I was not sure if I had summoned him for aid or merely for human conversation, but I said, “To find a witch, what do your priests do?”

“We have no priest. The chief is priest. We do not worship.”

I had begun remembering the krarl, but I knew nothing of the complex inner rituals conducted by Seel and his like in their stinking dens. It was indicative of my mood that next I said, idly, to Long-Eye, “A bitch mothered me. I am her kin but I must find and destroy her; the flaw in the scheme being that I don’t know where she might be.”

“In himself, Lord Vazkor will know.”

“I do not,” I said, “though I will suppose she is no longer in this land or continent. I think I would know, now, if she were that near. I think I would be guided to know it.”

“There is a big land to the south,” Long-Eye said. “East, then south. Across the great ocean. Perhaps there.”

When he spoke, it was like a summons. I glanced beyond him, at the curve of the sea. Why not that way? For sure, I could not go back. All was trouble and enmity behind me. I had no hearth, no kindred, nor any service to bind me, and my road had been paved with dead women. I had run toward the shore, had I not, as if it were my beacon?

“Who told you of this southern land?”

“Old maps of the lords show it,” he said. “There was trading once.”

I narrowed my eyes against the glare of the sun, and inside my lids suddenly saw a ship, fat-sailed, black on silver light. Precognition or self-deception? No way to learn but to risk the throw. Hwenit would live because of me, I was that much of a magician, and Long-Eye thought me a god.

In my current situation, I was prey for risk, and for any symbol.

To leave the island for the blank wideness of the sea was symbol enough of what I had felt in myself.

Before the lovers roused in the tent, or the boats of the black krarl came from the mainland, Long-Eye and I had put out onto the ocean.

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