On the morning of the sixth week, Gant stood with me at the prow and nodded toward the horizon. By now the lilt of the elven tongue was familiar; I understood far more than I could easily speak thanks to the captain’s lessons, but weeks spent with no other language had increased my comfort with both listening and speaking. “There’s your stop, Locke.”

I squinted past the sea spray on my glasses, saw only a smudge of gray and brown against steel blue and storm-dense sky. A warm, wet wind stroked the hair from my face. “The furthest island?”

“Of the Archipelago, yes,” Gant said. “The natives call their kingdom Serala, and the mainland Aravalís. That rock in specific is Dolí.”

I gripped the rail with fingers that remembered their aches. So many uncertainties. Out of courtesy I would have to meet with Kelu and Almond’s mistress, let her see that I was not what she sought. And then...? How would I find someone to help me? If even I could be helped? I was not only edging toward being completely disabled; unless I missed my guess, I was also a poppy addict. I had to find a way out of this spiral before it sucked me into the dark. I had to believe that I could return to Evertrue, to the university, to my classes, my family, my friends... Ivy. Even the thought of the sea could not repel me from my need to see them again as a man free of illness. I had to believe in a cure. Surely if I was healthy, I would have no more problems.

“How long?” I asked.

“Tomorrow morning you’ll be on the dock,” Gant said. “Go get your fluffs to paint on your blood-flag mark. It’ll need to set.”

“Right.”

So that evening by the yellow light of a lamp I sat on my narrow bunk across from Kelu, my wrist palm-up on her knee. Almond kneeled beside us, chin lifted and chest out-thrust so as to display the medallion hanging from her collar.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Kelu said while tracing the shape onto my skin with the pen sent by the captain. “You’re not Amoret’s to claim.”

“The captain felt strongly about it,” I said, constructing the sentence carefully. With enough time I could say quite complex things in the language now, but with the genets I concentrated on speed, which forced me to simplify my thoughts considerably.

“Well, he’s human,” Kelu said. “You only look human.”

“My shirt will... cover? Cover it,” I said.

“Until we dress you properly, anyway,” Kelu said.

“Pardon?”

She squinted at me. “Did you not understand that, or are you being shocked?”

“I understood you,” I said and switched to Lit. “I just didn’t quite believe what I heard.”

“Speak the right language,” Kelu said, bending over my wrist.

“How am I wearing too much?” I asked in the Angel’s Gift, irritated. “I am wearing just enough.”

“Serala is very hot, Master,” Almond said. “You will be uncomfortable if you wear all those layers.”

“Am I supposed to walk around naked?” I asked.

“Not naked,” Kelu said. “A pair of very light pants. Maybe a stole.”

“A what?”

“A stole,” she repeated, then looked at Almond, who shook her head. “I don’t know how to say that. A decorative strip of fabric over your shoulders.”

“They go bare-chested?” I exclaimed in Lit. At Kelu’s narrow-eyed glare, I switched languages and said, “That’s naked!”

“We’re naked,” Kelu said. “You’ll be wearing pants.”

“Yes!” I said, struggling with the words. What I wanted to say was ‘I most certainly will!’

Kelu shook her head, still bent over my wrist and concentrating on painting on the glyph. I felt the drag of the nib against the tender skin there like a talon. “Well, if you faint we’re not dragging you after us.”

“I will not faint,” I said. “I like the heat.”

“We’ll see,” she said, and turned my hand so she could continue marking me. I watched the ink glisten on my skin and then lose its luster as my skin absorbed the pigment, sullen and bitter and black.

When I woke the following morning I found the ship already at dock.

“Home!” Almond said, almost glowing as she helped me with my ablutions. “At last.”

“Huzzah,” Kelu said without enthusiasm and left the cabin. I followed her into a sharp-edged day; the sky was a patchwork of brooding blue clouds, and the holes in their coverage were lined with sunlight hard as steel and brittle as glass. The hot, salt-brightened wind did not caress me as it had at Far Horizon... it groped. I blinked and ducked my head against it.

“Ugly weather coming,” Gant said.

“I see,” I said, taking his offered hand. “Thank you for the passage, sir.”

“Be safe down there,” he said. “And come straight back if you have to.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said, the words slow but coming without pause. “But thank you for the warning.”

He nodded and we parted ways. This time I didn’t fall into the water; with Almond behind me and Kelu before I descended to the pier and halted there to take in this elven port—

—And found it full of humans. In fact, it looked very much like Far Horizon. The buildings, the dock with its line of piers, all of them similar. What trees I could spot were different; I recognized them as palms only from illustrations in stories.

“Looking for something?” Kelu asked.

I found it then. “The humans—” in the Angel’s Gift, the word for “people” was self-referential, and thus always indicated elves, “—they look... tired.”

“They’re servants,” Kelu said with a shrug and led me toward the town.

I followed her, unsettled. The humans around me were dressed as promised in very little, men in pants of some rough fabric, so voluminously cut they resembled skirts, and the women in shifts of the same material, sleeveless and ending halfway down the calf. The sun had darkened their skin to an appealing smooth brown, and they looked well-fed and strong... and yet something about them disturbed me. Their gait. The slump of their shoulders. Their restless eyes, never focused on one place for long.

“Servants in Evertrue don’t look like this,” I said in Lit.

For once Kelu didn’t tell me to speak the right language. “Servants in Evertrue aren’t food. Square your shoulders and walk like a person, or someone will come claim you.”

My spine straightened.

“Better,” Kelu said, and stalked on.

We left the port and entered the town proper, walking beneath the rustling fans of the palms. Their fronds almost clattered when they moved, so different from the gentle susurrus of leaves in Evertrue.

“Come on,” Kelu said. “Let’s move, or we’ll get the rain.”

So we moved, and my body did not object. Perhaps it was their nearness; perhaps my distraction with the strangeness of the climate, of the hot salt scent of it, the sharpness of the warning in the wind. Or perhaps the poppy. They swept me up in their urgency and my impression forever after of the town of Mene is of a blur of buildings, shadowed by the storms.

But I will never forget my first sight of an elf.

I don’t know what I’d expected. The paintings had conveyed a sense of length and grace, an elegant repose, but listening to the genets and their warring accounts had convinced me that the elves were like humans: good and bad, with the habit of portraying themselves in the best possible light. I had assumed then that the paintings were fictions... and they were. But they did not err on the side of idealizations. Kelu opened the door on an airy office, into a receiving room I lost for the light of the creature that rose from behind the desk. That he wore almost nothing registered only because it bared more of his skin, and his skin... his skin was luminous. Literally: it scintillated at the edges, as if the sun had crawled through the window just to lap at his edges. There were subtleties of hue in his skin that defied description: aching peaches so profound I could almost taste them, honeyed golds so sweet I could almost see them glisten. And that was before my eyes tangled in his hair. Brown was too flat a word. It shimmered as the strands shifted across one another, as if someone had ground jasper and tiger’s eye and scattered the dust across the crown of his head.

He looked real. More real than the world around him, and we were all dead, flat things, muted. It choked the words in my throat, stole their meaning and left me naked. At last I understood the elven fascination with light and color. Unbidden my mind whispered the word: fasrial, glow, a light cast from within.

“So, you’ve returned,” the elf said, and his voice caressed the back of my neck. “Did you bring us your quarry?”

“Yes, sir,” Kelu said, head bowed. “May we arrange to return to the lady?”

The elf nodded, mesmerizing me as his hair creased against his shoulders. “I’ll send a runner to the Door to tell them you’re coming. How many are you bringing?”

“Three,” Kelu said, “sir.”

His laughter made my teeth ache, as if it stroked the inside of my skin so lightly it tickled. “Waiting outside, is he? So what’s this you’ve brought with you? Present for your mistress?”

I dragged my eyes up to his and in them saw all the depth and complexity of a pond’s murk when the shiver-shimmer of afternoon sunlight glances across its surface. Something in the back of my head begin to howl. As I stared, transfixed, he approached me, and the closer he came the more my body shook. The poppy melted beneath the pressure of his regard, leaving my skin naked and raw, and he, oh, he was a fire burning me—

I moaned and the world tilted, and he grabbed me, and the touch of those hands! Fire and light and heat!

“Master!”

I’m dying, I wanted to whisper. I’m dying. And yet my traitor mind whispered back: This. This is what your body was meant to embrace. This is what your senses were honed to perceive. This is where you have always belonged.

How sad, how sad that you can no longer stand it.

“Master...!”

Her voice was very far away. I struck the floor, mildly surprised at the pain, and drowned.