Either Aryennos had had an astonishing number of romantic retionships in his life, or the overwhelming majority had been felids, since he kept referring to things he’d learned from or experienced with multiple partners.

  That might not be entirely due to something he was doing, however, since Heket said that while felids certainly formed extensive and complex families and other social connections both deep and shallow, long-term sexual pair-bonding was atypical. She seemed completely unsurprised by Aryennos’ history, so maybe it wasn’t terribly unusual.

  Hey, everyone has their preferences in partners, even pansexuals like me who don’t put gender or anatomy at the top of the list—personally, I really need partners to be empathetic, passionate about something, and not too hung up about sticking to pns. Species added a new axis to the whole thing, but since it was clearly no more of an issue here than orientation was, with no terminology for “pansexual felid-sexual cis male” I wasn’t going to waste time worrying about it.

  That conversation got started while we were putting breakfast together, and just sort of continued through it. Heket had finished her previous string project and brought out a different one to make with her crochet-like hook, this one smaller and looser and I wondered whether it might actually be jewellery and what had happened to the maybe-a-mouse. How Aryennos put up with having a conversation with Heket being crafty and me pying with my begleri toy, I wasn’t sure, but he took it in stride.

  Serru and Terenei left us to it, gathering things up and shooing us out of the house so it could be put back in its box and harnessing the ornithians. Any suggestion that we should stop to help was gently deflected.

  “Heket?” Serru said finally, when there was an opening. “We need to leave. We’ll be camping tonight, whether that’s in the house or in a shelter or by the side of the road we won’t know until closer to dusk, but I expect to be in Whalesong Landing mid-day after that. Assuming, of course, that the reports of no damage to bridges on the north side of the Quincunx are correct. If you’d like to come along for the ride and can get back by yourself, you’re welcome to.”

  “I have friends who live there,” Heket said. “Getting back isn’t a problem, Myu and I can just catch a coach or hop on one of the ships that run along the coast, even if we have to wait for everything to get back to normal. Sumi and Nami have room for me and even if they didn’t, I can always trade a story for a bed or a meal or a ride. I don’t have any tents on me, though. Should I stop and buy a couple?”

  “No, we have plenty in our camping gear,” Serru said. “It would be pointless to buy them with no idea if you’ll even need them. It’s fine. Do you need to tell anyone?”

  “I told my family I’d be gone for a day or two. I’ll just send them a message, and one to a friend to ask them to stop by to make sure they don’t worry, just in case. They’ll be okay without me for a few days.”

  “Great,” Terenei said cheerfully. “All settled. You three can have the back of the wagon so you can keep talking. Myu can come up front if she wants. Your mecha is still in the wagon after yesterday. The house is in the wagon, we made sure nothing’s been left behind anywhere. Everyone in.”

  Heket made short work of visiting the post office, leaving Myu to choose where she wanted to be in the wagon, and returned quickly.

  Her mecha had been colpsed down into a thick oval of metal with a couple of straps, allowing it to be carried as a kind of stiff and bulky backpack that weighed less than it looked like it should. Wearing it would be awkward but not impossible. It certainly made it easier to transport it, however, and I could see why she’d prefer to have it in reach.

  The space under the seats was starting to get crowded with a mecha, a portable house, the yellow-and-blue backpack of camping gear, and Myu’s travel den which was made of sturdy wicker woven in a ft-bottomed oval with a round hole in one end, a thick cushion in the bottom, and a handle on the top. She had several toys inside, including the mouse Heket had recently made her.

  At least personal bags tended to be worn or, at most, left close at hand. They were sort of addictive, being able to have everything in easy reach without bulk or encumbrance.

  Myu sat between Serru and Terenei for a while, watching the scenery and the other traffic, then hopped down into the back and vanished into her den for a nap. The motion of the wagon clearly didn’t bother her at all, a drastic departure from my experiences with cats and cars. But then, she was used to Heket’s mecha, and it would not surprise me if, to a cat, very fast motion in an enclosed vehicle that had a combustion engine was qualitatively different in many ways from not-as-fast motion in a vehicle rgely open and pulled by ornithians.

  We did not run into a single dead-end, no destroyed bridges, only minor storm damage.

  That made it a lot easier to appreciate the beauty of the Shallows, the isnds spread across them in clusters or isoted, rge or small, often with greenery on them.

  What made it harder was the traffic which, for this world, was quite heavy and rgely going the opposite direction. Heket said that it was a combination of normal trade and some neighbourly help with the bridge situation.

  Serru grumbled something, half under her breath, about it being impossible to pick a route that would bring us to locations for a midday break and a campsite tonight when she knew neither where those were nor the distances to them and they were probably going to be crowded—and Aryennos rummaged briefly in his bag, then stood up to pass her a rge, many-folded sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “A map. Those are what the rest of us use when we can’t figure out where we’re going or how to get there. I got it at the store from those very friendly aquians when I was browsing around yesterday.”

  Terenei tried to smother a ugh, but it escaped anyway, and he doubled over with his long violet hair falling loose to curtain his face. “Your expression...” he said, but that was all he had the breath for.

  Serru looked down thoughtfully at the folded paper.

  “What?” Aryennos asked. “That shouldn’t be any insult to your skills. You’re an excellent gatherer. This is a complicated area you aren’t used to even under normal conditions.”

  Serru nodded. “Thank you. That was surprise, not anger.”

  “I think we’re a little past Aspen Isnd,” Heket said. “The wind has a very specific sound through all that dense growth, and I’m sure I heard Anevur and Roven’s two mills just before that.”

  “Thank you,” Serru repeated.

  Terenei fought his mirth down to just occasional giggles that kept escaping; Serru just gnced sideways at him and sighed, but unfolded the map.

  It took her less time than I’d have expected to pn out a tentative route that could be altered at need. In the interests of encountering minimal traffic, we were going to be travelling about as far out from the mainnd as we could without access to a boat, although we’d be dipping east towards the ring road at moments.

  The view only got better.

  “What’s out there?” I asked suddenly, when we were in a stretch that offered a particurly good view of the horizon, an infinity away under blue sky.

  “The other continent,” Aryennos said. “At least, I assume it’s to the west, at least approximately. From what I’ve heard, you’d eventually reach shore if you went far enough in any province, but it’s not so good for boats or living.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. Heket?”

  She shook her head. “Sailing out past the known isnds into the unknown is a common story theme, but there’s no consistency in how it’s used to suggest any core of truth. The same for the other continent. That’s the origin you use when you want an audience to know that someone or something is mysterious and might defy normal expectations. I’ve never talked to anyone or heard a story from anyone who has been there.”

  “No books, either,” Aryennos agreed. “It’s supposed to be where ornithians come from, most recently. There are reasonable suggestions that a fair percentage of our domesticated animals and crops came from there, far back before even single-copy written history, and just maybe, long before that, some or all people species. I’m pretty sure there’s no evidence, but the only way to get evidence would be to go there, I suppose.”

  “There must be some contact, then,” I said. “If animals and pnts and maybe people are coming here from there.”

  “That’s... that’s true.” Aryennos’ forehead furrowed. “You’re right, that doesn’t make any sense, that we have no record of anyone going there or talking to anyone from there, and yet we believe that a lot of useful things come from there. And there’s no suggestion of these things coming here by accident, as seeds caught in a bird’s feathers or something. Usually the history traces back to someone introducing them specifically as new here but established there, which means there has to be contact.”

  “That is inconsistent and confusing,” Heket said, ears back halfway. “Either we do or we do not.”

  “I’m sure the answers exist. I’ll make that my next research project. The most important thing right now is research on newcomers and the Quincunx, but once I finish putting that together into a book, I’ll start looking into the other continent.”

  “You don’t settle for easy topics,” Terenei chuckled. “There are aquatic species other than aquians. They’re not as comfortable on nd. They might have some of those answers.”

  “Good point. I’ll make sure I try to find a way to talk to them.”

  “I suppose, Nathan,” Serru said, “the answer to the question of ‘What’s out there?’ is, ‘Something but we don’t know.’”

  “Hey, that’s a fair answer,” I said. “It’s always good to have more room to explore. It gets boring once you fill in the whole map.”

  Around midday, we stopped on a small unused isnd, just a fttish bit of rock that was barely above sea level but served to anchor a pair of bridges. The ornithians grumbled about stopping but did use the chance to drink and rest, and the rest of us could refill our water gourds. We made a simple lunch of travel bars along with fruit for the three humans and cheese for Heket and I; the right travel bars actually tasted pretty reasonable in felid form.

  Heket had questions about my world, too, sometimes ground I’d covered with the others but often things I had to stop and find ways to expin as best I could, like disabilities and animal care and racism, and even more often things I just didn’t have the first clue about, like farming and technology.

  We got lucky and found a shelter that wasn’t currently being used by anyone. We hadn’t seen anywhere with enough clear ft space for the house, so we decided without hesitation to stay here.

  The construction of this one was retively simple: it was of course raised on stone pilings, and had a roof of curved tiles, with the lower part of the wall stone and the upper part vertical wooden pnks. It was striped: the stone alternated between bck and white and red, and the roof tiles were striped, and the individual pnks had been painted to continue the theme at ninety degrees. The square tiles inside, stone or ceramic, had diagonal lines.

  We settled in comfortably, though grateful for the shelter to deflect some of the wind. The ornithians pyed in the shallows, of course, then had some berries and greens and investigated the interior of the shelter. Terenei coaxed them into one corner to curl up together and sleep.

  The rest of us, bellies full, set up a trio of tents that took up most of the remaining space inside.

  I was well into the second bottle of Lulbye Drops, each holding enough for a week. Terenei had assured me that he expected two more bottles to be waiting for him at the post office in Whalesong Landing, thanks to his grandfather, but I couldn’t help some apprehension. I really did not want to go back to those nightmares. The memories of them were bad enough.