Princess Miriamele considered the ocean.

When she had been young, one of her nurses had told her that the sea was the mother of mountains, that all the land came from the sea and would return to it one day, even as lost Khandia was reputed to have vanished into the smothering depths.  Certainly the ocean that had beaten at the cliffs beneath her childhood home at Meremund had seemed eager to reclaim the rocky verge.

Others had named the sea as mother of monsters, of kilpa and kraken, oruks and water-wights.  The black depths, Miriamele knew, did indeed teem with strange things.  More than once some great, formless hulk had washed up on Meremund's rocky beaches to lie rotting in the sun beneath the fearful, fascinated eyes of the local inhabitants until the tide rolled it away again into the mysterious deeps.  There was no doubt that the sea birthed monsters.

And when Miriamele's own mother went away, never to return, and her father Elias sank into brooding anger over his wife's death, the ocean even became a kind of parent to her.  Despite its moods, as varied as the hours of sunlight and moonlight, as capricious as the storms that roiled its surface, the ocean had provided a constancy to her childhood.  The breakers had lulled her to sleep at night, and she had awakened every morning to the sound of gulls and the sight of tall sails in the harbor below her father's castle, rippling like great-petaled flowers as she stared down from her window.

The ocean had been many things to her, and had meant much.  But until this moment, as she stood at the aft rail of the Eadne Cloud with the whitecaps of the Great Green stretching away on all sides, she had never realized that it could also be a prison, a holdfast more inescapable than anything built of stone and iron.

As Earl Aspitis' ship coursed southeast from Vinitta, bound toward the Bay of Firannos and its scatter of islands, Miriamele for the first time felt the ocean turn against her, holding her more surely than ever her father's court had bound her with ritual or her father's soldiers had hemmed her all around in sharp steel.  She had escaped those wardens, had she not?  But how was she to escape a hundred miles of empty sea?  No, it was better to give in.  Miriamele was tired of fighting, tired of being strong.  Stone cliffs might stand proudly for ages, but they fell to the ocean at last.  Instead of resisting, she would do better to float where the tides took her, like driftwood, shaped by the action of the currents but moving, always moving.  Earl Aspitis wasn't a bad man.  True, he did not treat her with quite the same solicitude as he had a fortnight ago, but still he spoke kindly - that is, when she did as he wished.  So she would do as he wished.  She would float like an abandoned spar, unresisting, until time and events dropped her onto land again....

A hand touched the sleeve of her dress.  She jumped, surprised, and turned to find Gan Itai standing beside her.  The Niskie's intricately wrinkled face was impassive, but her gold-flecked eyes, though sun-shaded, seemed to glitter.

"I did not mean to startle you, girl."  She moved up to the rail beside Miriamele and together they stared out over the restless water.

"When there's no land in sight," Miriamele said at last, you might as well be sailing off the edge of the world.  I mean, it seems as if there might not be any land anywhere."