“You’re wavering,” Toby said, reading his face. “You’re wavering, brother. I have you.”

“Damn it, lend me the boat!”

“Lend you my boat, so you can run her in and abandon her on the mainland?”

“And leave you safe on shore this side of the strait.”

“While you wreck my boat? No, thank you, brother! I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there and get out again with my boat, with room to spare. I’ve made a fine study of the tides and the shallows over the last dozen years, with that nice set of charts I picked up over at your place. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got charts our military doesn’t have.”

He gazed at Toby, at a face he’d so longed to see. “No.”

“I know the risk,” Toby said. “You’ve done what you want with your life. You’ve made the grand gestures. For God’s sake, give me the chance for mine.”

Got him dead on. He sat there a moment not saying anything.

“So,” Toby said. “We’re going.”

“Toby. If anything should happen to you—”

“Sure, sure, mutual. When do you want to leave?”

He made his career persuading the powers of earth and heavens. And his own brother nailed him.

“It’s not a done deal. I have to talk to Banichi.” Meaning Banichi, Jago, and the whole atevi contingent. “Not to mention the dowager.”

“You think she’ll want to come ashore on a Mospheiran navy ship? How would that look?”

Got him again. He heaved a slow sigh. “I’ll see if Shawn will give me a few boats for a screen and a diversion.”

“I’ve no doubt he will. But it’s not our problem. We can leave after dark, just get everybody into a couple of vans and pull up at the dock. My crew had her at the fueling dock when I left. We’re at dock C, number 2, easy to pull up and get right aboard.”

“Your crew. Who else have you snagged into this crazy venture? Not one of the kids, for God’s sake.”

“Barb.”

His heart thumped. “God.”

“You aren’t involved with her any longer.”

“No,” he managed to say. “No.” Barb, who’d been his lover for years, who’d broken with him, married and divorced Paul Saarinson, taken care of his mum with a daughter’s devotion, and pursued him with a forlorn hope of renewing their relationship, right up until he left the planet… and now she’d gotten her hooks into Toby? He started to say: It’s certainly over on my side… and then had sinking second thoughts, that it wasn’t a very good thing to say to a brother who might, God help them, have gotten himself emotionally involved with Barb.

Toby was entitled, wasn’t he? Toby knew very well what the relationship between him and Barb had been, and wasn’t, and then Jill had left him, and he could picture it: Toby and Barb both had been taking care of mum when he’d left, two desperately unhappy people in an unhappy situation—

“You’re not upset,” Toby said.

“I haven’t got a right in the world to be upset.”

“You’re damned right you don’t,” Toby said, with the slightest amount of territoriality, serious warning, one of the few Toby had ever laid down with him.

“I’ll wish you both the happiest and the best,” he said, “fervently.” And he thought to himself that if Barb made a play for him on that boat and hurt Toby, he’d kill her. “I’ll behave. Absolutely. Nothing but good thoughts.”

“Good,” Toby said, and took his promise at that, and the deal was done.

It was a quick council following, Toby describing the yacht’s speed under power and under wind, for their staff’s benefit, and Tano suggesting precisely, if they were going in by boat, where they might hope to put in unseen—the northern coast, a region which, though not Ragi, would hold no sympathy for the south, and Tano had connections there. It was a region of independent fishermen, practicing kabiu—seasonally appropriate—catch, people whose small boats supplied the tables of the wealthy and philosophically conservative houses, and who were not greatly interfered with, in consequence, in any political upheaval.

“We shall be one boat among many,” was Tano’s summation of the matter.

One boat among many. They would be relatively unarmed, vulnerable to spies and ambush both on the approach and after they landed, but that would be their situation wherever they went on the mainland.

The particular beach, Naigi, was the recessed shore of a region where Toby had fished before, a stretch of small islands and stony reefs. Tano had been there. There was a consultation of maps, a discussion of neighboring villages.

It was not a place inviting to boats of deep draft, another good point.

Yolanda arrived in the conference. “I’ve provided a short list of names in that area,” she said. “I have no way of knowing whether they’re still reliable.”

“The worst thing,” Banichi said, “will be to make a move and hesitate. It would lose lives of those who may attempt to support us. We are here. We have transport, nandi. We should go.”

There was a simple way of looking at it: if anyone did attempt to organize anything on the mainland in their support, they could not leave them exposed and unsupported, and they dared not go asking for support in every possible place, for fear of Kadigidi assassins moving in on the situation.

“We should move as soon as possible,” Banichi said, “and get as far from our landing as possible. If the dowager agrees.”

Cenedi agreed, and went and waked the dowager, who, Cenedi quickly reported, ordered them to gather only their necessary baggage, and by all means, depart as soon as the night was dark enough.

Plenty of time, then, to reach Shawn, not by phone, but by the services of one of their marine guards, who simply went downstairs with a sealed note, got into a car and took the twenty-minute drive to the Presidential residence.

Shawn interrupted his supper with his wife to send a message back by the same courier: The escort will act with all prudence and cooperation. The shuttle is under marine guard and will remain so around the clock, come what may. Give whatever orders you need regarding supplies and support. This man has his instructions, and the authority to do what you need. Good luck, Bren, to you and all those with you.

Meanwhile they had done their re-packing, unnecessary personal items stowed in Yolanda’s care, the shuttle crew briefed—and privately informed of Yolanda’s limits of authority.

The only remaining difficulty was getting over to the marina, and for that the marines were ready: four large vans and an escort turned up at the hotel service entrance, out between the trash bins. Marine guards stood by to assure their safety from the curious in the hotel—no few curtains parted on floors above, letting out seams of light, but they proceeded in the dark, except the lights of the vans, and they packed in as quickly as possible, Toby accompanying them and all their baggage piled aboard, for the brief transit from the hotel to the waterfront.

Masts stood like a winter forest beyond the dark glass as they turned in at the marina gate, the dockside floodlit, boats standing white on an invisible black surface, as if they floated in space. The vans ripped along past the ghostly shapes of yachts some of which Bren knew—the extravagant Idler was one, and the broad-beamed and somewhat elderly Somerset—the Somerset had used to take school children out on harbor tours, happy remembrance, incongruous on this nighttime and furtive mission.

The vans braked softly and smoothly, at the edge of a small floating dock.

Toby led the way out of the van, led the way down the heaving boards toward a smallish, smartly-kept vessel among the rich and extravagant, a boat rigged for blue water fishing, not cocktail gatherings. It was not the boat Toby had once had, Bren saw, but a new one. The Brighter Days, was the name on her stern. A ship’s boat rode behind her, at separate tie.

The dowager walked down the boards with Cajeiri and Cenedi, using her cane, but briskly, with a fierce and renewed energy—a curious sight for her, surely, to find such a large gathering of lordly boats: one or two was more the rule on the atevi coast, yachts tending to tie up at widely scattered estates. But for all that, it might have been one of the larger towns on the other side, with a working boat, a fisherman, bound out under lights, a freighter offloading on the shabbier side of the harbor, in the distance.