Cutting across it, scored over her right cheek from the hairline to her jaw, was a new wound. It glistened with a faint coating of salve like varnish. It was deep, and dark red, and it sliced straight through several of her other, older scars, as if it were brushing them aside.

Bellis never heard any stories about that last journey, which astonished her. In all the days and weeks that followed, when everyone was talking about the night of the mutiny, she never once heard about the Lover and Uther Doul moving sedately through a city tired and drunk on its rebellion.

She could imagine it, though. She saw them progressing sedately, the Lover sad and pensive, looking around her, memorizing the details of the city she had helped rule for so long. Hefting her pack, feeling the weight of all the books of arcane science, the tracts on possibility mining, the ancient machines that Doul had given her.

Doul beside her, his hand ready by his sword, to protect her in her last minutes in Armada. Was it necessary? Did he need to step in? Bellis heard no stories of him cutting Armadans down.

And was the Lover really alone?

It seemed hard to believe that after the years of her presence she would have no one ready to follow her. Her narrative logic was not the brutal mercantilism that drove Armada, but could it be alien to all its citizens? She could not have controlled a ship, even a small one, on her own. Bellis found it easier to imagine that as she walked through the city, she drew certain men and women out of their hiding places, that they sensed her passing and came to her. Alienated from their neighbors, impelled by other motivations, a gathering come out to drift in behind the Lover and Uther Doul, walking at her pace, themselves packed and ready to leave their city.

Romantics, storytellers, misfits, the suicidal and the mad. Bellis imagined them behind the Lover.

She could not help thinking that there was a small crew of them by the time the Lover emerged from below the eaves and crossed the deserted warehouses of the docks. She imagined that they must have joined the Lover on the deck of the prepared ship, helping her to stoke the engines, casting off, saying good-bye.

But Bellis did not know. The Lover might have gone alone.

All Bellis knew was that after almost an hour, with the sun very low and its light thick, a sail passed unmolested through the narrow entrance to Basilio Harbor and out into the sea. It was not large. Its deck was equipped with little cranes and winches and all manner of engines and boilers, the purposes of which Bellis had no idea of. It seemed well equipped and clean.