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powerful mage than you ever were before. Otherwise,’ he said with brutal frankness, ‘you will find your affinity as much of a burden as the rawest apprentice for years to come. You may even have to leave this city, for your own safety and that of others.’
    Now Jilseth was wholly lost for words. She could only stare wide-eyed at the Archmage. He looked steadily back at her.
    ‘Do your utmost to hone your affinity afresh,’ he advised her. ‘I don’t think that we need look for omens and portents as the Aldabreshi do, to know that Hadrumal will need wizards of your insight and ability to curb this Mandarkin mage’s ambitions, when he finally decides what to do with this island he has claimed for his own.’

 
    C HAPTER F OUR
     
    Black Turtle Isle
    In the domain of Nahik Jarir
     
     
    W AS IT THE turn of the season from Aft-Summer to For-Autumn? Hosh looked at his tally marks scratched in this sheltered angle where the black stone steps ran up to the broad terrace that served as the deserted building’s foundation.
    If he’d recalled the Caladhrian almanac correctly. If he’d kept his own count right. Was it tomorrow? Maybe yesterday. He frowned and recounted on his fingers before abruptly giving up.
    What was the point? The Aldabreshi didn’t consider the solstice or the equinox as any more significant than any other day and they certainly paid no head to the divisions between the seasons framing those days, as decreed by the different mainland authorities, so often differing by a day more or less.
    Hosh gazed up at the darkling sky. Why should the Aldabreshi heed the mainlanders with their almanacs and calendars constantly needing adjustment when their count governed by the moons slipped out of true with the sun’s aloof tally? The Archipelagans could trace and predict the path of every constellation as well as of the solitary coloured stars charting their own course through the heavens, named for the jewels which their colours recalled.
    An Aldabreshin compass was an intricate marvel; an engraved disc overlaid with a pierced swirling lattice dotted with enamels and gemstones and revolving around a central pivot. Navigating the hundreds of domains in the Archipelago, the thousands of islands, barren islets and hidden reefs, was simplicity itself to a ship’s master who knew how to read one.
    A Caladhrian compass was a box with a single needle pointing north. That was all the aid any traveller could hope for, from the Tormalin Empire in the east, where the mainland met the ocean, all the way to the Great Forest in the west, a trackless sea of trees by all accounts.
    Every Aldabreshin child grew up watching the skies. This wasn’t only the business of scholars. Everyone from the lowliest slave to the Archipelago’s fabled warlords with the power of life and death over thousands knew where the stars and the heavenly jewels would be and how to read the portents seen in the different arcs of the heavens.
    The best that Hosh could do was scratch marks on a wall and the mainlanders had the arrogance to dismiss the Aldabreshi as shoeless barbarians. He looked down at his toes squelching in the black mud. Didn’t anyone on the mainland know that going barefoot in these Aft-Summer rains was the only way to avoid foot rot? That could cost a man his leg if it didn’t kill him outright?
    He looked warily around the anchorage to reassure himself that all the pavilions were truly deserted. No movement caught his eye and he breathed a little more easily.
    Once the luxurious dwellings for some Aldabreshin noble family, the houses offered wide windows to catch the sea breeze in the punishing dry season heat and broad eaves offering shelter from the torrential rains which swept back and forth across the island since just after the Summer Solstice.
    Then corsairs had seized this anchorage, slaughtering any who didn’t flee before them. Hosh had seen the splintered bones in the scrubby woodland. But now the corsairs had