“Well, I could smell water, and I told Bay to find it. We hacked our way through some brush, got to the other side of the trees, and found ourselves above a sort of bowl, a flattened, round valley. Most of the valley was filled with a lake in the shape of a crescent. A big lake, bigger than anything in this Duchy, for sure.”

“This sounds promising. Go on,” murmured Koto.

“Oh, but it gets so, so much better.” Ivar grinned, as if he had a huge secret he was just about to reveal. “You know this thing you gave me?” He opened his hand, which had been held in a fist around something, showing that he was holding a sort of black stone disk. “This thing you said would show me where that magic you thought you sensed was? Well, it led me down to that lake. And—”

He snatched up a piece of chalk from where Ponu had discarded it and sketched a crescent shape.

Then he stabbed the chalk right in the middle of the crescent, on the very shore of what presumably was the lake. “It led me right there. There were stonework ruins, some a couple of stories tall. Hundreds of years old, looked like, and no people had been anywhere around for just as long, too, I’d wager. There were the remains of a tower, overgrown by generations of trees. Hardwoods. The brush we hacked through was probably streets, once, and when we got waterside, there was a jetty. Birds and bugs were everywhere, there were watergrasses and algae, and it looked like fish were striking.” He laughed again. “We ventured onto the jetty, mindful of snakes, and when we looked back the way we’d come, there were more ruins, and what looked like a charcoal dome. A little north of there, we could see another jetty, more intact than what we stood on. It was a dock. Straight as a bolt. Overgrown like everything else, and there was a line of pilings on either side of it. I think they were moorings or slips, once. The dock ended in a tee, probably ten horselengths long.” Ivar marked it on his crude map. “You can clear it, clean it up, and build your Gate right there. It’ll dump barges right into the water. And there was more. There were sunken boats by the shore, prows sticking up above the waterline. Looked like they’d rotted out from below, but what was above water still had flecks of paint. Still had their ribs, too. Must have been made from that local hardwood.”

They all sat there staring at him, dumbfounded, then looked from Ivar to each other, and back again.

“What star were you born under?” Ponu managed. “Because you must be the luckiest son of a bitch in the Empire.”

“I’ve been told that before,” said Ivar modestly.

Jonaton had been quiet but suddenly asked, “What kinds of boats?”