First she circled the Samylle islet a few times, to watch her lead and her tail move with her. Swing your partner, Baru thought, swing your partner round and round.

She broke north across a narrow rope bridge to Eddyn islet.

Wide-eyed and wondering, with a lightness in her chest and childhood instincts under her feet, she made the delightful perilous crossing. The bridge swayed amiably in the wind, and the wind played stone flutes and struck chimes, and the chimes rang out over the chatter of Apacaho creole, Aphalone, Iolynic different from Aurdwynn’s, even Kyprananoki tongues. No one at home liked Kyprananoke, Baru remembered; a rotten evil place. Not like here, where the sacred was everywhere. Below her feet the waves turned worship engines of wood and gleaming fish-scale. Young girls oiled the mechanisms. Their stone, she noted, was mortared even underwater: what additive did that?

“Watch how I work,” she murmured, “watch this, Hu, watch and see.…”

She imagined the Llosydane Islands as a woman.

The Twelve Families, say, were the head, and the stone of the fifteen pillars the legs. The people inside her did the work of bridge building and food distribution and shipping: the pumping heart. But she needed air, she needed food for her heart to pump. And the air must come into the port of her mouth.

The woman must inhale foreign food, and exhale dates.

So her throat—the place Baru might strike to get what she required—was the date market, where dates turned into Masquerade money, which would buy the Llosydanes’ food.

Whoever controlled the date trade had a hand on the throat of the Llosydanes.

On high Eddyn, three-story allhouses of mortar and recovered rubble glistened in a damp wind. She let the spies watch while she bought a kelp smallbeer, a coffee, and a shot of very expensive and wonderfully briny whiskey. Then she went (staggering not at all) into the Fiat Bank branch, with its Sydani staff and Sydani bankers and desperately Falcresti hive windows.

“Everything,” she told the clerk, as she supplied the number and password for the Throne’s stash account here. “In fiat notes, of course. But I want them in single-bearer bonds, not paper. I’ll hire some bravos for security, if you’ve got them?”

They did: two fine young women with Oriati rapiers and matching hats. She explained to them what a single-bearer bond was, just in case they thought they could kill her and take them.

“We know,” they said. “We guard the date merchants who come in from Aurdwynn. Our discretion is quite assured.” And the bolder one winked.

She took them outside.

“Those two,” she said, pointing quite openly to the spies, “are tailing me. I don’t want them hurt, understand? Not unless they come in at me. Good.”

*   *   *