Three stories tall, the sanctuaries, libraries, laboratories, and quarters of the Vilkui surrounded the inner court with their cloisters. A garden of flowers and healing herbs, intricately laid out, filled most of it. A lantern had been lighted in one arcade, but all windows were dark and Ilyandi stood out in the open awaiting her visitor.
She made a slight gesture of dismissal. The acolyte bowed her head and slipped away. Kalava saluted, feeling suddenly awkward but his resolution headlong within him. “Greeting, wise and gracious lady,” he said.
“Well met, brave captain,” the skythinker replied. She gestured at a pair of confronting stone benches. “Shall we be seated?” It fell short of inviting him to share wine, but it meant she would at least hear him out.
They lowered themselves and regarded one another through the swiftly deepening twilight. Ilyandi was a slender woman of perhaps forty years, features thin and regular, eyes large and luminous brown, complexion pale—like smoked copper, he thought. Cropped short in token of celibacy, wavy hair made a bronze coif above a plain white robe. A green sprig of tekin, held at her left shoulder by a pin in the emblematic form of interlocked circle and triangle, declared her a Vilku.
“How can I aid your venture?” she asked.
He started in surprise. “Huh! What do you know about my plans?” In haste: “My lady knows much, of course.”
She smiled. “You and your saga have loomed throughout these past decades. And … word reaches us here. You search out your former crewmen or bid them come see you, all privately. You order repairs made to the ship remaining in your possession. You meet with chandlers, no doubt to sound them out about prices. Few if any people have noticed. Such discretion is not your wont. Where are you bound, Kalava, and why so secretively?”
His grin was rueful. “My lady’s not just wise and learned, she’s clever. Well, then, why not go straight to the business? I’ve a voyage in mind that most would call crazy. Some among them might try to forestall me, holding that it would anger the gods of those parts—seeing that nobody’s ever returned from there, and recalling old tales of monstrous things glimpsed from afar. I don’t believe them myself, or I wouldn’t try it.”
“Oh, I can imagine you setting forth regardless,” said Ilyandi half under her breath. Louder: “But agreed, the fear is likely false. No one had reached the Shining Fields by sea, either, before you did. You asked for no beforehand spells or blessings then. Why have you sought me now?”
“This is, is different. Not hugging a shoreline. I—well, I’ll need to get and train a new huukin, and that’s no small thing in money or time.” Kalava spread his big hands, almost helplessly. “I had not looked to set forth ever again, you see. Maybe it is madness, an old man with an old crew in a single old ship. I hoped you might counsel me, my lady.”
“You’re scarcely ready for the balefire, when you propose to cross the Windroad Sea,” she answered.
This time he was not altogether taken aback. “May I ask how my lady knows?”
Ilyandi waved a hand. Catching faint lamplight, the long fingers soared through the dusk like nightswoopers. “You have already been east, and would not need to hide such a journey. South, the trade routes are ancient as far as Zhir. What has it to offer but the plunder of tombs and dead cities, brought in by wretched squatters? What lies beyond but unpeopled desolation until, folk say, one would come to the Burning Lands and perish miserably? Westward we know of a few islands, and then empty ocean. If anything lies on the far side, you could starve and thirst to death before you reached it. But northward—yes, wild waters, but sometimes men come upon driftwood of unknown trees or spy storm-borne flyers of unknown breed—and we have all the legends of the High North, and glimpses of mountains from ships blown off course …” Her voice trailed away.
“Some of those tales ring true to me,” Kalava said. “More true than stories about uncanny sights. Besides, wild huukini breed offshore, where fish are plentiful. I have not seen enough of them there, in season, to account for as many as I’ve seen in open sea. They must have a second shoreline. Where but the High North?”
Ilyandi nodded. “Shrewd, captain. What else do you hope to find?”
He grinned again. “I’ll tell you after I get back, my lady.”
Her tone sharpened. “No treasure-laden cities to plunder.”
He yielded. “Nor to trade with. Would we not have encountered craft of theirs, or, anyhow, wreckage? However … the farther north, the less heat and the more rainfall, no? A country yonder could have a mild clime, forestfuls of timber, fat land for plowing, and nobody to fight.” The words throbbed. “No desert creeping in? Room to begin afresh, my lady.”
She regarded him steadily through the gloaming. “You’d come home, recruit people, found a colony, and be its king?”
“Its foremost man, aye, though I expect the kind of folk who’d go will want a republic. But mainly—” His voice went low. He stared beyond her. “Freedom. Honor. A free-born wife and new sons.”
They were silent a while. Full night closed in. It was not as murky as usual, for the clearing in the west had spread rifts up toward the zenith. A breath of coolness soughed in leaves, as if Kalava’s dream
