Aleka nodded. “You’ll be in space, lan. No, I couldn’t bear to bind you.” A whip-flick: “As for our lady Lilisaire, I daresay you can cope with her.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“No.”
They sailed in silence. All at once, a form broached to starboard, and another and another. A troop of the Keiki Moana were out.Aleka regarded them with love. “We are different breeds, aren’t we, you and I?” she said at last to Kenmuir. “And we’re of the same blood.”
How many others might the future see?
“What you will make, right here on Earth—“ he began. He broke off, filled his lungs with the clean salt wind, and went on. “I wonder if in the end it won’t prove to be as strange and powerful as anything anywhere in the universe.”
She laughed, low in her throat and defiantly. “The making will be fun, anyhow.”
It will be joy, he hoped.
She took his hand again. “I wish you the same, darling,” she said, “yonder where Kestrel is.”
The little ship that had been Kyra Davis’s was outbound alone, to fare forever among the stars.