“Crow’s wing, they call my sort of hair, on Karis,” the Ship’s Doctor explained, “and yours, little sisters and brother, they call storm-cloud or lamb’s-wool.”

All those names were poetical borrowings from the vocabulary of the Original World, archaic and melancholy. On Sarronny, there were neither crows nor sheep, and the atmosphere did not make clouds that one could see from the ground.

“With those leaf-and-water eyes,” he told Jehen, “you’ll have an Astok in your family tree, somewheres-a-back. That eye color is recessive, but they stitched it into their genome for fancy’s sake.”

Yasmin laughed aloud at that. She and Ferenc looked at each other, brown eyes to brown, and Jehen frowned as they burst into giggles together.

“Or it could have been chance,” the Quartermaster said. “The Astokka haven’t an exclusive claim on everything, though to hear their own legends, you’d think they invented the sunrise. And sex, too, into the bargain.”

***

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