyes from the paper and noticed where Erming was looking. Erming, badly rattled, met her gaze hastily. The blush began somewhere near her knees and flooded her face in an instant. To her horror, Ms. Zhe's lips quirked in a slight, knowing smile.

* * *

We're everywhere, Xe thought. Well, if nothing else, it was good to know the girls still had the power to strike beautiful women dumb. She tried to hide the smirk that threatened to overtake her face, and saw by Ms. Yu's reaction that she wasn't entirely successful.

"I'm sorry," they said in unison. Xe laughed, adding, "I'm shy." Ms. Yu nodded with tooth-rattling agreement, and Xe added, "Well, compared to an American."

"You're not American?" Ms. Yu asked quickly.

"No," Xe said, "I'm from Bosnia." Ms. Yu didn't look enlightened. "Do you know where that is?"

"Not precisely," Ms. Yu said, coloring again.

"It's to the north of Kosovo, where the Chinese embassy was bombed by NATO in 1999," Xe said, laying the piece of paper with the Nu Shu script onto the table.

"Ah," said Ms. Yu.

"And it's a little northwestward of--"

"Greece," Ms. Yu interrupted in a soft voice.

"Yes," Xe said, surprised. She took a closer look at Ms. Yu. The woman before her was young--a few years younger than Xe--and looked like no hint of sorrow or effort had ever touched her round, unlined face. She was wearing blue slacks, like Dockers, only a brighter blue, and a short-sleeved white blouse under what looked for all the world like an art teacher's dark gray smock. Her hands were clasped before her, over the pockets of the smock, and she stood like a dancer waiting for the first notes of the music. She wore her long hair in a no-nonsense braid, little tendrils escaping over her temples, framing her face in a hint of wildness. The dark eyes behind Ms. Yu's utilitarian glasses were diamond-bright with intelligence, and her mouth was rosy and sensual, with a tiny hint of an overbite making her lips even fuller. Right now, those eyes were looking at Xe, and the mouth seemed as though it had something very important to say.

"I--I've never been to Greece," Ms. Yu said softly.

"Oh," Xe said, getting to her feet slowly, "you'd love it. It's... beautiful..." Ms. Yu's eyes blinked a bit. They were so dark Xe couldn't tell if they were brown or black, but they were animated by a soft glow, as if Xe had said something wonderful.

Xe came to abruptly, turning toward the table. "I'm sorry, I must be more tired than I..." She picked up the backpack and set it carefully on the table, turning to face Ms. Yu again. "Look, I don't know if this is possible, but..." She took the poem in her hand and held it out to Ms. Yu. "This... this looks exactly like something I..."

Ms. Yu took an eager step toward Xe and grasped the paper gently. "Yes?" she said, a sound like a little gasp. Mystified, Xe turned the paper loose. Ms. Yu curled her hand and held the paper close to her heart, looking at Xe with undeniable expectation. "You were saying...?"

"Uh... yeah," Xe replied, turning to the backpack and unzipping it. "The thing is, I have a sample of what I think is... well, people have told me it..." She began to haul equipment out of her backpack, first the laptop, then the bubblejet. "I think I have... I may have some Nu Shu, and I'd just like to know..." She fell silent while she attached the printer to the port, then opened the laptop and hit the power switch.

Mercifully, the laptop started with no trouble whatsoever, and Xe sighed with relief when it chimed. "I was afraid it wouldn't--never mind," she said, shaking her head and laughing at herself. "You see--" She turned and froze.

Ms. Yu was looking at her from a distance of about three feet, and her eyes were huge and shining. She had the paper in both fists, pressed to her throat, and her mouth was open slightly.

Xe backed up a step, maneuvering cautiously around the laptop. "If... if you'll have a seat," she said, "I have this file I put together last night, and I just have to pull it up and print it." Ms. Yu nodded, but not as if she'd really heard Xe. "Or... or you could read it off the screen," Xe offered.

"Yes," breathed Ms. Yu, sinking into the chair Xe had just left. "Of course."

It was difficult to break her contact with those eyes, but Xe pulled the laptop around to face her, sat in the chair opposite Ms. Yu, and pulled up a directory with an entirely innocuous name. She changed the suffix of the file and double-clicked it, and the application brought it up. Xe took a lungful of badly-needed air. "I was afraid that wasn't going to work," she murmured. She put a hand on the top of the screen and looked up again. Ms. Yu still had that unnerving hero-worship look on her face.

"I was wondering if you could tell me what it says." Swiftly, before she could talk herself out of it, Xe turned the laptop to face Ms. Yu, who glanced at the screen. She gave another little gasp, covering her mouth with her hand. When she took her hand from her mouth, she was smiling. Then she lifted those luminous eyes to Xe's face and began to speak.

"Two hundred leagues north of the End of the World, sister speaks to sister, hollow to hollow, heart to heart. The location is carved into the foundation of the Temple of the Flower at one of the five Magic Mountains, where the Yao writhe under the heel of the Han. Seek twenty-five, twenty, forty-two to the north, one hundred eleven, twenty-six, forty-five to the east. What you seek awaits you there."

A long, long time later, Xe shut her mouth. "You--" Her voice came out gravelly and graceless. She cleared her throat and tried it again. "You wouldn't want to try that again," she asked conversationally, "only this time, while you're actually... looking at it?"

Ms. Yu laughed, placing her hand over her lips again. To Xe's shock, tears began rolling down Ms. Yu's cheeks. "There is no need," Ms. Yu whispered. "I know what it says. I have known since I was six years old. Welcome, my sister. Welcome home."

* * *

You must be ready, Erming. You must be ready, for you never know when it will happen.

As she got older, and learned what time was about, the enormity of the task, and the unlikelihood that it would ever be completed, grew on her. She tried to argue, but Great-Aunt would hear not a word.

"My fingers are sore."

"Think of how sore they would be if you were holding a sword."

"I can't make the letters properly, the way you do. I'm useless."

"Ai, girl, give yourself five thousand of each letter, as I have had, and you will see which of us has the better hand."

About that many years had passed since her people inherited the unspecified task, she was certain. Centuries. Hundreds of centuries. Thousands. And untold moody, restless girls sitting by sluggishly smoking fires that left them scorched on one side and freezing on the other, trying and failing to draw elegant little letters that were more lyrical, more meaningful, than the hideously complex characters she and her fellow students labored over in regular school.

But after school was over, the boys, and many of the girls, were allowed to play, riding their bicycles, gossiping, spending time with friends, while Erming was stuck at the side of an unsympathetic old woman who did not acknowledge any logic in another's person's argument, and could be counted on to grunt merely, "Stop your whining," generally accompanied by the sharp crack of her thimble on the top of Erming's head.

She wasn't even related to Great-Aunt; she had no idea why she had to spend all of her free time over at Great-Aunt's, except that they had tested all the girls at school on drawing and Erming had drawn a picture of a fish with water coming out of the top of its head and for some reason they liked that and sent her to study with Great-Aunt.

You must be ready. You must be ready.

The first few years were misery, an unending stream of drudgery with no apparent end. She memorized piece after incomprehensible piece of script, fighting fingers that had been learning Hanzi a few hours before and now had to curve themselves differently to draw Nu Shu. Her mother talked to her vaguely about what an honor it was to study with Great-Aunt, and the other girls in school began to draw away from her, falling silent when she joined them in the schoolyard. After a while, she began to hang back, shyly bumping her book satchel against the stockings of her school uniform, but they had given over inviting her over for a chat before school.

When she began to squint at her letters, her mother took her many hours away by bus to a huge city to get her first pair of glasses. She had her eyes tested, then they went to an actual restaurant to have an actual meal while the technicians were making her glasses. Her mother casually placed a huge sum of money on the tray the waiter brought, as if she had done this a great deal. Then they went back to the doctor's office, Erming's mother navigating through the city streets like an expert. She remembered clearly the ride back home on the bus, the delight of seeing individual leaves on the trees and the little bits of gravel in the road, the wide smile on her mother's face, prompted by her own joy.

Great-Aunt marked the occasion with her usual gruff indirection, but the new glasses let Erming see how small she was, how frail, and how often her unmelodious voice masked a slight smile that might be the mark of affection.

"Come here, child," Great-Aunt said. "Now that I know you will not be bumping into my furniture and knocking my things to the floor, we shall start on something new." She opened the book on her lap, and Erming found herself studying a series of characters unlike any she'd ever seen.

"It's not Hanzi," Erming said, running her finger down the page. "Is it Nu Shu?"

"No," said Great-Aunt, with reverence. "This is Greek."

It was the doorway to a new world, and she found herself, on the rare occasions when the school watched government drama videos, bored and longing for her Antigone, who had gone to her death rather than betray her principles. Great-Aunt obviously had a great admiration for Antigone, which she transferred, letter by letter, to Erming. It was another few years before she found out why.

That happened the week she turned fourteen. She was tall for her age, knock-kneed and awkward about everything other than her scholarship. If anyone had asked her who her friends were, she would have thought for a long time before concluding that she didn't really have any. But no one in her school could write as beautifully as she, and she spent her time with Great-Aunt practicing Nu Shu and translating the great Greek dramas until she could think as easily in Greek as she could in Mandarin, Cantonese, or Jiangyong dialect. Great-Aunt had made a comment to the effect that English was next; when Erming replied that they'd been studying it in school for three years, Great-Aunt flapped a hand at her in dismissal. "The English they think they teach!" she said, in English, and Erming, who had ceased to be surprised at how much Great-Aunt knew, admitted without bias that her English sounded a lot more authentic and flowing than her teacher's.

You will have to know it, for I cannot live forever.

One Saturday after school, as Erming came into Great-Aunt's parlor for about the five thousandth time, Great-Aunt was nowhere to be found. Erming, reflecting uneasily that Great-Aunt was elderly and likely to break something and then be too feeble, or more likely, too proud, to call for help, rushed about Great-Aunt's house looking for her. Erming found her emerging from the water-closet, and the shyness and embarrassment always dormant in her burst into flower. She began to stammer an apology, her face filling with heat, and got only so far when, as she might have suspected, Great-Aunt interrupted.

"Girl," said Great-Aunt, shaking her head, "if you cannot deal with the idea of an old woman dropping a clod of mud, I fear you shall never survive tomorrow."

"Why?" Erming asked, curious despite her embarrassment. "What happens tomorrow?"

Great-Aunt put a hand on Erming's shoulder, reaching far up to do so. "Tomorrow," she replied, "you find out why you have been learning Greek."

It involved collecting electric torches and packaged foods, knives and blankets and water and an astonishing bundle of writing materials. The two of them packed a barrow, and Great-Aunt told Erming to be ready to catch the market truck in the morning. "And," she added, eyeing Erming's school uniform, "wear something you can get messy in."

That night, Erming was restless in her bed for a while, then lay on her back studying the ceiling. It occurred to her for the first time that her apprenticeship might be drawing to a close, and that she might have done well enough to be shown... what? The reason she'd learned Greek. But what possible reason could there be?

She ran through her heroines in her mind. Antigone, of course, so determined to honor her brother, sending him to his gods even though it meant her own death. Clytemnestra and Medea, one avenging herself for the death of her sunny daughter Iphegenia, the other avenging herself by killing her sons with the man she hated. Cassandra, paying for her beauty over and over again, refusing herself to man after man, losing both her virginity and her autonomy to men who had no interest in her insights. Andromache, losing her own child to the vengeance of the invaders who had robbed her of the husband she loved. Hecuba, who watched the royal house of Troy grow and watched it perish by fire and sword, losing her own children.

Grief. Loss. Wasted lives. Borne, in most cases, by women, who might have been afterthoughts in Greek society, but whose tragedies broke through the veil of willful ignorance in which the men of Greece shrouded themselves. Erming was the product of a society that had firmly set aside the old gender divisions, not wanting to lose half the sky, and the tragedies of the Greek heroines were even more appalling to her when she compared them with her own life.

The heart-sisters and laotang who used Nu Shu as a lifeline would not have found the lives of the Greek heroines that different from their own. Erming wondered if that was the connection. Great-Aunt had said she would know soon.

The next day, after little sleep, Erming found herself stumbling after Great-Aunt, who was pushing the barrow while Erming struggled with suitcases and bags of paper and ink. The market-truck, loaded with vegetables and a few unhappy, active caged chickens, picked them up. The farm women who were driving got out to help Great-Aunt and Erming load the barrow in the back, and the two of them squeezed into a tiny space between crates of squash and bags of rice.

The truck huffed and chuffed its way up, following the road that ran along the spine of the green-bedecked hills, and Erming apologized to Great-Aunt every time the jostling threw them into one another. Great-Aunt waved her knobbly-knuckled hands and grunted her indifference.

After the truck had been on the road long enough for the sun to rise and bake some of the chill from Erming's hands and feet, Great-Aunt sent her to knock on the side of the truck. She picked her way around the burlap sacks and crates, the chickens thrashing in agitation as she passed, and reached down through the slats in the side of the truck bed to knock on the driver's door. The truck pulled to the side of the road, and Erming retraced her footsteps, getting to the rear in time to help the farm women assist Great-Aunt in getting down. They unloaded the barrow and presented Erming with all her bags, then bowed to her and Great-Aunt, accepting Erming's thanks and Great-Aunt's assumption of worship-worthiness with short words, then they got back into the truck and putt-putted away.

The silence, after the chugging of the truck's engine, seemed even louder to Erming's ears. She looked around. The truck had left them in a little hollow fringed by tall, steep, lushly overgrown hills honeycombed with caves, the openings of some of which Erming could see from where she stood, greenery pockmarked with irregular gray circles of rock.

"Catch your breath," Great-Aunt said, a kindly note in her voice. "We've got a bit of a climb ahead of us, and I don't want you too tired to enjoy your introduction to the place."

Erming's head whipped round, and she stared in astonishment at Great-Aunt, who commenced to laugh, her wide-open mouth showing spots where teeth used to live. As Erming watched, completely baffled, Great-Aunt slapped her knee and cackled, then did a sprightly little dance in the road. "You don't know it yet, Erming," said Great-Aunt, "but you're no longer my pupil. You're my colleague. I can't abuse you like I have."

"Abuse me?" Erming asked, puzzled. "By teaching me Greek?"

Great-Aunt laughed again. She had a nice laugh and smiling did the most attractive things to her face. "I certainly thought so, when my teacher did it to me! I haven't been half so hard on you, Erming, not half. Then again," she said, co*cking her head and putting her fists on her hips in a way that reminded Erming of a crane, "I wasn't half the student you are. Teaching you has been a pleasure, my dear, a real pleasure. And now I know I can leave the legacy in hands much stronger than my own."

"The... the legacy?" Erming stammered. "You--you mean the thing about the End of the World and the compass points and that which you seek you shall find there?"

"That's exactly what I mean," said Great-Aunt, putting a hand softly on Erming's shoulder. "And the first thing I have to give you..." She wandered to the side of the road and into the greenery, and vanished.

"Great-Aunt!" Erming gasped, setting the bags down and hurrying after her. Great-Aunt was puttering about near a little shed that stood a bit from the road, so completely concealed by the overgrowth that she would never have seen it. Great-Aunt opened the door of the shed, went in, and emerged with two incredibly tall walking-staffs. She came back toward the road and handed one to Erming.

"These are to stay here," Great-Aunt announced. "You use them only when you climb, and the rest of the time they live in the shed."

"I understand," Erming said, bowing nervously. "Only here."

"Put the barrow in the shed," Great-Aunt said, "and fetch me the bag with the brushes. You take the ones with the paper and ink."

Erming nodded and hastened to stow the things. When she was done, Great-Aunt hobbled to the door of the shed, reached into her collar, and pulled out a long cord with a key on the end of it. She locked the shed. Erming looked around in apprehension; bandits, perhaps?

"Prying eyes," Great-Aunt said, as if Erming had spoken. "We don't want them here. Not everyone has the sense to keep his lips closed around an important secret."

Great-Aunt began to climb, holding the staff so that it would support her, and Erming followed. After a few moments, Great-Aunt began to sing, and Erming listened.

Dual Goddesses,

Here I am

Come to visit you once more

Come to care for the legacy

Come to introduce a new acolyte

To your temple

We pray you, make the path free from rocks

And snakes--

Erming gasped, looking about her wildly, and Great-Aunt turned her head and laughed. "Not really," she said.

And slippery spots

Lest your acolytes lose their footing

And break the thread that connects them to the legacy

So far more than we alone

So many waiting for the sign

Make us ready

To hear the sign

From our sisters

This occupied them until Erming saw a narrow rocky path cut into the hillside. Walking along it didn't require the staff, and she was grateful; the climb from the road had stolen much of her air.

This new girl by my side, Great-Aunt sang,

Is Yu Erming

Erming lifted her head, shocked, and almost tripped. The thought of scattering the paper and ink all over the path, breaking the delicate little bottles, went through her head, and she hauled herself upright hastily, by leaning on the staff.

She is a little clumsy, Great-Aunt continued without stopping,

As you see,

But her mind is keen and her knowledge great and her heart strong

You have chosen well, Dual Goddesses,

And if it be she who is to see the legacy completed

She will be stalwart and brave,

Like her beloved Antigone,

Like the Yao, like the laotang,

Like Bladewalker and Jessamyn,

Like Alcibiades and Serafina,

Like Theadora and Lao Ma,

Like Gabrielle and Xena

Erming was busily engaged in trying to figure out if she'd ever heard most of those names before when Great-Aunt halted before a wall of rock, leaning on the staff and catching her breath. She dug into her collar again and pulled out another key. She reached up to the wall, flipped a piece of it aside, and fitted the key into a lock set into the rock. Erming drew closer, gazing in fascination, when the rock slid aside with a great low grinding and the hillside opened up. Erming leapt back, almost tumbling off the path, and figured out immediately what the staff was used for: saving your neck when you've been startled.

Great-Aunt laughed and laughed and laughed. Then she said, "This is what you have been waiting for, Erming. And it has been waiting for you. Let's go inside."

* * *

Xe studied Ms. Yu from under lowered eyebrows. Ms. Yu was sobbing, tears spilling out from beneath the lenses of her glasses. "I--I'm sorry," gasped Ms. Yu. Xe lifted a leaden hand from the table and waved it in a vague that's all right gesture. "It's only that I never dreamed I would be the one... I thought surely Great-Aunt, or perhaps one of the children... I haven't made a selection yet, but there are two girls who seem well suited to the work..." Ms. Yu seemed to think of something then, and she wiped her eyes hastily and sniffed. "Or perhaps it will be no longer necessary. Do you know yet what you will do?"

"Actually," Xe said without hesitation, "no."

"There is time to decide," Ms. Yu replied instantly. "After all, they have been waiting for you for centuries... millennia, nearly."

"They have," Xe said. It wasn't exactly a statement. Aliens, she thought.

"And we have kept them safe," Ms. Yu assured her, pulling a snowy handkerchief from the pocket of her smock and dabbing her nose with it. It was embroidered, Xe saw, in Nu Shu. "You will see when we get there--the environment is perfect for preservation."

"Is it," said Xe.

"Perfect," said Ms. Yu fervently. "Just perfect. They look the way they did the first day. I have seen museum pieces, and they are in much worse shape."

Pickled aliens, Xe thought. "I'm certain you've done a good job," she hazarded.

"Oh, it isn't just me," Ms. Yu hastened to say, drying her face with the handkerchief. "It's the rest of the caretakers, all of them."

"I'm really grateful," Xe answered, more than a little desperate by now. "How many... caretakers... did you say there are?"

"One thousand three hundred and seventy-eight," Ms. Yu told her, "over the eighteen hundred and eighty-three years since they arrived. I am the last--and the least."

Xe nodded, trying not to let it show on her face or in her suddenly restricted breathing. Pickled aliens and a working spaceship. "You're... it, caretaker-wise?" she asked carefully.

"Oh," said Ms. Yu, getting up in haste and walking around the table to clasp her hands and bow before Xe, "you are right, Ms. Zhe, I have left that part of it far too long, but you see, since the scholarly study of Nu Shu began and this place became more popular, we have had to be very cautious. Very cautious. Selective as to whom we approach. Men are writing Nu Shu now, did you know?"

"Professor Li said something about it," Xe said, grateful for a question she could answer. She pulled the laptop toward her and closed the file, and the generic desktop image, a field of green grass, waved casually back and forth. Xe chose her next words carefully. "Professor Li recommended that I not place a lot of faith in what was going on at the Museum."

Ms. Yu nodded, looking a bit deflated. "Tourism is very helpful economically to this rural place, but tourism and scholarship are often mutually exclusive." Xe was struck by the precision of Ms. Yu's English. "I have a lot of sympathy for them," Ms. Yu continued, glancing at the screen of the laptop. "They have a difficult job, maintaining the legacy of Nu Shu with no one left to teach it."

"There's you," Xe pointed out. Ms. Yu's head swiveled toward her. "You're the best. So Professor Li tells me."

Ms. Yu hesitated, then pulled her wept-on glasses from her face and polished them on her handkerchief. "She is kind to recognize how hard I've worked," she murmured.

"So why aren't you at the Museum?" Xe asked.

Ms. Yu raised her head, her dark eyes trained on Xe's face. "I have another mission."

Before Xe was quite aware of it, she had shouldered her backpack and made plans to meet Ms. Yu at a hideously early hour. "Don't worry," Ms. Yu assured her, slipping her arm into the crook of Xe's elbow, "the roosters will awaken you."

Oh, swell, Xe thought, borrowing one of RangerGrrl's expressions. "What should I bring?"

"You had better bring everything you have," Ms. Yu said seriously. Xe had a fleeting image of her dead body lying in the hills getting chewed by pandas while Ms. Yu hocked her laptop in Shanghai. She dismissed it as unworthy.

They stopped before the hotel, which had just one kerosene lantern burning over the doorway. Xe was certain it had been left on for her. She looked around her. Without the light pollution of the big cities, the stars were large, gleaming, silent above the absent outline of the hills, the Milky Way clear, stretching like a band across the horizon of a cloudless black-velvet sky. She took a moment to appreciate the view, and thought that perhaps the galaxy itself might be sending her a message.

She turned to the woman by her side, smiling down into Ms. Yu's face and getting an answering smile. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep," Xe told her in a soft voice.

"Oh," said Ms. Yu, her face outlined in starlight and the soft glow of the lantern, "you will sleep like a child when you get there. I always do."

* * *

The roosters proved irritatingly reliable, and Xe was up before daylight, collecting everything she had. She sat on the bed with her hoodie draped over her arm, looking at her backpack. Clothes, extra shoes, notebooks, pens, combination hand-cranked and solar-powered flashlight (it had a radio in it, but she hadn't gotten much use out of it), digital camera, protein bars, towels, a set of international postcards with scenes from Guangzhou, cellphone, the sheaf of articles she'd shuffled while going through Customs, a crushable sun hat, about a thousand handkerchiefs, laptop, solar charger, chocolate, bubblejet, printer paper, water purifier, translation guide, Fodor's China, shampoo, soap, letters of introduction, toothbrush and toothpaste, CD-RWs, address book, cellphone charger, compass, small paper bag of nuts that had a picture of a squirrel on the outside, and eight Wolong panda keychains with a hidden prize. Her backpack seemed to have swollen in the night.

She rubbed her face with her hand. A powerful longing for coffee had taken over her soul. Next to her, on the bed, was one protein bar and the last of her apple juice packs from Guangzhou. She unwrapped the protein bar and opened the apple juice and ate moodily, wondering what the day would hold.

Where was this place Ms. Yu was taking her to? Suppose Ms. Yu wasn't the friendly, open girls'-school teacher she pretended to be, but a serial killer? They might overlook serial killers in a country with a billion-plus people in it. She might be a national hero.

Xe took another bite, telling herself, Don't be morbid. She's a perfectly decent lady. Treated you with nothing but kindness. And that whole you're-Supergrrl look she has in her eyes when she looks at you. Now, that was a little worrisome; you can't be the Messiah without a message. And... and...

And she had absolutely no idea where they were going. Or what they'd find when they got there. Clueless. Bereft of possible explanations. Something extraterrestrial, maybe. Perpetual motion. The 200 mpg fuel injector, buried in a Detroit safe-deposit box because it would have added a thousand bucks to the price of an SUV. The elixir of life. The secret of making coal out of old McDonald's bags. Having to cancel Easter because they found the body. She hadn't been able to make any headway, and each guess was more preposterous than the last. Nothing made sense.

She sighed, following it with a listless bite of her protein bar. What did they have, really, to hang this conspiracy theory on? A ruin in the middle of what passed for a valley on a Greek island. A sexy married bartender packing a wooden medallion in a Customs-proof smuggling container. A trip through a charred landscape in a rented sedan to a place that still seemed like a mirage. An indecipherable carving on a whale's tooth. A tremendously convenient assignment that left her plenty of time to poke around on another continent. Someone who recognized the message. Or said she did.

An elaborate scam? Xe didn't have much in the way of money, although she might at one point control enough of a budget at an EU ministry to make her a good target. The only problem was, they were about a decade early drafting the ransom note. A practical joke? Hey, not even Maggie had those kinds of resources, resourceful though she was. She longed for Maggie again abruptly, the type of pain that only comes from missing a close friend, an ache that told her she hadn't thoroughly thought through her relocation to Europe.

Maggie would know whether this was on the level. She could've asked Maggie...

She could've asked Maggie to come with her. And no matter what was going on in her life--the realization of all her dreams, a starring role on Broadway, the come-up-from-the-chorus type of success story theater fans loved, and millions of theatergoers discovering what all her friends had known for so long--Maggie would have given it all up in an instant if Xe said she needed her. She'd have dropped it all and bought a ticket to Shangjiangxu, Official Center of Noplace, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, People's Republic of China.

Xe crumpled up the wrapper of her protein bar and pitched it at the wastebasket. To her surprise, it circled the rim, then dropped in. She thought of all of them, Blackie and RangerGrrl, JLynn, AngelRad, McJohn and Story Doc. They'd left this all for her to figure out. No, she reminded herself severely. You volunteered for this gig. Don't forget that, and don't make your friends pay for your curiosity.

A soft knock on the door left her almost hanging from the overhead light. "Yes?" she called, her voice rusty from a night's disuse.

"Ms. Zhe," said a soft voice she recognized as that of Ms. Yu, "are you awake?"

She was tempted to make a smartass reply, but thought better of it. "Yeah, hang on a sec." She opened the door, and the bright, well-scrubbed, fresh, pretty face of Ms. Yu broke into an unforced smile at the sight of her. Xe couldn't help it; she grinned back.

"Good morning," said Ms. Yu, bowing a little. "Are you ready?"

"Sure," Xe lied.

* * *

Ms. Yu led her into a cold, clear morning. The predawn sky was a deep, dark fall-into-me-and-slumber blue, and the stars glittered bright and chill overhead, like the frost-pointed blades of grass below her feet. Xe's backpack seemed to have gotten heavier.

Ms. Yu was in a sensible-looking down jacket, and she was carrying two backpacks, one in each hand. Xe thought it a little ungallant not to offer to take one, but she had all she could do with her own. They walked out of town and followed the road, which was eerily silent, deserted and lifeless. "I have brought some breakfast," Ms. Yu called softly over her shoulder to Xe. "We can start while we are waiting for the bus."

"There's a bus to this place?" Xe asked.

Ms. Yu laughed a warm little laugh into the chilly air. "It runs close. The bus is for the factory workers. They go to the assembly plants for the week, where they will live in dormitories when their work shift is over. At the end of the week, they come home to their families and bring their pay."

"Is it a good living?" Xe asked, turning into an economist.

Ms. Yu nodded. "Much better than any they have known. It is highly skilled work. It allows people to live in rural areas and still support their families."

Xe discerned movement down the road a way. It might be the bus stop. She chose her next words with care. "Is pollution considered to be a problem?"

Ms. Yu replied, "A grave one. The price points set for manufactured goods by Western customers are too low to fund improvements in the industrial plants that would ensure environmental protection. It is ironic that rural Chinese can finally afford to school their children, but their performance suffers because of lead poisoning. "

Xe smiled into the darkness. "Where'd you learn English?"

"From my tutor," Ms. Yu answered, "and then at Stanford." She turned to Xe with concern. "Am I making mistakes?"

"Not a one, so far," Xe said with a laugh. "Your English is a lot better than mine. Stanford?"

"Bachelor's," Ms. Yu said, "and Master's." By now, they were walking side by side, and Xe had warmed up enough to be completely comfortable. "My bachelor's degree is in Linguistics, with a minor in Classics, and my Master's is in Humanities, concentrating on classical antiquity, historical preservation, and comparative linguistics."

"And here I majored in beer, pizza, and women," Xe muttered.

"I beg your pardon?" Ms. Yu asked.

"Nothing," Xe said. They were getting close to the bus stop, and the sky was now light enough that Xe could see people wandering around, a couple sitting on the ground eating, one man smoking and peering up the road as if he might make the bus materialize by pure determination. She turned to Ms. Yu again. "When are you going for your doctorate?"

"I'm not," Ms. Yu told her.

It was a little bit of a shock. "Why not? You're obviously a gifted scholar. Why quit when you're on a roll?"

"Because," said Ms. Yu simply, "you have arrived."

The other travelers betrayed not the slightest shred of curiosity at Xe's presence. The bus arrived a few minutes later, and the quiet passengers boarded with little fuss. They all carried bags or backpacks, and they were dressed in some version of the utilitarian dark slacks and white shirts she was accustomed to seeing on Ms. Yu. None of them had coats on, and Xe glanced at Ms. Yu's down jacket, heaped neatly in her lap.

"It gets cold," Ms. Yu murmured, keeping her voice low.

So wherever they were going, the temperature would be an issue... Xe huddled into her hoodie and looked around her. The bus was new-looking and clean, but hardly luxurious. Most of the workers were asleep, leaning against the windows or curled up in the bench seats. The driver was a competent-looking young woman who shifted the gears without drama or apparent effort.

Some signal, something in the road, or perhaps something subtle the driver did, seemed to enliven the passengers, and the few who were awake began to unzip their bags and open their backpacks. Packages of food appeared. Ms. Yu followed suit, taking a thermos, bowls, cups, and batter-fried rice cakes wrapped in waxed paper from her backpack. She served Xe, then poured tea from the thermos and handed her a cup. Xe was still hungry after her protein bar. She and Ms. Yu had their breakfast in silence, exchanging shy smiles from time to time. Xe decided Ms. Yu made a helluva cup of tea. When they were done, Ms. Yu folded up the waxed paper, stacked the bowls and cups, and put them all back into her backpack.

The bus climbed gradually, and Xe studied the passing landscape in the growing light. The gray, rocky, featureless valley became more green as the bus ascended. The hills pitched far more steeply than she was accustomed to, and she had to keep reminding herself that most buses didn't fall off mountain roads.

She drifted into a reverie, staring out the window. Somewhere out there was the answer to the question that had plagued her since she first saw the ruined Artemision on Evia. She touched the pendant at her throat, running her fingers gently over the design. She'd had the thing around her neck for more than five years, and between seeing it in the mirror every morning and her fingers exploring every millimeter of the surface, she could have drawn it. On one side, the big-eyed owl. On the other, the helmeted head of a woman. A tetradrachma, a high-value coin, but rendered in the ubiquitous olive wood of Greece, not silver. She had had it mounted in a silver frame, the dark wood set off inside a bright circle of metal. Initially, she had been exquisitely careful of the pendant, but it showed no more sign of wear than it had the day Lena cleaned it and stuck it into the box.

"Do you all wear them?" Ms. Yu asked in a low voice.

"Hm?" Xe inquired, turning back to Ms. Yu, who inclined her head toward the pendant. "This?"

Ms. Yu nodded and went on in a barely-audible murmur. "The token of the dual goddesses. Athena is the owl and Artemis is the warrior."

"You know what this is?" Xe whispered in surprise, glancing around her.

Ms. Yu nodded again, her face serious. "I knew when I saw it last night. Then you asked me to translate the message. And then I really knew."

Ms. Yu was leaning over her jacket with her elbows on her knees, looking up, and her face was inches away from Xe's. Somewhere out there, very close now, was her answer. Xe rubbed her tired eyes and chuckled softly. "Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up hallucinogens."

"Beg pardon?" Ms. Yu asked.

Xe smiled, and Ms. Yu smiled back, a bit uncertain. "Never mind, stupid joke," Xe said hastily. "I do that a lot. I can't really believe I'm here."

"It is also dreamlike for me," Ms. Yu affirmed. "I did not think I would be the sentry."

"The sentry," Xe asked carefully, "to what?"

Ms. Yu opened her mouth to reply, then looked past Xe. "This is where we stop."

She got to her feet abruptly, and the bus slowed, pulling as far to the side of the road as possible. Xe struggled upright and seized her backpack. The bus came to a stop, the brakes hissing, and Ms. Yu started up the aisle. Xe followed her. The door opened with another hiss. Ms. Yu bowed to the driver, and so did Xe, wondering if she was doing it right. They climbed down the steps, Xe moving awkwardly because of the backpack. She found herself in the road next to Ms. Yu, the bus pulling away from them and heading down the mountain road.

Xe shrugged into her backpack and turned to Ms. Yu, who was watching the bus disappear. When it turned the corner, Ms. Yu heaved a sigh that looked like relief and turned to Xe with a smile. "Are you ready?"

Xe gestured toward her backpack. "How long are we going to have to walk?"

"It's not far," Ms. Yu assured her. "Perhaps half a kilometer."

"Oh, good," Xe said, reassured.

"That way." Ms. Yu pointed up the steep, thickly overgrown hill.

"Crap," Xe muttered.

Ms. Yu laughed. "I will help you, Ms. Zhe." She rolled up her jacket and tied it to one of the backpacks, then picked them up, one in each hand, and headed off the road into the undergrowth. Xe followed cautiously. They had walked maybe ten meters when she saw the last thing she ever expected to see: a mundane little corrugated steel garden shed, painted, undeniably, in gray camouflage. Ms. Yu approached the shed, put down her backpacks, and pulled a long cord from inside her shirt. At the end of it was a key. Ms. Yu unlocked the padlock on the door and commented, "You had better leave your things here. It is too much to bring them all up in one trip."

"Will they be safe?" Xe asked, a little doubtful.

"There is no one here to steal them," Ms. Yu assured her, removing the padlock and opening the door. She went inside, and Xe peered cautiously into the doorway.

Regulation garden shed... a rock floor, shelves holding padlocked wooden boxes, a row of holders with what looked like pool cues along the back. It was clean, dry, and tidy; there weren't even any cobwebs. Ms. Yu set one backpack on an empty spot on a shelf and reached to help Xe off with hers. When Xe had the weight off her shoulders, Ms. Yu lifted it with a sudden effort, and Xe hastened to help. They slid the huge, heavy backpack onto another shelf (which, surprisingly, seemed completely capable of holding the load), and Ms. Yu patted it with caution, apparently watching to ensure that it wouldn't tumble off. Xe smiled at Ms. Yu's protective attitude toward her luggage, and Ms. Yu turned her head with a quick, answering grin.

Ms. Yu took two of the pool cues from the rack in the back and handed one to Xe, then grabbed the backpack from the floor and left the shed. Xe followed her. While Ms. Yu locked the shed, Xe studied the wooden pole: not, she now saw in the light, a pool cue, but a willowy-looking walking staff. Designs were carved into each end and the middle was wrapped in a stout leather sleeve. The staff looked like it meant business, and Xe looked up the hill again, apprehensive.

Ms. Yu laughed again. "You will make it. I'll help." She slid into her backpack and grasped her own staff. She walked back into the woods, and Xe followed, swinging the staff in the way Ms. Yu was using hers. It proved a lot easier than she had thought, and she was under the comforting illusion that this would be easy, right up until the moment she hit the climb.

There was something approximating a path, which was reassuring, and it ascended the hill like a switchback. Ms. Yu leaned on her staff, pausing frequently to see how Xe, struggling along behind, was doing. She's carrying a backpack and not even breathing hard, Xe thought, and I'm empty-handed and dying. She set the staff carefully onto the rock, and after a few minutes, she began to see how it worked; you found a good vantage point to set the staff so that when you leaned on it, it would tend to keep your body pushed toward the hill and away from the drop. She lost a little of her terror as they climbed, and knew she was better when she began to rethink the wisdom of keeping her hoodie on.

It was right about then that Ms. Yu began to sing, a lovely sky-filling warble that reminded Xe of a bird's trilling. Xe didn't catch a word of it, although a syllable that might have been "Zhe" appeared frequently. She relaxed as Ms. Yu went on, grinning as they made their way through patchy sunlight and bright green vegetation against the vivid dark gray of the rock. She was climbing a hill in rural China, with her very own customized soundtrack, and at the end of the climb was something she began to suspect her whole life had been leading to.

A few minutes later, they emerged at the end of the switchback trail, and the lip of the hill broadened into a wide, rocky ledge. Xe leaned on her staff, catching some oxygen, while Ms. Yu reached into her shirt again, emerging with another key. This one was blocky and ancient-looking, and Ms. Yu held it in one hand as she slid aside a panel in the rock. Xe blinked and put her fingertips to her eyes. Inside the panel, whose existence she would not have suspected before Ms. Yu touched it, was a substantial lock. Ms. Yu turned to her. "Hold yourself steady, Ms. Zhe," she said, then slipped the key around her neck into the lock and turned it.

Half the hill began to slide sideways, and Xe clutched at the staff until her knuckles hurt. A low rumbling accompanied the movement. Xe kept herself from falling off the rock by force of will, and when the rumbling quit, she was looking into the opening of a cave.

A long time later, Ms. Yu's silvery laugh brought her back to reality (if that's what this was). She shut her mouth and turned to Ms. Yu with an excited smile. "This is it? Really the place?"

"This is the place," Ms. Yu assured her, gesturing toward the opening. "Please come inside your home, Ms. Zhe."

Xe took a cautious step inside. It was dim and chilly, a dark expansive space, and grouped just inside the opening were things from the outside world, poking through the gloom: a camp stove atop a metal cabinet, a set of shelves that held dishes and wooden boxes of tea and rice, hard wooden chairs, a beautiful enameled table that looked like it might have stood, at one time, in a dissection room. Xe looked it over, thinking. Enamel wouldn't rot, not the way wood or painted metal would. That implied permanence. Next to the table was a sink with a tank mounted above it. The tap on the sink was a spout with a single handle on top, like a wine barrel. Xe leaned her staff against the wall, moving carefully, while Ms. Yu set her backpack on the ground and rummaged through it for something.

A little way back of the entrance was an area that looked like, of all unlikely things, a bedroom. The bed was a wondrous carved wooden creation with a dragon rising from the headboard. It was, she was intrigued to see, large enough for two (if they were well acquainted). Beneath it was a fiery red Oriental carpet, and the tail of a dragon, the twin of the one on the headboard, curled from beneath the bed. Xe turned involuntarily to glance at Ms. Yu, who was occupied in lighting a lantern. Ms. Yu looked up and met Xe's glance with a warm, bright, unselfconscious smile.

That answers nothing, Xe thought, turning to the rest of the cave. The lantern caught, and in the growing light, the shadows retreated, revealing more of the furnishings. Another table, this one broad and sturdy and made of wood, covered with what looked like hand-sized beanbags. She picked one up; it was a hand-sized beanbag. She tossed it from hand to hand, moving back into the cave, looking back occasionally at Ms. Yu, who was lighting the camp stove and putting on a kettle.

Farther in, past the table, the cave divided into two passageways that took off in opposite directions. The air was a lot colder, but not humid, unlike the Hunan she'd been acquainted with so far, and utterly still.

The light began to waver. Xe looked toward the mouth of the cave. Ms. Yu was walking toward her, the lamp in one hand. "We shall have tea soon," Ms. Yu said, "and in the meantime, perhaps I can show you what you have come so far to see."

She seemed quietly gleeful, like an excited kid hiding it well, and Xe's conscience attacked. "Ms. Yu--" Xe held out the hand not currently occupied with beanbag. "I have to explain something..."

It cost a chunk of Xe's soul when Ms. Yu's happy smile collapsed. "Yes?" asked Ms. Yu quietly.

Xe gestured toward the chairs, and Ms. Yu made her way solemnly to a seat. Xe pulled one of the chairs close to Ms. Yu and sat in front of her. "You see..." Xe leaned over and rested her elbows on her knees, tossing the beanbag from hand to hand nervously. "You have this notion that I... know what I'm doing here." She raised her eyes. Ms. Yu was looking at her with undisguised sorrow, and a pang of sadness unfolded in Xe's heart. "And..." She sighed. "And I don't."

It was a little easier, now that she'd started, and Xe shrugged with feigned nonchalance. "The fact is, I don't have the slightest idea what's here, or why it's so important."

"You don't?" asked Ms. Yu. "But... but I saw the token... last night..." She gestured toward Xe's throat, where the tetradrachma swung from its cord.

"This?" Xe asked, grasping it in her free hand. Something occurred to her just then. "Oh, is that what you were--" Ms. Yu turned inquiring eyes up from the pendant. "I thought--" Xe's face went crimson, and she was happy for the uncertain light of the lantern. "Never mind," she muttered, staring at the floor. "It's not important." Note to self: some women find you completely resistible. She would never again assume that a fascinated glance was directed at the grrls...

A hand descended on Xe's wrist, light as a hummingbird, and she looked up, miserable and lost. Ms. Yu was staring into her eyes, and the look of sympathy on her face was hard to take. "Ms. Zhe," she murmured, "where did you get this token?"

It seemed an oddball question, and Xe had to think for a moment. "I kicked it," she said finally. "Knocked it over with my shoe. A friend and I were on vacation in Greece, at this place called Cape Artemisium, and there was this ruined temple..."

She thought back to that day. Cold? Hot? Rainy or sunny? She was fairly certain it was sunny; neither she nor Maggie could have been persuaded onto a scooter if it was raining. How had they found the temple, anyway? She remembered the sign, but not exactly how they'd gotten there. She could recall scuffing her shoes in the dust covering what was left of the temple floor, more for something to do than an intent to look around, even a vague intent. She remembered crouching. The sun. The sun was shining on her back.

"It was a sunny day in October," she said in a murmur. "The air felt soft. I was with my friend Maggie. We'd rented a scooter and we were just driving around, looking for a place to have a drink. We saw this sign..." She remembered the Vespa heading downhill. "It was in a valley, the temple. It's just a ruin. There's nothing left except a square of stones around the foundation and parts of the floor. The rest of it probably got carted off to make houses..."

She thought a bit more, staring into the gloom of the cave, but not really paying attention to what she was seeing. "I asked Maggie to stop and I walked over to the ruin. I was shuffling my feet in the dust, just kicking things here and there, and I flipped it over. I picked it up. I could tell it was wood, but not really a lot about the design. We took it back to town and showed it to our friend Lena and she cleaned it up and put it in a box with a price tag and a receipt so we could get it past Customs..." The memory made her smile.

"Lena is your teacher?" Ms. Yu inquired unobtrusively.

"No," Xe said, her face cracking in a smile. "She's a bartender." She shrugged again. "Same difference."

"Where did you obtain the Nu Shu writing?" Ms. Yu asked.

"A few months ago," Xe explained to Ms. Yu's sober, serious face, "I went back to Cape Artemisium with my friend JLynn. They had horrible wildfires there this summer. We went to check on Lena and her husband. She said one of her neighbors had lost his life trying to protect the temple. So we drove out there, the three of us, JLynn and Lena and I..." She stopped again, lost in the memory. The blackened, blasted landscape, the crunching of the tires across the grass, the heavy smell of woodsmoke that hung in the air and coated the back of her throat.

"Yes?" prompted Ms. Yu softly.

"We got to the temple, and it was OK. Pretty much. I mean, it's already trashed. But then I started thinking, This isn't it, this isn't what we're supposed to be looking at..." Xe stared into the gloom again and went on slowly. "So we drove north. And we found this place... a beautiful little place, a lane of oaks that led to a pool with a waterfall. And we parked and walked in. I wanted... one of us wanted, I don't remember who, but one of us wanted to see what was behind the waterfall... Lena's lived there her whole life, and she never even knew the place was there..."

"What," asked Ms. Yu carefully, "was behind the waterfall?"

"A... a cave," Xe said, looking her right in the eyes. "A cave. A lot like this one, in fact. And it had this stone altar and underneath it was this thing that turned out to be a piece of scrimshaw... that's a piece of whalebone that--"

"Yes, I know," said Ms. Yu, with a tiny hint of a smile.

"I guess you would," Xe said, laughing at herself.

"Where was it?" Ms. Yu asked. Xe made a gesture of cluelessness, and Ms. Yu clarified, "The scrimshaw."

"Under the altar."

"What convinced you to look there?" Ms. Yu asked.

"I--I don't remember," Xe murmured. "I just got this wild hair..."

Ms. Yu stood up suddenly and went to the mouth of the cave. Xe leapt to her feet and followed. Ms. Yu leaned against the opening, looking out into a sea of greenery and a steep fall to the road they'd come by. "How did you know it was Nu Shu?" Ms. Yu asked, as if the conversation hadn't been interrupted.

"I--we didn't," Xe said with a gesture. "JLynn and a friend of hers, Blackie, got it back to the States and took it to a Chinese antique shop in San Francisco. They referred them to a woman who was a scholar of Chinese antiquities. She was the one who told them it was Nu Shu. I was going to China, so we decided to copy the writing and see if we could find someone here who could translate it."

Ms. Yu turned grave eyes on Xe's face. "How did you come to take a trip to China?"

"I got assigned a project on microcredit programs in the rural areas," Xe said. "It just happened."

"And you know nothing of what the scrimshaw described?"

"I haven't got the slightest idea."

Ms. Yu nodded and turned to look into the trees again. After a long silence, she spoke. "I don't know what to think," she said. "We always assumed that when you arrived, you would know the entire story. And now it appears you do not."

Xe was crushed. "I--I guess maybe you better keep waiting for the one--"

Ms. Yu shot out a hand and placed it on her wrist, again with that preternatural gentleness. "A moment. We are the only ones here. No one else can make this decision for us." She studied Xe's face, looking for something, something trustworthy. Xe prayed she would find it. "You are a spiritual person, Ms. Zhe?"

Xe lifted a shoulder. "Not really," she said, but it cost her something.

"Nor am I," mused Ms. Yu, putting her fist to her chin and thinking. "And yet. There is a great deal here that might be coincidence, except that it relates to the great secret. Who are we to guess at the ways of gods we assume are no more and have long since ceased to understand?" She turned to Xe and reached out to lay a feathery-light hand on the tetradrachma at her throat. "You bear their token. You obtained the whale tooth. You and your friends researched where it came from. You found Professor Li. She sent you to me with a note indicating that she thought you were the one we had been waiting for."

"I... I just--I don't think I am," Xe said, her face flushing with unaccountable shame. "I'm sorry, Ms. Yu."

"But what if you are?" Ms. Yu said. Xe lifted her head, and the light of zeal was bright in Ms. Yu's eyes. "We were not told that the person who would come would know what she was looking for. Perhaps... perhaps it is enough if one of us knows."

Xe's fingertips went numb with shock. "You can't mean that."

Ms. Yu put both hands on Xe's shoulders and tightened her grip a bit, just enough to let Xe know she was there. "I cannot throw away this chance on the hope of a better one. But we must be certain. Can you keep a secret, Ms. Zhe?"

Xe's mouth worked for a while before it would emit intelligible words. "Yes," she said, realizing that she meant it.

Ms. Yu's face cleared, and she was again the sunny young girl Xe couldn't quite believe really existed. "Then let me show you. Everything."

She took Xe's hand and led her toward the back of the cave. On the way, Xe remembered to snatch up the lantern.

* * *

They headed toward the left-hand passage beyond the worktable. The farther into the cave they went, the more helpful the lantern became. Ms. Yu took it and held it up before her, and her form was outlined in a misty halo. To either side of her, the corridor stretched far into the distance, going beyond where the lantern would reach. Every once in a while, Xe spotted characters carved into the rock: here a Chinese word or phrase, there a bit of Nu Shu, and, to her surprise, phrases she recognized as Greek. When they had gone about twenty meters into the passageway, Xe saw a recess chiseled into the rock. Set into it was a wooden frame with many square openings, and in most of them rested a round object that looked like leather.

"Which one first?" said Ms. Yu, stopping and giving Xe a sideways glance that looked nearly flirtatious.

"Uh... st--start at the beginning," Xe suggested.

"You're the boss," smiled Ms. Yu, with a formal inflection that let Xe hear the phrase as if for the first time. She handed the lantern to Xe, who held it up so Ms. Yu could see what she was doing. Ms. Yu reached into one of the cubbyholes and drew out a long cylinder of what looked like leather. "Let's look at this at the table," Ms. Yu said, and Xe turned to make her way back toward the mouth of the cave, holding the lantern and looking back to make certain Ms. Yu hadn't been swallowed by either gloom or mystery.

Ms. Yu, her face and hands golden in the lantern light, held the leather cylinder carefully balanced on the outstretched palms of her hands, taking careful steps along the stone passageway carved from the cave. She wasn't watching where she was going; she kept her eyes on the cylinder. Xe was to keep that image, that moment, preserved in her memory for years afterwards, the time between knowing that this was very big indeed and knowing exactly what it was that made it that way.

They reached the table, and Xe noticed that it had a remarkably smooth surface, planed and polished to a mirror-bright finish. Something about it aroused her curiosity, and she ran a finger quickly along the edge. The tabletop was a thick sheet of glass. The first thing she thought of was how difficult it would have been to get the glass halfway up a mountain. This meant important. Really important.

Ms. Yu set the cylinder onto the table's glass surface, as gently as the lunar lander settling onto the moon. Xe's heart began to thump. Ms. Yu put a hand on the cylinder and glanced around the table rapidly.

"What are you looking for?" Xe asked in a murmur.

"The other weight," Ms. Yu said, pointing at one of the beanbags. "There should be four of them."

Xe's hand went to her pants pocket, where an unsuspected heavy lump had settled. "I have it," she said, her face growing warm. She hauled it out hastily and put it on the table with a mutter of, "Sorry."

"No worries," Ms. Yu assured her, again making the phrase exquisitely formal. She set the four weights carefully at the corners of the cylinder, securing it so it wouldn't roll. Then she took the lamp from Xe and hung it on a hook hammered into the rock next to the table. She walked to the sink, Xe avidly watching her every move, and returned with a soft little vibrant pink whiskbroom. Xe's eyebrows shot up. Ms. Yu brushed the top of the table, little light flicks that looked like a ritual. Xe couldn't see any dust on the glass, but she was hardly an expert at... at... whatever this was.

Ms. Yu studied the tabletop, evidently finding it satisfactory, and then picked up the cylinder. Xe's heart leapt. The end of the cylinder had an elaborately-fashioned cap on it, and Ms. Yu untied a little thong that held it closed. It looked like a locking hasp, but made out of leather. Finally, she had it open, and she upended the open end over the palm of her hand. Xe's breathing sped up.

What emerged from the leather cylinder was a roll of what looked like thick paper, a uniform cream color with a bit of yellow to it. Ms. Yu laid the paper on the table and placed the cylinder to one side.

Xe bent over the paper. She saw instantly that that wasn't what it was; it had a translucence to the surface, and it was thicker than paper. "Parchment," she breathed. "A parchment scroll."

Ms. Yu smiled and took the parchment in both hands, touching it with what looked like reverence. "Would you be good enough to handle the weights for me?" she murmured.

"Sure," Xe said, maneuvering carefully around her to pick up two of the beanbags. Ms. Yu held down the flat side of the parchment and began to unroll it. "Right there," she whispered, nodding to the top of the parchment, and Xe placed the weight on the top corner as if she were handling pure diamonds. Ms. Yu nodded at the bottom corner, and Xe laid down the other weight with the touch she'd have used on a sick baby bird.

Ms. Yu unrolled the scroll, and Xe picked up the other two weights, moving around Ms. Yu and securing the other side as if they'd practiced for years. Xe smiled at her before her attention was captured completely by the scroll laid out on the table.

The parchment was covered in letters in a rich, glossy black. Xe bent over the scroll again, studying them, trying not to breathe on the parchment. "This isn't Nu Shu," she whispered at last. "It's Greek." She turned to Ms. Yu, hardly daring to ask her next question. "What does it say?"

Ms. Yu held her hand about four inches from the surface of the scroll and pointed at the letters as she translated.

I was still a girl when my little sister Lilias was born to my mother and father, farmers and fishers like so many in Potaideia. My little sister was the delight of my eyes, so tiny, so perfect, and I knew then that I would do anything to protect her. She lives a quiet life, far from my notoriety, and that is as I have wished; I thought to leave this chronicle to her and her children, to share as much of my life as I dare with the only dear ones remaining to me.

Xe's mouth had gone dry. Ms. Yu continued,

I never knew where my parents had acquired the utterly exotic name they granted me; no one else in our village (or, indeed, anywhere else I ever knew) possessed it. This is probably what awoke my dreams of glory. From my earliest moments, I knew that I wanted nothing else in the world but to be a teller of stories. It has not quite happened that way, but perhaps I can borrow a bit of the worldly air that goes with my name, and tell you a tale of the life and love of Gabrielle.

* * *

Brimming with unnamable emotion, Xe stumbled toward the mouth of the cave.

She was tall, the tallest woman I'd ever seen, and the look in her eye bespoke murder. Her strength was apparent; it would become legend. The other thing that struck me then, staring in open-mouthed wonder, was how very beautiful she was.

She stopped well short of the entrance, leaning against the rock wall and trying to catch her breath.

Though she fairly glittered with armament and menace, all I wanted then, or ever, was to be at her side forever. I have apparently attained only the forever part of that girlish wish.

Xe closed her eyes and ran a trembling hand over her face.

The gods, vengeful and capricious to one who kept faith for a remarkably long time despite ample evidence of their utter unfitness to rule over the world of mortals, have left me with little more than an ash-pot, bitter memories, and enough time to fully appreciate the import of both. From my now permanent incarceration in the bleakness of midnight, I cannot decide whether this is a blessing or a curse; it seems to me that the weight of my opinion is decidedly the latter. That may change over time; if I have nothing else, it has become apparent that that is the only thing I am granted in abundance.

They looked old. They looked ancient, in fact. She knew it was possible to falsify documents, of course, but why go to such lengths to validate a myth? The immediate possibility, that she had stumbled over a preposterous, elaborate seduction attempt aimed not at her but at one or more well-known actresses, seemed likely. While she could understand such an impulse, what seemed unlikely was that the object couldn't be achieved more easily, and at less expense.

And if this was a setup, how come they'd let her get so far?

For now, I know this, know it to the center of these increasingly weary yet ageless bones, know it far better than the name I was gifted with at birth, a name no mortal lips have directed at me in thrice a hundred years: I loved her the instant I saw her. And no matter how many eons of loneliness lie before me, I shall never cease.

Xe took a few tottery steps out onto the lip of the cave. She got within a meter of the dropoff to the valley floor, then decided it was better to sit down. She made a graceless landing and sprawled on the rock ledge, staring out into the sunlit greenery surrounding her.

Like the tetradrachma that bears on one side the token of Athena the wise, and on the other the head of Artemis the martial, so the most powerful human emotion has two faces: love and grief. I have tasted deeply but briefly of the one, and shall spend eternity submerged and laboring for breath in the other.

But would I have changed it? Petitioned the gods to spare me that fateful day, to have turned a corner or spent the hours abed with sickness or made me never look to a woman as a lover?

No. No. Never.

Some days I wonder what I could have done to deserve the consummation for which pitiful beggars and powerful monarchs alike have longed, life without end, only to find an ashen, hollow misery with each new sunrise. Other days, I am certain of the purpose of my immortality: I was put here, and shall remain here, to remember Her. For if the rest of the wide, wide world moves on to new diversions, new joys and griefs, and if I alone remain to keep the vestige of her still alive on this earth, that is worth each drop of pain that makes the mighty ocean of sorrow in which I swim, and shall, forevermore.

Soft footsteps behind her. Xe closed her eyes again, and the world dropped out from under her. She opened them quickly, and the green hill under the splendid noontime sky swam back into its rightful place. Ms. Yu knelt beside her, placing a tentative hand on her sleeve. "Ms. Zhe, are you all right?"

"Yeah," sighed Xe. She tried to give Ms. Yu a nonchalant smile, but it seemed a little forced. "I just--I wasn't expecting..."

It's true, her brain whispered abruptly. It's all true. The wildness threatened to take her mind for a ride, but she held it at bay for just a moment. She put a hand gently over Ms. Yu's. "Do you... do you know what you have in there?"

"Yes," said Ms. Yu with quiet firmness. "Yes, I do."

Xe withdrew her hand and prepared to speak, but she couldn't come up with her next question. She worked on it for a bit, then shut her mouth.

"What else do you wish to ask?" Ms. Yu's tone was soft, encouraging. It said Trust me. It said, I know what you're going through. It said, We have no secrets.

Xe took the plunge before she could think of any of the several thousand excellent reasons not to. "And you know about... the show?"

"Yes," said Ms. Yu.

That was it, but the earth fell again, and Xe gasped, trying to catch her footing. Ms. Yu's arms went round her, and Xe grabbed Ms. Yu's forearm by reflex. I'm going to throw up, Xe told herself, panicky. Or if I don't, I'm going to cry...

She braced herself on her free hand and sucked air into her lungs. She swallowed a couple of times. It helped. She turned to Ms. Yu, whose face was very close, and spoke in a near whisper. "So... so you know how important this is to... to millions of people, all over the world... millions of... of women..."

"Yes," Ms. Yu replied, her voice equally low.

"The... the people who put the show together," Xe asked, amazed that her mouth would do something as mundane as put words together. "Do they know about this?"

"If so, they did not learn of it from us." Ms. Yu drew away a bit and tucked her legs under her, looking as comfortable on the rock ledge as she would have on a silk cushion. "I do not know what they know of the history behind their show." She gifted Xe with a charming, shy little smile. "I have never actually seen it. Is it a good show?"

Xe's mouth opened, ready to pour out a thousand answers. She finally shut it, grinning. "Yes," she said.

"Ah," said Ms. Yu, nodding in approval. "That is good."

Xe laughed, a wonderful ground-shaking laugh that set her soul free to wander about the treetops shielding their little secret. Ms. Yu joined her, and the two of them laughed like demented things for a time. Xe wiped her eyes eventually and got enough air to ask, "And you've been looking after all of this? All by yourself?"

"I have," said Ms. Yu with pride. "Since Great-Aunt died eighteen months ago. I have been the caretaker for her legacy. Hers, and that of one thousand, three hundred and seventy-six others."

Xe gazed at her in wonder. The last caretaker. Eighteen centuries. A lifetime spent in preparation. Never knowing precisely what she was guarding, yet giving it her best effort, day after day, even if it took her entire life. "Ah, Ms. Yu," Xe breathed, "I could kiss you."

Ms. Yu's face grew grave. "What can I do to help you to decide quickly?"

"What?" asked Xe.

"What?" echoed Ms. Yu.

"You mean about the scrolls?" Xe asked.

Ms. Yu blinked, and a lovely color climbed into her face. "No," she said softly. "I did not mean about the scrolls, Ms. Zhe."

The two of them stared into each other's eyes for one electrified moment, then Xe leaned toward her slowly, reaching for Ms. Yu's face with the palm of her hand. "Aida," Xe whispered, just before her lips reached Ms. Yu's.

* * *

Aida's lips were cool and light against hers. The first touch, tantalizing and sweet, was over in an instant, and Erming's heart barely had time to register it. Aida drew back. "Is this all right?" she murmured.

"I--I don't know yet," stammered Erming, and Aida laughed softly, stroking the side of Erming's face with her thumb.

"Is this what you want?" Aida asked, keeping her voice low.

Erming borrowed some boldness from somewhere and replied, "I don't know yet. Kiss me again."

Aida chuckled and bent toward her. Erming put up a hand to steady herself against Aida's shoulder. Their lips touched again. Erming's eyes slid shut. Aida began, ever so slowly and subtly, to explore Erming's mouth, fitting her lips around Erming's. Erming tightened her fingers against Aida's shirt, and Aida put a hand over hers, the touch calming her.

You must trust her, Erming ordered herself. She is far more experienced in these things. Aida's fingers closed around hers. Erming was having a little bit of trouble breathing, and she pulled back just a fraction.

Aida took her hand from Erming's. "Too much?"

Erming felt her face flushing. She put her hand over her mouth and looked away.

"Hey," said Aida. She didn't raise her voice, and the lovely low tone plunged Erming into despair. "Can you look at me?"

Looking at you is my favorite thing, and I know that already, Erming thought, but she didn't turn her head. It can't be me, it can't be me.

"You don't like women," Aida ventured.

"Oh," Erming said, distressed, "oh, that is not the problem at all. I love women."

"Just not that way?"

"Oh, no, that way too." Erming turned her head finally. Aida had raised an eyebrow at her. Erming began to wave her nervous hands in the air. "I think women are beautiful--very beautiful, and I--I--have been known to think late at night of certain--"

"I get it, I get it," Aida interrupted, seizing Erming's hands and holding them steady. "You don't owe me any details." She added under her breath, "Especially not the ones you'll wish you hadn't shared later."

Erming looked away again, her cheeks flaming with shame.

"Hey, hey, that was a joke," Aida said, reaching out with her hand to touch Erming's chin lightly. "I'm sorry, I just wanted to see you smile... you have a beautiful smile..."

Erming felt her face twitching, without her control, and it settled into a shy smile after all.

"That's done it," Aida said, sounding pleased and relieved at the same time. "A beautiful ssmmmmmph--"

Erming had launched herself at Aida in mid-sentence, nearly knocking her over, but Aida proved herself capable of dealing with a stealth armful of amorous woman. Erming tightened her arms around Aida's neck and pressed her lips against Aida's, and Aida returned her attention, raising her hand to sweep Erming's hair from her neck. Aida reached up to run her lips and teeth along Erming's neck, and Erming gasped, not certain what to do to make it easier for Aida. Little hot flickers of sensation traveled down Erming's skin, working their way deeper with every millimeter of their journey, and soon her face grew hot for reasons that had nothing to do with shyness.

She was able to give herself to the feeling, indicating wordlessly where Aida was to touch, and soon was carried off on a current of sensation that lasted until she became aware of the cave echoing the noise she was making.

Abruptly, she pulled away again. Aida opened hazy hazel eyes with a vague question in them, and Erming sat up. Aida laid her head on the ledge, splayed her hands out along the rock, and groaned.

The warm tickly feeling vanished completely, fled like a scared doe. "Did I hurt you?" Erming whispered, horrified.

"Only if a bad case of blue ovaries qualifies," Aida muttered, rolling over and propping herself on her elbow. She blinked a couple of times, and her eyes cleared, which made Erming feel awful when Aida trained them on her in an insightful look. "I think I'm the one who should be asking you that question."

Erming's embarrassment swept over her like an ocean wave. She seriously considered jumping from the ledge, but reflected that Aida wouldn't know how to get back to Shangjiangxu without assistance. She murmured, "I ask your pardon."

"Why do you think you need to do that," asked a cautious Aida, "exactly?"

"I'm not a Western woman," Erming sighed, bereft of hope. She linked her hands in her lap and stared at them. "I don't know how to behave." Aida's eyes registered confusion, and Erming knew she was trying to pretend that she didn't know what error had been committed, and it made her feel even worse. "You're very kind, but I am not nearly experienced enough for--"

"Whoa, whoa, slow down," Aida said, sitting up and catching Erming's hands in hers again. "Experienced enough?"

"The average Western woman," Erming explained in desperation, "has five point three lovers and watches approximately thirty-three thousand sexual acts on television. I have had no lovers and Chinese television doesn't feature sexual--"

"Hang on a second," Aida said, raising a hand.

"--acts, so I have no idea how to behave and am certain to be inadequa--"

"You are hardly--"

"--te to a Western woman of such great experience--"

"If I might address just one of your many preconcep--"

"I'm sorry," Erming said, balling her fists in her lap. "I know I am... ignorant. And you deserve a lover with experience."

"The hell--" Aida put her fists to her temples and shook her head. "You know, I'm pretty certain I would understand what you're getting at if there were any blood in my head at the moment..."

Bravely, Erming put a hand on Aida's fist, drawing it down from the side of her head. "The music of love should be a delicate sigh. Like a phrase of music. Like this." Erming sailed her free hand gracefully through the air and sighed the first few notes of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Aida was watching her with unnatural attention, and Erming turned to stare out into the sky. "It should not sound like... like the grunting of a hog."

Humiliated, she turned to Aida again. Aida was sitting tailor-style on the ledge, her elbow on her knee and her chin propped on her fist. Her face was filled with sympathy, and her eyes were warm. The look on her face made Erming feel terrible. It was a moment before Aida spoke. "I don't know what you heard," she said softly, "but I was listening to... the most beautiful music..."

She reached for Erming's hand, and Erming, shocked speechless, let her take it. "And I was hoping," Aida went on, running her thumb over Erming's trembling fingers, "that you would keep singing for me for a very, very long time..."

Erming moved cautiously toward Aida, who obligingly moved her legs out of the way and opened her arms. Erming ran her hands over Aida's shoulders, then closed her eyes and leaned forward. Aida's lips moved on Erming's again, and Erming concentrated on the feeling, the warmth, the presence of another person behind the touch, a slick sliding goodness that began to awaken other feelings in other parts of her. This time, when her throat tightened and her breath began to make a noise on its way out of her, Erming couldn't have been less self-conscious.

It seemed like three hours later when Aida withdrew her lips from Erming's tingling mouth long enough to whisper, "Would you be more comfortable in the bed, Ms. Yu?"

"Erming," she whispered back. "It's Erming."

* * *

Xe untangled herself from Erming with little kisses and touches. She got to her feet. Erming drew herself up, wrapping her arms around her knees and looking up at Xe with what might have been shyness, or terror.

Xe held out a hand, and Erming, after a moment of visible self-struggle, took it. Xe helped Erming up. Erming dusted off the seat of her pants, and Xe gave her a brief smile. They looked at one another for a few moments. Xe moved forward and took Erming's wrists in her hands, holding her loosely enough to try to let her know she was in no danger. "We don't have to," she whispered, "if you don't want to."

"But I do," Erming replied in a low voice. She couldn't hold Xe's eyes and ducked her head.

"Erming," Xe murmured, "you're a beautiful woman and I would love to make love to you. But--"

Erming's head shot up. "I am? You would?"

"Very," Xe said, enfolding her in her arms. "And yes. But if you don't--"

Erming's mouth fastened on hers. Xe tightened her arms around Erming, running her hands over her back. Erming was wearing a bra, Xe noted briefly before becoming occupied in the question of what Erming's lips tasted like. She and Erming kissed for a while, slowly, taking their time, and finally Erming drew away, snuggling her head under Xe's chin. "What did you want to say?" Erming asked in a small voice.

"I can't remember," Xe said truthfully, pulling her close. "Does this feel all right?"

Erming nodded, rubbing her face against Xe's collarbone. "It would feel better in the bed, I think."

If the lady wants to get into bed, then the lady gets into bed. Xe raised a hand to Erming's chin and tipped her head up for a kiss. "I think we should try that experiment."

Erming raised her eyes to Xe's face, still doubtful. "Are you making fun of me?"

Xe touched Erming's face softly here and there with her fingertips and her lips. "I'm having fun, not making fun," she corrected. "There's a difference. OK?"

"OK," Erming said bravely.

Xe disengaged herself and took Erming's hand in hers. Erming shot up, nervous energy propelling her like a jack-in-the-box, and Xe leaned back so Erming wouldn't smack into her. Erming's face took on an embarrassed look again, and Xe tried another encouraging smile, leaning in to kiss her neck. Before she'd quite gotten there, Erming exclaimed, "Oh!"

Befuddled, Xe pulled back, but Erming was moving past her, rushing for the camp stove. "The tea water!" Erming said breathlessly. "It is still cooking!" The kettle on the camp stove, which Xe had completely forgotten, was pouring steam from its spout. Erming hauled the kettle away from the burner and killed the fuel to the stove. Xe touched her on the shoulder, and Erming nearly hit orbital velocity.

Xe laughed softly and put her hands on Erming's shoulders, turning her around. "Are you certain this is really what you want?"

"I am too clumsy." Erming's face fell again.

"No, you're not," Xe assured her.

"I have no little black dress," Erming said in a doleful voice.

Xe's response was a confused chuckle. "What does a little black dress have to do with anything?"

"Elegant Western women always have the little black dress," Erming informed her.

"I see." Xe brushed the hair away from Erming's face and leaned in for another kiss. "You don't need one," she said softly. "You have your eyes." She kissed Erming again. "And your mouth," she added, touching it again with her own. "And what I hope is a desire as great as mine."

"Oh... oh, yes," Erming replied fervently. "You are a knight, a hero!" She seized Xe's hand and brought it to her lips. "You have come all this way, and... and..." She looked into Xe's face seriously, searching it for something.

"And?" Xe inquired.

"And I have been waiting for you all my life," Erming finished in a low tone.

Xe's mouth stretched in what she was certain was a predatory grin. Her heart filled with a glorious sense of excitement, and the rest of her wasn't far behind. "Then it sounds like this meeting is long overdue," she replied, holding out her hand like the knight-errant Erming thought she was. "Ready?"

Erming nodded, and Xe led her to the bed, a trip of about five steps that seemed to take centuries. Erming crawled up onto the bed, drawing herself into a ball, and Xe sat cautiously beside her. "All right?" she asked.

"Yes," said Erming, leaning forward and reaching for Xe's face with her hand. Xe met her mouth, and Erming began to uncurl from her guardedness.

"To tell you the truth," Xe said between kisses, "I think you're the real hero. This place. This mission. Giving up everything to guard this treasure." She ran her hand down Erming's neck, and Erming hissed with pleasure. Xe stroked one side of Erming's neck and kissed the other, and Erming moved, sometimes making it easier for Xe to reach, sometimes as if she wanted to trap that insistent hand, those insistent lips, against her flesh.

Xe reached for the top button of her camp shirt with her free hand, unbuttoning it slowly, hoping Erming wouldn't get distracted. She got the top two buttons undone by the time Erming realized what was going on. Erming pulled away with visible effort. Her face was flushed and her eyes misted with pleasure. "Let me," she whispered, reaching for Xe's shirt with a tentative hand. "May I?"

"Please," Xe murmured, putting her hands atop Erming's. Erming's fingers moved under Xe's, and the touch, deft and capable, made Xe's breathing speed up. Erming opened Xe's shirt, but didn't pull out her shirttails.

"So much, for now," Erming said, staring at the buttons. "Yes?"

"Yes," Xe murmured, putting her hands on Erming's shoulders and leaning toward her for a kiss. There was a hint of tension in Erming's kiss now. Xe moved a bit closer.

The next thing she felt was a gentle touch on her chest. Erming's hands crept into the opening of Xe's shirt, settling lightly over her breasts. It took about two seconds for the fire to reach her brain. Xe made a muffled noise against Erming's lips. Erming pulled back and ducked her head, and Xe caught her by the back of the neck, keeping her from bolting. "That means I like what you're doing," Xe whispered into Erming's hair. "Keep doing it."

In response, Erming increased the pressure of her touch, following it up with her lips. Xe groaned softly and let her head fall back. Only a small part of her skin was exposed to the air, and Erming went over every millimeter north of Xe's bra, her touch knowing and exploratory at the same time. Xe's muscles tightened, and her hand became a fist. She loosened everything she could and whispered, "Here."

Erming sat back and lifted her eyes to Xe's face. Evidently, she liked what she saw, because she smiled. "Your breasts," Erming said. "They're beautiful."

"I'm glad you think so," Xe said, trying to avoid lunging at her. "You're about to see a lot more of them." She took Erming's shoulders and leaned forward to kiss her, urging her wordlessly to lie down. Erming lowered herself to the bed, and Xe moved carefully over her, not lying on her but not sitting up either. She held herself up with her arms and lowered her mouth to catch Erming's. Erming sighed against her and put up her arms, running her hands through Xe's hair. They kissed for a few minutes, and Erming wound herself tighter and tighter against Xe, who lowered herself cautiously until there was only a little bit of space between them. Erming put her hand into the opening of Xe's shirt, feeling her breasts, and gasped as Xe groaned again.

It was perfection, a moment combining passion and touch. Xe balanced on one hand and lifted her other to Erming's, pushing Erming's hand farther into her camp shirt. Erming's hand slid across Xe's bare skin as Xe disentangled her hand and reached for the buttons on Erming's blouse.

Erming wriggled underneath her. Xe closed her eyes and settled herself against Erming's body, hip to hip, mouth to mouth. She finished with the buttons and hauled at the side of Erming's blouse, pulling it free of her slacks. Her impatience got the better of her, and she put her hand against Erming's skin as she touched Erming's tongue with her own.

Erming's skin was soft and warm, and Xe could feel her breathing as she ran her hand over Erming's side. Erming's hands caught in Xe's hair, pulling her head down, intensifying the kiss. Xe's brain started to swim in a warm sea of sensation.

Erming twined her leg around Xe's, and Xe resettled herself so that Erming would have something to push against. Xe ran her hand over Erming's breast, the thin cloth of Erming's bra between her and Erming's skin. Xe spent a moment wondering about the construction of the bra, which was integral to getting it off Erming. Was it the kind she could handle, a Western-style bra, or did it have little silk laces or something? She could feel underneath it what this was doing to Erming, and she broke away from Erming's mouth to send her lips over Erming's neck. Erming leaned back into the pillows and lifted her chin to make it easier. Little noises came from her throat, and it just about made Xe insane with want.

She used her free hand to yank the rest of Erming's shirt free of her slacks. Erming opened her eyes and struggled to her elbows, and Xe got out of her way, staying as close as she could while Erming fought her way out of her blouse. Erming lay back on the bed, and Xe pulled back a little bit to look at her.

Erming's skin glowed in the gloom of the softly-lit cave. Her shoulders had the delicacy of a doe's, and her eyes were soft, liquid, huge, trained on Xe's face. Xe traced little patterns with her fingers against Erming's skin, and when Erming put an experimental hand lightly over Xe's, Xe told her, "Go ahead."

She continued her touches, skating across Erming's shoulders, neck, and torso. She smiled at Erming, hoping it came off as reassuring and not possessive, then ran her hand over Erming's breast, lightly at first, then increasing the pressure. Erming's breathing quickened, and she didn't move her hand from Xe's. Together, the two of them worked on Erming's breast. Erming's hand got tighter on Xe's, and her subtle gasps turned into moans.

Inspired, Xe leaned over to run her lips against Erming's chest. "Yes," she hissed against Erming's skin, "that's what I like to hear." Erming's skin smelled like a delicate, spicy perfume, and tasted wonderfully exotic. Erming's hand left Xe's, and then she hauled at the collar of Xe's shirt. "Yes, baby," Xe gasped, "hang on." It almost killed her to lift her hand from Erming's breast, but she tugged at her shirt, pulling it free of her pants and tossing it off the bed somewhere.

"Oh," Erming breathed, reaching for Xe's shoulders. Xe was crouched over her, shoulders bare, hands flexing, heart filled with pure lust. She probably looked like a Barbary pirate. Erming put her hands around the shoulder straps of Xe's bra. "Take this off," she whispered urgently.

Xe got out of her bra in Olympics-worthy time, and Erming's mouth opened. "Oh," she said. "So beautiful." She sat up quickly, and Xe got out of her way. Erming knelt on the bed, running her hands over Xe's shoulders, staring at her breasts. "You are lovely," she whispered, "like the Elgin marbles."

I'll have to ask her what that is, Xe thought. Later. "Go ahead," she said, indicating her breasts with a nod.

Erming put up tentative hands and touched Xe's bare skin. Xe caught her breath, and Erming's hands tightened a little. Erming's hands moved slowly, but her eyes were in constant motion, falling and rising from Xe's breasts to her face. "Does this give you pleasure?" Erming murmured.

"Oh," Xe said, running her own hands over Erming's forearms, "so much." They moved toward one another, kneeling on the bed, and Xe reached to pull Erming to her. They wrapped their arms around one another and met in a kiss. After a moment, Erming maneuvered an arm behind her back, and Xe, knowing what she intended to do, whispered, "I'll get that." She unfastened Erming's bra, vaguely surprised that it didn't tie or anything like that, and Erming shrugged out of it, still kissing her.

Their bare flesh was touching, and Xe could feel the tension in Erming's skin. She put her arms around Erming again, kissing her, reaching out to sweep the tendrils of hair from her neck. Erming raised her arms and loosened what was left of her ponytail, then shook her head like a model in a shampoo commercial. Her hair fluttered like a raven's wing, then settled lightly around her naked shoulders. Xe found her way through the soft black curtain to Erming's neck, kissing, nibbling, touching. Erming put her head back, laughing to the ceiling. Xe lowered her head, kissing her way toward Erming's breasts, and Erming quit laughing. Xe looked up into Erming's serious face, completely captivated, and smiled a wicked smile at her.

"Aida," Erming whispered, combing her hair with her fingers.

"Yes, baby," Xe whispered back.

"You still have your shoes on."

Xe quit kissing and sat back a bit. "Oh," she said, "OK. I'll take them off."

She moved to the side of the bed, moving slowly lest she fall off and hurt herself badly enough to interrupt this. She unlaced her sturdy boots--Erming was right, she could have done some serious damage to the bedlinens, if not the bed itself--and set them side by side on the carpet under the bed. The head of the dragon, scarlet against the patterned gray of the cave floor, flared at her. She took off her socks too, then stood for a moment to unfasten her pants. It hadn't occurred to her that her trip to China would include romance, so she'd brought her most utilitarian underwear. She wondered how Erming would respond to a thong or a push-up bra.

She turned back to the bed. Erming was sitting atop the covers in a kneeling position with her legs tucked underneath her, and she was completely naked. Xe's mouth dropped open. Erming had a shy look on her face, and Xe scanned from the top of her head to her kneecaps, then back up again. Erming's skin was rosy in the dimness, her breasts smaller than Xe's (this was common among Xe's lovers), but shapely and delicate, with small cherry-colored nipples that begged for a lover's mouth. Her hips were a lot curvier than Xe had had any reason to expect. She found this very satisfactory, very satisfactory indeed.

"You're beautiful," she told Erming, standing cautiously and slipping off the rest of her clothing. She climbed back onto the bed, settling herself against Erming's nude flesh closely enough that her knee slipped between Erming's thighs. Xe reached for Erming just as Erming reached for her, and the two of them sealed their bodies together, kissing and touching in a timeless interlude of pure feeling.

Erming's flesh was soft on the outside, firm underneath, and Xe thought all the climbing up to the cave was probably excellent exercise. Erming's hands roamed Xe's skin, feeling her way around a woman for the first time. She had terrific instincts, and when she began moving gently up and down, Xe could tell Erming was giving her something to work with. Xe got a little closer, pushing her thigh even deeper between Erming's, and the two of them moved back and forth, giving and getting pleasure.

Xe got to know Erming's shoulders, breasts, back, buttocks, ribs. Then she ran her hands over Erming again, just to see if she'd missed anything. Erming's breathing was hard enough now that kissing her lips was interfering with her blood oxygen levels, but Xe didn't mind concentrating her lips elsewhere, like Erming's lovely little breasts. Erming grabbed for Xe's breasts, squeezing in rhythm to her hips rocking against Xe's thigh, damp with sweat and arousal.

Xe wrapped an arm around Erming's waist, holding her in place, and ran her other hand, palm first, down Erming's belly. Erming gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, tightening her arms around Xe's neck. Xe kissed and licked what she could reach, pressing her hand firmly against Erming's belly, moving downward in the spaces between Erming's movements. Her fingers slid down along strong muscle, the heat and humidity growing the farther south she went. Finally, her hand slid into place around Erming's cl*tor*s, and Erming's groans became cries.

Erming, moving by instinct, ground against Xe's hand, and Xe growled wordless lust into the superheated air between them. Erming's movements became more and more frantic, but Xe held her in place, reaching and stroking with one hand as she pinned Erming where it would do the most good with her other arm. Erming's flesh grew hot and slippery against Xe's hand. Xe knew exactly what Erming wanted, precisely what she needed, and she kept her movements strong and vigorous, Erming's voice growing in volume as her movements grew more urgent. Xe reached into Erming with two fingers, cupping her palm firmly against Erming's mons, and Erming's head lifted in a long, loud cry of fulfillment.

Xe kept her hand in place, squeezing gently, until Erming's muscles slackened. Her head fell to Xe's shoulder, and Xe stroked her hair gently. "Shh," she murmured to Erming, whose chest was heaving with effort, "catch your breath."

"Oh," Erming whispered against Xe's neck. She tried to put her arms around Xe, but they weren't exactly working just then. Xe held her up, uncomfortably aware that a post-org*smic woman was lying against her, body still pressed up against Xe's own. She ran a hand down Erming's back, between her shoulder blades, which were slick with sweat.

They clung to one another for a while, Xe kissing the side of Erming's face as gently as she could, considering that the fire hadn't gone out in her. Erming sighed, "So that is sex."

"Yes, baby," Xe laughed. "That's sex."

"I can tell where it gets its reputation," Erming mumbled sleepily into her shoulder.

"Come on," Xe said, stifling a guffaw. "Lie down." She swung Erming down onto the bed, Erming not really able to help much, and looked down at her. Erming's skin was tinted with a delicate watercolor flush along her neck, chest, and breasts, and her eyes were heavy-lidded and satisfied. She was covered in sweat; damp strands of hair clung to her forehead and neck. She folded her hands over her abdomen and lay naked without self-consciousness, reaching up to toy with a lock of Xe's hair.

"You are still up in the air," Erming murmured.

"Hm?" Xe asked. Her pulse was pounding between her legs, and it made it difficult to translate Erming's statement into anything her then-feeble brain could process.

"Come here," Erming said, grabbing Xe's wrist and hauling her down onto the bed. Xe bounced into place beside her, and Erming rolled onto her and fastened her lips on Xe's.

"Hey," Xe said with half a mouth, "you're supposed to be falling asleep." Erming paid no attention, straddling Xe's thigh with her own. Her skin was still hot and wet. She moved her mouth down over Xe's neck and shoulders, then lapped at Xe's breasts, licking the salt from her skin. Xe groaned and put her hands on Erming's head, trying not to clamp down with her fingers.

Erming spoke between kisses. "I have lived in the desert all my life," she said, her lips buzzing against Xe's skin, "and now at last it is raining." She moved lower and lower, and Xe sat up in disbelief. "I want," Erming said from roughly the level of Xe's navel, "to dance in the rain." She kissed her way downward, and when her hot breath stirred Xe's hair, Xe's arousal exploded into hunger.

* * *

AngelRad checked her cellphone for the third time in as many minutes.

"Yes, darlin', we know you have an iPhone," Blackie said, an easy grin lighting her face. AngelRad favored her with a secretive, stern look from under her lashes, and Blackie clutched at her heart with both hands. "Don't be doin' that to a married woman!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah," JLynn commented, "that look ought to be registered."

"No dominatrix could ask for anything more," RangerGrrl said solemnly.

"When I am restored to the throne of the Czarina," AngelRad informed them, "the three of you will be conveyed to my dungeon immediately."

Blackie hiked her eyebrows at JLynn, and RangerGrrl ducked her head, muttering, "Sorry."

"None taken," AngelRad said. "It's just that no Empress worth her tiara wastes the talent of her more imaginative subjects."

McJohn guffawed, and Story Doc chuckled. They were in a little French restaurant in San Francisco, Blackie's favorite, and they were having dessert, alternating bites of chocolate pots de creme and fresh peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. McJohn and AngelRad were the only ones at the table with virulent-looking cups of espresso before them; they were also the only members of the party who seemed completely awake.

"I don't get it," AngelRad muttered, peering at her iPhone. "Punkin was supposed to check in by now."

"Frankly," JLynn said, "I'm starting to get a little worried."

"There's a shock," Blackie said with another grin.

"Dungeon," RangerGrrl warned her.

"Beg pardon," Blackie said, and JLynn waved her hand in dismissal.

"I'm pretty sure everything's OK," said McJohn, blowing on her espresso to cool it.

"Yeah, but how do you know?" asked JLynn.

"Lawyer's phone hasn't rung yet," McJohn replied, nodding toward Story Doc.

"There's a point," RangerGrrl said to JLynn. "I've seen them in geometry textbooks."

"What did we do for fun before we met them?" McJohn asked Story Doc.

"We had cable," Story Doc answered.

"Ah," said McJohn, looking as if a great mystery had been solved. "Anyway, I wouldn't worry about Punkin."

"She should have checked in by now," AngelRad said, looking at her iPhone one more time. "Oh, this is hopeless!"

"It'll be OK, AngelRad," McJohn said. "We know Xe, and we know her to be the equal of any locale, whether it's Manhattan or the jungles of Jiangyong (or however it's pronounced). If my guesser hasn't burned out with this city's truly excellent coffee, I'd guess she's having some adventure worthy of Indiana Jones, except better 'cause it features a hero with a world-class rack." She sipped her espresso and continued, "She's probably hunkered down in some secret cavern, having a fabulous adventure with a beautiful Chinese woman."

Story Doc, without uttering a word, threw McJohn one of the married looks they'd come to recognize.

"What?" said McJohn.

* * *

As she had drifted into sleep in the arms of a beautiful woman, so she awakened: slowly, comfortably, warm all over and all of her, body, soul, mind, aglow with a quiet happiness.

Erming was still sleeping peacefully with her head on Xe's shoulder, one hand nestled beneath Xe's ample breast, the other cuddling it from the other side. Xe sighed in contentment, looking down at the top of Erming's head, her hair tangled wildly in a manner not common among scholars of classical Greek. Xe could just see the edges of Erming's eyelashes lying along her cheeks, and farther down, in the shadow of the blanket, the tops of Erming's pretty breasts. Erming's leg was draped over Xe's thighs. Eventually, Xe was going to have to get up and try to find whatever Erming had that passed for a bathroom, but not right this second.

She put her free arm beneath her head and turned to look out of the opening of the cave, where the afternoon was mellowing toward sunset. Xe's mind was as peaceful as the sky. While they were making love, she hadn't so much as thought about the possibility of passersby, although Xe supposed that anyone who managed that climb deserved something for her trouble.

Erming was a nice cozy weight in her arms. Xe turned back to her new lover, studying what she could see of her in the dim light of the cave. I don't know anything about you. I don't know about your parents or whether this was what you wanted to do with your life. I don't know if you're married or seeing anyone. You've never even seen an episode of Xena. I have no idea if you'd react to it the way I did. Xe moved her hand cautiously, trying not to awaken Erming, and brushed her silken hair in a gentle caress. But I'd give half my life to find out...

Erming stirred and breathed deeply, then lifted her face to smile at Xe, an open, unselfconscious, sleepy, welcoming smile that made Xe smile in turn. After that, there wasn't much to do other than to lean down, taking her time, closing her eyes, knowing where to find Erming's love-softened lips, reaching in a smooth, easy, natural movement for Erming's breast. While they were kissing, Erming put her hand on Xe's neck, then slid it downward over her breast, then along her side, then up around her back, pulling her close with the grace of a much more experienced lover. They ended up glued to one another, legs braided into a preposterous but very comfortable pretzel.

Xe was perfectly content to start exploring again, as Erming's sleep-dampened skin held a new spice that tasted as alluring as it smelled, but Erming exerted the kindest, most polite pressure, So regretful to interrupt, my darling, but if I might request your attention for a moment, and Xe raised her suddenly befogged head, looking into Erming's sleepy, sleepy, beautiful dark eyes. "Yes, milady?"

"It is obligatory to urinate," Erming whispered.

Xe burst into laughter, and laughing was a little painful because she was feeling the pressure too, but she gave Erming a quick kiss and rolled to the side. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but that's the most elegant way I've ever heard that put." Xe ran an idle hand along Erming's arm. "Where is it?" Erming sat up and nodded toward a corner of the cave. It looked as if she was blushing, but the light was so subtle, so delicate, that it might have been Xe's imagination.

Xe lay back, putting her hands under her head. Erming's back, all lovely lines and curves painted in the soft, welcoming colors of a woman's skin, was close enough to touch, and Xe lifted a leisurely hand to do just that. "Go ahead," Xe murmured.

"You touch me," Erming said, just as softly.

"I hope to go on doing it," Xe said, running her hand up and down, up and down. Erming had extremely strong muscles, and Xe smiled tenderly at the vision before her, remembering just how tight Erming had held her. Everywhere. Everywhere. "Go ahead," she encouraged Erming again.

Erming turned her head a little, not quite looking at Xe, and tendrils of rich ebony hair swept across her shoulders. "I don't care to leave your bed."

Xe laughed. "It's hardly my bed. I thought it belonged to you."

Erming turned, finally, and looked at her. There was power in her face, pride and shyness and a sense that something had changed. It struck Xe abruptly that she was the reason for that expression, and it made her humble and exalted at the same time. Erming stretched herself along the bed and lay face down, putting her arm across Xe's shoulder and propping her chin on her hand. "I want to be in this bed with you forever," she said, her face so close to Xe's that it took no effort at all to lift her head for another kiss.

But the fire had banked, and it was more tender than frantic. Xe lay back with another sigh, and Erming settled herself into the spot between Xe's arm and shoulder, lightly brushing Xe's breast with a curious, light hand. Xe twined her fingers around a strand of Erming's hair, sighing with quiet joy. "You're beautiful," Xe whispered into Erming's hair. Though that word's hardly adequate. "I don't know that there's any language to tell you how beautiful."

Erming smiled at her, reticence warring with fulfillment, and replied, "Two. Nu Shu, and..."

She didn't finish, but Xe knew what she meant. Xe closed her eyes again, feeling Erming's closeness and warmth. "Making love to you," she finished, her words a mere breath of air against Erming's skin. She began to move, rolling onto her side in the first advance of a slow strategic effort at capture, and it was then that she remembered that both of them were mammals. She lay back and put her unoccupied hand under her head again.

"Didn't you say you had to get up?" Xe asked drowsily, without opening her eyes.

"I don't want to leave your bed," Erming insisted.

"Well," Xe said with bravado, "the alternative is flooding it. Come on, I want you comfortable."

Erming harrumphed, a ladylike little sound that made Xe laugh. She kept her eyes closed, giving Erming her privacy, and soon the retreat of Erming's warm solidity told her that she would have the bed to herself. The bedclothes rustled and the air chilled Xe's skin. She cracked an eye open to watch. Erming was crossing the room naked, tentative steps on what must have been cold stone. The strength in her body was apparent; Xe appreciated all over again the effort keeping this place had been to Erming. And then to keep it a secret...

Xe didn't say anything until she saw Erming emerge from the corner. She sat up, the better to study Erming's breasts, belly, mons, legs, arms, and how everything fit with her now-combed hair and blissful rosy face.

"Aii!" Erming exclaimed, putting her hands over her face. "You are watching me!"

"Hey." Xe sprang from the bed, regretting it instantly: the air was cold and the floor God damn cold. But her lady needed rescuing, and she crossed the room in a bound, taking Erming's hands in her own. "You have no reason to be ashamed, Erming." Erming didn't take her hands from her face, and while this meant Xe had other things to ogle, she got concerned that she'd trespassed. "You're a beautiful woman, and beautiful women should be looked at with admiration and lust and appreciation and will you please tell me I haven't shattered some social custom that will keep you out of this bed?"

Erming took her hands away from her face. "Because that would just about kill me," Xe told her softly.

"Oh, me too, Aida, me too," Erming answered with fervor. Her gaze dropped to Xe's breasts, and she gasped a little. "They are even beautiful standing up..." Erming said, with the passionate fascination of a scientist. Her eyes lifted, and she said solemnly to Xe, "But you must use the earth closet and then I'll feed you."

Xe lifted Erming's hand in hers and kissed the back of it. "Your slightest whim," she said gallantly, "is my ironclad command." She headed for the corner and found the place. It took her a little bit of time to figure out how it worked--she was damned if she was going to interrupt the tender, lustful interplay with Erming to ask for a dissertation on the plumbing--but eventually she got the idea.

When she returned from the corner, she found Erming at the stove, lighting it with perfect unconcern for her nakedness. Xe picked up a pan with a questioning look, and Erming pointed to the water tap. Xe filled the pan with water, and Erming took it from her and handed her the teakettle. Xe filled that too and gave it back to Erming, who set it on the stove.

Xe moved behind Erming, taking her in her arms and kissing her here and there along the neck and shoulders. "How long will it take to boil?"

"It's already boiling," Erming murmured.

Xe laughed. "I meant the water."

"Oh," Erming said, curling an arm around Xe's head to encourage her to keep on, "a long time. A very long time."

They went back to the bed, lying down together in its soft, welcoming embrace, and warmed each other as night came on and the water on the stove came to a boil. Touches became kisses, which turned into caresses, which grew deeper and more urgent, and they made love again, growing closer with each touch, each stroke, each look, each whispered word of desire, until words themselves fled and their speech turned primal.

* * *

The sound of the night insects singing awoke Erming, like the tiny voices of the stars blazing in glory across the ebony night sky. She was lying on her back with Aida's arm thrown over her tummy. Aida sprawled face down, deeply asleep, and Erming smiled tenderly at her, stroking Aida's arm with her hands, making her touch light enough that she hoped she wouldn't awaken Aida, but firm enough that Aida could feel it in her dreams.

Aida had very, very strong arms. Her lover's touch sang through Erming's muscles and bones still, a counterpoint to the symphony of the crickets serenading them in the velvety night outside the entrance to the cave. Erming was confident she would still be able to feel that touch as an old woman, whether or not she was fortunate enough to have Aida at her side.

The thought led her emotionally vulnerable mind to others she didn't care to examine right that moment, so she disentangled herself gingerly from Aida's profoundly sleeping form and got out of bed. The lantern was still aglow, and Erming thought she might need to refill it with fuel before too long. The chill assailed her, and she grabbed for her clothing, drawing it on as she watched Aida sleep. Aida had come to her from the other side of the world, and between the long journey, the newness of the place, the destiny she had found there, and jet lag, she might sleep for a very, very long time. Erming's heart grew full; as long as Aida wanted to sleep, she would protect her.

It took Erming some time to decide to turn away from the sight of the luscious naked woman fast asleep in the dragon bed, but eventually the cold got to her, and she rubbed her arms and went to look for her down jacket. She tried not to rustle it too much, lest she awaken Aida, but she got the jacket on without disturbing her lover, standing to watch for a little while longer, just a little while.

Eventually, Erming chided herself for indolent self-indulgence and turned back to her ordinary life. She lit candles, placing them here and there, well away from anything flammable, then blew out the lantern so it could cool enough for her to refuel. For the third time that day, she lit the stove, drew water, and started a meal. She stood at the stove, stirring and mixing and humming under her breath, looking over her shoulder from time to time at Aida, whose skin glowed golden and alluring by candlelight. Erming was swathed in clothing, but Aida's touch caressed her skin from across the room, cocooning her from the cold.

Erming smiled into the pot of rice. An improbable hero, her European lover, making her way thousands of miles on a hunch, no idea what she might find. How had she found Shangjiangxu? Why had she come to Erming, rather than to the Nu Shu Museum? Professor Li, of course, she was the connection, but how had Aida contrived to locate Professor Li in the first place? And what did Professor Li know that Aida so evidently didn't, the clue that had caused Professor Li to identify Aida as one of the initiates?

The necklace. Perhaps that was it, a wooden tetradrachma on a simple black cloth cord. The symbol of a secret kept for generation after generation, just between women, who, despite their reputation as gossips, had kept it safe for nearly two millennia from the incautious, the brutal, the opportunistic, the worldly. And Aida had had no idea of the importance of that, either.

Erming's mind ran idly over semiotics, a field she had found fascinating at Stanford, although she wasn't able to give it her all because of the other demands on her time. The language of symbols, how soul-deep universal wishes coalesced into imagery, and how that imagery in turn influenced human events. Semiotics reached a flowering in the much-studied pre-literate medieval period in Europe, although Erming, had she chosen to, could have shared a rich language of her own. It had felt like her own, her very own secret, burning deep within her like a little coal in her belly, until she found that someone else, someone whose very existence she had not suspected the week before, shared it.

And shared it, she was beginning to suspect, with a huge number of women all over the world, in the person of a tall, beautiful Greek warrior whose story mirrored the ones carefully hidden in the stone catacomb mere paces from where she stood cooking dinner. She had no idea whether the people who made the show knew of the archive, or how close they had gotten to the legend; her secluded, scholarly life had not afforded her an opportunity to see it for herself. Aida was, she gathered, something of a scholar of the show, and so telling her the stories would probably be the first chance anyone had had to research the question. Erming was looking forward to it.

The teakettle boiled, finally, and Erming wrapped a towel around her hand, swinging it off the stove to pour into the teapot, which had been patiently holding tea leaves for half a day. The fragrant steam rose in a cloud, and Erming inhaled it with gratitude. She was very thirsty; she had not realized quite how thirsty. Because Aida was a guest, she did a thing she nearly never did: she opened the little cupboard next to the stove and drew forth an ancient white ceramic crock with a metal catch. She opened the catch and lifted the lid. Inside was an antique trove of sugar, which had clumped together in the long interval of time since Great-Aunt's last visit. Erming took a clean wooden spoon and pounded at the sugar with the handle, breaking it into crystals. Her guest, her lover, would get the best Erming could offer: sugar in her tea.

The hands that slid around her waist didn't even startle her, and Erming turned her head with a smile as she quit busting up the sugar. Aida, her hair rumpled into waves like the ocean and her face still filled with sleep, smiled back and lowered her face to nibble along Erming's neck. Erming jammed the handle of the spoon into the sugar crock and turned all the way around, wrapping her arms around Aida.

Erming gasped, "You're naked!"

"Well," said Aida reasonably, kissing what she could reach around the down jacket, "whose fault is that?"

"No, no," Erming said in distress, "you will freeze. Go back to bed and I will bring you some tea."

"Come with me?" Aida offered, taking Erming's hands in her own.

Erming smiled in spite of herself. "You know what will happen."

"I certainly hope so," Aida replied between kisses. "I've been doing my best to convince you."

"I must feed you," Erming protested.

"Broaden your definition of 'feed'," suggested Aida.

Erming laughed. "No. You must have some food. I don't want to lovemake you to death."

"Ah," said Aida, "I've just decided how I want to go."

Erming threw her arms around Aida's neck and kissed her with hunger and fulfillment. She pulled away a few seconds later, when lack of air had made her a little light-headed, and declared, "There, that will do for now."

"Speak for yourself," Aida said, reaching for her lips again.

Erming was caught up in the kiss, and the fire began in her again. She ran her hands over Aida, appalled at how cold she was. "Your skin is all little hills," Erming noted with disapproval. "Get dressed."

"Really?" said Aida. She didn't stop kissing Erming. "I'm warm enough holding you."

"No, no, no," Erming gasped, pulling away. "Go. Sit. In the bed. I must make you dinner. And after dinner, I want to read you more stories."

"sh*t," Aida said. "I'd forgotten all about that." She peeled herself from Erming's jacket and walked back to the bed, stooping to collect her clothing from the dragon carpet. She pulled her clothing on, every move revealing a luscious, curvy shape: breasts, bottom, back, thighs. Erming watched until it occurred to her that this most enjoyable picture might suffer if Aida developed pneumonia, and she turned away to break up enough sugar for a couple spoonfuls in a mug. She poured the hot tea into the mug and stirred it, then took it to the bed. Aida sat against the headboard, legs stretched out along the bed, scrubbing at her head with her hands, rumpling her hair even more. Erming stood by the side of the bed and held out the tea. Aida accepted the mug from Erming, wrapping her hands around it, and kept avid eyes on Erming as she took a sip.

Aida's eyes closed gratefully, and she sighed, "This is delicious." She opened her eyes and trained them on Erming. "And much needed. You were right. Thank you."

"You're welcome," Erming said with a nod.

"Can I help you with dinner?" Aida asked between gulps of hot tea.

"No, you rest," Erming said. "You've had a long day." The implications of the statement hit her, and she blushed.

Aida caught up her hand. "Are you still shy?" Her voice was low and intimate. "Because if you are--"

"I'm not shy--"

"--I can hold you till you feel better." Erming's mind went blank, and she stared at Aida, whose face, softly painted in candlelight, revealed both tenderness and determination. Aida shrugged and added, "It works for me. When I feel shy. About something big. Really big." She moved a little bit closer, and Erming sat on the bed, mesmerized by the tone of Aida's voice. "About you."

Aida reached for her, and Erming leaned forward, closing her eyes, meeting Aida's lips, slipping out of her down jacket.

* * *

Eventually, they did remember that their dinner was on the stove, and they managed this time to get up before it burned. They sat at the white enameled table, which was incredibly cold when Xe rested her elbows on it. Xe was ravenous, and she felt like a yeti eating opposite the delicate, mannered Erming. They smiled at one another, shyly at first. Then Erming moved her chair so that it was beside Xe's, and she held out a little piece of prawn on her chopsticks. Xe grabbed at it with her teeth and Erming giggled like a girl. Soon they were feeding each other tender bits with little murmurs and kisses.

Outside, the night had taken on the profound blackness of outer space, brilliant stars blazing down on them. Xe had about four cups of tea, and Erming finally quit at six. They sat at the table in comfort and drank and talked for hours, little caresses and kisses interspersed with stories of childhood, adventures, lovers. The latter was fairly one-sided, and Erming was tremendously impressed; it was obvious that Aida's skill came from a considerable amount of practice.

When Erming began to shiver, Aida got up to fetch them a blanket, which she tucked around the two of them. She put an arm around Erming and they kept talking. Aida had grown up during a war, and Erming sensed a hesitation to reveal any details. Like a well-brought-up Chinese woman, she changed the subject. Erming had her own secrets, chiefly that her parents had been divorced. While being spared her parents' endless, uncivilized fights was rather more of a blessing to Erming than otherwise, not everyone saw it that way, and she was still regarded as peculiar among the people of Shangjiangxu.

Erming hesitated herself before confessing this to Aida, who tightened her arms about Erming and said only, "I'm sorry."

"I'm not," Erming said bluntly to her new Western lover. "They argued and argued all the time."

Aida picked up her cup of tea with a broad smile. "That's the spirit. I hear it sucks when they stay together for the sake of the children."

Erming, resting her head on Aida's shoulder, toyed with a button on Aida's camp shirt. "What does that mean exactly, 'sucks'?" Aida gargled the last of her tea, subtly, and set down the cup. "I used to hear it all the time at Stanford," Erming continued, "but no one would tell me what it meant."

"It's that face," Aida said, closing her eyes and going for Erming's mouth.

Erming began to think about the dragon bed again, and she hauled herself away from Aida's tempting, capable lips to ask, "I know it means something bad. Is it something sexually shameful?" Aida pulled back with a charmingly befuddled look, and Erming continued, "Whenever it was something no one would explain, it turned out to be sexual."

Aida blinked a little bit. "I'm sorry, what were we talking about?"

Erming laughed, keeping her voice low so she wouldn't startle Aida. "'Sucks'. What it means. But never mind."

"Do... do you think there's... anything shameful?" Aida asked with care.

Erming thought it over. She'd felt shy, vulnerable. Exposed, certainly, her deepest wishes openly on display, her arousal evident. It was a situation tailor-made for mockery by a companion chosen unwisely, but Erming had been confident, from the very start, that Aida would treat her with respect, and she had. "No," she said finally. "Not shameful. It is more like... like what the Catholics mean when they take communion." Aida's eyebrows hiked, and Erming hastened to explain. "A ritual difficult to describe, a deeply personal experience of becoming one with another, of knowing your own place in the cosmos, able to comfort and be comforted all at once."

Aida studied her face, then lifted a hand and ran her thumb gently along Erming's lips. "That's beautiful. I've never heard a more beautiful description of lovemaking." She placed her hand with exquisite tenderness along Erming's jawline and pulled her close for a kiss.

One kiss became two, then three, even though it was difficult to know where one left off and the next began. Erming reached for Aida with both arms, twining herself around Aida's neck, and the two of them kissed for a time. Erming was drowsy and warm, and she felt safe, protected, cherished. Whatever happened, however this turned out, she was profoundly grateful that her first lover was an honorable woman. After a bit, she sighed and laid her head down on Aida's chest.

"And it also makes it better," Erming remarked idly to Aida's amazingly wondrous breasts, "that you are a woman." Aida laughed, a sound that came to Erming through her chest, and Erming smiled against Aida's shirt. "Much, much better."

"Amen, sister," Aida said with another laugh. "When did you figure out you were interested in women?"

Erming shrugged and sat up. "I always have been."

"Was that a problem?" Aida inquired, picking up Erming's hand and examining it in the light of the lantern.

"Not for me," Erming replied, kissing Aida on the cheek. "It is not encouraged, but I was already well practiced at not telling all my thoughts to everyone. Have you always been gay?"

Aida nodded. "Ever since I can remember. Women have always fascinated me. I wasn't encouraged about it either..."

"You had no models," Erming said. "But I did. The laotang, the stories... I had many, many examples of heroes who were women and loved other women."

"You were lucky," Aida said soberly.

"I am the luckiest of women," Erming replied, reclining against Aida's shoulder and wrapping the blanket around the two of them. "I have this place and these stories to look after, and I have a beautiful and skilled lover."

Aida's arms drew her close, and Erming sighed with contentment and closed her eyes. "I knew," murmured Aida, kissing Erming lightly on the top of the head, "that we had a lot in common."

"Do they love each other?" Erming asked. "On the show? Xena and Gabrielle?"

Aida sighed, and Erming knew she was thinking how to answer. "It depends how you look at it," she said finally. "Me? I never had any doubt."

Erming nodded against Aida's shoulder. "There is a great deal one cannot say on Chinese television as well. Good for us, we have the stories."

"Do they love each other in the stories?" Aida asked.

"Yes," Erming replied instantly. "Oh, yes. There is no doubt of that. There cannot be any doubt."

"Will you read them to me?" Aida asked.

"In the morning," Erming answered. "I promise."

* * *

Xe thought of it forever afterward as the perfect day. They awoke to birdsong and mellow morning light, and found themselves lying in one another's arms. They made idle, soft conversation for a bit before getting up to make breakfast. Erming put a pot of water to warm on the stove and they had a bit of a bath. Fortified with soap and tea, Xe tackled the ancient washtub, cleaning up after breakfast, then putting their clothes in to soak. It made her feel homey and domestic, Erming's blouse nestling in the bubbly water beside Xe's camp shirt.

Erming refilled the lamps and swept the glass-topped stone table with her silly pink whiskbroom. Xe put her arms around Erming and nibbled at her neck, and Erming flicked at her with the whisk. Xe set some chairs next to the table, and then Erming took her hand gently and led her along the corridor to where the scrolls were kept.

Xe hardly dared to breathe. Erming selected a leather cylinder and brought it back to the table with subtle but exquisite care. Xe watched, captivated, as Erming opened the cylinder, extracted the parchment, and rolled it out along the table. She secured it with the leatherbound weights, then adjusted the lamps until their light fell on the surface of the parchment.

Xe studied it from as close as she dared. The parchment was cream-colored, with just a hint of yellowish-brown at the edges, and it was covered in tiny little ebony-black letters. The ink had a subtle, deceptive shine to it, and the letters seemed to pick up fire from the lamps. Erming's voice was low and assured as she began to read.

This is the eighteenth book of the second saga of the Warrior Woman, as told by her widowed lover, Gabrielle of Potaideia, bard, Queen, and warrior--

"What?" Xe exclaimed. "What does that mean, 'widowed lover'?"

Erming halted, her finger poised six inches off the surface of the parchment. "It... it says that here. It's a variant of the word chira, 'widow'. And then 'lover' is... is..." Erming hesitated, then looked Xe full in the face, her dark eyes soft and soulful. "Agapimo."

"Agapimo," Xe murmured, after a moment.

Erming placed her hand gently over Xe's, then blinked and looked away. "It's... not a common phrase..." she said vaguely.

"I'll bet," Xe said. She turned her hand over and enfolded Erming's hand with a hummingbird touch. "Will... will it bother you if I hold your hand while you read?"

"No." Erming smiled without looking at her.

"Distract you?" Xe asked quickly.

"That? Yes," Erming replied, her smile getting broader.

"OK," Xe said. "I'll just be right here. I won't make a peep. You won't even know I'm here."

"Impossible," Erming muttered, but her smile didn't fade. She turned back to the parchment, her hand poised over the letters, her forefinger skimming along as if conjuring the tale out of the air.

* * *

Shallow, silly girls are a dinar a dozen, and I was shallower and sillier than I care to admit to myself. As beautiful as she was, as cherished as she made me feel, as privileged as I was to be the only one who saw her in moments of naked vulnerability, with her head thrown back and her lovely low voice crying her passion to the gods, what impressed me in those days, as often as not, is that she was eager to fulfill whims in me that she would never have considered indulging herself.

Wealth is rare in this hardscrabble world, and I have never met anyone who has not suffered the cruel bone-gnawing hunger all too common in times of famine or disaster. But wealth is usually tied to land, and land to place. She, solitary and nomadic, had something else: money. A lot of money. It let her travel light, buy her way out of tight places, rest in palaces instead of hovels. To be sure, we slept in the woods often as not, eating roast hare or wild goose she brought down with that fearsome schakkram, but the truth was, all I had to do was smile wistfully and hint, and if it was in her power, she would turn the horse's head toward the nearest town so that I could have a soft bed and a dinner someone else had cooked.

Her indulgence didn't stop there; I could have had anything I desired from a merchant, and, had trinkets not been incompatible with the violence to which we were subject on a wearyingly regular basis, I could have had a jewel collection to rival that of Cleopatra, Queen of Kings. As it was, I restrained myself (as much as a spoiled girl can, and I doubtless congratulated myself for it far more frequently than was quite warranted), and when the lust for acquisition hit me, I tried to turn it down until it became too compelling to ignore.

It was even so the day we reached the capital of the realm of Solus. He was a cruel, frightened little man, overwhelmed by the legacy of a brilliant mother whose taste in bedmates was not as sophisticated as her understanding of statecraft, and whose assassination was accordingly a matter of when rather than if. In everyday matters, Solus allowed himself to be guided by his mother's chief advisor, Apex, which was doubtless wise in some instances; it was Apex, for example, who counseled Solus to allow the renowned markets in the capital to proceed unmolested, as they had in the Queen's day. In private, however, Solus clung to desperate, soulless rituals involving pain and blood to maintain a hold on his kingdom. I'd heard the rumors; I didn't care. I was there for the shopping.

She never cared to accompany me on these expeditions; she said the goods were always inferior and the haggling gave her an itch. She handed me the travel-day purse and left me to my unattractive vice while she scouted a meal in a tavern, and I soon found myself wandering with delight among the colorful fabrics, fragrant wines, sparkling jewels, squawking fowl, and vibrant oils of the market.

A lovely length of delicate cloth soon captured my attention, and I stood running it through my hand while the kapeloi positioned himself at the ready, arms folded and a smug look on his face, as if he had personally produced it from an unsung orifice.

"It's lovely, isn't it?" he said, nodding toward the cloth.

"Oh, did I interrupt you dusting with it?" I inquired, all feigned innocence.

He was prepared for a verbal spar, and I caught the glow in his eye. The kapeloi were accustomed to haggling and did it well, and this fellow was to prove the equal of any I had encountered.

"This cloth," he replied, "is made of the most delicate linen imported directly from the looms of the virgin priestesses of Alexandria, representing the finest of their craft. The hand is soft and the cloth delicate--just the thing for a lover to caress."

Indeed, my own thoughts had been turning in that direction (although her preference was then and always nakedness, some of her most eloquent speeches having to do with how little adornment a woman needed, being most beautifully fashioned by the very hand of the oldest Goddess of all). But it wouldn't do to let the kapeloi know that, and I replied, "I'm just looking today, really. I was merely wondering why, when you have such sumptuous goods, you keep this ugly scrap toward the front. Perhaps you keep it as a courtesy for passing soldiers to wipe the horsesh*t from their boots?"

He tried to hide a smile. "The flax from which this was woven grows nestled in the reeds of the legendary mystic Nile, facing the rising sun of Ra and Amun, harvested by bare-breasted young Egyptian women with silver sickles. It is said the priestesses whisper their ancient prayers over the looms, and into the warp and weft of this lovely cloth are woven the magic of the Egyptian gods themselves."

"Such a miracle," I said, setting the cloth down directly between us, "must be a costly thing indeed. I daren't touch it."

"Ah, but touch it you can, milady. A person of delicacy and refinement deserves equally luxuriant accessories. I should not have said anything had milady not been so obviously accustomed to fine things, but this very cloth can be draped about her neck--not that it requires adornment, being worthy of Nefertiti herself--for the unbelievably reasonable price of five dinars."

I burst into disbelieving laughter. (At that moment, I had four times as much in the purse, with standing orders from her to come seek her out should I require it to be refilled.) "I see!" I exclaimed. "Five dinars? You have obviously mistaken me for a queen."

"A pardonable mistake, I trust," he said, bowing, and I grinned in delight. "And I owe you a gesture of conciliation. Perhaps a discount is in order? One dinar off? Four. But it hurts my heart right here," he said, placing a hand over his tunic, "and I trust milady will share my weakness for aristocracy with no one."

"Have no fear," I replied, eyeing the cloth askance as if it might rise off the counter and bite me. "I shouldn't boast of having such a thing about me. It gives me the shudders."

"It was meant for milady, and no one else," he said, well-simulated sorrow pouring into his eyes. "Three dinars."

I looked about me, performing a searching examination of the ground. "Indeed, I am likely to run into some horsesh*t some time this morning, and my boots will likely need wiping. One."

"One dinar?" he repeated, reeling in shock. "Milady would not care to have about her refined person a kitchen maid who spent such an appallingly low sum for a scarf! Two."

"Done," I said, digging in the purse for two dinars. "Thank you."

"You'll look wonderful in it," he said, accepting the coins and arranging the scarf just so about my neck. "And thank you, love."

I walked away, feeling very fine indeed in my new scarf. I nodded in a regal fashion to the unlucky passersby who did not have a lovely new scarf or a rich lover to buy it for her, until the moment a hand caught it up from behind, twisting it so tightly against my neck that I soon lost my breath. I twined my hands in the scarf, clawing to get it loose, as my unseen assailant dragged me tripping and stumbling into a shadowy doorway. I smelled the scent of man near my face. Rape, robbery, murder; I would not go easy. And so I struggled until my eyes began to blank.

"Don't make me break your neck," he growled low into my ear. My hands went numb, and the last thing I remembered was trying to lock my knees so that I would not die on them.

* * *

Xena strode forth from the tavern, in search of her beloved. "Gabrielle? Gabrielle?" She threaded her way past stalls where merchants repaired sandals, prepared roast goat meat, bargained over bread, displayed amulets to the desperate forlorn of the gods. She came to a stop beside a dingy alleyway, reaching for the only familiar thing in the landscape: a long, straight wooden walking staff, carven in runes, bound with leather, and capped in metal. She glanced about rapidly. No young blonde appeared before her eyes. She reached for the staff.

A brutal hand seized the staff by the grip. "That's mine."

She turned her head. Standing next to her was a man who would have been handsome, but for the cruelty about his eyes and mouth. He looked like a shade whose soul had been lost, condemning his body to wander the earth unmourned and empty-eyed. His hair was dark and his muscles stood out in relief under his black leather armor. He reminded her of Ares.

"It belongs," she said, snatching it back from him, "to a friend of mine."

"Not any more." He made no abrupt grab to get it back; he merely held out his hand with a nasty grin. "Mine. Spoils o' my skill with a knife."

"What?"

Around them, the people in the market began to edge away.

"Your irritating little blonde piece," he said. "You'll find 'er in Tartarus."

Her hand tightened on the staff, but the smirk spread slowly across half of her face. "Do some more opium," she suggested. "You might have an even more entertaining dream."

The merchants nearest them hauled at cords to bring the curtains down in their stalls.

"You taught her well; she fought me." He laughed, making it sound like an insult. "At first. Till I showed her what a real man could offer." He patted himself, looking smug.

Her face twisted in derision and she hefted the staff. "Back to your pipe dreams, feeble inchworm." She turned on her bootheel and walked away. A marketwoman snatched up her toddling babe as she passed Xena, running in the opposite direction.

"Tight, too," the thug called after Xena. "Fit like a good glove. You hadn't stretched her much, warrior."

She spun, staff at the ready. "Where is she?"

He swelled with triumph. "Uh-uh," he said, wagging a finger in her face. "Here's the deal. You defeat me, I tell you where I left her carcass."

"No," she spat with contempt.

"I ain't acceptin' other bids." His grin widened, ugly and vengeful, and the blood swam behind her eyes at the thought of what he might have been doing when he unleashed it on Gabrielle. "That or you'll never know the story."

She poked the staff toward his midsection. "Go away, little man, before you annoy me."

"What, you don't give a f*ck about your bedwarmer?" He regarded her for a moment, lips lifting from his teeth in a sneer. "'S true, then. You're already dead inside." His sword slithered from its sheath like an oily metal serpent. "Lucky me, I get to decide where your corpse falls."

She swept the staff in a move she'd taught Gabrielle, intending to stun him long enough to rob the blood to his brain and panic him into telling her what he knew. He countered by circling his sword, and the end of the staff struck the mud. She used it as a pivot and launched her manure-covered boots toward his chest, knocking him backwards. By the time he'd recovered his feet, she had set the staff carefully against a wall and had her sword in her hand.

"Tell you what," he commented, not winded, "she fought like a little panther. Took me a while to get 'er underneath me. Bites and scratches. Must be you like that."

She met his blade with a couple of clanging exchanges, gauging his strength and style. He seemed adept enough, good endurance, and she could judge no weaknesses in his style. His strides were as long as hers, and within a few passes, they had ended up far away from the alley.

"I'm surprised you didn't hear her," he said. "She called for you."

She got within a barleycorn's width of his throat for that. His sword whipped about, blocking her stroke, and she reminded herself that he was no use to her dead. She drove him toward the open part of the market, intending to blind him with the sunlight off her blade, but he figured out the ploy in time to duck into another alleyway between buildings. He'd hemmed himself in here, and her smile grew murderous. Another flurry of strokes. The sound of the fight was very loud in the enclosed space.

She trapped his blade between the wall and hers, baring her teeth at him from a handsbreadth away. "You're going to tell me--"

Her head jerked away before she heard the hiss, but a noxious spray of oil hit her directly in the eyes. Her vision went red, and she knocked his blade upward, catching it with her free hand. She held him in place, unarmed with his throat trapped next to the edge of her sword, while she examined the pommel of his weapon. It was hard to see through the red tint, but there was a knob at the end, and she knew it activated a piston in the sword hilt. The blade near the handguard was covered in sticky red oil.

"You doped your weapon," she said with contempt. "sh*theel."

"You're Xena," he whispered with a horrible, triumphant smile.

She tried to blink the red oil from her eyes, but it clung. "Where is she?" she growled.

"All I have to do," he said, still in that creepy low voice, "is wait."

She didn't like the implications. She got him by the collar of his gleaming leathers and pushed him stumbling down the street. Her eyes were beginning to burn, and tears began to flood her face. She shoved him into the doorway of the blacksmith's shop. "Come out," she commanded. "I won't hurt you."

A door in the back opened to reveal the blacksmith, a miniature Hephaestus. "Your word," he said gruffly, not that a blacksmith had much to fear from someone who so often needed the services of the profession.

"Aye," she assured him.

He didn't so much as glance at her prisoner, nearly choking in her grip. "How can I serve you?"

"I want a stout wrist chain," she said, "to bind me to this idiot."

The blacksmith nodded and went to the wall, pulling off a length of chain and a couple strengthy strips from the iron hanging there. "What?" exclaimed the idiot.

"You and I," she said, ignoring the water streaming down her face, "are bound till I get her back safe."

* * *

The outline of his plan left me stunned and speechless. Apex gave me a look of grim satisfaction. "Aye," he said finally, "you'll do nicely." He jerked his head at the man in the corner. "You. Fairy-fly."

"Aye, milord," said the man.

"Do something about the bruises that f*ckhead Palaemon left at her throat."

The man glanced at me, and there was both apprehension and fear in his face. "Aye, milord," he said again.

"And dress her well. You fairy-flies adore that sh*t, don't you?" Apex's voice dripped contempt, and his eyes were hard as he stared at the man.

The man swallowed. "She'll be presentable, milord," he said, so softly that I could barely hear him.

"See to it," Apex said, turning on his heel. The guards leapt to catch the door, and he strode out with a swirl of cape and a clatter of harness.

"Always with the drama," muttered the man as he knelt to my hem. I could not help bursting into laughter, and the man cast a quick glance at the guards, who were grinning. Evidently, Apex inspired about as much loyalty in his troops as one might suspect. The kneeling man looked up at me with a small hint of life in his eye. "Vidalis," he said, holding up a hand.

I shook it, as I'd shake a man's hand, and said, "Gabrielle."

"So I heard," he said, fingering the hem of my skirt. "And now we have to dress you like the queen you are."

The next words out of my sore throat caused the guards to stand up straight and clutch their spears. "Aye," said Vidalis, getting to his feet and dusting his hands, "you're an Amazon, all right."

He was barely taller than I, and very handsome, long-lashed liquid eyes, a rosy sculpted mouth, and smooth, beardless skin. His hair fell in lovely waves from his crown and his build was more Adonis than Hercules. It was chilly in the room, braziers lit here and there, but Vidalis was barefoot in tight trousers made of thin, colorful cloth and a small buttonless vest that kept his lightly-muscled chest bare. He must have been cold. I began to suspect that they made him dress that way, and thought I knew why.

Vidalis crossed the room, opening a wardrobe against the wall and pulling out a length of cloth as colorful as what he was wearing. He took it to the table and spread it out carefully. "I've not got long for your gown," he said, picking up a holder with a length of chalk in it and marking the cloth here and there.

"Solus can't marry a man?" I asked.

Vidalis's eyes snapped to my face. After a moment, he murmured, "Right reason, wrong man."

"Who, then?"

"Palaemon," he sighed. Shame flamed in his face.

"Yeah, we've met," I told him, running my fingers over the bruises at my throat. "He's a brute."

"Tends that way," said Vidalis, looking down at the cloth with concentrated attention.

I understood. It takes a lot for a man, any man, to admit that another man has violated him: that role is reserved for women. Children. The weak. I stepped closer to the table, keeping my own eyes on his work. "So what's he got on you?"

Vidalis frowned at the rainbow stripes carefully laid out along the table. "My little brother," he whispered. "He's just a child. Pa--Palaemon keeps him as a page. In his wife's service." He looked up, and tears starred his beautiful lashes. "I told him I'd do... anything he wanted, any time, anywhere. He promised."

"Has he kept his promise?" I asked, keeping my voice low.

"So far," Vidalis said, attempting a diffident shrug and failing miserably.

I looked away, giving him a moment to collect his thoughts. The windows of this room were barred. Locking me in? Or Vidalis?

* * *

She'd told him she could kill him with her bare hands any one of two dozen ways, and hurt him in more. He'd tested her. She wasn't lying. Fortunately, it was only his ear, and he could ignore the throb of pain once the ringing quit. He took her anywhere she wanted to go, moving with increasing caution as they neared the palace of Solus, high up on the hill above the capital.

"Keep that chain quiet," she commanded, and he moved without thinking to gather the links in his bound hand. Her eyes were still open, but clouded in a horrible-looking red mist, the whites of her eyes nearly the same color. It probably hurt, not that she had made the slightest peep of pain. Solus's alchemist hadn't said anything about an antidote. I had to cheat, Palaemon told himself, looking at Xena's blasted eyes. Otherwise she'd have killed me. But it was a victory like ash, and it made his mouth sour to think of it.

They concealed themselves behind a load of firewood. No one was about, and he took the opportunity to murmur close to her ear, "I didn't rape her."

"I know you didn't," she replied in a low voice.

He blinked, trying to figure it out. "How?"

"I'd have smelled her on you," she said.

Shock rolled through him, and his tongue knotted for the next few seconds.

"You're not over-fond of women anyhow," Xena said.

It was another shock, just as horrible. "That's not true," he blustered, and a slow smile curved at one corner of her mouth.

"You think there's no way to make that honorable?" she said, the jeering tone unmistakable through her low voice. "How you love is always more important than who. But you--you've squandered it, that gift of the divine."

"I'm married," he said in protest.

"And if she'd been taken by a thug to be the wife of a crazy king, what would you do?" He had no answer ready at his lips, and the expression on her face told him what she thought of him. "Thought so," she said. "You're a cheat. You've cheated your whole life. And you'll never be anything else."

"You're a murderer," he pointed out.

"A murderer," she corrected, "with the love of the finest woman breathing."

* * *

I walked into the room knowing what it meant: if I didn't perform as a royal, Vidalis would lose his life. It wasn't easy to remember everything he'd taught me about court etiquette, and fortunately he was at my elbow to signal subtly... curtsy here, bow there, extend a hand to this one, a gracious sideways inclination of the head to another. Desperate as the situation was, it was difficult not to laugh at myself: Vidalis was so much more graceful, so much more at ease with the gestures, that had Solus wanted a consort all could look up to as a vision of effortless beauty, he could have done no better than to choose the comely-eyed man in the beautiful outfit.

But the point of a Queen is childbearing, and men do not excel at that. I'd no intention of getting into that situation myself, but I was stalling for time, wondering where Xena had gotten to.

* * *

Palaemon threaded his way through the trees, jerking the chain this way and that to keep her from the danger she was running too fast to avoid. He skidded to a stop just as he saw the drop, but she kept going, and the two of them tumbled over the edge. On the way down, he threw the chain over a stout limb, and her weight bowed it as she went over into the empty air. Panting, he clung face-down to the hillside, the pull on his chained wrist stressing his already tired muscles.

"How far down is it?" she called up to him. He raised his head and froze. "How far?" she insisted.

"Fatal," he stuttered.

"Cheater," she said, "I give you your life, with a choice. I unlock the cuff if you'll go after her."

The noise of the guards crashing through the brush grew louder.

"No," he said. He wedged his bootheels into the rock as securely as he could and hauled at the chain with both hands. The effort drew forth cries from him, but he got her back up onto more or less solid ground, pitched though it was, and he looked into her lifeless, bloody eyes and gasped one word. "Together."

* * *

She was young, lovely, a fitting queen for any lover, much less the ruler of a kingdom, and it gave me no little regret to press the knife to her young, unscarred throat. "Everyone remain calm," I commanded, and to my surprise, they did just that. The guards were on high alert, but all of them had those showy pikes that were so good for intimidating and useless in close quarters. They could have reached me with an arrow, but none were armed with a bow.

The vizier had his eyes locked on my face, his expression no more concerned than if I had just eaten a grape. "Apex," I said, addressing the vizier directly, "you must understand. Some women wed for gold, some for power, some for position, some for looks, some for sex. I'm none of these." (Well, perhaps the looks and the sex, but I wasn't about to tell him that.) "I bind myself not to a kingdom or hoard. I'm bound for life to the one I love, and living or dead, shall never bind myself to another."

The girl struggled in my arms. "Stop that," I whispered to her. "I don't want to hurt you, truly I don't."

"I'm frightened," she murmured back. I felt her tears dropping onto my bare forearm.

"Aye, me too," I told her, "but stay brave and we'll get out of this."

"Slice her throat and spill her blood," Apex replied with diffidence. "It's all one to me."

"Father!" she gasped, and he looked annoyed.

"Right," I said, laughing. "A man so poisoned he'd sacrifice his own daughter."

His jaw tightened, and his arm shot out. In an instant, he had Vidalis locked in the crook of his elbow, his own wickedly sharp dirk pressed into the young man's neck. "You little know how far I'd go, Amazon Queen," he said, his voice deadly. "I'm touching this sack of offal. Let my daughter loose."

"Don't," Vidalis whispered, his eyes locked on mine.

"Shut your co*cksucking mouth, fairy-fly," Apex hissed in fury, and a line of blood ran from the tip of his knife down Vidalis's chest.

I can always run after the ceremony, I told myself. I hoped it was true. I lowered the knife, and, to my relief, Apex relaxed his arm and threw Vidalis from him with disgust.

* * *

They crouched behind the wall of the kitchen garden. "No use," Palaemon gasped. "There must be a regiment in there."

"Very well," said Xena. She fumbled at her belt and emerged with a tiny metal tool. She seized the end of the chain and hauled his hand toward her. She applied the tool to the manacle, and it dropped from around his wrist, which felt like a bird set to soar.

"What are you doing?" he hissed.

"What I must. Listen to me," she said, not troubling to add a qualifier such as "sh*theel" or "moron". "You'll need all your guile, all your strength. Two against an army is not an easy thing, and we may have to split up."

"Are you serious?" He waved his hand before her face in complete disbelief.

She caught his wrist in a grip twice as tight as the manacle. "Stop that. They're marrying her to the king. Where is he likely to be?"

"Throne room," he said instantly. "That's where we do the big ceremonies."

She dropped his hand and held out a rusty, filthy palm. "Sketch the palace on my hand."

He put his hand round her wrist, trying to move gently, and drew in her palm with his finger. "Kitchen, where we are. Corridors. Here's a turn. Ignore it. Down this hallway. Turn east--left, I mean. You'll be able to detect the herbarium by smell. Just beyond it is the alchemist's library. Beyond that, the throne room, on the right. You'll know it because you'll hear the furnace--it's right behind there."

"It gets that cold here?" she asked.

"They use it for steam to power the machinery. The throne room is where they hold masques to keep the people impressed with fear. They'll be doing some kind of ceremony to mark the wedding as divinely inspired."

"Is anything in this benighted kingdom genuine?" she muttered.

He glanced about him rapidly. "There are soldiers everywhere. Someone to block our path every step of the way."

"That's of no consequence," she said.

"Is... is she worth all this?" he asked, hesitating over his words.

Her nod was as decisive as a killing stroke. "And more."

"Lovers," he said doubtfully, "make you weak. That's why I don't have one."

"Oh, so that's it," she said. The tear-tracks on her blasted face were tinged pink with blood, but the smirk was back.

"You don't like me much, do you?" he asked softly.

"I don't like your fakery," she said.

"I'm not a fake," he said with as much dignity as he could muster.

"You think I'm the one who's blind." Her smile was cruel and vicious, and he knew that, for many men, it had been their last sight this side of the grave. "Take care, Palaemon; eventually, we all become who we pretend to be. Make your choices wisely."

He watched as she coiled the chain about her hand. "Listen," he said, "Xena--"

"It's time."

* * *

Like me, Vidalis was under guard, and I could see him, head held up with dignity as he marched a careful half-pace before the two soldiers. If Apex's unforgivable insults had stained his soul, as I thought surely they must, he showed no sign of it.

Apex took us from the throne room through a little door behind which machinery clanked and rattled. It was viciously hot in there, and I could hear, under the hiss of steam, the roaring of an enormous furnace. Underneath that was another commotion, and after a moment, I identified it; the hubbub of battle. I glanced at Vidalis, whose face had gone ashen and sickly. He heard it too.

In the center of the room was a long, narrow table topped by another long, narrow thing covered with a rich scarlet cloth. Apex stepped toward the table and grasped the cloth in one brutal hand. "Queen," he said, pulling away the cloth, "behold your royal bridegroom."

I caught my breath and whispered, "Sweet mother Goddess." On the table was a coffin, and in it was a dead man. His throat had been slashed, and blood had run out of the coffin, staining its sides. His eyes were open in a look of utter horror.

"He heard legends of her beauty and power," Apex said, turning to Vidalis and me. "She was known to be dangerous, and, moreover, the unnatural lover of another unnatural woman. But nothing would do except that he become her husband. She, crazed by her demon lusts, consummated the marriage... thus." He gestured toward the coffin, then approached us. "It was a struggle, but my brave soldiers brought her down eventually." He waved at the soldiers, ten of whom surrounded me.

Vidalis stepped forward, and I shouted, "No! Don't die for me!" He stopped, gazing at me in agony. No staff, no weapon, nothing but my fists and feet. I was unable to overcome all of them, and they reached for their binders and tied me hand and foot. They picked me up, still twisting and turning to get away, and lowered me into another box. I commenced to scream.

Apex gave no sign that he cared. "Until we get the succession sorted, I have no choice but to assume the regency."

"Vidalis!" I shrieked. "Live long enough to tell Xena I love her!"

He had time for a brief nod. Apex laughed a horrible laugh. "Unrepentant to the end. Nail on the lid."

The tiny box went dark, and I screamed and screamed until I had no more breath, listening to the nightmare sound of nails thudding and squeaking into the wood above my face. I remembered I was a Queen and shut my mouth on my terror. This gave me the advantage of enough air to kick as hard as I could at the end of the coffin. It was slow going, and my feet grew bruised as the coffin swung into the air in the arms of a dozen strengthy men.

I heard a deep metallic clang, then the roaring of the fire grew in volume. I could no longer hear the fighting. The air grew hotter about my feet, awakening my panic once more. I kicked and kicked at the end of the box, screaming her name without cease.

* * *

A trail of dead soldiers marked their passage through the palace. They got to the throne room, bursting through the door simultaneously, and Palaemon grunted, "Deserted."

"Come on!" Xena shouted, stumbling across the steps of the dais. Palaemon took her arm and led her at a clumsy run to the door of the furnace room.

Apex turned as the door flew open. After a moment of astonishment, he purred, "Xena."

"Apex," she said with loathing. "Where is Gabrielle?"

"You're blind," he announced with satisfaction. He nodded toward Palaemon. "Well done, warrior."

Vidalis was on his knees, held down by four soldiers as another kept a knife pressed to his throat. "Let him up," Palaemon growled, and the soldiers stepped back obediently.

"Finish her off," Apex said, jerking his head at Xena.

"No," Palaemon said.

"What?" exclaimed Apex. It was his last word before Xena's schakkram thudded into his throat, exploding it in a shower of gore.

"Where is she?" she asked, her sword pointed unerringly toward them and her voice promising death. The soldiers pointed timidly toward the furnace.

"Oh," Palaemon whispered, "he couldn't have..."

"Where?" Xena hissed.

"The... the furnace--" Palaemon replied.

She dropped her sword with a clatter and dashed toward the source of the heat, groping with determined, unguided hands. Palaemon leapt forward to help, and between them, they hauled out a box whose lower end was consumed in flame. Xena's fingers scrabbled over the lid. "Hammer," she gasped. "Sword--"

Vidalis grasped a pike from one of the guards and thrust the end into the space between the box and the lid. "Haul, men!" he cried, and the soldiers seized the end of the pike, prying the lid off.

The box opened with a creak and a grind, and the lid popped free of the nails. Xena threw it wide and reached inside.

* * *

As she had given me life and love, so now she gave me light and air. I took a huge breath into seared lungs and used it to propel me upwards into her arms, and she caught me, as she always had, as she always would. She hauled me free of the box, shoving it from her with one hand. Someone was behind me with a knife, cutting the binders, and I threw my arms about her strong shoulders, burying my face in her armored bosom and letting loose a shower of tears.

"I was so frightened," I sobbed, entirely unlike an Amazon.

"Shh," she said, caressing my hair with hands that smelt of blood and metal. "You're safe."

I lifted my face, and the first thing that caught my attention was Vidalis, holding a pike in both hands. Standing next to him was the man who had kidnapped me, and he had his eyes on Vidalis. "Are you all right?" he asked gruffly, and Vidalis nodded.

I raised my eyes to Xena's face, and a horrible sense of shock made my muscles go limp. Her face was covered in blood, and it had run from her bruised, swollen eyelids. "Xena," I whispered, "what happened to your eyes?"

"It's nothing," she said, turning her face toward where Vidalis stood.

The man who had kidnapped me went to one knee before Vidalis, who frowned in puzzlement. "Vidalis--" he began, but Vidalis lifted the pike and sent it into the man's torso.

"Die, Palaemon," Vidalis growled.

Palaemon stumbled backward half a step and collapsed, half sitting. "It's your right," he gasped, lifting a hand to Vidalis, "and what I've earned. But know this: I love you. I didn't know how, but I do. I'll watch over you from where I'm going, and next time... I'll come to you clean. As a lover and not your tormentor..." He slumped, shuddered, and went still.

The soldiers turned their attention to Vidalis, who was staring in shock at the corpse on the floor. Then, one by one, they went to one knee before him. I recognized the guard who had watched over me in my captivity. He lifted his face to Vidalis, saying, "My liege..." Tears were running down the guard's face, but they showed every sign of being tears of joy.

* * *

The first command Vidalis gave was that healers be fetched for me and Xena. It appeared the alchemist had specifics both for burns and for the noxious concoction that had robbed her of her eyesight, and we were treated, bandaged, fed, and put to bed. I spent two days dizzily coughing up cinders, and she in very great pain from the thrice-daily treatment of her ruined eyes, until I insisted in a raspy whisper that they drug her into insensibility, which tender-hearted Vidalis was quite glad to order.

Despite everything he had to do, he came to see us frequently, dropping by the lovely, airy herbarium to speak to us of the latest developments. It turned out that he, kept by Apex as a slave and by Palaemon as a plaything, was the King's only legitimate son, and thus his heir. I was uncertain if Apex had poisoned Solus's mind against Vidalis, using his love of men as an excuse, or if the entire palace loathed same-sex connections as a matter of policy. I was too shy around Vidalis's new authority to wish to question him closely, and contented myself with being glad that they had not killed him outright. Palaemon's dying confession had explained that point to my satisfaction.

Vidalis wore the mantle of kingship, no matter how sudden, as if it fit him as well as the sumptuous new robes he assumed. The soldiers were devoted to him, despite the loss of so many of their number to the two-person whirlwind whose inadvertent creation was the succession to the throne of the equally capable, if untried, grandson of their legendary queen.

Palaemon was sent to his gods with the highest honors, having shown his true nature on the last day of his life, and just after that Vidalis brought his newly liberated little brother to the sickroom to meet us. The boy was adorable, as charming as his older brother and as bright, and their devotion to one another was obvious, and touching.

A few days after the battle in the furnace room, it was time to take Xena into a darkened room, remove the bandages from her face, and see whether the treatment had worked. Her eyelids were still swollen and tender-looking, but the dreadful bruising was beginning to fade, and when I sponged the shed blood from her eyelids, she did not stiffen with the agony I dreaded causing.

My hands trembled when I was done. "Try it," I said in a soft voice, as if her ears were as damaged as her eyes,

She opened her eyes slowly, her eyelids peeling apart under the burden of ointment. They fixed on me, and her smile grew. "If that isn't a sight for sore eyes," she murmured, and I laughed at her awful joke and put my arms round her neck and kissed her until my own eyesight blurred with tears of relief. We moved from the sickroom immediately thereafter, and Vidalis ordered his protocol officers firmly to let both of us stay in the easternmost bedroom of the royal suite, which had only one bed.

We left them when we were well enough to travel, with Vidalis's assurances that we had a home for as long as he was ruler, and longer if he were succeeded by those he wanted to leave in charge of his kingdom.

The only thing that had changed was that she now wore a handsome new hat to protect her still-healing eyes from the glare of the sun. We went slowly, as my feet too were still healing, and this gave us time to talk. "They used Vidalis, who he was, used that to deny him the throne," I remarked to her, surprised at the anger I felt.

She laughed and ruffled my hair with her hand. "Now you see why I keep you away from cities."

"How could anyone," I asked, my thoughts far off, "see what you give to me, and condemn it?"

"Because people have about as much sense of what's important as geese." She stopped and turned to me. "And if you're wondering, what I get from you is ever so much more than I could ever return."

"Love," I proclaimed, with all the assurance of an arrogant girl, "is a thing that just is. It can't be measured, nor should it."

"Measured, perhaps not," she agreed, "but it's always possible to add to the sum." She lifted an eyebrow, revealing a wicked blue eye, and I almost swooned with relief and an abrupt case of lust.

"Yes, let's try that," I said, moving into her arms and fastening my lips to hers.

* * *

Xe came to after a long while, and what caught her attention was Erming's face nuzzling her arm. She was standing behind her lover, with one arm wrapped around Erming's waist and the other between her breasts, her hand resting on Erming's shoulder. She hadn't known she could hold anyone that close.

"The End," Erming murmured, rubbing her face against the hand on her shoulder.

Xe kissed her on the ear, feeling a million million emotions, her thoughts ping-ponging around her mind. "Beautiful," she sighed at last. Erming pulled away a little to smile at her, and Xe added, "Story's not bad, either."

Erming laughed. "Let me put this up and we will get another."

"Are you really in a hurry?" Xe asked with nicely-feigned innocence. "Because I was having ever such a nice time holding you."

Erming's answering laugh was low and intimate. "I have had it out in the air and light for an hour and a half. It is not normal for them to be out in the air so long at a time."

"Will it damage them?" Xe asked, releasing her hold regretfully. "OK, let's put it up, then."

"I don't know," Erming admitted, removing the weights at the bottom with care and beginning to roll up the scroll with deft fingers. "We just do not often have them out so long." She touched only the spots on the scroll where there was no writing, Xe noticed. "They seem sturdy, but I have chosen not to risk them... they are very old." Xe put her hands on the other two weights and took them away at Erming's nod. "It would be terrible to lose them after so long."

"That's for sure," Xe said, watching Erming slide the scroll back into its leather scabbard. I ought to get her some of those gloves they use in museums, she thought, willing her brain to remember. "Do you oil them or the holders or anything?"

Erming shook her head. "They are still supple, as you see, and the decision to preserve them is not yet made." She latched the case, shaking her head in annoyance. "I don't mean 'preserve'," she said. "I mean another word, something very similar."

"Wait," Xe said, thinking it over. "I've almost got it--why the hell aren't JLynn and AngelRad here? They'd know in a flash--conserve."

"Conserve," Erming said in relief. "Yes, that is what I meant. Who are... are...?"

"JLynn and AngelRad?" Xe asked, and Erming nodded. "Two of my friends. Two of the friends who started this... this project. You'd love them. You will love them. Because you'll meet them."

A thrill went through Erming. This was no longer her own responsibility. She shared it. Shared it with a whole group, one of whom was now her lover. "Tell me of them? While we put this away?" She tucked the case under her arm and took Xe's hand, leading her back into the corridor that led to the scroll-cases. "How many of you are there?"

"Eight," Xe replied. "There's RangerGrrl, she's a squirrel wrangler."

"She is a which?" Erming said, pausing in the act of putting up the scroll and giving Xe a startled smile.

"A squirrel wrangler," said Xe with a grin. "She's a park ranger, works to conserve the wild places in America so people can visit them."

"Ah," said Erming, sliding the case into its cubbyhole.

"Blackie--she calls herself RangerGrrl's clone, they're great friends. Blackie's the world's biggest flirt, loves women and everything about them."

"She sounds wonderful," Erming said with a smile.

"AngelRad and JLynn are writers. JLynn is kind of a worrywart and AngelRad collects shoes. And they both write these exquisite stories, like..." Xe nodded toward the scrolls. Her heart was filled with warmth; she couldn't wait for them to meet Erming. "There's Bladewalker, she's a Cherokee medicine woman. And a paramedic, which is pretty much the same profession, come to think of it. And McJohn and Story Doc, who got all the stuff organized for me to come here. McJohn's some kind of secretary and Story Doc is a lawyer, but not one of the bad kind. She's really smart. Scary sometimes."

Erming was watching Xe, enraptured. Xe went on, "And then there's my buddy Maggie. She's amazing. She's... she's a famous actress on Broadway. For real. That's all eight of them. Oh, and me. And now you. That's... that's ten of us now."

Erming seized Xe's hand and led her back to the table. "We all met on the Web," Xe said, "at this amazing place called the Tavern Wall run by this amazing woman named NetGyrl. You'll love her. It's a place for Xena fans. We've all gotten to be friends, good friends--" Xe thought of Maggie and amended it: "Great friends, and what we all have in common, we all love that show, and it's... it's a dream, two strong, heroic women remaking the world because of their love for one another, and what you've done is to take our dream and... and make it... real."

Tears sprang into her eyes, and Erming caught up her hand. "I don't... I don't really believe I'm here, sitting in a fully-furnished cave with you, and you're showing me... where it all started..." The tears began to march down her face, and Xe wiped them away, frustrated and giddy with happiness. "I've found the truth, and it pisses me off that this wasn't as much a legend as the Iliad, but I get why there's Nu Shu and I understand that you've had to keep it a secret, and now I don't know what to do but... but..." Xe caught her breath and dashed the tears from her eyes, looking at Erming, in whose eyes tears also glimmered. "But take you back to that bed and make love to you for the rest of my life, if you'll... if you'll have me."

"Yes," Erming breathed, moving forward with care to take Xe in her arms. "Yes, my love, I will. I will. I do. I promise."

"Forever," Xe said, closing the gap between them as she closed her eyes, knowing right where Erming's beautiful mouth would be.

* * *

They spent the next few days reading, making love, having meals, making plans. Xe did her laundry and Erming made a list of supplies she would need. They slept curled together in the dragon bed, and neither spoke about when they might meet there again. They closed up the cave, Aida studying the smooth rock face with an unreadable expression Erming thought might be grim determination, or loss, or protectiveness.

Early in the morning, Erming walked Aida to the bus stop so that she could catch her bus to head back to Guangzhou, and the airport that would take her to the other side of the planet, an unimaginably far distance whose loneliness already pulled at her. Erming's whole body still tingled from Aida's kisses. Aida shifted her heavy backpack, which held an astounding amount of stuff, and took Erming's hand as they walked along the road.

The bus was right on time, and Erming's despair grew. Aida wrestled her enormous backpack into the cargo holder, then turned to Erming. The bus driver turned her head ostentatiously, and none of the other passengers were looking. Aida took Erming into her arms, the warmth and closeness enfolding her for one more precious moment, and then Aida's mouth was descending on Erming's again, passion and love and heartache all in one gesture.

"I have to go," Aida whispered, and Erming wondered who she was trying to convince.

"You have to go," Erming agreed, pulling her hands away, a gesture that gave her physical pain.

"I'll be back," Aida vowed.

"I'll be here," Erming promised her.

Keeping her eyes on Erming, Aida climbed into the bus, tripping up the steps because she refused to look where she was going. The bus driver closed the door and the brakes hissed as she released them. Aida waved, and Erming waved, and she did well to keep the tears from her eyes until the bus had begun to pick up speed, heading south.

Now you know, Erming told herself, what it is to be laotang.

End of Book III

Chapter 4: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book IV

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book IV

AngelRad was wandering through the best shopping mall in the universe, a place where everything was her size and came in the drapes and colors best suited to flatter her. Moreover, the sound system was playing "I Enjoy Being a Girl". She had just picked up a blouse that would coordinate perfectly with her new Diavolinas when her hand stopped...

It took her a moment to recognize the music as the ringtone on her iPhone. She picked it up before she'd even opened her eyes. The pleasant dream wisped away in shreds, leaving behind an itchy annoyance. "Someone I love had better be dead," she growled into the phone.

"AngelRad?" asked a tiny, far-off voice.

"Punkin!" AngelRad gasped, sitting up suddenly. "Where the hell are you?" Beside her, her lover sighed and rolled over, tucking the covers under her chin.

"Guangzhou," said Xe.

"Where?"

"Guangzhou," Xe repeated. "China. A spot where there isn't an Internet cafe. One of the few. What time is it there?"

AngelRad held the phone before her sleep-bleared eyes, staring at the time readout. The number was one that didn't exist in her world. She put the phone back up to her ear. "Half past Holy f*ck," she said. "And this isn't your cell number."

"Prepaid," Xe said. "Disposable." AngelRad's lover put her hand on AngelRad's naked thigh, and she nearly missed Xe's next word. "Listen--"

"You found it," AngelRad interrupted, stroking her lover's hair.

"Did I ever," Xe said fervently. "You won't bel--" The signal blinked in and out, and AngelRad muttered a technology-specific curse under her breath. "--know our favorite--"

"Punkin," she interrupted, "you're breaking up."

"--the show--they know. The producers. They know."

"Know what?"

The hiss of unimaginable distance answered her, then Xe's voice broke through again. "--true. It really happ--details when I g--"

I am never sending her to spy anyplace without decent phone service ever again, AngelRad fumed. "I can't hear you--"

"--someth--else--Ang, I... I met this woman..."

AngelRad's mouth dropped open, and she stared into the darkness of the bedroom, her lover's hand warm on her bare skin. "Oh, Punkin," she said. "Do you mean what I think you mean?"

"I--I think I do," Xe said. The shyness, the hesitancy were purest Xenalicious.

"Punkin," AngelRad breathed. "Oh, honey, I'm so happy for you." She thought for a second. "I am happy for you, aren't I?"

"Yeah," Xe said with a soft laugh. "Yeah, you are."

"Tell me everything," AngelRad demanded.

The goddamned signal went south again, and AngelRad closed her eyes to concentrate on what she heard. Her lover started stroking her thigh, and AngelRad had to open her eyes to pay attention to the phone.

"--can't wait till you meet--call you when I--"

The phone went dead, the connection terminating abruptly, and AngelRad pulled it from her ear, staring at the display. "Bye," she whispered. She ran over the ten words she'd heard successfully. Something was true, something about the trip to China, something that involved the producers of a show, evidently one they knew about. And apparently Xe, her solitary field-playing friend, now had a lover.

"So is someone you love dead?" asked her lover from under the covers.

AngelRad reached for her lover's head, placing a soft hand on her hair. "Evidently not."

"Worth it, going back to sleep?" inquired her lover.

"Evidently not," AngelRad smiled, ducking under the covers.

* * *

McJohn opened the door and walked in, and a woman in the back of the shop waved at her. McJohn threaded her way through aisles of seeds, mortars, grow lights, gardening equipment, composters. She joined the woman in the back of the shop.

"This is quite, quite cool," she told the woman with a smile. "How's retirement treating you, Peggy?"

"I'm always better here than in a place with unnatural lighting and unnatural work."

McJohn laughed. "It's easier since we replaced all that manual entry with data feeds," she said, "but I know what you mean by 'unnatural'."

"Thought you might," said Peggy with a salacious lift of her eyebrow. "Come on, let me show you the gardens."

McJohn followed her, the smile becoming a grin. Peggy led her out the back door into a sparkling clean greenhouse overrun with vegetable life. McJohn walked into the center, turning around and around, her eyes lighting on a bit of color, a droplet sparkling from a serrated leaf, gleaming tools hung neatly on racks on the walls. "Like it?" Peggy asked.

"It's beautiful," McJohn replied, "but I'm wondering what you did with all the dirt."

"Everything in its place," replied Peggy with the composure of a woman who knew precisely what that meant. She led the way into the rows and stopped to hold a gentle hand beneath a trumpet-like flower in a brilliant indigo. "South American. A relative of the gentian." Her eyes were large, liquid, dark, soft with love for the little flower perched safe in the palm of her hand. "Good for fevers, and the flowers make a beautiful tinting for watercolors."

"Of gentians?" McJohn inquired.

Peggy laughed. "C'mon, lemme show you the hydroponic garden."

"Not all that eager, to tell you the truth," McJohn said, a little nervous.

"C'mon, chicken," Peggy said, patting her on the shoulder. "I know from boundaries too. And you told me the wife doesn't have much use for fresh tomatoes."

"You're growing tomatoes out here?" McJohn said, much more attentive.

"Right this way."

She'd had about five of them, anything from grape-sized revelations to a massive, beefy, attitudinous monster that burst into sunlight in her mouth, and it was almost a shame to eat things that were so fine, so luxurious. Peggy's beautiful, expressive eyes watched her with satisfaction. "Wow," said McJohn, licking the juice from her fingers. "You are indeed cradled in the hand of your Goddess."

Peggy folded her arms and co*cked her head. "And you came here for a tomato orgy?"

McJohn blushed and looked at the floor of the greenhouse, which, like every other part of the place, she could have used for a plate. "Ah... not exactly. I was thinking more along the lines of a favor, even though it wouldn't be the first time."

Peggy smiled in understanding. "I have five cats," she replied, "and I know how to use them. What do you need?"

They walked and talked for a while, McJohn losing the thread of her story from time to time, as she tended to do, when she caught sight of a particularly lovely plant. She never brought a camera with her, unlike Peggy's other visitors, and Peggy was rather more impressed by that than otherwise. By the time McJohn had gotten through as much of the background as she intended to give, Peggy had a good idea what it was she was asking, even though McJohn didn't.

"There's a lot you can do with sunlight and earthworms," Peggy said, gesturing around her, "and then there are the projects that call for different tools. You're going to need money. A lot of it."

McJohn looked away, a trace of sadness in her eyes. "I thought maybe that would be what it would take."

"Hey," Peggy said, placing a hand on her shoulder. "It won't kill you. And it definitely won't kill Story Doc. There's no amount of money that lady couldn't handle, and handle like a champ."

"She's still pretty fragile," McJohn murmured.

"Let me show you fragile," Peggy said. She started off along the rows, and McJohn followed obediently. Peggy stopped before a marvelous gnarled piece of driftwood with a single delicate silvery-white blossom on a long stem. "Sterling. It's an orchid. Very rare. They only grow in a couple places. Florida. Louisiana. We found this one right after Rita went through. Millions of years they've been around, drought and flood, ice age and global warming, and this one survived a battering from a Cat Three." She turned to McJohn. "So have some faith in your tough little f*cker, will you?"

McJohn sighed. "If you say so."

Peggy crossed her arms and studied the exquisite, tiny blossom. "I'll see what I can do."

* * *

Three weeks later, McJohn and Story Doc parked the car at one of Houston's two airports, making their way into the terminal. McJohn was on the phone, chattering away happily in a confusion of directions, until they found themselves in the center of a crowd at the baggage carousels. "Never mind," said McJohn, "I see you."

The woman waiting at the carousels had bright silver hair cut short, brilliant blue eyes, and a ready smile. She shook Story Doc's hand and enveloped McJohn in her arms. "It's good to set eyes on you, finally," she whispered, and McJohn whispered back, "At last."

They drew apart, a little shy with one another, the two who had built such a close friendship of phone calls and e-mails, caught in the strangeness of meeting in person for the first time. "So," said McJohn, "to what do we owe the honor of a blitzkrieg visit from the world-famous Bladewalker?"

"You're not gonna believe it," Bladewalker replied.

"We might surprise you," said Story Doc blandly.

"All right," said Bladewalker, unleashing the smile again. "Brace yourselves. We won the damn lottery, is what."

* * *

It was quiet inside, after the riot of falling water, rustling leaves, and birdsong outdoors. RangerGrrl held out a hand to touch the wall. Under the dust of long neglect was wood, warm and solid beneath her fingers.

Blackie circled the other end of the room slowly, hands in her pockets, frowning thoughtfully at her dusty footprints. Just beyond where she was pacing, mellow late-afternoon sunlight struggled through a picture window coated with generations of grime. JLynn was standing next to the window, peering out through the gunk on the glass, and she licked her index finger and cleaned a tiny peephole. Then she looked at her finger, then looked for some way to clean it off.

She was still looking when the door opened and a mob walked in. Bladewalker held the door for Story Doc, McJohn, a woman in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, and a man wearing a short-sleeved madras shirt and Dockers.

"Found her," McJohn said, jerking a thumb casually at the woman in the shorts. "Ladies, this is Samantha from the inspectors'."

"Pleasure," said Samantha, traversing the room for handshakes and introductions.

"What do you think?" JLynn asked.

"Haven't seen anything major," Story Doc said.

"'S a good location," Bladewalker said. "Good and remote."

"Don't ask me," McJohn laughed, "I've fallen in love four times this week. What do you guys think?"

"How much is it?" Blackie asked from the corner.

"One point two," said the man.

"Yeah," Bladewalker pointed out, "but it's been on the market for twenty-six months."

"Financing," said the man, blustery and apologetic. "It's tough this far out, no doubt about it."

"What'd you find?" Bladewalker said to RangerGrrl.

"Cedar," she said, "I think."

Samantha joined her at the wall. "Sure is. Hard to see under all this."

McJohn turned to the man. "Sorry, David, we pay her to be picky. I know nobody's gonna come up here three times a week with a feather duster."

"That's quite all right," he said. "It's been unoccupied a while, no doubt about it."

"Could it be networked?" Story Doc asked.

"No reason why wireless wouldn't work," JLynn replied.

"That would be the best solution," Samantha agreed, kneeling in the corner and examining the joints in the paneling.

"I can arrange a weekend just for y'all, see how you like it," said David.

"Generous," said McJohn, "but thanks. We're not overnighting anywhere unless the electricity's working."

Every eye in the room turned to her. Story Doc's face took on a highly interested expression. In the abrupt silence, McJohn said with dignity, "Well, it pays to be thorough when you're test-driving the second bedroom."

* * *

RangerGrrl and Blackie had finished up the dishes and disappeared down the hiking path with a lantern, and JLynn was in her room working on the edits to the third Kahlua Blue story. Bladewalker sat on the steps with a sugar-free raspberry soda, taking in the night air and appreciating the living hell out of the blaze of stars overhead.

The screen door creaked, and McJohn emerged, swathed in sweater, gloves, a jacket, and her lined boots.

"Cold?" Bladewalker asked.

"Continually," replied McJohn. She tweaked the sleeve of Bladewalker's polo shirt. "Aren't you?"

Bladewalker shook her head. "This place is home."

"It's starting to feel like that to me too." McJohn settled on the steps next to her. "Guess what's going on in there?" Bladewalker had a smart-ass answer all ready, but McJohn went on, "A writer's working. Already."

"That's why it feels like home to you," said Bladewalker, and McJohn considered it. "You get Story Doc all settled?"

"Yeah," McJohn said. "Long couple of weeks."

"Yeah, but she talked David and them out of a quarter-mill plus. She's earned her rest." Bladewalker remembered their first conversation with the realtor. "Why the hell didn't you tell them you needed the electrical for medical equipment?"

"Upholding the honor of Lesbian Nation," said McJohn loftily. Bladewalker laughed, and McJohn said, "Hey, do you think we could go by the fruit-and-nut store again on the way to She-ville?"

"You drag me into that place one more time," Bladewalker groaned, "I'm gonna come out in Birkenstocks. What is it this time?"

"I saw they had some erythritol, and as I recall, I've been threatening you with that sugar-free peach pie for about half a decade now."

"You're such a girl," Bladewalker grinned at her.

"Am not. You should see me strip--"

"Love to."

"--a computer," finished McJohn patiently. "Knock it off or I'll hijack your e-mail address and spam the entire East Coast with Viagra ads."

"You don't know how."

"Better. I know JLynn."

"An effective threat." Bladewalker took a swig of her drink and handed the bottle to McJohn, who tipped it up. "The new Kahlua Blue mystery. Any good?"

"Yeah," said McJohn. "Really good. Better than the second one, even." She looked around at the trees, the stars, the outline of the mountains. "I think this place could do her a lot of good."

They were silent for a moment, passing the soda back and forth, and Bladewalker said, "You know, I've got a little bit of money put aside. How would you like to buy an old fishing camp in the Carolinas and start a women's writing center?"

"Love to," McJohn sighed.

* * *

The trip back to the Amazon Queen was somewhat hampered by Bladewalker's death-grip on Makionus's arm, though the scholar had not made the slightest effort to remove herself from the custody of the tall, sword-bearing menace.

"Tell me more," Bladewalker grunted.

"Ah--" said Makionus, attempting not to trip over some looming threat she could barely make out. The warrior jerked her away from it at the last second, and Makionus stumbled against her armor, apologizing in a near whisper.

"Tell me," Bladewalker repeated grimly.

"'The priestess of the dual goddesses, strengthened by their protection, has arrived safely at Sapphi.' That one came six months after I had met the lady."

"'Months'?" Bladewalker asked, and Makionus gave her the Greek translation, at which Bladewalker nodded shortly. "Then what?"

"Er," said Makionus.

"Damn you, scribbler," growled Bladewalker, hauling her out of the path of a stack of bricks. "I've waited half a lifetime to hear these words."

"Well, it's... it's just that they--"

Bladewalker stopped and whirled, and Makionus came to a stop up against the filth-splashed wall of a workers' tenement, Bladewalker's fists curled into her overtunic. "Could be a bit less personal..." Makionus burbled, trying to shrug, as best she could, around the granite fists.

"Spit 'em out," Bladewalker snarled into her face, "or, by the gods, I'll spit you on my sword."

Makionus nodded. "The next one was... was, 'The goddesses in whose hands we lay cradled have chosen us to bear their newest magic into the world.'"

Bladewalker's brows drew together, and she looked away briefly before searching Makionus's reddening face with her eyes. "What in the name o' Mithra does that mean?"

"I did wonder," Makionus said as conversationally as she could, considering the death-dealing hands gripping her collar, "but 'twasn't my place to interpret. I thought it sounded remarkably like a birthin' announcement."

Bladewalker shook her head as if to free it from a fog.

"Clearly not," said Makionus. "Obviously."

"What did she mean?" murmured Bladewalker.

"Well," said Makionus reasonably, "while you're tryin' to decide, d'you think you could allow me the use o' my windpipe again?" Bladewalker drew her hands from Makionus's collar with a murmur of what might have been an apology. "Quite all right," Makionus said, reaching up with caution to set her neck aright, "you were provoked, I imagine. The next one said, 'The two are strong again, as is the priestess of the dual goddesses.'"

"The two what?" Bladewalker exclaimed in frustration. "And what happened to make her... not strong?"

"I suspect that some of 'em are missing," Makionus said gently. "The messages. There've been some interruptions in the network."

"Was there another?" Bladewalker asked with eagerness, brushing the dirt from Makionus's jacket and seizing her arm above the elbow again.

"'Deed," affirmed Makionus with another nod. "'Of the two, one has my mother's eyes, and the other yours.'"

"Damnation," Bladewalker spat. "They ain't mine." Makionus gave her a startled glance, and Bladewalker clarified, "The messages. They ain't for me." She sighed. "Sounds like you're right. She went and got herself pregnant."

"She was most specific," Makionus argued mildly. "Perhaps she was talkin' about a familiar?"

Bladewalker shook her head, distracted, and continued dragging Makionus toward the docks. "Maybe she had to get married. This ain't no place for a single woman, specially not one with those looks."

"She was very beautiful," said Makionus wistfully. "The most beautiful woman I'd ever seen."

"Aye, that's her, all right," said Bladewalker, mouth set in a grim line. They were standing at the gang of the Amazon Queen. "What was the next one?"

Makionus hesitated again. This time, Bladewalker turned without getting rough. "Damn you, you weak-eyed parcel of ink-spotted papyrus pulp! What was the next one?"

"Theadora is taken," Makionus said in a low voice, "and I need you."

"Theadora," said Bladewalker, rolling the word about in her mouth. "A city. A city during a siege. I can find a city." She turned to the ship, cupped her hands about her face, and bellowed, "Lethe! We've found her track, at long last!"

* * *

Of a sudden, the shabby stranger with the tired eyes had arrived and changed everything. The rest of the day was to prove active for Alcibiades and Skittles: for a start, Bladewalker reversed a long-standing habit of ignoring the sailors to demand that Alcibiades set the prow of the Amazon Queen for West Africa instantly, at once, now. Lethe ordered him to belay Bladewalker's order and show their guest to the scriptorium, provoking the closest thing to a real fight they'd seen between the two. Demands and counter-demands flew across the deck. Willow found something profoundly urgent to do below. The panther prowled with restless steps and dissatisfied eyes, and the hawk took to the air, circling the ship, as Ranger kept an eye first on the one, then the other.

In the midst of the ruckus stood the stranger, looking from one to the other with curiosity and bafflement. She was well beyond middle age, her hair stone gray and her form stooped with rheumatism. Alcibiades could tell, from the black-spotted hands and the shiny surface of the bottoms of her sleeves at the forearms, that she spent a lot of time with paper and ink. It was a sensible choice of profession; she was obviously quite nearsighted, groping with stained hands for one of the lines, which she grasped as if it could keep her safe from the pits of Tartarus.

Skittles had spotted the same thing. "She'll decapitate herself on the lines, and I don't think that'd make Bladewalker or Lethe very happy," she said in a low voice to Alcibiades. "I think you'd best lead her back here by the sweeps."

"Me?!" Alcibiades eyed the combatants amidships. "You're a woman, you do it."

"You're the Captain," grinned Skittles.

Alcibiades grumbled under his breath as he crossed the deck to pluck at the stranger's sleeve. "Would you join us at the stern while these two..." He couldn't think of a way to finish the sentence, and the stranger turned to him with a smile.

"Reach a consensus?"

"Aye," Alcibiades said, offering her an elbow, "that'll do."

As he led her to the sweeps, moving carefully around the lines and ropes, Lethe and Bladewalker turned simultaneously to stab fingers in his direction. "Don't let her leave!" both bellowed in unison.

"I've no intention of leaving," called the stranger forthrightly. Lethe and Bladewalker went right back to their argument, and Alcibiades and the stranger reached the sweeps, where Skittles stood with her arms folded and a wicked expression on her face, watching Bladewalker and Lethe yell at one another.

"Women fight over you often, do they?" Alcibiades inquired with a smile.

The stranger indicated herself with a gesture. "I know you'd be surprised, considerin' my looks, how seldom it happens."

"Indeed, a great mystery," he said with great seriousness, "seein' as how that should be one o' the legends of Alexandria. I'm Alcibiades. I'm the Captain."

"Makionus," said the stranger.

She had a firm grip and a way of looking you in the eye that he approved of. He gestured toward Skittles. "Skittles, navigator and brains o' the outfit."

"Pleasure," said Makionus, turning for another hearty handshake.

"So what'd you do to heat up Thermopylae again?" Skittles asked, nodding toward the combatants.

"P'raps nothin' more than breathe," replied Makionus, eyeing the two. "Do this often, do they?"

Alcibiades and Skittles shook their heads solemnly.

"Reassurin'," said Makionus, settling by the rail with an intent gaze to watch Lethe and Bladewalker. "I'm no good with a knife, 'cept when the opponent is a block o' cheese."

"Anat Herself wouldn't be a match for these two," Alcibiades remarked.

It surprised him when Makionus laughed. "That fearsome, eh? You certain one of 'em isn't Anat, travelin' unknown to avoid beseechers?"

He took a closer look at her. She could not, by any feat of imagination, be considered Phoenician. "You know my gods, Makionus?"

"By reputation," she answered readily, "and there's a lot about 'em I like. I wish we still knew their names, 'stead o' havin' their aspects stolen by lazy layabouts--"

The argument on deck came to an abrupt end, and in the silence, the three of them turned amidships, where Lethe and Bladewalker stood glaring at one another, hands on hips. Neither had made a move for a weapon, which Alcibiades considered a good sign.

"Captain," said Lethe.

"Aye, Your Grace," he replied.

"How quickly can the ship be readied for departure?"

"That... ah... that depends," he hedged, taking a few cautious, brave steps toward her. "What would our destination be?"

Bladewalker, murder in her face, nodded to Makionus. "She can tell you."

"Sapphi," said Makionus. "A port in Western Africa. And then a city called Theadora."

Skittles and Alcibiades exchanged grave glances. "Never heard o' either one," Skittles said in a low voice.

"We'd have to make inquiries, Your Grace," said Alcibiades.

"Aye, do that," nodded Lethe, raising a hand in an imperious gesture toward Makionus. "You. Scribe. Come with me."

"Immediately, Your Grace," answered Makionus, picking her way across the deck with caution.

"I've somethin' to show you," Lethe said, taking the key to the scriptorium from her pocket.

Bladewalker dropped a heavy hand on Makionus's shoulder, and Alcibiades saw her try to control a flinch. "Don't get yourself killed," Bladewalker murmured to Makionus, "afore you write down all you told me."

Makionus nodded to Lethe. "I believe Her Grace may be more in charge of that than either of us."

Lethe turned with a look of amusem*nt. "Kill you? After all the trouble we've had to find you? I should think not. Be comforted, scribe."

"I'll do what I can along those lines," agreed Makionus, "but you'll understand if my hand quivers about the quill a bit..."

They disappeared below, and Alcibiades turned to Skittles, a grimness about his face. "Sapphi," he said. "And Theadora."

Skittles shrugged and made for the gang. "Well," she said philosophically, "it's been a while since a drunken, grizzled, one-eyed, one-legged pirate made a snatch for my ass in some foul drinkery, and I guess I better see if I'm missin' anything."

* * *

The lock to the scriptorium was well made and well oiled, and it opened with a solid ka-thunk, no squeaking or grinding. Lethe opened the door and stepped in. Makionus glanced at Bladewalker from under her brows, and Bladewalker thrust a hand abruptly toward the open doorway. Makionus entered the room, which was small enough to seat two comfortably, and crowded into the corner next to Lethe with a murmur of apology, accommodating the tall, broad-shouldered Bladewalker.

Light spilled into the scriptorium from two open square ports deckside, falling onto a smoothly planed wooden table adorned with leather-wrapped stones as weights. The table had barely enough room on either side for a bench and a couple of three-legged stools. The end of the table opposite the door butted into a large cabinet whose doors were covered in heavily-oiled waterproofing leather.

"Shut the door," Lethe said with a nod to Bladewalker. This occasioned some more crowding and a few more apologies from Makionus. Lethe ignored her and put her hand on the cabinet door, unclasping the complicated mechanism that held it securely. The door swung wide; Makionus and Lethe had to bend over so it could open fully. Inside was a complex wooden frame divided into squares about the breadth of the palm of Lethe's hand. She reached into one of the cubbyholes to draw forth a well-tended leather cylinder.

Makionus kept her eyes on the cylinder, and her brows drew together in concentration. Lethe removed the cap at the end, then shook out a length of rolled-up parchment. She unrolled it with the quickness of long practice, securing the edges with the leatherbound stones. She gestured to Makionus, who gave her a disbelieving look.

Makionus placed her hands with care on the table, to either side of the parchment, then leaned down until her face was a hand's-breadth away.

"'O Muse, who hears the desperate cry of a bereaved woman,

Guide my hand across this parchment,

For my tears have blinded me,

My sorrow clouded my tongue,

And I cannot tell this tale any longer.

'She who made me whole is gone,

The life in my blood,

The breath in my body,

The blood in my heart,

And now I know

How Death is mercy.

'I need you now, O Muse,

Your strength, your eloquence,

The deft spinning of your long tapered fingers,

Graceful above the loom.

'For without you,

I cannot go on,

And without me,

Then She is forgotten,

And without Her,

The world is truly lost....'"

Makionus straightened slowly. The concentrated look had become a frown. "This is Gabrielle's Life of Xena."

"Yes," said Lethe.

"I thought it was lost," Makionus said.

"No," replied Lethe. She swept a hand in the direction of the parchment. "As you see."

"What is it," Makionus asked, looking from one to the other, "that you need from me?"

Lethe's shoulders relaxed. "First off," she said, "I believe you're to guide us to West Africa."

Bladewalker's gusty sigh was loud in the small room.

"And in between doing that," Lethe added, nodding toward the story laid out on the clean table, "I believe you'll spend a lot of your time copying this out."

* * *

Makionus walked a little taller, flanked by armed warriors, a panther, and a hawk. Lethe and Bladewalker exchanged amused glances at her purposeful air; she could not possibly have seen more than two steps before her.

The streets of Alexandria were infested with people, donkeys, skinny dogs and cats, scuttling rats, flies, beetles, and all manner of ants. The sun blazed in fury alike on soldier and poet, courtesan and dung-sweeper, priest and merchant, philosopher and madman. Piles of offal in filthy puddles lay next to market-stalls offering costly cloth, delicate spiced pies, exotic wine, strong cheese.

"'You'll need help,' she says," Bladewalker murmured to Lethe.

"This is Alexandria," replied Lethe, kicking at a half-rotted apricot and sending it into the gutter. "P'raps she knows of a rat that can hold a pen."

Makionus led them to a tumbledown building in a shabby neighborhood. She stopped before the door of a Greek-style taverna advertising its wares by leaning drunkenly at an angle against the building next to it. She turned to Lethe, Bladewalker, and Ranger.

"I have an apprehension," said Makionus, "that the people here will see me with three dangerous warriors and assume I've become important enough to attack."

"You don't believe," asked Lethe with some merriment, "that a panther is going to dissuade them?"

Makionus laughed. "An excellent point, but, really, I'd prefer you not chip your blades on my behalf. 'Twould be wicked expensive to get 'em repaired."

"Aye, there's that," said Lethe. "Ranger, if you'll take the front, Blade and I will enter this fine establishment with Makionus here."

Ranger nodded, taking up a defensive position and scanning the streets for threats. Blackie settled on guard next to her, and Klokir turned her head this way and that, alert for danger. As long as no general was able to recruit and motivate an army of wastrels and drunkards, they seemed safe enough.

Makionus nodded to Ranger, a gesture capable of many interpretations, and went into the taverna. Bladewalker and Lethe followed.

Inside, the heat was not much mitigated by gloom and the oppressive smell of sour wine and sickness. A few patrons lay about in various states of awareness, and a few other heads swiveled toward them as they entered, hostility warring with resentment at their appearance. A man in a wine-spotted apron turned from filling two bottles at an ancient, cracked cask stoppered with dirty rags.

"Good day," Makionus said. "May I ask if--"

"In the back," said the man, jerking his head toward the rear of the taverna. "And take her with you; she's been annoyin' the paying customers."

"Philo?" inquired Makionus innocently.

"Diodorus," he grunted, and Makionus winced in sympathy. She glanced at Lethe and Bladewalker as if asking for permission or attention, then made her way through the front room to the back door. Lethe and Bladewalker followed, soon finding themselves back in the heat and sunlight.

Sitting on the back stoop was a woman in much-patched clothing of no determinable color, so bleached was it by the sun. She had hair of a Northern blonde, holes in her boot-soles, and her head in her hands. Makionus smiled a pained little smile and approached to lay a hand on her shoulder.

"f*ck off," groaned the woman.

"I'd like to talk to you," Makionus said, pitching her voice low in consideration of what was obviously a powerful hangover.

"Have ye brought more wine?" inquired the woman without raising her head.

"No," said Makionus.

"Then f*ck off twice," said the woman. "With the leaden prick of Hephaestus."

Lethe and Bladewalker exchanged a doubtful look.

Makionus sat on the stoop next to the woman, regarding their less than promising surroundings. "Lovely view," she said. "You can't even see the gallows from here."

The woman picked up her head at that. "Did you hear? They executed another one today. For denyin' the primacy of Jupiter."

"I heard," said Makionus gently.

"The primacy of Jupiter!" cried the woman. "Of all idiot notions. Isis has millennia on that tin-balled excuse for a thunder-chucker."

"Aye," said Makionus, "you're right about that, Dogmatika."

"If they ain't hangin' the scholars, they're burnin' the libraries," Dogmatika went on. "All that knowledge, distilled drop by drop from the finest minds o' the race, nothin' but smoke for their half made-up, half stolen gods."

"That's so," commented Makionus.

"It does nothing but deprive a moronic race of capable brains and freeze the work of honest natural philosophers, that," said Dogmatika petulantly. "And none to speak for freedom o' thought to the face of this threatened despot teeterin' atop a gilded throne perched on knifepoint."

"Couldn't agree more," said Makionus.

"And there's no more wine!" Dogmatika said, shaking her head in disgust. She blinked and grabbed it with both hands, pressing at her temples and whimpering.

"This is help?" inquired Lethe sardonically.

"The best." Makionus gave Lethe a brief smile and leaned a little closer to Dogmatika (a courageous move, considering). "Listen, Dogmatika, what if I were to tell you that at least one o' the old legends had a basis in fact?"

"I'd say you were tryin' to cheer me up," Dogmatika said, "'cept this is you sittin' here."

"Gabrielle's Life, specifically," Makionus continued, as if Dogmatika hadn't spoken.

"It's a myth," Dogmatika scoffed, waving a hand in dismissal.

"Saw it today," Makionus said. Dogmatika opened her mouth to protest, and Makionus interjected, "I'll remind you I don't wander Bacchus's groves, as a general rule."

"Sobriety ain't the same as sanity," remarked Dogmatika.

"True," Makionus said, thinking it over. "Look, I'll make you a wager. If I'm right, you get whatever you want."

"You haven't got anything," Dogmatika pointed out.

"Can't argue the point," said Makionus agreeably.

"Wait," said Dogmatika, a grin spreading over her face. "I've got it. I win, you arrange that damnable mop of hair of yours into some sort o' shape."

"Very well," said Makionus, getting to her feet and hauling Dogmatika up by an elbow.

"Possibly a galleon," Dogmatika said. "Or--wait! I've got it. Bear-grease, and we sculpt it into a Diana."

"Whatever you like," said Makionus, steering her down the alleyway to the street. Lethe and Bladewalker stuck their thumbs in their belts and ambled after.

"Romulus and Remus, sucklin' a she-wolf," suggested Dogmatika.

"That'd take two more heads o' hair," Makionus replied, leading her to the front of the taverna.

They met up with Ranger, Blackie, and Klokir, and Dogmatika was so engrossed that she didn't notice the panther or the hawk. "An allegory of the infallibility of the Alexandrian despot," she went on, growing inspired.

"I can only promise my own scalp," Makionus said, "not that of every non-bald man in Alexandria."

They had gotten near the docks when a commotion in one of the innumerable stinking alleyways resolved itself into a young woman in white dashing toward them. Behind her, rearing struggling horses against the crowd, were three mounted women with swords in their hands. Makionus and Dogmatika caught the running woman, who seemed at the end of her strength.

Lethe, Ranger, and Bladewalker drew their swords in one smooth movement. "'Gainst the wall, scribbler," said Bladewalker, without looking. "I ain't lettin' the breath leave your lungs without them messages."

Makionus and Dogmatika hauled the woman to the wall, placing their backs to it and watching in apprehension as the mounted women drew nearer. Their faces were Asian and their eyes glittered coldly with blue fury.

Makionus turned to the woman. "It's going to be all right," she said. "You'll see."

"Unless we die, o' course," said Dogmatika. She sounded nearly cheerful.

* * *

The alleyway cleared in a heartbeat, and the three mounted warriors drew up in a triangular attack formation, facing the three footsoldiers, Blackie and Klokir at the ready to either side of Ranger.

The horsewoman in front wore gleaming black lacquered armor over yellow silk. She reared the horse and sliced her sword through the air in a whistling arc: not an attack, merely a display. She swept scornful deep blue eyes over the company, her gaze coming to rest on Bladewalker's face.

"Sister," she purred.

"Hardly," grunted Bladewalker.

The woman laughed, low in her throat. "None so blind," she said, "as those who scorn a gazing-glass as girly."

"What is it you want?" Lethe interrupted.

The woman's eyes shot to Lethe's determined form, sword at the ready, her feet poised for action. A dawning awareness grew in the woman's face. "Can it be? Do some legends still walk the earth?"

"'Tis a tired old earth your father left scorched and bloody," Lethe replied, her voice shaking with anger. "I can only hope he's the same."

"Father is well, thank you for inquiring," said the woman. "And growing in strength every day." She turned to Ranger. "My quarrel is not with you, warrior. Your people and mine have been allies since the advent of Chronos. You and your pets are free to withdraw."

Blackie's tail lashed back and forth, and a low growl escaped her throat. "Not when you threaten my friends," Ranger replied, implacable. "And insult my tribe."

"You plannin' to talk us to sleep and rob our wallets, or what?" Bladewalker said.

The mounted warrior raised her blade and pointed toward the wall where the young woman in white sat gasping between Makionus and Dogmatika. "She belongs to us. Leave her to us and there'll be no trouble."

"You 'belong' to a lover," said Bladewalker, "and you three don't exactly look like the cuddly type."

"Oh, for Father's sake, Marcia," interrupted the warrior in red silk, "just run them through and let's take the girl."

"Shut up, Marta," Marcia snapped. She juggled the sword in her hand, as if thinking.

An ugly jeering look twisted Lethe's features. "Frightened, little lamb? Daddy won't let you run?" She made a bleating noise, and Marcia's face flamed with fury. She reared the horse again, and Lethe swept her sword beneath the horse's belly, so close it must have felt the whoosh of the blade's passing. Marcia's sword made contact with Lethe's on a sidestroke, and Lethe laughed, her eyes shining.

"Do that again and your horse spills its guts!" Lethe called.

The warrior in blue charged for Ranger as Marta spurred toward Bladewalker. Ranger's sword flashed like fire and the warrior in blue swept past, wheeling her horse for another charge. Blackie went low, her tail weaving hypnotically in the air.

Marta hauled her horse into the air by the reins, intending to send its armored weight crashing down on Bladewalker, who ducked under the flashing hooves and severed the girth with a stroke.

"Dogmatika," said Makionus, "you wouldn't happen to have a scrap o' parchment and a bit of ink about you?"

Dogmatika beseeched the empty heavens sardonically and dug in her pockets.

Marta's saddle went one way, and the horse another, and the red-clad warrior tumbled clattering to the ground. She found her feet easily enough, facing Bladewalker. On her face was a cold demon's smile that never got as far as her eyes.

Blackie launched herself toward the warrior in blue, who turned and swept the big cat out of the way with the flat of her sword. Blackie sailed past the horse, twisting in midair to regain her balance, and landed on her feet, turning with a hiss to face off against the horsewoman again.

Makionus accepted the parchment from Dogmatika and began to scribble on it with a length of char in a holder. "Makionus," she muttered to the young woman in the white outfit. "And you?"

"P-Pyra," stammered the young woman.

"Pleasure," nodded Makionus, reaching for Pyra's hand with her own grimy one. "They're absolutely tremendous at this, no need to worry."

"Dandy," replied Pyra faintly.

Bladewalker's sword met Marta's in a shivering clang. Their first three passes left them on opposite sides of the fight, and Marta saw Ranger launch the hawk toward the back of the blue-clad warrior. "Angelica!" she called. "'Ware head!"

Angelica ducked, and Klokir sailed past her head, climbing at the end of the alleyway to soar in for another pass. Ro and Jerseygirl leapt from Ranger's pockets to her shoulders to watch.

Marcia was driving Lethe up a small flight of steps, Lethe carving the air around Marcia's blade with a series of exchanges nearly too fast to see. Marcia sat her horse easily, parrying each of Lethe's strokes without much effort, and Bladewalker glanced her way to see how she was holding up. Marta took the opportunity to send her sword whizzing past Bladewalker's ears, and Bladewalker caught the stroke in time, sending her staggering back a couple of steps.

The squirrels chattered in agitation on Ranger's shoulders, and she shook her head stubbornly.

"Well," Dogmatika said by way of comment, "can't count on our rude friend Makionus for an introduction, I see. I'm Dogmatika."

"Pyra," said the woman in white, taking Dogmatika's hand with her own, which was shaking.

"Aye, so I heard," said Dogmatika.

With an eerie screech, Klokir dove for the head of Angelica's mount again, and the horse wheeled to avoid her. Blackie hissed, ears laid back flat, and lunged for the horse. The terrified horse rolled its eyes, screamed, and reared. Angelica went backwards over Blackie into the air, and Ranger heard the silk of her sleeve rip. Angelica landed in the filth of the street, rolled to regain her balance and lifted her sword.

The squirrels' chattering had reached a fever pitch, and Ranger finally nodded, scooping them up in her free hand and pitching them at Marcia before turning to catch Angelica's blade with her own.

The squirrels landed on the back of Marcia's saddle and scrabbled their way up her armor to her head. There, Jerseygirl threw herself claws and teeth foremost at Marcia's eyes, while Ro ducked into the collar of her armor. Marcia screamed and dropped her sword, clawing at the furious little bundle of fur attached to her face. Lethe laughed and leapt from the steps to catch the bridle of Marcia's horse. The horse reared, and Lethe's feet left the ground.

Bladewalker and Marta were still battling, their swords clanging in a fury. Marta feinted and dashed toward where Pyra was sitting. Makionus never looked up, scribbling frantically on the parchment. Bladewalker caught her balance and dashed after Marta. Pyra shrank back as if she could melt into the masonry of the wall. Marta's sword went up, and Dogmatika threw herself over Pyra and Makionus. Bladewalker caught Marta's sword with a slithering hiss, throwing her back from the wall.

"You're welcome!" Dogmatika called pointedly to Makionus, who was untangling herself from Pyra.

"Pardon?" inquired Makionus. Dogmatika favored her with an impolite gesture, and Makionus nodded in distraction and went back to her scribbling.

Marcia's horse reared again and shook its head, trying to get Lethe loose from its bridle, but all that happened was that Marcia thumped gracelessly to the ground, Jerseygirl clinging to her head. Marcia hauled at the livid little creature clinging to her face, and finally Jerseygirl let loose. Marcia's face was streaming with blood, and she raised her arm to catapult Jerseygirl at the wall as hard as she could. Blackie went airborne, catching the squirrel in her mouth midflight and slinging her to Ranger, who scooped her out of the air and stuck her into a pocket.

Marcia seized her sword and ran for Lethe, who let go of the horse's bridle and dropped lightly to her feet, laughing. "Daddy won't like this story," Lethe panted as her blade met Marcia's. "Face chewed into kibbie by a fancy rat."

Marcia's sword arced like lightning, and Ro darted from her collar to sink her teeth into Marcia's ear. She swept the squirrel from her with her free hand, and Ro zigzagged through the combatants to the safety of Ranger's pocket.

"Shouldn't we do something to help?" suggested Pyra.

"No, no, they'll be fine," muttered Makionus, a little absently. "They do this all the time."

Klokir fluttered around Angelica's head, and Angelica batted her away with her unoccupied hand. Taking advantage of the distraction, Ranger swept her blade in a complex circle, and Angelica's sword clanged to the ground. Blackie crouched, baring her teeth at Angelica, who hesitated before going completely still.

Bladewalker trapped Marta's sword beneath her own and raised her boot to shatter the blade. Marta drew back the snapped end of the sword and Bladewalker pointed the murderous edge of her own directly in Marta's face.

That was about the time that Lethe stepped inside Marcia's guard, turned, and threw her over her shoulder, neatly disarming her as well. Marcia leapt to her feet and grabbed for her knife, and Lethe grinned, pointing two swords at her. In an instant, all was still, save for the sounds of heavy breathing and Blackie's thoroughly unnerving growl. The combatants were covered in dust and garbage, and Marcia's face looked like it had taken a leisurely stroll across a fire-pit.

"Pa-thetic," pronounced Lethe. "Yield."

"f*ck you," spat the bloodied Marcia.

"Not if you're no better at it than swordplay," said Lethe. Bladewalker's guffaw was hearty and victorious.

"Next time," Marcia snarled, snapping her fingers. A little shower of sparkly blue stars surrounded each of the Asian warriors, and when it faded, they, their horses, and their weapons had disappeared.

* * *

In the silence, Lethe raised her arm and wiped the sweat from her face. Ranger held out her arm and chirruped to Klokir, who took to the air, swooped in low, and settled into place with a deep flutter of wings. The squirrels poked cautious little heads out of Ranger's pockets, and Blackie curled around her legs.

Bladewalker took a look around her. Nothing remained of the attackers--not even the broken edge of Marta's blade. She lowered her sword and put her hand to her eyes, rubbing the sweat from them, then took another look. Other than the scuffs in the dust and the hoofprints of the horses, there was no sign of the sudden, savage fight. The skin of the back of her neck prickled. She took refuge in the oldest invective she knew. "Who in the name of Medaure were they?"

Lethe's head whipped around, and she nailed Bladewalker with an assessing look. "You don't know?" she asked with deceptive mildness. Bladewalker shook her head in incomprehension, and Lethe sheathed her sword. "We'll return to this later," she said. "For now, let's get back to the ship."

"Not a senseless notion," called Dogmatika from the sidelines. "This place'll be crawling with Roman soldiers in two heartbeats." She looked at Makionus, still on the ground, cross-legged and writing frantically. "Did we interrupt the play-by-play, nearly dyin' on you?"

"Aye... no," murmured Makionus without looking up.

"You," said Lethe, jerking her head at Pyra, who did her best not to flinch. "You're with us."

"They might come back," objected Pyra. "They're dangerous--"

"Not half so much as we," Lethe interrupted with a wolfish grin. "As you see. Come on."

They began to move, save Makionus, who sat where she was, continuing to scratch away with the char on the now-dusty parchment. "Hey," Dogmatika said, whacking her shoulder with a fist, "stir thy stumps, idiot, lest the Romans finish the job those comely assassins began."

"A moment," Makionus muttered, bent over her work.

"Scribbler," Bladewalker spat, a sound like a thunderclap. "Move."

Makionus struggled to her feet and followed Dogmatika and Pyra, still writing. They began to thread their way back through the narrow streets to the docks where the Amazon Queen lay berthed, wiping the traces of sweat and dust from themselves, catching their breath after the excitement.

Makionus stumbled from time to time over a pile of half-dead vegetables or a broken pot. Dogmatika, growing tired of her clumsiness, grabbed her tunic at the shoulder and commenced to steer her this way and that. "Admirable powers o' concentration," remarked Dogmatika to Pyra. "See you don't fall into the same trap."

"And now we're talkin' of traps," said Lethe, "why were they chasin' you?"

Pyra shook her head. "I've no idea. They come back from time to time, and each time they try to kill me."

Lethe co*cked her head at her. "You don't look much like a threat."

"I'm a healer," replied Pyra with dignity. "I'm no threat to anyone save Anubis."

"Seems like it'd take them three a lot of effort and more than a little luck to kill someone," Lethe remarked. "You ain't been bringin' their targets back from the dead?"

Pyra laughed, a low, musical sound. "Not that I know of. I work more with illness than sword wounds, and more with herbs and drugs than surgery." Her speech had a lovely lilt to it, with grace to her pronunciation and a remarkable sophistication in her choice of words.

The alleys widened, and the streets grew broader the closer they came to the harbor. Ranger hummed a soothing little tune and lifted a glove to stroke Klokir's breast. The agitated hawk ruffled herself up, shaking her feathers back into place. Blackie moved with sinuous grace at her side, and Ro and Jerseygirl climbed cautiously to her shoulders, where Ro sat alert for danger and Jerseygirl commenced what looked like it would be a lengthy job cleaning her fur.

A squadron of Romans moved past at the quick-march, swords out and held at the ready over their shoulders, and the warriors looked as mildly curious as they could contrive. Makionus took no notice, continuing to write, as Dogmatika yanked her away from a half-charred vinegar barrel. "Muse just drop the sequel to Iliad on thy head, did She?"

"A moment," said Makionus. Dogmatika kept her fist in Makionus's tunic, hauling her out of the path of trip hazards, but otherwise paid her no further heed.

"Illness?" inquired Lethe, not as if she were really interested. "Like, f'r example, brain fever?"

Bladewalker gave her a sharp look, but Pyra considered the question seriously. "I have worked with melancholiacs, yes," said Pyra. "And some who were raving, having lost their moorings in this world and wandering in the next realm. And those with epilepsy, truly a tragic affliction. I've employed an herbal approach in all these cases, trephination having had variable results."

"Does it work?" asked Lethe casually.

Pyra shrugged. "With some, it's very effective," she said, "particularly when combined with music. For others..." She shrugged again, the hard-headed fatalism of a healer who knew she could not save every patient.

Lethe's face turned stony. Bladewalker dropped a comforting hand onto her shoulder. They came in sight of the harbor, and Bladewalker sighed in relief: the ship was bobbing quietly up and down at anchor, and no loaders were hurrying up and down the gang. She must be provisioned and ready to depart.

Skittles came down the gang to meet them, stopping as she caught sight of their disheveled clothing. "By Mot the dark god of f*ckups, what happened to all o' you?"

Lethe laughed. "Had a bit o' trouble recruitin' our latest shipmate," she said, clapping Pyra on the back. "Pyra the healer, meet Skittles the navigator."

They shook hands, and Dogmatika shook Makionus by the shoulder hard enough to rattle her teeth. "Hey, dungbrain, care to look up for a breath or two?"

Makionus scribbled a flourish at the bottom of the parchment and turned to Bladewalker. "Careful with it," she said, rolling up the parchment and peeling off a little strip from the edge, which she wrapped about the scroll. "It's in char, not ink, and it'll smear. Still, that's the only one till I can make a fair copy."

Bladewalker accepted it, gesturing toward it in confusion. "What in Tartarus is this thing?"

"Your messages from the priestess," said Makionus, nodding toward it. "Every one, along with when I received it." Bladewalker turned the scroll over in her hands with a frown, and Makionus jammed her hands in the pockets of her trousers, adding pleasantly, "Now it won't press you quite so much, havin' to keep me alive."

* * *

Lethe asked Alcibiades into her cabin, where he took the news of his three new shipmates with equanimity. He and Lethe reached an accommodation as to fares, and then he and Skittles conferred about where to sling all the extra bodies. He was talking with her in a low voice in their accustomed spot by the sweeps when Bladewalker mounted the steps to join them.

"Well?" she growled.

Alcibiades and Skittles exchanged a look. He turned to Bladewalker, attempting to be as civil as he could; something about her suggested the smoke of battle. "Sapphi lies a few weeks' sail to the west," he said, "but Skittles was able to get no knowledge of Theadora."

"Could be inland," Skittles offered, "or known by another name."

Bladewalker nodded. "It'll do. We make for Sapphi."

"Aye," he said, wanting to make things absolutely clear, and also assert his captaincy, "Lethe's already approved."

Bladewalker nodded again without speaking, then turned on her heel and headed down the steps, leaving Alcibiades and Skittles to breathe without hindrance. Halfway down, Bladewalker turned back, oddly hesitant. "Thank you," she grunted.

They were too astonished to reply, and Bladewalker made her way across the deck, disappearing into Lethe's cabin. When she had gone, Alcibiades and Skittles raised their eyebrows at one another.

"Hast gotten thyself into a good 'un this time, my brother," Skittles told him.

"Well," he said vaguely, "'tis rumored Dogmatika and Makionus can tell stories..."

* * *

They were fairly on tenterhooks for the next day, wondering if the Romans would come to inquire about a swordfight they'd heard noised in the market, but in the bustle of the port, none seemed to take note of their comings and goings. Lethe, Bladewalker, and Ranger escorted their new teammates as they settled their affairs and gathered their belongings. Makionus left her home (which was surprisingly nice, considering how she dressed) in the care of her friends the Amazon gladiators, whose chief concern was finding another scribe. Pyra collected a store of herbs and drugs that took a small cart to bring back to the ship. Dogmatika had a personal library of voluminous volumes; it gave them some uncertain moments trying to find space for all of it in the scriptorium. They saw no sign of the three sisters, whose appearance gave Bladewalker a great deal to think about.

Lethe was convinced that the three were the unholy children of a fallen god who was using them to regain his throne. While this notion made Bladewalker uneasy, it was even more of a shock to hear that Lethe considered her one of them.

Well, perhaps it was part of Lethe's come-and-go insanity, which had more gone than come during their trip, to Bladewalker's relief. It would have been difficult to manage homicidal mania aboard a tiny little ship, and Bladewalker's soul went to ice thinking about what she might have to do to stop a murderous rampage. If Lethe had settled into her mission of taking the scrolls to safety, and was left with only odd speculations about blue-eyed women that might result in a diagnosis of paranoia from their new healer, that was something Bladewalker could handle.

It was easier to think about that than to tamp down the hope that flared in her in unguarded moments.

* * *

When all was stowed and lashed and pinned and waterproofed and locked, and all were aboard, Alcibiades took his leave of the port authorities--or, rather, authority, a pompous but friendly fellow who accepted his vague mention of Berenike, to the east, as though he'd announced their next destination. The pole-boats took the ship out to the open water, and Ranger sent the hawk aloft to spy out curious eyes as they turned her head to the west, and Sapphi. They were not pursued, and all aboard felt their lungs less squeezed in the welcoming air of the Internum Mare.

Although Makionus knew the name and dwelling-place of the next recipient on the priestess's network, she had learned of the prior stop only by accident: the messenger had by happenstance arrived upon a horse whose branding marked it clearly as being from Cyrene. She had no notion of whom to contact there, the couriers having only the next message and the name and location of the next recipient. Makionus suggested that she and Bladewalker make whatever discreet inquiries one can make in the presence of a strikingly beautiful, heavily armed woman. Bladewalker furrowed her brow doubtfully, less at the description than at the notion that a secret-keeper would willingly divulge information to just anyone. Not just anyone, Makionus pointed out: the description the priestess had given was sufficient to identify the intended target of the messages.

Bladewalker had to admit it was true. Other than the three odd sisters, she hadn't seen any women who fit the description Bellaster had given her couriers. It might just be that they'd walk down the main street of Cyrene and bump into the woman, or man, who carried Jessamyn's words to Bladewalker. Of course, it might be just as likely that she could fly to the moon.

Makionus, having delivered her message and offered the clues she had as to its origin, seemed to take no further interest in the affairs of the parted lovers; she spent her days below in the scriptorium, laboring over her copies of the Xena scrolls. Dogmatika had begun with a good will (and much better handwriting), but soon stalled when she began paying attention to the stories. Soon she was staring at the same page for candlemarks on end, marking up numberless wax tables with detailed notes she then transferred to their precious stores of parchment: she called it "textural analysis" or "commentary", but it seemed to Bladewalker like nothing so much as a vast exercise in laziness.

Bladewalker, ever aware of the hazards posed to the scrolls by wind and wave, asked Makionus to set Dogmatika back to her brush; Makionus made vague promises, but no real moves to redirect the efforts of the scholar she could not seem to be persuaded was her subordinate. Lethe advised Bladewalker to leave the two to their work, even though it appeared to her as though only one of them was working.

Bladewalker reminded herself that she had no real knowledge of the world of scribblers, a mighty queer place that, in turn, seemed to regard warriors as worse than useless, crashing metal-tipped oxen who upset ink-bottles and smeared drying parchments. Rather than remain in a place certain to frustrate her, she took to spending her time on deck, pacing back and forth and urging the ship westward with her will.

Cyrene proved, ultimately, a disappointment; a woman came to the ship late at night to say that her mother, Cyrilla, had been a member of the network, but had been carried off by a fever some years before. Makionus asked if the woman had taken her mother's place in the network. The woman raised their hopes by saying that yes, she had, then dashed them to cinders again by adding that she had never received a message through the network, and was uncertain whether that meant the couriers would not seek her out, or that there had been no more messages.

Bladewalker roamed the streets of Cyrene that night, hoping against hope for some vague, formless, purposeless assassin to rush her in the dark; it didn't happen, as she might have expected, for none cared to try conclusions with a menace whose very walk bespoke murder. She tried to tell herself that a murderer was who she was, but a small echo of her lover came into her mind: one person on the sad and darkened earth knew different, and Bladewalker, out of the myriad reasons she loved her, loved her also for that.

* * *

They followed the coast of Tripolitana, and at every port of reasonable size they argued back and forth: stop to probe the extent of Bellaster's network, or make speed for Sapphi? They had no luck at Lepcis Magna, skipped Oea, and found only stubborn silence at Sabratha and the island port of Girba. The next battle, at Tacape, resulted in frustrating silence; touchy and wounded in their feelings, the shipmates elected without discussion to avoid the island of Cercina entirely, putting in at Hadrumentum instead. If Bellaster had a station there, they were unable to discover it, and Bladewalker's frustration and despair continued to climb.

Dogmatika, citing some farcical notion she called "secretism theory", pointed out how it worked: each station on the network would know only the identity of the next recipient, not any of the previous ones. In that way, the network could not be traced back to its origins, revealed only in the first message, the one most likely to have reached the end of the line, as it was issued shortly after the network itself was set up. People die, Dogmatika shrugged, messengers are waylaid, enemies monitor the traffic. Indeed, she added, it was fairly a miracle that so many messages had gotten through for such a long time: even the Romans had to replenish their courier routes continually lest a broken link divert the information as vital to the Empire as its commerce and military strength.

While the design of such a network was clever in the extreme--and Dogmatika spared a few unaccustomed words of admiration for Bellaster, along with wondering where she'd acquired the skill to set it up--it was ideally done so that that which Bellaster intended to hide remained hidden.

One thing they all agreed on: the network had to have a stop in Carthage, that fabled, ancient, stubbornly persistent gem of a city in Numidia. However, the city was enormous, and they were looking for only one person. However would they find her? (Or, Alcibiades insisted on pointing out, "him".) It was Pyra who had the bright notion of seeking among Bellaster's professional contacts: they should look to the priestesses of the Greeks. Lethe, directing her gaze to the masts, added that it would not be out of place to ask among the horse-traders: Carthage had a tremendous horse-trading industry, and it would be a logical place from which to recruit riders and station-agents, who were accustomed to meeting people from all over the world.

Bladewalker's gratitude to Lethe for this suggestion was apparent, not that the reasons were clear to her shipmates, and they made their plans accordingly: Ranger, Pyra, and Dogmatika were to inquire among the priestesses, while Lethe, Bladewalker, and Alcibiades visited the horse-traders. They had it all in place well before docking, and when the Amazon Queen came to berth in the crowded port of Carthage, they set off with a will.

The three who visited the temples found their visit tranquil, if uninformative, but the group at the horse fair got their first nasty shock.

* * *

They moved through the crowd, three armed and obviously capable warriors, Bladewalker a full head taller than many of the men. She was unmistakable, and Lethe remarked that anyone who had heard Bellaster's description of her would have no doubt exactly who she was. Thus, Bladewalker felt herself along on the trip as an exhibit, and moreover, she was out of her depth: while she tried her best to pretend to know quality horseflesh, she ended up deferring to her companions' far greater knowledge. Lethe and Alcibiades chattered along in cryptic, elliptical speech about the speed of this one and the endurance of that; Bladewalker, remembering her good mounts in the army and reflecting that Evgenyi, the cavalry commander, had chosen them, found her heart emptying of hope and filling up with bitterness.

The sun was hot, gleaming off the dark, muscled coats of fine mounts, and the smell of horsesh*t permeated the air, along with the buzzing of innumerable flies. Bladewalker had quite fallen into a reverie by the time a young man holding two costly bridles spotted her, paled, and turned, dropping the bridles into the dust as he took to his sandals. Bladewalker, with the reactions of a panther, was after him before her brain had quite registered his movement. Lethe turned and pelted after Bladewalker, with Alcibiades a heartbeat behind her.

Although Bladewalker clattered with armament, the young man was in sandals rather than boots, and she found him easy enough to catch. She got a hand into his tunic, whirling him about, and had her hands about his neck as she pushed him stumbling backwards against the nearest wall. Lethe and Alcibiades pounded gasping to a stop beside her.

"Talk," Bladewalker growled, shaking the young man hard enough to rattle his bones in his skin.

"Don't kill me," he whispered, in evident terror.

Lethe's face was thundercloud-stern. "What makes you think she's a threat to you?"

He turned his face to Lethe and spoke through trembling lips. "She killed my father when I was a boy. Tabari."

"Did you?" inquired Lethe of Bladewalker.

"Probably," Bladewalker shrugged, not loosening her hold. "Sorry to orphan you as a babe, but he'd have done the same to me if he could. It's war, kid, men get killed. That's why they call it that."

He was shaking his head, appealing with his eyes to Lethe.

"Or p'raps it wasn't war," Alcibiades said insightfully. "Is that it?"

"Was it war?" Lethe asked.

The young man shook his head. "It happened here. Here at the horse-market. Fifteen seasons a-gone."

"Then we're talkin' murder," said Alcibiades grimly.

Bladewalker's brows lowered. "I've never been here, much less a decade and more ago. What in the name of Chemosh are you--"

"Let him go, Blade," interrupted Lethe, placing an eager hand on her arm. "You won't run, will you, boy? 'Cause I'll send her after you again." He shook his head. Bladewalker took her hands from his throat, and he gulped air.

"Now, boy," said Lethe in a deceptively sweet voice, "tell me all about this woman who looks so like my friend Blade here."

He shook his head again. "It wasn't one woman. It was three of 'em. Three tall armed warriors, with black hair and blue eyes and the look of the Far East to their faces."

* * *

They let Tabari's son go shortly thereafter, and Bladewalker urged upon him enough silver to replace tenfold the bridles he had lost to an opportunistic thief.

She had learned that which she wished she had not. The three sisters had penetrated Bellaster's network years before, and the consequences might be anything: they might have gotten all the messages out of Tabari before killing him. They might have gone after Bellaster. The prospect of it squeezed the blood from Bladewalker's heart.

Alcibiades wore an aspect of grimness; it was likely the triplets had more than one reason to pursue his pretty little ship now, and Bladewalker knew precisely what he was thinking: defenses, evasions, weaponry, alliances, protection for his crew and his passengers. What and who he could count on in a fight.

The effect on Lethe was profound, and unsettling. With the young man's first words, Bladewalker could see a feverish light fade from Lethe's face. She knew it well: it was hope, and as she watched, it flickered and died to ash. Only one of them had the prospect of a reunion, and the sudden chance that sprang to life in Lethe's eyes had died in the space between heartbeats. The two of them, wounded and bereft, cast unmoored into a world that wanted only their swords, paid only for their honed, practiced ability to kill. Of what use was Lethe's skill with a pen, compared to her skill with a blade? And which of her talents had grown more keen, and which had been permitted to wither? Soldier, poet, lover--only one, Bladewalker knew, would ever see the light of day again.

As horrible as the news was, as much as it increased Bladewalker's anxiety to suspect that an implacable (if clumsy) enemy stalked the lover she hadn't seen in half a lifetime, the story Tabari's son told had done nothing but extinguish the preposterous opium dream that kept Lethe's ageless soul from desiccating.

Lethe was less tall as they walked back to the ship, less sure of herself, less obviously dangerous. She made her way to her cabin without speaking and shut the door, leaving Bladewalker to give the discouraging news to her shipmates.

* * *

Deliberately, methodically, Lethe laid out a sheet of parchment on the tiny desk in her cabin. She affixed the corners with leather-wrapped stone weights, then sat to select a clean brush from the holder. They were all clean. She didn't have the energy to frown, or upbraid herself. She had a favorite among the brushes, and she slipped it from the holder with gentle fingers. Then she uncorked the tiny bottle of ink and waited for inspiration.

Immortality had left her with few surprises, but one thing that did manage to astonish was how she could still, after centuries, misjudge time so badly. She might have been sitting for only two or three hundred pulsebeats, but it seemed a day and a night. The light through the porthole hadn't changed appreciably. She returned from a barren reverie to find the brush still dry, the parchment clean. She stared down at it with a little smile on her lips.

"Still no words," she murmured. "The one thing I had that you did not. How many times did I tell you I loved you before you ever once said it yourself? A thousand? Five thousand?"

There was no answer, but then again, she hadn't expected one. She set the cork stopper into the ink-bottle and slid the brush back into the holder. She got to her feet, thinking without thought, then knelt to fetch an ancient, well-tended leather bag from beneath the bunk. She had carried it since the end of her old life, and it was the only thing that, above all others, she cared for, even when she neglected everything else. When she had gone for decades living in forests and ruins, years and years passing during which she spoke so seldom that her voice corroded to a whisper from disuse, the bag was always brushed, always oiled, always supple, always mended. Anything less would have tempted her to let what was inside rot beyond any hope of recovery, and when the thread of sanity was frayed enough to snap, her silent, anguished soul rebelled against that one final loss.

She had carried it for many years unopened, and she decided to open it now. She knew why; she knew precisely why. She set the bag carefully into the center of her bunk, running her hand across the leather she knew considerably better than her own skin.

"I breathe," she told the bag. "I spit." The bag sat silent on the blanket. "I am," she concluded. It was a quote from something she remembered reading once, back when reading was a pleasure and not a sore reminder of deprivation. "And so does she."

Lethe passed a hand across her forehead. "And she's warm. Strong. Protective. I could share this place with her, instead of seeing that look in her eyes that always says guest." She was too dry for tears. "You left me alone to be tempted by a face, a form, a spirit like yours. She chose to stay. She chose to fight. She chose to champion our history, ours, yours and mine, on the assumption that it was important to a woman she knew for a day and a night half a lifetime ago. Do you know what that is? That's love."

She reached for the straps on the bag, unbuckling the familiar, sturdy brass catches fashioned by a farrier whose great-great-great-great-grandchildren had long since turned to dust. She lifted the flap on the bag to a sweet, musty odor of trapped air. She reached past the object on the left and pulled out a heavy wooden box reinforced with metal, laying it flat on the bunk. It was nearly too heavy to handle one-handed, but she'd had a lot of practice.

The box had a complex locking mechanism, the invention of a gifted metalworking engineer she'd met among the barbaric detritus of the Persian empire. She undid the catches and opened the box. Inside, nestled into a frame of the stubbornest, toughest wood she could find, was a gleaming incised metal circle she hadn't seen in the lifetime of three kings. She picked it up before she could decide otherwise, a familiar weight of oppression and loss.

The tears she had choked off for centuries turned to bitterness in her throat. "And you? You left me here. Your precious honor, common as horsesh*t and about as meaningful, but too important to set aside. Even for me. You left me here to be their daidala, bearing their torture day after day, year after year, made ageless so they could enjoy my agony without cease, until I found I'd outlived even them." The look on her face became a sneer. "If I'd doubted your godhood before," she spat to the heavy metal ring, "that sealed it for me."

There was a knock at the door of the cabin, and Lethe raised her voice to call, "A moment." The metal thing was locked away, stowed in the bag, and back under the bunk before it could occur to the intruder to interrupt again.

Lethe stepped to the door. Pyra stood in the doorway, hand raised to knock again. "Your Grace."

"Come in," said Lethe, sweeping her hand in a gesture of welcome.

Pyra nodded, perhaps a bit nervous, and stepped into the tiny cabin. Her glance swept the interior, coming to rest on the desk. "I've disturbed you writing. I'll come back--"

"No, no," Lethe interrupted. "Please. What can I do for you?"

It was a phrase she had first learned when she first learned what it was to be a gracious ruler, and Pyra responded with a relieved, if reserved, smile. "I thought perhaps there was something I could do you for, Your Grace."

Lethe studied her for a moment in silence, pasting onto her face a smile she hoped didn't appear predatory. "I can see I'll have to watch thee, healer," she said, slipping into the familiar.

"I'm not a threat," Pyra said quickly. "To you or anyone."

"Aye," replied Lethe with a chuckle and a nod to eastwards, "tell that to yon martial Qin sisters."

Pyra dropped her gaze to the desk again. "I've no idea why that is," she said in a low voice. "Perhaps I remind them of someone they fear, or perhaps my medical work has stolen back from Yan-luo someone they wanted dead."

Lethe settled into the chair at her desk, looking up at Pyra in assessment. "Yan-luo, eh? And where else hast been, then, healer?" Pyra hesitated half a heartbeat, and Lethe said, "Go on."

"Would you like to hear my professional qualifications," asked Pyra carefully, "or are you marking time until you can shoo me from your presence?"

Lethe lowered her head with another chuckle. "Who sent you to look after me?"

"It was Lord Bladewalker's idea," admitted Pyra, "but I took it mostly as permission to intrude." Lethe raised her head, and Pyra went on, almost apologetically, "You asked after treatments for brain fever. I thought... perhaps..."

"You're experienced with this, then?" inquired Lethe. "Enough to spot the symptoms?"

Pyra shrugged, but her gaze did not waver from Lethe's face. "Enough to suspect. No mother, it matters not whether she loves her child, would burden her with the name 'Lethe', so I think that choice must have been yours. It might have been in response to great personal sorrow, whether external or internal, something that makes the very thought of your own name on another's lips too painful to endure. And indeed, pain is a great part of this illness. 'Tis one of those afflictions makes the sufferer most reluctant to seek a healer."

"That's because there's no treatment," Lethe shot back.

"No treatment," Pyra responded quietly, "or no privacy?"

Lethe, struck by this, stared without speaking.

"I need no details," Pyra assured her in haste. "I've seen how you prefer the company of those who know how to keep their own counsel. It wouldn't be necessary to intrude on your solitude."

Lethe turned to the desk and found her speech again, along with her suspicions. "You're offering? Why?"

Pyra went to one knee and looked up into Lethe's face. "Because I'm a healer. And I became a healer because unrelieved pain offends my soul."

"So now you're the Guanyin, always at the most genteel war with Yan-luo." Lethe glanced sideways at Pyra. "Talking of that, people who walk with me tend to find their lives nasty, brutish, and short."

"Short they may be," replied Pyra, without raising her voice from the mild, calm, physician's tone Lethe recognized, "but the worth of a life isn't in its length. Quality counts also, and all other things being equal, a life without pain is preferable to a life of agony."

She wasn't aware, Lethe thought, that sometimes pain was the legacy of gods who lived no more to be persuaded to stop it. "Suppose it can never be alleviated?"

"Never," answered Pyra with a brief smile, "is a very long time. Time enough to try a little bit of everything."

"All right, very well," sighed Lethe, smiling in turn, though it made her face tired to do so. "You've won me over with your unassailable logic."

"That Greek-trained mind," said Pyra, getting to her feet. "I thought perhaps logic was the key to the lock."

"So what do you counsel first?"

"Rest," said Pyra, turning for the door of the cabin. "Shall I ask Lord Bladewalker in to attend you?"

"Not just now," said Lethe, thinking of her vulnerability.

Pyra co*cked her head at Lethe. "Can I trust my newest client not to misbehave if she's alone?"

"Aye," said Lethe, smiling again. "Mostly."

Pyra glanced at the porthole, estimating the time. "Shall I come see you at sunset, then?"

"That sounds good," said Lethe. (It really did, which was mildly unusual.) Pyra gave her a nod, then departed, closing the cabin door with a subtle, reassuring quiet.

Lethe sat for a while, thinking thoughts she was too weary to articulate. Then she got up and reached again for the bag under the bunk. She unwrapped the massive metal circle and took it in her right hand, pulling up her left sleeve with her teeth. Experimentally, she ran the keen edge over the inside of her left arm, one wicked sharp line of pain at a time. The blood collected bright in the scratches, welling up to fall droplet by droplet onto the floor of the cabin. She watched the wounds bleed for a long time, gauging how long it took by the throb of her pulse before they closed, whitened, and disappeared.

* * *

After their discouraging stop in Carthage, the shipmates began to notice differences: Bladewalker's distraction, and Lethe's distance. Pyra spent much of her time on deck, brewing various foul decoctions out of herbs and drugs and bearing them to Lethe's cabin, whose door remained resolutely shut. Alcibiades and Skittles murmured to one another at the watch-changes in the night, pondering mysterious illnesses and fractures betwixt lovers; neither was a welcome development on a tiny ship whose crewmates, no matter if they readied knives for one another's carving at dockside, must resolve to remain friends as long as Athirat held their seaborne fates cupped in Her occasionally capricious, tempery hands.

If Lethe's stone-stubborn silence disturbed Bladewalker, they had no visible sign of it; she stood ever at the prow before the mast, looking westward into some future none of them could imagine. Whatever it was she sought, it was in the legendary land of Mauretania, at a place half rumor, Sapphi, and another that seemed wholly legend, Theadora.

"A talisman," grunted Skittles one day as they hauled the heavy steering-oar at the sweeps.

"A woman," replied Alcibiades shortly, and Skittles laughed, her arms slackening on the oar so that it was all he could do to keep the ship from coming ingloriously into the wind. "A little assistance, here, sister?"

Skittles seized her end of the steering-oar and braced her feet. "Thy pardon, brother, but with thee, it's always a woman."

"What else is there?" he said with feigned simplemindedness, and Skittles grinned at him.

"This here's my brother Alcibiades," she said, jerking her head in his direction. "Strengthy enow, Athirat knows, but he's a bit soft in the head when it comes to two-legged creatures with breasts."

"Aye, well, thou'lt keep my secrets from any two-legged breasted creatures?"

Skittles shook her head. "She'll see it in thy face."

He hadn't sufficient breath to spare to tell her the woman for him would arrive when the Amazon Queen could sail through the air instead of over water, and set the prow for Tingi, the gateway to west Africa.

Reaching that guidepost on the journey was to intensify the effect on both Bladewalker and Lethe. They watched Bladewalker at the prow from well before dawn to well into night, eyes closed, swaying with wind and wave, heedless of the need for meat, drink, or rest. Something that came to her in the fresh sea breeze seemed to sustain her.

Lethe, by contrast, seemed more shrunken every time they caught one of their increasingly infrequent glimpses of her. They saw Pyra's frequent trips to her cabin, and the implacably closed door, as evidence of some tremendous struggle.

But between whom? And over what?

* * *

Pyra fed the tincture into the cup drop by drop, finger poised carefully over the little pipe she wielded with skill. She set the little pipe onto a cloth laid out on the desk, then stirred the decoction into the tea. She turned to hand it to Lethe, who, as was her wont, sipped it without comment or protest.

"That's foul stuff," Pyra remarked, folding her arms and nodding at the cup. "I apologize for that. Valerian's effective, but not precisely alluring."

"It doesn't matter," murmured Lethe. Pyra's brows drew together. "Oh, for the lost eye of Horus, healer," snapped Lethe, "would you not make that face at me just for once?" She tipped up the cup to drain it, then handed it back to Pyra.

Pyra didn't nab the bait; she took Lethe's wrist in her unoccupied hand, counting off her pulse against the swaying of the ship. "You haven't been sleeping, either."

"I don't need it."

"Nor eating--"

"Shut up, healer."

Pyra leaned back and studied Lethe's face, locked and barred as firmly as the door to the cabin. "We're making landfall at Tingi," she said.

"Hurrah for us," said Lethe, turning her face to the wall.

"Would you go ashore?" Pyra inquired mildly.

Lethe's head whipped about. "So you can leave me in an asylum for the insane?"

Pyra knelt before her, resting a hand on her knee. "So that you can get some air. Some light. Blow the cobwebs from your brain."

"f*cking hell, no!"

"Could your healer order you?"

Lethe favored her with a cruel smile. "She could try."

Pyra studied the floor for a moment. "I could ask Bladew--"

"No," spat Lethe.

"But she lov--"

"I said no," Lethe interrupted, her voice ragged with pain, "and I meant no. She's not to know any of this. You promised me, healer. You promised me."

"I shan't go against my promise," said Pyra wearily, getting to her feet. "But I think she could do you some good."

"I don't need her," said Lethe with bravado.

"You're better when she's about," Pyra pointed out, and Lethe had no answer ready. "And your condition continues to deteriorate, and yet you won't let her in. Don't you think she wonders why?"

"No," said Lethe bitterly, "I don't."

"Why is that?"

"Because," Lethe said with exaggerated patience, "she's got something far more important on her mind."

"What's more important than the woman she loves?"

"Precisely," said Lethe. Her smile was aged and weary.

Pyra studied her another moment. "I should like to try something else."

"Whatever you like."

"A sleeping-cure. Three days of extract of poppy."

"Whatever you like," Lethe repeated.

Pyra sighed. "Very well. I shall start to mix it up." She went to the door of the cabin.

"Pyra," said Lethe in a low voice.

Pyra turned to her. "Yes?"

"She is not to know, do you hear me?"

"I hear you," said Pyra solemnly. "I promised you your privacy, and whether I think it a good idea or no, I shall respect it."

"Thank you," murmured Lethe. "Poppy... will I have dreams?"

"Probably," said Pyra.

"Will... will they be happy?" whispered Lethe.

Pyra smiled, but there was sadness in it. "I shall pray to Imhotep for that to be the case."

"Let us hope," said Lethe, staring without seeing at the wall, "that there is still a god about to hear you."

* * *

You said you would respect my privacy, healer.

And so I shall. Provided you keep your promise to me.

I have promised that I would do myself no harm if you left me to my solitude. Do you not trust your patient's word?

If she is not too ill to give it.

Even opium. Even something that strong. She might have known; hers was no longer a normal carcass. During the day, Pyra's decoction had left her in light, disorganized dreams, during which she was not certain whether anyone was in her cabin or if she heard birdsong, and the evening dose had quite fled, leaving her watchful and jittery. She lay on her bunk with her hands behind her head, staring at the decking that formed the ceiling of her cabin. The ship swayed with a hypnotic rhythm and the slap and hiss of the waves against the planks could have soothed a legion of colicky babes.

Pity she was no babe, and nothing stood between her and the sucking whirl of loneliness. Words had failed her long since. Love, before that. The hope of death seemed forlorn, and with every league she traveled away from the withered hands of the gods who'd taken her maidenhood, she became more aware of the waxing chatter of madness deep in her brain.

They'd driven her lover crazy; her, to whom they had given the gift of immortality, they had driven sane. And now their grip was slipping as the last of them tumbled over the horizon's edge into oblivion, and the future for her meant freedom, eternal life, and insanity. It would be a race to see which would claim her first, the weapons she tested against herself in secret, or the illness that would turn her mad hand toward others in perpetuity.

Immune to rest, she was as alert as a cat who's spotted a mouse. If she'd had whiskers, they would have been a-quiver, detecting prey. Her muscles drew up, and imaginary fur rippled over her arms and thighs. She sat up quickly, pulling off her nightshirt over her head. The warmth of the sea air enveloped her nakedness, and she closed her eyes a moment, feeling it like the touch of a lover. Her eyes snapped open, feral, hungry. She left the bunk and dressed herself in the soft, loose shirt and trousers she wore to crew aboard, leaving the fasteners undone about her throat, then opened the door to her cabin without the slightest noise, and stepped barefooted into the night.

* * *

The moon and stars washed the deck in silvery blue, and she walked past lines and shrouds gleaming quietly with cold fire. A bright wind teased at her skin, whispering mockeries too fast to catch. She ignored them; her prey had appeared, tall at the prow with one hand on a shroud, gazing thoughtfully into the water bubbling up from the keel.

"Hold the turnover watch, do you?" murmured Lethe. The wind snatched the words from her mouth, spinning them like spindrift, but the woman at the prow lifted her head, and the look in the icy blue eyes became one of puzzlement and concern.

"Lethe?" asked Bladewalker. "Why are you up?"

Lethe took the last few steps to her side silently. "I was about to ask you the same."

"Shall I fetch Pyra?"

"No... thank you," said Lethe, leaning against the rail on her elbows and studying the glitter of the starlight on the waves. "I think it would distress her to know that her medicine isn't as effective as it might be. I think..." Lethe raised her eyes to Bladewalker's face. "I think a bit of nighttime air and a talk with a friend would do me some good."

"Then I am at your service," said Bladewalker with a quiet smile.

Lethe returned the smile and turned, leaning with the rail against her back. She propped her elbows behind her on the rail and leaned her head back, closing her eyes and shaking her hair with a low laugh. She opened her eyes and remarked to Bladewalker, "That feels good."

"It's good to see you outside again," said Bladewalker, taking a step nearer. "I--"

"I've missed you," Lethe interrupted. "I miss our talks. The friendship we had--so intimate. I could say things to you I've never said to anyone else in my life."

"I know you've been lonely," said Bladewalker in a voice whose gentleness would have astonished the others. "So have I."

"It occurs to me," said Lethe with care, "that within a few days, perhaps, a new life will begin for you. And things will change between us then. You, back to your love, while I..."

"I shall always--"

Lethe held up a hand. "I know. You needn't break your reserve being more open than is comfortable. I have this sense, though, that there will always be... something unfinished between us."

Bladewalker drew half a step nearer. The starlight, caught in her serious blue eyes, burned steadily.

"I've wondered..." Lethe sighed. "I suppose I always shall..." She turned her head, looking at the restless sea beyond the sweeps, beginning to blur with the moisture that came to her eyes.

A gentle hand caught her under the chin. Bladewalker turned Lethe's head and bent her own, and their lips met in a tender, heart-filling moment. Lethe looked up into her face, a promise and a fulfillment, taking her time for what she knew would be the last time.

"Wonder no more," Bladewalker murmured, putting her arm around Lethe. Without another word, Bladewalker led her back to her cabin, shutting the door behind them.

* * *

The hunger took her over the moment the door closed, and she hauled her shirt from her chest and arms, leaning back to let Bladewalker bury her face in Lethe's flesh. Each kiss left a tiny seal of flame on her skin; Lethe was groaning within three heartbeats. She raised her arms to catch Bladewalker's head and pull her closer, and Bladewalker's lips found Lethe's again.

Bladewalker pulled Lethe close enough that she could feel the hard little buttons on Bladewalker's leather jacket against her skin. She ran her hands over Bladewalker's arms, feeling the muscles beneath the leather. Bladewalker hadn't made a sound, but her lips never ceased roaming over Lethe's neck, leaving little flickers of sensation behind. Lethe's breathing turned into gasps.

"Yes," hissed Bladewalker. "I want to hear you."

"The others--" whispered Lethe.

"Let them hear," Bladewalker murmured into her neck. "I want you. I don't give a damn about anything else."

Lethe hauled her arms out of her shirt and pulled it free of her trousers. Bladewalker's hands went instantly to Lethe's breasts, and Lethe felt Bladewalker's teeth against her skin. Lethe reached around the insistent hands to loosen the fasteners on Bladewalker's jacket. Bladewalker's mouth traveled down Lethe's neck to her breasts, and Lethe tugged at the jacket, arousal and haste making her expert and deft. Bladewalker slung the jacket behind her and took Lethe's hard nipple between her lips. Lethe's voice rose, and she grabbed for Bladewalker's head with both hands.

Bladewalker stood abruptly and whirled Lethe into her arms, setting her onto the bunk in one swift motion and settling over her. Lethe squirmed underneath her, pulling frantically at Bladewalker's shirt. Bladewalker's hand caught her wrist.

"Stop," Bladewalker grunted. "Don't get in my way."

"Whatever you want," Lethe gasped as the maddening lips went over her naked torso. Lethe moved, rocked, twisted--anything to feed more of her flesh to those insistent lips, those demanding teeth. Bladewalker's hand reached into Lethe's trousers. Lethe put her hands down and lifted her hips, and again Bladewalker interfered, knocking Lethe's hand away with her elbow.

"I know what I want," Bladewalker said, raising her head and looking into Lethe's face. Lust and moonlight painted her face into a sharp, nearly cruel mask. "I'll give you what you need."

"Yes," Lethe whispered, overcome. "Whatever you want. Whatever you need--"

Bladewalker's hand had found her mons, her fingers provoking Lethe's want into ravenous hunger. Bladewalker's fingers slid over the slickness between Lethe's thighs, and a slow, triumphant smile spread over her face. "This is what you want?"

"Yes," Lethe panted, raising her hips to shove the trousers down and kicking them from her legs.

Bladewalker knelt between her thighs, sweeping her nakedness with hungry, attentive eyes. Her hand never stopped moving. "What do you want?" asked Bladewalker, running her fingers in slow, teasing circles.

"You."

"How?"

"Anything," Lethe said, nearly sobbing in desperation.

"How?"

"Whatever you want!" Lethe cried. "Oh, my dark god, take everything!"

"Tell me," Bladewalker spat. "You don't get it till you tell me."

"Feed me," Lethe snarled. "Fill me. Damn you, take it! Take me!"

Bladewalker plunged into her, and Lethe's whole body tightened around her hand, cries of arousal forced from her lungs and throat. Bladewalker stroked within her, the invader opening her up wider, as rivulets of warmth ran down her icy soul and fields of flame danced before her closed eyes.

Bladewalker lay over Lethe's frantically thrashing body, catching Lethe's thigh between her own and capturing the skin she could reach with her mouth and her other hand. Lethe set the rhythm for them both, moving to feel the liquid, inescapable hand deep within her. Bladewalker caught the back of Lethe's head with her free hand and looked into her face.

"That's it," Bladewalker said, watching Lethe throw her head back into the pillows. "You're beautiful. Do it for me." Lethe tossed her head from side to side, wanting to run and yet knowing a century wouldn't be long enough to have Bladewalker inside her. "Show me," Bladewalker murmured into her ear. "Show me everything you've wanted from me."

Lethe's eyes squeezed shut, and Bladewalker's mouth came down over hers. Lethe grabbed for her with arms, thighs, legs, everything inside and outside, everything at her command, and the two of them, slick and sealed together, moved higher and higher. Liquid lightning passed between them, the storm furious and unyielding. Lethe gave herself to it, pain and tragedy and bliss and the hard, hot desire that had captured her before the lover around whose body she curled had even been born. She held her breath, letting Bladewalker carry her the rest of the way, and the ice-dam of loneliness and longing between them shattered.

* * *

Lethe awakened gasping for air, lacking the strength to sit up. She thrust her hands into her sweat-soaked hair, shoving it roughly away from her eyes. It was daylight, and for a moment, she knew nothing more.

A wave of shame rushed over her. She swallowed past a dizzy, sick feeling in her head. Her stomach came sluggishly to life, and she closed her eyes, willing it into stillness. When it was quiet, she caught her breath and heaved herself up in the bunk.

Her nightshirt was so wet it clung to her. She pulled it away from her skin, staring down at her treacherous body. "Damn you," she growled to her breasts. A body was the last thing she wanted right now. And yet, her body persisted, this wretched unkillable carcass carting her bitter mind about, not letting her die, as she was long overdue to do.

You pollute her memory with your very thoughts.

Her body wasn't the problem; it was her mind, her soul. After all, her body had kept a respectful distance, not trespassing on another woman's single-minded love. And what about your own lover? She'd made fervent vows of faithfulness, vows she'd intended to keep forever even after her uneasy then horrifying acquaintance with what "forever" meant. And then a woman so like and yet so unlike her lost, dead lover made a mockery of every word that passed through her lying throat. Had she ever meant any of it?

Apparently not. It was not strength, but a fierce desire to escape, that propelled her from the bed. She peeled the sodden nightshirt from her skin and flung it with a splat to the floor of the cabin. She raised her arms to let the air in the cabin dry the sweat from her torso. Which one had called first? Her corrupt soul, or her understandably ravenous body? Which one had prompted the fever? How could she run?

You cannot run from the inside of your own skull. You cannot escape the guilt you and you alone bear.

Her skin dried in the air, and she lowered her arms and looked around, her eyes darting back and forth like a hunted thing. She found her shirt and her leathers, dressing in haste, stamping into her boots. The hides didn't make her feel any safer, particularly.

She leaned against the wall of the cabin abruptly, fists on the wood beside the porthole, eyes squeezed shut. "Blade," she whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, you didn't ask for me... I'm not what you want and I betray all of you every time I look at you... I'm wrung with grief, hollow with loss, abandoned and soulsick, and you're... you're alive..."

She beat softly against the planking, the frustration welling over. There was no one she could tell. Pyra, capable though she was in so many ways, simply could not understand. She had no idea how Bladewalker would react if she were to talk to her; probably with horror. And why not? Some burdens were too great to ask another to bear, and laying that on Bladewalker's shoulders would be too much. So far, the betrayal hadn't escaped her skull, but she knew that, soon, she would throw away the last vestige of human feeling and give in to the temptation to reach.

And Sapphi, and Bladewalker's reunion with Jessamyn, was only days away.

If you can hold out that long. She snorted in derision. There aren't chains on Earth that powerful.

The shame swelled her throat. Fraud, poser, spittle-gob. And here you've set yourself up as the heroine of a great romance. You weren't good enough to sweep up after her horse, much less keep her memory. She turned from the wall, not nearly through with herself. It was a travesty, this eternity of madness and sorrow, and the most painful thing was that knew she'd been on the receiving end of a powerful, faithful love--and she had never once deserved it. The name drummed deep in her, thumping with her heartbeat: Xena, Xena, Xena.

Her lip curled in scorn. You shouldn't permit her name through your filthy head. She could've used you. She should've used you, thrown you aside, just like you've used Bladewalker, who only wants to preserve the tales of a worthless idiot. The memory of a rare smile on a sunny day, the gentleness of a hand that gave up killing once it touched hers, a beautiful face radiant with fulfillment as they lay drenched and embracing, everything in heaven and earth fled but the love between them. Years of worship, all of it directed at her by the greatest soul she'd ever known. Had any of her own offerings ever been genuine? It'd be pretty to think a twisted soul like yours could be redeemed by love, wouldn't it? But she... she loved you, held you countless nights, shared her bed and her body, no one else from the day you entered her world until the day she left it. And all you do is whine that she chose to leave you.

Wouldn't you? Would there be any reason to stay with a thing like you?

She found herself on her knees, her arms wrapped around herself, head lowered into her breasts. Whoever tells that story, you shouldn't be in it. You don't deserve it. It was easier now, now that she had admitted it to herself. You never did. You never could. You never will.

She got to her feet, her breathing light again for the first time in days, and opened the door to the cabin.

* * *

When the door to the scriptorium opened, Makionus and Dogmatika looked up from their work. Lethe stood in the doorway, pale and trembling in her leathers.

"Your Grace?" inquired Makionus, standing up and approaching her. "Should you be out of bed?"

"I've got a new assignment for the two of you," Lethe announced.

"Yes?"

"I want you to take every single scroll," said Lethe. There was where she stopped speaking, and Makionus and Dogmatika looked at one another.

"And?" Dogmatika asked, gesturing for more information.

"Burn them," Lethe said.

"Excuse me?" said Makionus.

"You heard me," she snapped, turning a scornful face on Makionus. "Your eyes may be weak, along with your storytelling style, which features no sense of rhythm, feeble diction, and an appalling lack of pace, but I take it there's nothing wrong with your ears."

"Why?" asked Dogmatika.

"You don't have to know that," Lethe said, turning a venomous eye on her. "Just do what I pay you for."

"Your Grace," said Makionus in a low voice.

"You really want to argue, scribbler?" said Lethe, turning to her. "With me?" She drew her knife from her belt, and Dogmatika got hastily to her feet.

"I don't mean to be difficult," said Makionus, "truly not. But if you're not cert--"

Lethe thrust her knife into the air in front of Makionus's face, and Makionus, seeing the blade before her eyes, stopped talking.

"Kn-knife," called Dogmatika experimentally up the stairs to the deck. "She's got a knife... you may wish to arm yourselves and come take a look..."

"You're sweating," Lethe murmured with satisfaction, turning the knife this way and that so that Makionus could get a good look. She jabbed the knife toward Makionus's eyes. "I said burn them."

"Don't," whispered Makionus. "You don't know what you'd be losing."

Lethe shrugged, backing her against the wall of the scriptorium. "One less annoying bard. The world's the richer."

"I meant the stories," Makionus said. "Please, I beg you, slake your bloodlust on me and leave the scrolls be."

"Knife. Knife, damn you!" hollered Dogmatika. "Get down here!"

Lethe grabbed for the scroll on the table, and Makionus slapped her hand down on it. A clatter of footsteps started down the stairs to the scriptorium. Lethe hauled at the parchment, and Makionus held it down with both hands. "I'll eat your heart!" Lethe shouted, reversing the knife and sending it into the table between Makionus's outstretched fingers.

Something jerked her backwards off her feet. "Let me go! Let go of me!"

Bladewalker swung Lethe away from the table, her feet flying through the air. "Stop this!" Bladewalker spat through clenched teeth. "Stop it!"

"Let me go, you sh*t! I want all of this burned!" Lethe elbowed Bladewalker in the ribs, but aside from a grunt as the air left her lungs, Bladewalker didn't react. "All of it in the flames! I want it all to be ashes!"

"Calm down!" Bladewalker yelled. Alcibiades reached around her and got a hand on Lethe's ankle, getting a kick for his trouble. "Stop it, Lethe!" Bladewalker repeated.

"f*ck you!" Lethe shrieked at her. "Let me down!"

Ranger appeared at Bladewalker's right, seizing Lethe's ankles. Between the three of them, they hauled the struggling Lethe, coiling like a python, up the stairs to the deck. The door to the scriptorium slammed behind them, and the bolt ground home into its hasp.

Skittles saw them coming up the stairs and reached for the ropes to set the rudder. "Skittles," called Alcibiades, "stay by the sweeps."

Pyra emerged from Lethe's cabin, a look of horror in her eyes. "Rope," grunted Bladewalker, and Pyra hasted to the nearest coil, handing it to Alcibiades, who began to wrap it around Lethe's legs. Blackie leapt from the sweeps and began to pace back and forth, showing her teeth in a brief grimace.

"Burn it!" Lethe hollered to the wind. "I want it destroyed!"

"Calm down," commanded Bladewalker, kneeling across Lethe's legs and holding her wrists pinned across her chest. Ranger held down Lethe's ankles as Alcibiades secured Lethe's wrists with the rope. "You seem somewhat upset," Bladewalker commented with remarkable courtesy, considering. "Care to explain?"

Lethe spat in her face. "f*ck you, you're not my lover and I'm not yours!"

Bladewalker's eyes met Alcibiades's. "Trussed?"

"I think so," he said with a brusque nod. Bladewalker got to her feet and hauled Lethe up by the wrists, then threw her over one shoulder.

"Let me go," Lethe whispered.

"When you can behave," Bladewalker said, opening the door to the cabin and flinging her none too gently onto the bunk. "Healer."

"Aye," said Pyra, bravely pushing aside the people before the door and entering Lethe's cabin. Lethe's eyes glittered as if with fever, but she was quiet, and Pyra placed a hand on her forehead, frowning in concentration.

"What are you giving her?" Bladewalker asked.

"Just... just extract of poppy," said Pyra in incomprehension. "It's only to make her sleep."

"Mixed in what?" called Dogmatika unexpectedly from the doorway.

Pyra turned and went to the desk, where two bottles and a cup sat on a tray. She picked up the larger bottle and thrust it at Dogmatika. "This."

Dogmatika unstoppered the bottle and took a cautious sniff, jerking her head back. "Whew! What is this stuff?"

"Brentwine," Pyra said. "The poppy extract is very hard to dissolve, and a distilled alcohol makes it easier."

"Brentwine," said Dogmatika grimly, setting the stopper back into the bottle. "That's powerful stuff, and that's the word of an expert." She nodded toward Lethe's bound form. "Do you know whether she drinks?"

"I--I've never seen her touch anything stronger than... than ale..." said Pyra. She closed her eyes. "Ay, no..." She turned to Bladewalker with a sick expression on her face. "I never thought of that. She might have trouble handling alcohol. And I've been dosing her with this six times a day for three days..."

Ranger put a comforting hand on Pyra's shoulder. "You couldn't have known."

"And if you'd been in Alexandria," Dogmatika pointed out, "you'd've been doing this in a hospital, where she could be watched all the time."

"Ranger," said Bladewalker. "Alcibiades."

"Aye," said Alcibiades, and Ranger held out her hand, palm down.

"Stay by her." Bladewalker pointed at the quietly shivering figure in the bunk. "Please. While the doctor works on her. Meantime, I'm gettin' her weapons and movin' 'em to someplace I can keep safe."

While Lethe lay without moving and Pyra reached around the ropes to take her pulse, Bladewalker collected anything that could possibly be used to harm anyone and left the cabin. She went below and stowed all of Lethe's gear in a crawlspace next to the galley, reminding herself to check on the knives and swords frequently for rust or pitting.

On her way back, she stopped by the door to the scriptorium. Dogmatika turned at the shadow in the doorway, and her jaw tightened. In the middle of the table was a square of parchment with some wrinkled spots, and a knife with a bit of red at one edge. Makionus was sitting at the table, her head propped against one hand, staring dolefully at a stained strip of toweling wrapped around the other.

"Both of you all right?" asked Bladewalker.

"Aye," said Dogmatika grimly, while Makionus nodded without taking her eyes away from the bandage.

"Scrib--" Bladewalker sighed and chose a different word. "Makionus. When the doctor's finished in the cabin, I want you to have her look at that."

Makionus raised glazed eyes to her face.

"Are you certain you're all right?" Bladewalker asked.

"Oh, aye, aye, right as rain, it's not my writing hand," said Makionus, her voice light and rapid. "But they're not safe, Lord Bladewalker, it's dangerous if she's going to be--"

"We'll take good care to keep her from this place," Bladewalker said, adding with feeble hopefulness, "until she's recovered."

Dogmatika interjected, "But if she comes back and she's--"

"I said I'd keep the place safe," Bladewalker interrupted. She was finally, thoroughly sick and tired of this. "Makionus, you just keep copyin' out them scrolls. And Dogmatika..." She waved a hand vaguely in Dogmatika's direction. "You just keep on doin'... whatever it is you're doin'."

Makionus smiled a little at that, and Bladewalker, having issued all the orders she could think of, nodded to them a bit and climbed the steps, each of which seemed the height of a mountain.

* * *

The last thing on the sea or in the sky that Bladewalker wanted to do was go back to Lethe's cabin. Her boots and jacket seemed carved of rock. She kept putting one foot before the other.

The door was open, and Pyra was leaning over the bunk, Alcibiades and Ranger behind her, looking down at the figure in the bed with similar grave faces. Bladewalker stepped into the tiny cabin, and Alcibiades and Ranger made way for her.

Lethe lifted her flushed face and trained her glassy eyes on Bladewalker. "Let me go?"

"No."

Lethe gestured as well as she could, considering that she was bound hand and foot. "I'm no danger to you."

"Well, not to me, perhaps," Bladewalker said, the anger creeping through her casual tongue, "but you appear to have forgot that there's a shipful o' people with us."

Lethe snorted and turned her face to the wall.

"Pyra," said Bladewalker, "what do we do now?"

"More rest." Pyra wouldn't look at Bladewalker. "I have something else to try, something that can be given as an infusion of tea."

"What is it?" asked Bladewalker.

"A mixture of the nightshades."

Ranger glanced at Pyra, startled. Bladewalker merely nodded. "And if that don't do it?"

Pyra was a bit hesitant. "There's a technique that induces sleep, but it's very risky... it's controlled strangulation."

"You might just get me to volunteer," muttered Bladewalker.

Lethe's head whipped round, and she hit Bladewalker with a look that promised trouble. "f*ck you."

Bladewalker waved her hand in the air as if erasing the words. "Nightshades, then." She met Lethe's eye. "You won't give us no grief about the taking of it?"

"No," said Lethe. The air appeared to go out of her, and she lay back, staring open-eyed at the ceiling. She looked for all the world like the statue atop a queen's tomb.

"I'll go prepare it," Pyra said, leaving the cabin with quick steps.

"We'll have to do a watch schedule," Bladewalker said to Alcibiades and Ranger. "I'll sit with her till Pyra gets her back to sleep."

"I'll take evenings," Alcibiades offered. "We're sailin' daytimes."

"The animals and I can do the nights," said Ranger.

"Will they need permission to defend themselves 'gainst a shipmate?" Bladewalker asked. Lethe's gaze shot toward her.

"I'll explain it to them," Ranger replied, her voice as calm as it usually was.

"I'd be interested," Bladewalker commented under her breath, "to hear their reaction."

They stood in silence until Pyra returned, bearing a steaming cup of something that looked like ink. True to her word, Lethe drank it without fuss--she didn't even make a face, which Bladewalker, who could smell the stuff, thought remarkable. "How quick does it work?" asked Bladewalker.

"It's usually fairly rapid," said Pyra.

"I'll sit with her, then," said Bladewalker, putting her hand on the chair at Lethe's desk.

"I'll see how Skittles is getting on," said Alcibiades, leaving the cabin with what looked distinctly like relief.

"I'll confer with my tribemates," said Ranger, exiting right after him.

Bladewalker moved the chair and settled into it beside the bunk. Lethe closed her eyes. "Doctor," grunted Bladewalker.

"Aye?" Pyra replied.

"On your way, stop by the scriptorium, will you?"

"Another patient?" asked Pyra quickly.

"Just... stop by," Bladewalker said, glancing up at her.

"I--" Pyra looked at Lethe, obviously torn.

"I'll sit with her," Bladewalker told her.

Pyra nodded, collecting the stuff from Lethe's desk, and left without a word.

Lethe smiled ceilingwards without opening her eyes. "It feels good," she murmured, her voice low and slow.

"I'm glad," said Bladewalker.

Lethe turned her head and opened her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"You're ill."

"I'm still sorry," sighed Lethe. "I've... I've betrayed you."

"If you have," said Bladewalker shortly, "I ain't aware of it."

Lethe's eyelids were heavy. "I've wandered in fields of midnight, taking it as my fiefdom," she said, "and never wanted the dawn to break. That's evil. I know the difference. You don't deserve it, and I'm sorry."

"That's all right," Bladewalker said, reaching for the blanket and settling it over Lethe, as much to cover the sight of the ropes as anything else.

"Would you really strangle me?" Lethe asked curiously.

"If I thought it would help," Bladewalker said.

Lethe laughed. "Help me, or help you?"

Bladewalker smiled a little, feeling the muscles of her face drag. "Excellent question."

"I bleed longer now," Lethe told her. "How far are we from Sapphi?"

Bladewalker had to think about it. "'Bout four, five days, the captain tells me."

Lethe nodded, almost as if Bladewalker had confirmed something for her. "I've got that much time to set myself to rights."

"What?" She knew it was useless to ask a lunatic to explain; it was out before she knew it.

"Sapphi," Lethe said. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open, and her speech was growing slower. "You'll see her again. You'll forget all about me."

"That's not so," Bladewalker said gently, clasping her hands together.

"I met her once," said Lethe. "Did you know?"

"You never told me," said Bladewalker around the knifestroke of pain in her chest.

"I know why you've followed her half your life," Lethe murmured. "I knew once what that felt like, the kind of devotion a woman can inspire in you..." Lethe was still for a time, and Bladewalker hoped she was finally asleep, but she was not. Her eyes snapped open; the pupils were huge and opaque. "I want the scrolls burned."

"We'll talk about it when you've rested," Bladewalker told her.

"No," said Lethe. "Now. Give me your word."

"I can't."

"Your word, Bladewalker," Lethe insisted. "On your honor."

"I promise you," Bladewalker said, "that I shall do what I think best."

"And that's what pleases me." That seemed to satisfy Lethe; she lay back and gave in to her heavy eyelids. "And, Blade--"

"Yes?"

"Those two, in the scriptorium?"

"Yes?"

"They've seen it," Lethe said, her tongue thickening. "They've seen everything. They're bards and they know how to memorize... They can write 'em down again, any time... You'll have to kill them both."

A long silence followed this. Bladewalker sighed and set her hand to Lethe's forehead. "I promise," she said softly, "that I'll take care of you."

Finally, Lethe was asleep, a faint smile delicately painting her lovely, ageless face.

* * *

By midafternoon, all was quiet aboard, the only sound the wind whistling through the rigging and the deceptively gentle-seeming battery of the waves against the hull. Skittles and Alcibiades set the rudder and sat down with a loaf and a bottle of water to talk. Down in the scriptorium, Dogmatika had carefully moved the parchment to her side of the table and was occupied in smoothing the creases tenderly with a flat wooden scraper. Makionus didn't look up; she stared at her hands, laid out on the table. One was spotted with ink and rough with a scribe's calluses; the other was wrapped in a clean new bandage.

When Dogmatika was done fixing the parchment, she sighed, picked up a brush, dipped it soberly in the ink-bottle, and began scribing characters where Makionus had left off. Eventually, the silence unnerved Dogmatika, and as she paused to let the newly-inked line dry, she commented, "Yon peaceable little leech is formidable indeed, to take down a warrior the like o' Lethe with nothin' more than a bottle of hooch and a couple seedpods." When Makionus didn't look up, Dogmatika added, "I can see why those evil triplets would want her dead." Makionus snorted, but didn't look up. "I shouldn't repeat that little jest, I s'pose?"

"Aye, I wouldn't," said Makionus. "It needs some work 'fore you trot it out to a paying audience."

They didn't say anything for another while, and Dogmatika remarked, "If I'd known a knife would leave you quiet enough for me to think, I'd've pulled one on you ages ago."

Makionus chuckled and lifted her eyes to Dogmatika's face.

"That one ain't funny either," Dogmatika pointed out.

"To take a feeble kitten scared o' the thunder," Makionus replied, "and make her laugh at a tempest? That's a talent, and one I wish I had right about now for myself."

"Can I do anything for you?" Dogmatika asked.

"Anything else, you mean?" Makionus rested her cheek on her uninjured fist, studying the bandage around her other hand. "'Sides savin' my life?"

Dogmatika shook her head. "That was Bladewalker." Makionus flexed her fingers experimentally beneath the bandage, and Dogmatika added, "She said she'd keep us safe."

"Can't be everywhere," Makionus murmured. She roused herself from her funk and said to Dogmatika, "May I request another task before you continue with that?"

"This?" said Dogmatika, gesturing with the end of the brush toward the parchment. Makionus nodded, and Dogmatika set the parchment to one side, weighting it with the stones so it could dry flat. "What is it?"

Makionus reached into the pocket of her tunic and pulled out a battered scrap of parchment Dogmatika recognized instantly. "Could you copy this out for me?"

"The courier bulletins?" Dogmatika said, taking it carefully from her. "Certainly." She took a fresh sheet of parchment from the stack in the scrollstand and eyed Makionus. "Where will you be?" Makionus didn't answer right away, and Dogmatika added hastily, "'Cause your handwriting's for horsesh*t, and half the char's rubbed off anyways. I may need a translation."

"Up on deck," Makionus said, getting to her feet.

"I'll set this to a slate," said Dogmatika, picking up a slab of stone and a set of ribbons to tie the parchment to it.

Makionus laughed. "You can't write on the pitchin' deck of a ship, with the wind blowin' the ink in your eyes!"

"Watch me," said Dogmatika with a wicked grin that made her eyes sparkle, and Makionus laughed again. "What are you gonna be doin'?"

Makionus studied her face. "Do you ever tire," she asked, "of bein' bully bait?"

"Bully bait?" inquired Dogmatika in incomprehension. "You mean wearin' an invisible target?" Makionus nodded, looking relieved. "We're on opposite sides o' the table on that as well; I'm mostly the one does the bullyin', comes to that. What've you got in mind?"

"A secret that ain't a secret," replied Makionus, "ain't a weapon either."

"Good thinking," Dogmatika said. "Then you'll want to lock the door and set a guard."

"Aye, and the hatches too, from on deck," said Makionus. "I'll go talk to Ranger."

While Dogmatika set up the slate, Makionus went in search of Ranger. She found her leaning by the port rail, staring moodily out to sea. Ranger heard Makionus coming and turned. Her attention flicked to Makionus's hand, and she asked, "All's well?"

"Yes, thank you," said Makionus. "You?" Ranger nodded, her eyes bleak. "I'm not certain how to approach this," continued Makionus, "but I was wonderin' if I could ask your tribesmates for a favor."

"What is it?"

"I'd like to know if they'd watch the scriptorium and let me know if either Lethe or Bladewalker approaches it."

Ranger nodded. "I'll ask 'em. I think they'd be willing."

"Would you express my gratitude," said Makionus, "and my regret that I don't know enough of their language to be able to express it myself?"

Ranger smiled briefly. "Aye," she said, "it'll be done."

Makionus went below again. Dogmatika had collected the parchment, the ink, some brushes, and a couple of blotcloths. She went up the stairs as Blackie crept downward with soft steps, settling herself before the door of the scriptorium.

"My thanks," said Makionus, shutting and locking the door. "Will you be able to warn me should you see a head pop over the top of those steps?"

Blackie turned her gaze toward the top of the stairs, and Makionus followed the direction. Little Ro sat at the top of the steps, fluffing up her tail. "I'm obliged," said Makionus to both of them. "And I'd like to return the favor, though I've no talent but storytellin'." She thought for a moment and added with a laugh, "And a poor one at that, I'm told. Still, I'm in your debt, if you'll let Ranger know how I might be of service." They didn't respond, and Makionus made an awkward little gesture and climbed the stairs. Along the way, she looped the cord that held the key to the scriptorium about her bandaged hand.

The door to Lethe's cabin was still closed. Makionus struggled with the first of the hatches to the scriptorium, finally managing to bang it shut and affix the pin in it. She shook her bandaged hand, and Alcibiades appeared at her elbow. "Let me help," he said quietly.

"Didn't mean to break your ship," she murmured.

"You haven't," he said with a kindly smile. "I don't know as you can." He had the other hatches dogged in a few fingersnaps, and he put his hands on his hips. "What else can I do for you?"

"You and Skittles are sailin' us west from the sweeps?" asked Makionus. He nodded. "How would you like," Makionus asked carefully, "a story or two to pass the time?"

"Very much, that's how," he said, the smile becoming an attractive grin. "Come, then, bard," he said, clapping her on the shoulder. "I'll get Willow and we'll build you a stage at the sweeps."

* * *

If her presence aboard the Amazon Queen had left them any lingering doubt about how long Makionus could talk, that first afternoon would've set it to rest forever. She went on from the time she settled herself at the stern rail till long after the sun had set, telling them tale after tale of a warrior woman and the bard she loved. It was a task for anyone aboard to speak at a volume that would carry over wind and wave; Makionus's voice was more than equal to it, though, and Alcibiades, who had come to think of her as soft-spoken by nature, speculated on where she kept that powerful voice when she wasn't using it.

She made grand gestures, did Makionus, her hands swooping through the air as she illustrated this incident of warcraft or that rosy speech of love. They forgot the bandage, and the key that dangled carelessly from her hand, subject at any time to being lost in the waves beyond hope of recovery. Skittles noted the casual flinging about of what she knew was the only key to the scriptorium, but after a time, she quit fretting and listened. Makionus spoke continuously, interrupted now and then only by a silently laboring Dogmatika who offered a correction, or a critique of the presentation, without looking up from her slate.

By nightfall, they knew the name of the warrior woman, the name of the bard, the names of their seemingly innumerable enemies, the name of the scribes and copyists who had recorded the tales, and even the name of the warrior's horse.

Skittles, whose mind was keen for details and whose memory was finely trained, remembered every one of what they came to call "the Cargo Stories", nearly word for word, from the moment she heard it until the end of her lengthy life. She passed the tales along to her children and grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren she was privileged to live long enough to know well, generations of wide eyes and open mouths snared, enraptured, in the soft grass at Gamma's sandaled feet. Her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren passed the stories along to their own children, friends and family sharing in the legend of power. Eventually, the tales went to roost in a thick, deep forest far to the northwest of the land of their birth, cared for by centuries' worth of women who taught them in secret to their daughters, a myth of power and lost glory so prized, so treasured, that when a pair of brothers collecting words for a new thing called a "dictionary" passed through their territory much later on, the daughters of daughters of daughters who had daughters who had daughters of their own concealed, of all their riches, only one set of fables from the researchers.

Alcibiades went to his watch in Lethe's cabin, his head a-spin with tales of valor, and Bladewalker emerged moments later, headed below to sleep. Makionus paused, but only to go and hand to Bladewalker the scroll Dogmatika had spent the afternoon working on. They exchanged perhaps half a dozen sentences, the lengthy ones belonging to Makionus, and the one- or two-word answers to the warrior who towered over her by three-quarters of a league. Bladewalker gave her a sharp look once or twice, and then a brisk nod. She turned to go down the steps, and Makionus knelt before Jerseygirl, who was standing at the steps, to murmur something and point. Then she returned to the sweeps and continued to talk to an audience whose members came and went, but whose fascination remained constant.

Very, very late into the night, Ranger spelled Alcibiades in Lethe's cabin, and Makionus, her voice finally hoarse enough to detect, went to him to ask if she and Dogmatika might have the honor of sleeping next to the only available person on the ship who carried a knife. His smile was weary, his gentle consent immediate.

Makionus turned to Willow, at the sweeps, and held out a key that dangled from the cord she'd had in her hand all day. "Would you be good enough," asked Makionus in a ragged voice whose timbre made Willow want to wince, "to pitch this overboard at the first sign of trouble?"

* * *

Lethe stayed in her cabin all the next day, and Bladewalker stayed with her. The Amazon Queen rounded the northwest corner of Mauretania and Skittles turned her head south to the sound of tale after tale from Makionus's increasingly feeble voice. When Makionus commenced to cough so violently that she could not continue, Dogmatika took over with a will and a freshness that brought the epic springing to life again.

Dogmatika sang them south toward Sapphi in a vigorous, youthful voice that crackled with fire and spirit. Skittles imagined that the end of the steering oar she held was a staff, and that she was using it to battle enemies and save heroes whose names rang with the sound of proud, long-conquered, forever lost Greece: Lachesis, Atreus, Melosa, Odysseus, Kanae, Penelope, Athena, Mnemosyne. She could almost feel the hot Grecian sun on her back, the dry earth beneath her boots, and her watch sped past as if carried in a chariot guided by the hand of a god.

Makionus sat at the sweeps, bundled in a blanket as she sipped from a cup of Pyra's throat-soothing tea, grinning at Dogmatika as tale after tale unfolded before their sea-dazzled eyes. Dogmatika spoke, and the sun moved majestically up from the port rail, sailed over the masts, and sank slowly to starboard, leaving the sky to fade through rose and purple to a black with the depth of obsidian, dusted with brilliant spangles of light.

Ranger joined them early in the day, left when her jaw-cracking yawns gave evidence of her long watch during the night, and returned after snatching some sleep. Willow came and went, performing errands about the ship, but most often sitting quietly at the sweeps with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped round them, never looking away from Dogmatika. Alcibiades and Skittles left periodically to fetch water or food for the assembly, and then Alcibiades went to his watch in Lethe's cabin. Even Pyra spent most of the day at the sweeps, the wind blowing her short hair out of her eyes so that anyone could see the look of delight in them.

Long past sunset and well into night, Dogmatika went on. She only stopped in the middle of a sentence, and only because she was looking at something only she could see.

They turned toward the steps, which Blackie was ascending with her habitual graceful silence. Ranger exchanged some unspoken message with the night-coated panther, then announced, "Bladewalker's coming."

An instant later, they heard the door to Lethe's cabin open and shut. Then Bladewalker climbed the steps, her footfall heavy, her form outlined in stars. By the time she reached the sweeps, they had fallen still.

"She's awake," announced Bladewalker without preliminary pleasantry. She nodded to Makionus. "She wants to see you."

"Absolutely not," said Ranger, getting to her feet.

Makionus stared open-mouthed and dumbstruck at Bladewalker. "Alone," Bladewalker added, with a sigh.

"If you think we'd agree to that," said Skittles in an ominous voice, "you're as mad as she."

"Are you quite certain," asked Makionus with an effort, "that it was me she was talkin' about?"

Bladewalker shook her head in exasperation. "Scribbler, you irritatin'--!" She folded her arms tightly over her chest, doubtless as an alternative to reaching for Makionus's worn-out throat. "I told her," said Bladewalker, making a heroic effort at patience, "that it was entirely up to you."

"I should decline," said Pyra.

"My advice," put in Dogmatika, "would be to tell her 'f*ck you' right back three or four times."

Makionus heaved herself up, unwrapped the blanket from her shoulders, and began to fold it. "Curiosity," she remarked, "can also be a tragic flaw."

"You're not serious!" exclaimed Skittles. "I need to get the capt--"

"He says it's Makionus's decision," Bladewalker interrupted.

"Makionus," Ranger urged, "think about this--"

"Give her your dagger," said Dogmatika to Bladewalker.

"So I can cut my own head off in a moment of excitement?" asked Makionus. "Before I even find out what it is she wants?" She went on one knee before Blackie. "Honored warrior, might I request the protection of someone who keeps her counsel far better than I've ever managed?" Blackie walked to the head of the stairs and turned her great yellow eyes on Makionus, waiting for her.

"Lethe's lunacy's catchin'," said Dogmatika, crossing her arms.

"Listen to me," Makionus said, putting a hand on Dogmatika's arm. Dogmatika stared stubbornly at the deck of the sweeps. "You've come on this journey little knowin' what it would mean to you, but I can see what it's done for you. We're more strangers than friends, but I've always respected your scholarship, and this time out you've matched it with discipline. I charge you with this: see the project through, whether you keep it or hand it off to someone capable. Find another copyist to take my part. Preferably someone with better handwritin'. That shouldn't be difficult."

"Don't," whispered Dogmatika, not raising her head.

"You can do it," Makionus said as softly. "I know you can." She nodded to Blackie, and the two of them started down the stairs. Bladewalker fell in behind them.

They paused by the door, and Bladewalker murmured, "She's unarmed."

"You'd have to reduce her to a torso to disarm her," said Makionus. "Along with knockin' out all of her teeth. Even then, I'm not certain..."

"She's ill, scribbler, not homicidal," Bladewalker said by way of reminder.

"I could question your accuracy, but I don't believe there's much time." Makionus thought it over. "Well," she said finally, "one goes to sea for the adventure of it." She raised her unbandaged hand with a bit of hesitation and knocked softly on the door. It opened a crack, and Alcibiades looked out at them.

"Damnation," he said through his teeth, "I was countin' on you to say you'd sooner trust your fortunes to the open sea."

"I wish I'd thought of that option, Captain," said Makionus, sounding a bit distracted. "My thanks to all of you for takin' me on this journey. It's been a rare lively bit to an ofttimes dull life, and not a bad coda."

"You... you're welcome." Alcibiades looked as if he might say something else, but in the end he merely stepped aside, and Blackie and Makionus walked into the cabin. Makionus shut the door carefully, and that was the last they saw of her.

* * *

Inside the cabin, it was just as dark on either side of Makionus's eyelids, and the only sound was the painfully loud thumping of her heart. She thought about reaching around her for some hint of the panther, but reflected that Blackie might well finish the job Lethe had started, and if she didn't bleed to death she'd walk off keel for the rest of her days.

"You've come," said a soft voice in the darkness, and Makionus nearly gifted the captain with a new hatchway to his pretty ship.

"Aye," she said, not bothering to add what was uppermost in her tunked-over mind, which was, "But that was so long ago I've smooth forgot what it was like."

"Brave of you," grunted Lethe. "I wouldn't have expected it, considering."

"I'm only holdin' a twentieth of the bravery," Makionus replied. "Yon cat has the rest."

Lethe chuckled softly. Makionus's eyes detected a bit of movement on the bunk. "You brought an ally," said Lethe. "Someone who can't talk and won't let you get hurt."

"That was the bargain I hoped I was makin'," said Makionus. "You sound as though you've had some rest."

"You would care?" asked Lethe. There was a bleak note to her voice.

"Yes," said Makionus stoutly. "And not just because when you're slept and sober, you're less likely to be takin' knives to people." Lethe didn't answer, but Makionus thought she saw something that looked like a woman turning her face away. "Epic literature," Makionus went on, "isn't to every taste, but usually the objecters confine themselves to cuttin' remarks."

"Does it hurt?" asked Lethe, with what might have been a gesture toward Makionus's bandaged hand.

Makionus didn't answer for a moment, as she was deciding whether or not to be honest. "It commenced to, once I got over the terror."

"But Pyra took care of you?"

Makionus nodded. "And very well. As it sounds she has for what ails Your Grace."

The scene before Makionus abruptly took form, and the first thing she saw reliably was Lethe sitting up in her bunk, her head bent over her hands. "Did she tell you what she thinks is wrong?" The question was phrased with attempted mildness.

"She said she thought you were sufferin' from profound melancholia. I told her it was truthfuller to say we were sufferin' from your profound melancholia."

Lethe laughed. "Do you consider that Greek? Wherever did you learn it?"

"Found a scroll of Hesiod in the privy outside the Library in Alexandria."

"No wonder." Lethe's laugh was fluid and graceful. "And it betrays its origins every time you open your mouth."

"True, but it's a lovely tongue, and I can no more do without it than a Spartan without iron. Though after I'd learned enough Greek to read the Hesiod, I wasn't surprised where I found it. Think what I could've been with a few pages of Sappho instead."

"No one," said Lethe softly, "would ever have left that in a privy."

"No," agreed Makionus. She shook her head. "No. Though the Romans ain't o'erfond of her--she treasures women, and that's a dangerous notion that could lead to chaos, like havin' to wash out your own loincloth."

"The horror," said Lethe with another laugh. "Is there nothing you can't turn into a joke?"

Makionus cradled her bandaged hand in her whole one. "Humor," she said quietly, "is a soothin' balm to a mind so sore it can't tell its arm from an asp."

Lethe twined her fingers together in her lap and stared at them. "There was a time," she whispered, "when I'd sooner have died than attack an innocent."

"So," said Makionus experimentally. Lethe gestured to her to continue, and Makionus gathered all of her courage and snatched some from Blackie. "Is it somethin' you did, or somethin' you are?"

Lethe's sigh held the sorrow of centuries. "I wish I knew." She lifted her head, and in the starlight, Makionus had the impression that she had turned into a ghost. "I'm sorry."

"As long as you're apologizin' to me in the flesh rather than burnin' incense to my shade in a temple, all's not lost," said Makionus. "But would you consider stayin' away from liquor and literature until you decide which of 'em it is poisons you?"

"I'll think about it," said Lethe, looking ever so slightly offended. "But I've asked Bladewalker to see to the destruction of the scrolls." Makionus didn't reply, and Lethe added hastily, "My mind is made up, Makionus."

"Even the most fervent partisans of Aristophanes," retorted Makionus, "don't insist that Sophocles be burnt."

Lethe leaned back in the bunk with another sigh. "Do you know when I first regretted Bladewalker meeting you?"

"Instantly, is usually the answer to that sort of question. Ask Dogmatika." Lethe looked away, irritated, and Makionus said, "I beg your pardon. But I'm not certain I want to hear the answer."

Lethe turned her head, delicate ghostly bones and feverish bright eyes, and looked at Makionus. She seemed too fragile to resist the pull of gravity. "It was when I showed you that story," she said, "and you knew right away what it was."

To cover the sense of shock she couldn't quite understand, Makionus rubbed at her chin with her uninjured hand. "An amateur scholar," she said with care, "doesn't have a chance like that fall into her lap every day."

"You just... upended your life for the chance to see them. You made that decision like sunrise, just that quickly. Nothing would've stood in your way. I didn't know a stack of parchment could mean that much to a person..." Lethe closed her eyes for a moment, as if gathering her strength, then directed her attention again to Makionus. "I'm sorry it's all been for nothing."

"I wouldn't describe it as 'nothing', Your Grace," said Makionus, "and I'm only sorry Dogmatika and I will be the last to see 'em. They're every bit as wondrous as my most fervent hopes could've imagined, and more." Lethe looked away, eyes vacantly half-focused on the ceiling, as Makionus went on, "I... I've waited a lifetime for this, through the continual disappointment that bleakens the heart of every lover of tales, and I'm not a young woman. I can offer you nothing but my wish that the tragedy not be compounded by the story of it bein' lost forever."

"My mind," said Lethe, as if the weight of the sea dragged at her, "is made up."

She didn't speak again, and Makionus asked at last, "Was that all you wished to tell me, Your Grace?" Lethe nodded, waving a hand absently in dismissal, and Makionus said, "We bid you a good night, then." Lethe didn't answer, and so after a bit, Makionus opened the door of the cabin, holding it for Blackie. She stepped outside after the panther had glided from the cabin into the darkness on deck, then closed the door to, turned, and nearly collided with everyone else on the ship.

They were circled about the door: Ranger with Klokir on her arm and the squirrels perched on each shoulder, Alcibiades with his hand on his knife, Willow holding a stout cudgel, Skittles balancing a lengthy pike, Pyra clutching a length of rope, Dogmatika gripping what looked remarkably like an oar, and Bladewalker, breathtaking in the darkness, with her sword in one hand and a gleaming dagger in the other.

"Stand down," Bladewalker grunted softly. No one moved a muscle. "Stand down," repeated Bladewalker, a little louder and more annoyed, and the group flinched and began to back away from the door of the cabin.

"You're not killed?" exclaimed Pyra in a whisper.

Makionus looked around her and spread her hands. "As you see." She made her way through the crowd to the stairs that led below and turned for one last word. "And I do regret," she said with a shaky grin, "spoilin' your Maria Susima."

* * *

She awakened to the steady, subtle sound of the wind, and a feather-light hand on her wrist. The light striking her closed eyelids was the delicate silvery blue of early morning, and her body swayed bonelessly with the rocking of the ship. She opened her eyes. Pyra was holding her wrist, and her hand dangled without resistance or will into space.

"Good morrow, Your Grace," said Pyra quietly. "How do you feel?"

Hollow was the answer to that, empty enough to echo, but she had a vague notion an honest answer would only mean trouble, so she murmured, "Tranquil," because that fit too, and Pyra nodded, looking brusquely hopeful after the manner of leeches.

A movement in the corner caught Lethe's attention; Ranger had gotten smoothly to her feet, stepping with noiseless caution around the panther curled on the decking and Pyra. "I'll fetch Lord Bladewalker," said Ranger quietly, opening the cabin door to a flash of sunrise.

When she had gone, Lethe trained her eyes on Pyra's face, which was not the easiest thing; the form of the doctor swam in and out of sharpness. Pyra placed Lethe's hand back on her chest, moving her limbs without resistance, and Lethe looked up at her with the wide-eyed trust of a sick child. "More nightshade?"

Her voice sounded slow and thick to her, but perhaps it was just her ears, for Pyra had no difficulty understanding. "I think we should see how you are today." She moved to the desk, turning her back on Lethe without fuss or apprehension. Blackie didn't so much as twitch an ear. Pyra handed Lethe a cup of water, supporting it unobtrusively with her own hand. Although Lethe was hardly thirsty, she raised it to her lips, with Pyra's help, and took a mouthful. It was clean and chill, the taste of the winter mountains in the homeland she would never see again, and it washed away enough of the bitterness that at least one little part of her felt fresh.

The cabin door opened again, and Bladewalker stepped in, training her attention on Lethe. Pyra gathered her things, moving without hurry, and Blackie got up, stretching as much as a powerful cat can in a crowded little room. Pyra and Blackie left, and Bladewalker approached the bunk.

"How are you?" asked Bladewalker. Her voice was tender enough to make Lethe wish she could still weep.

"Better," she said, her voice a near-whisper. It was true; she was no longer one giant aching rage, and if nothing else, she'd learned what healers meant by "resting comfortably". She sat up, and Bladewalker, unbidden, perched herself on the edge of the bunk like a cautious visitor unsure of welcome. Lethe reached tentatively with hands that felt foreign to her, and Bladewalker held out a hand quickly, gathering her into powerful, protective arms. Lethe sighed, closing her eyes, and rested her cheek against Bladewalker's shoulder. Forever might be a bearable burden if she could rest here, safe in the arms of a friend, but she knew to the depth of her bones that Bladewalker's destiny was close, perhaps only hours away now, and she had no more right to be a part of it than she had a right to be a part of the saga sleeping quietly in the scriptorium.

We tried, and that is worthy, but we failed, she told herself, with the first ice-bright clarity she'd had in days. It is time to admit that I have failed, to acknowledge that I am tired, and to clear the field for the ones who might succeed.

She tested her decision with slow caution, like she would test an untrustworthy piece of ground, first touching it with the toe of her boot, then stamping a bit, and it held up beneath her. If you're far enough from under the cloak of the Greek gods to be hurt, then perhaps you are far enough from under the cloak of the Greek gods to be killed. And if you can be killed, then the last woman who has befriended you in spite of yourself can live out her life with her beloved in safety. "How far to Sapphi?"

She felt Bladewalker's silent sigh throughout her body. "Day after tomorrow, perhaps, the captain tells me."

"And you've seen to it the scrolls are burnt?"

Bladewalker's hand came up to stroke the back of her head. "Are you still on about that?"

She nodded, stretching like a cat under the soothing hand. "You gave your word."

"It's not safe," Bladewalker pointed out. "Not on a ship. Not open flame."

"Then you'll see to it when we get to port?"

Bladewalker pulled away a bit, and it felt like Lethe's soul ripped away as her arms withdrew. Bladewalker placed a hand on Lethe's cheek. In her face was the struggle to understand. "Why d'you insist on that?"

"There's a prophecy--"

"Horsesh*t," snorted Bladewalker.

Lethe smiled a lie into her face. "It's older than both of us. Older than me, even."

"You'd just--walk away from all of that? The only living memory of your lover, even?"

I don't want to lose her, but that's the only way to lose me, and I would not leave this earth with that lie still in it. "They must be sacrificed." Bladewalker didn't look convinced, exactly, so Lethe added, "For the greater good."

"Why?" asked Bladewalker in incomprehension. "Why does it have to happen that way?"

"Who knows?" Lethe shrugged a convincing nonchalance. "It's a god thing. We wouldn't understand. We never will."

"What is it you ain't sayin'?" Bladewalker asked, the frustration audible. "Does this... does it have to do with... with your health?"

Lethe hesitated over her next words. Bladewalker had never lied to her, not that she knew, and to leave Bladewalker with a lie seemed cruel. But one small lie, a tiny comfort along to way to sparing the world a greater one... She reached out to lay a fragile hand, weary with the weight of centuries, on Bladewalker's arm, and opened her lips to speak.

The knock on the door caught them both. For a fraction of a heartbeat, she looked into Bladewalker's eyes, and Bladewalker into hers, and then Lethe called, "Come in."

The door opened, and Alcibiades stood in the doorway with his hand on the latch. "Please excuse the interruption," he said, not as if he really knew what he might be interrupting, or cared overmuch, and a rush of affection for him went through Lethe.

"That's all right," she said, with a genuine smile. She would miss him, in particular, but this was the right thing to do, and her heart felt light for the first time she could remember. "How can we serve you, Captain?"

"There's a storm comin'," he said. "An ugly one, by the looks of it. I'd like to borrow yon strong warrior from you, if that's all right."

"We'll both go," said Lethe instantly. "You'll need everyone." She hopped off the bunk as if she hadn't been confined to it for days.

"I'd be in your debt," he said, with a relieved sigh. She could see the worry buried in his eyes, and she thought that to reassure him was a small mercy.

"Come, Captain," she said, giddy as a girl, "what's a little storm to the Amazon Queen? You never know; you might've escaped a worse one without a breath of wind to tell you it was coming."

She stepped into her boots and left the cabin, and she had the sensation that Bladewalker's eyes were boring holes into her back.

* * *

As it happened, the storm proved difficult, a coastal howler of the type Skittles had heard could occur without warning along the western coast of Africa. The Amazon Queen tossed and struggled over a dark-green sea as the wind dinned in their ears and rain met spray, coating the ship with a fine crusting of salt. Before the sky darkened to a greenish twilight, Alcibiades and Bladewalker went aloft to furl the sails, moving smoothly as a team despite a wind so high that neither could possibly have heard a shouted command or warning. Ranger sent her tribespeople below to shelter in the hold, next to the locked scriptorium. Blackie's ears were flat to her head and the tilt of her whiskers showed her unhappiness.

Skittles and Lethe braced at the sweeps, monitoring the stout ropes that held the steering-oar steady. Makionus and Dogmatika stumbled their way astern from the hatch that led below, offering assistance, but Lethe pointed out the bandage on Makionus's hand and suggested they hold themselves ready in case there was an emergency. The prospect was not thrilling to Dogmatika, but the two headed back down to huddle with Pyra and the animals. Bladewalker, Alcibiades, Lethe, Skittles, and Willow gathered at the sweeps to await the worst.

When it came, it burst upon them with fury, a right vengeful witch of a storm, all keening winds buffeting their eardrums and flashes of cold salt spray that had them drenched and shivering in moments.

The next few hours were very busy, and at one point Willow, lashing a loosening barrel, slipped on the deck and fetched up hard against the rail, stunned and breathless. Lethe threw herself without hesitation into a slide down the pitching deck to catch Willow by the back of the shirt and haul her toward the doors of the cabins. Willow fisted her hands in Lethe's jacket and gasped for breath, and Lethe craned her neck to look back toward the sweeps. Bladewalker launched herself over the top of the cabins, catching a shroud in one hand along the way and putting an oaken arm about Lethe and Willow. She held them safe in place for a time no one could reckon save by its misery, the storm lashing their faces with chill, salty force. Eventually, Lethe was able to take Willow below to hand over to Pyra for care, and in the process she discovered a small cache of arms in the hold. While Bladewalker had done her best, there is no truly secure hiding place aboard a tiny ship.

There came a time when Alcibiades wondered if he'd finally gone deaf with the ceaseless racket, or if the storm had abated somewhat. It proved, to their surprise, to be the latter, and within a deceptively brief time, a dismal yellow sunset was pouring through a jagged gap in the dull gray clouds. The sea itself grew quiet as night came on, and save for the wreck of the sea-spattered deck, they could almost have considered the storm a chimera. They cleaned up as best they could in the darkness and rested where they dropped.

Bladewalker, whose strengthy frame had been sorely tested, had never for a heartbeat forgotten what was to come: after a lonely lifetime, she would finally see Jessamyn again.

And Lethe, exhibiting patient grace in the face of Willow's effusive gratitude for her life, told herself that she had at least one good deed to take with her to her grave. Surely she could pick a quarrel with some random thug in Sapphi in an attempt to sink into the blankets of her final bed sooner rather than later. And if that did not work, if her skill won out over her determination, there would be another thug. There always had been; there always was; there always would be.

They arrived at Sapphi the next night, a beautiful vessel much abused by the vagaries of the ocean, with their first real chance to assess the ship's post-storm condition. After the masts and decking had been seen to, a remarkably undistracted Bladewalker called the crew together in a subdued fashion to ask that they light lamps and collect at the scriptorium to see what harm, if any, had come to their cargo. She suggested that they perform with efficiency and zeal, but without disturbing the patient resting in her cabin above. Soon, all were carefully removing parchments from leather quivers, looking for damp spots or crumbling. The scriptorium had come through the storm without significant injury; the scrolls, to Bladewalker's intense if low-key relief, showed not a quarter of a tenth of a pinpoint of damage. Dogmatika drafted the first piece of what was to become an elaborate concordance of the stories, and the others spent much of the night fetching and rolling at her command.

That was when Lethe took on her own color of shadow, slipped undetected past the others to collect her sword and her knives, murmured something soundless directed at the absent Bladewalker, and quietly left the Amazon Queen. She did not look back, and tried to tell herself it was because she did not care a fig for anything or anyone aboard. She was not entirely successful in her attempted self-deception, and, burdened with memories and regret, soon melted into the darkness of an unremarkable port town.

* * *

There was music in her head.

It seemed she had wandered a hundred lands, traveled more oceans than the earth held, fought and died again and again, to get to this moment. Someone somewhere had told her, someone someplace had said yes, yes, she is always there, down this lane, to this crossing, this little house, that little field, left, then right, then left, then left again.

Agapimo

Agapimo

I have traveled far

Without you

My sole companion sorrow

That one more night had passed

Leaving us bereft of one another's arms

Everywhere you might have lain

Alone without me

I too lingered

To catch the scent of you in the air

In long-abandoned beds

Lying alone

Imagining

The time we were entwined in love

Your body cradling mine, your spirit

Wrapped about me, my fingers

In your hair, your fingers

Scribing your name into my skin

For our speech had fled

And then so had you

It couldn't be that simple, not after all this time. She cursed the length of the road, though it seemed her boots had sprouted wings. She told herself Jessamyn might be married, a mother, uninterested, resentful of Bladewalker's abandonment, not willing to revisit a long-ago relationship, possibly ashamed of her attraction to a warrior, or a woman.

None of it made the slightest dent in her anticipation.

The crossing.

This little house.

That little field.

Left.

My heart longs for you with every beat

Heartbeats turn to days, nights, seasons, years

Hope oozes from my heart

And I am alone with sorrow and grief

After a time, even they can bear my company no longer

And I am left with emptiness

And still I seek you

I stand at the prow of a ship

Watching the moonlight of Artemis caress the swells of the ocean

I think of the moonlight on your breasts

As my rough warrior hands caressed you

Perfect, ah, perfect

I feel the soft breeze

And remember your hands on my face

The gentle rocking and creaking of the ship

As she makes love to the ocean

Serves only to remind me

Of the way our bodies fit together

As we rocked in ecstasy

Our cries the music of goddesses

A right turn right here.

I have forgotten nothing

Not one touch

Not one kiss

Not one word of love

Not one movement

The light on your skin

The lips on my face

The look in your eyes

Left.

You are so clear to me

That I reach for you

And draw thin air to my breast

My heart longs for you with every beat

Days, nights, seasons, years,

While yet it beats

I will search for you

Agapimo

Agapimo

Left.

The house was small, but she recognized it instantly: it was white, rectangular, unlike the organic constructions in this place, the product of a Greek-ordered mind.

She was in the yard, scattering grain from her apron for a flock of well-tended chickens. She looked up and dropped the apron, in motion before Bladewalker could quite react with a smile, a wave, a gesture of greeting. Thus, Jessamyn's first sight of her returned lover was the stunned look on her face and her general air of having been turned to stone.

Jessamyn plowed into her, Bladewalker remembering just in time to open her arms. The two of them tumbled ingloriously into the dust of the road, and half a lifetime's hunger descended onto Bladewalker.

Jessamyn's lips were on hers, an insistent demand. Bladewalker's muscles had gone quite limp, and she let Jessamyn have her way. Jessamyn's hands clawed at Bladewalker's armor, and when she buried her lips in Bladewalker's neck, Bladewalker lifted her arms and tightened them around her.

"Agapimo," Bladewalker murmured.

"My love," gasped Jessamyn. "You're here. You're finally here."

"Aye," said Bladewalker, "and rather aware o' that fact, at the moment." She struggled to sit up, and Jessamyn pulled back, all but her hands, and sat on her heels, looking at Bladewalker with tears shining in her eyes. They reached for one another simultaneously, shy tender hands settling onto one another's faces, and Bladewalker wanted to spend about a thousand years kissing the tears on Jessamyn's face into laughter.

"Have you been well?" asked Bladewalker in a near-whisper, not wanting to disturb the magic.

Jessamyn nodded her head bravely, trying to swallow past the lump in her throat. "But lonely. Oh, sweet Goddess, have I been lonely for you!"

"As have I, my love," said Bladewalker. "But that's over now--" She caught herself and added with caution, "That is, if you want me--"

"Yes," interrupted Jessamyn, pushing her backwards into the dirt again. "Yes, Goddess, yes, I want you." Her lips caught Bladewalker's again, and the fire licked into fury. Bladewalker ran her hands down the form she remembered so well, noting, with approval, that Jessamyn seemed in fine shape, healthy and obviously interested in life. The feeling of Jessamyn's lips on her skin was too powerful to ignore, though, and she put her hand to the back of Jessamyn's head, trying to pull her close enough to devour.

Jessamyn was the one who ran out of air first, and she broke from Bladewalker's mouth with a sharp, small gasp. "Did I hurt you?" Bladewalker asked, gentling her hand.

"No," laughed Jessamyn as the tears spilled down her face, "no, of course not, my love." She seized Bladewalker's hands and tugged. "Come inside. Come inside."

Bladewalker could have answered that she was about to come right there in the road, but she didn't care to spoil the reunion with a giddy, distracting, remarkably stupid, entirely indefensible joke. Instead, she grinned and leapt to her feet and held out a hand. Jessamyn took it, graceful as a dancer despite the awkwardness of the situation, and Bladewalker pulled her to her feet and into her arms. They kissed for an immeasurable time, Jessamyn's strong hands unfastening bits of Bladewalker's armor, and Bladewalker didn't care if they ended up naked in the middle of the road with the whole world looking on.

Jessamyn's touch poured years of arousal and yearning over Bladewalker's skin, and Bladewalker's body responded. She swept Jessamyn into her arms, where she fit just as well as she ever had, and they walked toward the house with their lips roaming one another. Bladewalker tried not to stomp any of Jessamyn's chickens as they went through the yard and up the steps, but it was so difficult to attend to anything but the satisfying weight of the lover she'd been without for so long. Bladewalker stopped by the door, and Jessamyn fumbled with one hand for the door latch. She got the door open eventually, and Bladewalker stepped over the threshold with Jessamyn in her arms.

"Which way is the--"

"Left," Jessamyn mumbled against Bladewalker's neck, and Bladewalker nodded as best she could, trying not to stumble. She found the bed as much by wish as navigation and set Jessamyn down gently. Jessamyn thrashed her way free of the enveloping bed, grabbed Bladewalker's collar, and pulled her sprawling atop her body.

Bladewalker put her hands on Jessamyn's face, closed her eyes, and drank her in. Jessamyn's mouth molded to hers, arms and legs sweeping up to pull her closer, closer, closer. Bladewalker settled into place between Jessamyn's thighs, kissing as deeply as she wanted. Later they could take their time; today, right now, was for assuaging the pain of separation and the urgency of reunion.

Bladewalker lifted one hand, resentful that she couldn't spend a few more precious seconds touching Jessamyn, and began hauling at the fasteners for her armor. Jessamyn's hands flew up to help, and the two of them loosened the ungainly jacket so that Bladewalker could toss it to the floor. The boots would take longer, and Bladewalker decided in a flash that they could wait. She pulled herself up from Jessamyn's body. Jessamyn was breathing rapidly, breasts straining beneath the laces of her bodice, and Bladewalker braced herself on one knee to free both hands for the task of untying.

"You're beautiful," Jessamyn hissed at her, eyes shadowed with want. "You're even more beautiful than I remembered."

Bladewalker pulled the bodice open with one efficient movement and looked at Jessamyn's breasts, dark, soft, inviting. Her head swam with arousal and hunger. She put her hands flat over Jessamyn's breasts, and Jessamyn made a noise and moved to accommodate her. Bladewalker closed her eyes, feeling, feeling, feeling.

She swooped for Jessamyn's body, crushing her hands between them, and set her mouth to Jessamyn's again. Jessamyn's skin was warm and fragrant with the tropical sun, her body lively and active. They moved together, Bladewalker's muscles tightening and loosening against her lover, and Jessamyn reached down to pull the skirt up over her legs. Bladewalker's hands swept downward, following the path of the retreating skirt to trace along the bare skin of Jessamyn's legs, knees, thighs. The smell of Jessamyn's heated skin was driving her insane.

She moved back a little from Jessamyn's body, taking one more look. Jessamyn pulled the cloth from her hips, and Bladewalker fed the hunger with one quick glance. "This feels like home," she murmured, and Jessamyn's eyes got shy again.

"You are home," she whispered back, opening up for her lover, and the music in Bladewalker's head became an anthem of triumph. She slid her hand over Jessamyn's inner thigh, then nestled close, gathering her into her free arm, her other hand poised to come home, truly and for all time. Jessamyn wrapped her arms around Bladewalker's neck and huddled against her, kissing softly wherever her lips would reach, the invitation unmistakable. She was welcome, and Jessamyn still wanted her, and the joy of it nearly smothered Bladewalker.

She pulled away just far enough to look into Jessamyn's eyes. One more move, one more step, one last soft footfall in the nearly endless journey that could now end. The tenderness in Jessamyn's face told her everything she needed to know. Bladewalker made the move, sliding into the snug warmth she remembered so well, yet feeling it as if for the first time. Jessamyn's head fell back and her eyes closed, and she sang with the music of Bladewalker's lost, lonely, reclaimed soul--

A jerk and a wrench, and Bladewalker opened her eyes to darkness. Her heart was pounding, along with her pulse elsewhere. The slight rocking of the bunk told her she was still aboard the ship. She lifted a weak hand to wipe the sweat out of her eyes and turned over in her bunk. Her fist and teeth clenched at the same time, and she had to loosen both forcibly.

It lacked but a couple fingers of sunrise, and she got to her feet, glad of the chance to do something. Anything. Anything was preferable to losing herself in sleep again, where treacherous dreams could suck her under the waves.

My mind can lie to me, she told herself. My heart, never. So she would quit listening to her mind and listen to her heart instead, and her heart told her that Jessamyn was close, closer than she thought, and that she would see her again sooner than she had imagined.

She got herself dressed in as much leathered armor as she had, anticipating all sorts of trouble and trying to prepare for it. Soldiers, guards, protection from threat. It wouldn't surprise her to find that Jessamyn was a queen, ruling the destinies of thousands from a palace high on a hill. Or the priestess of the Dual Goddesses, interceding with them for mercy, compassion, and wisdom for her fragile, insecure congregation. She concealed this dagger here, that blade there. A pouchful of money, in case there was any bribing needed to be done, or bonds to be redeemed, a horse to be hired, a physician to be engaged, anything like that. Some travel bread. A skin of water. She'd thought about bringing a blanket, but reflected that no matter how long she had to travel, it was mild enough here that she could wrap herself in her cloak and sleep on the ground, as she'd done for years.

She gave her mind these toys to play with, distracting it from betraying her, and all along, her heart beat in a slow, steady rhythm, the rhythm of a seasoned soldier prepared for battle. She stretched out her hands, which were steady. Good. Good.

She went up the steps to the deck and walked to the door of Lethe's cabin. Her steps were a lot quieter than she had any reason to expect; she was in heavy boots, suitable for horseback or combat, anything but flight.

She stopped before Lethe's door and took a bit of a look around. The sky was lightening, dim shapes of the port's buildings beginning to emerge from the cloak of night. She raised her hand and rapped softly with her knuckles.

There was no answer. She knocked again, a couple of times, then reached for the door latch. It occurred to her that she had no right to do so, especially after the estrangement that had led to Bladewalker moving out of the cabin they shared. She dropped her hand.

"Lethe," she called quietly through the door.

No voice spoke, and Bladewalker, apprehensive, hurried on. "I'm away from the ship. I don't know how long. The captain has orders to hold her here until my return. I don't know what will happ--" She caught herself, bit her lip, and finished, "We'll speak when I get back. Make some plans..." That seemed a bit harsh, somewhat less than encouraging, so Bladewalker added, "Be well. Rest. I'll be back."

This was her last chance to say something to the friend and foe whose fate had entangled so powerfully with her own, but she couldn't think of the words. In the end, she murmured, "I'll be back."

No sign of life from within. Bladewalker set her face into impassivity, standing a moment without thinking. Then she turned on her heel with a parade move she hadn't used in half a lifetime, marched to the gang, and descended to the dock. She walked away from the sea onto firm land, looking for someone to whom to pose the question that blazed in letters of fire against her soul.

* * *

Lethe's sleep had been profound, untroubled by dreams or doubt, and what finally awakened her was a beam of sunlight across her closed eyelids and the fresh scent of the sea. She threw an arm up to shield her eyes and opened them.

She was in a clean, bright, airy room she'd seen only by lamplight the night before. The room was big enough for the hearth, carefully tended, that ran along the same wall as the door. The bed was against the opposite wall, a little distance from the window, close to air and morning sun, but far enough away that no storms would spoil the covers. A large cupboard stood in the corner and chairs, chests, and tables of various sizes and decorations sat here and there about the room. A wooden screen hid the corner with the chamber-pot and its associated accoutrements, an unobtrusive touch of civilization out of place in this rough-and-tumble port town. It was a peaceful room, the sort of place for lazy mornings after nights of vigorous lovemaking, a place to linger in bed and talk.

Lethe turned her head. The girl was sleeping peacefully on her side, her hands tucked up under her chin. Her delicate young face, as fine as a sculpture, was smooth, her brow uncreased. Her eyelids were round, and her eyelashes were long enough to feather delicately along her cheek. Her skin was the beautiful dark color one saw so seldom in Greece, a lovely cinnamon that marked her as a child of Africa, and something else. Something about the shape of her face reminded Lethe of someone, but she couldn't quite recall whom just that moment. Perhaps one of the women at the scriptorium, their names and faces blurring into incoherence over the years.

She seemed barely old enough to make her own decisions, but the lovely, ample-hipped, full-breasted form was that of a grown woman, and Lethe wondered why the girl had not long since married. She was adamant about her virginity, and it struck Lethe as preposterously unlikely that she had managed to maintain it so long. Why had her tavern-master not sold her, or put her to hire? She could have made him rich. Would have.

Perhaps he was her lover. Lethe could certainly see putting her to an exclusive contract. She sat up cautiously, trying not to disturb the young woman in whose bed she lay, and leaned on her elbow to take a closer look.

The girl's rich, abundant hair, caught in a loose braid, lay tumbled over the bedclothing. She'd worn it cascading down her back the night before, tucked away from her face beneath a kerchief. That was all the evidence Lethe needed: she was unmarried, as a woman with a husband would bind all that hair beneath a turban.

A beautiful young woman, a mouthwatering temptation, and she'd remained unmolested by the unlikely expedient of lying about her man-shriveling prowess as the daughter of a sorceress? That took some guts as well as brains, and Lethe gave the sleeping form a one-sided salute of a smile.

And she'd decided to take in a wounded stranger, one who'd dispatched half a score of her fellow citizens, with nothing more than a promise that she wouldn't be harmed. And having gotten that promise, she'd turned over to sleep, and slept still.

What could she not have made of herself, a comely, resourceful, intelligent, protective girl, if she'd not been trapped in this place, in thrall to the moron Cyclops for whom she slung ale and fended off groping? What could she not have made of, say, Lethe's money and the ship she'd hired? Suppose her last gift to the woman who'd tended her wound was a bright future, rich with possibility?

Well, then, she could put off dying one more day.

Lethe got out of the bed, moving slowly to avoid awakening the girl, and got herself dressed. The sword wound on her knee was still there, and had swollen some in the night, like a strike from a puff-adder, and the sight of it made Lethe's heart swell too, but with happiness. It would be possible. She could leave this place, no longer captive to the vengeance of gods who'd had the bad grace to die before getting their fill of tormenting her. One last good deed, assuring the girl's future, and then she'd be free to wander as far from Greece as she could get before the next attack left her gratifyingly, permanently bereft of herself.

She propped the sword next to the window and sat in the windowframe to put on her boots, appreciating the freshness of the air. She had just gotten them on when a tiny gray bird flitted in from nowhere and perched next to her. The bird studied her with its head to one side, evincing a profoundly serious black-eyed curiosity, and Lethe reached with a careful, steady hand to gather it onto her fingers.

It had been a long time since a bird perched on her hand and poured forth a song, but that was precisely what this one did. They had done this forever ago, every once in a while, and it had always made Xena laugh to see it. Lethe lifted her other hand, moving slowly so as to leave its security unchallenged, and the bird permitted her to stroke its soft, feathery breast. It never stopped singing. The music, and the singer, were reminder, balm, and promise all at once, and Lethe smiled in unfeigned delight at this, a generous gesture from whatever gods still lived to grant her one final blessing before their greatest gift, oblivion.

The bird finished whatever it had to say and lingered not much longer, giving her a sideways look that might have been stern or might have been friendly--it was so hard to tell with a bird. Then it disappeared backwards from her hand, and Lethe watched it stitch a path into the bright blue morning sky.

When she turned back to the room, her hostess was sitting up in bed, a delighted look on her face. "Good morning," said Lethe easily, just as if they'd been friends forever. "I hope I didn't wake you."

* * *

"A woman. A beautiful woman. Bellaster by name, or possibly another. About this tall. Beautiful."

In her purposeful wanderings, Bladewalker had found that the import house did not open until after midday, that the market was peopled by non-locals, and that not everyone was able to understand her speech. Not all of this struck her as entirely plausible. She'd seen an odd thing in the people of Sapphi, a kind of practiced scan that took in her armor, her weapons, and her eyes, after which the hitherto clever faces turned stupefied and uncomprehending.

"A beautiful woman. Her name's Bellaster, or Jessamyn. Maybe a priestess."

Armed soldiers eyed her as she passed. She knew better than to approach any of them. The bakery women exchanged glances, then shook their heads as one. Her frustration grew. Most of the taverns were shuttered and barred, which seemed out of place in a port town, where thirsty sailors sick of the sea might alight on the dock at any time of the day or night. The apothecary affected not to speak Greek, in spite of the labels on his jars. Her hands were sweaty from being clenched into fists. The potter didn't look up from her wheel, and the blacksmith was a-clanging and a-banging so hard that a question couldn't possibly have been detected. Her heart was pounding in the same rhythm.

"Dark eyes. Skin the color of yours. She's beautiful. About this tall. Bellaster. Jessamyn."

They were hiding something.

In her soldiering days, she would have started by firing their outbuildings, moving closer and closer to the house as she continued to ask, reasonably, even sweetly. She couldn't do that here; this was Jessamyn's home, these people her neighbors.

Damnation! Why don't they talk?

In the end, she went to the livery, looked around at the horses and their tenders, and picked out a likely-looking young man. He'd probably been a boy two seasons earlier, and he was grooming a fine bay filly with attentive concentration. He looked a bit too young to have been part of the courier network, but you never knew. His face was like Jessamyn's, and she wondered for a vertiginous breath or so if she might have found Jessamyn's son.

"Fine mare," she said, thinking to sneak up on it.

"Aye, so she is," he said with pride, in remarkably fluid Greek. "A prize-winner, too. She comes of fine stock. We breed 'em to relay and courier. They can go a day and a night without stopping--almost like a camel."

She affixed a smile to her face and remarked, "Seems like a shame to treat an animal like this that way."

"They're built for it," he said, sweeping a brush over the horse's flank. A boyish stubbornness, a hint of defensive pride, as if she'd insulted his manhood.

"It shows," she said, although she was uncertain whether it did or not, "along with the care in tendin' her."

"We're the finest place on the coast for blooded Numidians," he boasted, brushing at the horse's glossy legs. The mare stood completely still. "No one can touch our stock."

"So I see," she said, trying to sound impressed. She stuck out a hand and said, "Bladewalker."

He took it without fuss and gave her a man's grip with the hand not holding the brush. "Mosi."

She nodded, and he went back to his currying. "I have a friend," she said idly, the blood leaping in her throat, "who loves 'em and knows 'em well. She's from this part o' the world. Perhaps you know her? Name's Jessamyn."

The brush faltered, and his face whipped toward her, shock painted clearly on his features. She had his throat in her hand in a heartbeat, and him against the wall of the barn in another. "Listen to me, boy," she ground out from between her teeth. "I've come a very long way in a very long time and ain't getting any cooperation from your fellow citizens, here. I want some answers."

"Warrior," said a woman's voice. Bladewalker gave Mosi a deeply significant look of warning from under her brows and turned her head. The woman standing before her was in tribal dress, a colorful sweep of cloth enveloping a lush form, and the turban on her head was of the same cloth. "Take what you like," said the woman, in Greek accented with the tongue of Africa, "but leave me my firstborn."

"When he talks," Bladewalker said, turning back to Mosi. He had his hands flattened against the side of the barn and his attention completely on her.

"He's too young to know anything," called the woman. "I'll tell you what you want to know."

She thought it over, then asked Mosi, "Do you love your mother?"

"Yes," he whispered.

"Then do nothin' foolish, and you'll get to keep her," she said. He nodded as best he could, and Bladewalker loosened her hand. He stumbled the few steps to his mother, taking her arm and trying to haul her away.

She turned her head. "Mosi," she murmured, "I've given my word. Let me talk to the warrior."

"But--"

"Warrior," she said, lifting her head with the same pride Bladewalker had seen in her son, "let us withdraw to talk."

"Who are you?" asked Bladewalker.

"My name's Abayomi," said the woman, "but they call me Mother Adero. I'm the midwife here."

In the tiny piece of a pulsebeat she took to make the decision, Bladewalker saw that Mother Adero was unafraid. "All right, then," said Bladewalker, "let's go."

* * *

Mother Adero led the warrior a little distance away. A curious crowd began to gather at a respectful distance. "What is it I can tell you?" asked Mother Adero.

Bladewalker glanced toward the watchers. "I'm lookin'," she said, pitching her voice low, "for a woman."

"The brothel's back the way you came," said Mother Adero, the scorn evident in her voice.

"No," Bladewalker told her, shaking her head in frustration. "A particular woman. A woman name of Bellaster, or maybe she goes by Jessamyn." Mother Adero regarded her impassively. "This ain't exactly a town friendly to strangers, is it?"

"What makes you think she is here?"

"Because," Bladewalker shot out, "none of you's told me no yet."

Mother Adero considered it, then appeared to reach a decision. "What do you want with her?"

"Please--" Bladewalker reached for Mother Adero's arm, remembering just in time to pull her hand back. "I've come a long way and it's took me a long time. I've... I've got to find her. I lost..." She caught her breath. Mother Adero's eyes were like obsidian, revealing nothing. "You've got to tell me she's here. I've got to know that."

Mother Adero's eyes flicked back toward the barn. It seemed as though she thought smiling might break her face. "I'll take you there," she said abruptly.

Bladewalker's knees went like a spavined horse.

* * *

They walked out of town, up a slow slope that led north along the coast. As they got away from the port, the shore rose into a steep cliff where lush green grass rippled, blown flat by the strong sea wind.

"How long has she been here?" Bladewalker asked, her voice barely loud enough to carry over the cries of the seabirds.

"Nearly two decades," said Mother Adero.

You would be thrilled to see how tall and straight your daughter stands now. She is a good girl, too, sunny of disposition and smart as a treeshade of elders, as the local people say. She will be a woman soon. How I long for you to meet her, Agapimo, and return to the family who loves you and has waited for you and waits yet for you.

There had been a shuffle outside in the yard, a furtive and bloodthirsty sneaking, but Jessamyn, occupied in writing a letter, knew none of it until the crash that announced the breaking of the door. They took her, rough hands by rushlight, and would have taken Serafina too had Jessamyn not stopped them with a few quiet sentences. "She's nothing to do with this; it's me you want. Sekae, I've been a good neighbor to you, like your mother was to me. Take her to Abayomi."

Her last clear sight of her last remaining daughter was of Serafina dragged from the house, twisting in the arms of a relieved-looking Sekae and his shocked sons as she shouted, "Mama! Mama!" through violent tears.

"I love you," she whispered, knowing already that it was too late.

You have to get Fee to Harrel.

He's not back yet.

Promise me, Abayomi. Promise me you'll look after my daughter and keep her safe.

I have kept that child safe since before her birth. I won't abandon you, Jessamyn.

"M--married?" asked Bladewalker after a little bit.

"No," said Mother Adero. "Never."

"Does she--" Bladewalker cleared her throat. "Does she have children?"

Mother Adero turned her head and looked Bladewalker over, head to foot. "No."

I'd no idea her holdings were so vast.

Shh--it's the midwife, she has ears like a fox.

The path led upward, a gentle but long climb. Bladewalker began to sweat in her armor.

The taxes on your holdings come to nearly thirty crowns, woman, and you have not paid them in three years.

This is ridiculous. It's not a tax, it's attempted theft. We don't owe a nomad chieftain and his camel-drovers taxes. None of us pays them. They don't rule here.

Then there is the other matter.

What other matter?

The matter of sorcery.

Mother Adero remembered the dignity of the slight figure, her head high and her back like a tree trunk despite the cruel bindings that bit deep into her wrists. She was nearly a goddess to them, especially the younger ones who knew her dignity, her influence for good, her great wealth. She kept horror from their doorstep, it was said, and Sapphi prospered while she was there to bend her energies toward the improvement of the place and the people. But the mighty too can be felled, even a water buffalo may fall to a pack of cowardly hyenas, and so it was with those who had more than one reason to resent the stranger with the idea that humanity could be perfected.

They hadn't subjected her to an outrage, and it was one tiny mercy; Mother Adero would not have wanted to think of that proud, steadfast woman bent beneath the sick will of a deranged man.

"Where are you taking me?" murmured Bladewalker.

Mother Adero turned her head without speaking. Stranger, you look so much like her poor lost child. It seemed as though here, finally, might be the thing for which that stubborn, proud woman had waited, the great secret of which no word passed her lips, the devotion that tied her to this hostile place. But it was too great a risk; the last time a dark-haired, blue-eyed stranger came to town, Serafina's sister had been taken.

In the end, impatient with the bureaucratic nonsense of the far too self-important minister, the men who wanted Jessamyn's land united with the men who wanted Jessamyn's death and pronounced a sentence that meant her doom. They hauled her to the gallows, rigged the rope in the dark, turned their now-guttering rushlights on her already ghostly face. She closed her eyes just before the trap fell, and none attended her last murmur of "Agapimo..."

"Does she live on the cliffs?" Bladewalker said.

"It's near," replied Mother Adero.

It had fallen to her to intercept Harrel on his way back into town from doing some mysterious errand. They've moved against her at last, she told him, and when he swung back up onto the horse without speaking to go to her, Mother Adero had caught his boot and beseeched his face with her eyes. It's too late, she said. I'm sorry. It's too late.

He had gone wild with grief--men always did--and she let him storm and rage and weep and when he was done, she told him, You must make some plans for that child's future. And he went, like the man he was, to fetch Serafina away from the crowd staring in untiring awe at the decay of the best thing that had ever fallen into their miserable lives. He had spoken a few words with the minister--I'll pay the taxes, I'm in charge of her property. And when a couple of whispers arose about Serafina, he grasped instantly that it wasn't her lineage, but her inheritance, that was at issue, and he said quietly, "And in return for settlin' the taxes, I'm takin' this girl in bond." His heavy hand had dropped onto Serafina's shoulder, his fierce one-eyed gaze daring any to defy his claim, and the crowd drew back with a murmur. The minister told the town scribe to have the bond recorded, and thus was Serafina's future assured.

Her mother had been hanged as a witch, and that meant no resting in the town cemetery. Harrel got a plot from a man who grew grain north of the port and went up late at night to dig. After he had been working a while by torchlight, silent, secretive figures melted out of the shadows to help. They dug without cease or speaking for hours, and when it was day, Harrel collected what was left from the gallows and made his way, without hindrance, north to the only home he would ever make for the woman he would always love. What he said to her, he said to only the open air and the peaceable sea, and after he had seen to things, he came back down to town, checked the new bond bracelet Serafina wore, and returned to his tavern as if nothing had happened.

Except he never again went north on his trips.

The place was wild with the grass, glossy and fat in the bright sun and moving in waves like the sea far below, and to the call of the seabirds in the pure salty air, they stopped before a small slab of rock from which the grass had been carefully trimmed. Mother Adero nodded toward it.

Bladewalker took a step forward and looked down. There, incised on the rock in painstaking, laborious carving, were Greek letters that spelled the name IESAMIN.

* * *

Mother Adero watched without speaking. The warrior stood with one foot forward, head bent, gaze locked on the carving. It had taken Harrel weeks and weeks to chisel it, and he refused all offers of assistance, even from people who had had no part in her death and spoke of it in quiet tones as murder. When the stone was finished, he had carted it up here by himself, again refusing help, and set it with his own hands.

The breeze stirred the warrior's hair, but nothing else moved. It did not seem that she breathed, and Mother Adero began to doubt her caution. This did not look like the latest raid in a death-facing rivalry as incomprehensible as any; it looked, in fact, much like love. The silence went on and on, and yet the warrior stood unmoving, looking down at the rock. Had the supple green grass not kept rippling in the breeze, it might be easy to think that time itself had ceased, the world come to an end too abrupt to allow the last rays of the sun to fade into darkness.

"When?" asked the warrior, her voice raw.

"Three summers past," said Mother Adero. The warrior didn't flinch, didn't stir, didn't so much as blink, and yet the pain that radiated was powerful enough to detect from several paces away. This one would sink into grief as if into a deep, still, stagnant pond, and never emerge.

"How?" asked the warrior.

Mother Adero opened her lips to answer, and her mind blanked. She selected some words, fit them together with her habitual reserve, and said at last, "A tropical fever. Of a type that sweeps this area from time to time."

The warrior made no response for a long while. She never lifted her head, never took a step nearer the stone or farther from it. Mother Adero did not come here often; it reminded her too strongly of what rested beneath this stone, and it made her sick to think of her friend that way. She preferred to recall Jessamyn's rare smiles, her lovely low voice, the trick she had of getting her way with ruffians and blackguards without ever becoming unpleasant, the dedication and calm with which she raised her daughters, and then her daughter, waiting for something that had, apparently, finally arrived.

"Leave," murmured the warrior.

The word had called Mother Adero out of a reverie, a memory of a far younger Serafina, fresh sorrow graven on her face, kneeling to trim the grass around the stone with her mother's ancient, wickedly sharp kitchen knife.

"What?" said Mother Adero.

"Leave me," spat the warrior, turning. There was a long, awful-looking dagger in her hand. Mother Adero backed away, eyes on the knife, and turned to flee when she thought herself out of safe throwing distance. She did not slacken her pace until she got back to town, and raced to gather her children and slammed and locked the door of her house and saw no one else that day and all the next.

Alone, Bladewalker stood over Jessamyn's grave, silent, her brain empty, her soul dead, her heart nothing but a pulsating pain. The sea refused her silence; the treacherous sun kept on shining, denying her the mercy of darkness; her lungs continued to pull in air whose very existence was blasphemy. She stood with head bowed to the only goddess in whom she had ever believed and cursed the cosmos wordlessly for still spinning.

Wrong. Wrong. Not her. Oh, not her. It rose in her like sickness, like a tide, like a volcano, and it got too heavy to hold, too massive to stand beneath, and so she clenched her fists and shut her eyes and lifted her chin in a long cry of agony as it drove her to her knees, forcing the air into the tribute it was too uncaring to offer. The seabirds on the cliffs lifted from their nests, wheeling in disturbed circles, calling to one another.

Bladewalker opened her eyes and put her hands before her, and for a wild, savage instant, she thought of clawing into the earth with her bare hands, gathering up the precious remnants of her love, and fleeing this place, a travesty of eternal, peaceful beauty. Instead, she lay flat on the glossy grass, putting her cheek against the cold stone and closing her eyes to feel the chill seep into her throbbing heart to still it. The sooner it was dead, like the rest of her, the better.

The place rebuked her grief, the obscenity of lush green grass and the warmth of the sun sparkling off the waves of the ocean. And yet, who should care that one used-up, useless warrior had lost the only thing that kept the blood moving in her veins? What was the grief of one lonely, twisted woman in a world that manufactured fresh pain with every dawn, even as it perfected the endless forms of agony that tortured every living thing under the heavens? Why should any god anywhere, whether bloodsucker or merciful, give a damn about the love that had remade her inside and out?

Life was no gift, and death too much to bear.

"You," she whispered to the stone, "were the best thing I ever knew." The words surprised her; she would have thought her throat choked off with suffering. "This sunshine, this greenery, this sea, all the work of all the gods that ever were or ever will be--it's all a pale and sickly thing. When you were real. The only real thing. The only real woman walking this earth. And I failed you."

A dizzy sense of sickness took her, and she welcomed it. It fled, like the rest of the thoughtless cheating things in this place, leaving her alive, and bitter at that. "I'd have been an ally to your man, and a protector of your sons and daughters, and in service to you all my days. But they say you lived your life alone. I failed you, agapimo."

Had anyone held her, sponged her skin, touched her hand as the fever took her? Bladewalker had failed her in that as well, leaving her alone during her final illness, to go through that by herself. No strength, no support, no love. Alone. She took that hideous loneliness onto herself, knowing she would bear it for the rest of her days, and wishing only that she had shouldered it in time to save Jessamyn's life.

She ran her hand over the letters carved on the stone, which was so cold it made her fingers ache. She wanted her numb hands to memorize the carving, be able to trace it without thinking in the scriptorium that was, now, all she had left to return to. "We have the stories," whispered Bladewalker. "You may have no kin for me to protect, but at least that was saved from the ruin of this tired old earth." She sat up, moving her muscles solely by will, because they were drained of all strength. "I vowed I'd take 'em to safety. And as long as this mockery of air sustains me, I'll see 'em to their new home."

She lowered her lips to the stone, placing the last loving kiss she would ever place upon anything. "Rest, my love. Sleep here in peace in this lovely place, and let me serve you as long as time remains to me. How I long to encircle you in my arms, and how I wish that the goddesses you served so faithfully and well are doin' that for you now."

She stretched her hands out over the stone, taking a last, heartrending look. "I love you, Bellaster the priestess, Jessamyn my lover. I always have, I always will, and never more than right at this moment, when I know how far away you are." Her hands lingered over the carved letters IESAMIN. "Rest, agapimo," she murmured one last time, then got to her feet and made her way south, toward the ship, hoping that her heart would never lose the chill of Jessamyn's gravestone.

* * *

The madness had receded from Lethe's brain like a tide, chased from her by a lovely, trusting young woman who'd offered her bed and then slept undisturbed the whole night beside a corpse-maker. Lethe had moved through her day with a lightness to her step and a sense of omnipotence, clean and free for the first time in what seemed like centuries, and may well have been. They had got everything sorted, and Serafina was leaving this horrible place at her side, pursuing a destiny far away from a place that would execute a woman for witchcraft and then enslave her wealthy daughter.

She entered her cabin without thought and sat at her desk, casually picking up a brush and inking it.

By rights should this, my hand, be dust,

A scattering of bone,

Past interest even to the passing worm.

Yet here I stand outside the realm of time,

Which is to say outside the realm of earth,

And those who'd envy such a state

Should live within this skull,

Half sane, half mad,

For but a day or two.

Death? Why, it's a mystery to all,

To none more than to me,

Who deal it out without contrary thought,

A widowed, orphaned severing,

A link that cannot mend.

Where are the gods who'd halt

An engine minting chaos?

Where is the man who'd end

This endless reign of pain?

Where is the sword to take

This half-mad, half-sane head?

Or can it be that I am sent

In answer to some vast colossal need?

The sacrifice of blood

In service to the greater good?

Can it be that I,

Preserved against a thousand thousand deaths,

Swift, painful, lingering, or light,

Am meant to scatter death

On some unfathomed goal?

Might I become a vengeful, fearsome god,

A tool to keep the night at bay,

To grant the innocent a breath of sleep

Unburdened by the pain and stench of death?

And have I learned this at the foot of one

Whose youth and beauty struck--

When it hit, it hit like a boulder to her chest. The brush fell from her fingers, smearing the fresh parchment, and she had one moment for dismay before the letters blurred and it took her again, clawing at her heart. It knocked her to her knees retching, arms wrapped about her torso, muscles moving quite without her volition. The sword-strike became a bright line of pain pressed to the floor of her cabin, and the weight of the air became too strong to withstand. She held out her hands hastily, resisting the pull that would carry her to the bottom of the sea, until her arms shook with effort and the sweat trickled stinging into her eyes.

It was different somehow, foreign, tasting alien to her, as if it were happening to someone else, a sense that everything was lost, a feeling like the earth itself had fallen away from her. There was nothing in her mind but one desperate wish.

"Bladewalker," she whispered through clenched teeth, "help me."

The pain sucked at her, a gnawing deprivation, anguish of a type she could not recall feeling since Xena's death was fresh. Her brains blanked and she forgot her own name, forgot where she was and with who, a blurred face the only thing before her eyes. She had to find the person it belonged to; there was nothing so important as that.

Her body moved without direction, and that was good, as she was positively incapable of giving it. She reached for the edge of something and pulled herself to her... her feet, that was it, and a series of glossy black lines traced on a flat surface swam into view. She stared at the lines, not knowing what they were, knowing only that it was important not to lose them.

Something moved below her eyes, and after a moment she realized that it was her chest, pulling in air and sending it forth in panting exhalations. Air, she told herself firmly. It's called air. You need it.

She had to go in search of help; this was wrong, what was happening, and she was in terrible peril. She remembered how to get through the... the door, that was what it was called, and she pulled her battered mind together long enough to work the mechanism that caused it to swing open.

Outside was a foreign place, a place she could only dimly remember, a place of blue sky and blue water and a figure she nearly knew, standing among others. She gasped the only name she could recall, "Alci," and the figure turned toward her.

* * *

Bladewalker learned, on that long walk from the cliffs, that it was possible to keep going when the very life had been drained from you, to move and breathe and walk and even think when the spirit had fled and left nothing but a quietly thumping heart that did not die only because it could not remember how.

I wish she'd had a great love. I wish she'd had a lover who meant to her what she did to me. Not like my pitiful corrupted effort. One such as I could never love. Not the way she should have been loved. She deserved a hero as great as her great heart.

If she could not give love, she could give service. She would give herself to the service of a woman who knew how to love the way Jessamyn deserved, give herself to the mission of saving the tales of true heroes. She would serve Lethe until the breath finally fled her worthless frame, good only for violence, incapable of being animated by love, and the only thing left for her crippled carcass to welcome would be the last day of her life.

Lethe would know resurrection, and so might her beloved, and Bladewalker's. But Bladewalker herself would end with her last breath, and that was the only thing in this whole long awful ordeal that finally seemed unequivocally, completely right and correct and true. She would die some day, and the world would blot out her very memory. As it should.

The gang of the Amazon Queen drew her on, and she swept the deck with eyes that saw nothing until they lit on Lethe. The captain and the physician were holding her, and the look on Lethe's face was one of fright. Bladewalker had some vague idea that Jessamyn would have disapproved of Lethe being in pain, and so she hastened up the gang and opened her arms and took the trembling woman into them and vowed with what was left of her to protect Lethe until such time as her beloved returned for her.

End of Book IV

Chapter 5: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book V

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book V

It wasn't often that Lorena could get away from her life, which involved not only a full-time job, but the single parenting of two young daughters and the infinitely more troublesome monitoring of her mother. It had taken Bladewalker about a month to get enough of a breathing space to make it back to Charlotte, and a week after that while Lorena juggled her schedule enough to meet with her for breakfast. She was on time, which was mildly surprising, seeing that she'd gotten off shift and dropped the girls at school before heading for the firefighters' favorite breakfast place. Bladewalker had just taken the first sip of her coffee when the door of the diner opened, and Lorena walked in, shading her eyes against the brightness of the sun outdoors and looking around for her.

Bladewalker set down the newspaper, got up with her habitual smile, and crossed the room to escort Lorena to the table. "Good morning," she said. "How are the girls?"

"Into ponies and long division." Lorena put a hand to Bladewalker's shoulder and leaned in without fuss to kiss her quietly on the cheek, a lovely gesture of non-threatened affection from a straight Black woman. "I'll tell 'em you were asking. Good morning, sweetheart. It's great to see you."

"Great to see you too, Lorena." Lorena was still in her dispatcher's uniform, and Bladewalker appreciated the effort she'd taken to get there; from what she knew of Lorena's life, it must have been considerable. She swung into the speech she'd rehearsed in the car. "Listen, I wanted to thank you for--"

"Miss this?" interrupted Lorena, co*cking an eyebrow at Blade, who laughed. "When the girls have been bugging me for a week to ask what it's like to be a millionaire?"

"My financial advisor would know better than I would," said Bladewalker, trying to sound hifalutin' and winning a grin from Lorena. "It all just turns into a bunch of zeroes and I get dizzy."

"Yeah, you seem a little down to earth for all that." Lorena settled into the booth and set her purse next to her. "So. Your 'financial advisor'. Any good?"

"So far, terrific. She's been a friend for a while." Lorena seemed relieved at that, which was touching. "I'm thinkin' if she gets into any trouble, she'll be smart enough to ask for help." Bladewalker raised a hand toward the waitress, who hurried over with a cup and a pot of coffee.

Lorena got her coffee taken care of while she gave her order to the waitress, doing two things without apparent effort. Bladewalker had seen it before, on more than one occasion, and it convinced her all over again that Lorena was absolutely the right choice. That meant she had to be on her toes, eloquent and persuasive, and she wished all over again that McJohn and Story Doc had agreed to come with her. She stuttered through her breakfast order, and when the waitress had gone with a "hon" and a "darlin'" for each of them, Lorena leaned forward with a smile and murmured, "No pancakes with extra syrup?"

Bladewalker felt herself blushing, to her horror. "They... they're wanting to keep me alive, for some reason. We've..." She sighed, thinking of McJohn and her endless experiments into nutritionally responsible cuisine, until Story Doc had put her foot down, hired a professional chef, and banished McJohn to her office to get some typing done. The food had gotten a lot less hit-or-miss after that, and Bladewalker had to admit that having her meals taken care of had made her feel stronger, which she needed badly. "We've got a kitchen at the Center," she said, the tips of her ears growing warm. "And a cook to run it."

"Reeeeeeeeeeally," said Lorena, sitting back and folding her arms over her chest. "No more McDonald's?"

Bladewalker leaned over the table conspiratorially. "We don't use the M-word there. They'd skin me alive and nail my pelt to the barn door."

"So that's why you invented a reason to come see a buddy from the old days?"

"The old days," chuckled Bladewalker. "Three whole months ago. Not entirely. Listen... I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Sounds whipped to me," said Lorena. "Specifics?" She had an easy, fluid sense of language, a facile verbal style ideally suited to the job of a 911 operator, and she and Bladewalker had often talked through emergencies in a satisfying elliptical poetry McJohn compared to Shakespearean blank verse. Even Lorena's call reports had a rhythm and pace that made them a pleasure to read, no matter what appallingly common drunken fall or car wreck formed the desperate core of the story. It was a hell of a way to get through a "Trouble Breathing" call, but Bladewalker had cherished it then, and cherished the memory now.

"How tied are you," Bladewalker asked carefully, "to 911?"

"You mean as a profession?" Lorena asked. Bladewalker nodded, and Lorena turned her head to look out the window. "I'd have to think about it," she murmured. "It's good money, and I can see the girls to school if Mom picks them up." She thought a bit longer, and Bladewalker gave her some time. "Be nice to get off graveyards," she said, "spend some time with them when I'm not at Dispatch or going over their homework."

"Ponies," said Bladewalker instantly, "and long division."

Lorena turned her head and gave Bladewalker a quick smile. "Job interview, Blade?"

Bladewalker put her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand, meeting Lorena's eyes. "The place is 98% lesbian," she said, "and I only say 98% 'cause there's a couple I wouldn't care to ask that kind of personal question. Would that be a problem?"

"I don't know," said Lorena, batting her eyelashes in practiced fake innocence. "Would they be all up in my face wanting me to be baby mama?"

Bladewalker let loose a guffaw that raised heads from newspapers all over the diner. "I think I can say that you won't be looking at any restraining orders."

"Sounds like heaven," sighed Lorena. "Now, this place, it's up in Asheville, right?"

"Yeah," said Bladewalker. "But there's this really excellent private school for girls the Presbyterians run."

Lorena's eyebrows went up. "Private--?"

"No, no," Bladewalker said hastily, waving her hand and cursing herself for losing the thread of her sales pitch. "That goes with it, we'd take care of that, it's not a problem. Your mom would be welcome too; we've got plenty of room, and there's this senior center with bus service. We just got 'em a couple Wiis, whatever those are, and I understand the tennis-playin' old ladies are in better shape than the Marine Corps by now."

Lorena's face was bright with possibility, and clouded with a charming confusion. "What... what is it you want me to do for you?"

"Oh, right, I could've told you that, right," said Bladewalker, spreading her hands in apology. "I'm sorry, I knew I shoulda strong-armed McJohn into--"

"McJohn? Who's McJohn?"

Bladewalker hesitated, then said, "She runs the Center. I mean, the writing program. When she's not screwin' off baking sugar-free pecan pie... uh, never mind, I'm no damn good at this. What we'd need," she said, stopping for a lungful of air and to tell herself to settle the hell down, "is someone to run the place."

"You... you mean like an office manager?"

"Oh, more than that, it's everything from ridin' herd over the landscapers and construction crews to setting up the networks to running off the people who know what we're doing with the money and call to beg. Not that they don't have a good case, but we've already got a project, a big one that--"

"Whoa, whoa, slow down, there, cowpoke," said Lorena, holding up both hands. "Who's doing it now?"

"All of us," confessed Bladewalker. "Badly."

"So... this woman who runs the writing program... you're telling me there's no writing program yet, and you'd like there to be?"

"Yeah," said Bladewalker, with immense relief. "We gotta get McJohn outta that damn kitchen b'fore she poisons everybody. And that woman can spend more time talkin' Mac network specs than anyone on the planet."

"Why'd you think of me?" asked Lorena.

"'Cause you could do it," said Bladewalker stoutly. "Better'n anybody any of us could think of. It's gonna be a lot of work. And I've worked with you and I know you could."

"You're not going to a headhunter?"

"A stranger?" said Bladewalker, widening her eyes in mock horror. "You can never tell who you'll get. Some deranged loony. Some blabbermouthed drug fiend. A Republican. A Baptist."

"The horror," said Lorena with a laugh. "What's the downside?"

At least, Bladewalker was ready for this one. "I might hafta ask you," she said carefully, "to learn Greek."

"Hm." Lorena looked at the table, her face thoughtful. Then she looked up at Bladewalker, and excitement sparkled in her eyes.

Bladewalker sighed and relaxed, and the waitress came by with their breakfast, which she was able to tuck into with cheer.

* * *

WWW.PRWIRE.ORG

WOMEN'S WRITING CENTER PLANNED FOR ASHEVILLE, NC

Asheville, NC will be the site of a new center dedicated to the development of promising women writers. The Asheville Women's Writing Center, slated to open this summer, will feature writing courses, residencies and internships, and opportunities for research into the history of writing by women.

"While women have always produced poetry, songs, stories, essays, and nonfiction, support for the expression of women's experiences through the written word has historically been less than optimum," said M___ J____, leader of the Writers' Development Program at the Center. "Writing has always been a challenge, but women who write have had to do so with limited time and resources, compared to the support available to male writers. Academic writing development programs, reflecting their personnel makeup, have tended to favor male applicants and topics of interest to mainstream audiences. The AWWC will offer its support instead to the development of women writers."

The Center is located in a wooded bend of the French Broad River on a rustic 85-acre campus that formerly housed a fishing camp. Interns, residents, and visiting scholars will be housed in individual cabins featuring advanced computer networking capabilities with broad access to academic resources. "We'd like to think that, in keeping with Virginia Woolf's recommendations for supporting women who write, this certainly qualifies as a room of one's own," said S___ D___, the legal director of the Center. "While we can't provide two hundred pounds a year, we can hand them a fishing pole."

The Center will work closely with the prestigious Women's Studies Program at the University of North Carolina--Asheville (UNCA) to provide resources and encouragement to women writers. "We are particularly excited about the opportunities for cooperation with the faculty and students at UNCA," said J___. "Being able to take advantage of the top-notch scholarly and research resources of the Women's Studies Program will offer our colleagues an unprecedented opportunity to do their best work."

"The Asheville area provides a unique environment for writers and scholars of women's writing," added Lorena Dickenson, Director of the Center. "It's a diverse, vibrant, culturally rich community of artisans, craftspeople, educators, and nature-lovers sharing beautiful surroundings. Inspiration is everywhere, and we hope that our colleagues at the Center will be able to use that inspiration in the service of their own creativity."

For more information, call 828-___-____, or visit the Center's website, www.awwc.org.

* * *

WWW.PRWIRE.ORG

AWWC ANNOUNCES SPONSORSHIP OF NOVELS, NONFICTION WORKS

The Asheville Women's Writing Center of Asheville, NC today announced a major publishing event, the release of the first four books by authors working in the AWWC's Visiting Writers and Scholars program. The books, two novels and two works of nonfiction historical research, will be published simultaneously by Argo Press, a new imprint of the Women's Studies Program at the University of North Carolina--Asheville.

For Avalon, by R___ M___, is a speculative-fiction novel featuring a woman who, nearing the end of her life, is troubled by visions of a mystical island and a disturbingly familiar figure. M___ comments, "Western culture spends very little time on the experiences and accumulated wisdom of the elderly, particularly women, and I thought it would be interesting to turn an elderly woman into the hero of an adventure story."

Good v Evil, by A___ R___, is a novel exploring the intersection between insanity and power, as personified in a haunted teen and the courageous girl who befriends her. "The concept of the eternal struggle between good and evil dates to the historical rivalry between cosmopolitan, prosperous Babylon and conservative, religious Jerusalem," says R___. "It lends itself to a one-sided vision of life, one I consider simple-minded and propagandistic. I wanted to explore a more complex vision in which redemption is a matter of love."

Splitting the Tongue: Asian Women's Voices in English-Language Fiction, by C___ W___, is a survey of works by women writers of Asian ancestry writing in English. "The title is a reference to the Chinese ritual of Asian mothers nicking their infant daughters' tongues to ensure that they would grow into meek and subservient women," says W___. "It's a compelling symbol of the pressures to silence Asian women, and the authors examined in the book were doubly courageous to write at all, much less in the face of such opposition to the sounds of women's voices." The book features the first in-depth examination in over two decades of the strikingly different careers of the Eaton sisters.

Virago: Subversive Images of Strong Women in Popular Entertainment, by D___ T___, is an examination of the phenomenon of the unconventional images of femininity in mainstream popular entertainment. "The term 'virago' has come to be seen as an insult," says T___, "but the dictionary definition is 'a strong woman who is not conventionally feminine'. Given the long-standing impulse in popular entertainment toward reinforcing cultural images of what women should be, the presence, number, and vigor of subversive female characters is astonishing."

Future releases by the AWWC include Closest to My Heart, an in-depth examination of the influence of lesbian-feminist activists on the development of the political career of Eleanor Roosevelt; Warrior: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Also Cradles the Sword, a survey of the legends and reality of women warriors throughout history; The Fall, a novel of four exceptional women set against the backdrop of patriarchal religion supplanting early matriarchal communities; and Tales from the Tavern Wall, a collection of stories from one of the Web's premiere locations for fiction about strong women.

The AWWC is dedicated to the support of women writers and scholars. For more information, call 828-___-____, or visit the Center's website, www.awwc.org.

* * *

WWW.PRWIRE.ORG

AWWC PROVIDING TECHNOLOGY ASSISTANCE TO CHINESE HOME OF NU SHU

The Asheville Women's Writing Center of Asheville, NC has announced a new project to provide the world home of a unique women's language with advanced technology. The Center is to supply Shangjiangxu, a remote village in the People's Republic of China, with computers, satellite dishes, and imaging equipment to further the scholarship of Nu Shu, a unique written language invented and used by women.

"The AWWC is dedicated to the development of women's voices," said Center Director Lorena Dickenson. "Nu Shu is a rare and fascinating example of the impulse toward self-expression among a community of women who were excluded from traditional scholarship."

Historians trace the development of Nu Shu to the rise of the Han Dynasty, when women from the Yao people maintained written contact with women friends and female family members after their marriages into Han society. Nu Shu is a streamlined version of the more conventional Hanzi orthography used to record Mandarin and Cantonese correspondence.

"Scholarship into Nu Shu has been hampered by the loss of its last native practitioners, as well as the rarity of examples of the script and the scarcity of scholars of women's writing," says Dickenson. "The AWWC is honored to offer these resources in support of research into this unique cultural treasure."

The AWWC is dedicated to the support of women writers and scholars. For more information, call 828-___-____, or visit the Center's website, www.awwc.org.

* * *

The meeting was half over by the time JLynn was able to get away from her testing. "Sorry," she murmured, slipping in through the door of the conference room.

"No sweat," said McJohn. "We were just about to get to you."

JLynn took her seat with a grateful sigh. "Just put up the stats."

"Thanks," said McJohn, turning to Lorena. "Now, what was this Donna asked you?"

"She wanted to know," Lorena replied, "if we could extend the smoking section of the trail all the way down to the water."

"Butts in the Broad?" RangerGrrl asked. "John Muir would have a fit."

"And fits from the Beyond are twice as tough to exorcise," remarked Story Doc over the conference phone.

"You can't stop 'em from smoking," Bladewalker pointed out. "This here's No'th Ca'lina."

"There are already three smoking cabins on campus," Blackie said, fiddling with a pencil. "The ventilation on those three is top of the mark. Smoking indoors is a luxury any more. There's hardly a hotel left in Asheville that has a smoking room. And now they want to be able to smoke on the trail?"

"It wasn't a demand, she just asked," Lorena said with a smile. "We do encourage them to ask."

"I understand that," Blackie replied. "But Asheville's growing like a weed, and that's already stressing the environment."

"Can she go take a walk to Sharon's cabin and have a nicotine break when she gets there?" asked Bladewalker.

"There'd be blood on the trail by morning," JLynn said.

"If they didn't start an affair," Blackie said, and she and JLynn grinned at one another.

"This one's tough," sighed McJohn. "I can see it from both sides."

"Look," said the conference phone, "I'm the last person on the planet to tell a smoker to suck it up and not suck it up. If Donna wants to be able to smoke outdoors, she's got to find a spot that won't interfere with the residents who don't."

"Plus it's really close to the woods," RangerGrrl said.

"There's that," said McJohn. "Even if you put up sand trays every six feet, it still isn't safe. And I don't know that there is another place. What do you think, Blade?"

"I hate tellin' residents they can't take a walk without giving up something they love," said Bladewalker, "but I don't see a way we can accommodate her just now. Let's ask Samantha back in to see if she can figure something out."

"More concrete," groaned Blackie. "Another building."

"Not necessarily," RangerGrrl assured her. "She did a great job with the recycler."

"Nature's Mama Bear," said McJohn with a smile. "Blackie, I am so glad you guys decided to move here. I'll call Samantha--"

"No, you won't," said Bladewalker, Lorena, and the conference phone.

"Lorena will call Samantha," said McJohn, "and I'll go slip my feet back into the leg irons."

"Uh-uh, you don't get to play till the curriculum's done," said Bladewalker.

"Where do they get these ideas?" McJohn asked the conference phone.

"Must be all that screaming," replied Story Doc in a bland tone.

"Braggart," said Lorena absently, making a note on her padfolio. "JLynn, your turn."

"Got the stats here," said JLynn, reaching for Lorena's laptop and using it to open a file. They turned their attention to the display panel at the end of the room. "Story Doc, you with us?"

"Yes, that looks good."

"The Shangjiangxu link's been live without a break for twenty-eight hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty-eight seconds."

"She's good," said Blackie to RangerGrrl.

"It's on the bottom of the screen," said Bladewalker, gesturing with her pen.

"We've transmitted and retransmitted the test file a total of... well, you'll see the counter running, but it's about forty-five thousand times. Loss-free."

"How 'bout the automation?" asked McJohn.

"Solid," shrugged JLynn. "They just have to load any files they want to send into a defined subdirectory on the server and it splits 'em into packets and converts the packets into a data stream."

"And you were worried about translating Greek," commented the conference phone.

"Thereby making them easy to encrypt," said RangerGrrl.

"And if they can be encrypted..." Bladewalker said.

"They can be camouflaged," finished Lorena.

"Sounds like they're ready to go," said McJohn, smiling at JLynn. "Well done. Thank you."

"And in a related development," Lorena said, "our newest staff member will be joining us Tuesday."

"We got a yes?" RangerGrrl asked.

"We got a yes," Bladewalker confirmed.

"Good," said Blackie. "'Bout time."

"So this time next week," Lorena said, "Bladewalker, McJohn, and I will be in our very first class in classical Greek."

"On the other side of the chalk, for once," said Bladewalker to McJohn.

"Don't remind me," groaned McJohn.

* * *

Scholarship, scholars agree in principle, should be pure, open to the most capable and free to follow promising inquiries wherever they might lead. In practice, that noble idea is nearly nonexistent. Once you fought through the thicket of who was qualified to claim the few slots in the limited pool of academic appointments, there were continual battles over whom to appoint, with the plum assignments always seeming to go, first and depressingly, to straight white males, then to the women they'd talked into extramarital affairs, and if anything was left over, to buddies, relatives, and the department's long-retired secretary's feeble-minded great-nephew.

By the time you got down to gays and lesbians, the pickings were slim, and lower still on the totem pole were people who, like Dr. Fisscher, had done an initial doctoral dissertation on the relevance of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth to gender minorities. It had been a battle to get the topic accepted at all, and Dr. Fisscher thought that was the end of it; when the finished product was rejected during orals (something none of the librarians could ever remember happening), it meant starting over, this time with a safer topic. The result, a rehash of the geopolitical/historical significance of Paul's choices of which congregations to support and which to ignore, was capably researched, adequately written, impressively edited, and appallingly dull.

It was the sort of dissertation that the Southern Baptists would have embraced, but then the Southern Baptists would have had to become a great deal more accepting to offer Dr. Fisscher a post, and this, of course, was something the world could have waited a long, long time to see. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Dr. Fisscher's financial support came from tutoring far less well educated seminarians headed for glorious careers in pulpits all over the world, path smoothed by reassuringly recognizable category signposts it never occurred to them to question, even after meeting someone who so profoundly transgressed them all.

The first indication that things might be a bit different with the AWWC was an e-mail Dr. Fisscher got from the director of the Center. The head of the writing program noted from your CV that you've published a couple of articles in the Gender Identity Quarterly, and she suggested that I check with you on preferred pronouns.

Nobody, to Dr. Fisscher's recollection, had ever asked a question like that, much less after picking up a subtle clue like a choice of publication. With a distinct sense of pleasure, Dr. Fisscher sat down at the Dell to compose a roomy reply.

First of all, thank you for your consideration, and please thank Ms. J___ for thinking of it. Virtually every human language has a gender lock--including Greek, by the way--and getting beyond that isn't easy.

Selecting a third-person pronoun to use in speech isn't necessary, strictly speaking, as so few people use it to describe someone who's in the room, and who cares what anyone calls you when you're not there to hear it? Writing (as I'm certain you've discovered in a number of other contexts) is the challenge.

I vastly prefer prose in which the writer skips the third person entirely, but that's not always convenient or simple. In English, the choices are between neologisms and antiquities. The three most common neologisms are the pronoun 'sie' (which may or may not be borrowed from German) and the possessive 'hir'; the pronoun/possessive pair 'ze' and 'zir'; and the word 'per' (abbreviated from 'person') for the pronoun (both subject and object) and its possessive.

Those, however, are neologisms, and I'm a classicist. I'd rather borrow from Edgar's rustic in Lear and return to the past. Middle English once had a perfectly serviceable gender-neutral pronoun: ou, as in, "Did you see Edgar this morning? Ou had on a really nice shirt." The object and possessive forms of this pronoun are still being sought, but since using 'our' for either would tend to lead to confusion, I think 'oum' makes a great object case and 'oun' a terrific possessive.

If that's too burdensome, then please accept my thanks for the question and select whichever approach suits you best.

The answer was swift, collegial, and warm:

Dr. Fisscher:

Thanks for taking the time to explain about the pronouns. I have to say that, honestly, it's not an issue I ever thought much about, but I'm learning a lot of new things lately, specifically about how to demonstrate respect for diversity, and appreciate you taking an ignorant question seriously.

I got curious after your e-mail and spent lunch researching the question of the gender-neutral pronoun in English. It turns out that the epicene question has been around for a lot longer than I thought--I was under the impression that I was the only one who ever wondered why we didn't have one. It seems like it would come in pretty handy.

As long as I was Googling anyway, I also took the liberty to check out some of the descriptions of Greek grammar. Three genders. Even for stuff like tables and shoes. Terrific. I'm in for it. I hope you'll go easy on me; it will be my first foreign language, and McJohn says it's far from a simple one.

Speaking of whom, she got very excited at your e-mail and would have sent you one that was just as well-reasoned and informative, but we've had to put a hold on any recreational correspondence until she finishes up a couple of other projects. (With two linguists on staff, I can see that the conversation will always be lively and educational, but I'm wondering whether we'll get anything done.) She's looking forward to meeting and working with you, as am I.

Regards,

Lorena Dickenson

Director, AWWC

P.S. Thought this might come in handy, too. Attached is a list of professional services in our area for transgendered folks, including medical resources and support groups. We have a great group here called Phoenix; it has over 200 members now, the Executive Director tells me. They're not real thrilled that the city's nickname is "She-ville", but progress rarely leaps, does it?

Four days after receiving that e-mail, Dr. Fisscher zipped oun last suitcase and sat down with a copy of Addison's Classical Greek Grammar, Ed. 7 to wait for the cab that would take oum to the airport.

* * *

They had stopped Dr. Fisscher at Security, which was a reminder, as well as an explanation, of why ou didn't much care for air travel. It was always that damn driver's license, the profound disconnect between the only two choices allowed and what the screener saw looking up from the little plastic card. Then it was the inevitable hesitation over whether to use a male or female screener for the frisk job, along with removing oun shoes (what the hell did they sniff them for, anyway, residue from a prayer rug in a mosque?), then the frustrating exercise of trying to explain identity politics in thirty seconds to the self-righteous, willfully ignorant skeptics of the TSA. All because "GQ" wasn't an option for that damn checkbox, still called "Sex" after all this time and all that research. "GQ" had a nice dash of worldliness; it would have been a matter of pride to carry a hunk of plastic that said that.

The nerve-jangling time in Security was somewhat mitigated when the gate attendant, a lovely dark-eyed Asian woman, smiled as she scanned Dr. Fisscher's boarding pass and said, "Thank you, sir. Have a nice flight."

Addison's occupied oum for the first hour or so of the flight. Ms. Dickenson sounded bright, capable, and curious, exactly the sort of student Dr. Fisscher found so delightful. The other two pupils, Bladewalker and McJohn, were unknown quantities, although they seemed to handle themselves relatively well in English. Perhaps Greek wouldn't be that much of a challenge, but then again, their age was against them. Dr. Fisscher asked ouself for the thousandth time why three people at a lesbian writers' center in the Carolinas had such a pressing need to learn Greek, and why they hadn't gotten a lesbian professor--ou could think of several--to handle the job.

They'd offered a two-year contract, to be paid whether Dr. Fisscher remained or not. It was breathtaking. Audacious. Worrisome. Dr. Fisscher had signed it anyway; it was far more money than ou had ever been offered for a job. Although it was really not a secret where they'd gotten the money to start the Center--and ou was impressed with the initiative and sense of true servant leadership it took to do that instead of buying a yacht or moving to Malibu--that still didn't go far enough toward penetrating the mystery of their single-minded pursuit of a scholar of classical Greek.

Around oum, travelers plugged into iPods or worked on tablets: presentations, meetings, interacts, analyses, songs, stories. Dr. Fisscher had one battered book. Old-fashioned. Traditional. Impoverished, which was the real explanation. Ou hadn't even been able to get a converter box, much less a hi-def TV, so oun choices in televised entertainment were limited to VHS tapes and DVDs, of which ou had a considerable collection as friends and acquaintances dumped all that old technology and embraced the implications of NetWork. That wasn't half bad, though; ou had a Xena collection that was pretty damned impressive for anyone, much less a half-starved scholar.

It would have been a comfort to have it with oum. Unfortunately, it was staying home until Dr. Fisscher was able to gauge whether or not oun presence at the Center would last longer than a week. Something about this was definitely nerve-wracking, and ou couldn't quite put a phalanx on what it was.

The plane banked, and Dr. Fisscher looked up from Addison's to a quilt of dark green vegetation stitched together with blue rivers. Ou leaned forward to take a closer look. Hilly. Row after row of peaceable-looking hills stretching into the distance, growing bluer and bluer as they went, interspersed here and there with evidence of human habitation: little patchwork towns, industrial parks, farms. Tiny cars flashed in the sunlight, traveling minuscule threads of blacktop. Somewhere down there was an old fishing camp, and somewhere at that camp, perhaps, might be destiny itself.

* * *

Charlotte, despite the laid-back name and its location in the drawly, temperate region of the country, proved anything but calm: travelers bustled and employees hurried and announcements echoed through the terminal. Dr. Fisscher, carried along by the impetus, found oun steps moving with more purpose. Ou scanned the crowd, looking for someone who might look like she belonged to a lesbian writers' center. As it turned out, she was the only person in the entire airport who looked like she had all the time in the world, and she unfolded herself from an energy-sparing lean against the wall, taking her hands from her pockets and stepping forward for a handclasp.

"Dr. Fisscher?" said the woman. Dr. Fisscher nodded, not without an abrupt increase in heart rhythm, and the woman said, "Welcome to Charlotte. I'm Bladewalker."

Collecting luggage took them some time, and Bladewalker handled it with a low-key efficiency that tempted Dr. Fisscher toward some inexplicable, absurd attempt to assert oun own competence. They made their way to the garage, Bladewalker handling two heavy bags without fuss, Dr. Fisscher doing the same.

She drove a pickup. Of course. They stowed the luggage in the bed, Bladewalker covering it securely with a waterproof tarp and strapping it in with some effective-looking bungees. Dr. Fisscher settled into the passenger seat and buckled the seat belt as Bladewalker swung herself into place behind the wheel. They left the garage and picked up a freeway, which, Dr. Fisscher was intrigued to see, was freshly blacktopped.

Bladewalker offered a choice of radio stations, and Dr. Fisscher, not having much of a preference, told her that whatever she chose was fine. She hit the button, and, unexpectedly, Dr. Fisscher found ouself in the middle of a rousing live performance of the "Habanera" from Carmen.

"Lorena and McJohn," said Bladewalker, "are looking forward to meeting you."

"Likewise," said Dr. Fisscher. "I was hoping they'd be able to get away to the airport."

Bladewalker smiled briefly into the driver's side mirror. "I'm pretty much the only one with any free time at the moment," she said, changing lanes. "They do all the heavy lifting and ask me in to sign checks." She had beautiful silver hair and the kind of blue eyes that could arrest your attention from across the street. She was wearing jeans, Ropers, and a sober plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms. Dr. Fisscher wondered if she had a can of chaw in her back pocket. The radio station must've been intended to make a favorable impression.

"So is this a lifelong dream of yours?" Dr. Fisscher asked, mostly making conversation.

Bladewalker shook her head and reached up to adjust the rear-view mirror slightly. "Just since people started writin' stuff I was interested in reading," she said. "And I had to wade through a lot of crap before I found the Tavern Wall. I wanted to be able to tell 'em all to quit doin' whatever they were doin' for a living and write full time."

"And then it happened," remarked Dr. Fisscher, interested despite ouself.

"And then it happened," said Bladewalker, but not as if this were any sort of a big deal; mere agreeable confirmation.

I don't know how I'd react to winning the Powerball, Dr. Fisscher thought, but I don't think I'd be so matter of fact about it. "So now," ou ventured cautiously, "you're learning Greek."

"Yeah." Bladewalker raised her eyebrows and blew out a little sigh. "That's gonna be fun. I don't know how it'll go. I haven't touched it in three decades."

"Excuse me?" asked Dr. Fisscher, startled.

"Last time I studied Greek," said Bladewalker, "was in college."

"You... you already speak it?"

"'Speak' is a bit ambitious," replied the woman Dr. Fisscher would not have been able to distinguish from a farm hand. "I got pretty good at readin' it, but that was a long time ago."

Dr. Fisscher groped for something to say. "What about Ms. Dickenson and McJohn?"

"Newbies," Bladewalker said with a grin. "They've spent two weeks practicin' the alphabet to get a jump on it. They recite it to one another at the breakfast table, 'bout ninety miles an hour. Even the girls are pickin' it up. It's pretty funny."

"And the girls would be...?"

"Lorena's kids," said Bladewalker. Dr. Fisscher felt an immediate flash of disappointment. "Charity and Faith. They're nine. Char wants to be a vet and I think Fee's lookin' to prove Einstein wrong about somethin', not that I can follow what it is."

"Maybe they ought to learn Greek," said Dr. Fisscher.

"I hope they will," said Bladewalker, with every indication of seriousness.

It burst out of Dr. Fisscher before ou could stop ouself. "Why?"

Bladewalker glanced at oum sideways, a warm, nonjudgmental amusem*nt in her blue eyes. "Every educated person ought to be able to speak Greek," she said. "Don't you agree?"

It sounded like a challenge, and something about it put Dr. Fisscher off stride. "Well," ou said carefully, "it would make the world safer for scholars..."

"I wish somethin' would," said Bladewalker.

They turned west onto another freeway, headed for somewhere called Belmont, and Dr. Fisscher murmured, "Portia's seat."

Ou was surprised when Bladewalker burst into a guffaw. "That's exactly what McJohn said first time she saw that sign. You're gonna get along like Carolina and Blonde."

"That's a good thing, I take it?" Dr. Fisscher asked carefully.

"Absolutely," said Bladewalker. "It means I've got somebody else to send to Shakespeare in the Park."

The longer the drive went on, the more hilly the landscape became, inspiring rural vista succeeding inspiring rural vista until it was a letdown to see the road widen into a town. The towns themselves were tantalizing hints in the mundane lettering of the freeway signs: Goshen Grove. Catawba Heights. Spencer Mountain. Crowders Mountain. Caroleen. Frog Level. Spindale. Cleghorn Plantation. Pea Ridge. Burnt Chimney Corner. Buckeye Ford. East Flat Rock. Upward. Sunny View. Lake Lure. Chimney Rock. Bat Cave. Bearwallow. Flat Top.

"Lot of movies shot around here," Bladewalker commented.

"I'm beginning to wonder why all of them weren't," said Dr. Fisscher.

They skirted Asheville proper, and Bladewalker turned off the freeway down a road that narrowed progressively to a two-lane meander through thick green woods. Water sparkled here and there through the trees. Every once in a while, Dr. Fisscher could see a building set into the greenery, but the impulse to build for the retreating city crowds seemed to have skipped this area. It seemed like a peaceful place, the kind of place where you could wander through lovely landscapes thinking deep thoughts until the time came to return to your desk and write them down.

Bladewalker rolled down her window, and a fresh, wild breeze, scented with evergreen and sleepy with birdsong, rolled into the cab of the truck. A few minutes after that, she slowed the truck and pulled into a well-kept driveway past a sign that said merely, in stone letters on a stone slab, "AWWC".

The road took its leisurely course past streams and rocky outcrops to a low dark-gray building with long windows. It nearly disappeared into a thick stand of trees that surrounded it, and a ledge fell off just beyond the end of the building, to where a lazy little creek sparkled in the sunlight filtering through the branches. Bladewalker switched off the truck, and Dr. Fisscher unbuckled the seat belt, opened the door, and alighted onto the pavement, getting a lungful of pure, tree-scented air. The twittering and chirps of innumerable birds mingled with the chatter and gurgle of the water, and then Dr. Fisscher heard another sound that seemed to fit: running footsteps, and a pair of young voices crying, "Blade! Blade's back!"

Dr. Fisscher turned, and two little girls were barreling toward the driver, who caught the first and swung her up into her arms with a somewhat labored laugh. The other grabbed Bladewalker's elbow and gazed up at her adoringly with a face that was as alike as her sister's as could be.

Twins, thought Dr. Fisscher.

"All right, you barbarians," called a commanding voice, and a young woman walked around the side of the building. "Leave Blade alone, she's been all the way to Charlotte and back today."

She was notably self-assured, moving with grace and purpose down the steps toward the driveway. She was wearing a business suit in blue pinstripes, and her dark, intelligent eyes reminded Dr. Fisscher of a doe's. Right then, they were trained on Dr. Fisscher, who wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of oun life with those eyes looking at oum.

"They're all right, Lorena," said Blade, lowering one twin to the ground and picking up the other.

"You didn't take us," pouted the twin in Bladewalker's arms.

"You had school," pointed out the young woman.

"I'd'a let you play hooky," said Bladewalker, "but the only way we'd've all fit in the truck is if I sat in the back."

"We could drive for you," said the other twin.

"I b'lieve you would," said Bladewalker, grinning. The twins' mother had reached the truck, and she looked up at Dr. Fisscher with concentrated, unselfconscious attention. "Lorena Dickenson," said Bladewalker, "this is Dr. Fisscher."

"Pleasure," she murmured, reaching for Dr. Fisscher's hand.

Dr Fisscher took her hand, which was warm and strong. "Likewise. Thank you for getting me here."

"I wouldn't have missed it," she said, still looking up into oun face. She sounded utterly sincere.

* * *

The place was beautiful, the food stupendous, the acceptance instant. That first night, after supper, Dr. Fisscher left oun cabin (which was clean, snug and cheery) and went for a long ramble down the path that led to the river. Subtle path lights let oum wander free of risk, without obscuring the brilliance of the stars overhead. The air was alive with the sounds of night insects. Back home, there was still snow on the ground. Here, it didn't seem as though that was going to happen very often.

It felt freeing, and Dr. Fisscher allowed ouself a moment to fantasize. Suppose this, right here, was the promised land? Could it really be that way? These people didn't seem to care about anything other than oun skills in Greek. It hadn't seemed like the right time to inquire about their opinions of gender, but the sense of being part of a... of a family, that was really the idea, was a powerful draw.

There was a long, cozy table on the enclosed porch of the converted house they used as the office, computer center, and kitchen, and many of the residents had gathered for supper as the sun went down. The porch was bordered on three sides by expansive picture windows looking out over the ravine with the creek at the bottom. The wall at the side of the house had two long sideboards covered with dishes, and the porch was fragrant with the steam emerging from the lids pried up by the curious. The table was set simply, but lit with four branching candlesticks set at intervals.

As people came in, they issued a general greeting and then went to the sideboards to help serve. Dr. Fisscher started in to help, but Ms. Dickenson pointed out that ou'd had a long trip and might be more comfortable just settling in at the table. Ou wondered briefly if this was a form of segregation--not touching their food--but then Ms. Dickenson assured oum with a laugh that ou'd be drafted into waiting tables soon enough. Dr. Fisscher took the seat she indicated, finding that her detailed pre-arrival questionnaire had resulted, with admirable consideration, in a glass of iced tea and a few packets of sweetener.

It felt peaceful, no one tense or attitudinous, residents juggling bowls to shake Dr. Fisscher's hand and say welcome. It was a bit dizzying to meet so many people ou had known for years as electronic presences: RangerGrrl, Blackie, JLynn, a vivacious blonde who could only have been AngelRad, and was. A couple of them seemed preoccupied, and Bladewalker pointed out in a low voice which ones were working on projects. Not all of them were at supper; some took their meals back to their cabins (including, Dr. Fisscher gathered, Ms. Dickenson's mother), and a few did their own cooking. That didn't seem to bother anyone. The kids sat between their mother and Bladewalker. Ms. Dickenson scanned the table and hauled out a cellphone. "Lock that damn thing," she announced without preamble, "and get the wife. You've got guests."

"Sorry," said a hasty, apologetic voice Dr. Fisscher could hear. "Be right there."

Seconds later, Dr. Fisscher heard footsteps, and two women walked onto the porch. They both had short silvery-gray hair like Bladewalker's, but one of them looked like she'd seen tough times and had come to this place to rest up.

"Dr. Fisscher," said the other with warmth, putting out a hand as Dr. Fisscher got to oun feet. "Welcome to the Center. I'm McJohn, and this is Story Doc."

Dr Fisscher took their hands in turns, remarking to Story Doc, "Also known as Wonder Woman?"

"She makes stuff up," replied Story Doc, "but I don't really want her to stop." Dr. Fisscher liked her immediately.

"I'm sorry we couldn't meet you at the airport," said McJohn, sitting at Dr. Fisscher's right, "but the deadlines here are worse than the Trib, and it gave you the perfect welcoming committee."

"I understand," said Dr. Fisscher. "Bladewalker took good care of me."

"Care to join us for grace?" Ms. Dickenson asked, looking directly at Dr. Fisscher. It took oum a moment to understand, but eventually ou made some gesture of assent, and all of them joined hands. Ou reached for McJohn's hand on one side and Bladewalker's on the other. A woman at the end of the table said a few words about the Creator Spirit and a general appreciation for blessings. It was over in moments, and Dr. Fisscher was caught off guard again. Were any of them Christians?

The conversation had spun into a discussion of Homer before ou could make any subtle inquiries. Ou seemed to have gotten there in mid-argument. It seemed fairly obvious, asserted a woman whose name was Donna, that while only a man could have written Iliad, only a woman could have written Odyssey.

"What makes you think women can't write about war," asked RangerGrrl, "and a man about weaving?"

"Yeah," said Blackie. "Textiles bore me silly, but stick a sword in some chick's hand, and I'm there!"

"There aren't any 'armed chicks' in Homer," said McJohn with a grin.

"Teeny-tiny little audience," added Story Doc. "A fraction of nothing, ratings-wise."

"But definitely the kind of folks you want as houseguests," said Bladewalker. She and McJohn exchanged a quick smile.

They had solicited Dr. Fisscher's opinion once or twice, and ou wondered if they'd started the conversation for oun benefit, as a welcome. It was a little off-putting, the assumption that Homer had to be either a man or a woman, but then again, it wasn't anything Dr. Fisscher wasn't wearyingly familiar with. As it was, the discussion took some twists that were difficult to follow, especially when ou would catch Ms. Dickenson's soft, dark eyes in the candlelight. Ou found ouself waiting for her to smile, to laugh. She had beautiful dimples in her cheeks and a laugh that was simultaneously hearty and shy. The prospect of facing that in a classroom twice a day didn't seem as though it would take much in the way of endurance.

After dessert, Ms. Dickenson and the twins joined most of the rest of them in the kitchen to do dishes, and McJohn was ordered back to her office by a chorus of voices. She shrugged with a smile and welcomed Dr. Fisscher again, then returned to her desk.

Supper left Dr. Fisscher with more questions than answers, and the walk was a good chance to mull. Surely they hadn't needed oum to decipher Homer's gender. And how could someone without enough free time for an airport run possibly muster the resources to learn Greek? And why did the director of the Center, the director of the writing program, and the owner of the place need to know it, anyway?

A rhythmic shh-shh-shh along the path alerted Dr. Fisscher to something not insect-sized approaching, and when the jogger appeared around the bend in the path, ou nodded politely, getting a nod in return. When the jogger had passed, Dr. Fisscher was alone again with the chirping of the insects.

Ou stopped, stuck oun hands in oun pockets, and looked around. The trees were soft, protective shapes, darker outlines against the dark, and the stars blazed coldly brilliant this far from the light pollution that had taken over the continent. In the distance, the hills went mountainous; nearer in, the river caught glimmers of starlight and the occasional waveborne gleam of a dockside light.

There might be a bridge around here. Some kind of picturesque sort of wooden structure, hung with ivy, arching over a clear stream that dimpled and glittered over millennium-old water-smoothed rocks. The kind of place one could go walking. Perhaps at the side of a doe-eyed business-suited mother of twins, a lady whose own dimples were already distracting.

Dr. Fisscher chuckled at ouself, turned, and ambled back to the cabin. There were notes to put in order, friends to call, a laptop to learn how to connect to the network. And in two days, oun first class in Greek for an exclusive clientele of three.

* * *

The first week was everything Dr. Fisscher could have hoped for: three attentive students, all of whom had keen minds and an obvious, if somewhat puzzling, dedication to learning. They met twice a day in the conference room at the back of the main building, where Dr. Fisscher could look over the heads of oun students into a lovely stretch of sun-dappled woods through the picture windows. Once, during their first detailed discussion of verb conjugations, Dr. Fisscher's attention was captured by a movement that turned out to be a doe and her fawn quietly cropping the grass on the lawn, delicate necks stretched toward the ground, delicate legs balancing their torsos, delicate muzzles nibbling little blades.

Ou found that, contrary to expectation, Bladewalker was the quietest of the three, absorbing the information without comment until she was asked to repeat it. Ms. Dickenson, soft-spoken and respectful, asked a lot of questions, her eagerness to learn apparent in every inquiry.

McJohn was another matter. After four sessions, Dr. Fisscher had formed an assessment that she was stubborn, headstrong, opinionated, and convinced of her infallibility. Ou had to admit that she was bright and caught on quickly, that she was right more often than not, and that her challenges were not directed at oun authority, but to the topic at hand; that didn't help oum deal with the countless interruptions, demands for detailed explanations of advanced grammatical points, and debates on linguistics. While neither Bladewalker nor Ms. Dickenson appeared impatient at the digressions, Dr. Fisscher came to see them as the only disruptions in an otherwise pleasant project.

It made it difficult to gather oun thoughts and return to the lesson, and it generally required a couple of minutes to get back on track. This didn't seem to be a problem for the class, but it definitely turned into a problem for Dr. Fisscher. They had a lot of work to do, and it was already apparent that this was going to be the fastest-paced, most complex teaching job of oun career.

The combination of the intensity and speed of the teaching, and the willingness of the class to let McJohn waste endless amounts of time in the dogged pursuit of minutiae, made oum wonder over and over just what the hell ou was doing in this luxurious classroom teaching Greek, of all exotic things, to three people who had a writing center to run. McJohn was the ostensible director of the Center's writing program, but days had gone by and Dr. Fisscher still hadn't seen an iota of evidence that there actually was one. Ou never saw her, except at class or during meals, and not always at the latter; she seemed to live in her office, to which Ms. Dickenson and Bladewalker would banish her at the slightest hint of distraction from the task at hand. In fact, the only place they gave her free rein was in oun class, and ou resented being the designated steam valve.

Half the time, she hadn't completed her assignments, and Dr. Fisscher got the impression that the others couldn't have cared less. Not doing her homework didn't appear to slow her down any; at the end of the second week, McJohn began to ask questions in Greek. By the middle of the fourth week, she was arguing with oum in Greek, and in an accent as precise as that of the classics professors who'd taught oum originally (although her vocabulary was still as primitive as her handwriting). It meant slowing down even more to make certain they weren't leaving Bladewalker and Ms. Dickenson behind. They seemed entirely willing to indulge McJohn's whims, and Dr. Fisscher began to pick up little clues from that, especially in the interaction between McJohn and Bladewalker.

It got worse the week that Bladewalker and Story Doc went to New York on a business trip. Bladewalker, Dr. Fisscher discovered, acted as a brake on McJohn's less noble impulses; with her gone, McJohn tipped right over the line from handful of smartass into self-indulgent snot.

They were to the point of discussing conditionals, of which McJohn already had a solid grasp, not that her getting to a topic two sessions before Dr. Fisscher introduced it formally was a surprise by then.

"May I get a definition of 'conditional'?" asked Ms. Dickenson.

"A 'conditional'," explained Dr. Fisscher, "is a grammatical method of speculating about future, possible, imaginary, or nonexistent events."

Ms. Dickenson looked a bit lost, and McJohn grinned up at her from her battered, highlighted, annotated Addison's. "Woulda, shoulda, Prada," she said, and Ms. Dickenson's answering grin looked like they were protecting a secret they had no intention of sharing with oum.

"Got it," said Ms. Dickenson, making a note in her notebook.

"There's an excellent example in the Gospel of Mark--" began Dr. Fisscher.

"Everyone's favorite junk Greek stylist," muttered McJohn absently, making a note in her book in tiny Greek letters. Ms. Dickenson chuckled and turned her attention to Dr. Fisscher, whose face was growing warm.

"Perhaps St. Paul would suit better?" inquired Dr. Fisscher in a polite voice thickly o'erspread with sarcasm.

"Oh, please allow me," said McJohn in Greek. "If we were to continue to allow women to participate as full members of the Church, the world would come to an end."

It was openly challenging, and rude to boot, and Dr. Fisscher was completely unable to find a mistake in it anywhere, which was twice as infuriating. "I take it you'd prefer an extra-Biblical example, McJohn?"

She clasped her hands together like a silent-movie actor and mouthed, "Please."

"Very well," ou said, turning to the board and writing a sentence rapidly in Greek. The room fell silent, and Dr. Fisscher turned back to see not what ou had expected (a student who was finally ready to shut up and let oum teach), but a livid anger smoldering in McJohn's face. Ms. Dickenson was trying to puzzle out what ou'd written, a little line between her eyes.

"Let's take a walk, Doctor," said McJohn decisively, getting to her feet.

"Thank you," Dr. Fisscher said, with an absurd little bow, "but I think I'd better go back to my cabin and make a reservation for a flight."

Ms. Dickenson stood up. Her confused expression went to alarm in an instant, which was nice to see, but it was a little too late to change oun mind.

"Evidently, you mistook that for an invitation," said McJohn. She had her fist clenched around her pen, and ou could tell that she was making an effort, probably to avoid wiping the floor with her Greek tutor. "Let's go."

"Excuse us, will you?" said Dr. Fisscher to Ms. Dickenson.

"Erase that, would you?" asked McJohn civilly enough, nodding to the sentence on the board. Ms. Dickenson didn't answer right away, and McJohn added, "Blade's conferencing in in an hour. I don't want her to see it."

"Okay," said Ms. Dickenson, moving to the board and picking up the eraser.

McJohn preceded oum out of the classroom, stalking down the path on the other side of the driveway, head down. The set of her shoulders radiated fury.

Well, Dr. Fisscher thought, No matter the provocation, it's not like you haven't earned a tongue-lashing. Just put up with her ranting five more minutes and you can be home tomorrow.

She stopped out of sight of the main building and rounded on oum. "Do you have any idea," she said, "of the kind of damage you can do this place with an unsupported accusation like that?"

"Is it unsupported?" ou asked insolently.

"I owe the answer to that question to two people on this planet," she said, "and you are not one of them."

"I'm not the one for a lot of things," ou retorted, growing angry in turn. "This was obviously a mistake, and I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"You consider teaching me Greek a waste of time?" she shot back, in flawless Greek.

"Quit showing off," Dr. Fisscher snapped, in English. "So you're gifted with learning languages. It's rare. Big deal. You ought to take a swing at behaving in a civil manner some time; now, that might present a challenge."

"Excuse me," she said in English, "for not genuflecting to the professor on a regular basis." She made a mocking bow. "I didn't realize you were so insecure that I needed to."

"You think I give a damn whether you worship me the way your girlfriend worships you?" ou said, reckless now that there was nothing left to lose. "I haven't got a mistress, and I damn sure haven't got the money to buy her a play-pretend school." She was about to shout oum down, but ou went on, "This may be a vanity project for you, but every time you open your mouth, you break everyone else's concentration."

"That's not true," she said.

"Are you certain? Just because you can pick up things without continuity? Everybody can do that?"

She looked away into the woods.

"When we left, Ms. Dickenson was still trying to read the board," ou pointed out.

Her eyes snapped back to oun face. "Goddess be praised that she couldn't," she said.

"And I haven't even mentioned your anti-Christian bias," ou went on, "but now that you've brought it up--"

"I am not--"

"Now you're going to deny that too, I suppose--"

"I wasn't finished." She folded her arms over her breasts. "If I could have been permitted to finish my sentence, I was going to say that I am in no way restricting your practice of your religion."

"And the constant insults?" Dr. Fisscher was goading her, and knew it.

She sighed, her frustration evident. "Find a woman something to respond to in the philosophy that started the Crusades and the Inquisition and has no use for fa*ggots except to burn Joan of Arc."

"So you have a problem with Catholics--"

"And your little friends the Episcopalians?" she interrupted. "Let me see, didn't Henry VIII start that little party because the Pope wouldn't let him get divorced to marry the woman he had the hots for?"

"The ones who ordained the gay bishop," ou corrected.

"Yeah?" she said. "The reason half of Africa left to start their own churches? So much for your boy preaching tolerance. Speaking of which, let's start in on the Southern Baptists. Or are they too easy a target?"

Dr. Fisscher was out of patience. "So you'd be willing to behave yourself in class as long as we didn't use any examples from the best-known Greek text in the world?"

"Try that one on Aristophanes," she retorted.

"You've got a hand with a one-liner, I'll give you that," said Dr. Fisscher.

She chortled, but without pleasure. "You ought to try arguing with Story Doc."

"I'm not that stupid," ou said.

"Wise of you."

She seemed a little less angry now, and it made oum oddly relieved. Ou made a conciliatory gesture and asked, "So what would you prefer?"

She thought for a moment. "The Trojan Women."

"Right, have the class go suicidal." Ou snorted in derision. "Again with the women. For a non-biased person, you have a lot of prejudices."

"It may have escaped your notice," she said through her teeth, "that this is a women's writing center."

"Provided you ever do any writing," ou said. "Do you ever intend to go back to it, or are you just going to engage in recreational torture of a succession of Greek tutors for the rest of your life?"

"You don't get it," she said in a low voice. "Yeah, I've been something of a brat, I'll admit it. But I told myself years ago I was never going to set foot in a classroom again unless I was on the other side of the chalk. And now I find my gray-haired feeble-eyed self learning Greek."

"Yes, why is that?" ou asked directly.

"I'm not going to tell you that," she said without belligerence.

"Why not?" ou asked.

"I don't trust you," she said flatly.

"You don't trust me?" Dr. Fisscher asked, incredulous.

"Well, would you?" she asked. "I mean, given the way you've been treated?"

"What?"

"I don't know about you," she said, adding reflectively, "which might be ninety percent of the problem." She gestured vaguely in oun direction. "But my first thought would be revenge."

Ou had to think about it, and she gave oum time. "Well," Dr. Fisscher said eventually, "you'll be glad to know that I don't take my examples from Greek drama."

"Which is why you never think about civilian casualties when you write on the board?"

Ou finally realized what she was talking about. "I apologize," ou said. "That was ungallant of me."

"If you've got a problem with me," she said, finally calm, "keep it to me and don't insult Bladewalker's ethics, will you? Or her taste in women?"

"I don't see where it would be an insult," Dr. Fisscher said. "Not that part, anyway."

"Very gentlemanly of you," she said, bowing a little. "Thank you. It wouldn't be our first disagreement, but thank you."

"It'll be our last," ou said gently.

She evaded oun eyes. "You're leaving?"

"I'm thinking about it," Dr. Fisscher replied.

"Would you do me a favor?" she asked. "As a gentleman?"

"If I can," ou said cautiously.

"Sleep on it?"

Dr. Fisscher sighed, looking around at the trees, the mountains, the river. Bad move. Don't make a decision based on the landscape. Was it possible to demand a concession from her? That didn't seem right somehow. After a moment's reflection, ou realized that there was bad behavior on both sides, and it came clear in a flash: I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with a student like you. I don't know that I'm a good enough teacher. It was a valuable realization, if distressing.

"Very well," Dr. Fisscher said, despising ouself abruptly for sounding like a pedant.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said, sticking her hands in her pockets and hunching her shoulders. "We'd all appreciate it." She nodded politely and walked past oum, and in a moment she had gone around the bend of the path, and Dr. Fisscher couldn't see her any more.

* * *

The knock on the door was soft enough that ou would have had every reason in the world to ignore it and go on with oun packing. But an equally soft voice called, "Dr. Fisscher," and ou had no choice in the matter.

The door swung open, and, as Dr. Fisscher was nevertheless surprised to have confirmed, Ms. Dickenson stood outside. "May I come in?" she asked without preamble.

There wasn't much of an answer, except a half-hearted gesture that might have been a welcome. She walked past oum and took a look at the living room, which ou'd done oun best to keep spotless. "It doesn't look as though you ever moved in," she said unexpectedly, turning to face oum.

"The best traveler," ou replied, "stays a short time and leaves a small footprint."

"So you don't see yourself as belonging here," she said, as if ou'd confirmed it for her.

Ou shook oun head, but it was impossible not to smile, she was so very beautiful and so obviously sad, and Dr. Fisscher took an enormous, life-shattering risk before her and said, "What I will miss... is seeing you in class twice a day."

"I'll miss having dinner with you," she replied, catching oum off guard, as ou realized she'd been doing since oun arrival. "I missed it tonight. My last chance." She shrugged and turned toward the picture window that looked out over the path, as if trying to pretend that losing a limb wouldn't mean much to her. Then she chuckled a bit and smiled, putting her fist to her chin thoughtfully. "McJohn wasn't there either. She hates looking like an idiot."

"I would think," said Dr. Fisscher with care, "that it would be a more realistic goal for her to avoid making other people look like idiots."

Ms. Dickenson laughed, finally, and turned her soft eyes on oum again. "You should make that suggestion."

"No, no," ou said fervently, holding up both hands. "Not getting back into the ring, thank you. Two black eyes and a broken nose are enough."

"I've never seen two amiable people have an argument in ancient Greek," she remarked. "Very classy. Beats the hell out of fighting over sex and money." Ou ducked oun head, mumbling something that discouraged additional conversation, hoping she wouldn't ask what she damnably, infuriatingly went right on to ask. "What was it you wrote on the board?"

It was the one time ou was glad a student hadn't been able to keep up. "Something unworthy," ou replied, standing straight and taking the hit like an adult, "and untrue."

She took a step toward him, studying oun face with the same concentration she'd shown when they met, and went on to ask the only question that could possibly be worse than the one she'd just asked. "Why?"

"Because I'm not a gentleman," Dr. Fisscher replied quickly.

"That's not really the reason, is it?" she asked.

Dr. Fisscher's eyes shifted about the room, coming to rest, finally, on her face, and ou knew then and there that, wherever oun life took oum, there was one thing ou would never be able to do, and that was lie to the woman standing before oum. "No," ou said, cursing the flush that came over oun face and continuing anyway. "She... she outmaneuvers me, and it takes some time to steer the car out of the ditch."

"That's a brave thing to admit," she said, adding out of nowhere, "to a stranger."

Ou gathered the bravery she seemed convinced ou had and answered, "You're the one thing about this place that doesn't feel strange."

She ran her gaze, soft and lovely and vulnerable and yet intelligent and insightful, over Dr. Fisscher's mortified face one more time and said, "If I were to ask you to come with me somewhere, would you?"

* * *

She led oum to the back of the main building, then held her finger to her lips and stashed oum in a dark corner of the hall before taking a couple of noiseless steps into the kitchen, where ou could see oun most fractious student at the sink, attacking something with rubber-gloved hands and a decided ferocity. There was a profound air of something exceptionally chocolate baking, and ou saw that the oven light was on.

"What are you doing, boss?" asked Ms. Dickenson.

"I'm not your boss," McJohn replied, as if on autopilot. "Bladewalker is."

Ms. Dickenson sighed, and from where ou was standing ou could see a small smile on her lips. "So what are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" she snapped. "Cleaning. In my family, we clean when we're upset. You should talk to my sister. She's been doing it for forty years."

"Yeah," said Ms. Dickenson, "she seemed a little tense when I met her."

"Like she hasn't got reason," McJohn muttered, then turned to glance at Ms. Dickenson. "I'm sorry."

She didn't explain, and Ms. Dickenson shrugged as if it didn't matter. "What's in the oven?"

"The ganache torte the girls liked so much," replied McJohn. "I thought I'd try being useful, for once."

"It smells great," remarked Ms. Dickenson, with admirable delicacy and questionable relevance. "So what are you so upset about?"

"Oh, I don't know," said McJohn, tossing the sponge forcefully into the sink and dodging the flume of suds that leapt into the air. "Let's start with driving off the most qualified Greek scholarly resource we could have on this project by being a self-indulgent asshat who can't just shut up and learn Greek from the nice professor, even if it does come from the Bible. And then there's interfering with you and Blade while you were trying to learn. There aren't many sins in my world, but standing in between knowledge and the people who are trying to get it--that's a biggie."

"Especially for a Black woman," murmured Ms. Dickenson.

"Oh, please," said McJohn, hauling one of the rubber gloves off and reaching under her glasses to rub her eyes. "Yeah," she whispered.

Ms. Dickenson put her hands softly on McJohn's shoulders. "Tough the crackers screwed up Reconstruction and left the righting of it to you." McJohn chortled, but not as if she were amused, and Ms. Dickenson said, "If only we'd had you on the job, that nasty ol' Jim Crow era would never have happened. Have you talked to Story Doc?"

McJohn shook her head forcefully.

"That's too bad; you're only half yourself when she's away. Bladewalker?"

"No," said McJohn, turning back toward the sink. There was something in the syllable that shut off further conversation. Ms. Dickenson leaned against the counter, watching McJohn scrub. "I don't think it means to you what it means to me," McJohn said in a voice Dr. Fisscher could barely hear. "I don't see how it could."

Ms. Dickenson folded her arms. "It's kind of like how you are about The Central Question of American Society," she said, leaving Dr. Fisscher no doubt whatsoever about what she was referring to. "I don't have to have a personal stake in it to know that it's important that it happens." She unfolded her arms and took a few steps toward where Dr. Fisscher was standing. "And if the world doesn't run to suit you, you might want to look around and see that there are a lot of people who agree with you, for good reason." She nodded to Dr. Fisscher, who took a step into the kitchen.

McJohn stared at oum, her face blank. "Hair shirt and everything," Dr. Fisscher remarked to her. "Very Christian martyr of you."

"Press your luck," said Ms. Dickenson dryly. "Smooth move, ace."

McJohn caught her breath and tossed a scowl toward Ms. Dickenson. "If I were your boss," she said, "you would be in so much trouble right now."

"I want you to listen to me, both of you," said Ms. Dickenson. "You're not nine-year-old BFFs who got into a fistfight on the playground and won't speak to one another as long as you live. You're both adults. And adults can be honest with one another."

"Completely?" asked McJohn, lifting an eyebrow.

"That's up to you," said Ms. Dickenson swiftly. "But I'll tell you this. I want to learn Greek." She looked at Dr. Fisscher. "And I want to learn it from you." She turned to McJohn. "And I want to learn it with you there in the class. That's what I want. If the two of you are as smart as I think you are, you'll come clean with one another. I'm going to put the girls to bed, and then I'm headed there myself."

She paused on her way out the door to tell Dr. Fisscher, "She makes killer sugar-free hot chocolate, by the way. Word to the wise? Offer to help." Then she was gone, and Dr. Fisscher and McJohn were left looking at one another, neither particularly eager to break the silence until it got awkward.

"She's got a commanding air," Dr. Fisscher remarked.

"She's well qualified," McJohn said. "And always right, damn her slimy little soul." She sighed. "I think we're supposed to bond over hot chocolate."

"Probably more benign than boutique bourbon," ou said, noting, with pleasure, the look of surprise on her face. "Yes, I do remember that one. Fondly. Where do we start?"

She opened the fridge and came out with a box of baking chocolate. She shook a square out of the box and handed it to Dr. Fisscher. "Pulverize this for me." She nodded toward the counter, which was pretty expansive. "Cutting boards and knives. I'd advise the cleaver; it gets hard to beat up when it's cold."

"I may not need to get so drastic," Dr. Fisscher said, selecting a butcher knife and a cutting board with a rim. Ou rolled up oun sleeves, unwrapped the square, and set to work, reducing the chocolate to neat slivers in seconds.

McJohn whistled, then went back to the fridge. "You're pretty handy with that thing."

"I've made a special study of arm strength," replied Dr. Fisscher.

She paused in mid-fetch. "Oh, hell. Bodybuilder. Of course. Do you need a weight room? I didn't even think of that. The gym's down in town, and that's a thirty-minute dr--" She stopped herself. "Sorry. Assuming again." She sighed and asked, without looking at oum. "When's your flight?""

Dr. Fisscher shrugged. "You asked me to sleep on it. How do you make it sugar free?"

"Let me show you," she said, setting a pan on the stove.

They stood over the stove, occupied with the project until it was done, then sat in chairs at the kitchen table and talked some more. She took the cake out of the oven, explaining what all she was going to do with it, and ou was intrigued to find that she didn't consider herself a cook, but more of a slapdash experimenter fortunate enough to be able to feed her alchemical failures to accommodating friends. She called it Ultra Low-Impact Baking. It hadn't been anything like a disaster; in fact, a former co-worker had started a bakery using her recipes, and was growing rich catering to diabetics and people with celiac disease.

"But you're not diabetic?" asked Dr. Fisscher.

"Not personally," she said.

"Then why blow your brains out over it?"

"Because I never had to give anything up," she said, as if this explained everything.

"What are you doing learning Greek?" ou asked.

She got quiet and looked at her cup. "Maybe I'll tell you some day."

"Why is Ms. Dickenson learning Greek?"

She glanced at oum, then back at her cup. "Because," she said, "she's always wanted to read the Bible in the original."

"She's a Christian?" Dr. Fisscher asked, eyebrows hitting oun hairline.

"Raw-thah," replied McJohn. "She's a lay reader for the Presbyterians. She's good at it. She's had a lot of practice reading to the girls."

"Isn't that the religion of the oppressor?" Ou was teasing a bit, but McJohn didn't seem offended, and roused herself to answer.

"It's called 'reclamation'," she said, "like when a gay woman refers to herself as a 'butch dyke', or hip hop's fondness for the epithet that begins with 'n'. I think W.E.B. DuBois said it best: he called it 'a term no white man should use.' The shortest way I can put it, you can say it if you belong to that group, but if you don't, set your mouth elsewhere."

"Like 'genderqueer'," ou said, and she nodded. "So Ms. Dickenson following Christianity is a way of reclaiming that religion from the people who hijacked it, and an entire race into the bargain, a long time ago."

"Paul," she said sourly, leaving no doubt as to her opinion. "The New Testament Moses, leading a bunch of seekers in exactly the direction that would convince them salvation lay in identifying everyone else as a heathen so you could knock them over the head and take their stuff."

"You know," remarked Dr. Fisscher, "I've seen a heartening trend with that. As time goes on, more and more people are concentrating on the ministry itself, not the divinity angle."

"'Bout damn time," she said.

Ou sat back and looked McJohn right in the eye. "Like me."

"I'm glad to hear it," she said softly. "I don't have a problem with 'Little children, love one another.'"

"Neither do I," said Dr Fisscher, adding carefully, "and I don't exactly fit the profile of most desired parishioner."

"I'm aware of that," she said. "It gives me some hope. Have you gotten in touch with Phoenix yet?"

Ou shook oun head. "It's not like there's a one-size-fits-all solution," ou said.

"Well," she said diffidently, "it's just that they tend to hang out down at First Presbyterian, listening to Lorena."

Ou smiled. "I'll keep that in mind, thank you. May I... help you with the dishes?"

The next day, at supper, Dr. Fisscher served the ganache torte, which was terrific.

* * *

If I had had any questions about how the Amazon Queen would perform in a sea not native to her, they were answered after we had been but a few days on the open water. The ship, smoothed by the hours of labor when she was being carried via ox-team over the land to the Red Sea, seemed to have appreciated the thoughtful attention to her well-being, and returned it by caring well for us. She seemed to skip along the water like one of the sharp-winged black-striped seabirds we saw skimming the waves.

Although it was a fascinating thing to watch, I did not observe enough of the birds to draw any closer comparisons, for there was always a reason to spend my time belowdecks or, if I was feeling reckless, the sweeps: Bladewalker.

Since the day when she had called me a thief for wearing a dress obviously too fine for a tavern-wench, and been charged by the Captain with keeping to the prow, Bladewalker had seldom let her shadow fall across any of us. It was as well. The mere sight of her broad shoulders at the prow, her chin sunken into her chest as she stared hour by hour into the monotonous changeability of the ocean, was enough to make me quake. That she had given up her weapons to Lethe did not reduce my sense of doom; I dreaded the prospect of the tall warrior's stealthy approach, with her noiseless tread and unobtrusively lethal manner, and had more than a few nightmares in which I was pursued about the ship, deserted under the moonlight, by a faceless phantom who reached hissing for my throat.

Harrel, who had grown protective and bristled with edges after Bladewalker's outburst, cautioned me constantly to avoid her. I thought this a useless admonition, and more than passing strange besides; as if I would get within Kilimanjaro's height of a woman who wanted my death! It occurred to me that Harrel had known me since I was a suckling babe, and perhaps he was unable to grant me the benefit of having developed any grown-up sense. Too, the ship was small, and it was nigh impossible to avoid her entirely. She hovered, like a bleak presence, over my head.

We seldom saw Lethe on that trip over the Indian Ocean; although she never left off being gracious and kind to the shipmates, she kept to her cabin most times, and I suspected it was from mortification at Bladewalker's behavior. It must have gotten close in the cabin (as it did in mine tho' I spent little time there, only sleeping), and it seemed to me that fresh sea air would be a hell of a thing to give up. Pyra hovered ever nearby, spending long hours in the cabin when Bladewalker was at the prow, and often Ranger and the animals would disappear within for the space between sunrise and sunset. It was almost what one would do to attend upon a queen, and yet I wondered: if Bladewalker, openly murderous as she had been, was left to prowl the prow alone, was there something even darker that required that Lethe be closely kept? And if so, what?

There was yet another puzzle involving the warriors, and I pondered long the relationship between the chimera that was Lethe and her weapons-master. Often, late at night, I would hear through the walls of my cabin noises I interpreted as evidence that they were lovers, and yet, with the dawn, Bladewalker would leave the cabin to take up her solitary brooding at the bow, and Lethe's door would remain firmly shut, Pyra or Ranger and her tribesmates kept within. Then we were into another day of attempting to avoid the icy blue stare and open disapproval of the lethal Bladewalker.

Still, if she represented my midnight, there was always a noontime: the Captain. He was tall, powerful, handsome, and benevolent, protective like a brother, and attentive like the suitor an untried girl would recognize nowhere except from her dreams. He made me feel an unfamiliar, pleasant combination of safe and jittery, and it soon transpired that the first thing I would do upon leaving my cabin in the morning was look for him. It wasn't long before I noticed that he would do the same when he heard my door open.

It was that way the day we finally got the compass working.

A fresh, spanking sea. A brisk, caressing wind. A bright, benevolent sun. A high blue sky, and far above, Klokir circling, gliding back and forth, seeking either enemies or breakfast. Serafina latched the door of her cabin open and went back within to open the ports as well; it would be a fine, calm day to air out the room in which she slept.

When she turned to the doorway again, the captain was standing amidships, framed by the doorway. She had quite gotten over her maidenly reserve, considering him a friend, and smiled her sunniest smile. He staggered back a pace, putting both hands to his heart, and called, "Don't unleash your arrows at a poor defenseless fellow, Your Ladyship!"

"How can I keep from smiling at such a handsome defenseless fellow, Captain?" she called back, happy to tease, happy not to feel prickly and uncertain around him. "'Tis but as much as you've earned, bein' handsome, as I've noted."

He dropped the game and sauntered toward her, perfectly at ease. "And would Her Ladyship deign to assist a poor handsome fellow with, say, a compass?"

"Gladly," she said, holding up her skirt with grandeur and extending a hand for the elbow he held out. "Provided you ask me to do no more than spell it." Harrel, her constant shadow, with his constant scowl, fell in behind.

"We'll require Your Ladyship's assistance in the crucial matter of pourin' the liquor," said Alcibiades, escorting her to the sweeps and holding out his hands to offer her support up the stairs. She promenaded up to the sweeps like the oh so important barmaid she felt herself to be just then, and was rewarded by a deep, courtly bow from Skittles that made her burst into merriment.

"The third of the triad is among us," said Skittles, with eyes a-sparkle and a grin that would not wipe off her face, for she was a lover of cunning engines, and all that needed to be done to engage her formidable mind was to present her with some mechanical puzzle requiring solution. "Wouldst care to take a look at our carefully-crafted apparatus?"

Not recognizing the word, Serafina answered with caution, "That depends. This does have some bearing on the compass, does it not?"

"So it does," said the worthy Skittles, avoiding an opportunity to mock her ignorance. She led Serafina to a wooden structure about waist-height, comprising a pole with what looked like a thick wagon-wheel mounted at the top, parallel with the horizon. The wheel was carved of wood and fitted here and there with leather, and in overall shape it resembled a circular cage. In the interior of the cage nestled the brightly-scoured compass, its arrows and markings clear, the peg agleam like it had just come off the draw-bench. The wooden cradle that held the compass so closely was intricate and well made; even Harrel drew near to take a closer look.

"'Tis a masterful piece of carving, that," said Alcibiades with pride. "Skittles has been many and many a day at the fitting of it together."

"So I see," said Serafina, and the odd thing was that, the more she looked, the more she did. The cage was fixed in place with two wooden pins extending crosswise, and she ran a finger over one of them, trying to trace what would happen if it were removed.

"Go ahead," Skittles said softly, nodding in encouragement.

"I'll break it," replied Serafina.

"Not a stout piece of carving," the captain said. "That's good cypress, from my home. Try it."

Serafina reached for the pins, one in each hand, and slid them free. The cage began to swing and turn with the movement of the ship, and her face took on a look of astonished delight.

"It's called a 'gimbal'," said Skittles, obviously proud. "It's designed to keep the compass upright while we're usin' it. See? There's a weight at the bottom, and it swings on its pivots so the compass stays even with the horizon."

"So the liquor won't spill?" asked Serafina eagerly.

"Nor the needle catch," said Alcibiades. "It'll move freely, pointing north howsoever the weather goes."

"Clever," muttered Harrel in fascination, studying it through his one good eye. Alcibiades was too excited to cuff him for his presumption in speaking, and Serafina caught the captain's eye from close at hand, smiling a secret little smile Alcibiades returned threefold.

"Now for the liquor," Skittles said, lifting the top of the sweeps locker and pulling forth a bottle Serafina found quite familiar, having washed it a couple thousand times in her life. She accepted it from Skittles and levered the cork free with thoughtless expertise.

"How much?" she asked, looking from Alcibides to Skittles.

Skittles unfastened the catch holding the compass closed and swung its glass cover out of the way. Alcibiades held it for her, his strong hand touching the rim delicately. "Fill it to the line inscribed just inside the top," Skittles told Serafina, "gently, to avoid bubbles."

Serafina tipped the bottle with care. She was an expert at pouring without touching the side of a mug, and she used that skill to avoid damaging the delicate metal of the compass. The liquor flowed like a stream of molten glass until it had just reached the line. She swung the bottle away, looking an inquiry at Skittles.

"That's... that's perfect," said Skittles, studying her with evident respect.

"And the needle?" Alcibiades prompted.

"Yes," said Skittles. "Right here." She held it up: a little metal arrow brazed to a tiny cup. "I've waxed it so it'll turn freely, as you said."

"I did?" asked Serafina, somewhat distracted by the proximity of the captain.

"And now we'll have a notion of Her Ladyship's engineering capabilities," said Alcibiades, grinning sideways at Serafina. "Ready?" he asked Skittles.

"For Athirat," murmured Skittles, a bit nervous, and she laid the fragile cup-and-needle construct onto the peg, her fingers dimpling the surface of the alcohol. She stuck her tongue between her teeth and released the needle from her fingers. It floated, quivering a bit, then began to swing in an arc, coming to rest unmoving directly over a marking incised in red enamel at the bottom of the case.

Alcibiades lowered the top with reverence, and the glass came into contact with the alcohol. The three of them bent over the compass, captivated.

It was like looking into a clear, still lake at a motionless fish far below the surface. They could see directly to the bottom of the case of the compass. The alcohol was so clear that the shadow of the needle stood out in relief against the enameled lines and letters at the base, and the needle itself was as steady as if it had been pinned in place.

Serafina scarcely dared to breathe. "Will it spill out?" she whispered as quietly as she could.

Alcibiades shook his curls. "Skittles lined the rim with leather."

"Is it... is it north?" Serafina asked.

In answer, Alcibiades pointed to the sun with one hand and the opposite horizon with the other, and nodded in the direction the needle was pointing. "Does Her Ladyship think the experiment a success?" he asked, his eyes glinting with triumph.

In return, Serafina threw her arms around his neck, laughing with inexplicable relief, and nearly knocked both of them over the sweeps rail. They remembered how close they were to the compass and did a comical, clumsy little dance to avoid it, finding themselves in one another's arms. The captain's face was very serious, even a little shocked, and Serafina was a heartbeat away from doing something either very wise or thoroughly foolish. She tightened her arms around his neck, wondering if she dared to go up on tiptoe and reach for his lips with her own.

"Hey! Victory dances forward of the sweeps, ox-brace!" Skittles bellowed. Serafina and Alcibiades turned their heads simultaneously, and she was holding a jack-pin poised to bash in both their skulls. "Knock over my compass and I'll use both of you for ballast!"

"Quite right," Alcibiades said, catching Serafina's hand in his and holding the other out to allay Skittles' fury. "Indeed. Wouldn't care to interfere with the navigation of the vessel, which is obviously in capable hands... we'll just... go dance... amidships..."

He led Serafina down the steps backwards, both of them groping for the rail and keeping an eye on the livid, exultant Skittles, who stowed the jack-pin and folded her arms, regarding the compass with great satisfaction. Harrel followed Serafina down the steps with his hands in his trousers pockets, for all the world as if he saw compasses every day and thought them no great achievement.

Alcibiades drew Serafina to the front of the cabins, out of sight of the sweeps, and the two of them burst into childlike giggles. He let go of her hand and put his arm about her waist, drawing her close, and her heart hammered as he lowered his face to hers. She had just enough time to think, At last!

The banging of the hatch to the scriptorium startled the two of them out of their wits, and the sight of Willow scrambling up the steps as if a demon were after her turned Serafina's excitement to fright.

"C--C--Captain," Willow said, tripping over coils of rope in her haste to come up from below, "we--we--we--have a--"

"Yes?" inquired Alcibiades politely through his teeth.

"St--st," said Willow, who gulped and tried to rearrange her tongue. "Stowaway." She jerked her head toward the hatchway. "Below. Stowaway."

* * *

"Stay here, Serafina," said Alcibiades grimly, patting her arm in reassurance and stalking toward the hatchway with her at his heels. She followed him down the steps. He turned at the bottom and nearly ran into her. "Your Ladyship!" he gasped. "I thought I told you to stay topside!"

"You did," she assured him agreeably.

"Then--"

"I'm going with you," she said. Ranger and Blackie appeared at the top of the steps and began to make their way down.

Alcibiades leaned close to her and spoke in an impassioned whisper. "You can't."

"Of course I can," said Serafina, as Harrel peeked in from the hatchway and then came down to join them. "You may need an extra hand."

"Yes," he murmured, attempting to be reasonable, "but not yours." The door to the scriptorium opened, and Makionus and Dogmatika stuck their heads out inquiringly.

"Nothing's going to happen," said Serafina.

"Because you're not going," hissed Alcibiades. He jerked his head at Harrel and Ranger, who moved into position to flank him.

"What is it?" asked Dogmatika.

"Stowaway," said Harrel blandly. Above, Lethe appeared, carrying two heavy swords, and right behind her was the unarmed but still terrifying Bladewalker.

"Ah," said Makionus. She turned to Dogmatika. "We'd best lock the door, then." They began to work at the lock, and Alcibiades turned to Serafina again.

"Go back aloft," he said sternly.

"There's no danger," she assured him.

"You don't know that," he pointed out.

"Actually," said a voice from the gloom of the hold, "she's absolutely correct."

* * *

"But then," continued the voice, as a figure made its way into the light from the hatchway, "she usually is." There was a sudden slither of blades, and a half-dozen knives, a pair of swords, and a quill pointed in the figure's direction.

The reaction to this was a merry, ship-lightening laugh. "What are you going to do with that?" said the interloper to Dogmatika, nodding at the quill. "Blot me from your story? And I suppose this time you'll finally succeed?"

Their visitor was a woman with dark brown eyes and hair as black as Bladewalker's, streaked with silver. She was dressed in sun-faded gray leather over a body that was round and soft-looking, and her face bore an expression of sardonic glee that approached a sneer. A deep scar divided her right eyebrow, and her hands were large and strong-looking.

"Who are you?" demanded Alcibiades.

"Peace, Captain," said the stranger, holding up her powerful hands, which were empty. She wasn't carrying a knife, at least not anywhere where any of them could detect it. "I haven't so much as taken a drop of your water." She looked from one to the other of the shipmates. "My name," she said, "is Elsapia."

Dogmatika's eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. "Aye, I don't wonder that you wonder," said Elsapia, "and you'd be surprised to find out how close you are."

"What in the name of Athirat are you doin' aboard this ship?" The words ground out from between the captain's teeth.

"I wanted to meet you," said Elsapia. "All of you. Before it's too late."

The blades rose a fraction of a barleycorn toward her.

"Explain," said Alcibiades.

"You'll get to India soon," said Elsapia, pulling a cask close and settling onto it as if on the most comfortable chair at a banquet. The sunlight struck sparks of silver mingled with indigo from her hair. "Provided," she added with a shrug.

"Provided... what?" asked the captain.

Elsapia looked up into his face. "You do have the prettiest eyes, Captain," she murmured. She smiled, and the sneer vanished under a crooked but unmistakable impression of enjoyment. "But back to the matter at hand. I believe you've not been permitted to pursue your mission unimpeded? Something about evil triplets?"

Alcibiades stuck his chin out. "What do you know about it?"

"Rather a lot," said Elsapia. "I've been following you since you picked up yon fearsome warriors." She nodded to Lethe and Bladewalker. "I wonder, Captain," she said conversationally, "if the valuation you've put on your cargo is quite accurate. Seems to me there's a few Ms and Cs left out of that number."

"What in the hell are you going on about?" demanded Alcibiades.

"I'd explain," said Elsapia, "but you haven't a lot of time." She looked up at him again, smiling her funny smile. "You see, you're pursued."

* * *

Serafina watched as Alcibiades stood open-mouthed before his newest and entirely unintentional passenger, evidently searching for words. Elsapia inclined her head toward the hatchway. "In a moment..." she murmured.

"Captain!" Skittles called from the sweeps.

"Watch her," Alcibiades said to the air. He was already in motion up the steps. Serafina thought it prudent not to follow. Lethe handed Bladewalker one of her swords, and Bladewalker took it without comment. It settled into her hand as if it had grown there.

"That feels good, doesn't it?" said Elsapia in a low, seductive tone.

"Who are you?" demanded Lethe, but in an equally quiet voice.

"Or what?" grunted Bladewalker.

"Merely a woman," replied Elsapia, "and rather less of one than the two of you, at that." She nodded pleasantly toward the steps. "He's about to call you."

"All a'deck!" cried Alcibiades from above.

The hair began to creep along the back of Serafina's neck. She glanced toward Lethe, apprehensive and beginning to be frightened, and Lethe nodded in reassurance. The shipmates looked at one another, irresolute, then Bladewalker spoke. "You've not harmed us," she said to Elsapia. "Have we your word you won't do so now?"

"Yes," said Elsapia instantly.

Something about her made Serafina trust her word without hesitation; whatever it was, the tall dark-haired warrior responded to it too. "Come up," said Bladewalker, gesturing with the hand not holding the shining, deadly sword.

The rest of them swarmed up the steps, Harrel matching Serafina's steps, with Elsapia and Bladewalker bringing up the rear at a carefully casual pace. As they poured forth from the hatchway, nothing but light blue sky and deep blue sea met their eyes. With a low growl, Blackie leapt soundlessly for the roof of the cabins. Ranger nodded toward the sweeps, and she and Lethe pelted up the stairs to the stern. Harrel stuck to Serafina, barnacle-like in his persistence, while Makionus and Dogmatika attempted to keep from running into one another as they bumbled their way up.

When all of them had collected at the sweeps, they noticed two things: first, that it was uncomfortable to have quite so many people in such a small space, and second, that the captain was leaning over the railing, staring astern with a grim expression on his handsome face. He was looking at a large three-masted ship traveling at a respectable pace behind the Amazon Queen. The ship had the aspect of a fighter or brigand, with a carved, painted dragon's head at the prow and shields hung about her sides. The sails on one mast were a bloody crimson, those on the second a blue the color of midnight, and those on the third a cheerful daffodil yellow. And she had appeared, in the middle of a featureless flat ocean under a bright sunlit sky, from the approximate center of nowhere.

"Now, where, by Athirat, did they come from?" murmured Alcibiades.

Serafina shivered with fright, overlain with an abrupt and utterly untimely sense of dizziness.

* * *

"What is it they want?" Alcibiades added, largely to himself.

"Everything," replied Elsapia. He whipped his head round and fixed her with a furrowed-browed glare. "What is it you have? History. Legend. The heritage of a proud, stubborn race of victors whose death is already imminent, a corpse looking for a place to fall. Insight into how to outmaneuver them, a sharp sword that turns in their hands. Ancient enemies who've defeated them again and again, a thirst for vengeance not yet slaked. The daughters of heroes, in whose veins runs the blood of the gods. A magic spell of glory, slumbering between its incredible past and its unpredictable future, carved in inky trenches on parchment, and the living parchment that made them. Their cousins, their sisters, their nieces, their slaves. The now half-imaginary memory of a time when every breath was glory, and a shot at founding a dynasty that will rule through fear and petty evil for a thousand thousand years. There's not one thing on this ship that couldn't make them the most powerful force in the world, and only one of you knows that."

"You seem to have a lot of the answers," snarled Alcibiades. "Tell us how to get out of this."

Elsapia spread her hands. "I can only tell you what's behind it. Suggesting something to try? You'd know better than I; you're not blinded by the tangle of threads that stretch from this point into every direction of numberless futures. For all I know, anything I tell you would lead to a beautiful ship with a dragon's face captained by the shell of a once-handsome man who has only enough breath left of his lost soul to scream." She lowered her gaze to the decking and remarked, as if to herself, "And they live to hear that screaming..."

The ship looked a little closer. Serafina's knees had gone weak, and she caught at the rail. Alcibiades shouldered past the rest of them and caught her up in a strong arm that trembled slightly. "Serafina," he murmured in a soft, concerned voice.

She was too distracted to come up with anything noble to counter the peril they now found themselves in. "I'm... I'm not going to throw up," she whispered.

He reached for her face with a strong, gentle hand. "I shan't let them have you. I'll die first and my ghost will battle them for you, forever if that's what it takes."

"That's not precisely reassuring," she pointed out. Tears were running from her eyes. "I know them... I know who they are..."

Harrel's head came up.

"There... there are three of them," Serafina said, frowning through her tears into a watery, obscure distance. "They're from far to the east, and they... they wear those colors... that's how you know which one is which, by the colors..."

"Serafina," hissed Harrel, pushing past a startled Dogmatika to kneel by her side. He seized Serafina's hand and beseeched her with his one good eye. "Don't speak of this now, I beg of you. Don't talk about it. Please. I'm begging you. We'll talk later. Please. If I ever did anything to protect you--"

"Protect her, bondsman?" exclaimed Lethe. "You made the richest woman in Sapphi your slave!"

Harrel paid her no more attention than the menacing ship that drew ever closer. "P--please, Fee," whispered Harrel, and there was sweat on his face, which had gone an ugly gray. "On your mother's memory... please give me a chance to talk to you. Later. Alone."

"There'll be no later," Ranger pointed out, "unless we can outrun them."

Gasping for air, Serafina stared down into the blur that was Harrel's agonized face. He looked like a man who had reached the limits of his endurance. Behind him were Dogmatika and Makionus, avidly attending the conversation; Ranger with the squirrels on each shoulder and an agitated Klokir on her fist, with Blackie by her side, the fur over her hunched shoulders ruffled in apprehension; Lethe, pale and determined not to sell her life short, and the fearsome Bladewalker, who, for once, seemed protective and not disapproving; and Skittles, stalwart with one hand on the steering-oar and the other curled protectively around the compass. And somewhere, Willow, who hadn't signed on for a voyage quite so exciting, and her beloved Pyra, who wanted only to heal and found herself constantly out of her depth.

She could see it all so clearly, and it sickened her. Makionus would be the first to die, doing something foolish and brave far outside her capabilities as a warrior. They'd yoke Dogmatika to a desk to copy out the scrolls forever. Harrel and Willow they'd run through without a second thought. They'd send an army of eldritch creatures after Lethe, and even Bladewalker would tire and falter defending her, and then they'd swarm her too. They'd make Ranger watch as they tortured each of her companions to death, then execute her with satisfied looks on their smug, loathsome faces. They'd chain Pyra to a workbench to make poisons and Skittles to a rudder to lead them to evil till they were nothing but skeletons wrapped in ancient, dusty rags. And my brave Alcibiades, the man I love, empty-eyed and hollow at the prow of a magnificent, terror-inspiring ship as it conquers, wave after wave after wave, and blots out every good thing under the sun, every hope of every mother that her child will know happiness and purpose, and finally extinguishes the very sun itself. I cannot let that happen.

She raised her hand as if to bless them all, and it seemed another, ghostly hand lifted with hers, and she found herself gazing as if through water into a weary pair of blue eyes in a pale, thin, lined face that seemed as though it had never known a smile.

We cannot let that happen.

Some wordless utterance scuttled across the floor of Serafina's mind.

We cannot let that happen.

She held her hand out, catching the wrist of the other, feeding her strength. Serafina could feel it. She was appallingly weak, the girl in the mirror, near the end of her life. And Serafina herself was so tired, so frightened, so dizzy that had it not been for the strong arms holding her, she would have crashed senseless to the deck.

It was too vast, the prospect of losing them all, even the familiar stranger in the mirror, and her courage was such a shy, terrified, small thing, far too small for this. Even a spirit like her mother's had been crushed by evil; even her mother had been unable to save herself, even for Serafina's sake. There was nothing she could do, and she would lose them all, and little cared what happened to her after that.

One more urgent call from a place she would never recognize. We cannot let that happen.

We won't, Serafina thought at her firmly, then added something she hardly understood. We're coming. She blinked, and the last of the tears fell away from her eyes. "Unlock... the gimbal," she whispered.

"What?" murmured Alcibiades at her side.

"Unlock the gimbal," Serafina announced.

* * *

Alcibiades turned instantly to the compass-pole and slid free the pins that held the gimbaling in place. It began to sway back and forth and sideways with the movement of the ship, and he turned to Serafina expectantly.

"They... they haven't a compass," she said, spreading her hands in dismay and looking from Skittles to Alcibiades. "Don't you see?" She asked that question because she didn't see, and it seemed terribly important just then that someone did. "They don't have a compass," she repeated, hoping that more clever heads would know what the hell she meant by it.

Skittles frowned, shaking her head. "I--I don't--"

A shy, tentative smile played about the captain's lips, unfurling into brilliance. "No compass..." He put his hands out and grabbed Serafina by the shoulders, then leaned in to give her a sound, smacking kiss on the cheek. "Your Ladyship, you may just've saved our skins!"

Serafina nodded as best she could, looking into his lovely dark-lashed eyes, animated with the excitement she'd seen countless times as he took command of his ship.

"Skittles," he said, nodding to the navigator, "stand by for course correction usin' your new toy. We're going to haul as close to the wind as we can, see if we can tack more nimbly than they."

"Tack?" asked Harrel blankly. "That's your plan? Are you serious?"

"Bondsman," said Lethe through her teeth, "thou'lt haul as well without thy tongue."

"Shutting up now," said Harrel, giving Serafina a glum look.

"Stand by," Alcibiades said decisively to Skittles.

"Aye, Captain," she replied, taking a fresh grip on the steering-oar and nailing her eyes to the compass swinging freely in its elaborate cage.

"All hands to the braces," said the captain, turning on his heel and making his way down the steps to the deck. "All hands!" he bellowed, and the rest hastened after him. Willow and Pyra met them amidships, and Alcibiades gestured toward the huge expanses of canvas catching the wind above their heads.

They formed two lines, with Alcibiades to the fore at the port side, Serafina behind him, Harrel and Ranger behind her, and Makionus at the rear. To starboard, Willow took the point, and Pyra squeezed in between her and Lethe, with Dogmatika behind her and Bladewalker looming at the back.

"May I help?" called Elsapia.

"I'd hold that a favor," said Alcibiades, nodding toward Bladewalker. Elsapia took a spot between her and Dogmatika.

"Loose," hollered the captain, and Makionus and Bladewalker untied the lines that passed through heavy blocks to control the brace. The others seized the ends and stood ready, all eyes on him. "Close to port!" he shouted, above the noise of wind and wave, and then he called cadence for them in his strong, authoritative voice as they hauled in line on the one side, paid it out at the other. "A-theeeeee-na! A-theeeeee-na! A-theeeeee-na!"

The brace holding the mainsail swung sluggishly and the sail began to move, catching the wind at an angle. Serafina could feel the Amazon Queen strain forward with the wind. They set the brace in place, and anxious eyes turned toward Skittles at the sweeps, a stubborn look on her face as she watched the compass. At first the gimbal swung slowly, so slowly Serafina couldn't tell if it was moving. Then Skittles gave an abrupt nod, just as Serafina saw the shadows of the objects on the deck begin to slide across the surface.

Skittles glanced behind her. "They know we're moving!"

Serafina looked sweepsward. Above Skittles' head, the tip of the yellow sail was just gliding into view. Serafina turned toward the captain, a little desperation oppressing her lungs. Alcibiades was looking up at the sails, the muscles in his neck at full stretch. "Gentle Athirat," he murmured, "Thy children have a mighty great need of Thee just now..."

"Please, Athirat," added Serafina in a small voice.

He turned and grinned down at her. "That's the spirit, Your Ladyship." He pointed a finger past her at Makionus, who put both hands on the port brace line and kept her eyes on him. He shaded his eyes with a hand, and the edge of the sail began to flutter in the wind.

"'Tis a good angle, Captain!" Skittles hollered.

"Ready-y-y-y," he called, and they seized the lines. "Bladewalker," called Alcibiades without looking at her, "have a care for that tall head of yours when that brace swings; it'd give even you a moment o' grief!"

"Aye, Captain," answered Bladewalker. Serafina glanced her way; she was smiling at him. She looked good with a smile on her face, almost like this was where she belonged.

"Skittles," ordered Alcibiades, "come about!"

"Aye, Captain!" she shouted, and they loosed the brace-lines to move the sail as she swung the steering-oar hard. The Amazon Queen headed across the wind, and they all ducked as the brace swung ponderously across the deck, the wood creaking as if it might snap. They set to the brace-lines immediately as it settled, and Alcibiades called cadence for them again. "A-theeeeee-na! A-theeeeee-na! A-theeeeee-na!" The ship found her spot, running with the wind, and her speed leapt notably.

"They're comin' about," Skittles announced.

Alcibiades called, "Aye," but he never looked away from the sails. He added in a murmur, "But I'll lay four-to-one you're a big lumberer, you tri-colored demon, and you ain't sprightly like my Queen."

They waited for a breathless time for Serafina knew not what. In the rush of wind and slap of wave it was hard to hear, but eventually, little shreds of shouting wisped past her ears. It wasn't in a tongue she spoke, and it had the cadence of birdsong, but it sounded remarkably like swearing. Skittles glanced past the stern of the Amazon Queen and turned back with a merry grin lighting her face. "I think it safe to say they ain't got an experienced crew aboard."

Alcibiades laughed. "Then let's show 'em some sailin', my friends!"

They repeated the maneuver three times, and each time Skittles studied the compass for some unfathomable sign, and the dragon ship pursuing them fell a little farther behind each time they tacked across the wind. Then it became an endless matter of haul, wait for Skittles to read the compass and call the course, duck the brace, haul some more, wait some more, listening for the course. Shouts and straining arms and ducking with a back and legs that scarcely worked, all of them save Alcibiades doffing clothing as the sun grew hotter. Serafina began to figure the game after a while: the compass let them sail close to the wind without losing momentum when they came about, and they were able to travel farther with each hop than the blindly wallowing dragon ship to their stern. The other ship's course turned erratic, she taking wide, time-wasting swings where the Amazon Queen leapt like a gleeful dancer back and forth across the head of the wind.

Serafina lost herself in the pure pleasure of watching the strong sunlit back and shoulders of the captain, tirelessly pulling at the rope, calling corrections, setting them to little tasks she didn't understand. She told herself that if this killed her, at least she'd die looking at something delicious.

The dragon ship fell farther and farther to their stern, and after a few hours, it became apparent that the Amazon Queen had won her first contest of stealth against the larger, heavier opponent. By sunset, they could no longer see the menacing ship, and the sun sparkled fiery across a sea that was empty save for the Amazon Queen. Serafina's shoulders were worn with hauling and her muscles shook and she was weary to the roots of her hair. "Rest on me," Alcibiades said, his voice the gentlest whisper, and Serafina closed her eyes and threw her arms around him and hung suspended between the sea and the sky.

She inhaled the scent of him, sea and sweat and muscles and a faint hint of the oil he used to dress his long curly hair, keenness and courage and a sense of strength corralled in the service of good, and she hoped to die with those stalwart arms holding her safe. It didn't look as if today would be the day when that would happen, though, and her gratitude swelled her heart to near bursting. "Thank you, Athirat," she sighed against his shoulder.

"Thank you, glorious one," murmured Alcibides into her hair, but she wasn't certain he was talking to his goddess. He stroked Serafina's hair with his powerful hero's hands, and she thought she would never again feel as happy as she felt this moment.

* * *

They ran with dark lanterns that night, oil lamps in glazed clay holders with shutters that could be fixed to throw the beams in only one direction. The moon and stars sailed half-hidden behind shredded clouds outlined sharply in platinum light, and deceptive gleams ran hither and yon across the ponderous waves. With a bit of luck, they might stay concealed by the sea.

Provided.

Alcibiades and Skittles stood at the sweeps, back to their regular course now that the danger had passed. It would have been impossible to read the compass by the shifting light of the moon and the dark lantern; the gimbals were locked down tight and the compass itself had been stowed carefully in Skittles' sea-chest in the crew cabin. Alcibiades eyed the moon-whitened sails with a worried expression.

"If they're going to find us," said Skittles, "they're going to find us."

"Don't go all Stoic on me," he said, turning to offer her a brief smile. "I prefer you cheerful."

"So do I," she assented, "but out o' nowhere they came and from nowhere might they return."

"Let us hope," he muttered, "that Athirat is a bit fonder of us than that."

A darker black against the blackness, a quiet gleam from yellow eyes, and they knew that Blackie had leapt to the roof of the cabins. Alcibiades and Skittles turned toward the steps, and in the dimness cast by the dark lantern, they could see Elsapia and Ranger ascending to the sweeps.

"You sent for me?" inquired Elsapia with courtesy.

"Aye, thank you," said Alcibiades, a shade nervous. "And thank you for the escort," he added to Ranger, who held out her hand, palm down, in the gesture of service they'd come to recognize.

He turned his attention to the woman before him, hesitating a bit. Precisely how did one go about conducting an interrogation? And what would he do if Elsapia proved reluctant? Call for Bladewalker to apply some sort of unimaginable pressure? He little doubted her capable. But what would that make him?

"Fear not, Captain," said Elsapia with a soft chuckle. "There'll be no need for you to step across that line. I'll tell you what I know freely."

His shoulders relaxed just as his guts tied themselves into knots. "How do you know these things?"

"I just always have." She shrugged, as if having deep knowledge of others were nothing special. "There was a time when it was useful to some, but not to the benevolent. Not like you."

"Them three out yonder," he said, tossing his head toward the open sea to the westward.

"Yes," she said. Skittles drew in a shocked breath, and Elsapia gave her a look that could only be described as sympathetic. "I wish I didn't have to discuss these things before you, gentle one." She turned her face to Ranger. "Or you or your tribesfolk, noble Aeron. Particularly little Ro, who has an abhorrence of violence and apologizes to the very nuts she consumes."

"We can bear it," Ranger replied. "It sounds as though you did too."

"True enough," said Elsapia, "but it's all gone in to making me who I am now, and I don't know that I'd trade it for a peaceable past, particularly since I've met all of you."

"Who are they?" asked Alcibiades, trying not to sound like he was terrified.

"They call themselves the Triad," said Elsapia, fixing her great dark eyes on him. "They're sisters, as you've guessed. Triplets, in fact. Half orphaned and half abandoned, until their father needed something of them."

"Their father?" asked Ranger quickly.

"The god of war of the Greeks," said Elsapia. "Ares."

"I thought he was dead," grunted Alcibiades.

"He very nearly was," affirmed Elsapia, "but, as you see, the Romans gave him a new coat of gilding and set up a simulacrum, and sold their people a dream of martial glory." Alcibiades wasn't too happy with where this was headed, and he wasn't surprised at her next words. "What could they do," Elsapia added with quiet humor, "except begin to pray to him?"

Serafina stood before the door of her cabin, all nerves. "Come in," she said, with an abrupt little sweeping gesture. Harrel walked quietly past her, shielding with one hand the tiny flame on a lamp he carried in the other. He turned, and his face was grim by the feeble glow.

"Sit," said Serafina, indicating the coffer they'd taken from her mother's house.

Harrel glanced at it, and a wave of pain went over his face. "I prefer to stand," he said gruffly, setting the lamp into its iron sconce on the wall.

If you hadn't been visitin' your mistress in the north, Serafina thought with ancient irritation, you wouldn't've lost your mistress in the south. Wisdom put the bit to her tongue, though, and all she said was, "You had somethin' to say?"

He nodded, then ducked his head. She was abruptly confronted by an imaginary picture of Harrel as a child, getting scolded by his mother for some stunt both perilous and boylike, looking up at her from under his brows, trying not to laugh. She lowered her gaze, trying to get herself under control. When she looked up, he had raised his head, his face stony.

"I don't suppose," he began with evident care, "that there ain't no reason we can't discuss it no more."

As conversational openers went, she'd heard only a few that were worse. "Discuss... what, Harrel?"

His mouth worked for a second or two, chewing on words, thinking better of it, and swallowing them. "Her," he said at last.

The dread hit Serafina in the solar plexus. "Her? You mean Mother?"

"No," he said hastily. "Though I've got a few things to s--never mind." He shook his head with evident irritation. "I meant... I meant... damnation!" He ran his hand over his face, and she could hear the rasp of his whiskers. "I meant Theadora."

Something about the name struck her, but she could not tell if it was thrill or fright.

"Should we mount guard?" Bladewalker asked.

"No. They'll be all right, and they can call us if they need help." Lethe stared out the porthole of her cabin as Bladewalker sheathed the sword she'd given her. Her hand came free of the hilt with reluctance.

Bladewalker hung the two swordbelts to hooks on the wall of the cabin, then turned to Lethe. "How are you feeling?" Bladewalker asked. It had become a ritual, and only after a time had Lethe felt safe enough to be truthful.

"Strong, for now," said Lethe shortly, not turning from the porthole. "I'm wondering whether they'll be back tonight."

Bladewalker folded her arms across her chest. "They'll find us prepared for them," she said. The bluster hid her very real apprehension that their abrupt appearance meant they could show up at any time.

"There's something I haven't asked you," Lethe said softly.

Bladewalker's back went icy. "What's that?"

Lethe glanced away from the porthole, but not at Bladewalker. "What... did you find at Sapphi?"

* * *

"I--I don't understand," said Skittles in a soft voice. "What does prayin' have to do with any of it?"

"Prayer is power," answered Ranger, a modulated voice emerging from a face that was ghostly in the uncertain lamplight. "You pray to someone, you give that someone power."

"How?" asked Alcibiades.

"It's like yon light," said Elsapia, gesturing toward the dark lantern. "One little lamp, one little beam, hidden by a shroud with only a small slit to peep through... that's not much. But multiply that light by a hundred lanterns, a thousand, a thousand thousand lanterns, and this deck is lit up like noontime--aye, and beyond. One can see far in the light of a thousand thousand lanterns. And the one who can see... can see what to do."

"So each prayer is... is a lantern?" Skittles asked, looking from Ranger to Elsapia.

Elsapia nodded, placing a finger on the side of the lantern. "The analogy's not exact, you understand. Prayer doesn't weaken with time or distance, and once it's called into being, it takes a long time for that beam to waver and flicker and die." She directed her eyes to the lantern and murmured, as if to herself, "Concentrated wishcraft." She glanced at Ranger, adding, "'Grant me wealth, grant me power, grant me victory, grant me a beautiful lover, grant me sun and rain for my fields, grant me health for my livestock.'"

Elsapia turned from the lantern, folding her hands behind her back, and walked past where Blackie was reclining on the roof of the cabins. She looked over the rail, out on the rippling roll of the star-spattered waves. "And it happens. Once. Twice. Perhaps it's coincidence, perhaps it's more. So the natural response is 'Thank you.' And maybe it happens again. Maybe friends ask your secret. Maybe you get your whole family to join in. That one lantern lighting others. And soon you have fields and fields ablaze with these tiny lights, altogether more strengthy and irresistible than the tide."

"But I thought they had all died," Alcibiades said. "All the Greek gods."

Elsapia shrugged and turned to face them. "It was a near thing," she said. "Most are gone, yes, swept off in a plague whose nature is unknown, but some of them survived, clinging to existence after their families and fellows had gone wherever gods go to die."

"Which ones?" asked Skittles.

"The ones you might expect," answered Elsapia. "War. Death. Desolation. Hunting. Growing. The ones with plenty of work still to do."

"But no one prays to the Greeks any longer," said Ranger.

"No need," replied Elsapia, with a smile that looked nearly feral in the lamplight. "The Romans took care of it for them. Set up a hollow bronze shell with a fearsome mask to the fore and nothing inside, told the people this was the path to glory."

"The prayers didn't have a real target?" asked Ranger.

"Indeed not," said Elsapia with a hint of scorn. "You can't converse with a gilded eggshell."

Ranger bent her head and studied the half-imaginary decking. "So Ares stepped in."

Elsapia nodded. "He'd had plenty of practice. What could you expect of the man who'd stolen his father's thunder, forged it into edges keen enough to feed all Hades's minions on the blood of slaughter?"

"He... he battened on the prayers intended for Mars?" asked Skittles.

"Yes," said Elsapia. "And at first, because he was so weak, he channeled that power into an activity foreign to his very nature."

"What was that?" asked the captain.

"Creating life," said Elsapia. Blackie got to her feet as a shudder went through the listeners. "He had enough strength to totter from place to place, always using trickery or guile, or, as he grew stronger, force to get his way. Married, coupled, virgin, elder, child, dedicated to the altar of women--none of it mattered to him. He wooed his targets like Eros and scattered seed like Demeter. And always he sought out one type of woman: dark hair, blue eyes, steady hand, direct gaze."

The shipmates exchanged a glance fraught with concern. Ranger frowned in the direction of the keel, and Blackie descended lightly to the deck to sit beside her.

"Something about it's unusual," continued Elsapia. "Something none can understand. All his children--they're all girls. Never any boys."

"Why would a god of war not want a passel of boys?" asked Alcibiades, narrowing his eyes. "That'd make one whirlwind of an army."

Elsapia shrugged. "That's not known except between his left ear and his right. It's as though something is driving him, but no one can say quite what."

They were silent for a moment, then Alcibiades roused himself to speak. "So the Triad are his daughters."

Elsapia nodded briefly in confirmation. "And others besides."

The silence unspooled, a bit longer this time. Alcibiades looked at Skittles and Skittles looked at him, then both looked at Ranger and Blackie, who looked back.

Someone had to utter it, and it fell to the captain. "Bladewalker," he said heavily.

* * *

Serafina put her hands behind her, groping unobtrusively for the latch on the cabin door. When she spoke, she did so with slow deliberation.

"I... don't know anyone named Theadora."

Harrel held out his hands, palms up. "Fee, I know she told thee to deny it, but this is me. Harrel. Your mother's friend, and your protector."

She could feel her face growing ugly with rage. "My mother's lover," she spat, "my bastardin' father, and my owner."

He took a shocked breath and blinked as if she'd slapped him. "Fee," he whispered. His one good eye was round and glassy. "Tell me... tell me you don't believe any of--of that..." He trailed off, searching her face like a seer Cyclops, while she stood proud and firm as mountains before him.

He seemed to crumple then, a strong man gone tiny and feeble and old, and he reached for her bunk as if blind and sat heavily, putting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "Oh, Jessamyn," he murmured, so low she could barely hear him, "what a mess you've left us to put aright." He shook his head, then covered his face with his hands. His shoulders commenced to quiver, and Serafina watched in horror as the man she'd never known to exhibit any emotion, save grumpiness, dissolved into tears.

Men don't cry, some detached portion of her mind told her. Dump the horsesh*t, her shocked heart replied. Harrel does.

She knelt gently before him and put a hand on his knee. "Harrel," she said in a low voice. His weeping was eerily silent, almost as if he'd had lots of practice concealing it. "Harrel," she said again. He gave no sign that he had heard, and panic was beginning to rise in her. Back off, said her suddenly wise heart, and let the man cry. She sat back on her heels and put her hands in her lap, waiting patiently for a while that seemed very long. "I don't know everything," she said abruptly into the weird silence of his grief. "I'm beginning to think I don't know anything. I wish... I wish you would tell me..."

He sat up and took his hands from his face, brushing at his eye with a sleeve. She moved to one haunch and reached in her dress pocket for a clean handkerchief, which she handed to him. He accepted it with a brusque nod, not looking at her, and wiped his eye and blew his nose with a down-to-earth honk. He swallowed and turned his head to look at her. His face was shiny with his tears, but his eye sparkled with what looked remarkably like love. He reached for her chin with one rough hand.

"You've such a look of her," he said, and there was an undeniable warmth and affection in his tone. "Oh, I don't mean exactly like, you're different, that's for certain, but you have that look about you, that look of a girl just turnin' into a woman. A woman in love."

He drew his hand back. Her face scalded. "He's a good man, Fee," said Harrel, flaring after that into a lightning anger. "No matter what the dungbrains might say of him." The anger vanished whence it had come. "And he'd care for you like he does this ship. D'you know how rare a thing is the Amazon Queen, how well kept she is?"

"I know," she said steadily, not wanting to interrupt him.

"He's oceans and acres better than that tavern-trawlin' trash in Sapphi," he went on, his contempt evident in his voice. "When I got back and found..." He cleared his throat a little and looked away from her for a moment. He turned back to her, his face set with determination. "You with your mother," he said, "I could see 'em circlin' like the carrion birds they are. You was rich, and young, and distracted, and so... very... beautiful..." His eye went watery again, and he gave her a tiny smile. "I wanted to gather you up and carry you to a place where you could be safe... that's all I wanted then, havin' lost Theadora and your mother, was to protect you..." He drew a straggling breath and straightened his shoulders, propping himself up with his hands on his knees. "But there was dozens of 'em, not a man among 'em who'd've scrupled to respect your grief, no more than they'd scrupled to keep from murderin' the woman who'd made that place what it was..."

He put his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. "D'you see, Fee? D'you not see? I stepped in 'cause there was dozens of 'em, too many to draw against, and I had to think o' something quick to get you safe, and rotten sorry I've always been that it was what it was. But it kept 'em offa you. They'd not've cared if you was disminded by sorrow, if you'd died of a broken heart a week later, s'long as they could make use of you and toss you aside like a melon husk." He shook his head, staring at the decking between his boots. "Your mother, now. Your mother?" The little smile lit his face again. "She had a slightly different opinion o' women. She bought the brothel an' made a deal with Deborah the Larger: any o' the girls who worked there had unchallenged right to refuse any o' the men who came for custom."

"Beg pardon?" she asked blankly.

"Oh, don't mistake her," said Harrel with what sounded like vast pride. "She'd've closed down the place if she could've. She'd a problem, she said, with Eros runnin' unyoked with Aphrodite. But there ain't no stoppin' it, not s'long as there's poor young women in a port town. So she did the next best thing: took it over, made it clean an' safe, and none o' them girls had to take a customer they didn't trust." He chuckled, his one eye seeming to look back over a distance measured in years rather than leagues. "It caused endless fights. But your mother, she hired the biggest, meanest fellows she could find, and once even a woman, an old battle-scarred Dahomei who was built like a granite cliff and could gut a chicken in an eyeblink. They had no trouble for years."

He turned to Serafina. "I dunno if you 'member what that place was like when your mother ran it, Fee. You was so young when we lost her. There was a hospital and no orphans--between 'em, Mother Adero and Jessamyn saw to that--and a school. That's where Johanna..." He looked away, and Serafina was surprised to see his face twist in pain. "I ain't treated that woman right, Fee," he said softly, "for all that she's my wife. An' a wife deserves better at her husband's hands than me." He sighed, and an age-old misery lifted into the air between them. "I wasn't her choice, nor she mine, but I'd no balls to refuse when her father said I had to make it right..." He snorted. "'Zif that was right. Aye, but she's got Wolfrum now, and that's good... he'll care for her in the way I never troubled to..."

He fell silent, the self-reproach coming off him in waves. "Why do you hate her so?" asked Serafina cautiously. "Her temper? Her looks?"

Harrel waved his hands in the air as if brushing her words aside. "No, none o' that. Just... only... I made her pay and pay again, day after endless day, and all on account of... she wasn't your mother." He sighed again, the kind of sigh that doesn't lighten a burden, merely gives the sufferer a moment to shift it from one aching spot to another. He looked her right in the eye and spoke again. "I ain't your father, Fee," he said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. "I'd've been proud to be; you're a helluva girl and I couldn't be prouder of you than if you was mine. But I wasn't never your mother's lover. Never, not even for an instant. She... she wouldn't have me."

He put his fingers to his eyes, weary lines in his face. "An' I know what you're about to ask me. I'd ask it too, I was sittin' there where you're at. But I just don't know what to tell you about that. I didn't never know whether to believe her... an' I don't to this day, for all it's up in my face, testin' me." He took his hands from his face, a watery, exhausted eye trained on her. "I'm only a man, and a stubby, grubby little man at that. I ain't got the kind of faith your mother had. But, you see, she walked with her goddesses, cradled always in their hands, even after she'd left off bein' a priestess, and I think... I think that was what made me grieve just for me, not for her, 'cause she'd gone to the destiny they'd called her to. She, you see, had been stamped by 'em, claimed by the divinity. So when they call you Your Ladyship?" The corner of his mouth lifted in a pained smile, and she saw, for the first time ever, a damn near fatherly love agleam in his face. "They ain't lyin'. You see, Serafina, you ain't no bondswoman and you ain't no tavern maid, and you never was. You're royal, the daughter of Jessamyn, the priestess Bellaster of Cape Artemisium, and twin sister to Theadora."

She stared at him, stared long and silently, while waves of shock ran up and down her backbone and her muscles went to water. And then, while her mind was still dizzily, busily gnawing the words that had poured from him, she did the most ridiculous, childish thing any silly girl could: she collapsed into noisy weeping on the floor of the cabin.

* * *

In the stillness after Lethe had asked her question, Bladewalker was aware of little other than her hands thrust into her belt and the straining rhythmic roll of the ship under full sail toward India. She stared at the corner of Lethe's bunk, where she'd spent many and many a bitter night trying to keep Lethe's body connected to her mind. It was as if her life had made a wide, purposeless circle of the globe, starting out losing her mother to howling insanity, and now in danger of having Lethe sucked under as well.

The difference was that whereas Bladewalker could not recall the slightest shred of grief for her mother, Lethe had sparked some kind of connection, some kind of emotion in a soul long since gone to a cold, ashen mud. Bladewalker had lost everything that had ever mattered to her, family and love and the horrific calling at which she excelled, and with the loss of Jessamyn, that too brief taste of the miracle she had thought was only for others, she had thought nothing else could ever hurt her again.

But it did, called night after night to a bed warmed not with love, or even her unfairly maligned sister, lust, but a horror seemingly new with each sunset. She could trace the growing madness in Lethe's face, coming to dread a slight flicker of the light in those beautiful sea-green eyes, a widening of the lids that bespoke the fit coming on. With the flight of sanity would come Lethe's intractable determination to destroy herself. And then it was a race against the madness, pinning Lethe's frantically struggling body to the bunk until daybreak, and the horror receding with the daylight.

It was as well Bladewalker had been born with height and reach and strength uncommon among men, let alone how rare it was among women, for if she had had to depend on thought or will rather than raw muscle, Lethe could have risen serenely from her bed, selected several keen-edged weapons, and slaughtered them all in their sleep.

In any normal life, on any normal world, a night aboard a sailing ship would have resulted in the passengers being rocked into slumbers, but this was not a normal place to be, crouching over Lethe as she went, with lightning quickness, for anything she could use to cut her own flesh. The nightly battle had left Bladewalker tight-lipped with fresh pain and light-headed with sleepiness.

And yet, tonight, she was calm, lucid--concerned, even, aware of Bladewalker and her surroundings, enough even to begin to claw, in her ignorance, at the still-bleeding slash that divided Bladewalker's heart.

Lethe turned, searching Bladewalker's face with her eyes. She didn't speak again, and Bladewalker's fingers tightened on the shirt tucked beneath her belt.

"I came back alone," Bladewalker said finally, wondering in an idle flit of thought why her own sanity hadn't shattered at the words. Lethe didn't say anything, and her expression never changed. "As you see," added Bladewalker.

Lethe lowered her head and put a hand to her chin. "I see." She didn't look up for a few moments, and when she did, an entirely sane sympathy roosted in the depths of her lovely eyes. "Is there a chance of reconciliation?"

It seemed an odd question, but Bladewalker said instantly, "No."

Lethe nodded. When Lethe spoke again, Bladewalker fancied she heard an edge of hurt in her voice. "You didn't say anything."

Bladewalker tried a careless shrug, which didn't quite come off as she'd hoped. "You had your own affairs to tend to."

Lethe took a step forward, the green eyes lifting to Bladewalker's face as she approached. "We're friends, Blade," she murmured. "Friends tell each other things."

"Didn't wish to burden you," grunted Bladewalker. She jammed her hands deeper into her belt.

Lethe came even closer, close enough to rest a hand on Bladewalker's chest, just below her shoulder. "You? A burden to me? The one who's saved me from my folly a thousand times? The one who's protected my every step? The one who's brought my stories out of danger and is escorting them to a safe new home? Burden? Burden?" She moved slowly, gently, to run her arms up Bladewalker's armor and twine them about her neck. "How can you ever say that about yourself?"

"Lethe--"

Lethe lifted a hand and placed a finger to Bladewalker's lips. "Shh. I want to know what I've done that you can't trust me."

"Noth--"

"Shh. I want you to trust me. I wouldn't harm you, Blade. You do know that, don't you?" Lethe pressed her body closer, and Bladewalker pulled her hands free of her belt, catching Lethe about the waist to arrest her progress.

"Stop," said Bladewalker firmly.

"I want you to know," Lethe said, as if she hadn't spoken, "that if she doesn't want you any more--"

The sound of sobbing from the next cabin caught them both off guard, staring into one another's eyes from a hand's width apart. Lethe pulled back, and Bladewalker's eyes slid shut with relief.

"Fee," said Lethe grimly, catching up the sword belts and handing one to Bladewalker. She threw open the cabin door and hurried out, Bladewalker right at her heels.

* * *

Alcibiades heard the noise and dashed past Elsapia, with Ranger and Blackie bounding down the steps after him. The door to the crew cabin was just opening, and Willow emerged, rubbing her head and looking rumpled and puzzled. "Sweeps!" shouted the captain, and Willow was in motion instantly.

Alcibiades threw wide the door of Serafina's cabin. She was crouched on the floor sobbing, eyes squeezed shut and fists pressed to her mouth. He slid into the cabin on his knees and caught her up in his arms. "Serafina, it's all right," he crooned, glancing up into Harrel's weathered, defeated eye. "Everything is all right. We're here. We're here."

She threw her arm about his neck and gripped his shirt tight enough to pull the collar against his throat. He drew his arms closely about her, supporting her head against his shoulder. "It's all right," he said, an uncomfortable feeling of missing air constricting his words a little. "We're here. We've got you. You're safe."

It was dark as a cave in the cabin, save for the feeble light of the lamp in its holder on the wall, swallowed by blackness only a pace from its brave little beams. The shadows seemed to loom over Serafina, and he threw them a fierce glare, daring them to touch her. He looked up at Harrel, whose face bore a doleful, hopeless expression unlike his habitual scowl. "I told her," he said quietly. "I had to."

"Told her what?" snapped a voice from the doorway. Alcibiades looked up; Lethe was leaning in the doorway with one hand, the other holding her sword belt. Behind her was Bladewalker, and next to her was Ranger.

"Alci," gasped Serafina. He looked down, and she was looking up into his eyes, her own swimming in water. "I have--had--a sister. I had a sister, and nobody told me--"

"Have." The quiet remark came from the doorway of the cabin, and Elsapia moved with subtle grace to enter between Ranger and Bladewalker. "Have," she repeated, as Serafina tried to calm the hitching of her breath and stop crying. "She lives yet." Elsapia knelt before Serafina and took her hand (the one not choking the captain). "You are the one who most needs to know."

"Where?" whispered Serafina. She was soft and vulnerable in his arms, her eyes huge and delicate in her tender face, and he wanted nothing more than to protect her from any and all evil. But he barely understood what she was saying, and her hand lay without objection or defensiveness in Elsapia's larger ones.

"They have her," Elsapia replied, speaking so softly that Alcibiades, a hand's length from her, had trouble hearing her. Elsapia's gaze was trained on Serafina's tear-glazed eyes, and the two of them shared some form of intimate communication from which he felt shut off. "The Triad. Those three sisters who've attacked you once, and your shipmates, and will doubtless try again."

"Who are they?" murmured Serafina, staring into Elsapia's face in incomprehension. "What do they want?"

"They are the dark-haired, blue-eyed daughters of the Greek god of war," said Elsapia. Her voice was so calm and soothing that it raised the hair on his arms. "And they want something from each of you."

"I--I used to play a game as a baby," Serafina said to her, with questionable relevance to the topic. She loosened her hand from Alcibiades's collar, to his intense relief, and sat up a bit. "Mama had a thing she called a 'mirror', a thing she said had come from the east. I would crawl toward it and hold out my hand..." Elsapia opened her hands, and Serafina lifted hers like a bird learning to fly. "And I would reach, and in the mirror would be a pale girl, like me... and I would touch her hand, and she mine..." She held out her hand, empty in the empty air, a call without an answer, and fell silent, her half-lit face registering an awful lifelong loss, and then even the loss of the loss.

Harrel put his hand to his face, squeezing at his eyes. "'Twas no game, Fee," he said heavily, his words rough as if pushing past gravel in his throat. "When you was learnin' to crawl, the two of you, we would put you on the floor, one in each corner. 'Cause you couldn't bear to be apart."

Horror overcame Alcibiades's soul, and the silence weighed at his shoulders. He did what he could to gather Serafina even closer. She shook her head, her eyes closing in pain. With his arms around her, he could feel her struggling to breathe. She looked up, desperation painting her features, and whispered to Elsapia, "Why don't I remember?"

"Your mother thought..." Harrel cleared his throat and started again. "She thought they'd come back for you, and... and she thought to hide you 'mongst the other girls, and if you didn't know you had a sister, they'd not know you. And look elsewhere."

Serafina lifted her head and stared at him, her mouth working, but no sound emerged. Then she levered herself to her feet, so abruptly that Elsapia fell back on her heels and Alcibiades had to loosen his arms about her in haste.

Serafina marched to the doorway. "You," she growled, her voice low and deadly, with a note that promised trouble. "You know them, don't you?"

She was staring at Bladewalker.

"No," grunted the warrior.

"Liar," spat Serafina, reaching past Lethe to shove at Bladewalker's armor. Alcibiades began to scramble to his feet. "You're one of them, you hell-spawned fiend." Serafina slapped at Bladewalker's chest again, and the warrior fell back a pace, swinging the sword belt well out of Serafina's reach. Serafina pushed her away from the doorway, out onto the deck lightly coated in starlight. "You know where my sister is, bitch! Tell me!"

"No," repeated Bladewalker, her face like granite.

"Serafina," said Elsapia in warning.

"I know you're in this! Tell me!" shrieked Serafina, punching at Bladewalker's armor. Though the blows could not have had more effect than an insect splatting against her leather jacket, Bladewalker continued to pace backward, step by step, toward the rail. "You owe me, God damn your heartless, hateful soul!" Serafina shouted. Alcibiades maneuvered for a chance to seize her about the waist. "Tell me what you've done with my sister!"

"Nothing," said Bladewalker.

"You f*cking liar!" bellowed Serafina, raising her hand to knock Bladewalker's head into the sea. Bladewalker moved too fast to see, arresting Serafina's hand just a fingerwidth from her face. Serafina's hand was still open, curved for a murderous strike, and Bladewalker's hand gripped her wrist like an iron manacle. They stared at one another, dark eyes locked on blue eyes, Serafina's determination to kill with a blow matched by Bladewalker's insistence that she'd get no closer, and the others got over their paralysis and moved.

In a heartbeat, Ranger, Lethe, Harrel, and Elsapia had Bladewalker's wrists pinned to the rail, and Alcibiades had got his arms about Serafina, swinging her away from the danger. "Let go of me! I want her dead! I hate her!" Serafina's arms flailed and her legs kicked and Alcibiades had a time holding on to her.

"Calm down," he told her through his teeth.

"I hate you!" Serafina shouted at Bladewalker. "I wish you were dead!"

The silent Bladewalker kept her blue eyes steadily on Serafina's face. "Serafina," said Alcibiades, attempting a reasonable tone despite his breathlessness.

"You kill everything you touch!" Serafina went on, struggling just a little less in Alcibiades's arms. "A murderer calling me a thief! How many souls have you sent to hell? Tell me that! Is my sister one of them?"

"No," said Bladewalker. She hadn't made a move to break her captors' grip on her wrists, though Alcibiades had no doubt she could do so easily.

"How the f*ck would you know? Have you kept count? Can you even count that high? Did you even know who she was?"

"All right," said Alcibiades, turning Serafina in his arms and shaking a finger in her face. "That's enough."

Serafina flung her hand in Bladewalker's direction, one accusing finger pointing steadily at her. "But she--"

"I said it's enough, Serafina," he repeated firmly, sick to his stomach. "You've got reason, Athirat knows, but I've got a ship to run." He put a hand on her shoulder, and she stared into his face, breathing hard.

"You," he said, breaking his gaze from Serafina with reluctance and turning to Bladewalker. "It's clear your apology didn't do much to convince Serafina of your... benevolence. I don't want either of you layin' eyes on one another, speakin' to one another, nothing. You're to avoid each other from now on." He set his shoulders and continued, "You're a danger to this ship and everyone aboard, Bladewalker. And you've got the look of them that's chasin' us. I've got to protect my people. So when we reach land, I want you off the Amazon Queen."

"I'm yours to command," replied Bladewalker.

"No," said Lethe, taking her hands from Bladewalker's wrist. "We need her here."

Alcibiades shook his head, hoping he didn't come off as stubborn or overprotective. "My mind's set, your Grace," he said sternly. "Knowin' what we know, we can't risk one of his children aboard."

"Then I leave too," said Lethe.

"Your choice," said Alcibiades.

"With the scrolls," she added.

It shocked him, but he stood his ground. His mouth had gone dry. "I'll try to find you another ship to carry you to Qin."

"I'll have to stay with Lethe." The voice had come from behind him, and Alcibiades turned his head to see Pyra creeping out of the door of the crew cabin. Behind her were Makionus and Dogmatika. Above them, he could see the heads of Skittles and Willow, watching wide-eyed from the sweeps. He waved a hand at them, bidding them back to sailing, and their heads disappeared.

"I must remain with the scrolls," said Makionus abruptly.

"Me too," said Dogmatika.

Alcibiades's mouth set in a stubborn line. "It's as you decide." He hesitated, glancing at Serafina, not wanting to ask lest she tell him of a terrible choice that would strike his heart to its core. She ain't yours, he thought firmly, trying to convince himself. You've got no claim on her, not even by rights of your love. He had his own decision to make, and yet he'd already made the one that made the other inevitable. Time to be a man. He bit his lip, then spoke at once, before he could think it over. "Harrel, would you take Serafina back to her cabin?"

"No," said Serafina abruptly. He swiveled his head, and she seized his hand. "I want you with me."

* * *

The humans fell silent, and Serafina let go his hand as if it had become red-hot iron. He searched her face and his brain, looking for some reply he might make, but had come up with nothing when Blackie commenced to purr loudly, rolling onto her back and rubbing her face with sensuous determination on the decking. It took three heartbeats for her to destroy his commander's dignity, turning his display of decisive authority into a slightly ridiculous moment of insanity. His hands itched to pick up the great cat by the scruff of her neck and throw her into the ocean, except he strongly suspected he'd be the one to hit the water, probably less half his blood and one or two limbs, and the damage was already done.

He turned his attention resolutely from Blackie and smiled a pained little smile at Serafina. "As her Ladyship wishes," he said.

Evidently the import of what she'd said had gotten through to her, for Serafina lifted huge dark eyes in a frightened face. "I need to talk to you," she said in a low tone.

"Of course," he replied. "Instantly." Something occurred to him, and he held up a hand. "A moment, if I may."

She nodded, and he turned to the others. "We'll discuss this later. For now, my orders stand. Does anyone need 'em repeated?"

A chorus of headshakes and a muttered "No" or two. He nodded, hoping he looked like a captain, and turned to Serafina again. "Your Ladyship?" He held out a hand and indicated her cabin, then followed her across the deck. She opened the door in the stillness and looked over his shoulder, and he saw her face change again.

"Harrel!" she exclaimed, a mixture of exasperation and embarrassment, and Alcibiades turned to see her bondsman at his heels.

Harrel's face bore the stubborn, grouchy look they'd come to expect as his usual expression, and his hand hovered near his knife.

"Yes?" asked the captain with marginal patience.

"I'll watch the door for you," said Harrel, stolid and bulky.

"From outside?" inquired the captain politely.

"Yes," Serafina shot back. "Come on." She grabbed the captain's hand and dragged him into the cabin, then slammed the door.

"I'll be right out here," Harrel called through the door. "If you need anything."

Serafina put her hands over her face, and her shoulders shook. Alcibiades, alarmed in an eyeblink, reached for her. He peeled her hands from her face, which was convulsed with merriment. He drew a relieved breath. "He's better than a dog," said Serafina, giggling softly.

"He's better than Blackie," responded Alcibiades, and her giggles became a soft chuckling, accompanied by a bit of emotional mist.

She wiped the last of the tears from her eyes. "And he was just saying earlier--"

But she stopped herself, looking down, and he put a hand to her chin. "What?"

"Nothing," she muttered, evading his eyes. "Damnation, but it's dark in here." She turned to the lamp, drew her knife, and tweezed the wick up a fingerwidth. The cabin brightened, and his eyes lit on the bed.

"Captain," she said, whirling, and he turned to her, clasping his hands behind his back.

"Aye, Your Ladyship."

"I wanted to ask you..." She looked up into his face, and he put some sort of encouraging expression on it. Serafina put her hands behind her back, looking abruptly shy. The two of them stood before one another in absurd solemnity, for all the world like a pair of dancers waiting for the pavane to begin. "Did... did you mean that?"

"Mean what?"

"About... about putting Bladewalker off the ship."

"Indeed I did," he responded with captainly firmness. "She's dangerous."

"I know..." she said, a bit distantly. She gestured with a hand, and he hissed and caught it in his fingers, gentle but frantic.

"Did she hurt you?" he gasped, just barely avoiding bringing her hand to his lips. His vision went cloudy around the edges, centered on her face, and she poked out her lower lip and shook her head. He opened his hand, and she drew hers slowly away from him.

"Of course not," she replied. "Nor did I do her any damage," and she sounded angry and annoyed with herself. "I ought to practice lifting boulders... or befriend a pack of elephants fond o' stomping..."

"All the more reason for her to leave," Alcibiades said. "She could do you an injury."

"That's just it," said Serafina, in a voice close to a whisper. "I... don't think she would."

"Not hurt you?" he exclaimed. "When she'd challenge a pride o' lionesses to a wrestlin' bout, draw on a Roman legion for lookin' at her sideways, or challenge Melgart to a grudge match for the prize o' the Underworld?"

She turned, folded her arms, and stared at the floor of the cabin. "And yet," she murmured, "when she called me thief, she didn't so much as lift a finger, though she could've swatted me down like a tsetse fly." She thought for a moment, then added, "And just now, when I was beatin' on her with all the tremendous force of a hair-kissin' breeze, she didn't make a move to defend herself."

"Lethe's taken a shine to you," he said, his voice dry. "If that don't explain it to your satisfaction--"

But she was shaking her head, and she turned to look him in the eye. "That's not it." He nearly missed her words, for there was an ancient wisdom in her look, an elderhood he'd never seen in her, and he fervently hoped it was a trick of the light, and not an awakening clairvoyance. It would change things between them if she could see through him.

"It's not," he said, not certain whether he was asking a question.

"No," she said, and she put one hand on her hip and used the other to massage her forehead. "At least, I--I don't feel that it is..."

"Excuse me?"

"That's just the problem." She spread her hands, looking so adorably baffled that he longed to kiss her on the nose. "I just have this feelin' inside me that... that puttin' Bladewalker off is the worst thing you could do."

"Why?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head as if to dislodge a bee from her brain. "I don't know. But something happened to me today, when we were runnin' from the dragon ship, and now I'm all over funny--"

"I'll get Pyra," he interrupted, putting his hand on the door latch.

"No," she said softly, putting her hand over his. "Don't. I don't think this is the sort of thing she could help with." Her hand was warm, her skin like the caress of water against him.

"What do you think it is?" he murmured.

"I don't know," she said again, "but it... it was somethin' that knew to unlock that gimbal, and somethin' that meant if we didn't run from the Triad, we'd all be doomed and dead. And it wasn't Harrel tellin' me I had a sister made me cry... it was 'cause I didn't know, and the feelin' told me I should've never forgotten."

It made him a little uneasy to hear her speak this way, but he resolved to listen; she'd not hauled the steering-oar against the wind on him yet, and he saw no reason not to trust her. "And that something," he said, "is telling you Bladewalker ought to stay?"

She put her hand to her chin and stared at the decking again. "It may be that if we lose Bladewalker, we lose protection." He snorted, and she repeated patiently, "It may be. Or it may be that if we lose Bladewalker, we lose Lethe, Pyra, the scrolls, Makionus, and Dogmatika. And it may just be that a ship called the Amazon Queen is supposed to see the scrolls home."

They were silent for a moment, both lost in thought, and then she roused herself again to speak. "And yet," she said softly, "that same feelin' is tellin' me Bladewalker's in this thing with the Triad up to her scalp."

"You be careful around her, Serafina," said Alcibiades, putting his hands on her shoulders. "I'm still not convinced she doesn't mean you harm, and it could be this feeling that... that..."

"I think," she said reflectively, "that I ought to talk to Elsapia."

"Sweet mother Athirat," he muttered. "That's what we need, all right."

"She knew about my sister," Serafina pointed out. "It may be it's time to find out what else she knows."

He drew his hands from her shoulders. "I can't find a damn thing to fault with your logic, much as I want to. But you be careful, and make sure me or Harrel are about when you do it. Understand?"

"Aye, Captain," she said, smiling at him.

He sighed. So beautiful, so near, and he had his own feeling that all it'd take was an outstretched hand. But he had to get back to the sweeps; Skittles had been there all day, and was probably about dead on her feet. "Serafina," he said, "I must--"

She went on tiptoe and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. "Quiet watch, Captain," she said, and reached around him to open the door.

* * *

After he had vanished from her line of sight, she heard his booted footsteps climbing the stairs, then a soft murmur of conversation as he spoke with Willow and Skittles. Serafina glanced out the door. There, standing by the rail, was Elsapia. She was leaning against the rail on her elbows, looking out across the rhythmic, quietly tossing sea, as if waiting.

Waiting for... me? Can it be?

It was a short walk across the deck to her, but Serafina's steps were soft with anticipation and dread, almost as if she were making a procession to her coronation. "Harrel," she whispered--at least, her lips moved, but she could have sworn that no word emerged. Harrel appeared, as if she had called him into being with her mere whim, and fell into step behind her like a baron escorting a monarch.

Elsapia turned her head from her study of the waves, straightening as Serafina approached with her glumly protective shadow. Moonlight, chased by clouds, ran along the deck, sparkling in minuscule halos in Elsapia's silver and black hair.

"I," said Serafina experimentally, trying out her voice. Elsapia didn't answer, which wasn't astonishing to Serafina, seeing as how it wasn't much of a question. "Want," she added, feeling just a bit foolish and young.

"What is it that you want?" Elsapia asked. Her voice was low and gentle, the tone of someone who was entirely sympathetic, even to the point of listening as long as it took for Serafina to finish what she had to say. Her eyes were dark, understanding, occult in their insight, a little light agleam at the center of each.

"My..." Serafina cast her gaze out to sea, both to avoid the distraction of those dark eyes and to give herself a chance to think. The waves rolled, one after the other after the other, and as she followed them back to their unknown origin beyond the horizon, it seemed to her as though all of the world depended on her answer. What is it that I want? Love? Safety? Adventure? To have a talent? To have a lover? To have a family? It struck her at once, with the force of a blow to her keelbone, and she trained her eyes on Elsapia again. "History," she murmured.

Elsapia held out a hand that seemed to glow. "Come," she said. "Take my hand."

Terribly afraid, Serafina laid her hand in Elsapia's far larger one. She was not certain whether Elsapia would strangle her with those strong hands, or worse yet, leave her physically untouched and tell her something that would shatter her heart. But Elsapia's hand was warm and unthreatening around hers, and she reminded herself that Harrel was right there, and would protect her.

Elsapia led her to the rail, guiding Serafina's hand to rest, palm down, on the wood, then covering it with her own. Harrel took up a position right behind Serafina. Elsapia granted him a brief smile, then turned to the sea again.

"Each of those waves," said Elsapia, pitching her voice so that Serafina alone could hear, "is the measure of a life. Some tall and grand, some fittin' in the spaces between queens and goddesses, some you'd hardly notice, mere ripples up and down the swells, buried in a mass of countless ripples of no more magnificence than they."

Serafina watched the movement of the water, mesmerized, and Elsapia went on. "But what you can see of the waves is only a tiny part. Those waves run deep beneath the surface, water moving as spirits run through it, and the origin of the mightiest wave might've been the frightened flap of a tiny fin fleeing a menacing shadow."

Elsapia turned her face to Serafina. Her skin seemed alight with the same phosphor that coated rigging in the night. "Thus it is that every wave is shaped by one thing, a small thing, in its past. And when it comes a-roarin' at you like the end of the world, it can help to remember how tiny and feeble were its beginnings."

She looked out to sea again, and Serafina studied her profile. Her skin held the translucence of a fine marble carving, and the scar on her eyebrow gleamed like a tiny sword. Serafina wondered how it had come about.

"Ask," murmured Elsapia.

* * *

She found herself drowning in a sea of questions, a flood of mysteries swirling about her head. One simple word, an offer with no strings, no conditions. It didn't even seem as though Elsapia wanted anything from her in return.

"Who was my mother?" she gasped.

A crooked smile blossomed gradually on Elsapia's face. "A wonder. A miracle. A woman out of time, out of place, born half a world away and uncountable years from her destiny. The scion of a race of tamers, overlords to the beasts, who offered herself, with open eyes and willing heart, as an obedient servant to the gods themselves." Elsapia chortled, an intimate little laugh. "And she. Of all people. Unsuited by nature to obedience, and they were weak, unable to threaten, unable to punish. She walked their path knowing that her peril, and her end, lay in the machinations of other humans, not the feeble Greeks."

"Why?" whispered Serafina.

Elsapia turned to her. "To bring something back to this sad, tired, brutalized, godsforsaken world. To bring back hope. To bring back magic. To give the world a gift of wonder, mirror images of miracle. To give it you."

In the silence, Serafina was aware of her body breathing, but little else. A roaring quite unlike that of the ocean had begun behind her eyes, and as she stared at Elsapia, the hollow booming took over her skull. I've missed you, she thought, though till today I'd've said you were a phantom in a polished bit of metal. "Where is my sister?" Serafina asked, her voice a choke of grief. She put a hand to her breast and cleared her throat, then said steadily, "Where is my sister?"

"Not far," Elsapia reassured her. "The two of you grow closer by the day."

"Will we find her?" Serafina was tempted to add something like alive or safe or disminded, but the roaring in her head, the silent echo of something missing, was too loud, too distracting.

Elsapia co*cked her head, and her smile straightened out. "It's my turn to ask a question. How much of the argument over predestination have you followed?"

Serafina tried to make sense of the question, but ended up with nothing. So she said, "Nothing."

"Hm," said Elsapia. "Your mother must've taught you something of it, but perhaps not the Greek vocabulary. Attend, then, for a bit of reminder. Since the beginning of time, humans have argued over whether their every move is ordained by the gods, or if they have free will to effect their own destinies. 'Tis a great mystery, perhaps the greatest: nothing less than Elysium or Tartarus, or your own Heaven and Hell, twist on the pinpoint o' the question." Elsapia turned, leaning comfortably on the rail on one elbow and gesturing with her free arm. "It is a question I have some perspective on, considering the cliffs and abysses where I've lived my life, and what I could see now from this promontory, now from that precipice. I think it works a bit differently from what is commonly supposed. I believe that our slightest action is foreordained, and yet that we have free will to take whatever action we wish, and for this reason: we cannot foresee the outcome of our actions when we take them."

Serafina put a hand to her temple and shook her head, wincing a bit. "My brain is afire..."

"Indeed, 'tis late for philosophy." Elsapia laughed her gentle laugh and put a hand on Serafina's wrist. "You're a lovely young girl wishing the haggard crone would strike at the target, instead of meandering erratically six leagues from the stadium, wondering where she's mislaid her bow." Serafina laughed, which felt like a relief, and Elsapia removed her hand. She continued, "All I meant was this. Suppose I told you that you and Theadora were destined to meet again, no matter what you did to effect the reunion. Suppose, more grimly, that I were to say she'd been lost to you forever." Serafina caught her breath with a sharp little noise, and Elsapia inclined her head respectfully. "I speak in supposes and theoretics for a reason, Serafina. Please indulge me for a moment. What do you think would happen if I were to tell you that either victory or defeat were a certainty?"

"I... I would know," said Serafina after a pause to have a bit of a think. "Knowing would be a comfort. But then... then I think... I might be tempted to... to stop looking."

"Precisely," said Elsapia. "You're approaching an ancient, slow land, where time itself crawls and sizeable percentages of the populace make a spiritual quest out of stillness, speechlessness, motionlessness, a place where flowers called 'lotus' unfold endless petals ripe for endless contemplation and life trickles away in eternal, pleasant dreams. It is a place to lose oneself. And that you cannot do, and for more reasons than just Theadora."

"So you can't speak of what is to be?" Serafina inquired cautiously.

"It would be more accurate to say that it would be misleading to put your trust in me. The past is clear; it leaves a well-trodden path to this very spot. But look into the future, and possibility piles up on possibility until the light of the very stars is a tangled web of beams and the planes converge, diverge, and converge again until a candlemark from now is but a snarled, impenetrable mess." Elsapia turned her head to the sea again, murmuring, as if to herself, "That thicket, 'tis how the gods protect free will, and their tender mercy to the ones who can see over that horizon..."

The scar glowed over her eye like a vein of purest silver, and Serafina dared to ask in a low voice, "Who wounded you?"

Elsapia turned to her, her look both friendly and surprised. "Haven't you guessed by now? Why, then, since you ask, and since it's in the past, I'll answer you. The Triad."

* * *

Something came at Serafina then, a dark bolt of pain and fear she barely had time to duck, and it was as if her head had split open. Before she could draw the breath to cry out, the feeling disappeared like a puff of smoke, and she raised a frightened face to Elsapia.

Elsapia laid her large hands gently on Serafina's face. "Peace, child," she whispered. "It was long ago, and far away, and I'd hoped it wouldn't touch you." Serafina's eyes fluttered closed, and Elsapia smoothed her thumb over Serafina's eyebrow as if gentling a spooked filly. "It's not yours, not any part of it, and you've no duty to take it on. I can bear this burden on my own."

When Serafina opened her eyes, the tears had already begun to prickle. "It's not fair," she said in a low, despairing voice. "It's not fair what they did to you."

"No," said Elsapia, in a gentle tone that might have been reporting a tendency in the sky toward rain. "No, it isn't. But fair and unfair are two poles, and everything swings from one to the other to the other. And that swing? That's life, Serafina, life. The kind of life your mother said yes to, and the captain, and your sister, and you. We all have a choice, and remarkably few of us turn it down. You were born human, with a mind that gets curious and feet that can carry you to what's making you curious, and hands to pick it up and eyes to peer into its heart. Some of what you examine will be ugly and painful, and some will be beautiful and fleeting, but all of... it all goes into making you the being you are. Unique, captivating, necessary. You've no idea how necessary."

Elsapia drew her hands from Serafina's face, and Serafina shot out her hand to take Elsapia's. They stood hand in hand for a moment, and then Elsapia turned her hand this way and that. Serafina made a platform of her own hand and looked at Elsapia's strong fingers and long, smooth palms. Whatever had touched her had left those hands intact, hands that could plow a field or cradle an infant, and Serafina smiled a little at the image. Whatever she'd lost, it seemed she hadn't lost everything.

It made her want to hunt down the Triad and make them feel what she'd felt, what they'd made Elsapia feel, dismantle the wall they'd put up to block the road so decent people could pass back and forth unmolested.

"Aye, that's you," said Elsapia, with what sounded like a mother's pride. "The explorer, and the warrior. Why stay home when there are lands to travel, seas to sail, adventures to have, romances to savor, a world to save?"

Startled, Serafina met her eyes. "A... a world?"

"And you'll never know how far its borders stretch," said Elsapia, "for it's a place measured in time and spirit and the strength of true women's hearts. Always the same, and always changing, and you're a part of it now, and you'll never be foreign to it."

"It's someone else you mean," Serafina said, shaking her head.

"No," said Elsapia, "it's not."

"It's too much to take in," Serafina whispered, staring at the decking.

"Not for you," replied Elsapia. "Not with Theadora here with you."

"Why is my head echoing?" asked Serafina.

"You already know the answer to that," said Elsapia swiftly, and Serafina considered a moment, then nodded.

Serafina raised her head. Her hands tightened into fists. Before she could convince herself to remain silent, she said, "I... I want to know something else."

"Ask," said Elsapia, like a genii.

"Who is my father?" whispered Serafina.

Elsapia's eyes shot to Harrel's face, and for the first time, she appeared to hesitate.

* * *

"I knew it," Serafina said in a low voice. She could feel her eyes go to ice and her mouth twist in a sneer. "I knew it all along." She turned to Harrel, her fists already forming.

"Hold," said Elsapia, a sharp hiss like the snap of a whip. Her hand closed around Serafina's wrist. "This man has done nothing to deserve your contempt."

"Nothing?!" exclaimed Serafina. She was furious, but she kept her voice down, not quite certain why. "He enslaved me, set me to scrubbin' bottles and dodgin' perverts in his rat's turd of a tavern!" Harrel stood stalwart and grim-jawed, a light of horror buried deep in his one good eye. She was unmoved to compassion for him. "He stole my inheritance an' made me think myself as worthy as somethin' he scraped from the sole of his sandal! My own--"

"He's not your father," snapped Elsapia, her voice as low as Serafina's. She didn't tighten her hand about Serafina's wrist, but Serafina could no more have wrenched free than she could have if it had been pinioned by a baobab.

"Then who is?" demanded Serafina. She'd lost her mother and her sister; was she to live the rest of her life without a family? Her knees went weak. Overcome by misery, she let herself sink to the deck, too sorrowful for tears. Elsapia's grip went from preventive to protective, and she lowered Serafina gently, then freed her wrist. Serafina drew up her legs, wrapped her elbows about her knees, and lowered her head into the circle of her arms.

Beside her, Elsapia sighed and sat. "My child," she murmured. Serafina closed her eyes, and one comforting, warm hand descended onto her shoulders, another on her arm. "It isn't fair to you either. Such a sunny young girl to lose so much, and it seems as though you'll keep losing and losing until you've no teeth nor limbs nor eyes, nor mind to miss them with."

"You don't know," grumbled Serafina.

"About your father, you mean?" Elsapia asked in a gentle tone.

"And you piss me right off when you do that," Serafina complained. "If you can see so far, how come you can't see that?"

"Fee," said Elsapia, moving a little closer, and Serafina leaned against her, closing her eyes again.

"It's a little enough thing," Serafina went on, feeling drowsy and warm against the softness of Elsapia's body. "You could tell me. A soldier? A merchant? A drunkard? Someone who fed her pretty promises and used her and left her burdened with the two of us?"

"I cannot see your mother gulled by a sweet-talking man," Elsapia said, and then Serafina heard something she hadn't expected: Harrel laughing.

Serafina's eyes snapped open, and she stared up at him. Harrel was guffawing, slapping his knee, his breath rasping from his throat as if he had the croup. "She's got the right of it, Fee," said Harrel, fighting for air. "Thy mother wasn't never one to listen to hyacinth-scented honey-drenched horsesh*t."

"Then what do you see?" asked Serafina, sitting up.

Elsapia's eyes were filled with sympathy, and the scar seemed to pulse in the moonlight. Her mouth drew up at the corner; it must have made it a challenge to manage the lovely words that poured from her. She was quite beautiful by starlight, a wondrous motherly figure with a subtle glow to her skin, as if she'd taken those scars and forged them into the costliest of jewelry. It was a useful lesson in making pain worth it, Serafina realized with a stab of acute insight, and she resolved to attend whatever Elsapia had to say to her.

Elsapia took Serafina's hand between hers and spoke softly. "Fee," she said, "I can see fairly far back, that's true. But there's a part of your mother's life that's hidden from me."

"Why?" shot out Serafina. "Was she ashamed of him? Was he common? Poor? Ugly?"

Elsapia laughed softly into the night air. "Beautiful child, what ugly lover could have a part in the making of thee? No, no, that's not it. But your mother kept her own counsel about so many things that I wasn't surprised to find something concealed."

"Great," muttered Serafina, lowering her head to her arms again.

"'Twas something else that surprised me," Elsapia continued conversationally. Serafina raised her head and peeped at her suspiciously out of one eye. "Not that the circ*mstances of your conception are shrouded with a discreet veil, but that... no matter where I look, no matter how far, I just don't see a father for you."

"Everybody's got a father," said Serafina, but she was a little doubtful.

"I didn't say you didn't have one," Elsapia said by way of clarification. "I merely said I couldn't see one."

"Spit on your scrying-glass," suggested Serafina miserably, "and rub it on your sleeve."

"And yet," said Elsapia, almost as though she were addressing herself or someone far away, "I see a protector hovering about you, closer than ever before."

"Is it Mother?" asked Serafina softly.

Harrel made a brief choking noise. Serafina glanced at him; he had pressed his fist to his lips and was shaking his head at one or the other of them, she couldn't tell who.

"No," said Elsapia simply. "No, it's not your mother."

"Enough," grunted Harrel.

"Shut up," Serafina said.

"No, Fee," sighed Elsapia, getting to her feet and holding out a hand, "he's right. We won't get to the bottom of this tonight, and you're weary."

"How... how do you know so much about my mother?" Serafina asked shyly, taking Elsapia's hand and rising with grace to her feet. "Did you know her?"

"I didn't have that honor," replied Elsapia, and the curve of her damaged mouth made her statement even more regretful. "But I did have the privilege of knowing someone else well. Someone very important indeed."

"Who?" Serafina whispered, but she had already guessed.

"That's right," said Elsapia with another co*ckeyed smile. "Your sister, Theadora."

* * *

Robbed of breath, robbed of speech, Serafina stared into Elsapia's face. There was a look to her, a sense of far-seeing and a shimmer of what might have been liquid light. She looked as though no corner of the cosmos could dare hide from her gaze, as though she could stare right back through time until its beginning and ahead until the end of the world. And Serafina knew, knew to the center of her bones and in every fiber of her rapidly-beating heart, that Theadora could do the same thing, and could see them then and there, as they stood talking quietly on the deck of a beautiful little ship who could tell how many leagues from the place in which she was held.

Elsapia's eyes were large and full, and Serafina could tell that Elsapia knew that she realized Theadora could see them, and that she should say nothing of this. Words, she told herself frantically. There are words. What are they?

"What..."

It seemed an unpromising beginning, and Serafina bit her lip and attempted it again.

"What is she like?"

Elsapia's compassionate expression grew deeper. "She's lovely," she said. "As lovely as you, but not in the same ways. Strong. Capable. Able to endure."

Elsapia was telling her that her sister was strong, then, and a strong person might be able to resist whatever the Triad tried to do to her. A horrible thought struck Serafina just then, and her arms dropped and her legs went weak, as if they were weighted with chains. "Have they hurt her?" she whispered.

Elsapia reached for her hands again, holding them gently between her own. "Not often," she replied, "and not badly. She gives them no reason, and they'd learned long before that one cannot dig the third eye out of the skull without the affair ending badly."

Serafina pulled her hand free and reached with tentative determination for Elsapia's face. Her fingers came into contact with the scar on Elsapia's skin, and while she felt no pain, she was aware of a dim sense of screaming and that hollow throbbing in her brain. She closed her eyes and shook her head, murmuring, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..." to Elsapia.

"Escaping such a thing with only a lopsided smile and an interesting seam o'er one eye is more than many could've hoped," said Elsapia, "And I promise you, they won't maltreat her that way. She is too valuable to them."

"However did you escape?" whispered Serafina.

Elsapia shrugged. "'Tis no great feat when one is no longer of use."

Serafina couldn't decide which was sadder, the loss or how matter of fact Elsapia was. "But... but you can still see... things, can you not?" Serafina asked.

"No," said Elsapia bluntly, "not like before."

It was like a knife to her chest, and Serafina turned, putting a hand to her forehead. What would it be like to bear that kind of brand forever, and to know that the scar concealed a barren spot where once lived the biggest part of your soul?

"Be comforted on my behalf, Fee," murmured Elsapia, putting her warm hand under Serafina's chin. "When one's seen sufficient tempest, famine, and battle, being blind can be a great mercy."

Serafina squared her jaw and lifted her head, staring Elsapia straight in the eyes. If I don't speak, she thought firmly, can you still hear me?

Elsapia's smile grew a bit broader on one side. "It seems you have another question."

"I--I wish..." A dizziness plucked at her elbow, but she ignored it and kept her gaze nailed to Elsapia's. "I wish I'd not forgotten her." Will you tell her I'll remember her now that I have her back?

Elsapia put her hands to Serafina's forearms and gripped them. "She knows," said Elsapia. It was as well that she had a firm hold, for Serafina's knees nearly gave way.

Elsapia turned. "Harrel," she said softly, and Harrel stepped forward to put a protective arm under Serafina's. "This young lady," Elsapia went on, "has had a long day and many shocks. Will you see her to her bed?"

"Aye," said Harrel, "it's time we were all abed."

Serafina put out a quick hand and touched Elsapia's sleeve. "Thank you," she said. "On behalf of my family, thank you."

"It is an honor to serve your house," Elsapia replied with a bow.

And while she was still trying to master her reaction, Harrel led her away from the rail to her cabin, and while she undressed for bed and got into her bunk, she repeated a single word to herself, carving it so deeply into her brain that she could never lose it again.

Theadora, Theadora, Theadora.

She told herself not to forget, never to forget, and then she was asleep.

* * *

Whether it was the protective presence of the mysterious Elsapia, the guidance of the captain's Athirat, or purest chance, they were never able to argue out to their satisfaction, but the shipmates were untroubled by pursuit from the evil triplets the rest of the way to India. They were, however, vigilant, and days of uninterrupted vigilance, flinching at every shadow, had them all jumpy and snappish.

Alcibiades spent many an off-watch in his hammock in the crew cabin, hands behind his head, staring up at the underdecking and wondering how many crew members he would have after landfall in India. He had had great plans, a notion to sail upstream along the Sindhu and its feeders, bypassing the lengthy, dangerous crossing at the tip of the land, doing what, to his knowledge, no mariner had accomplished: an overland river route to the bay that was the gate to the land of Qin. With sailors and haulers the like of Bladewalker and Lethe, he felt he could have done it; now, that was all in doubt, and all because of Bladewalker's accursed blue eyes and dark hair.

Those eyes had gone cold. Whatever she was looking for in Sapphi, she had not found it; either that, or the city/town/realm of Theadora, which no research of Skittles' had been able to locate, kept that hidden treasure away from her. He had wondered at the change in her since her return; she was seldom what one could consider jolly, but there had been an eagerness, a lively sense of anticipation, when she was in search of wherever Theadora was, and something had happened in Sapphi to chase the life from her face.

It had not returned.

They had had no more fits of homicidal rage from Lethe, and he suspected that the tall, silent warrior was the reason. It seemed that burden after burden had settled on her shoulders, boulder after boulder till it seemed that even Shammu the Sky God would buckle under the weight. Bladewalker, though, had kept upright, betraying little strain. She had, moreover, kept to the letter of his commands, haunting the prow during daylight and not so much as training her eyes toward Serafina.

He went back and forth on the question: was Bladewalker, who had not (he had to admit) offered any violence to a shipmate, too dangerous to keep aboard just because of her looks? Or would he find himself one day cursing his assumption that her restraint meant he could count on her always to bridle her murderous impulses?

She had not harmed anyone.

Yet.

But there were her sisters, jet hair and lapis eyes, and they had done plenty. And promised more. He had someone precious to protect, and he would have emptied his veins to do so.

But was he looking for threats in the wrong spot?

Or precisely the right one?

His thoughts sloshed back and forth like the water in the bilge, and he still had not reached a conclusion many days later. It was with a sense of great relief and even greater dread that Alcibiades heard the welcome words from Willow, steadfast at the sweeps: "Green, Captain, green!"

As the shipmates crowded the rail, peering into the distance to see what Willow's blue-weary eyes had detected, he watched their delight with one thought popping flotsamlike to the surface of his mind:

Thou'lt have to decide, Captain. And soon.

* * *

The legends told of a land cradled in the lap of a powerful river goddess, rich with forests, teeming with life. The humans fortunate enough to inhabit this place were likewise wealthy, sleek and pampered by their benevolent deity. Fruits fell from the abundant trees into their outstretched hands and the waters washed away any uncleanness and time passed, but no woman could tell of its extent save through the counting of her children and her children's children.

The women's roots ran deep into the land, air and earth and water and fire combining to feed and shelter them and their children. The men had roots too, but some did not acknowledge them, saying that the goddess did not cherish them, only the women, for to them She had given the knowledge of immortality, in the form of children.

And these men, say the legends, grew greedy to put their own stamp on the land, and they ripped out the forests and dammed up the rivers to remake their garden paradise. And when the women, wise in the ways of seasons, protested this folly, the men locked them away and forbid them their friends and set them to cooking and cleaning and bearing children. Many, many children, and as the populace grew, the women wept to see each child have a little less than the one before.

The men, in their arrogance, rebuilt the land the goddess had given them, thinking they could surely do better, and when the courageous women protested yet again, they set in place a priesthood to silence them once and for all. The priests took the goddess away from the people by making her a figure of evil, and they said the women were evil for being made in the shape of the goddess. They shut the women behind doors and took their stories and retold them, this time with men as the heroes, and they built up the men to think that they were lords over the winds and waves and forests. And the women worked with their hands to keep the world going, for the sake of their children, and they waited and kept their counsel.

The men behaved like lords, taking slaves and demanding tribute, occupying themselves with hunting the animals while the women labored and watched. And one by one the jangled animals withdrew past the boundaries of what they came to call, in warning and derision, The World of Men.

The burden of the people grew upon the land, and the goddess grew angry, sending first sickness and then monsoon to turn them from their course. But the men would not be turned, and the sickness became plague and the monsoon floods, and when the people had descended into misery, the women began to teach their children in secret, saying,

"The Earth is the Prithvi Sukhta, my Mother, and I am Her child.

"May the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, flowing with waters and grains, vegetation and living creatures, nourish Her child.

"May the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, hold Her child never far from Her life-giving breasts, and may She send Parjanya, the rain-bearing clouds, to ease the thirst of living creatures.

"May the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, so rich with life, counteract that part of human nature that tempts Her child to imposition of will, aggression, subjugation of living creatures, or their annihilation.

"May the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, grant to Her child the gift of harmony with other living creatures.

"May the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, grant to Her child the gift of radiance.

"Wherever I go, whatever I do, whether I sit, stand, or move, may my actions be such as to avoid grieving the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth.

"I cherish the spirit of the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, who shelters all who seek truth, all who are tolerant and understanding, all who grant strength and nourishment to others, all who express creativity in art and poetry and song.

"May the child of the Prithvi Sukhta, our Mother the Earth, live always in accordance with Her wisdom, compassion, and grace."

And when they had finished this teaching, the women took their daughters aside and said, There is a secret beyond this secret, and it belongs to the women and the girls, for the risk of sharing this with any man or boy is too great until they accept the wisdom of the Prithvi Sukhta. This belongs to women and to women alone, whose very bodies move to the rhythm of the Earth our Mother. And then they spoke to their daughters, saying,

"Sing to me, Muse, of the Warrior Woman, beautiful and strong, clever and wise, the guardian of the tiny portion of good amid seas and continents of evil...."

* * *

The land got closer and closer, crawling infinitesimally toward us over the sea, and the nearer we got, the more the water changed color from deep blue to a clear, sparkling green. The land was even greener than the water, towering trees hung with vines and creepers, rioting with innumerable flowers, and with little glimpses of buildings well hidden by vegetation and shaded from the fierce, bright sun. By the time I could see shadowy glimmers of the sea floor, we were close enough to shore to be able to tell the colors in the clothing the people wore.

We hauled canvas as we approached, both to slow ourselves down and to turn the ship so we could sail north, looking for a place to berth. My heart had been hammering for quite a while; I was actually on the other side of the world, impossibly far from the home that had taken more than it had given. And Elsapia had assured me that every moment, every step, every league brought me closer to the only living member of my family.

My eye was drawn from time to time to the sight of the tall, dark-haired warrior at the prow. The rest of us stood amidships, at a respectful (or possibly fearful) distance, and only Lethe was willing to make the journey, requiring just a few steps but an ocean of courage, to stand at Bladewalker's side. Then again, I reasoned, Lethe had little to fear; Bladewalker would never harm a lover, unless (as I had come to assume, judging by the nightly noises from the cabin next to mine) that was what was wanted.

It might have been that their rough bed-play was the outlet that kept Bladewalker from slaughtering all of us; if so, it gave me one more reason to be profoundly grateful to Lethe. She bore no visible marks from what must have been an active bed, nor was there much sign of affection between them. I felt my ignorance of this portion of adulthood keenly. The speculations had nearly driven me insane, and once or twice I had inquired, timidly and subtly, along that direction to the three with whom I haunted the scriptorium when Lethe was not present.

Harrel had gotten the look, half of disgust and half of apprehension, that he got whenever the topic of Bladewalker came within six leagues of arising, and Dogmatika always expanded on my comment by saying that no amount of bloodletting between those two would be a surprise, considering. Makionus, who could be relied upon to challenge idle gossip, no matter how deserving the target, never looked up from her copying while she reminded us that we could little guess what two people got up to when they were alone together, and that observation of human behavior was capable of limitless interpretations, only one of which could be right. Dogmatika retorted that Makionus had more reason than most to credit Lethe's appetite for violence, and Makionus said there was a difference between homicidal mania and recreation, and she was neither so comely to think it the one nor so threatening as to assume the other. Neither of them would explain these comments, even when pressed, and I walked out of the scriptorium as ignorant as I had been when I walked in.

My occasional investigation reached no conclusions, and I found myself afraid to ask Elsapia, who would probably have told me the truth.

Lethe, at the prow, reached for Bladewalker's hand and smiled up at her. Bladewalker turned her head and smiled back, her cold beauty gone warm and intimate all at once. It was another maddening clue, one I had no idea how to interpret.

A shadow fell across my hand on the rail, and I turned. Elsapia gave me her gentle smile and opened her arms, and I hugged her, hard. Elsapia kissed me on top of the head. "I don't want to interrupt your sightseeing, dear heart."

"I don't want to let go," I replied, snuggling close under Elsapia's chin.

"Here," said Elsapia, turning me so that I could face the shore. Elsapia put her arms around my waist. "There. Now you have both."

It felt wonderful, and I told her so, leaning my head back against her shoulder and folding my arms over hers. She was like a favorite aunt, but not the ones I had known in Sapphi, the ones who smacked my hands when I stole sweetfruit from the bowl and kept me from behaving like a brat because my mother's daughter had to be held to a stricter standard of behavior than other children, for some reason. Elsapia had done nothing but to answer my questions and shine with love toward me, and I trusted her like I'd trusted few others in my life. "We made it," I said, studying the coastline through dreamy, slitted eyes.

"Bellaster be praised," replied Elsapia, and I whipped my head round, grinning. Elsapia pressed another kiss to my forehead, and I turned again, safely in the circle of Elsapia's arms, to watch the shoreline pass in a stately promenade.

The sun was low in the sky when we found an inlet, a small break in the unending forest where a tributary of the Sindhu flowed into the sea. People on the shore waved the Amazon Queen toward the inlet, and Skittles and Alcibiades maneuvered the ship with skill and little fuss until she sat quietly at the mouth of the tributary, which was only a little over twice as wide as the ship. The people on shore tossed ropes to the deck, and Bladewalker seized them whirling in midair, making them fast to the jackpins at the prow. On shore, drovers on either bank of the river fastened the other ends of the ropes to the stout collars of double-yoked oxen, and as the drovers called and whistled back and forth, the oxen strained at their yokes and the ship began to move.

I crept from Elsapia's arms to get close enough to watch. After the initial effort, the oxen moved easily enough, and the ship floated through a dreamlike green-roofed canal with the ease of Ngami the Moon Goddess sailing in a cloudy night sky.

The oxen towed the Amazon Queen to a berth some distance from the mouth of the tributary, settling her into a small, snug space she just fitted. Alcibiades and Willow ran out the gang to a narrow wooden dock, and a broad-chested black-bearded man trod upon it with light steps, rushing onto the deck and catching Skittles in a remarkably close hug that left her looking a little dizzy. He spoke in a rapid, liquid tongue that only Skittles seemed able to follow easily. Alcibiades reacted in a friendly but baffled manner to the flood of language, and Makionus was watching the stranger in utter fascination.

"Pitar, Pitar," called a strong, clear voice, and I heard a door slam at the same time that a young woman dashed down the dock, holding up a close-fitting skirt over ankle-length trousers as she too went up the gang. "Alci!" she cried, leaping into his arms and kissing him stoutly on each cheek.

By this time, I was laughing, and when he turned to me with a charming grin and a shrug, as if to say, I cannot help it if every woman finds me irresistible, I was wise enough to wink and blow him a kiss, which was my answer: I know, and I rely upon it, my handsome friend. Reassured, he turned to the lady again, whirling her into his arms and setting her down on her feet.

The man, who resembled a wine-cask with muscles and a turban, gripped the captain's wrist, still filling the air with those flowery, incomprehensible sounds. The woman commenced to render his words into Greek with a lovely, flowing accent.

"Pitar says it is too long since you have visited us, and you have grown into a full man--" At this, the man began to gesture toward Skittles, talking volubly in a language none of us had the slightest hope of deciphering.

"Pitar," scowled the young woman, and a rapid exchange of syllables like birdsong followed. It could not have been anything other than an argument, and finally the woman said to Alcibiades in Greek, "Pitar asked if you were ready to sell your chief wife to him just yet."

"I'm afraid not," said Skittles, with the solemnity of a village elder. "Please tell your father that the situation is not as he thinks. In fact, it is I who own the captain, not the other way around."

The woman laughed and rendered this in her speech, and her father huffed and blustered, clearly bereft of an answer. The rest of us had gathered around this odd pair, and as I grew closer, I could see that the woman had lovely dark eyes, darker even than mine, and soft-looking brown skin.

Alcibiades introduced each of his shipmates in turn, and the man had a comment for each, most of which the young woman was unable to render in Greek. He paused for a time when he saw Pyra, and a longer time when he took Elsapia's hand. He nodded with respect to Bladewalker and Lethe, gave Harrel a brisk handshake, and actually saluted Ranger and Blackie.

"And this," said the captain, "is my good friend Serafina."

The man's eyes, large and gleaming with curiosity, fastened on mine. He reached for my hand, grasping it gently, and murmured something soft and respectful-sounding before letting it go.

"What was that?" I asked the woman.

She gave him a look that was half exasperation and half love. "He says," she replied, "that his friend Alcibiades has added a rare jewel to his harem."

I was struck speechless, and the man gestured toward Skittles again, arguing something persuasive at the captain. The young woman snapped at him again, and it was some time before she could translate. "He says," she told Alcibiades, "that now you have so many wives you won't miss Skittles."

"Mesa," said Skittles with a smile, "if you're man enough, there's no such thing as too many wives."

Alcibiades blushed to the roots of his hair, and Mesa clapped him on the back, nearly knocking him over the rail, and called us all, with an unmistakable gesture, in to supper.

"These clowns," said the woman in affectionate annoyance, holding out a hand to me. "Ignore the introductions in favor of the wine." Her grip was strong and direct, as was the look in her eyes. "It is a pleasure to have you with us, Serafina. My name is J'lari."

* * *

The wine was excellent, the hospitality gracious, and the place magnificent. The home of Mesa and J'lari, his daughter, was made of a tempered hardwood polished well with some form of oil. The public rooms, where we all sat or lay on cushions, were more frame than room, with walls of a light canvas material that kept away the astonishing number and variety of night insects while letting in light and the cool breeze from the river. As night fell, nearly silent servants moved with grace along the pathways, setting out small oil lamps whose glow illuminated the way to the dock where the ship lay stately at anchor.

After supper (served by the same nearly mute, nearly ghostly figures), J'lari left her father dozing at the host's corner of the table while the rest of us went to check on things shipboard. The forest canopy was so thick that the sky was a whispered rumor overhead. The lamplight glimmered on the ripples in the river and the cry of the insects made a soft, sleep-inducing hum.

Bladewalker and Lethe vanished into their cabin, and we did not see them again until morning. Harrel and I found everything in order in my cabin and, not having much else to do, joined Alcibides and J'lari on deck. We found them in mid-conversation at the lamplit sweeps, and Alcibiades waved us over. He was taller than J'lari, and bent to the side to hear her speak. She was talking softly, and it seemed as though she could not meet his eyes.

"There is no one to look after him," she said.

"He has an army of servants," the captain pointed out.

"Who would not lift a finger to help him if he got tipsy and fell in the Sindhu."

"The Sindhu," said Alcibiades, "would part for Mesa."

She laughed and shook her head. "You and your fancies," she said dismissively.

"You've a few of your own," Alcibiades pointed out. "Nothing stopped Srikandi from taking up her armor and weapons and seeing the world."

"A childish dream," she sighed. "I am hardly Srikandi."

"You are my Srikandi," he said. "And growin' to man-height hasn't changed that. And never will."

"Athirat has granted your wish," she said, giving him a shrewd look, "but Lord Krishna has yet to hear mine."

"Srikandi didn't wait for an invitation," he said. "Man, woman, it's the same for each. If you want somethin' in this world, you've got to take it with both hands and not let go."

"And if I do," she said, folding her arms over her chest and meeting his gaze, "what do I have to set aside?"

"I've no answer for you," he said, "'cept to tell you that we've been friends for a long time, and I can see your soul dyin' of thirst."

"J'lari," I whispered. The two of them turned to me in some surprise, as well they might. My heart had begun to race and my hands were shaking, but I went on, "If you do nothin' but tend a man who doesn't need tendin', you're robbin' him of his life too."

I barely knew what I was saying, but J'lari's large, liquid eyes seemed struck by a sudden enlightenment, and she reached for my arm. "You've given me something to think about," she murmured. "Thank you, my sister."

Sister. It went through me like lightning, and I wondered if I had ever heard the term applied to me before. "You... you must come," I said, my words hissing with an intensity I could not explain. "You must."

I was making a frantic attempt to determine what I'd just advised, as my brain refused to make any connections between my words and reality. While I was thus occupied, J'lari looked at each of us in turn, then trained her eyes on the neat, trim little deck of the Amazon Queen. Her eyes came to rest on my face. "You're right, Serafina," she said. She laughed softly and threw her arms about my neck. "You're right," she whispered in my ear.

"Good," I said, patting her on the back. "I knew you'd see... why it was so important."

Later, I thought, I have to get Alcibiades alone and ask him what in the name of Athirat I've just told her to do.

* * *

J'lari departed the ship, deep in thought, and Alcibiades was left on the deck of the Amazon Queen with Serafina and her omnipresent shadow. Alcibiades opened his mouth to say something, with some sort of little shrugging gesture, and Serafina turned instantly to Harrel.

"Won't you go see if you can help Mesa's servants tidy up after supper?" she asked him, her voice sweet and low.

"They can do it themselves," Harrel replied, casting his one-eyed gaze in the captain's direction.

"I'm certain they'd welcome your assistance," Serafina said.

"I'd break things," he said stubbornly.

"Harrel--"

"I'm going," he grumped, sticking his hands in his pockets and making for the gang. He turned before descending to add, "And I'm counting to a hundred, and if you're not back by then, I'm coming to look for you."

He stomped away, his footsteps echoing down the gang, as Serafina muttered, "Yes, Father."

Alcibiades laughed, and she turned a livid face on him. He shut up. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know."

"He's not," said Serafina, crossing her arms and fuming at Harrel's departing back. "Although you couldn't tell from his behavior."

Alcibiades hesitated a moment, and Serafina turned to him. Her face glowed by lamplight and her eyes were dark, but radiant. "Yes, Captain?"

"It's a beautiful night," he said finally. "And there's a beautiful lady standing on the deck of my ship, and I find myself getting... notions."

"Indeed?" She took a step or two toward him, moving like a woman who well knew how. "Notions?" She got very close, looking up into his face, and though the Queen held steady, the deck shifted beneath his feet. "Such as?"

"I find myself thinking," he said, teasing back just a little, "of asking the lady for a favor."

"A favor," she said, as if thinking. "What sort of a favor would you ask the lady?"

"A grave and impudent one," he answered.

"Hm," said she, mulling. "Well, if one is to ask a favor, especially an impudent one, 'tis best to go about it with some gravity."

By now, he had a smile half a league wide. "A poor fellow, such as I am, hardly could ask for such a thing."

"Poor?" she snorted. "Why, you've the finest ship in half the world. In fact, she's made it across half the world, so there's been ample opportunity to compare."

"Aye, she's all right," he said, a shade dismissive.

"Well," she said, "it's as easy for a lady to grant a favor to a rich fellow as a poor one."

"Is that right?" he asked.

Her smile was as broad as his. "Aye, it requires only better shoes."

"Ah," he said, putting a hand to his chin and regarding her feet, which he could hardly see. "So... how are your shoes?"

"Well suited," she laughed. "What's the favor?"

"I was wondering," he said, "if Her Ladyship would care to accompany the wealthy ship's captain on a stroll about the riverbank?"

"It's a good thing," she replied as she took his hand, "that my shoes are prepared for any eventuality."

"So it is, and prudently managed besides," he said, letting her lead him down the gang. "Tell me, is that part of bein' a lady?"

"Oh, 'tis the very first lesson," she assured him with great seriousness. They moved away from the lamplit dock, traveling the path that led to the river, where only occasional lights winked and glittered through the softly moving greenery. Her hand was warm and soft in his, and he thought if she held his hand long enough, he might be able to feel her very soul in her palm.

"Tell me somethin' else?"

"Willingly," she said, stopping to face him.

He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, relishing the chance to touch her skin. "How much time have we got 'fore your chaperone comes for my hide?"

"All night," she replied, shaking her head with a brilliant smile.

"All night?" he asked, astounded.

"All night," she said firmly. She broke into a merry laugh and added, "Harrel couldn't count to a hundred if you gave it to him in camels."

* * *

She took advantage of his answering laughter to tug at his hand, leading him farther down the path by the river. The trees met overhead, enveloping them in a warm, dark softness enlivened by the soothing, chirruping hum of the night insects. Little glimmers through the foliage showed them the path, lined with stones and smoothed by the feet of countless wanderers over countless days. He followed with no hesitation whatsoever, though he did ask, "Where are we going?"

"Somewhere so far from people that the only lights are the ones Astraea put in the sky," she said.

He stopped walking and hauled back on her hand, and she turned with a question in her face. He pulled her close and lowered his face to hers. He had one glorious, dizzying moment of seeing her beautiful face approach him, and then his eyes closed and he put his lips to hers.

She was as warm and soft and dark as the night itself, and she tasted of some exotic spice. She had found him without any trouble, and her kiss was at first tentative, as if she were afraid of hurting him. As her confidence grew, she pressed herself closer to him, and deep beneath her gentle touch he could feel her hunger.

He slid a hand around her waist as she slid her hand up his vest, twining up around his neck like a serpent. Her hand came to rest at the back of his head, her fingers combing slowly through his long hair. She made a little noise against his mouth, and he nearly went up like a waterspout.

She pulled away abruptly with a gasp, and he put a hand to her elbow, concerned. She put the back of her hand against her mouth and whispered, "Forgot to breathe."

"Don't do that," he said, smiling. "I just found you, and I ain't ready to turn loose of you yet."

"Nor I you, Captain," she said, grinning at herself. "Not for another fifty lifetimes. Where were we?"

"Right... here," he said, pulling her to him again and kissing her. She put both arms around his neck and stood on tiptoe, and he wrapped his arms around her waist as he learned her lips and her mouth and what she liked and what would make her make that little noise again.

In the tiny spaces between kisses, she murmured against his lips, "You're good at this," and he murmured back, "You inspire me."

Eventually, she pulled away, a grown woman's smile on her entirely kissable lips and a shade of what might have been fright in her eyes. He reached for her neck, then thought better of it and gently rearranged a spill of her magnificent hair over her shoulder. "Slowly?" he asked in a near-whisper.

"Yes," she breathed with gratitude, adding immediately, "If it won't drive you mad?"

He shrugged with a manly diffidence he was far from feeling. "No more than you've already got me, Your Ladyship."

"A--all right," she said. She searched his face with her eyes. "That... that is all right, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said in soft reassurance, taking her wrists in his hands. "Yes, it is. I ain't one of those who'd press an advantage, Serafina." He was glad she had drawn back before his very bones burst into flames, but for now, he was able to be a gentleman. "If I get too forward, you're welcome to clobber me with a jack-pin."

"If you'll do the same," she said instantly, and he was about to protest that having to dissuade her was a thoroughly preposterous notion when she added, "Shall we stroll like you wanted, Captain?"

"A pleasure," he said, smiling. He tucked her hand into his elbow, and as they set off, she leaned against him and rested her head for a brief moment on his shoulder. He put his hand over hers, snug in the crook of his arm, and thought the night ablaze with glory.

The path followed the riverbank, rising and falling at this hillock and that clifflet eroded with the monsoon floods, and soon they had gone past the tiny civilized lights. The darkness was warm with wildness and possibility, and yet he felt able to protect her from any stray predators--chiefly, he had to admit, a lust-addled seafarer. She was such a solid presence next to him, the girl of his dreams walking at his side with her soft arms entwined about his, and she seemed entirely willing to spend time in his presence even after he'd kissed her. When she spoke, it startled him. "Would you tell me something?"

"If I can."

"Will you really put Bladewalker and the rest off the ship?"

He sighed, the fantasy deflating. "I've not exactly reached a final reckoning on it." She smiled beside him, and he could feel it before he turned his head. "What is it?"

"I was just thinking how nice it was that you weren't saying, 'Ship's business,'" she replied, imitating a gruff sailor, "and tellin' me it was none o' mine."

He gave her a startled glance. "D'you think I would?"

"I don't know, would you?" He could see just enough of her face in the darkness to know that she was laughing softly.

He chuckled in response. "I've come to rely on your instincts, Your Ladyship. You seem to have a sensible head on your shoulders, though it took me some time to notice, bein' distracted by what it looked like."

"Thank you, Captain," she said, making a lovely, graceful little bow. By now, they had left the paved path outside Mesa and J'lari's house, and he turned his head to make certain he could still see it.

"Should we turn back?" she asked.

"Aye, that's the sort of thing I meant," he said. "You seem to know what I'm thinking just before I say anything."

"I assure you, Captain," she sighed with audible frustration, "that I find you annoyingly impervious to penetration."

He broke into a full-bellied guffaw, and she joined him. He gestured with his free hand, and they started back for the house. He looked at her by the slightly less uncertain light of the lamps on the path. She wasn't the girl he had thought when they met, but a woman, a child who had become a person without anyone quite being able to lay a finger on when or how it had happened. It won't be forever, he thought, remembering her last comment.

"I hope not," she muttered. He stared at her, and she pulled free of his arm, folding her hands behind her back. "Does it rain here often?" she asked airily.

He put a hand on her arm and stopped her. She turned to him, and there was that fright in her eyes again. "I--I didn't say that... out loud, did I?"

After a bit of hesitation, she shook her head solemnly.

The first thought that popped into his head was, And here I've been tryin' to convince you I'm a gentleman! Her face burst into a brilliant full-on smile. He shook his head as if to clear it. "Can you stop that?"

"I don't know," she said with bravado. "I'm not certain I feel like it. You're a very entertaining fellow, Captain, whether you're usin' your mouth to speak or not."

"How long have you been able to do this?" he asked in astonishment.

She shrugged. "About a week."

"A... a week?"

She looked around, almost as if she were scanning for concealed enemies, and laid a hand on his arm as she moved distractingly close to his ear. "Captain," she whispered, "Elsapia and I talked that night, and I... I can feel my sister."

He put an arm around her, making it look as casual as he could. He nuzzled her hair, murmuring back, "Is she giving you this?"

"I don't know," she said, keeping her voice low. "But I'm getting certain of a lot of things lately."

"Like not putting the rest off the ship," he whispered, and she nodded against his face. "And making certain J'lari comes with us." She nodded again. And knowing we'd have no trouble with Bladewalker? Is that part of it too? Her nod was vigorous, and she accentuated it by throwing her arms round his neck.

He knew he was in love with her, the kind of love that burned and banked and flared and exploded from time to time, turning into families that became dynasties, and he was tremendously eager to get on with the project of making her the queen of the world. Right now, right here, though, she needed him not as a lover, but as a friend, and he struggled briefly with his conscience and his lust before deciding.

He pulled back from her and gave her a searching look. "You know," he murmured, "that you're safe with me?" He shrugged, thinking of her kiss. "More or less," he said, "mostly."

She laughed her beautiful laugh and took his hand. "Come on, Captain. Let's walk the path a couple more times. After all, if you want to speak with me, you've proven you don't need your lips to form words."

* * *

It was a soft early morning, with the gentle light of a mild sunrise falling through the lushness of the trees to dapple the ground in greenish magic, and J'lari was in a mood by turns foul and despairing. She was doing what she normally did when she was not feeling particularly sunny: spend half the day punching holes in innocent targets with long, wickedly sharp arrows.

Her bow was constructed in layers of a supple, forgiving wood carefully stitched together with the fibers used for the ropes that held elephants and towed ships. She had made it herself, the twenty-fifth of the bows she'd constructed since an artillery-mad childhood and the grown-up bitterness of realizing that she would never have a place in any man's army. The bow had a sweet draw, exactly matched to her strength, and a nearly noiseless release that sent the missile silently in search of its target. She never sullied it hunting: she was determined that the first blood it would draw would be that of a human, an enemy who threatened her family or friends.

But life in this sleepy, unburdened place had offered little opportunity for the daughter of a rich man to prove her valor in the defense of hearth and loved ones. She spent her time serving at her father's otherwise womanless table and, when she could get away, setting up targets and busting them to pieces with her stealthy, hushed weaponry.

She had already punctured three targets, and knew herself to be at a rare level of frustration when she sent the next two arrows into the hearts of the last two. Her arrows were carefully crafted of strong heartwood, which took some time to cure properly in this warm, wet climate, and she had spent uncountable days whittling, smoothing, crafting, until those arrows were as straight as a beam of sunlight. Fitting heads and fletching were their own arts, distinct and separate, and she considered the arrows objects she knew better than the riverbank home she had not left for a night since her birth here. She knew each arrow individually--could, indeed, have assigned names based on their characteristics, like "Swift-Flyer" or "Heart-Finder"--and she was surprised to find herself so casually willing to destroy two of her few friends.

Well, she would collect what was left, and she would put them away somewhere so secure she would never again be tempted to reach for them, and then she would hunt up Alcibiades and tell him no. And after that? She supposed her heart would break, but at least Pitar would get his dinners on time.

She strode to the target with a warrior's walk and pulled the intact arrows from the targets. Then, she drew forth the splinters of the ones she'd shattered, sad little scraps of once-proud strength lying dead and dry in her palm. She clicked her tongue at them, cursing herself wordlessly for letting her anger fly loose of her control (as she would never have allowed to happen with one of her precious arrows). As she stood with head bent over her broken arrows, the despair flooded her heart and welled up in her eyes.

Something, some change in the light, made her dash the water quickly from her eyes with an unoccupied hand and turn her head. Ranger was standing on the path, watching her, with Blackie by her side and the squirrels perched one on each shoulder. Ranger had a gloved thumb hooked in her belt, and on her other glove rested the magnificent Klokir, whose feathers looked invitingly soft, and whose strong muscles were clearly defined beneath her plumage. When she first saw Klokir, J'lari had longed to stroke those feathers, but had the notion it was unseemly for a warrior, so she didn't so much as ask.

J'lari took refuge in the rituals of hostessing. "It's early, warrior, and you got to bed late. What are you doing up?"

"Elsapia is a somewhat restless companion," replied Ranger with a smile. "I ask your pardon for the interruption." She had a soft, cultured voice, and her Greek bore an accent J'lari had no hope of locating. "It must be difficult for you to find a time to drill when you won't interrupt the household."

"Drill?" laughed J'lari, trying to recover her equilibrium. "It's not a drill, warrior, it's a... a hobby."

Ranger co*cked her head, looking not unlike one of the animals with whom she traveled, and regarded J'lari with a serious expression on her still, handsome visage. "You're not the family's protector?"

"Protector?" J'lari laughed again, a high, girlish sound that made her despise herself. "Hardly. I'm a... I'm..." But she looked up just then, lifting her eyes to Ranger's face, and the warm, guarded sympathy in Ranger's eyes made her think her heart had laid itself out at Ranger's booted feet. "I don't know what I am," she whispered, and the tears blurred her sight of the real warrior standing before her.

She was barely able to detect the soft smile returning to Ranger's face. "May I?" murmured the warrior, stretching her free hand toward J'lari, who nodded. Ranger's gloved hand descended into hers, and the fragments of arrow changed hands.

Ranger juggled the pieces into a row, and as she examined them, Klokir bent from her perch on Ranger's rock-steady arm to peer one-eyed at the wood. "These are excellent work," commented Ranger. Reflexively, J'lari handed her one of the intact arrows, and Ranger looked it over, her eyebrows lifting in surprise and admiration. She looked up at J'lari. "Who fletches for you?"

"I... I don't have a fletcher," J'lari replied. "I make them myself." She shrugged, trying to match Ranger's still confidence. "I have a lot of time on my hands."

"You put it to good use," said Ranger immediately, handing her back the pieces and the arrow, which J'lari gathered to her breast like a bouquet of flowers. Ranger nodded at the arrows. "These are tools that could do the job without cruelty," she murmured, and J'lari, struck by the comment, asked, "What do you mean?"

"When blood must be shed," answered Ranger, "it need not happen with cruelty. The direct strike, the immediate loss of life, no time for agony, or terror, a flight to the Summerlands as swift and light as the arrow that carries you there. If you must kill, you needn't kill like a clumsy, frightened beast. It is well to develop the talent to take life without marking a creature's last moments with pain or fear." J'lari remembered, for the first time, that Ranger was an archer. "My tribe," Ranger went on, "spends a great deal of time developing that sort of skill. We could well use a tool-crafter like yourself."

Silence fell over the little glade, even the half-sleepy birds letting their music fall unsung for a moment, and J'lari studied the quiet, capable woman before her, draped in the fur and feathers of her friends, standing as easily as if she could claim the whole earth, but chose instead a more enlightened way. Somewhere on this earth, there were more like her, and the glade seemed to pulse with glory at the very idea. "Where is your tribe, Ranger?" whispered J'lari, when she could speak.

"Far to the northeast of here," replied Ranger. "And my tribespeople call me Aeron. I would count it an honor if an expert archer like yourself were to do the same."

"Very well," said J'lari, extending her hand to Ranger. "Aeron."

Ranger took it, the firm grip of a woman who well knew what hands were for and how to use them, and then she nodded. "I wish you a good drill, Archer," she answered, and moved past J'lari. Blackie stretched herself back on her long legs in a bow of sorts and followed Ranger, and in a few moments they had disappeared down the path that led to the riverbank.

J'lari watched them go, her mouth halfway open and her mind sparking with possibility.

"Daughter," called a voice, and she turned hastily to see her father standing in the spot Ranger had just vacated.

"Good morning, Pitar," she said, with a new steadiness in her voice. "Did you sleep well?"

"Aye," he remarked wryly, gathering her close and pressing a gentle kiss on her forehead, "considering all the salutes your reprobate world-traveling friends forced me to drink last night." She laughed, her soul filling with an unaccustomed courage as she marshaled words for him. He pulled away, gazing down at her with a familiar prideful look it seemed she had spent her life seeing, but not appreciating. "Daughter," he said, "that one with the--" He made a vague gesture toward his face, holding a finger up before his eye and making a sawing motion.

"Elsapia," she said, slipping the intact arrows back into her quiver.

"Aye, that one," he said. "She met me on the path... said you wanted to talk to me about something?"

"Did she?" replied J'lari, a shade surprised. "Aye," she went on, "I do." She squared her shoulders, settling the quiver into place, and prepared to break both their hearts.

* * *

I awakened in his arms.

The miracle of that. I stare at these lines now, setting the pen aside and gazing, still enraptured as the child I was, on the words that truly mark my last step from girl to woman. As the ink dries and my history passes into something less evanescent than memory, yet not as permanent as stone, I am overwhelmed with the sense I had then that life, even my life, could contain magic.

Most markers of womanhood have to do with tiresome images repeated so often as to have lost all significance: ruptured hymens, jumped broomsticks, moonsets, a naked woman at the window, singing in soft triumph to the dawn while her lover lies a-drowse in the bed behind her. Mine was less dramatic and yet more profound; the first time I entrusted my safety, my vulnerable sleeping self, and my heart to someone not my kin. In a reversal from the shattered, deception-filled days of my youth, the woman found protection where the child trusted in lies.

We had walked and talked for what seemed like a year the night before, up and down the riverbank, the starlight gliding with us across the still water, and with every promenade, it seemed as though I could hear his thoughts more clearly. My rather too casual announcement had unsettled him, and something about it was deeply disturbing to him; however, as we walked, the conviction grew upon me that he was not troubled because I was too close, but that that closeness would reveal things about him I would find difficult to understand, and impossible to accept.

You who read this will already be well aware of how artless I was as a girl, how shallow and self-absorbed, and so perhaps a moment's thought will reveal how I could have been relieved, rather than concerned, as his wispy drifts of thought became clearer and clearer, and I began to detect in him a fear that I should discover something he did not wish known. You can guess easily my own thoughts: Yes, he is distant and withdrawn, but it is not because of anything in me.

I spent little time wondering what it might be--coiner, smuggler, adulterer, murderer?--and contented myself with the reflection that whatever ghastly offense he had committed, he must have done it for an excellent reason, then went back to exploring his obvious interest in every part of me. Most girls first stumbling over the world of love don't have such reassurance in their arsenals, and I confess my back grew straighter and my steps lighter the more I came to understand exactly which part of me he was craving to appreciate at any given moment.

I was surprised to find that what he wanted most of all was to hear me speak. We talked about everything that night: where we'd come from, where we were going, what we wanted from life (including one teasing, laughter-filled interlude in which we enumerated the numbers and accomplishments of our imaginary children), favorite colors, flowers, games, birds, footgear, bivalves, clouds, seaweed, hats, continents, until we both were near collapse from laughing again.

From there, the conversation turned serious, and I fretted openly about the Triad: whether they would find us, what they would do if they did, who might be in danger. I was happy that the flow of interior conversation went only one way, for I was seriously thinking of slipping away from the Amazon Queen to draw the danger from my friends, and the thought would only have distressed the man who watched me with an unconcealed ardor glowing in his face.

Eventually, I began to stumble with sleepiness (although by then both of us had long since committed the path to memory, Athirat knows), and he drew me close beneath his arm, warm and protective as I looked up at his face and wondered if I could ever leave his side, even to save his life. He led me to the bank of the river, where soft green moss formed a lovely, welcoming bed, and he stretched out, patted the springy greenery next to him without a word, and gathered me to him.

We kissed a bit then, gently, and I started to lose my wakefulness right away, pillowed comfortably on his arm. A sense of peace, despite the danger from the Triad and the menace represented by the fearsome and unpredictable Bladewalker, stole over and through my heart. Nothing could touch me, safely in the circle of his arms, and when his kiss settled gently against my brow, I sighed in contentment, put my hand to rest on his shoulder, and mumbled something I was unable to recall the instant the words left my lips.

"No, Your Ladyship," he murmured with another kiss, "I'm not puttin' 'em off the Queen."

Some day, I thought with a last shred of coherence, I really must remember to remember the questions I ask him...

* * *

I wandered in peaceful slumber, untroubled by nightmares of the Triad, for many an hour in the arms of the man I already knew I wanted to spend my life with, and as I had fallen into sleep, so I returned to consciousness: a strong embrace, a cocoon of loving protectiveness, the soft caress of the air against my skin and distant birdsong filling with gladness the few parts of me not already ecstatic with the wonder of him. I sighed, stirred, and stretched, then opened my eyes to his, a mere hand's-breadth from my face.

"Good morning," he murmured, sounding far more awake than I felt. In response, I twined an arm over his neck, and he rolled toward me obligingly, putting his arms around me and lowering his lips to mine.

He tasted sweet, always, his mouth soft and yet insistent against mine, a lover who combined ardor and consideration in equal parts. His mouth awoke a liquid excitement in me, flaring up instantly like a banked fire, and I pulled him closer. His body was a welcome weight against mine, holding me down lest I fly away in ecstasy, and his hand lifted to touch my face, drifting downward as we kissed. I gasped a much-needed breath just in time to meet his hand with my breast, and as his hand closed gently over me, the gasp became a little noise.

"Yes," he whispered, tightening his hold just a shade, and it was too much for me; I broke free of his lips and turned my head, my fingers tightening into claws in the cloth of his vest. "Yes," he murmured against my neck, and my heartbeat became a gallop, sending the blood throbbing through unfamiliar parts of me. I wanted to gather him close, so close he and I would be intermingled, never to be apart again until the end of time. His mouth traveled over my neck, growing more demanding, more powerful, and the ground trembled beneath our heated bodies.

"Was that your doing?" he asked softly, not stopping his caresses.

"Aye, and more besides waits for you, my handsome one," I replied, turning my head and stroking his hair with a wildly overexcited hand. "Kiss me."

He shot up to capture my mouth again, and I put my hands to the corded, tense muscles of his arms. He exhaled a sound that might have been "Oh" or "Ah," not that I was in much of a position to notice which, and I responded by twining a leg over his and pulling him closer in to my hips. The ground commenced to shake beneath us, and it was this that finally caused him to raise his head and look around.

"Sweet mother Athirat!" he exclaimed, his voice rough with arousal, and he threw his arms around me and rolled us down the riverbank, where we landed in an inglorious, befuddled heap in the mud next to the water.

Where we had been lying just moments before, a moving gray tree trunk thudded into the moss. I had no opportunity to grow accustomed to the notion of trees that could walk, for the trunk flexed, lifted, and moved on, to be followed, moments later, by another thumping into the place vacated by its fellow. I lifted my eyes from the fatal threat, looking up and up and up at the biggest damn animal I had ever seen. It rose to the treetops, a gigantic thing with huge flapping ears like living umbrella-leaves and a long, thin, muscular nose that would have dragged the ground had the creature not kept it curled. Its body looked as wide as the Amazon Queen, and its steps were so thunderous as to vibrate the ground.

I know my mouth was open in astonishment and my expression vacant and stupid, and Alcibiades, less astonished (or perhaps knowing what the thing was), turned to me. "Art uninjured, Serafina?"

I nodded in some distraction, watching the monstrous thing pass, and he leapt to his feet, pulling me up one-handed and putting protective arms around me. The beast was large enough for a roofed house to be built on its back, and in the house was what was surely one of the greatest magicians ever to draw breath.

A movement down the path caught my attention, and I turned in disbelief to behold another of the huge animals, with another house and another two humans, and behind that a third.

"That's what I get for necking on the elephant path," he muttered. I turned to him with a question in my eyes (one that was only to be answered later), and he gave me a helpless, comical look of regret and sincere apology, seizing my hand and pulling me into a run along the riverbank. It was slow going along the muddy, slippery bank, but the animals, for all their size, did not move very fast, and he hauled me up the bank and onto the dock next to the Amazon Queen, where we could see our shipmates ranged along the rail, gazing with various degrees of fascination as the enormous beasts blundered their slow, destructive way through the forest.

"Pyra!" called a voice from atop one of the beasts, and Pyra, suddenly animated, leaned on the rail waving frantically and calling back, "Ridah!"

Bladewalker's head shot up at that, I noticed, and she trained her cold blue gaze on the animals making their procession toward the dock.

"Ridah!" cried Pyra again, dashing down the gang, followed by shipmates in instant motion. She would have dashed toward the huge gray animals, and probably gotten stomped into mush for her carelessness, but Ranger stopped her with one hand on her arm, and Pyra contented herself with standing on the dock with her hands intertwined as if in prayer, jumping up and down with excitement.

The animals came to a ponderous stop that would have been extremely impressive, especially to an enemy army, and a figure climbed forth from the house atop the foremost, stepping onto its broad, flat head. The animal lifted its long, powerful nose high, and the figure stepped into the loop it formed, to be conveyed with little fuss and astounding expertise to the dock. An instant later, she and Pyra had leapt into one another's arms and were caught in a warm embrace, crooning to one another in a language I could not begin to decipher.

Pyra pulled away eventually, and turned to Alcibiades with the enthusiasm with which she did pretty much everything. "Captain," she said, gesturing toward her friend, "this is Abard'ridah."

"Pleasure," he replied with great self-possession, taking his arm from around my shoulders to clasp the hand of the woman before him.

* * *

For all her spectacular arrival, the woman was warm and friendly. "An honor, Captain," Abard'ridah replied in charmingly-accented Greek, taking his hand. She unleashed a beautiful white-toothed smile in a dark face on the captain, and he in turn gave her the crinkle-eyed grin of which I would never grow tired.

"And this is my good friend Serafina," Pyra went on, gesturing to me with the arm that wasn't tight about her friend's neck.

Abard'ridah turned to me, a light of intelligence and insight gleaming in her dark, liquid eyes. "So," she murmured, sweeping my face with her gaze, "you are she."

I would probably have reacted with puzzlement to this, or at least an intrigued demand to explain, but she had taken my hand in a firm grip, and anyway the blood was elsewhere than my brain just then. I shook her hand with vague thoughts of being famous all up and down the Sindhu and its tributaries, then returned to the warmth and safety of the Captain's side. He put an arm about my waist and laid a terribly distracting hand on my hip.

Pyra continued to make the introductions--Ranger and her tribesfolk, Lethe, Bladewalker (who gave Abard'ridah a brusque nod halfway between welcome and salute), Willow, Skittles, Dogmatika and Makionus, Elsapia (whose penetrating gaze was the equal of Abard'ridah's own), and Harrel, who gave me my first real shock by ignoring the newcomer with her attendants and three powerful beasts and scowling over the heads of the others directly at Alcibiades and me.

It was then that I remembered we'd been away all night. We had, to be sure, spent most of it talking and a significant fraction asleep, and I had returned to the ship with the greater portion of my virginity still intact, but Harrel was unaware of that, and moreover, I had no intention of relieving his anxiety. I faced him with a stubborn scowl of my own, warning him silently to mind his own damn business and leave me to look after mine.

Abard'ridah took Pyra's elbows in her hands, saying in voluble Greek, "It is so good to see you again, Pyra."

"And I you, Ridah," replied the worthy physician, throwing herself into her friend's arms for another hug. "But how is it that you arrive here, of all places?"

Abard'ridah laughed. "That's a tale. Do you remember Chen-Shi?"

Pyra's face lit in a glow I had never seen. "Indeed, as if I could forget him! How is our good friend?"

"Still running the Empress's armies," replied Ridah, "and still spending what little free time he has mourning your departure." Pyra made a dismissive gesture, and Ridah continued, "He had a vision one night in his sleep, and in that vision he saw me and my attendants in my father's most splendid howdahs, seeking you through the forest." She indicated the space around her with a wave of a hand that bore, I now saw, several costly jewels. "This one, as it happens."

"Chen-Shi and his visions," laughed Pyra. "And yet I cannot question his accuracy."

"You never could," said Ridah, giving her a shrewd look. I glanced at Alci, but he shrugged and stuck his thumb into his sash, listening with, apparently, no less confusion than I. "He has sent me to join your party."

Alcibiades took a step forward, taking his arm smoothly from around my waist. "Er," he said, holding up a finger.

"Captain?" Ridah turned to him with her lovely smile, seemingly unaware of the consternation she had just awakened in him.

"Join the party?" he inquired carefully.

"Indeed," she said, with great self-assurance. "You'll need me."

"For what?" asked the captain in the politest tone he could muster.

"I've no idea," replied Ridah, her frankness disarming us both, "but Chen-Shi's visions are true, and it is fruitless to question them."

"Is it," he said.

"Oh... Captain," said Pyra, discerning the reason for his sudden intrusion into her reunion. "I see what you mean." She hastened to explain to Ridah. "My dear friend, the captain has carried me aboard without a contribution to my keep for many a day now, and I fear he may have exhausted his resources."

"Not exhaus--" Alci began.

"Money?" asked Ridah with a trilling laugh. "The Empress has sent enough for a legion of passengers to sail to the ends of the earth!" She turned to her attendants with a quiet command or two, and I saw the back of her robe, embroidered in costly, colorful silks that convinced me she had a fortune tucked into the houses atop her great beasts. The men seized some burdens inside the houses and dismounted in the same manner as Ridah, then walked cautiously down the docks, struggling to balance small but heavy metal-bound wooden coffers between them. They set down the chests next to one another, and Ridah pulled a key attached to a bright blue silk ribbon from her robe, bending to unlock them. She threw the tops open with a flourish, and I saw Alci flinch.

Lethe's eyebrows went skyward as she looked into the coffers, Dogmatika looked thunderstruck, and Willow fairly gasped.

The coffers shone with the dull, opulent gleam of gold, coin after coil after coin laid out in precise rows on a rich dark cloth. I knew there was a layer of coins below the first, and another under it, and another underneath that, as if the earth itself were held up on layers of shining, costly disks that went on forever.

"That handles the pecuniary considerations nicely, I expect," commented Elsapia into the silence. Dogmatika turned a glazed, disbelieving gaze on her, and Bladewalker's solemn, beautiful face took on the distinct air of carefully suppressed laughter.

The coins were each embossed with a delicate image of a rose, and it looked as though there were as many of them as stars in the skies.

"Ridah," Pyra breathed, kneeling before the coffers and staring into the gleam, which reflected a soft, subtle light into her face. She looked up at her friend. "Why?"

"Because," said Ridah, as if this answered everything, "Chen-Shi told her you'd need it."

* * *

"For what?" exclaimed the captain with impatience.

"I've no idea," Ridah shrugged. "Chen-Shi--"

"'--didn't tell me,' I suspect," Alci interrupted. "Pyra, your friend seems to have left out a good three-quarters of the story."

Ridah took no offense, co*cking her head to the side and studying him with a little smile on her face. "He may not have known it," she said, putting a finger to her chin as if in thought. "And yet," she commented softly, "he guided me here..."

There was nothing to say to this, and so none of us said it. Alci looked at each of us in turn, then shook his head. "I'm already stackin' the crew like firewood as it is," he protested.

"What's in those coffers," said Ridah unobtrusively, "would pay for woodcarvers to build new bunks."

"Usin' what for space?" argued the captain.

"Captain," said Pyra, "I'm confident Ridah doesn't mean to bring the elephants..."

"Indeed not," snorted her friend. "Have you ever seen a seasick elephant?" She shuddered and looked at the deck.

"Captain," said Pyra, "is... is there not a way we can find space for Ridah? It... it's so very important..." She spoke in a tone of quiet, urgent desperation, and I wondered at it.

"Why?" demanded the captain. A panic was rising in him, a panic I had no trouble detecting, but found incomprehensible. It was something to do with losing private space aboard the ship, but why did he fear such a thing? Was he smuggling?

"Our friend Chen-Shi," said Pyra in a near-whisper. "He says he had a vision, and in that vision he sends us Ridah and a great deal of money--"

"Which makes us tempting to others than just the Triad," he pointed out.

"The Triad?" asked Ridah sharply. Her head whipped toward Pyra. "Have y--"

Whatever else she would have said was cut off by the incredibly loud noise of a slamming door and the sight of an obviously livid J'lari storming from the house, followed by an equally angry Mesa, spouting syllables like a boiling tea-vessel.

J'lari had her bow in one hand and a quiver of arrows in the other, and she strode onto the dock with determination to hand them to Ranger, who accepted them instantly, but with a question in her face.

"Keep them," J'lari told her through her teeth, "lest I give in to the temptation to orphan myself by sunset."

Mesa's flow of eloquence stopped abruptly, and he pointed an accusing finger at the captain. "You!" he called in Greek. "You have done this thing to me! Your host!"

"Excuse me?" Alci replied, turning his attention smoothly from one argument to the next.

"You have turned my daughter's head with your talk of romantic adventures!"

"I haven't," retorted Alci, "and what in the name of Mot the dark god of f*ckups are you on about?"

Mesa's mustache trembled with outrage. "Aye, play the innocent, you... seducer!"

Alci's eyes grew wide.

"Pitar," sighed J'lari, clearly out of patience. "Alcibiades is not now, never has been, and never will be my lover."

"Although," Alci hastened to assure Mesa, "she is very lovely and would be a gracious and char--"

I seized his arm and shook my head at him. "Not helping, " I murmured, and mercifully, he shut his alehole and let the two argue it out.

"Pitar," said J'lari, "it is time for me to make my own life."

"No one but you can find my shirts," Mesa complained.

"That's because you keep rearranging your bedroom," J'lari said. "And all I ever do when you hide them is ask Soucharitha where they are."

"They make the food too spicy when you're not here," he attempted.

"They make it exactly the way you like it," she answered. "Soucharitha has been running the kitchen since before I grew breasts."

"The servants won't be careful with the fruit unless you supervise."

"Pitar," she said, throwing her hands in the air, "you haven't had a bruised apricot since Soucharitha took over the gardens!"

"You cannot turn the house over to Soucharitha and expect it will run half so well," Mesa said, folding his arms over his chest and bristling at his daughter.

"Too late," she retorted, putting her hands on her hips. "The only reason I get to drill with my bow is that Soucharitha manages the endless details of making you happy, and she's damned good at it. You'd give her the credit, too, if you weren't so eager to keep me chained to your side till I die!"

A stricken look came over his face. He stumbled back a step. J'lari couldn't meet his eyes, and her face flushed crimson. I could feel the shock emanating from both of them, and I took a few steps forward, placing a hand on J'lari's arm. "J'lari," I murmured, "where is Soucharitha now?"

"Here, Your Ladyship," said a meek voice from the door of the house. The door opened, and a dark-eyed shy-looking woman appeared. She was dressed in sturdy, practical clothing, and two streaks of gray hair swept back from her temples. She walked down the path to the dock and headed for J'lari's father. "Mesa," she said in a low tone, "your servants are all experienced and dedicated to your comfort. And yet I suspect this is not why you object. You think J'lari might be headed into terrible danger."

"She's carrying a bow," he burst out, as though this were the worst thing he could possibly imagine.

"One I made myself," J'lari said, raising her head with pride. Soucharitha moved to stand beside her, looking up into her face with a mother's compassion, and J'lari addressed her father again. "I may be only a girl, only fit for keeping house, but I made that bow myself and you shall never destroy my pride in having done so."

"No, no." Mesa shook his head and waved his hand in the air, as if rubbing her words out of it. "You think I hate that bow because a girl should be scrubbing clothes and stirring pots?" He moved closer to her and took her chin with a gentle hand. "Daughter," he said tenderly, "you are my only child, and impossibly precious to me. And carrying a bow is only giving an evil man--or woman--an excuse to lift one to you."

"Mesa," said Ranger without moving from her planted position on the dock, "you haven't seen this crew in action. Aye, we've faced some rough seas, and will doubtless hit another storm or two. But we look after one another. And if it's a question of J'lari pursuing the difficult craft to which she was born, I can think of no better friends to accompany her."

"Daughter." He looked into J'lari's face. "You're right. I've dreaded this day since your mother died. And I've kept you here longer than I had a right to. Aye, I'll let you go, to follow this... foolish, dangerous chimera where it leads you. And I shall never think of you without my heart swelling with pride. But do not ask me to be happy."

"I shall miss you too, Pitar," J'lari told him, swallowing a sudden shine of tears. "And you, Little Aunt," she told Soucharitha, "for whom I could never learn kitchencraft, despite your patience and my efforts."

"You have another calling," said Soucharitha simply, patting J'lari's arm. "Mesa," she said, turning to him, "I think you would benefit from a mug of strong tea and a bit of a rest on the divan in the parlor. I'll have your breakfast brought to you there."

Mesa's face turned suddenly hopeful. "Can you wait to leave until the next monsoon season is over?"

"Pitar!"

"Come, Mesa," said the motherly woman with the graying hair, "tea. Rest. Breakfast." She led him toward the house, and J'lari, overcome with emotion, turned away to look out across the water at the Amazon Queen, stately and at rest for only a little while longer.

"Ridah," sighed the captain, "I believe we were discussing woodcarvers and extra bunks?"

"I have an idea," I told him, slipping my hand into his and standing on tiptoe to whisper, "You could move into my cabin with me."

His knees went soft, but his face went glad, and I found myself laughing with pleasure and anticipation.

There is, of course, more: details about our preparations, the food and water we stockpiled, the arrangements for making our way across the continent, all of us scouring the ship for stowage for the astounding amount of stuff Ridah had brought with her (for a great deal will fit on an elephant), and my joy and trepidation when my gallant captain accepted my invitation, and Harrel's resulting peevishness. My dear friend Chen-Shi, who asked me, in typically mysterious fashion, to provide this chronicle, and declined, in typically mysterious fashion, to tell me why it was so important, is eager to read about the journey that was our last before we gained his most welcome and supportive friendship.

But there are children to feed and put to bed, and a husband just returning from a long day away from the cave, and a dirge to be sung for our lost comrades, and so I close here, to take up my pen again after the morrow (baking day) and the day after (washing).

Sleep well, my absent friends, and may you live in my memory until the time when we shall stand together again.

* * *

It took four days to fit the ship for what was to be her most fateful journey, and workers swarmed her every moment of that time, reinforcing her timbers, rebuilding her cabins, organizing the hold. Every cask for water or food was examined and rebuilt or replaced, and each fit snugly into a new specially-made storage area that would nearly eliminate the need to lash it in rough weather. The chief of the landborne crew was particularly intrigued by the earth closet, and plied Alcibiades with endless questions about how he had constructed it. The earth closet was the only part of the ship that didn't have major work done to it; when the antlike workers were done with their myriad tasks, the dazed shipmates hardly recognized the Amazon Queen.

Willow, who had handled the numberless difficulties of looking after the Amazon Queen belowdecks with quiet efficiency and near-total silence, came into her own with this project; they heard her unfamiliar voice at all hours, directing the workers, consulting with the crew chief, coming up with brilliant idea after brilliant idea she had clearly spent some time developing.

Ridah's money paid for everything. She insisted on installing a rack belowdecks, a long, sturdy affair running between two of the pillars of the hold, and when it was done, she caused other workers to affix to it an arsenal: pikes, bows and arrows, swords, leather-covered lacquered-wood armor, helmets and leggings, chains and irons, and the disassembled guts of what she called a "trebuchet", but Alcibiades recognized, with a stab of fear, as a catapult.

"We are not fighters," he argued to Skittles and Willow.

"We are," responded Ranger simply.

It appeared, then, as if they were refitting the Amazon Queen as a ship of war. It gave him a sick feeling of dread.

Serafina borrowed a trio of workers and the crew chief for a project in her cabin: reinforcing and muffling the wall her cabin shared with that of Lethe and Bladewalker. The crew chief understood without her having to spell out why, and he directed his workers to gather fibers from a tree he called kapok to pack the space in the framing for the wall before they covered it with thin timbers. The kapok was delightfully soft and springy, and Serafina occupied herself during the wall's construction in stitching together pillows so her captain could rest well.

The wall went together in a day, and Serafina stood in her cabin and knocked, and the crew chief stood in Lethe's cabin and listened in vain for the noise. He went away satisfied, but not half as satisfied as the girl who was about to invite her suitor to move in with her.

Harrel was no happier about that than when she'd brought it up. For all his unexpected defense of Alcibiades the night he revealed that she had a sister, he was stubbornly opposed to any suggestion that they share a bunk, and had watched the construction of the muffled wall in her cabin with increasing alarm. No one listened to his complaints--he was only a bondsman, and a remarkably inept one at that--and they all grew weary of telling him to shut up. Thus it was with a sense of astonishment that they saw the frustrated Cyclops turn at the supper table one evening after yet another tiresome argument and exclaim through clenched teeth, "Do something!"

He was staring, in impotent fury, at Bladewalker.

"Me?" she inquired in blank astonishment, setting down her knife and returning his look. "I've no say if Her Ladyship invites a guest into her cabin." She picked up her knife again, turned back to her supper, and added in a voice with an edge, "And neither do you."

Harrel sputtered for a bit, choked with words that wouldn't emerge from his mouth, then got up abruptly and left the table, to everyone's relief.

Serafina excused herself with a murmur and went to look for him. She went down the green-bordered path by the river, her thoughts considerably less peaceful than the verdant landscape.

He was standing beneath one of the wide-rooted trees whose leaf-heavy branches brushed the water, shoulders hunched and hands jammed in his trousers' pockets. He was looking out over the water, and although he must have heard her coming, he didn't turn to face her.

"Harrel," she said in a soft voice.

"Come to have your bondsman thrashed for insolence?" he inquired bitterly.

"No," she said, shaking her head with a small laugh that had no amusem*nt in it.

"You'd have no lack of volunteers," he grunted.

"The others," she said, thinking it out. "They don't really understand that you're not a bondsman."

"Fit enough recompense, I expect," he muttered.

"You did what you thought you had to do," she told him, wondering where her wisdom was coming from. "Even settin' Bladewalker on me like a huntin' hound." That part still seemed unreal to her; had he honestly expected her to--what? Turn Serafina over her knee and spank her out of her decision? And what, exactly, was his problem? "Harrel... I thought you admired him."

"Aye," he sighed. "I do." He still wouldn't look at her.

"Surely you know..." She thought for a moment, trying to find a way to put it that wouldn't cause him more distress. "The compass-heading we've decided on?"

"Aye, I do," he said. The sadness and loss in his voice were hard to take.

"Harrel," she said. "Look at me." He snorted without turning his head, and she snapped, "I said look at me!"

He did, his reluctance obvious, and she spread out her hands. "I'm not a little girl any longer. I'm not Theadora's baby sister, nor Mama's orphaned daughter, nor your bondservant. I'm a grown woman, and like it or not, wisely or not, for good or ill, I've got to live me my own life now."

"They know where you are," he said in a low, venomous voice. "You're headed toward their home. And not a one of 'em aboard ship's takin' you away from this place. Least of all him."

"Mama died at home," she shot back. "Murdered by people she considered her friends." He shook his head in pain, and she went on remorselessly, "Don't you understand, Harrel? There's no safety, nowhere. I could've stayed home and died of a fever, or ended up bearing the brats of a man who gave me no say in the matter. Or tended bar for you until you'd forgotten that it was supposed to be for my safety."

"I wouldn't never have done that," he said, goaded into speaking at last.

"Horseclods!" she burst out. "You didn't even tell me about my sister!"

"I'd no idea you didn't remember her!" he shouted, clenching his fists. He lowered his voice and hissed at her, "I didn't never forget."

"You'll have to excuse me the lapse," she retorted, her voice shaking with anger. "I was a baby and all of you were tellin' me she was a phantom. Well, now I'm woman-height, Harrel, and I'm makin' my own decisions, and what I've decided is that I'm goin' after my sister, and part of that is Alci's movin' into my cabin with me, and I expect you'll keep your objections fenced behind your teeth."

He turned, finally, and faced her with a sad, proud smile. "Aye, you're Jessamyn's daughter, all right. I couldn't never win a argument with her neither."

"Come on back," she said, jerking her head in the direction of the dock. "You haven't finished your supper, and we've got a long night's work ahead of us."

In return, he reached for her, and she found herself enfolded in his arms. It was a great deal like being hugged by an elephant, and she caught her breath as he whispered, "I love thee, Fee, my daughter-that-coulda-been." He drew back, tears glimmering in his one good eye, and with his heavy warrior's hands firmly planted on her shoulders, he said, "Aye, then, let's go fetch Theadora home, you an' me an' your man."

* * *

Their departure, early one morning when sunrise-birthed steam still rose from the sluggish spots of the river, was well-attended: it seemed that everyone who lived in the valley of the Sindhu's tributary turned out to wave the ship farewell. The workers who had rebuilt the ship were there, trading bits of self-congratulatory boastfulness about their work. Abard'ridah's soldiers stood at attention in their howdahs, prepared to escort the ship many leagues toward the east until they reached the point at which they would turn south, back to her father's estates. Mesa's servants crowded the docks, so many offering embraces and advice to their departing mistress that it took J'lari some time to get aboard.

When the pathways filled, the onlookers scrambled into the ponderous trees, hanging from this branch and that like noisy fruit. The cacophony silenced even the birds, who were resentful that both their perches and their air had been invaded by ground-dwellers.

J'lari stood at the rail next to Ranger, waving at the onlookers, one in particular: Soucharitha, who was ensconced in a tree overhanging the dock and pumping her arm so frantically it seemed she would end up splashing into the river. J'lari ran over in her mind her parting words, delivered in the pre-dawn quiet of J'lari's bedroom as Soucharitha helped dress her for the last time. "Never hide the courage and the skill you've spent so long acquiring," said that worthy woman to her mistress, "and you shall never fail the proud name of this family." The embrace Soucharitha gave her was powerful and loving, and J'lari thought she would be able to call on Soucharitha's quietly faithful strength when her own faltered. She was certain it would be more common than not.

As if she could hear J'lari's thoughts, Ranger smiled at her in reassurance, and J'lari's heart went a little weak.

Mesa was standing on the dock, arms folded over his chest and his mustache at a stubborn, unhappy angle.

The elephants lined up along the bank, and the onlookers drew back as they began their ponderous procession to the east. A double team of the shipmates, with Alcibiades and Skittles at the fore, stood braced at either side of the stern, balancing long cloth-covered poles they lowered to the dock to push the ship away. Willow, at the sweeps, kept a watchful hand on the steering oar. The ox-drovers tightened their grip on the reins, and with the snap of whips in the air above the oxen and the creak of waterlogged timber, the Amazon Queen began to move.

"No!" shouted Mesa, shoving past his servants to holler up at the ship, "I've changed my mind!"

J'lari's face went hot. "Pitar, what now?"

"I--I--I cannot trust the apricot harvest to the servants!" he sputtered.

"They've forgotten more about apricots than I'll ever know!" J'lari called down to him from the deck.

The ship's speed increased infinitesimally. He took a few steps along the dock, staying even with her. "But... but... they cannot wash my clothing correctly!"

"You dunk it in the river and scrub it against a rock," J'lari told him. "It's not as if it's a challenge."

"The servants will cheat me at the market!"

She shook her head. "Pitar," she hollered in exasperation, "you don't need a housekeeper, you need a wife!"

"How am I to find one without your help?" he cried in desperation, spreading his hands wide. "Good women do not fall out of the trees!" At that moment, the vigorously waving Soucharitha lost her footing, tumbled from the tree, and plumped into his outstretched arms. He stared at her a moment in astonishment, then said idiotically, "Hello."

"I think he'll be all right," commented Ranger quietly at J'lari's side.

Soucharitha turned in his embrace, throwing one arm about his neck and waving frantically at the departing ship. "He'll be fine, J'lari! We'll look after him for you!"

By then, the ship was turning into the open river and the oxen were settling into their stride, and it was a good thing; both Makionus and Bladewalker had lost any effectiveness as pole-pushers, as they were laughing nearly too hard to stand.

"Good-bye, my darlings!" cried J'lari through tears, exactly like the tough, emotionless warrior she wasn't. "Be good to one another! Be happy!"

The ship made her turn and pointed her head east, and the oxen settled into following the elephants. They were on their way, with celebration and courage that was more or less foolish, toward the palace of the Triad.

* * *

Two days later, they had reached open water, and the elephants turned south as the well-compensated ox-teams returned west along the riverbank. The Amazon Queen sailed east under her own power, reaching a lakeside town after a day in the freshness and speed of being under canvas, their spirits restored. The captain and Skittles went ashore to arrange the next part of the journey, and the rest of the shipmates joined them for supper after tidying up the newly-rebuilt vessel.

Serafina was to remember ever afterward the glow in Elsapia's eyes as she watched her and Alcibiades flirt and banter across the table in the tavern. At one point, Serafina, laughing at something the captain had whispered to her, turned her head and saw those occult eyes. She ducked her head shyly and covered her face with her hands, and when she peeped through her fingers, Elsapia, with a gentle smile on her scarred face, dipped her tankard in a salute.

Much later, when the shipmates returned contented and merry to sleep under the brilliant stars aboard the Queen, no one remarked on the shadow that detached itself from the group and went in the opposite direction.

Elsapia shouldered her bag and turned to watch from the shade of a tree along the bank as, one by one, the shipmates went up the gang to their bunks: proud Lethe and stalwart Bladewalker, Skittles discussing some point of navigation with Alcibiades, who had his arm around the shoulders of the vibrant Serafina, nearly-silent Willow and the perpetually unhappy Harrel, Ridah and Pyra catching up with their friendship while Makionus and Dogmatika compared notes on the stories, and J'lari quietly talking tactics at Ranger's side, with Blackie gliding with nearly-invisible grace beside them, Ro and Jerseygirl balanced on Ranger's shoulders, and Klokir wheeling overhead to settle on the spars.

"And so," murmured Elsapia, as if to herself alone, "the shipmates are assembled, and all is in readiness." She sighed as Blackie stepped noiselessly upon the gang, vanishing as she reached the rail. "But you cannot ask me to stay and watch. I haven't a strengthy heart, not like those yonder." As the stars wheeled slowly overhead and the moon crossed the sky, she gazed upon the ship for a time she could not reckon in heartbeats, then turned and disappeared into the hills rising over the lake.

End of Book V

Chapter 6: Tales from the Tavern Wall: The Xena Cycle, Part 2: A Living Parchment, Book VI

Chapter Text

TALES FROM THE TAVERN WALL

The Xena Cycle

A Living Parchment (for Cath)

Book VI

In endless, empty nights of hopelessness, when the chains gnawed at her ulcerated wrists and ankles with particular cruelty and it seemed as though even the half-starved beetles had forgotten she was there, she would lie on the cold, hard stone of the floor and let it leach the life from her. When her body was chilled enough to shake, it meant she was halfway there, and she dared to feel a flash of gladness. She would lie unmoving save for the quivering of her protesting flesh until she was so cold she no longer remembered she had a heart. Her limbs grew still and her breathing slowed and shallowed and anyone seeing her then, curled slack-jawed and misty-eyed behind half-closed lids, would have thought her dead.

She was not dead; she was dreaming.

At first, goaded beyond remaining in a body that existed purely for abuse, she returned to the times she could remember far away from this place. A woman. A beautiful, kindly woman. A woman who never looked at her without her reserve softening into love. A woman who crooned words of affection to her. A woman who held out the world to her in the palm of a soft, protective hand, with the implied promise to teach her everything, everything.

And a child. Another child, like her, and not alike. Someone to cherish. Someone to protect. Someone whose hand she knew better than her own, a soft baby face with long lashes and sweet breath misting about her. The times when each was tucked safely in the woman's arms, their feet touching as each nursed quietly at her breasts, a feeling of peace, contentment, belonging, right. She was tempted, in moments when she had been pushed past endurance, to dismiss the visions as wishful thinking, a baby game of extreme reaction to the petty brutality of the captors who treated her suffering as a form of amusem*nt, and a paltry and feeble one at that.

But something told her that this, here, now, was the illusion, not those times when it seemed that the powerful woman who held her ran the machinery of the heavens and all she needed, for the rest of her life, was to know that that child was near her. No, no matter how great the pain, how humiliating the myriad banal cruelties of her captors, how numerous the times when she was anchored firmly in her body by purposeless agony, something wiser and far more ancient than she whispered, This is not who you are. You come of strength, and one of such strength these feeble charlatans cannot long keep captive. You will not be here forever, and then you will know the truth.

The still, small voice, not a trick of her mind because her mind was not so wise or so powerful, kept her going even after the starvation had robbed her of the height that was her birthright and the chains had weighted her muscles into atrophy and the darkness had drained the life from her skin. She had been purified by fire and hope, and degraded and debased as she was, as weak and powerless, as unable to deflect even one of the thoughtless blows aimed at her by the captors she suspected also knew they could not prevail, what she dreamed was her own might.

She dreamed of strength, of standing free of chains, of walking on her own feet into the light, of running. She dreamed of the face of a girl her own age, light where she was in darkness and dark where she glowed, and she dreamed that she was running into the girl's arms. She knew that, once they touched, some longtime wrong would be set right, and no one would ever separate them again.

* * *

It wasn't always possible for Makionus to get away, to spend some time alone with her thoughts and commit them to scraps of parchment, and long weeks at sea had left her with little sense of privacy. As much as she liked them all, she was always aware of a difference-driven tension between the heroes on every hand and the weak-eyed, rheumatic-kneed woman who followed them. She was far older than the rest, qualified, but only by years, to grandmother them all, and where they could split firewood with a well-thrown knife, talk with beasts whose very eyes promised alien thoughts, or steer a tiny, fragile vessel across the entire world, she had only a spotty, opinionated sense of tale-spinning and an ability to draw uninspiring letters in a number of tongues with a donkey's plodding persistence.

Once, before the rest of them were able to do much more than toddle and prattle, Makionus had fallen in love, and as unlikely as it would seem to anyone watching her haul her way wheezing up the path from the beach to the cliffs, she had been loved in return. Her lover had been a woman, a scholar like herself, but with a sense of self-possession and a cheerfully pragmatic awareness of the general inadequacies of the world that, paradoxically, allowed the chronically worried Makionus to soar. She was convinced that a benevolent, if unrecognized, deity had granted the gift of a great love to an utterly unworthy mortal, and never lost her conviction that the tired, hard world nonetheless contained so many sparks of miracle that the happily-ever-after could be around any corner.

That sense of wonder persisted even after the loss of the woman at the center of her existence, whose body was not as resilient as her invincible spirit. Once, after they knew they were to be parted but before it happened, Makionus had asked her lover if she believed they would have another chance in another life, and had received a characteristically memorable response: "I doubt it. Religion's nothing but a way for the opportunistic to prey on the fearful, and if there were gods, I don't think they'd have given the keys to enlightenment to the type of swag-belly who goes for priesting." It had made Makionus laugh, but with a stab, and her lover had placed a weak hand delicately on her wrist. "Don't think I find that a sad thing," she had said, "for it means that, in all the histories of all the worlds, I am the only one who's ever been privileged to be loved by one such as you."

It was the type of statement that carries you through the rest of a life empty of most emotion save sorrow, and Makionus was left only with a regret that she had never had a chance to return the favor. As she settled into a permanent widowhood, Makionus had done no pursuing, nor had she been approached, to see if a second attempt at love would prove lengthier, if not as fruitful, as the first. In her more philosophical moments, she thought that when someone who knew how to love loved, she would leave an indelible impression on the beloved; her only question was whether she had ever gotten close to showing her lover just how important she was, as words were inadequate and Makionus had no illusions about her allure. She was left grateful that she was the one chosen to shoulder the burden of loneliness, as it spared her pain-wracked lover some additional agony, and consoled herself with the thought that perhaps, in a bit more time, the cosmos might answer the question in such a way as to prove both of them joyfully, wonderfully wrong.

She had spent the rest of her life in the dust and haze of ink and papyrus, fingernails black to the beds, her form growing stooped and her face taking on a perpetual squint. It was of benefit to her as her eyes grew less and less capable of sharp focus: the bitterness with which she had reproached the dirty, noisy cruelty of the race had receded behind a curtain of fantasy she could evoke without effort from nearly any document she examined or prepared. Her life was peopled with vague figures onto whom she could project her own notions of glory, and not being able to see was probably what kept her from despair.

Now, she had reached a good spot, dictated less by an inspirational view than by the pain in her lungs, and she bent low to ascertain whether her chosen perch was a rock or a coiled serpent. It proved the former, and she settled onto it with a little grunt, reaching simultaneously into her pocket for a set of parchment scraps and a length of char in a whittled wooden holder.

The ground was warm, in this place where summer was less a season than a suggestion, and the glitter-enlivened blue of the water beyond the high cliff on which she perched was soothing, seeing as she wasn't three paces from its restless menace, as had happened all too often aboard the ship. Too, the surface on which she sat wasn't pitching wildly in all directions; she didn't mind, but a still earth took some time for an old woman to get used to.

The parchment scraps, ragged ends she'd trimmed from thin sheets of cream-colored story-beds, were already half full. She had been thinking, in the past few days, about two people in particular, and about something that had bothered her since she'd met the second of them.

Bladewalker.

Serafina.

The first was the only genuine warrior she'd spent much time around. Makionus's gladiator friends were imposing, shapely beauties with a keen sense of drama and a fanatical dedication to plating themselves with hard-won muscle, but there was an aura of carefully-constructed artifice about them. Bladewalker was something different: as hard and capable as any of them, as easily able to command great physical prowess, but completely uninterested in creating artful fantasies. Her might was directed toward something other than illusion, and where Makionus had long admired the dedication and craft her friends displayed inside and outside the arena, Bladewalker was the reality even the most skilled gladiator could only hope to simulate from afar. They were the teasing hint, Bladewalker the terrifying promise, and Makionus had always been grateful for whatever inner spirit of rigid self-control kept the volcano from erupting, even as she chafed with curiosity to know its origins and extent, like an explorer dying within sight of the fabled legendary land the sole of her sandal was destined never to know.

Serafina was open where Bladewalker was hidden, a tender thirsty seed opening itself to the buffeting of the rough spring rains, and watching the pleasure and pain of that young life as it got its first knocks and scrapes and glimmers of glory had recalled to Makionus her own days of discovery. Overwhelmed as Serafina often was, she never shrank from going somewhere or learning something new, taking equal delight in mastering the complexities of Greek grammar, the intricate skill of reading a compass, or the subtleties of wooing her first lover. She threw herself with passion into her life, moving with enthusiasm through her days aboard the Amazon Queen, the dull and the dangerous alike.

Serafina had already lost a great deal more than even she realized, and was on the verge of an adventure whose extent would astonish her; moreover, she was determined to fetch her handsome ship's captain along with her every step of the way, and showed every sign of doing just that. She was a hell of a girl, exploring fearlessly a brutal and bruising world with rare flashes of exaltation, and she would be a hell of a woman, distilling the light and dark of her life into a rich, potent wisdom. It would be something to see, not that Makionus expected to last that long.

They could not have been less alike, and what puzzled Makionus was an odd experience she'd had more than once. Despite her weak eyes, she could tell the difference between Bladewalker and Serafina at sight--for one thing, their features and clothing were of different colors--but on more than one occasion, Makionus had unaccountably mistaken one for the other. Once, she had issued a friendly, teasing greeting to her ardent, conscientious pupil, making some stupid joke about chalk and letters, and had blinked to see the girl's form dissolve into Bladewalker's irritated scowl. That was nothing compared to the time she had glanced up from a difficult parchment to inquire what service she could render to the warrior, only to get a tongue-lashing from a highly offended Serafina, who gave her to understand that no one could possibly be quite that blind.

If Elsapia had still been with them, Makionus would have requested some time and some of her insightful speculation, but that worthy, wise woman had departed the ship earlier in their journey, none was quite certain when or where. It had taken Serafina some time to come to grips with a fresh grief, and Bladewalker and Lethe had taken to discussing in low voices the possibility that Elsapia's employment with the Triad was not quite as over as she had insinuated.

Whatever the truth of that, they had not been pursued since the day the ships had come in such perilous proximity, and all breathed a bit more easily, occupying themselves with resettling the ship's complement to accommodate the two new voyagers, J'lari and Ridah. Their journey across the continent, hopping from tributary to tributary on a route the captain planned, Skittles navigated, and Serafina documented with scrupulous exactitude, had taken them from the mouth of the Sindhu through a still, imposing landscape of mountains soaring to either side of the thin intersecting ribbons of water forming the pathway of the Amazon Queen, until finally they reached a place where the speech of J'lari, Ridah, and Pyra with the inhabitants became sharper, less liquid and more musical.

They were in a place where the trees and rocks themselves had gathered wisdom from endless seasons, snowfall accumulating on the heights to dissolve trickling under solar pressure into the spring rivers, lush green bursting forth into a short, sweet summer, then cold nights and browning vegetation, followed by another period when life itself, locked in ice, slumbered dreaming of the warmth to come.

It was high summer, and while in Alexandria that meant a welcome heat lubricating Makionus's rheumatic bones, here it was still a bit chilly even at noon for her equatorial blood, and she was glad of the exercise, and even gladder of the rest at the end. It gave her a chance to study her scraps of parchment, covered in closely-fitted letters in what was called "fast Egyptian", an alphabet of simplified hieroglyphs she and Dogmatika, alone of the shipmates, could decipher. Unromantically, Bladewalker's symbol was a boot, while Serafina had the honor of being represented by a door latch.

The boot and the lock. They weren't bad, as inadvertent metaphors went. But what did they have in common?

Sapphi, of course--that was obvious, and Makionus turned it over again and again in her mind. Sapphi was the home of the African woman who had caught her sleeve that long-ago day outside the Library, her face strained and desperate. Makionus might have shied away--she'd had enough contact with the crazy and violent to practice the prudence that had let her live this long--save that the face was first, very beautiful (a quality in women for which Makionus had a decided weakness), and secondly, stamped with a heroic, clear-eyed sanity. Not being accustomed to having spectacularly beautiful strangers throw themselves into her arms in public, Makionus was not, at first, inclined to believe that she had been plunged into an adventure like those unspooled, strand by strand, by the streetcorner tale-spinners she haunted.

She had the presence of mind to scan the woman's clothing and choose Greek for her introductory remarks. The relief went over the lady's face like a recovered wax tablet melting into smoothness. Something about Makionus had seemed trustworthy, for which she was forever grateful, and her reward was a message and a true mystery whose unfolding occupied many late nights, during which she whittled and carved and stained and waxed and strung a small, flat wooden box in which she kept the tetradrachma the priestess had urged upon her.

In all the intervening years, as uncertain as a scholar's income was, she had never been desperate enough to part with it, and had it with her still. She had also never left Alexandria, despite temptations and the occasional offer of travel, because of the increasingly dim possibility that an exhausted messenger would canter into her courtyard, leave her another missive from the Priestess of the Two Goddesses, and wheel the horse in search of another courier to carry the news along the line to who knew what terminus.

That had not happened in quite some time. Instead, absurdly, the intended recipient of the messages had walked into the taverna where she wrote letters for travelers, stopped in front of Makionus's table, and leaned forward from a great height to show Makionus her warrior's bearing, dark hair, and blue eyes.

She still was not certain whether to be surprised or to take it as a matter of course. Alexandria--where else would someone in search of a lost priestess go? And yet she had gathered that Bladewalker had sought her out for an entirely different reason, having to do with the copying out of the scrolls.

There had to be a connection between those two mysteries as well. Makionus had yet to discover it. It was enough to put together two and two and come up with four hundred, as she had done with the case of Lethe, quietly fascinated and repelled in turn by the black-on-white treasure resting calm and unchallenged in the hold of the Amazon Queen, save by a woman who could not possibly have been so closely involved with the stories unless she was their originator.

That also hadn't surprised Makionus much, and save for one moment of utter terror that told her she was not quite as willing to depart this existence as she had tried to assure herself she was, she'd had no reason to fear Lethe, immortal though she might very well be. It was probably what Makionus, had she found herself in the same situation, would have decided: keep it to yourself and give no one a reason to target you. She reasoned that what had caused Lethe to turn against the scrolls, and by extension against their custodian, was not endless life, but a combination of madness and liquor all too familiar to Makionus from an unfortunate and seemingly persistent affinity for bullies.

Despite the brutality of the injury, her hand had healed well enough that the scar was just a white-tipped red streak running between two fingers of her right hand like a glyph of an arrow. There was a matching mark on her palm. The wound never became infected, thanks to the salve of Serafina's that occupied so much of Pyra's intellectual curiosity, and Makionus was grateful to both for expending that rare, precious substance in the service of her recovery. She owed it to her healers to attempt to penetrate the mystery of the Triad, who seemed to be targeting them both, but for a reason Makionus was not clever enough to decipher.

She used the hand to smooth out the parchment carefully along her knee. Bladewalker. Serafina. Sapphi. She frowned out over the water of the inland bay, sparkling in the light of a summer far milder than any to which she was accustomed. Lethe had gone ashore at Sapphi, and had returned with Serafina. And Bladewalker had gone ashore at Sapphi and had returned alone.

The others knew only of a courier network and two names: Sapphi and Theadora. Had she not heard the name Sapphi from the lips of the lady herself, Makionus could well have considered it a metaphor, as it sounded a great deal like the poet who had given wings to the souls of lonely women for millennia; on the other hand, there had to be countless little hamlets and cities and towns called Theadora. Yet it appeared they had found the metaphor, and lost the reality.

It was always possible, Makionus reasoned for the thousandth time, that "Theadora" was intended to be a plural, possibly (if her shaky grasp of Greek grammar was accurate) "Theadorae", or "Gift of the [Dual] Goddesses". Dogmatika could have told her instantly, but she didn't dare ask, lest she provoke questions she was not clever enough to deflect.

Lethe left the ship alone, and came back with a girl and her bondservant, their positions reversed overnight. Bladewalker had left the ship seeking a priestess, and had come back to dedicate herself to Lethe's service. Why?

Makionus had never had the courage to ask, not being eager to provoke a rage that would see her split like a melon. Come, scholar, she told herself, thou'lt have to get thy information from another source. She tried to broaden her thoughts, like an alchemist recording the weather and moistness of the air the day of an assay into transmuting lead into gold.

What had happened the day Bladewalker came into the tavern? The day they reached Sapphi? She shook her head, hopelessly muddled. Best to start at the beginning: the day the priestess plucked at her sleeve.

The street. The same people she saw every day. The priestess was the only one out of place, with her pure Greek accent, her Greek outfit, her single-minded pursuit of a messenger... and, of course, being the most gorgeous woman Makionus had ever--she shook her head again.

A ship. The priestess had arrived aboard a ship. Her own? No, for then the sailors would never have allowed a woman of such beauty to travel unescorted through a dangerous place like the port at Alexandria. So, not her own ship. She had bought passage. For herself alone? No, she had been traveling with a man--not a husband, not a master, nor yet a servant, not exactly... a friend, she'd said, a good one.

Which one?

That man yonder, the one with the bandaged eye.

Makionus raised her head, trying to peer into the past. Something skittered away from her mind, eluding her as it had eluded her for months now, and she made a sudden effort and seized it, wriggling in her grasp, and tightened her brain round it so it would not escape.

"The ship," she whispered, as the shock of disbelief dissolved along her bones. "That ship was the Amazon Queen." She got to her feet. "And the one-eyed man," she murmured. "He knows it."

She had to get back to the ship, and she spun on her heel.

There in the clearing before her, standing with weapons at the ready and sardonic smirks on their identical faces, were three Eastern women in yellow, red, and blue.

Ah, proktos Herae, thought Makionus.

* * *

"Good day, ladies," said Makionus mildly, crooking one knee and spreading her parchment out on it. "'Tis a fine day for sunbathing," she continued, scrawling a careless line on the parchment, "and I'd merely drag at the beauty quotient by playin' Siren along with you." She straightened, then folded the scrap so the fragile line of char was inside. "So I'll leave the afternoon to the three of you." She gave them a silly little gesture of salute and took a step forward. Three blades lifted, and Makionus stopped.

"It's the scribbler," said the woman in yellow with a fine note of derision.

"On board a sailing-ship," said the woman in red, her voice dripping contempt.

"About as useful as tit* on a boar-hog," added the woman in blue.

"That's quite an image," Makionus replied. "Striking. Evocative. D'you write?" The three approached, taking slow, cautious steps toward her, and Makionus willed herself to stay where she was. There would be time and opportunity to throw herself from the cliff, if she needed to.

"I'm not armed," Makionus pointed out. Cruel smiles began to crawl over the angelic faces of the deadly women before her, and Makionus realized she had committed a tactical error. "Well, p'raps I am," she said with a shrug, and they rushed her.

She pelted for the edge, and they cut her off, blades catching glitters from the sun. In a heartbeat, the option of leaping from the cliff was gone to her forever as they drove her away from a quick death and back into the forest. She turned, moving with a speed that surprised her, and dashed through the trees, with her pursuers, encumbered by armor and heavy weapons, falling behind as they ran. Her heart wasted a few beats in hopefulness, right until the moment that she fetched up against a sheer wall of rock blocking her escape.

So it had begun. Sell yourself dear, scholar, Makionus thought, turning to face the now-gasping hunters. There was nothing she could do to warn her shipmates, and she had no delusions she'd get away from these three in one piece. Her mind ran over her options, which weren't numerous or positive. "I see the game now," she rasped at the woman in yellow. "Go for the one who can't fight." She knew, from the fury on the woman's face, that the stroke had told, and she followed it up, hauling air into her lungs to be able to speak. "Bright of you pretty little dolls not to go up against real warriors. They'll chop you to fragments and paint their decks with your blood."

She had just time to note their anger before they went for her. She tried to give as good as she got, but her bones were brittle and she was unaccustomed to striking beautiful women. Her muscles betrayed her, and after a confusing few moments, she found herself on her back with her hands tied to a tree. The woman in red was bending over her with an anticipatory smile on her face.

Makionus had seen that look before, a combination of righteousness, lust, and shame, and in an interesting place: the square outside the taverna, on the face of a Roman garrison commander having one of his men flogged in public for some infraction involving insufficient care of his kit. It gave her a notion, a notion that could perhaps be developed into a wedge. Spin 'em a tale, she thought, an' make it good, for the stakes have never been so high.

"Enjoy this, do you?" murmured Makionus in an intimate tone. The woman's features took on a cold arrogance, as if she were afraid she'd been found out, and Makionus added in a near-whisper, "I ain't the type to inspire it, I know, so I'll ask you... for your best."

A riot of emotions passed over that face then, and the woman sputtered, "What?"

"Out of the way, Marta," said the woman in yellow, and Marta's face slid aside, to be replaced by the identical face of her sister. "Where are they going?" she demanded. Makionus raised her head a bit and met the gaze of her red-clad sister. "Where are they going?" repeated the woman in yellow, a little louder.

Makionus shrugged as best she could, considering her bound hands. "Ask them." The blow, when it came, was sudden and strong, reminding her of other blows she'd escaped by fleeing her father's home a lifetime ago, and she thought, It's caught up with me, finally. "Or not," she said diffidently, snorting the blood from her nose with what she hoped looked like disgust at a lack of finesse.

The woman in blue knelt to rifle through Makionus's pockets, pulling forth scraps of parchment. She looked at one, then another, then another, trying to decipher the smear of Greek, hieroglyphics, Phoenician, Latin, and Hebrew. "What is all this crap?" she asked.

"Notes for a thrillin' tale it appears I won't finish," said Makionus. "Character sketches, plot devices, the usual." The woman in blue cast the scraps away with a twist of mockery on her flawless porcelain face, and Makionus, instead of watching them go, trained her eyes on the woman in red. "Marta? That's your name?"

"Shut up, scribbler," said the woman in yellow, raising her hand again.

Marta arrested her sister's arm in mid-air. "I'll handle this, Marcia," she said decisively, and Makionus closed her eyes and smiled just a tiny fraction. "You'll just exhaust her before she tells you what she knows."

Marcia wasn't happy, but she pulled away from the captive, and Makionus tried to loosen her muscles, preparing herself for what was to come. "So you're Marta," she said conversationally to the woman in red. "I think you'll probably hear it rather a lot from me, till you force the words from my brain for good and all." Marcia made some kind of impatient noise; Makionus ignored her. "That costume," she said, nodding toward Marta's red robe and red-lacquered armor. "Just a threat, or more like a promise?"

Marta gave her a practiced, brutal leer, but the surprised delight in her eyes was hard to hide. "You'll have to see, won't you?"

"Ah," sighed Makionus, closing her eyes again. "Can it be I've finally found an expert?"

"That's disgusting!" burst out the woman in blue.

"It's art," corrected Makionus.

"Shut up, Angelica," said Marta, reaching for her belt. She pulled out something Makionus didn't expect: a flask. From another part of the belt she extracted a folded square of red silk. It looked expensive. Makionus watched as Marta poured something from the flask onto the cloth, then reached for her face. It was cool and refreshing, and as Marta sponged the blood away, Makionus tasted a drop of the runoff. Water. Marta was cleaning her up.

As she worked, Marta spoke softly, intending her words only for Makionus. "I want every drop of sweat, every drop of blood, to belong to me and me alone. Can you give me that?" Makionus glanced at her two sisters, drawing nearer with curiosity. "You let me handle them," purred Marta with great self-assurance. "This is just you and me now."

"Then aye," Makionus replied, "with all that's in me."

Marta gifted her with a satisfied smile, taking up the challenge.

"What did she say?" asked Marcia.

"That she doesn't know anything," Marta answered instantly, and Makionus knew better than to contradict her. "But that's about to change. Angelica, do we have time to build a fire?"

* * *

What with gazing enraptured at the captain during the day and sleeping curled in his arms at night, Serafina was seriously behind with her record of the voyage. Makionus hadn't said anything, nor had Alcibiades, but she finally found some self-discipline and told herself she'd spend at least one afternoon doing her job. It helped that Alcibiades and Skittles were making some adjustments to where the whipstaff met the steering-oar, a difficult and exacting job that required expert hands, as hers were not.

Thus it came to pass that Serafina found herself down in the scriptorium in Dogmatika's accustomed seat, trying to organize her highly disorganized notes. Dogmatika had spread out at Makionus's place, taking advantage of her scholarly colleague's cliffside ramble, and was writing rapidly and with intense concentration, drawing Greek letters so fast and with such precision that Serafina found herself sourly envious.

Serafina had looked at her notes several times, wondering why she was unable to make sense of them. The reason for that, she suspected, was hanging in a basket at the stern of the Amazon Queen, and she allowed herself a wry little smile.

He was very shy, was her handsome captain, and seemed, despite his evident ardor, content to let things develop as they would without any prodding or pushing from him. She had nearly driven herself mad any number of times in longing for that very prodding and pushing, but he was doubtless wiser than she in matters of love, and she tried to put the bit to her lust and refrain from rushing him. He would move when he was ready, and she would beg, borrow, or steal the patience she needed to wait until then.

She had wondered, more than once, if his secret was that he really didn't care for women, and in her frustration had come close to suggesting that he leave off his pretense; she couldn't really believe it, though, having the evidence in his eyes and words and hands and sighs and thoughts, all of which were as flattering as they were overwhelming.

Serafina settled herself in her place again and stared at her notes. She remembered the day she had written all the way around this particular half-sheet of papyrus: the channel through which the Queen was sailing rounded a mountain and narrowed with little warning, and the water foamed white, roughening too swiftly for them to do much more than hang on. Serafina hooked a knee around the ladder from the sweeps and wrote her description of the channel, drawing letter after letter with painstaking concentration, turning the page a quarter-turn at the edges because she dared not take her hands from the brush. She'd ended up spoiling her ship-shift with ink, but the papyrus made it through the whitewater channel intact, along with the rest of the ship and her crew, and rested in calmer water by nightfall. Makionus, attempting later to read her notes, was impressed, and said so.

She turned the papyrus now in a circle, trying to figure out what, exactly, she had been thinking when she wrote it. Was her spelling normally so atrocious, or had she just been afraid? She had her lips screwed into a concentrated look when a pair of solemn blue eyes popped into the middle of the letters. Serafina sat up and blinked; the illusion disappeared. She remained still for a moment, wondering if Theadora were perhaps trying to reach her, not that she'd been precisely receptive recently.

No, nothing. Serafina quieted her galloping heart and set herself back resolutely to her letters. Nothing came of this attempt either--what did she mean by "hydra", or was it "hyppo"? She sighed with frustration and thrust her free hand into her hair.

"Out, out," said Dogmatika, waving the hand not holding the brush in her general direction.

"I'm sorry," replied the chastened Serafina. "I'll be quiet."

"Then do so up on deck," said Dogmatika, not looking up from her page.

Hurt, Serafina gathered up her notes and her fresh papyrus and left the scriptorium. On her way up the stairs to the deck, the eyes appeared again, and she stumbled against the steps, banging her knee. The pain drove the vision from her brain, and she looked up from her scattered pages to see Blackie at the top of the stairs in a slight crouch, tail whipping back and forth.

She's going to spring! Serafina thought in terror, and Blackie sat instantly, looking offended. A pair of boots, followed by another, wandered into her line of vision, and Ranger and J'lari saw her, descending the stairs rapidly.

"Are you hurt?" asked J'lari courteously, taking Serafina's elbow and helping her to her feet.

"No," said Serafina, but she was rather unsettled by this time. The eyes showed up again, and Serafina frowned and blinked. Her sister's eyes, which she knew from dreams, were serene and sad; these eyes were cold and emotionless, save with a bit of tension in the brows. "No," Serafina breathed.

J'lari was collecting Serafina's scattered papers, and Ranger, oddly, was looking at Blackie. She turned to Serafina. "What is it?"

"I--I'm supposed to go get..." began Serafina. Ranger's face held a question, and Serafina finished faintly, "Bladewalker."

Ranger's expression went grave, and she offered Serafina her elbow. J'lari did the same on the other side, and flanked by the archers, Serafina ascended the steps. When she got topside, she saw Harrel through the open door of her cabin, sweeping the windborne smuts from the floor. He took one look at her, stashed the broom, and walked toward them, a question forming on his lips.

Serafina took a rapid look around, counting. Willow sorting tools into a bucket for Alcibiades and Skittles at the stern, Ranger and J'lari at her side, Harrel standing before her, Pyra, with Ridah looking on, mixing some concoction of melted beeswax and herb tea she'd been working on, Dogmatika in the hold, Klokir dozing on her perch in the sun, the squirrels similarly sacked in tiny nets hung from the crossbeam, and the door to Lethe's cabin closed. That meant only one person missing.

Serafina's heart had started to race. She moved around Harrel without really seeing him, heading for the door of Lethe's cabin. He hastened to follow, and was right by her side by the time she reached it. Without the slightest hesitation, she lifted her hand to knock.

The door flung open, and there was the tall warrior, glaring down at her. "What in the hell do you want?" she growled.

Bladewalker looked, Serafina realized all of a sudden, exhausted. "I wouldn't disturb you," Serafina said forthrightly, staring right into the eyes she'd been imagining in appallingly intimate detail for the past few minutes, "unless it was important." She added under her breath, "Athirat knows."

"What is it, Serafina?" asked Lethe from within. She showed up in the doorway, nearly able to stand under Bladewalker's outstretched arm. Serafina saw that both of them were fully dressed.

Serafina tucked her papyrus under her arm with a hand that had gone cold. "I don't know," she said, her voice flat.

"Fee?" She turned her head unwillingly--it meant losing a contest with Bladewalker's furious, frigid gaze--to see the captain wiping pitch from his hands as he came toward her. "What's the matter?"

The connection between them went only one way, and something told her to keep it from the others. "I need to talk to Bladewalker," she said with great care and solemnity.

"About--?"

She tightened her hands into fists. "I'm not sure."

His eyes narrowed and his head went to the side, studying her. "May I be there?"

She was about to answer when Blackie materialized atop the roof of her cabin. Ranger glanced at Blackie and interrupted, "How long has Makionus been gone?"

She didn't wait for an answer, moving instead to Klokir's perch. "We've need of thy keen eyes, old friend," she murmured to the hawk, who went from drowsy to alert within the space of a breath. She stepped onto Ranger's leather-covered arm, and Ranger took her to the port rail, launching her into the air.

Klokir swept upwards in wide circles, and they all watched, shading their eyes and holding their breath, while she made a wide circuit around the cliffs sheltering the ship. She went into a dive, pulled up just before striking the trees at the summit, circled tightly, and issued an anguished-sounding cry Serafina had never heard before.

"Arm yourselves," Ranger announced into a horrified silence, "and follow me."

* * *

Lethe's effortless athleticism gave her the lead, and even running uphill in boots with a drawn sword in her hand appeared to give her no trouble. Bladewalker, with greater physical strength and a longer stride, pushed herself to keep up. Behind them, Ranger and J'lari, bows in hand, ran as if yoked into a team, Blackie leaping from rock to rock in a fluid movement that carried her steadily upward. Behind them were Harrel, the captain, and the stubbornly persistent Serafina.

"Faster!" Lethe called, breaking into a sprint, and Bladewalker, unable to avoid it, glanced at the sheer drop two cubits from her shoulder.

"You'll break your neck!" she panted.

Lethe threw a glare over her shoulder. "She's given us away," she snarled. It was something to think about, and Bladewalker called on a long-dormant stamina to draw even with Lethe.

The two of them pelted into the woods shoulder to shoulder, seeking the spot over which the now-silent hawk hovered. Something fluttered yellow, red, blue, and they ran toward it, heedless of traps. It was a spear, sent into a stout young tree trunk with such force that the point protruded from the other side, sticky with sap from the wounded tree, a tricolored silk banner dancing with silent menace from the shaft.

They didn't slow down, running past the ugly warning until they reached a sheer cliff face.

Serafina held one of the captain's hands; in the other, he held his longest, sharpest knife. Next to her, Harrel was puffing like a dragon, stumbling and catching himself, always onward. She was already gasping for breath, calling on her fear where the warriors had their training and their weaponry. J'lari and Ranger, moving like mirror images of one another, disappeared into the woods, and Blackie melted into the shadows right next to them.

As they broke into the trees, Serafina stopped, her mouth open and her knees gone liquid. Sticking right through one of the trees was a spear, and it was hung with the colors of the Triad. Harrel dashed past them, sword at the ready, as the captain tightened his grip on her hand.

"This was a bad idea," Alcibiades muttered, his eyes on the spear.

"Come on," she urged, pulling at his hand. They found their feet and ran toward the others. She saw a little gap in the undergrowth, and as they neared it, Harrel burst out of the gap, blocking her way.

"No," he said, his face gray and his eye stern.

"She's my teacher!" Serafina cried.

"I said no!" He looked terrible.

"She's my friend!" Alcibiades caught at her elbow, and she shook free of his hand. "I've seen worse with Mother--!"

"Fee," said Harrel, tossing his sword into the dirt behind him and catching her up in his arms. She beat at his ribs, and Alcibiades grabbed for her wrists. "Fee," he said again, as she writhed in his arms, trying to get loose. It was like trying to escape a prison cell. "Not for you, damn it!" Harrel shouted into her face. "For her! For her, Fee!"

She quit struggling, and the breath rasped in her throat.

"For her," Harrel said, a little more quietly, though he still looked as though he might throw up any second. Alcibiades had his hands on her shoulders; now, she was bit more inclined to listen. "Her dignity. 'Member that, Fee. Respect it. And her. Everything she gave y--"

He choked and swallowed and opened his arms, and she sank back into the captain's desperate embrace, shaking her head, the one word circling her mind as she put her hands to her temples and tried to will Athirat to make it yesterday forever.

* * *

They worked in near silence, Ranger and J'lari with arrows nocked to their bows, guarding a sad, shocked burial detail. While Lethe used her knife to remove the bindings from the body, Bladewalker found a hand-sized slab of rock with a flat side and began to dig. Klokir came to settle on a tree branch, resolutely keeping her face turned away, watching for danger. She perched with her shoulders hunched and her feathers ruffled up, as they had seen her do on freezing days. Ranger sent the squirrels to gather up the scattered remnants of parchment before the winds carried them off forever, and Jerseygirl found a black leather cord with a flat wooden box attached to it. Ranger picked it up and cleaned it off, then tucked it safely into the pouch at her waist, next to the parchment.

Blackie found a little stream not far off, and they brought water in whatever would hold it, leather coats and hats and cupped hands, washing the body as best they could before drawing the tattered remnants of Makionus's clothing around her and laying her into the trench Bladewalker had made. They could not do much, but they saw to it that she went into her grave free, a tiny victory over the Triad in the face of an overwhelming defeat.

They had more rock than anything else, and so they built her a cairn. It was nearly sunset when they had finished. None of them wanted to leave her where she had fallen, and none of them wanted to remember what they'd seen, or imagine what had led to it, but they had little choice.

Ranger gathered her tribespeople, and her shipmates joined her, standing around the cairn in the last rays of the day's sun. Ranger held out her hand, palm down, over the grave of Makionus, and as the rest of them listened, she chanted in a language none of the rest of them knew. "Rest well, hero, until the Summerlands," she whispered after that, and all of them repeated it through lips that felt foreign with disuse.

When that was done, they turned reluctantly to leave. On their way to the path down the cliff to the ship, they saw the spear again, and were filled with loathing. Bladewalker drew her sword and shattered the shaft at the trunk with one blow, picking up the horrible thing and carrying it in her hand all the way back down. No one had to be told what she planned to do with it, and in the meantime, it would serve to transmute their horror into rage.

* * *

Serafina returned to the ship on feet that did not feel the ground, staring with eyes that did not see. She was conscious of little other than Harrel's hand at her left elbow and Alci's at her right, and the two of them got her up the gang and onto the deck of the Amazon Queen. The first thing that swam into her field of vision was the pale, strained face of Dogmatika. Behind her were Pyra and Ridah, waiting silently for news. Skittles and Willow stood at the sweeps. Willow was twisting a length of some rag in her hands.

Harrel drew himself up, removing his hand from Serafina's arm. He clasped his hands behind his back and announced to them, "Makionus is killed." In the ensuing silence, he raked them with his eye, then cleared his throat and added, "So..."

He stumped past them, heading for the bow, and took up a stance, staring out over the water with his arms folded.

"Serafina," whispered a voice, and Serafina turned from the sight of Harrel at the bow to Dogmatika, reaching for her sleeve with a tentative hand. "I--I'm so sorry," said Dogmatika.

Serafina tried to think of something comforting to say in turn, but the words clogged in her throat and all she could do was nod.

"Skittles," said Alcibiades. "Willow. We'll have to set a guard. We sail at first light."

Skittles coughed delicately into her fist, not meeting his eyes. "The oar's fixed," she said in a low voice.

"Thank you," he said, looking at Serafina. "Fee, is there... anything we can do... for you?"

Words still would not emerge. She shook her head instead.

"I..." He lowered his head and bit his lip, then lifted his lovely green eyes to hers. "I'm sorry, I have things to look after. I'm--"

The captain of the ship. She nodded again. I wouldn't love you if you weren't.

He touched her arm with compassion, casting about for something to say, then turned and ascended the steps to the sweeps, gathering Willow and Skittles to him for a conference.

Serafina turned. Her feet and hands had gone all pins-and-needles. She walked carefully to the bow and stood next to Harrel, studying his strong profile in the light of the setting sun. He unfolded his arms without looking at her, gathering her close, and she curled into his chest, burying her face in his coat for the first time she could remember.

* * *

The others returned to the ship with the last of the daylight to find the lamps lit and much-needed buckets of water drawn, some for drinking, some for washing. Dogmatika stood amidships waiting for them, like a deposed monarch, stiff with dignity and unexpected grief, and as they plodded out of the gloom and up the gang one by one, she searched them for something she did not find. By the time Bladewalker, in the rear, got to the deck, Dogmatika had found an emotion, and unleashed it on her.

"Where is she?"

Bladewalker, not troubling to open her mouth, made a gesture over her shoulder with her empty hand, indicating the cliff behind her.

"You just left her up there?" cried Dogmatika in disbelief.

Ranger turned and put a hand on her shoulder. "Dogmatika," she said in her controlled voice, "we had no choice. We brought you her notes--"

Dogmatika flung the hand from her shoulder and rounded on Bladewalker. "And that was your doing, was it?" She pointed at the shattered shaft in Bladewalker's hand and added, "I see you had time to collect a souvenir--"

Bladewalker turned to face her. "Dogmatika," she said, making her own name sound like the deadliest of insults, "you're in charge of the scriptorium now."

"Like the gnawed-on prick of Anu I am!" retorted Dogmatika. "Or is that just until your little friends decide to pick me off too? By the planet-spewing womb of Nut, why do we even have warriors aboard?"

Bladewalker's hand tightened on the staff, and she lowered her eyebrows. Dogmatika, to her credit, stayed right where she was, and the two of them bristled at one another.

"Attend to me, drunkard, for I won't say this twice," said Bladewalker, biting off the words in her fury. "There wasn't but one person aboard this ship to whom those stories were as important as they are to me. And I've just buried her. With my own hands. You're in charge of that scriptorium now, and you'll drive yourself to your death doin' it half so well as Makionus, or you won't have to worry about the Triad tearin' you apart; I'll do it myself. Do you require any more tellin', or will that suffice?"

Dogmatika's feet remained planted on the deck, but her face radiated hatred. "That'll do," she spat.

Bladewalker went past her, barely picking up her feet, and disappeared into Lethe's cabin.

* * *

None of them slept that night. Eventually, Serafina, scattered with nausea and dizziness and weary of shivering alone in her bunk, left her cabin and went to sit at the sweeps with Skittles, Alcibiades, Ranger, and Blackie. None of them spoke much, but at least they were all able to be miserable together.

Toward dawn, Serafina, who had been hugging her knees for some time, found the courage to blurt out, "So why didn't you bring her home?"

In response, Ranger got to her feet and crossed the sweeps to sit next to her. She put an arm around Serafina's shoulders, and Serafina settled into the curve of Ranger's body. "Your Ladyship," murmured Ranger, "it would've been no favor to you, and I'm certain she'd be relieved that the end of your friendship isn't that kind of burden."

"Everyone treats me like a little girl," Serafina complained.

Ranger tightened her arm around Serafina and turned her face to the east, which was lightening just a little. "Say, rather, like a respected friend."

Serafina stared at the east, hoping as hard as she could that the sun would finally rise so they could leave this horrible place, and whatever it was up on the cliffs that none of them wanted her to know.

* * *

It had been an uncharacteristically quiet night in the cabin of Lethe, whose nightly madness appeared to have fled with the abrupt loss of their comrade. She and Bladewalker sat without speaking on opposite ends of the bunk, and Lethe's green eyes took on a cat's spectral presence in the darkness. Bladewalker, unsure of how they'd come to this and what she felt about it, was content to keep her mouth shut, and was happy that Lethe chose to follow her mood.

With the dawn, Bladewalker got up from the bunk and sat in the chair at Lethe's desk. The unknowable depths of the earth pulled at her. She wondered where her muscles found the strength to resist it. She could feel Lethe's eyes on her back, and when she heard the soft rustling of Lethe's lithe body leaving the bed, she wasn't precisely surprised.

A hand came down softly on Bladewalker's shoulder. Even this did not precipitate her into the depths. She turned her head and studied Lethe's hand, molded by an amount of time Bladewalker could not begin to understand, a hand as adept at slaughter as poetry, a hand that had fought with savagery the gods that formed it, even as it recorded delicate traceries of wonder at the marvel of their creation.