Squander! The word! She laughed again, and quickly considered herself lucky to have a precocious child for a ward. Never mind, she told herself, the vocabulary she herself could not understand sometimes. Never mind how Sawi’s words, too, can become endless conundrums that edged on the philosophical. I think I may be too old for this, she thought, suddenly feeling weary. “Come now,” she said, “let’s finish drying you off and then let us get your supper.”
There was a certain steeliness in the young boy’s voice. “I will show you, Iba,” he said. “I will show you how not to get lost anywhere, even in distant seas. There is an undrawn map of this world that will astound us how little we know of geography. Someday I will draw that map. And you will not get lost.”
Iba laughed, for she was easily
