Aminata groaned. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to feel. So she would keep on doing her duty, like an ox, a big, lumbering ox, because she didn’t fucking know how to do anything else.

The feather brushed her forehead. A stupid ember burnt warm in her breast.

The letter did mean that Baru had remembered her.

*   *   *

“YOUR full report, Lieutenant Commander, on the situation on the Llosydanes.”

Captain Nullsin was a short fat man with a hammer in place of his left hand and a brisk competence which was Aminata’s only comfort in all this. He began this officer’s dinner by tapping his hammer against a wineglass and, uncharacteristically, calling for a reading from the Book of the Sea. It was proscribed, but after today’s work in the burnt ruins not even the surgeons gave a shit. In fact it was the ship’s surgeon who lifted her chin and recited, from memory,

Remember first that you are of the sea

Carry fire far from homeland hearth

Keep the ways and moorings fair and free

Chart the stars and shallows all you see

Guard the salted yields of the earth

But remember first that you are of the sea

In time of war they send us from our berth

To humble ancient peoples’ ancient pride

To keep the ways and moorings fair and free

A hundred hundred miles from our birth

We fought and by the thousands died

And all those lost are ever of the sea.

A few officers flicked water onto the floor and murmured thanks to Ascentatic. Aminata looked away. The Cult of Ships was too dangerous for an Oriati woman, whose heritage might mix poorly with such superstition in the eyes of Navy Censorate evaluators. But out here on the middle seas, ever one day from disaster, she understood the need to worship. The ship bore up against storm and reef. The ship’s ropes trembled and sang to them on spring wind. Always, in the face of catastrophe, the ship endured. Aminata thought that only the truly heartless could lay hands on Ascentatic’s timbers without feeling a pulse.

Oh, they were all looking at her, weren’t they? It was time for her report.

“Something very peculiar,” she said, “has been done to the Llosydanes.”

Swiftly she summarized recent events: the rumor of trade closure, the collapse of the exchange rate, the mad night of currency speculation. “On that night Sulane arrived and began deploying marines onto the Llosydanes. By that point the currency exchange was normalizing, as an unexpected supply of fiat notes came into circulation. The next morning the Morrow Ministry station on Moem islet came under attack by Oriati grenadiers. Sulane’s marines counterattacked—”

“We’re sure of that?” Nullsin asked. “Ormsment didn’t strike first?”