“I don’t know. I expect so. You should ask Aroo, or the Saeli who first settled here. I do not know what they explained.” Hilfa shook his head. “But while it would be nice to have a Saeli child, it is not necessary for the pod. If you don’t want one, I can help with the human children.” He already did.

“I can see you’ve been thinking about this a lot, but it isn’t a human kind of thing,” I said.

“Pod formation is difficult, and we have come so far on the road together. I want to form a pod with you. You are my friends. The other Saeli don’t like me. You saw that earlier with that pod of kelp-gatherers. They think I am an orphan, that I was an egg somebody of my gender brought out and raised without a pod and then abandoned. It happens occasionally. It is disapproved of, in our culture, though they say there are other Saeli cultures where only those of my gender raise children and there are no pods.”

“Well, maybe the crew is something like a pod,” I said. This hadn’t been what I expected when he’d started to work with me, but I did care about him and I didn’t want to trample over hopes he’d clearly been holding close for some time. “I do think of you as being almost like a brother. And if you were to raise an egg, I’d certainly help.” I thought of all the times he’d helped get the kids to eat in the mornings, and helped Dion limp along to Samos, our eating hall, even carrying him a few times on icy days. “But that doesn’t mean that Thetis and Marsilia are involved. This isn’t how it works with humans.”

“But you want Thetis and Marsilia wants you.” He sounded entirely matter of fact. “I don’t understand.”

No, he certainly didn’t understand! “Marsilia works with us, but this isn’t how we organize things,” I said. “I do feel as if you’re family, Hilfa, and I think from what she said earlier that Marsilia does too, and likely Thee does as well, but even so that doesn’t mean we’re going to arrange a pod.” I suspected that, far from wanting me, Marsilia had come to work on my boat to keep an eye on Hilfa.

“They have marriages with multiple adults in the City of Amazons,” Hilfa said. “And they have fishing there too. Thetis could work in a nursery there, but I think Marsilia needs to be here for politics.”

“Marsilia definitely needs to be here.” We had reached my sleeping house and stopped outside it. “This isn’t going to work. Plato’s right. Friendship is best.”

“But a pod is friendship.”

“And Marsilia and Thee are sisters,” I said.