The new members of the rapidly expanding band were two women — Pandelon and Cordeine, a carpenter and a sailmender — and a man, Thesme, one of the winchwinders. Valentine bade them be welcome, and accepted pledges of allegiance from them, a ceremony that stirred vague discomfort in him. Yet he was growing accustomed to taking on these trappings of rank.

Grigitor and his children had paid no attention to the kneelings and hand-kissings among the passengers. Just as well: until he had conferred with the Lady, Valentine wished not to spread news across the world of his return to self-awareness. He was still uncertain of his strategy and unsure of his powers. Besides, if he advertised his existence he might draw the attention of the present Coronal, who was not likely to stay his hand if he discovered that a pretender was journeying toward Castle Mount.

The trimaran resumed its voyage. From isle to golden isle it went, staying well within the coastal channels and only occasionally venturing into deeper, bluer waters. Past Lormanar and Climidole they sailed, and Secundail, Blayhar Strand, Garhuven, and Wiswis Keep; past Quile and Fruil; past Dawnbreak, Nissemhold, and Thiaquil; past Roazen and Piplinat; and past the great crescent sand-spit known as Damozal. They stopped at the island of Sungyve for fresh water, at Musorn for fruit and leafy vegetables, at Cadibyre for casks of the young pink wine of that island. And after many days of traveling through these small sun-blessed places they pulled into the spacious harbor of Rodamaunt Graun.

This was a large lush island of mountainous origin, surrounded by black volcanic beaches and equipped along its southern shore with a splendid natural breakwater. Rodamaunt Graun was dominant in the Archipelago, by far the largest in the chain, with a population, so Grigitor asserted, of five and a half million. Twin cities spread out like wings from both sides of the harbor, but the flanks of the island’s looming central peak were also well populated, with dwellings of rattan and skupik-wood rising in neat ranks almost to mid-point. About the last line of houses the slopes were thickly covered with jungle, and at the highest level rose a plume of thin white smoke, for Rodamaunt Graun was an active volcano. The last eruption, said Grigitor, had occurred less than fifty years before. But that was hard to believe, when one looked at the impeccable houses and the unbroken forest growth above them.

Here the Pride of Mardigile would turn back for home, but Grigitor arranged for the voyagers to shift to a trimaran even more noble, the Rodamaunt Queen, which would carry them to the Isle of Sleep. Her skipper was one Namurinta, a woman of regal poise and bearing, with long straight hair as white as Sleet’s and a youthful, unlined face. Her manner was fastidious and quizzical: she studied her assortment of passengers closely, as if trying to determine what pull had drawn such a mixture into an off-season pilgrimage, but she said only, "If you are refused at the Isle, I will return you to Rodamaunt Graun, but there will be extra costs for your upkeep in that event."

"Does the Isle often refuse pilgrims?" Valentine asked.

"Not when they come at the proper time. But the pilgrim-ships, as I suppose you know, don’t sail in autumn. There may not be facilities ready for receiving you."

"We’ve come this far with only minor difficulties," said Valentine jauntily. He heard Carabella snicker and Sleet make stagy coughing sounds. "I feel confident," he went on, "that we’ll meet no obstacles greater than those we’ve already encountered."

"I admire your determination," Namurinta said, and signaled to her crew to prepare for departure.

The Archipelago in its eastern half hooked somewhat to the north, and the islands here were generally unlike Mardigile and its neighbors, being mainly the tops of a submerged mountain chain, not flat coral-based platforms. Studying Namurinta’s charts, Valentine concluded that this part of the Archipelago had once been a long tail of a peninsula jutting out of the southwest corner of the Isle of Sleep, but had been swallowed by some rising of the Inner Sea in ancient times. Only the tallest peaks had remained above water; and between the easternmost island of the Archipelago and the coast of the Isle there now lay some hundreds of miles of open sea — a formidable journey for a trimaran, even so well equipped a trimaran as Namurinta’s.

But the voyage was uneventful. They stopped at four ports — Hellirache, Sempifiore, Dimmid, and Guadeloom — for water and victuals, sailed on serenely past Rodamaunt Ounze, the last island of the Archipelago, and entered Ungehoyer Channel, which separated the Archipelago from the Isle of Sleep. This was a broad but shallow seaway, richly endowed with marine life and heavily fished by the island folk, all but the easternmost hundred miles, which formed part of the holy perimeter of the Isle. In these waters were monsters of a harmless kind, great balloon-shaped creatures known as volevants that anchored themselves to deep rocks and lived by filtering plankton through their gills; these creatures excreted a constant stream of nutrient matter, which sustained the enormous population of life-forms about them. Valentine saw dozens of volevants in the next few days: swollen globular sacks of a deep carmine hue, fifty to eighty feet across at their upper ends, plainly visible just a few feet below the calm surface. They bore dark semicircular markings on their skins, which Valentine imagined were eyes and noses and lips, so that he saw faces peering gravely up from the water, and it seemed to him that the volevants were beings of the deepest melancholy, philosophers of weight and wisdom reflecting eternally on the ebb and flow of the tides. "They sadden me," he told Carabella. "Forever hovering there, tied by their tails to hidden boulders, swaying slowly as the currents move them. How thoughtful they are!"

"Thoughtful! Primitive gasbags, no cleverer than a sponge!"

"But look carefully at them, Carabella. They want to fly, to soar — they look up at the sky, at the whole world of the air, and long to encounter it, but all they can do is hang below the waves, and sway, and fill themselves with invisible organisms. Just in front of their faces lies another world, and it would be death to them to enter it. Are you untouched by that?"

"Silly," Carabella said.

On the second day in the channel the Rodamaunt Queen came upon five fishing-boats that had uprooted a volevant, brought it to the surface, and slit it into gores; they clustered about the huge outspread skin of it, cutting it into smaller sections and stacking them like hides on their decks. Valentine was appalled. When I am Coronal again, he thought, I will prohibit the killing of these creatures, and then he looked at the thought in amazement, asking himself if it was his intention to promulgate laws on the basis of sympathies alone, without study of the facts. He asked Namurinta what use was made of volevant-skin.

"Medicinal," she replied. "For the comfort of the very old, when their blood flows sluggishly. One of them provides enough of the drug for all the islands for a year or more: what you see is a rare event."

When I am Coronal again, Valentine resolved, I will reserve judgment until I am in full possession of the truth, if such a thing is ever possible.

Nevertheless, the imagined solemn profundity of the volevants haunted him with strange emotions, and he was relieved to pass beyond their zone, and into the cool waters that bordered the Isle of Sleep.