Victoria Goddard

“The vendor looked at him through narrow eyes. “What is your name, what is your island, and what is your dance?”

The questions shocked him through to the core.

It took him a moment to pull up the traditional answers. “I am Cliopher Mdang of Tahivoa in Gorjo City. My island is Loaloa.” He paused a moment, before the desire for it to be true overcame the fear that he overreached himself in the claim. His third answer came, as a result, much more quietly. “My dance is Aōteketētana.”

“Where have you danced the fire?”

These were the questions out of the Lays of the Wide Seas. Cliopher had been expecting to haggle over price, not his identity. He took a breath. No one was listening to him but the vendor.

“I learned the steps on Loaloa from the direction of the tanà, my great-uncle Tovo. My feet bear the scars of my learning.”

He gestured down, though the old burns on the sides of his feet, where he had brushed up against the coals, were hidden by his Solaaran-style sandals.

“And I danced the fire across the Wide Seas when I sailed down the river of time in a ship of my own hands’ shaping.”
― Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor