I watched Thrana napping in the corner of the galley, curled into a tight ball. Next to her, Mephi chewed on a bone the cook had given him. Even curled up, Thrana now took up a great deal of space. The most prominent change had been her size. She could now rest her head on my shoulder when I was standing, and she’d shed her horns, leaving fresh, black nubs at the base of her skull. I’d hefted the old ones in my hand, tracing the spirals, peering at the white cores. When I’d prodded at one, a piece had fallen out. The inner cores were fragmented.

“You can have them,” she’d told me, her voice solemn. Feeling a little sad about how quickly she’d grown, I stashed the horns in the chest at the foot of my bed and tucked a couple pieces of the bone into my sash pocket. When I had the chance, I could have some memento carved from them, a reminder of when Thrana had been younger and smaller.

“Nisong wants you to go to Gaelung,” Jovis was saying. “She wants you to engage in battle with her. You personally.”

I rubbed a hand over my eyes. “I was on my way there already.” We both picked at the food on our plates. But even the most elaborate of cakes would have tasted like dust to me now. Nisong. She mocked me by claiming to be my half-sister, aimed to demoralize me by kicking the supports out from beneath me and taunted me by terrorizing and murdering my citizens.

Jovis lifted a hand and began ticking off fingers. “In case you forgot, ships can be turned around. Yeshan, your general, is nearly there with her forces. Nisong is waiting for you and, whether or not she’s a construct, she doesn’t seem foolish enough to have no plan.”

I speared a mushroom with one chopstick and wished it were Jovis’s head. “If only my choices were as easy as you made them seem.”

The boat swayed heavily to one side and I seized my bowl before it could go skittering off the table. Sailing in a wet season storm wasn’t for the easily sickened. Most of the passengers, including Ragan, were laid out in their beds, waiting out the storm. I was lucky that it didn’t affect me, though I also didn’t have Jovis’s easy gait across bucking floorboards. He’d kept a finger hooked over the side of his bowl.