Deceptively, because people were troubled. When Dolls and horses and people had come pouring through the foot-Gate, smelling of smoke and ash and screaming their heads off about demons, the Circle had done some sort of massive scrying spell, and pretty much everyone around the lake had gotten a bird’s-eye scrying view of the destruction.

Isla told him most people had cheered and openly rejoiced. But then, most people had just seen their most feared enemy getting pulverized. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen innocent people, people a lot like them, running for their lives through a burning hell. They didn’t have it on their conscience.

And now, of course, the folks who’d been too far to see the scrying had heard about it secondhand and wanted to be told. So the entire lakeshore was alive with the murmur of tens of thousands of people, and probably three fourths of it was the people who’d been here to see the scrying disk telling the people who hadn’t been here what they’d seen.

And probably all sorts of wild interpretations of it.

Can I correct any of that? Do I even want to? Every bit of the Plan had assumed that the Empire and the Emperor would still exist after Regatta Day, and an awful lot of it had been built around preventing him from finding them.

Now—

I’m not going to think about it, he decided. I’m going to sit here with my sons and my friends and drink and watch the sunset.

He had been rather crispy, he’d been told, when Star dragged him across the Gate. The Carcanet had saved him from fatal damage, but it had also fought all the attempts to Heal him when he’d gotten to safety. Finally the Record Keeper had taken it off, and Alberdina had done her work, aided by other Healers he didn’t know. Whoever they were, they were geniuses. There was hardly any scarring. Right now, he felt mostly like he’d had a bad sunburn and a wretched cold.

He glanced over at Isla; their youngest boy had fallen asleep in her lap. She smiled at him.

“Pass the wine,” said Ponu.

The entire top of the barge had been covered in rugs and cushions, and was full of people. Isla, Hakkon, the boys, Delia, Merrin, Ponu, some of the Dolls, Beltran . . . most old friends, some new.

“Well, now what do we do?” he asked the mage.