There was no moon. The sky was overcast. Men at the capstan trudged silent circles, first to pull up the anchor that held them near the pier and then to pull the ship away from the pier by winding up the fat cable that led to a second, larger anchor sunk far out in the bay. Abasio pointed the big cables out to Xulai, reminding her of the rope nets holding the cliff villages in place. When they were above the larger anchor they trudged again, coiling that rope into its cable tier and hoisting the anchor into its chains. The captain gave his orders in a low voice; the seamen did not shout or whistle as they loosed sails and tugged them to catch the offshore wind, turning the ship and tacking it slowly out of the bay. When morning came, the ship had gone west beyond the edge of the world, and only one woman, standing alone in the tower of the Watch House, had seen it go.
Far out in the western sea, as the sun rose, Xulai came on deck to see a familiar figure standing at the rail. She stopped, breathless, as he turned.
“Father!” The word she had never used came without thought. She threw herself into his arms, feeling his wet face pressed to her forehead. “Where have you been?”
“Xulai, Xulai, Daughter, oh, if you knew how long I’ve wanted to call you that . . .” They clung together wordlessly.
Finally, she managed a coherent thought. “But here? Why didn’t we travel together? Why didn’t we—”
“Shhh. We couldn’t.” His arms tightened around her. He held her away from him, looking into her eyes. “So many things I wished for that I couldn’t . . . Couldn’t let you know who you were. Couldn’t let anyone know. Couldn’t show you any affection more than I might show a stranger. But I’ve been here, child. I started the journey two nights after you left. Hallad, Prince Orez, arrived that same night to keep Woldsgard safe. This is where your mother told me to go, to keep me safe and to confuse things.” He wiped his eyes, half laughing. “Oh, didn’t we spend decades confusing things! I’ve spent so many years making false trails I may never be able to travel openly anywhere!”
“How did you get here?”
“I came south, within easy distance of the Old Dark House but west of it, along the mountains. A couple of my Men of the Mountain from the high north were with me for most of the trip, scouting ahead, cleaning up our trail behind. That’s one route, close behind the Old Dark House, where they’d never suspect I would go! From there, day by day, I kept on through the forests to the Lake of the Clouds, then east to Elsmere and on to Merhaven, and then, at night, onto this ship. Years ago, Xu-i-lok wrote a letter for me to carry, telling the captain what to do with me. I have been just another of the seamen for some time now. Every now and then they have to take the ship out into the sea to be sure it’s still seaworthy. I am actually learning how to set sails and which rope to pull when they yell at me. It took some getting used to, being yelled at.”
“You came all that way alone? But you didn’t go to Genieve?”
“It was best so.”
“Why didn’t we go to Tingawa years ago? Why didn’t we bring my mother? Why—”
“Shhhh.” He drew her over to a covered hatch and sat her down upon it. “We followed plans, dear one, plans centuries in the making. Plans made by the clan Do-Lok. Oh, child, they’ve been trying to solve this one for over a hundred years.”
“What ‘this one’?”
“The problem of what mankind does with the waters rising. What does he do when there is no more dry land, dear heart? Oh, not in my lifetime or yours, but soon after. No way to stop the waters rising. No way to go back to the planet we used to have. No way to undo all the things we did wrong. Clan Do-Lok has been trying to work this one out for a very long time. You’re part of the solution, as was I. First Xu-i-lok and I, the man who loved her, to create you. Then you and Abasio . . . we had to wait for Abasio. He was a person they knew had to exist, somewhere. Statistics, they said. Statistically, he had to exist! First they had to find him! Then they had to get him to Woldsgard. We couldn’t leave Woldsgard until that happened. And it might not have worked. You might have hated him. Oh, I was so thankful to meet him, there at the gard, to know you liked him.”
“Love him, Father.”
“Even better then, my child. Even better. Oh, so good to say that something is going well! Precious Wind, she was part of it, a good part of it. Even Blue, the horse, he’s turning out to be part of it too. And you had to be old enough to understand and strong enough to endure . . .”
“To do what?” she cried.
“To create a new human race,” he said. “People who can live in the sea.”
“And all this terror, this being frightened, was planned?”
“No. None of the horror was planned, not by us. Just as the water goes on rising, so there are forces on earth who don’t want us to survive. That much was known. We did not know who they were! Where were they? Why were they? Those things weren’t known then and aren’t really known now. To begin with we didn’t know about the duchess or her mother. We still
