Marie said, “You sound like you speak from experience.”

“You should have let me open fire on that longboat,” Similce said.

“I won’t open fire on my countrymen unless I have no other choice,” Isabelle said.

Similce’s dusky face turned red with anger. “Are you the capitaine of this ship, or aren’t you? Because if you’re capitaine of this ship then your sailors deserve better than to be made targets because you’re too squeamish to defend them.”

Similce’s accusation hit Isabelle like a spear to the gut. Even if she didn’t quite think of the Skaladin aeronauts as her men, she’d still let Djordji get injured.

Isabelle shook out her stunned tongue. “You are correct. I thought we could get away without killing anyone. I was wrong to make that my priority. Thank you for pointing it out.”

Similce’s face still bloomed red, but her anger stumbled in the absence of any resistance. “You are wise to listen … and I must thank you for saving my life.”

“You are most welcome,” Isabelle said.

Similce returned her attention to the orrery. “Let’s have Flotsam’s stone.”

“Let’s see what you already have, first.” Isabelle said. With no pictorial vaporgrams to go by she’d have no way to tell one blip in the tank from another without a before and after.

Similce grunted and slammed the matrix shut, turned the orrery’s main valve, and pressurized the sympathetic chamber. When it was charged she sparked it to life with a galvanic inducer. Waves of green light rippled through the tank and caught on scores of motes of light. It wasn’t immediately obvious what each blip represented.

“The big glow bug in the middle is the Saint Asne, us,” Similce said. “The rest are skylands familiar to me.”

Isabelle glanced to Marie, who nodded; she’d memorized the pattern.

Isabelle handed over Djordji’s chartstone. Similce discharged the tank, put the Flotsam stone in the matrix, and charged it up again.

“No telling where it will be,” Similce said. “We’ve only got about a week of supply, and I’ll not go hungry chasing phantoms.”

Yet when she sparked the orrery to life, there was a new blip that there hadn’t been before. It was very nearly the closest thing to them.

“Three days out,” Similce said with huff of disbelief. “It’s a cursed sort of luck you have, Soulless.”

“You agree, then?” Isabelle said.

“The deal was a neutral port, not one friendly to you,” Similce said.

“As if all these other ports aren’t friendly to you,” Isabelle said.