She smiles.

"I'll go see what my daughter's made for dinner."

Dinner turns out to be, somewhat unsurprisingly, fish. There are local herbs and vegetables involved. Tarinda is welcome to partake.

"I don't know if food's at all hard to come by around here, I normally eat more than a person who doesn't have any of my stuff but I can go without and go hunting or something if that would be easier on you guys."

"We have enough to feed a few guests with no trouble," says Viasarae. "As long as you don't eat more than, oh, four or five girls your size, you needn't worry."

"Not that many, no." Om nom fish.

The fish is pretty tasty! Ebasi chats with her mother about village gossip over dinner; Kioh, bored by this, pesters Tarinda with questions about her world—how big is a sky ship and how fast do they fly and how do they know which way is down and is Mars pretty and does it have oceans and if so do people fish in them and if so how do they build their boats.

Sky ships come in lots of sizes but hers was small! They fly SO FAST, once they're up high enough, like fast enough to go around the whole world a couple of times in less than a minute except it would slow them down to go in a circle like that. A basic sky ship does not in fact know which way is down, but good ones know how to pretend a way is down to make it more comfortable to ride in them. Mars is beautiful and she will draw it for him if he likes and it has an ocean and fish and she has never built a boat but she's sure people do it all kinds of different ways, some that would look familiar to him and many that would not.

Kioh boggles about how incredibly fast that is and then intermittently throughout the rest of the conversation has to pause to re-boggle about it. He oohs and ahhs at her drawing of Mars and has opinions about ways to build boats.

And then eventually the food is gone and the dishes are cleared and Kioh's last wondering whisper of "so faaaaast..." recedes into the distance as Ebasi leads him away by the hand, and Viasarae checks that the contents of her cozy little bedroom are to Tarinda's liking, and if Tarinda follows Viasarae outside to watch her go out to sea for the night, she will see her wade out into the river and duck under the surface and disappear.

Interesting. Tarinda, for all her otherworldliness, will sleep in an entirely conventional fashion in the offered bed.

In the morning, the boats set out around dawn. Viasarae is there to watch them go. The village is much quieter afterward, although not completely deserted.

She finds Tarinda. "Did you sleep well?"

"I slept great, thanks!"

"I'll be going shortly. Expect me back by tomorrow or so; if two days go by without any word, I think you can assume I annoyed the Emperor but managed not to lead him to you, and in that case I think you should ask Ebasi to take you to Southport so you can try your luck there."

"Okay. Thank you very much."

"You're welcome."

She wades into the river again, and off she goes.

Tarinda frets and picks up vocab.

A column of seawater rises from the ocean under the flying island of Skygarden and deposits a pretty girl on the eastern edge, in the middle of a lovely little park bathed in the early morning sun. Her dress is green and tattered, her feet are bare, and before the water has finished pouring off her she strides confidently up the grassy slope.

There's a man lying in the dewy grass, hands tucked behind his head, gazing at the sky; when she passes him, he sits up. "Where are you going?"

She doesn't break stride or look back, but she does answer. "I've a fancy to meet the Emperor."

"That so?"

Something in his tone gives her pause. She turns to face him.

"Who wants to know?"

He studies her thoughtfully for a long moment, and then says, "The Emperor."

She crosses her arms, unimpressed. "Prove it."

—he laughs.

She waits.

"Are you sure you want to ask that of me?"

She reaches a hand toward the edge of the island, grasps at thin air, pulls slowly inward. Her column of seawater peeks over the edge again, pointed vaguely in his direction although it's still a little too far away to threaten an imminent dunking.

"Are you sure you want to make me repeat myself?"