She circled it in awe. Wine and no sleep gave her a singing headache: she felt brightly, tenuously alive. “Taranoke,” she said, determined to keep that name alive and spoken. “Taranoke … there you are.”

Beginning at her home, she surveyed the map.

And for the first time in her life the world revealed itself to her. Not the ring of the Ashen Sea, which you could see in any gazetteer, but the full sweep of the globe from end to endless end. Baru gasped in delight, and covered her mouth.

“It’s so blue,” she said. “I thought there’d be more land.”

Apparitor spoke from her blindness. “Eight parts water and two parts land, we think.”

“Has Falcrest surveyed it all?”

“Not all. Not the poles, though the ana-folk say you can walk across the ice all the way to the lodepoint. And the south? Who knows. The Oriati, maybe. We’ve never managed an expedition past Zawam Asu, into anterior seas or the western oceans. They sell us charts but it might all be fancy. Whale queendoms and the like. Creatures with tongues as long as kraken arms.”

“We used to think,” Baru whispered, “on Taranoke, I mean—there was a blue hole, that’s like an underwater well—”

“I know them,” he said. “Horrifying pits.”

“I swam in it,” Baru protested. “We called it the Navel.”

“Pit seeks pit, I suppose.” But he was staring at her. Wondering, maybe, where the executioner had gone.

She said, in a rush, “And we’d say the Navel was the lowest place in the world. That’s why all the rivers converged on the Ashen Sea. And if you went out far enough in any direction, eventually the mountains would rise up to the sky.” And then, with defensive pride: “Although we know, always knew, the world’s really a globe.”

“I’ll be outside,” Iraji said. Apparitor gave him a quick squeeze, not looking, absentminded gratitude. They were friends. Baru touched a coin with her mind, a disc with Duke Oathsfire on one side and Duke Lyxaxu on the other. The coin was proof that she could betray people even if she saw their dearest friendships.

Cold currency, of course. But valuable.

She gathered her attention on the known world, the Ashen Sea and its surrounds. Apparitor mistook this for disappoinment: “I’d like to fill in the more tentative edges,” he said, protectively. “It’s my passion, exploration. There’s trouble raising ships and money, with war so close, but I still have my ways.…”

“How does it work?” Baru said.

“Eh?”

“This. Our world. How does it work?”