She already had notions as to why, but she wished to hear how Edda would choose to answer.

“Some things by their nature cannot be mapped.”

A newcomer to watery things, Prim had thought Firkin rather pretty when she had first laid eyes on it, but soon came to understand that it was a short, tubby cargo barge, and quite slow, especially compared to the large vessels that did nothing but make the run up and down the First Shiver between Cloven and Secondel. For much of the way, this body of water was more of an inland sea than a channel. Robst liked to stay in the lee of the chain of big Bits that formed its western shore, and so the Land proper, when visible at all, was seen at a distance through obscuring mists and hazes. Larger vessels sailed right down the middle, where they could take the full measure of the wind. Many were the occasions when Prim would notice Mard or Lyne taking a break from nautical duties to gaze wistfully at a bigger ship in full sail, overhauling and blowing by them as if Firkin were dragging anchor.

As days went by, Prim began to notice more and more details on the opposite coast and understood that it was drawing nearer. For the great Shiver was narrowing, just as the maps had always told her.

Early on the sixth morning, she felt her hammock rock strangely and knew that they had struck, or been struck by, a current. She went abovedecks to see dawn breaking over mountains on the rim of the Land, now very close. Turning to gaze west at the nearer shore, she saw not the usual scrub-crusted brow of coastal bluffs, but a strange and arresting landform: knuckles of bare, broken stone protruding from barren ground that sloped steeply down and dove into the sea.

So they had reached the southern tip of the Bit known as Chopped Barren. In ancient times the region had been cleared of trees by woodcutters from Eltown. It was still covered mostly in grass and scrub. The broken and tumbled scape now taking the light of the dawn was Feller’s Point: the mess that had been left behind when the hill-giant had stood up and walked away, and everything west of the river had broken off from the Land and begun its slow drift into the ocean.

Just on the other side of Feller’s Point would be another Shiver, or rather a cauldron where a few of them joined together. The broadside current that had nudged Prim’s hammock came from there. Once it had been the junction of two rivers, a few miles above Eltown.

This then was the place where they would have to choose. By doubling back round the point and fighting both the current and the wind, they could make for the western sea. En route they would pass familiar territory where the kinsmen of Mard and Lyne dwelled. Then they would face the passage round the cape that Edda had warned of. The mere mention of that idea made Robst uneasy. On the other hand, if they stayed their southerly course, they would pass down the main channel between Secondel and the large Bit known as Thunkmarch.