Tenoctris the Wizard stood in the prow of the royal flagship, staring intently at the sky. "Sharina," she said, "we're suddenly in a focus of enormous power. There's something here. There's somethingcoming here."

Sharina glanced upward also. "Is it good or bad?" she asked, but the wizard was lost in contemplation.

Cumulus clouds were piled over the island of First Atara on the northern horizon, but here aboveThe Shepherd of theIsles there was only a high chalky haze. Whatever Tenoctris was looking at couldn't be seen by an ordinary person like Sharina os-Reise.

Sharina grinned: or, for that matter, seen by Princess Sharina of Haft. In preparation for meeting the ruler of First Atara, she was this afternoon wearing court robes garments of silk brocade stiffened with embroidery in gold thread. They were hot and uncomfortable in most circumstances; here on shipboard they were awkward beyond words. The Shepherd had five oar-banks and was as big as a warship got, but the deck of her streamlined hull was no wider than necessary to allow sailors to trim the yards when the vessel was under sail.

Sometimes Sharina wondered whether she'd feel more at ease in formal garments if she'd been raised wearing them. Liane bos-Benliman, her brother Garric's noble fiancee, certainly wore hers with calm style. On the other hand, Liane did everything with style. If Liane hadn't been such agood person and so obviously in love with Garric, even Sharina might've felt twinges of envy in thinking about her.

Sharina and Garric had been raised by their father, the innkeeper in the tiny community of Barca's Hamlet on Haft. No school for the wealthy could've educated them better in the literature of the Old Kingdom than Reise himself had, but they'd grown up in simple woolen tunics and had gone barefoot half the year.

Sharina grinned. She guessed she could learn to wear court robes more easily than even Liane could learn to wait tables in a common room packed with sheep drovers and their servants, many of them drunk.