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years.”
    Dhrun only smiled. “Didn’t we agree that we would never discuss what came before?”
    â€œYour crimes were that great?”
    The goddess’s smile faltered by a degree. “That would be telling.”
    Leandra laughed. “I will give you more time in the wrestling arena if you can answer a rather difficult question.”
    â€œYou know I can’t resist a challenge.”
    â€œWhy would I want to kill you tomorrow morning?”
    â€œBecause you realized that the green Spirish dress also looks better on me?”
    Leandra smiled but then looked directly into Dhrun’s eyes.
    â€œOh,” the goddess said, “you are serious?”
    â€œI am.”
    Farther aft, the lieutenant called for the sails to be brought down and for all sailors to take up positions along the hulls to paddle into Keyway Island.
    Dhrun cleared her throat. “You speak like one who has received a prophecy.”
    â€œThrough the godspell I bought from the smuggler.”
    â€œI don’t mean to doubt you, but is it a … strong prophecy?”
    â€œI inherited my mother’s ability to comprehend the possibilities of the future. I do not have her gift for seeing the landscape of time, but I am a good enough judge. I foresaw that I cannot escape the choice between killing someone I love sometime early tomorrow morning or dying myself. Hence, goddess, my challenge to you.”
    Dhrun nodded. “Then … I suppose you might dispose of me if my death would advance our cause significantly—say by eviscerating me to make one of those godspells you are buying from the smuggler.”
    â€œWell played,” Leandra said softly. “Here I thought I was interrogating you. You know, for a young divinity, you are impressively shrewd.”
    â€œOh the boys are young, but Nika—like most everything in the Cloud Culture—has been around forever. I was first incarnated when the Cloud People were still a seafaring tribe on the western Spirish coast. I have some hazy memories of the Spirish tribes destroying our cities and exiling us to the sea. There were decades of wandering before we fought the outer islands away from the Lotus People.”
    â€œMaybe you should stop playing with the boys so much and write some of it down, for posterity.”
    â€œThere’s no glory in posterity. Victory begets posterity, not the other way around. But to answer your question, my lady, if you were to kill me tomorrow, it would be to deconstruct me and sell some part of my text to that smuggler we just met.”
    Leandra met the goddess’s eyes. “You know I am dealing with the smuggler to discover how to stop his kind.”
    â€œMy lady, I am two thirds a wrestler,” Dhrun said. As she spoke the arm interlaced with Leandra’s became thicker, hairier.
    When Leandra looked up at Dhrun’s face, the divinity had manifested Dhrunarman: dark eyes, strong jaw covered by a scrim of a youthful beard. Dhrun’s voice, so suddenly male, was low. “Learning an illegal hold helps one escape it, but it also increases the temptation to use it.”
    â€œDhru, do you think me that ruthless?”
    He looked at her with a young man’s face but through the eyes of an ancient soul. “Most divinity complexes I’ve encountered are a fixed mixture of the beings that fused to create them. There are very few who, like me, can shift within the bounds of our incarnations. Would you agree?”
    Leandra said that she would.
    â€œWhen you can change so fast—from male to female, from young to old—you can see how fast everyone else changes but doesn’t realize it simply because the color of their hair or skin or what’s between their legs is constant. It seems to me that every soul—human or divine—is far more flexible than it ever supposes.”
    Leandra paused to think about this and looked aft. She was supposed to be