Lilla threw up his hands at the pair of them. ‘You’re supposed to talk sense into her,’ he signed. Toxte shrugged an apology and the warrior muttered something Xessa didn’t catch and stomped off into his house in disgust.

‘I mean, he’s right. It’s moon-madness. But tell me anyway. Because there are around twice as many Drowned now as there were fifty sun-years ago.’

‘When the Empire of Songs started expanding.’

They stared at each other. That correlation, whether coincidence or not, never failed to send a shiver through Xessa’s spine. The last capture attempt had been a generation before that, but now every Wet seemed to bring more Drowned to the Swift Water, more death to their people. They couldn’t afford to wait any longer, surely.

‘The numbers we see at the Swift Water each day now … they frighten me,’ Xessa signed in the end.

‘And nothing frightens you,’ he signed and she couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or mocking. It must have shown, because Toxte reached out and cupped the side of her face for a moment. ‘I’m not being cruel. I mean it: I’ve never seen you frightened.’

‘Then your eyes are as bad as Tayan’s,’ she signed, ‘because I’m close to pissing my leggings every day I have the duty.’ And when you look at me like that, she wanted to add, but didn’t.

Xessa shifted to sit opposite him on the damp stone so they could sign freely, but her belly warmed when Toxte casually extended one leg and pressed it along the length of hers – maintaining contact as naturally as if they were married. The line of her thoughts broke for a moment and she couldn’t suppress a smile, nudging at his leg with hers.

‘You’d need at least three ejab,’ he continued as if he, too, had whiled away hours wondering how to capture a Drowned. Perhaps he had. Xessa fell a tiny bit in love with him just at the idea. ‘But the question the council will ask is why now, in the middle of the Wet? In the middle of a war?’

Xessa swallowed the anxiety of her next words. ‘Because if we’re fighting Drowned and fighting Pechaqueh, we will lose. We’re already losing. We will die or be enslaved, every last one of us. The council won’t say it, but we all know that if it gets bad enough, they’ll have ejab lining up to fight the Empire. Do you want to be killing men and women one day and fighting Drowned the next? Do you think we could? Say we lost a fifth of our ejab in the fighting but prevailed over the Melody. Could the city survive those losses, especially with all the refugees we have here?’