Primus saluted and retreated into the throng.

“This way! This way!” Rebecca called as she shot through the entrance like a comet. Her eyes grew wide and she shrieked with delight. “She’s here! I found her!”

She flew straight to Isabelle and wrapped her in a hug. “You’re alive!”

Isabelle returned her embrace. Her warmth and solidity cracked the ice of unreality, the fugue of playing Builder and Breaker and saints all in one. Bitterlich swooped in as a raven, dropped into his erstepelz, and met her gaze with joy and relief before he took her in his arms and expressed with lips a love that words alone could not describe. Here was a world she wanted to live in—a larger, better world than the grandiose fears of saints and fanatics, a world that could not be compressed into a single virtue or flaw. Here was a world of friendships and family. Yes, there was pain and wickedness aplenty, but it was no longer beholden to the fears of men long dead.

“Thank you,” she said when finally they came up for air. She felt she could flow through Bitterlich’s gaze forever.

“For what?” he asked.

“For bringing me back.”

CHAPTER

Thirty-Three

The Potencia, with Isabelle in command, breached the Bittergale on her outward run three months after going in.

There had been a great deal of work to do, first in collecting all of Travers’s crew and convincing the acting capitaine of the Potencia to surrender. The Conquest treasure, what remained of it, had been gathered. Isabelle had planted the flag of l’Empire on a patch of land well up the coast and away from la Forêt d’Essaims, which had become the insect forest’s name of record over Jean-Claude’s objection. He’d wanted to call it New Buggering. And so was the colony of Ultima Thule declared and claimed in the name of Impératrice Sireen.

And then many a council had been held on what to do next.

In the end, “We go home” had won out over less practical suggestions.

Isabelle had sworn in Similce and her crew into the Célestial navy and granted them shares in the venture. Then they’d spent weeks practicing approaches to the escorts that would get them all through the Bittergale intact. They would present the whole package to l’impératrice as a fait accompli.

“Do you think all these promises will stick?” Jean-Claude asked.

Isabelle said, “I imagine Sireen will be happy enough to present this new craton to the world as her idea, and use it to cut the knees out from under everyone who has been trying to pin the expedition on her as a failure.”