“Hah! Bad for the sheep, but you have to admit, it’d be so funny it’d be worth it! But. Yes. No. All right, not a swamp, then. But you just send some hardy, over-muscled, over-eager lad who loves nothing more than to hack his way through howling wilderness and eight million leagues of wait-a-minute bushes and bears and Gods only know what else to find a river, and we can put a proper water-Gate on it, and there you go! Well, first we go through and build a durable Gate frame under shelter, and bring through parts for a bigger one. Obviously. But that’s tomorrow!” Jonaton grinned into Kordas’s face. “Easy peasy nice and breezy. You’ll finally have a use for that manor-sized barn full of hulls. Among other things.” Jonaton gently pulled his hand loose from Kordas’s and yawned, covering his mouth with his sleeve. “I’m going back to bed now.”

And without another word, the mage padded in bare feet to the staircase and up it. Kordas turned to Hakkon. “Did you know anything about this?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, obviously I’ve known he’s been working non-stop on this since your father’s time,” Hakkon pointed out. “But no, I had no idea he’d . . .” Hakkon paused as the enormity of it all hit him. “By Klathor’s Axe. He did it, didn’t he? He really went and did it!” Hakkon’s eyes widened and a wicked grin spread over his face. “We’re going to be able to do this! We’re going to get out of this place!”

“Slow up, old friend. Not without a lot of planning and a hell of a lot of secrecy,” Kordas pointed out. “In fact—” and now the enormity of the task that faced them hit him. “The work we’ve been doing all these years is nothing compared to the work that’s ahead of us.”

“But now we know the goal is provably possible,” Hakkon pointed out.

He nodded. Now we can see it, not just dream about it.

“I’m going to go check on the warehouses,” he said. “And then I need to get someone with a better head for math than I have to tell me how many thousand more hulls we’re going to need. This . . .” He scratched his head. “ . . . is going to take a lot of whiles. But first, let’s go talk to the Circle.”

Hakkon groaned. “Not those old coots! Kordas, they’re half drunk and all crazy!”

“They’re not as drunk or as crazy as you think they are, though they’d like you to think that,” he retorted, and led the way down the stairs again.