“Mm,” Svir grunted, but he patted the bowsprit by his side.

They sat together on the bowsprit, two wary feet from each other. She said, recklessly, “How did you meet him?”

“Hm?” Apparitor glanced over, one coil of his hair pressed between his lips, like an idle child. “Ah. You mean my man.”

“Lindon Satamine.”

“Yes, yes, stop looking so smug. Are you here to tell me our love is unnatural and doomed?”

“No!” Baru cried, caught by her own awful lie. “No, I—I promise I’m not.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “We’ll see. Well, Lindon was in the Storm Corps, leading an expedition east—you read my report, I assume? So you know the details. Anyway, then, my version. I’d run away from home on an expedition of my own. Built the fleet myself, in Starfall Bay. But not five days from land Lindon’s ships intercepted mine.” Fondly he looked to the eastern horizon, past the high purple cirrus, into farther parts of the night. “He had the clever idea to use my ships as auxiliaries. He took our supplies, and he took me hostage, because my crews were sworn to me. I was bored, ferociously bored, and I hated him so. I did everything I could to torment him. He would punish me by keeping me belowdecks, so I couldn’t see the horizon.”

“You must have been a boy!”

“No, no. I was a man by Stakhi reckoning.” He shook his head, dizzied by the gulfs between cultures: to think back on his voyage was to cross not just time but an entire mode of being. “At least I was a man by my age. In the mountains we don’t … it’s not like Incrasticism, see, there’s no concept of an essential male or female nature. You become as you act. That’s why the Stakhi people in Aurdwynn are so fixated on manliness and womanliness: because you can lose those things by acting incorrectly. You can imagine how it was for me at home … wearing a man’s crampons and sitting at the high table as a prince, but making a woman of myself in bed. They would have liked me better if I called myself Princess.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m not a woman. Anyway, princesses don’t inherit. They’re married off to other Mansions. Or they become sacred weatherworkers. They go up onto the mountaintops when they die, to be mummified in the cold dead air. There are crevices full of princesses.”

Baru shivered. Then she thought a dire thought. She had already promised this man back to his brother; she had offered to sell Apparitor to the Necessary King.

What would that do to him? Would he be murdered? Tortured? Forced into a symbolic role as Princess?

Hastily: “Tell me more about the voyage.”

“Ah, the voyage! What a romance it was! I knew Lindon wanted me. I knew he was too noble to act on it, because I was his prisoner, and younger than him”—he laughed, and wheeled on Baru, suddenly intent—“you should’ve seen the man’s torment, all alone with his horny prisoner while his crew carried on!”