“We’re still working on the possibility that people could sleep in the daytime while they accumulate energy, then take off the wings and work at night.”
“So, I’m right. If you don’t turn us into vegetables, carnivores will have to eat fish and herbivores would eat seaweed.”
Blue stared out through the door while she attached and assembled tiny parts in the light of the window. He was trying to imagine talking with wolves. How does food talk to someone who is hungry? Does a hungry person want to take time to talk to food? If they could talk to one another, could they still eat one another?
He mused, “So you’ll grow vocal cords in the wolves. Then you’ll teach them to talk. Then you’ll see if they actually can. Then you’ll ask them if they want their young born able to talk?”
Precious Wind picked up one assembly and attached it firmly to another, setting the linked devices into the sunlight. A tiny wheel began to spin. She said, “That’s the last step in the process, inserting the right sequence into the reproductive organs. Once we find the right sequence.”
“Keeps you from being bored, I suppose,” said Blue. “Keeps you from feeling seasick. I’d like to make a suggestion.”
“That being?”
“There’s a thing called a . . . wampus? A sea thing. It’s about my size, I think. Abasio read me a book about it.”
“I think you mean walrus,” she replied, starting a new assembly. “But they need dry land to have their babies on. A lot of the creatures that were originally land animals that returned to the sea and evolved further while in the sea still need dry land to bear children on. Walruses. Seals. Sea lions. All those. Whales and dolphins bear their young in the water, but they have to boost the babies up to the surface to breathe until the babies learn to do it themselves.”
“I’d prefer to think of my foals as turning into something like the wampus, if it came to that.” Blue brooded over this for some time, forgetting completely to be seasick. “Or a very large herbivorous sea otter that could live on seaweed. They make nests in the weeds and lie on their backs in the sun. That looks very pleasant to me. I remember rolling on my back as a colt. It was comfortable.” He went back to his railing, so full of thought about sea creatures and eating seaweed that he forgot to be seasick for the rest of the day.
Out on the deck, Justinian was continuing his conversation with his daughter while Abasio listened from where he leaned on the rail. He had never really seen the ocean until now, on this ship, and he found it endlessly fascinating. He found equally fascinating the things Justinian was telling Xulai. How he had loved Xu-i-lok. How they had met. How they had been married. How frantic they had been when they found out she had been “cursed,” though they knew it hadn’t been a curse. Whoever had done it had done it badly but repeatedly. If it had been done right, the princess would have died within a season instead of lingering all those years. How they found out it had been Alicia. What they had learned about the Old Dark House.
“The Old Dark Man sounds like an ogre to me,” Abasio commented. “I met a few, back in the wild lands. At first I thought they might be trolls, but trolls weren’t intelligent. Both were the results of unhindered genetic experimentation, and I’ll bet your Old Dark Man was the same, at least partly. Why does he want to kill Tingawans?”
Precious Wind, who had finished assembling her devices, emerged from the cabin with Blue behind her. “Now that you’re talking of the Old Dark Man, there’s something I have to tell Xulai. Well, tell all of you, actually. May I interrupt you?”
Justinian nodded and gestured toward a large, square hatch cover where they could sit near one another. As the others arranged themselves, Precious Wind sat down, her booted feet neatly together. From her pocket she took a red, ovoid object and a sheaf of papers, holding them before her. “I found this where you hid it in the wagon, Abasio. I should have given it to Xulai long ago, but I put it off.”
“That’s not like you,” said Xulai chidingly. “You don’t put things off.”
“You had just learned who you were and how old you were, and I thought any additional responsibilities might be crushing. It was to ease your life that your mother left you this,” Precious Wind replied, holding up the red oval she had been holding: “This is ug ul xaolat.”
“What is it?”
“In Tingawan the words mean ‘a thing master.’ It has a number of ‘things’ that it can order and direct. You can speak to it or simply press it with your fingers to summon a hunter, or to move very swiftly to a place of safety, or to have something carried to another place. Whatever thing you want, this master summons it. It can move you faster than a slaughterer can move. It is why it was entrusted to your mother, so she could escape, if necessary. Unfortunately, this device could not protect her
