“She has seven secret foxes,” said Hava, which made Nev’s eyebrows rise to her hairline and stay there for a while.
“So,” said Giddon quietly to Hava, when Nev had moved away. “We’re telling her everything, are we?”
“We’re going to need her help once we’re in Torla’s Neck.”
“How hard can it be to sneak into a house?”
“Listen, who’s going to be doing most of the sneaking? You or me? I want her help.”
Giddon couldn’t dispute that, so he watched the landscape instead. The airship hugged the coast, passing over hills with cows grazing on their golden slopes. Idly, he counted buildings, fields, tiny bright dots in a tangle of vines that might be pumpkins. Then he lifted his eyes to the bank of clouds far out at sea, which seemed to be growing as the airship flew north, masses of gray blobs piling themselves up into mountains.
Giddon was about to ask Nev about the clouds when something astonishing came into view. He’d heard of glaciers, but he’d never seen one before. The glacier, if that’s what it was, was gray and wrinkled, but shining white and blue from within, like the delicate insides of a shell, but massive, as if the earth were an animal with beautiful scales just under a translucent membrane. It flowed between mountain peaks all the way to the sea, where it dropped blue blocks of ice into the water.
On either side of the glacier, the land stretched up from the sea in dark, climbing steps that were cultivated with rows of some now-dead crop that Giddon guessed was tea. Beyond the tea stretched forests of fir trees; beyond those climbed mountain peaks with more glaciers flowing between.
He was about to ask Nev about the glaciers when Nev pointed out to sea. Giddon knew, before he even looked, what she was pointing at, for he felt them: silbercows, filling his mind with a touch as light as a soap bubble.
Hello! Giddon called out. I hear you! Then he saw them, racing across the surface of the water, trying to keep up with the fast-flying Mail airship.
You! they said, sending him the image of the house, the shadowy airship, and the terrible, heart-wrenching explosion. Then they sent him the Seashell, resting on the ocean floor beside the gigantic tentacles of the Keeper. We will help you!
Help me! said Giddon, surprised. How will you help me?
We’ll bring you what you need!
What I need? said Giddon, his heart filling with Bitterblue, even though he knew that couldn’t be their meaning.
In response, their own feelings changed to a kind of surprise and confusion. Tentatively, they began to show him a new story. A swimmer; a drowner. The impression of a small, cold, furious, determined, drowning person passed through Giddon like an arrow and his whole being cried out in anguish and need, because he recognized her.
Wait! he shouted, for the silbercows were turning away. A fjord reached out into the sea, cutting off their path; the airship swept on, but the silbercows had to go around. Wait! he screamed, running to the airship’s stern, trying to hold fast to the thread connecting his mind to theirs. Show me the rest! he cried. Show me the rest. But the thread was broken. They were gone.
Giddon dropped to the floor of the deck, his face buried in his hands. When, a moment later, Hava lowered herself beside him, there was no way to pretend he wasn’t sobbing.
She was quiet, waiting until he was over the worst of it.
“Did they show her to you?” he finally said when he was quieter, numb.
“Yes.”
“What did it mean?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything, beyond what we saw. We can’t even know if it’s true.”
“But it was her. They saw her! We need to find them and talk to them again,” he said. “As soon as possible.”
“Giddon,” said Hava, in a low, heavy voice. “She was drowning. Do you really want the silbercows to show you the story of her drowning?”
“Yes,” he said, his tears starting up again helplessly. “Because then we’re there, witnessing it, and it’s less like she was all alone.”
* * *
—
Later, as the light began to turn to pinks and golds, a long isthmus came into view far ahead. It formed a bridge to a spreading mass of forests that Giddon, remembering his maps, realized must be the beginning of the rest of the Torlan continent. He was looking across an isthmus at the nation of Kamassar.
“Torla’s Neck,” he said out loud, forming a new understanding of the name of the Keepish province that connected the continent’s head to its body.
“Where’s the Cavenda house?” Hava asked Nev. “Do you know?”
Nev flashed sudden, surprised eyes at Hava. “It’s at the top of the isthmus,” she said, “very near the border to Kamassar. We’re too far away to see it from here.”
“Have you been there?”
“No, I’ve never seen it, but Torla’s Neck isn’t big. Everyone knows where the rich people live. Why are you asking about the Cavenda house?”
“Have the silbercows shown you the picture of the explosion?” Hava said. “With the house?”
Nev was quiet for a beat, turning her face away so Giddon and Hava couldn’t see. “Is the house in the silbercow image the Cavenda house?” she finally asked.
“We think it might be,” said Hava.
“Is it their airship? Their doing?”
“We don’t know. We think it might be.”
“Mmph,” Nev said, an obscure, but plainly dissatisfied, sound.
“What?” demanded Hava.
“I may have abandoned a friend in a time of need,” she said.
* * *
—
The Mail crew landed at an airship dock on a cliff above a rocky beach, near a cluster of buildings at the edge of a pine forest. A man came running from the closest building, waited for one of the flyers to shoot an anchor into the landing web, then fed them a dock line.
“The post office is here,” one of the Mail crew said, lowering the ladder. “After we deliver our mail, we can drop you closer to where you live, if there’s a dock.”
“This is perfect, actually,” Nev said. “I live here.”
“That’s lucky,” said the woman.
But then, once they’d disembarked, Nev began to walk toward the cliff edge.
“Where are you going?” said Giddon.
“Home,” she said.
“The houses are that way,” Giddon said, pointing.