“Is there . . . some way I could help?” Prim asked.

“It is about time to empty the bowl,” Edda pointed out, and nodded at a large table in the middle of the kitchen, on which a considerable heap of flour already stood. Prim stepped in, picked up the bowl, and carried it to the table, where she dumped it out atop what was already there. Then she paused for a few moments, for the shape of the heap was strikingly like that of the mountain in her dream, and the cloud of loose airborne flour still swirling above it was like the thunderhead that obscured the heights.

But she knew that the flour was spilling out onto the floor by the mill, so she hurried over and reinstated the bowl. While she was there kneeling at Edda’s feet, she scooped up loose flour in her hands and transferred it into the bowl. The scent of flour was everywhere, of course, but so was the scent of Edda, which was faint but bottomless.

“Baking more bread?” Prim asked. For it seemed that Edda had baked more than enough of it yesterday.

“Hardtack,” Edda corrected her. “To sustain us on the road.”

Chapter 49

Chapter 49

Two days’ easy walking took them to the place where the river emptied into a broad bend of the Shiver that formed Calla’s northeastern coast. From there, across several miles of open water, they could see a solitary mountain guarded by ranges of foothills. It was not evident from here, but Prim knew from maps that this was a separate Bit unto itself, with another Shiver cutting around its backside and separating it from the much larger Bit that lay off to its east. Formerly all three landmasses had been one huge Bit, but the solitary mountain had drawn to itself all the wildest and most fractious old souls that still dwelled in the Land, and the place had become so unmanageable that, like a nail driven into a block of brittle old wood, it had snapped the big island in half and found itself standing alone in the midst of a newly formed Shiver. The waters girding it and the air above were infamously fickle and hazardous. Reaching this harbor, as beautiful and placid as it seemed, was therefore considered too dangerous to be attempted by sea. This did much to explain why Edda had been able to enjoy such isolation in her valley, for one end could only be entered by going over the pass, and the other was, to all intents and purposes, barred to mariners by the wild souls on the Bit opposite. But there was a village at the river’s mouth where a few doughty souls lived from fish that they caught along the nearer shore. This was notched with little coves where they could take refuge when air and water were raging. One of these, a man named Robst, agreed to take the party as passengers on his boat, Firkin, if they would pull on oars, and perform other tasks, when needed.