Penric's Mission

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“Desdemona!” Penric breathed, awed. “Will you look at that light.”

He leaned on the railing of the Adriac cargo ship coasting slowly up the narrowing Gulf of Patos, and stared eyes-wide at the rocky shores of Cedonia. The dry clarity of the air made the distant granite mountains seem as sharp-cut as glassmaker’s crystal. The angled sun of morning was the color of honey. He tilted back his head to take in the astonishing blue vault above, so deep it was dizzying; he felt he might dive up through it as into the sea, endlessly, and never drown.

It was what he imagined enchantment should be, in some myth or legend of personified elements, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Sky. Mortals, he was reminded, did not usually come out well at the ends of those tales.

“Yes, but by noon it will scorch that pale scholar’s skin of yours to blisters. Keep yourself covered. We’ll have to see about getting you a proper hat,” his demon returned, speaking through his mouth as prosaically as the bossy older sister he sometimes imagined her to be. But he thought she was not unmoved by the sight, shared through his eyes, of the light of the land of—could you call it her birth?—that she’d last departed, what, over a hundred years ago?

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