Edda seemed to be working her way around the map according to whatever whim took her at the moment. She had begun with some corrections to the network of Shivers through which they would have to sail in order to get past Secondel, but then she had jumped down to the Last Bit and done some work with the silvery-blue silk that she favored for drawing the slender arms of the sea where they reached between islands; it was the color of cresting waves and so it warned mariners that here was surf over shallows and stones. Thence she had jumped over to the mainland and brightened the city of Toravithranax with many fine stitches in all colors, then continued eastward across the Land, running generally parallel to, and south of, the long feature known as the Hive-Way. Though Prim had never seen it, she had been told that it was made of the same stuff as the great Hive that buttressed the tall spire upon which El kept his Palace. In the middle of the Land, the Hive-Way fattened to an elongated lozenge enclosing the spire and the Palace, but east and west of there it was as slender as needle and yarn could make it. If one thought of the Hive-Way as a road, then it connected the Land’s west coast, at Secondel, to its east coast at Far Teem and North Teem, passing round the Palace in the middle. If one thought of it as a barrier, however, it cut the Land in two, between a north and a south half that were roughly equal in area. In order to get round it, one had to travel by sea—or, if one were Corvus, simply to fly over it.

Prim yawned, and all of a sudden had it in mind that she’d been up with Edda for a long time. She had been assisting the giantess by fetching lengths of colored silk, as requested, from her sewing kit, which was small enough to go in a pocket and yet seemed to contain no end of threads and needles. Threading such fine needles ought to have been nearly impossible in such dim light, but Prim had found that if she gazed fixedly upon the eye of one of Edda’s needles, it would seem to open up until it was the size of a doorway.

“Do you ever sleep?” Prim asked.

“I can sleep if I choose,” said Edda, “but if I don’t, it is fine.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” Prim asked.

“You see much in the day that needs to be sorted through, picked over, weeded, made sense of. That happens while you sleep. When you wake up, you remember what was important and you have it all sorted. For me, these things happen in the moment. And I have less need than you of forgetting.”

“Does that mean you remember more?”

“I am constituted differently from you. There is simply more to me,” said the giantess.