He sneered at them with Hina scorn for the superstitions of other races. They’ll be thick as fishlice at the Temple tomorrow. Where’s that curst patrol? I want to get out of this. She won’t come, not this late. He propped his chin on his fists and watched the ship. He drowsed, the Wounded Moon creeping higher and higher behind him. The guard patrol was late. Hanging round the winestalls. Let them stay there. “Let’s get out of this,” he whispered. “That ship’s settled for the night. Won’t no one be coming ashore.” He twisted his head around so he could see his sister. She took her stubbornness into the water with her, he thought. She stood at his left shoulder as she’d stood since the night she came swimming through water and air and terror to find him while her body rocked at the bottom of the bay. The black glitters that were her eyes stayed fixed on the Phras ship as if she hadn’t heard him. “The man on the mountain said she’d come,” she said.

“Doubletongue old fox.”

She turned on him, stamping her crystal foot down beside his shoulder, her crystal hair flying out from her head. “Be quiet, fool. He could curse you out of your body and where’d I be then?”

Aituatea rubbed oily fleeces between his palms, shivered at the memories her words invoked. Old man kneeling in his garden on the mountain, digging in the dirt. Clean old man with a skimpy white beard and wisps of white hair over his ears, tending rows of beans and cabbages. Old man in a sacking robe and no shoes, not even straw sandals, and eyes that saw into the soul. Aituatea, jerked his shoulders, trying to shake off a growing fear, went quiet as he heard the faint grate of bale shifting against bale. He stared unhappily at the blind ship; whispering to himself, “It’ll be over soon, has to be over soon.” Trying to convince himself that was true, that he’d be through dealing with things that horrified him. The Kadda witch dead and Hotea at rest, which she would be now but for that bloodsucker, and me rid of her scolding and complaining and always being there, no way to get free of those curst eyes. He wanted to climb down from the bales and get off Selt for the next dozen years but he couldn’t do that. If he did that, he’d never get rid of Hotea, she’d be with him the rest of his life and after. He suppressed a groan.