Prim found that shocking in a way, since she had grown up staring at this map, and had always believed it to be a true and correct depiction of the Land. So at first she doubted her own senses, and wondered if this was a trick of the light, or even if she was really still asleep and merely dreaming all of this. But stepping in closer and bending down to watch, she saw beyond doubt that Edda was blithely and confidently altering the courses of rivers and the coastlines of Bits, moving a city to the opposite side of a river, changing deserts to forests. And yet this was not done carelessly. Had such changes been wrought by anyone else, Prim would have felt outrage, but as it was she could only assume that Edda knew better than whoever had originally made the map and that it was better now than it had been. In a half-asleep way she even fancied for a few moments that Edda might be working a kind of magic here and that the people who lived in that city would wake up tomorrow morning astonished to find that the entire thing had been translated across the river while they slept.

The faded and frayed threads Edda had torn out were strewn about on the floor: coarse tufts of weakly colored fiber such as one might use to stuff a pillow. In her needle was a filament so fine that Prim had to drop to her knees and bend close in order to see it; but when she did, it was the color of a new blade of grass when the sun first comes out from behind the clouds after a week of spring rain. Edda was using it to correct a sliver of map that had formerly been depicted as the edge of a desert. Now she was making it into a forest by using needle and thread to fashion a lot of clever little knots that looked the way trees must have looked to Corvus when he was soaring high above. The movements of her needle were deliberate, unhurried. Prim, no stranger to embroidery, winced a little whenever Edda’s needle plunged into the map, for it was as fine as the green thread and it seemed impossible to shove it through the tough ancient hide without breaking it. But it slipped through as if Edda were sewing in burlap. The smoothness with which the giantess worked was hypnotic to Prim, who passed into a state that somehow combined the most delicious alertness with a lack of moment-to-moment awareness akin to sleep. Time passed at once quickly and slowly. The tying of an individual tree knot, or a series of running stitches marking the course of a river’s tributary in bright blue silk, was carried out in carefully considered steps, and yet when Prim tore her gaze away from the detailed operation of the needle and rocked back to gaze at the entire map, she saw that a vast territory had been so depicted. And yet the sun had not yet begun to lighten the sky, and the lanterns had not consumed much oil.