“I stayed in her household during the fasting days,” Captain Hetnys said, “and do you know, her everyday dishes are a set of blue and violet Bractware. With all the serving pieces. In perfect condition.” Behind me, Ship showed me, Kalr Five was suppressing a satisfied smirk. We’d hardly eaten during the fasting days, as was proper, but Five had served what little we did eat on the Bractware and—no doubt purposefully—left the unused dishes where Captain Hetnys could see them.

“Well! What good taste, Fleet Captain! And I’m glad Hetnys mentions it.” She gestured, and a servant bent near, received murmured instruction, departed. “I have something you’ll be interested to see.”

Out in the dark a high, inhuman voice sang out, a long, sustained series of vowels on a single pitch. “Ah!” cried Fosyf. “That’s what I was waiting for.” Another voice joined the first, slightly lower, and then another, a bit higher, and another and another, until there were at least a dozen intoning voices, coming and going, dissonant and oddly choral-sounding.

Clearly Fosyf expected some sort of reaction from me. “What is it?” I asked.

“They’re plants,” Fosyf said, apparently delighted at the thought of having surprised me. “You might have seen some when you were out this morning. They have a sort of sac that collects air, and when that’s full, and the sun goes down, they whistle it out. As long as it’s not raining. Which is why you didn’t hear them last night.”

“Weeds,” observed Captain Hetnys. “Quite a nuisance, actually. They’ve tried to eradicate them, but they keep coming back.”

“Supposedly,” continued Fosyf, acknowledging the captain’s remark with a nod, “the person who bred them was a temple initiate. And the plants sing various words in Xhi, all of them to do with the temple mysteries, and when the other initiates heard the plants sing they realized the mysteries had been revealed to everyone. They murdered the designer. Tore her to pieces with their bare hands, supposedly, right here by this lake.”

I hadn’t thought to ask what sort of guesthouse this had been. “This was a holy place, then? Is there a temple?” In my experience, major temples were nearly always surrounded by cities or at least villages, and I’d seen no sign of that as we’d flown in. I wondered if there had used to be one, and it was razed to make way for tea, or if this whole, huge area had been sacrosanct. “Was the lake holy, and this was a temple guesthouse?”

“Very little gets past the fleet captain!” exclaimed Raughd.

“Indeed,” agreed her mother. “What’s left of the temple is across the lake. There was an oracle there for a while, but all that’s left now is a superstition about wish-granting fish.”