The salt-island reminded her of that reef. The great mosses and lichens that crowned it looked as though carved by elfin jewelers. There were golden heliodor stalks with exploding cinnabar heads, and beds of blue-green beryl, and creeping carpets of amethyst orbs, and forests of ruby-tipped olivine spears, and towering onyx pagodas and toadstools, and rolling lichen-mats like landscapes carved of jade in arches and hollows and orange-velvet cups. Dragonflies darted hither and thither like winged brooches, crimson, bronzy green, and black-banded yellow.

Juvianna spoke the new words of her duty, “I offer you banishment or release of the darkness from your mind.” Usually she said death or release, but as Hensson had not yet committed a crime, death was not on the table here. It did not matter—banishment and death were essentially the same thing. Where would he go, how would he survive if cast out?