Robst—who had been engaged in a detailed conversation with Brindle on the topic of rocks—stood still for a long time, gazing at his boat as if he were expecting it to bob back up again. It did not, however, and so after a while he shrugged and walked down the dock to board it and continue his preparations. He struck a deal with two younger kinsmen and a local woman; these would provide him with a skeleton crew so that he could sail Firkin home after discharging the passengers. A short while later they were under way.

Using sails when they could and oars when they had to, they proceeded north up the Shiver in a furtive way, hewing close to the near shore until the mountain of the wild souls was well behind them. Then they ventured out into the middle of the channel, which was many miles broad this far north. They passed out of the Eternal Veil of Mist that surrounded Calla and came out into full sunlight. They caught a stiff west wind that was sluicing down another Shiver that delineated the north coast of Calla. This drove them eastward at a good clip. Prim’s home island fell away aft. At some point Prim realized that she could not see Calla—or, to be precise, the Eternal Veil—anymore, and wondered when or if she would ever see it again. They were navigating now generally eastward between Bits that seemed on the whole darker, colder, and less welcoming. It was because they were covered mostly in trees—the greenish-black trees of far north and high mountain—with only rare patches of farm and pasture.

Four days’ voyaging took them round the south cape of another Bit. As soon as they’d cleared it, they hooked northward into the First Shiver, which in these parts was so broad as to be more of an inland sea than a channel. The coast opposite was not always visible, but they could see hills rising above it. And so this was how Prim got her first look at the Land proper. From the deck of this boat, it looked no different from another Bit in the distance. But Prim could not help gazing on it and thinking about the fact that once you set foot on it you could reach all the places on the big map: not just the Lake Land, which was the nearest part, but the Knot, the Fastness, the Hive, the Palace, and the teeming lands surrounding the great river as it flowed down to the far eastern sea.

Soon visible off to their left was their destination: West Cloven. This port had a sister city, unsurprisingly known as East Cloven, just opposite on the shore of the mainland. In the old days they had been one town straddling a river that drained part of the Lake Land. Like Eltown and Toravithranax farther south, it had been settled in the time after Egdod had thrown down the first Hive, and the souls who had dwelled in it had dispersed to all corners of the Land.