He tried his best to remember the scent of her black hair, the heavy softness when he ran it through his fingers, the thrill when she’d placed his hand on her stomach and whispered in his ear that they were to have a child. Sometimes the memory made him rise to his feet with added bounce in his muscles, while on other nights, inexplicably, the sense of loss weighed him down and he rose as slowly as a man wrought of stone. The ship, as far as he could tell, had shifted to a heading to the north, running on a course that must be almost parallel to the Burgla’le coast. Why? Did Tatiana have some knowledge to which only she was privy? Any sane person would expect the Sung ship to head mostly west, in the direction of their homeland. North was the fragmented crescent of the islands of the Indofreska, or the Million Isles, as they were sometimes called. Some said the people of Indofreska were of the same lineage as the Bloodmen, for after all the coast of the Bloodmen’s Clandom was not that far to the east and the waters separating them might once have been as shallow as those between the Indofreska islands.
