Still, those filthy Lannach’honai had flourished, so maybe the Lodestar did not care… No, it was too cold a thought, here in the night wind under ashen Sk’huanax. Surely the Lodestar had appointed the Fleet an instrument, to destroy those Lannach beasts and take the country they had been defiling.

Rodonis’ wings beat a little faster. The flagship was close now, its turrets like mountain peaks in the dark. There were many lamps burning, down on deck or in shuttered rooms. There were warriors cruising endlessly above and around. The admiral’s flag was still at the masthead, so he had not yet died; but the death watch thickened hour by hour.

Like carrion birds waiting, thought Rodonis with a shudder.

One of the sentries whistled her to a hover and flapped close. Moonlight glistened on his polished spearhead. “Hold! Who are you?”

She had come prepared for such a halt, but briefly, the tongue clove to her mouth. For she was only a female, and a monster laired beneath her.

A gust of wind rattled the dried things hung from a yardarm: the wings of some offending sailor who now sat leashed to an oar or a millstone, if he still lived. Rodonis thought of Delp’s back bearing red stumps, and her anger broke loose in a scream:

“Do you speak in that tone to a sa Axollon?”

The warrior did not know her personally, among the thousands of Fleet citizens, but he knew an officer-class scarf; and it was plain to see that a life’s toil had never been allowed to twist this slim-flanked body.

“Down on the deck, scum!” yelled Rodonis. “Cover your eyes when you address me!”

“I… my lady,” he stammered, “I did not—”

She dove directly at him. He had no choice but to get out of the way. Her voice cracked whip-fashion, trailing her. “Assuming, of course, that your boatswain has first obtained my permission for you to speak to me.”

“But… but… but—” Other fighting males had come now, to wheel as helplessly in the air. Such laws did exist; no one had enforced them to the letter for centuries, but -

An officer on the main deck met the situation when Rodonis landed. “My lady,” he said with due deference, “it is not seemly for an unescorted female to be abroad at all, far less to visit this raft of sorrow.”

“It is necessary,” she told him. “I have a word for Captain T’heonax which will not wait.”

“The captain is at his honored father’s bunkside, my lady. I dare not—”

“Let it be your teeth he has pulled, then, when he learns that Rodonis sa Axollon could have forestalled another mutiny!”

She flounced across the deck and leaned on the rail, as if brooding her anger above the sea. The officer gasped. It was like a tail-blow to the stomach. “My lady! At once… wait, wait here, only the littlest of moments — Guard! Guard, there! Watch over my lady. See that she lacks not.” He scuttled off.

Rodonis waited. Now the real test was coming.

There had been no problem so far. The Fleet was too shaken; no officer, worried ill, would have refused her demand when she spoke of a second uprising.

The first had been bad enough. Such a horror, an actual revolt against the Lodestar’s own Oracle, had been unknown for more than a hundred years… and with a war to fight at the same time! The general impulse had been to deny that anything serious had happened at all. A regrettable misunderstanding Delp’s folk misled, fighting their gallant, hopeless fight out of loyalty to their captain… after all, you couldn’t expect ordinary sailors to understand the more modern principle, that the Fleet and its admiral transcended any individual raft -

Harshly, her tears at the time only a dry memory, Rodonis rehearsed her interview with Syranax, days ago.

“I am sorry, my lady,” he had said. “Believe me I am sorry. Your husband was provoked, and he had more justice on his side than T’heonax. In fact, I know it was just a fight which happened, not planned, only a chance spark touching off old grudges, and my own son mostly to blame.”

“Then let your son suffer for it!” she had cried.

The gaunt old skull wove back and forth, implacably ."No. He may not be the finest person in the world, but he is my son. And the heir. I haven’t long to live, and wartime is no time to risk a struggle over the succession. For the Fleet’s sake, T’heonax must succeed me without argument from anyone; and for this, he must have an officially unstained record.”

“But why can’t you let Delp go too?”

“By the Lodestar, if I could! But it’s not possible. I can give everyone else amnesty, yes, and I will. But there must be one to bear the blame, one on whom to vent the pain of our hurts. Delp has to be accused of engineering a mutiny, and be punished, so that everybody else can say, ‘Well, we fought each other, but it was all his fault, so now we can trust each other again.’ ”

The admiral sighed, a tired breath out of shrunken lungs. “I wish to the Lodestar I didn’t have to do this. I wish… I’m fond of you too, my lady. I wish we could be friends again.”

“We can,” she whispered, “if you will set Delp free.”

The conqueror of Maion looked bleakly at her and said: “No. And now I have heard enough.”

She had left his presence.

And the days passed, and there was the farcical nightmare of Delp’s trial, and the nightmare of the sentence passed on him, and the nightmare of waiting for its execution. The Lannach’ho raid had been like a moment’s waking from feverdreams: for it was sharp and real, and your shipmate was no longer your furtive-eyed enemy but a warrior who met the barbarian in the clouds and whipped him home from your cubs!

Three nights afterward, Admiral Syranax lay dying. Had he not fallen sick, Delp would now be a mutilated slave, but in this renewed tension and uncertainty, so controversial a sentence was naturally stayed.

Once T’heonax had the Admiralty, thought Rodonis in a cold corner of her brain, there would be no more delay. Unless -

“Will my lady come this way?”

They were obsequious, the officers who guided her across the deck and into the great gloomy pile of logs. Household servants, pattering up and down window-less corridors by lamplight, stared at her in a kind of terror. Somehow, the most secret things were always known to the forecastle, immediately, as if smelled.

It was dark in here, stuffy, and silent. So silent. The sea is never still. Only now did Rodonis realize that she had not before, in all her life, been shut away from the sound of waves and timber, and cordage. Her wings tensed, she wanted to fly up with a scream.

She walked.

They opened a door for her; she went through, and it closed behind her with sound-deadening massiveness. She saw a small, richly furred and carpeted room, where many lamps burned. The air was so thick it made her dizzy. T’heonax lay on a couch watching her, playing with one of the Eart’ho knives. There was no one else.

“Sit down,” he said.

She squatted on her tail, eyes smoldering into his as if they were equals.

“What did you wish to say?” he asked tonelessly.

“The admiral your father lives?” she countered.

“Not for long, I fear,” he said. “Aeak’ha will eat him before noon.” His eyes went toward the arras, haunted. “How long the night is!”

Rodonis waited.

“Well?” he said. His head swung back, snakishly. There was a rawness in his tone. “You mentioned something about… another mutiny?”

Rodonis sat straight up on her haunches. Her crest grew stiff. “Yes,” she replied in a winter voice. “My husband’s crew have not forgotten him.”

“Perhaps not,” snapped T’heonax. “But they’ve had sufficient loyalty to the Admiralty drubbed into them by now.”

“Loyalty to Admiral Syranax, yes,” she told him. “But that was never lacking. You know as well as I, what happened was no mutiny… only a riot, by males who were against you. Syranax they have always admired, if not loved.