“With an obvious answer.”

“You didn’t need to stay with us after your initiation, after your change. Could have chosen any line of business on the island or off it.”

“I wanted this since I was a child.”

“Why?”

The moon was full, and the rabbit-shadow inside dark. “My folks work with ships. Mom, Dad, they realized back before I was born that the boom market for Kavekana sailors wouldn’t last. We’re a small island in a big world. We wouldn’t always be the cheapest source of labor, or the best.” She struck the balcony stone with her cane. “That left the Order on the one hand, and on the other, waiting tables for cruise-boat tourists looking to guzzle a Mai Tai or seven.”

“Why not leave?”

“This is my home,” she said. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d been born in Dresediel Lex, or Dhisthra, or the Shining Empire. This is where I became myself.” His bowed head, his careful soft voice, unnerved her. She’d expected the shouting match, not whatever this had become. “Why did you join, Jace?”

“Same reason, “he said, “different decade. I wanted to help my home. The gods didn’t come back from the Wars, and we had to keep the island together. Who knows what Kavekana might have become if we let history take its course? If we gave up after the gods left? No idols, no pilgrims, no Penitents. It might have been better.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at Dresediel Lex, ruled by hungry skeleton kings. Look at crumbling Alt Selene. Would you rather we be the butcher of a continent, like Shikaw, or a mechanical wasteland like King Clock’s country? Or I guess we could have sold ourselves to the Iskari, or to Camlaan. Played host to military bases and squid cathedrals. They’re worse than tourists, I hear.” She nodded down the slope, to the lights of the bayside city. “This way, we stay ourselves.”

“Do we?” Jace stretched out his hand for her shoulder. She hesitated, then stepped closer so he could reach it. He was old, but his grip was firm. “You want to help Kavekana,” he said, “but what Kavekana? You have a vision, a dream of a place that’s not here anymore. I sent you away to save us, but also to learn. You don’t appreciate what we mean to our pilgrims, how we fit into the world. As long as you don’t know that, I can’t trust you.” He released her shoulder. “Do you understand?”

Jace was bent around a point a few inches above his heart. Craftsmen said that mass, energy, spirit, warped the world like weights on a rubber sheet, making straight lines curved. Younger, Jace had stood straight, a grand architect shaping idols. He’d lived a thousand years since then. Even light bent, in the spaces where he walked. “I think so.”