text: The Aaldian ship was a living thing, like a Saiduan fortress. Luna had thought that was impossible. No Saiduan or Dhai knew how to ensoul a hold anymore, but when she tried to ask the crew about it, they turned up their hands at her and smiled bright white smiles. Only the man on the beach spoke Saiduan. Luna pressed her ear to the hull at night, shoved into the packed hold of the ship with the other refugees, and listened to it breathing. The surface of the ship was spongy and slightly sticky, like undercooked bread.
  
  Aaldians were strange people. Luna knew little about them. They left their country only to trade. They sent no travelers but those in the ships, and none of them ever stayed behind when they docked. Where they had come from, no one seemed to know. Perhaps they had always been in Aaldia, hiding from the Dhai and Dorinah and Saiduan.
  
  They were lean, dark people with twisted hair the color of burnt wheat that they wore in tight locks, intricately woven into knotted crowns. Their sex, let alone their gender, was often difficult to tell, and Luna gave up on it. With no common language, Luna had no way to ask them what was polite or proper. Those on the ship seemed very young, for sailors. She did not see a single person older than thirty.
  
  The storm came upon them suddenly, driving great curtains of rain from the northwest. Luna stood on deck when it came, heaving the contents of her breakfast as she had done for the last six days. The wind knocked her back from the rail, and nearly took her from her feet. One of the Aaldian crew called out from the main top, and the rest of the crew took to the rigging to bring down the sails.
  
  Luna slid below deck just as the deluge opened from the heavens. She clattered down the steps with a wave of water, instantly soaked. She ran to the long storage hold she shared with the other refugees and pulled on her coat. She huddled next to a barrel of salted fish, pressed hard against the spongy hull. She was still nauseous, and the rolling of the boat didn't help. Another of the refugees, a little girl called Sola, vomited her meager breakfast. Luna gagged at the smell.
  
  Luna heard a great cracking overhead. A thump. The whole ship shuddered.
  
  Water poured into the hold.
  
  Luna made for the stairs. She got to the top just ahead of those behind her, just as a great wave smashed into the side of the ship, sweeping her overboard, heaving the ship over with her.
  
  Water embraced her.
  
  Come all this way, this far…
  
  Luna gasped for air. Swallowed water. Gagged. Darkness.
  
  Clawed for the surface.
  
  Her hands broke into the air.
  
  Luna's head came up. She gasped. Got a mouth full of water. The waves pummeled her. She splashed in the roaring sea, adrift. Saw wreckage. Paddled for a bobbing bucket. Grabbed it. The wind roared. Rain fell, nearly horizontal, like a shroud.
  
  She needed a miracle, Luna knew. But Luna only had herself.
  
  Luna heard someone calling. Looked for the voice, nothing, but there… she saw a shoreline. A coast. That's what it was, wasn't it? That long black bar gave the suggestion of land, a black sand beach. She held onto the bucket and kicked – it was futile, though. Luna was carried by the waves, buffeted, a buoy on the open water.
  
  The book was a heavy burden. She shrugged out of her coat. She could lose the coat, not the book. Not after all this. Not when she was so close.
  
  The sea fought her.
  
  She fought back.
  
  Hours passed, though it felt like days. It had to be hours because she saw the gray light of dawn, the burning brand of Sina piercing through the heavy cloud cover. Fog had descended sometime during the night. Luna couldn't see much past her outstretched arm. Just her and the bucket, floating in a borderless sea.
  
  She was a ghost, unbound, and Sina would not take him.
  
  Five years old, six years old, when the Saiduan took her, but she remembered so little of it, and so little before that. Her first memory, this flat sea, blazing hot, the water so blue, and the horizon stretching out so far it looked like a painting. One mother dead, the other gasping like a fish, so thirsty, squeezing the last bit of dewy moisture she had wiped from the inside of the boat into Luna's thirsty mouth.
  
  Luna was too young to ask why she bothered, why she persisted, in the face of certain death for all of them. Hope. Her mother had hope. Hope drove the world, and despair destroyed it.
  
  Luna jerked awake, splashing.
  
  She had nodded off, slipped from the bucket. She kicked and pawed after it in the heavy surf.
  
  Her legs hit something soft. Found purchase.
  
  Luna stood on the sandy bottom. She clawed forward. The fog thinned, and she saw the black sand beach of northern Grania stretching before her. She slogged up onto the beach, pummeled by the surf. Luna collapsed a little ways up the beach, and crawled a few more feet forward, just out of the reach of the encroaching tide. If the tide was coming in, it meant she would have to move at least a mile and a half more to escape the rising water, but her exhaustion was so deep she could not move.
  
  Luna put her face into the crook of her arm and made a terrible sobbing sound. She shed no tears, just made the noise, shuddering there in the sand until the feeling passed and she could begin moving up the beach.
  
  She crawled and crawled as the fog cleared and the high tide line drew nearer. When she finally collapsed, Luna had forgotten that there was anything in the world but this: struggling across the black sand to the tideline, hands scratched by black sand.
  
  When she woke, massive black gulls circled the sky, screaming.
  
  "What's this?" Voices, speaking Dhai.
  
  "Another body from a wreck. Storm must have taken several ships."
  
  "Dhai ships? There are no Dhai in the water now. Ours?"
  
  Luna felt someone kick her. She rolled over. Two Dhai faces peered down at her. One short and fat; the other smaller, leaner, with a meaner face.
  
  "Ours?" the smaller one said.
  
  The fat one crinkled up her face. "Those are Saiduan clothes." She switched languages, something that sounded very like Dhai, but wasn't. Then waited expectantly.
  
  "Is this Dhai?" Luna said, in Dhai.
  
  The fat one sighed. "Dhai." She pulled at a weapon on her hip.
  
  "Wait, wait!" Luna said. She pushed herself up.
  
  "You have news for me, Dhai?" the fat one said.
  
  "Saiduan. I have news of Saiduan."
  
  The leaner woman laughed. "You hear that, Gaiso, she has news of Saiduan."
  
  "I have all the news I need," the fat one, Gaiso, said. "I organized the final purge of Anjoliaa myself."
  
  "Where am I?" Luna asked.
  
  "Where do you think you are?" Gaiso said. "You've got yourself washed up on Dorinah, the first commonwealth of Tai Mora reborn."
  
  Above them, something red and malevolent seethed in the sky.