The Argo

The Argo is the great wooden ship that Lady Pentandra has been quietly commissioning at the urging of Old Antimei. It enters the page in Hedgemage, where Pentandra grumbles about "meeting with an ancient shipwright in a smelly port city because of prophecy" and asks the seer outright: "Am I still to build this monstrous ship? Because that's turning out to be a challenge wrapped in a headache. No one thinks it can be done. And it's incredibly expensive." She has ordered the timber, hired a shipyard, paid everyone to keep it secret, secured supplies from the Stenchworks, and put a list before the Vanador smiths.

Antimei is unyielding on its necessity. "Oh, the ship is quite essential, I'm afraid. It will be required for what lies ahead." Pentandra later confirms the same to Briga, the goddess of fire, who admits the prophecy is even out of her purview: she does not know why it is needed.

By Marshal Arcane the project is far enough along that Princess Rardine has signed off on the Alshari treasury's share of the bill. Her summary: "The ship. Insanely expensive, intensely secret, and I have no idea why you want it." Pentandra answers only that it will be instrumental in the future, and that Rardine's willingness to indulge a magus on faith is one of the reasons she values her position in Alshar.

The Argo is reliably described as huge, wooden, seagoing, and built to carry a single specific cargo a very long way. It should not be confused with Master Minalan's much smaller four-seat Junebug, which is a colonial-era aircraft, not a ship. The Argo's first sailing has not yet been chronicled in the text available to this wiki.