“Mistress? Are you all right?”

She lifted her eyes to Rache. The woman had entered, gathered up the coffee things on a tray, then come to stand next to where her mistress stared black-eyed off into the distance. This woman, a servant-slave in her own house, entrusted with the teaching of her granddaughter. A woman she hardly knew at all. What did her mere presence in the household teach Malta? That slavery was to be accepted — was that the shape of things to come? What did that say to Malta about what it meant to be a woman in the Bingtown society to come?

“Sit down,” she heard herself saying to Rache. “We need to talk. About my granddaughter. And about yourself.”

“Jamaillia,” said Vivacia softly.

The word woke him and he lifted his head from the deck where he'd been sleeping in the winter sunlight. The day was clear, neither cool nor warm, and the wind was leisurely. It was that hour of the afternoon designated for him to “pay attention to the ship,” as his father so ignorantly put it. He had been sitting on the foredeck mending his trousers and quietly conversing with the figurehead. He did not recall lying down to sleep.

“I'm sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Don't be,” the ship said simply. “Would that I could truly sleep as humans do, turning away from the day and all its cares. That one of us can is a blessing to us both. I only woke you because I thought you would enjoy seeing this. Your grandfather always said that this was the prettiest view of the city, out here where you cannot see any of its faults. There they are. The white spires of Jamaillia.”

He stood, stretched and then stared out across the blue waters. The twin headlands reached out to surround the ship like welcoming arms. The city lined the coast between the steaming mouth of the Warm River and the towering peak of the Satrap's Mountain. Lovely mansions and estate gardens were separated from one another by belts of trees. On a ridge behind the city rose the towers and spires of the Satrap's Court. Commonly referred to as the “upper city,” it was the heart of Jamaillia City. The capital city that gave its name to the whole satrapy, center of civilization, the cradle of all learning and art, glistened in the afternoon sunlight. Green and gold and white she shone, like a jewel in a setting. Her white spires soared higher than any tree, and so intensely white were they that Wintrow could not look at them without squinting. The spires were banded with gold, and the foundations of the buildings were rich green marble from Saden. For a time Wintrow gazed out on it hungrily, seeing for the first time what he had heard of so often.

Some five hundred years ago, most of Jamaillia had burned to the ground. The Satrap of that time had then decreed that his royal city would be rebuilt more magnificently than ever, and that all of the buildings should be of stone so that such a disaster could never befall Jamaillia again. He called together his finest architects and artists and stonemasons, and with their aid and three decades of work, the Court of the Satrap was raised. The next-to-highest white spire that pointed to the sky denoted the residence of the Satrap. The only spire that soared higher was that of the Satrap's Temple to Sa, where the Satrap and his Companions worshipped. For a time Wintrow gazed at it, filled with awe and wonder. To be sent to dwell in the monastery that served that temple was the highest honor to which a priest could aspire. The library alone filled seventeen chambers, and there were three scribing chambers where twenty priests were constantly employed in renewing or copying the scrolls and books. Wintrow thought of the amassed learning there, and awe filled him.

Then bitterness came to darken his soul. So, too, had Cress seemed fair and bright, but it had still been a city of greedy, grasping men. He turned his back on it and slid down to sit. flat on the deck. “It's all a trick,” he observed. “All a rotten trick men play on themselves. They get together and they create this beautiful thing and then they stand back and say, ‘See, we have souls and insight and holiness and joy. We put it all in this building so we don't have to bother with it in our everyday lives. We can live as stupidly and brutally as we wish, and stamp down any inclination to spirituality or mysticism that we see in our neighbors or ourselves. Having set it in stone, we don't have to bother with it anymore.’ It's a trick men play on themselves. Just one more way we cheat ourselves.”

Vivacia spoke softly. If he had been standing, he might not have heard the words. But he was sitting, his palms flat to her deck, and so they rang through his soul. “Perhaps men are a trick Sa played on this world. ‘All other things I shall make vast and beautiful and true to themselves,’ perhaps he said. ‘Men alone shall be capable of being petty and vicious and self-destructive. And for my cruelest trick of all, I shall put among them men capable of seeing these things in themselves.’ Do you suppose that is what Sa did?”

“That is blasphemy,” Wintrow said fervently.

“Is it? Then how do you explain it? All the ugliness and viciousness that is the province of humanity, whence comes it?”

“Not from Sa. From ignorance of Sa. From separation from Sa. Time and again I have seen children brought to the monastery, boys and girls with no hint as to why they are there. Angry and afraid, many of them, at being sent forth from their homes at such a tender age. Within weeks, they blossom, they open to Sa's light and glory. In every single child, there is at least a spark of it. Not all stay; some are sent home, not all are suited to a life of service. But all of them are suited to being creations of light and thought and love. All of them.”

“Mm,” the ship mused. “Wintrow, it is good to hear you speak as yourself again.”

He permitted himself a small, bitter smile and rubbed at the knot of white flesh where his finger had been. It had become a habit, a small one that annoyed him whenever he became aware of it. As now. He folded his hands abruptly and asked, “Do I pity myself that much? And is it so obvious to all?”

“I am probably more sensitized to it than anyone else could be. Still. It is nice to jolt you out of it now and then.” Vivacia paused. “Will you be going ashore, do you think?”

“I doubt it.” Wintrow tried to keep the sulkiness from his voice. “I haven't touched shore since I ‘shamed’ my father in Cress.”

“I know,” the ship replied needlessly. “But, Wintrow, if you do go ashore, be careful of yourself.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, exactly. I think it is what your great-great-grandmother would have called a premonition.”

Vivacia sounded so unlike herself that Wintrow stood up and peered over the bow railing at her. She was looking up at him. Every time he thought he had become accustomed to her, there would be a moment like this. The light was unusually clear today, what Wintrow always thought of as an artist's light. Perhaps that accounted for how luminous she appeared to him. The green of her eyes, the rich gloss of her ebony hair, even her fine-grained skin shone with the best aspects of both polished wood and healthy flesh. She flushed pink to have him stare at her so, and in response to that he felt again the sudden collision of his love for her and his total benightedness as to what she truly was. It rocked him, as it always did. How could he feel this… passion, if he dared to use that word, for a creation of wood and magic? His love had no logical roots he could find… there was no prospect of marriage and children to share, no hunger for physical satiation in one another, there was no long history of shared experiences to account for the warmth and intimacy he felt with her. It made no sense.

“Is it so abhorrent to you?” she asked him in a whisper.

“It isn't you,” he tried to explain. “It is that this feeling is so unnatural. It is like something imposed on me rather than something I truly feel. Like a magic spell,” he added reluctantly. The followers of Sa did not deny the reality of magic. Wintrow had even seen it done, on rare occasions, small spells to cleanse a wound or spark a fire. But those were acts of a trained will coupled with a gift to have a physical effect. This sudden rush of emotion, triggered, as much as he could determine, solely by prolonged association, seemed to him something else entirely. He liked the Vivacia. He knew that, it made sense to him. He had many reasons to like the ship: she was beautiful and kind and sympathetic to him. She had intelligence, and watching her use that intelligence as she built chains of thought was a pleasure. She was like an untrained acolyte, open and willing to any teaching. Who would not like such a being? Logic told him he should like the ship, and he did. But that was separate from the wave of almost painful emotion that would sweep through him at odd moments like this. He would perceive her as more important than home and family, more important than his life at the monastery. At such moments, he could imagine no better end to his life than to fling himself flat upon her decks and be absorbed into her.