For the participants—for the most part—it was the most tedious day of the year. You lined up your barge with all the other locals, often before dawn. You waited your turn as the line crawled slowly toward the Gate. When you finally got to the Gate you were generally hot and tired, and when you went through, you had to put on a show of sorts for the entire time you were crossing the Bay—if nothing else, you had to sing along or pretend to dance with the music from the larger ships. It took at least a candlemark to cross the Bay, and the entire time, your senses were bombarded with music, you were crowded so deeply among the other boats that unless you were lucky enough to be on the outermost layer, all you saw of the procession was your neighbors, and the never-ending colored smokes would leave your eyes red and watering. The only good thing was that it was guaranteed not to rain.

Kordas always participated. His barges always had the same big figures of horses as his great-grandfather’s, stowed in the manor from year to year, brought out, touched up, and decorated with flowers and ribbons. He and his people always returned from the Regatta with watering eyes and headaches, and only the fact that he made sure each barge had enough food and good beer to see them all through the day kept tempers in check. And with all of that, he couldn’t ever recall having seen anything of the rest of the parade, nor having been offered as much as a celebratory candy.

Every so often he’d have an “emergency” that kept him home, usually an illness, and hire boatmen to take his place. His father had done the same, and his grandfather. Everyone did, at least among those who weren’t vying for prizes. So that was what he planned to do this year. So his barges would go out, be seen, and come home—and mingled with them would be the last of the escapees. They would have entirely different talismans on their prows—talismans that would send them to a Gate that “pulled” rather than pushed, talismans that had no return marked on them.

It wasn’t foolproof, but it was as good as three generations of Dukes had been able to conjure.

And it had the advantage that even if someone found out some of the barges were not going where they should have gone, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to untangle the mystery until it was far too late. With so many craft going through the Gates, the Gate “memory” would have been overwritten a hundred times by the time mages came to “read” it.