“But you’d have to go—” She was reasonably familiar with the maps of the known world, and the Empire was huge. She shook her head. “—you’d have to go far outside the borders of the Empire! And how would you cross all the land between us and there? I mean—” She tried to wrap her head around the idea of packing up thousands of people and all their worldly goods—and travel how? By wagon? That would take an impossible number of horses, mules, and oxen. And who would let such a caravan cross his lands? Could they go by canal? That was more feasible; after all, a Tow-Beast could haul as many as ten barges depending on what they were loaded with. But again, who would let such a caravan cross his lands? And then, once they got past the last of the canals, what would they do? They’d have to find a river or—

“We. You are part of this now. And as for how, by Gate,” said Isla. “Or, to be more specific, by barge and by water-Gate.”

“But that’s—”

“Hard, but not impossible. We needed to assemble trustworthy mages to build and lock Gates, then work out how to assemble a receiving-Gate far away. In the unknown. Last night, one of them not only worked out how to do it in theory, he worked out a link to an actual place.” Isla waited for that to sink in.

Delia’s mouth sagged slightly open with shock. Did this have anything to do with the earth trembling this morning? No, Ponu had said that it was something to do with the Capital, and she didn’t think he’d lie about that, and she was certain he was correct about his guess. But—

“But this is incredibly dangerous,” she protested. “Aside from if the Emperor finds out about it, it’s dangerous to do magic that requires that much power, and—where would we go, anyway?” All the choices seemed fraught. East past the Capital was nothing but ocean. North was cold and inhospitable and full of enemies of the Empire. South was worse; there was an active war going on down there right now. And West—every league that the Empire had moved westward had involved moving into lands where magic was unpredictable, into wilderness where there were monsters and other hazards—

“I told you. Very far west,” Isla said. “West, so far as we can tell, is mostly land that has gone wild. I know you’ve been in the library almost every day since you arrived here. You’ve read about that, surely?”

She nodded numbly. “But—”