Chapter 635: Up

They decided before breakfast, which Valerica said was a record.

"It’s the price," she said. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed above the tannery with the map of the west spread over her knees, and the Aelstrom Palace was not on it, because no Imperial map had ever bothered to draw the Palaces. "It was always going to be the price. She came for you. The children are what she’s prepared to carry to get you."

"So we go," said Ashe.

"So we go, and you argue." Valerica looked at Vane. "I’ll write the arguments. You stand there and look like you’re for something."

"I am for something."

"That’s why it’ll work."

Ashe was at the window, looking up at the ship. It hung above the market square where it had hung the night before, pale and slender against a clean sky, its glass panes ringing faintly whenever the wind changed.

"I want it noted," she said, "that I was bad at boats, and now there’s a boat in the sky."

"Noted," said Valerica.

"I grew up on a mountain."

"Mountains are in the sky," Nyx pointed out from the floor, where she was lying on her back with her arms spread. "Partly."

"Mountains stay where you put them."

"So will you," Isole said, without looking up from the satchel she was repacking, "if you sit in the middle and don’t look over the edge." She considered. "I’ll give you something for your stomach."

"I don’t need anything for my stomach."

"Then I’ll give it to Vane," Isole said, "and he can give it to you when you’re green, and you can pretend it was his idea."

Ashe opened her mouth and shut it again. Nyx laughed so hard she rolled onto her side.

Mara, at the table, had not looked up once. She was writing a list of everything they would need to bring and was on her second page, and she had underlined soap three times.

Father Cray went door to door all that day.

Vane went with him for some of it. He stood in kitchens while the priest explained, slowly and plainly, what the Palace was and what it was not, and that nobody would be made to go. He watched parents hold their children’s hands across scrubbed tables and look at the ship through their windows. Some said yes before the priest had finished. Some said no and shut the door. Most of them asked for the night to think, and when Vane came back down the lane at dusk he saw lamps lit in every house in Holloway, and people sitting up behind them.

The cooper said yes. He said it in his own yard with his arm round Tomas’s shoulders, and then he looked at Vane over the boy’s head and said, "And if they won’t keep him?"

"Then I’ll bring him home," Vane said.

The cooper nodded once, as though that settled it, and went back to his barrels.

Tobi Rusk came in from the coast a little after dark with seven children in the back of a borrowed cart, and Marta met him in the middle of the river road and hit him in the chest with the flat of her hand, hard, and then held on to him for so long that the cart horse got bored and started eating the hedge. The seven children climbed down and found their own families in the crowd, one after another, and Mara stood at the side of the road with her ledger and checked their names off as they went.

When she reached the end, she closed the book and looked at the cart, empty now, and at the road leading west toward the sea.

Vane knew what she was thinking. He thought it too, every time he looked at that road.

Corin.

Brynn found him on the chapel steps late that night.

"I’m not coming," she said.

He had known since the river road. He nodded.

"Somebody has to be here when the table comes back." She sat down beside him with her bad arm across her knees. "It will, you know. Next spring, or the one after. The network still runs. Marta and Tobi have a boat. Pell knows every captain on the coast." She looked up at the ship’s pale shape against the stars. "And now we know a Palace will come down if someone shouts loud enough. That’s new."

"You could shout," Vane said.

"I’m not a Master," said Brynn. "I’ll write to you instead."

She gave Mara something before she left: a short length of tarred rope with a fisherman’s knot already tied in it, Marta’s knot, the one she had taught Mara in the tannery yard. Mara turned it over in her fingers for a long time. Then she untied it, retied it, held it up so Brynn could see, and said, "Again?"

"No," said Brynn, and her voice was not quite steady. "That one’s right. Keep it."

The ship left on the morning after next, as Sarai Vell had promised, with whoever was on it.

There were a hundred and ninety-one children on it in the end, and a good many parents, and Father Cray, who said he was too old to fly and came anyway because someone had to read the names at the other end. There were six of them, and Mara. There was a Princess’s letter in Valerica’s pack, left with her the morning Anastasia rode for the capital, sealed and unread, because the outside said For the Palace gate, not before.

The platform carried them up in groups of twenty. When Vane’s turn came, he stood at its edge with Mara beside him and watched the town fall away underneath: the square, the chapel, the yard with its high new wall and forty empty wagons standing in the dust, and the whole of Holloway out in the lanes with their faces turned up.

Then the platform rose through a gap in the hull, and the town was gone, and there was only the deck.

Ashe sat down in the middle of it immediately and did not move again. Isole handed Vane a small paper twist of something. He put it in his pocket for later.

The ship turned west.

The Western provinces opened out beneath them, brown and gold and folded with valleys, the Marrin a bright thread running down through them to the coast. Beyond the coast lay the sea. From up here it went on and on, darker than he had ever seen it, all the way to the edge of the world, and far out on it, very faint in the morning light, Vane could see a long, slow band of cold blue-black under the surface, moving.

Nyx came and stood beside him at the rail, and he felt the Dreamscape go out across the water and come back.

"It’s bigger," she said quietly.

"I know."

Mara opened her ledger on the rail between them and wrote something down. He did not ask what. Then she closed it and stood looking west with him, toward a Palace nobody had ever drawn on a map, with the knot from Brynn wound twice around her fingers.

"What happens when we get there?" she asked.

Vane thought about the cooper, and the wall, and the road, and the hundred and ninety-one names in her book.

"I’ll know when I’m standing in front of it," he said.