As the wind continued, she screeched that I should subdue it with my magician’s powers, and I informed her that I would put her to sleep with an oar if we had any more chat from her.

In any case, the wind did no more than rock the boat and shear the caps from the waves. We sighted the island at length, and soon ground on its seaweed beach.

Qwef and I pulled the craft above the tide-line, into the lee of long rocks, white-faced with the droppings of birds, and vivid green elsewhere from sea lichens. The wind flapped like idle wings among the tops of the great bare trees with mossy trunks that edged the beach fifty yards away.

Gray gulls mewed, causing the red cat to growl in its cage.

“The wind will drop by daybreak,” Qwef said. “I will return to the mainland then.” He stood looking at Hwenit, as she walked ahead toward the trees, and if ever I saw a man engaged by a woman, it was he.

I said, “She will have you if you ask her.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I cannot ask her.”

“Why, man, do you take her gibes for earnest?”

“No,” he said, quiet as the sea had suddenly grown. “Certainly my father sees no wrong in it—it is not our way to make iron rules, like chains, and hang them on men and women. And yet, to me it seems—unlawful.”

I did not understand him, and told him so. The girl was willing—urgent, even—Qwef’s father gave him blessing, and was Peyuan ungenerous?

“But that is my problem,” he said, laughing a little. “My father and Peyuan are one man. He wed Hadlin after his white girl’s death, to obtain a mother for Hwenit, mostly, though he grew to love Hadlin after. And Hadlin bore me. I am Peyuan’s son. Hwenit and I are brother and sister.”

Everywhere laws are different. Among the Dagkta, a man who lies with his sister is flogged and the girl branded between her breasts. Most communities frown on incest. In some, death is the wage it earns, and though the black folk were openhearted toward the fact of love, wherever it took root, I saw in Qwef’s eyes, side by side with his desire, a cold revulsion. To lie with the fruit of the seed that also fruited you, limb by limb with that which one’s father’s limbs had fashioned. The answering coldness stirred in my own groin at the dream of it. The oldest cringing in the world.

Behind us all, a dull maroon sunset began to sink upon the invisible mainland.

Part III: The Island

1

I LAY IN THE TENT on the island. I dreamed this:

I was flying. As in the tunnel, I imagined myself black-winged. The beat of wings lifted me from one shore to another. I came back to the mainland, moving high over the ocean, seeing its blackness break below me into white gold on the headlands, finding the white skeleton of a city in a bay.