Outside, Thrushchurl is pacing the deck. Maybe Jil Punkinflake is with him, I don’t know. Silichieh staggers off to his bunk, looking beaten. Now I follow, not tired, not alert. Lying in my bunk, I can hear flakes of air rattle against each other.

Someone whispers something in my ear and I bolt upright out of sleep. Silichieh is gone. I’m alone. It’s night. The island is still floating outside the door.

I lie back. I sleep.

Someone whispers something in my ear and I start out of sleep. There’s nothing but the wind in the cabin and the island at the door. I lie back and listen. Gradually, I begin to make it out. There is a sound like speech in the wind blowing from the island, a whisper, without words, but with an addressing sound of speech. I imagine the island is haloed with that sound.

I lie back in my bunk again. The sea laps at the hull, the wind grates gently on everything, the island gazes in through the door at me. I dream of the dark water beneath us; I’m a spirit moving effortlessly through the coolness down there, the water moving through me, my calm mind settling as though I were only sinking into a bottomless bed. There is a white mass of paper in a rude body, pulling itself along the bottom with its reedy arms, sliding itself in among the rocks. A sudden impulse makes me want to drag myself down, to stare into its face, because the sight will terrify me and realizing this is like acquiescing to the impulse—I divert myself toward the bottom and watch from behind as the two pale arms float out and it lays its hands on a polished brown brass-framed counter top like a barman. I snort with laughter and wake myself up.

*

We’ll depend on Nardac’s keen eyes to guide us in. She is set out with a couple of sailors in a patched lifeboat, haunched there in the bow, over the water and swinging the boom of her bony arm, in line with her beak, this way and that. There was no keeping her to her bunk, although her wound is still not healing. She seems almost not to notice it, and to be insensible to the pain.

With the coming of the wan morning light, a survey from the mast has disclosed an end to the field of blocks where the land opens up, and that there is a passage through. All hands are on deck watching anxiously; at the rail someone I don’t recognize is impatiently taking it all in. Saskia arrives on the bridge. She puts her hand on Jil Punkinflake’s shoulder as she passes him, no differently than she would have gripped a post standing in the same spot, and he’s just beside himself, his face mingling pink and yellow with pleasure.