What then did Fern see in the map? She seemed to be looking not at the coastline of the Asking itself, but at the open sea to its south. Prim had never paid much notice to that part of the map; it was just a featureless expanse of animal hide that had been dyed blue.

Or was it? Fern was gazing at it much longer and more intently than made sense for a featureless expanse.

“What do you see?”

Fern reached out with a scarred, weathered hand, dripping with rings, and brushed a part of the map where the dye had set unevenly. “Just the ghost of a memory, perhaps,” she said. “I was of a big family. The youngest. From here.” She indicated a river delta on the south coast. “We booked passage on a vessel bound for Toravithranax.”

“All the way around the Asking?”

Fern looked at her. “Yes, for the family was too large to attempt the crossing of the desert.” She glanced at Querc as if to hint at why: people like Querc’s family might have attacked them? Then she shifted her attention back to the map. She kept stroking, with the tip of her index finger, that irregularity in the dye, as if she could bring it to life; or maybe it was alive to her. “Somewhere around here it took all of my family.”

“What took all of your family?” Prim asked. “Why, that’s awful!”

Fern just tickled the map as if it could yield up an answer.

“A storm?” But Fern’s language had hinted at something with a will. “Or . . . a big fish? A . . . sea creature?” She’d been about to say “monster” but didn’t want to sound stupid.

“You’re thinking wrong,” Fern said. “Trying to make it out to be a normal thing of this world.”

“Oh.”

“That’s not what it was at all,” said Fern. She was firm on that, but in her mood was a quiet hopelessness that Prim—or anyone—would understand. “You see, I have sailed these seas for many hundreds of falls and seen many storms and many big fish. This was not of the normal order of things, this one that took my family.”

“Is it possible—” Prim began.

“That my seeing of it was wrong because done through a child’s eyes? That is what everyone says.”

“I’m sorry.”

“‘Storm,’ ‘maelstrom,’ ‘beast,’ ‘monster’ . . . those words are not wrong, though. Provided you use them only as poets say ‘my lover’s lips are a flower’ or some such.”

“But this was more—a thing unto its own kind,” Prim said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been looking for it ever since.”

“Yes.”

“I believe you,” said Prim. “From a distance once I saw the Island of Wild Souls.”

“And you were raised on the back of a sleeping giant.”

“Corvus told you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you agreed to join the Quest. Not for the money.”