"We'll get through all right," he said to Nylandor, who was standing nearby. "Getting back will be much harder."
"Why is that?" Julina wondered out loud.
"With the extra weight," explained Rhia, "We'll be riding much lower in the water."
"Well . . . what if we're riding too low when we return?"
Rhia shrugged, unconcerned. "It just means ferrying people across the reef in longboats and waiting for the ships to cross afterwards."
"And if the weather is bad?"
"Then we wait."
Five days more they sailed, eventually coming about to face northwest. The terrain they saw was extremely mountainous. All of the hills as far as the eye could see were made up of facets of jagged, impassable rock.
On the twentieth day, they came in sight of a coastal region that became abruptly flat. Tiny dwellings could be seen. They had reached Hollind. Rhia could scarcely contain her excitement, and pointed out various landmarks to Bix as they became visible.
To the eyes of the ships' occupants, Hollind was a very small place for a country. It was perhaps fifteen miles long via the shoreline, and ran some ten miles inland until it ended abruptly in a wall of high, craggy, forbidding-looking mountains of black rock, upon which nothing green grew.
As they neared the place Rhia told them the docks lay, she watched the shore anxiously for any sign of her people. Julina came to stand beside her. "Something is wrong!" said Rhia, her face ashen.