Hilfa appeared, wearing loose-woven dark-purple pants, with his chest and back bare. I had thought he would be disconcerted seeing a bunch of important people wanting to talk to him in the middle of the night—not that it was so late really, but I’d had a long day. Hilfa didn’t even blink. He invited us all in and apologized for not having enough chairs. He knew everyone except Hermes. Marsilia introduced them. To my surprise, Hermes said something to Hilfa in Saeli, which I took to be a greeting. Who would have thought he’d know it? He hadn’t used it to greet Aroo. Travel and trade, I thought; he’d probably run into Saeli on other planets where humans had contacted them.

We sat where we could. Hilfa scurried around putting all the lights on, which made the room very bright. Thetis and I sat on the bed, against the wall. Pytheas took one chair, and Marsilia the other, while Hermes leaned against the table. Then Hilfa made a dash into the little back room, which wasn’t much more than a big closet really. He brought out wine, and Marsilia got up to help him mix it and hand the cups around. He brought four matching red-pattern winecups, and two Saeli-style beakers. He gave one of those to me, with a smile, and kept the other himself. Mine was incised with geometric patterns in the porphyry inlay, so I couldn’t quite figure how he meant it. It might have been treating me as family, to have the other cup that didn’t match, or it might have been meant as an honor. There was no telling, and it wasn’t the time to ask. I decided it came out positive either way, and smiled at him over the brim. Other times when I’d had a drink at Hilfa’s place we’d used winecups, but there had never been more than three or four of us. It was a biggish room, with one small red-and-blue geometric rug, and the walls were painted white, with no frescos or other art. It had always seemed quite empty to me, until now, when I’d have thought it full if I hadn’t come straight from the press at Thessaly.

“Athene is missing,” Pytheas said as soon as we had all settled down and sipped our wine.

“Missing? Lost?” Hilfa asked, turning to him from where he had been putting down the wine bowl on the table. The swirls on his skin faded a little. Up to that moment I thought there had been some mistake, that Hilfa couldn’t be anything but what he seemed: a slightly puzzled Sael who had somehow wandered into all this by mistake. “Is she—” He hesitated. “Do I say she? Are there no special pronouns for divinity?”

“No, you simply say she,” Marsilia said. “Ikarians capitalize it when they write, but we use the same word.”