“So, daughter,” the voice spoke all around her in the sea. “You have come.”
“I’ve come,” she replied with her mind, her lips still sipping the sea, her gills still breathing for her. “Oh, yes. I didn’t believe in you, but still, I’ve come.”
“You have refused to believe in me,” said the voice, with a hint of laughter. “You have been a doubter?”
Genevieve floated, spirit and mind, untroubled. “You seemed unlikely,” she said. “You seemed . . . invented.”
“Ah, well, yes. Invented by time, made likely by space. We living things work so hard to acquire knowledge. Surely you wouldn’t suppose it wasted?”
“No,” she confessed. “It’s better not wasted.”
“Which is why you were sent,” the spirit said. “Your lineage was sent to see the world and the creatures in it, those like you and those unlike you. Your lineage was meant to learn their beliefs and their doings, to judge them and return with that judgment.”
“I have judged,” she said, utterly unworried at this verdict. She need not concern herself with ifs or buts. What she knew was simply correct. “There are many good folk on Haven, but the use of the lichen is wrong. Those who have used it should perish.”
“And those from outside, who seek to use it?”
“Should also perish if they will not repent of it.”
“And the innocent?”
“You have already prepared for the innocent,” she said. “How long ago did Tenopia go into Mahahm? How long ago did your own people make for them a refuge in Galul?”
“Those are called rhetorical questions,” said the spirit with something very like laughter in its voice.
“Indeed,” said Genevieve with matching laughter.
“Hundreds of daughters in the first few generations of Tenopia’s line. Hundreds of daughters more from Tewhani’s line, then both daughters and sons. But you are the first child with Tenopia’s blood from both parents. You are the first, and Dovidi is the second.”
“My father is of that lineage?” She could not imagine the Marshal of that lineage.
“Not the man you are thinking of.”
“My father was someone . . . else?”
“It is self-evident. No such brutal warrior could have come from our lineage. Would one of our lineage act as he has done?”
She thought not. No.
“Your husband’s mother, she also was of Tewhani’s blood. There will soon be many others like you and Dovidi, returners to the sea, but they will come in their own time. Before that, you have a duty to perform. Do you know what it is?”
“I have the duty to explain. People will need an explanation when the lichen is gone and all its works and customs are abandoned.”
“That will be soon. We are singing the furnaces of the world to raise the floors of the sea. If the sea floors are raised beneath the deeps, then the water in the shallows also is raised.”
“There are good creatures of this world who need dry land. Does their Haven remain?”
“Haven always remains.”
She smiled, feeling the pulse of the sea around her. “I was afraid, for a time, that whatever was done would be too late . . .”
“Very late, certainly, and perhaps too late except for the father of your child. He saw what needed to be done and by doing it, he has bought this world the necessary time. We approve of him. He is of our lineage. He is among our people.”
The words filled her with delight and wonder, an inner warmth she had felt only once before, in Weirmills, when she had lain within Aufors’s arms. Dovidi squirmed in her grasp, waving his hands at the creatures all around them, his expression echoing her own.
It seemed to Genevieve that they talked for some time after that, the creatures of the deep glittering like sequins and the songs of the sea moving among them like the surge and collect of the waves. At last, however, the voices stilled and the one voice said regretfully, “Now is time to go up.”
Slowly the marvelous cortege sang its way upward, a long, slanting line that ascended into the pale greeny glimmer of surface light.