Serra found us quickly enough, and I apologized. I had stopped to pray, and that was all right.
“I thought my new page had sunk through the floor,” she said.
We returned to the villa, and it was holiday there, with much foolishness: the maids were served wine and wore sandals in the house while Serra went unshod, and Ephor Menasos and Serra waited on them like they were queens. I sat at the Ephor’s official desk in his official chair with a paper crown and gave orders to rule the island: the streams to run with iced lemon squash, and the hills to be covered with sugar paste and such. These were their suggestions: I had no idea what orders were traditional.
His seat was remarkable, the back made with many teeth and hinged mandible parts, the stony tripartite jaws of a gorgona.
“That’s the mouth of a living thing?”
“Yes,” Menasos said cheerfully. “All grown up!”
“Terran?”
“Native. My great-great-grandfather killed this one off the coast as it tried to drag down a sponge fisherman’s boat.”
“That’s…awfully big.”
“They get bigger. Huge ones lurk in the deep, and there’s a story of sailors who land on a sleeping one like an island and start a fire—with the results you might expect.”
In the evening, the market was crowded with tables and feasting, and the townswomen threw a large image of a woman made from woven flowers and branches into the sea, replacing the real one their foremothers would have selected to give the Nereids.
“She would have only been a servant,” Psamathe assured me as we stood on the headland and watched the waves swallow the figure.
“Guess how I feel about that.”
“As Miss pleases.”
The moons rose, the larger first, the smaller trailing. Moonlight ran liquid on the water. I stared at their marred faces and the steady pricks of light hanging among the stars: the machines of men in orbit. Perhaps one was the Yi So-yeon.
Serra allowed me to go my own way tonight. She and Menasos had a secret rendezvous to keep in memory of their meeting, and only Amara was needed to watch over their festivities. I’d seen enough of the town’s doings and walked east, over stones to broad beaches tide-narrowed below the cliffs. The light on the water stirred my memories, and I felt a certain pressure in them, but the breakthrough into the dream failed to come.
We arrived at a place where we could advance no further, the waves of the highest tide rushing, blocking progress. There was a stretch of dry sand thirty meters long and twenty meters wide. I stood near the whishing waves, moons high but still divided: it did not look like they’d cross until after midnight.
Psamathe stood beside me, observing as I gazed at the sea and the moons. Rhodope waited a dozen paces away, hands folded.
“What are you thinking, Miss?”
“I’m thinking I don’t know what to do. I think I’m safe from the Council and the Scyroses if they can’t find me, but how long will that last? If this Leksios figured out who I am, they will be back, don’t you think?”
She looked solemn. “Miss, I am not wise, but I would fear that.”
“What should I do? I can’t run, have almost no money and nowhere to go, and don’t know how to live in this world. I can speak the language but don’t understand the customs.”
“Miss is correct.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Me?” She seemed genuinely surprised. “What ideas could I have?”
“You must think something.” I turned and looked at her. “What would you do?”
Her mouth fell open, pale and pink in the moonlight, her skin polished for the stars. She half raised a hand. “Do?” The thought seemed a horror. “Do?”
“Yes. If you were me.”
She looked at Rhodope behind her. “I cannot do. Miss.”
“I’ve seen you do things,” I said angrily.
“I do what I am supposed to do, Miss.” Her eyes struggled to look away but clung to mine.
“I thought you were supposed to call me Sir,” I said dourly. “Since I’m condemned to pretend this until disaster strikes.”
“I do,” she said, “what is proper.”
“And?”
She was a trifle taller than I, was Psamathe. She looked at me confused. “Miss—”
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