They hid for four days.
There was a cave on the side of the island that faced away from the wind. It was low and dry, with a narrow mouth. Mav only cast his Manifestation at night, in the hollow among the rocks beside it. During the day, his Subjects stayed at home. He didn’t want anything flying past to see a dome of water shining in the sun.
Food was easier than he had feared. Every evening, Two took the needlefish home to hunt in his own sea. When Mav called them back, they came out of the dome with fish in their jaws, and the three of them cooked on a fire of dead wood at the back of the cave. The water of the dome was fresh, so they drank from it.
Ronald looked at the fish on his stick and laughed for the first time since the cliffs.
"We’re lost in a World with no ground," he said, "and we’re eating your dinner from home."
"Do you want to go hungry instead?" Mav asked.
"No. I want this every day for the rest of my life."
Tamsin didn’t laugh, but she ate. Then she took her slate and began to write.
-----
She wrote about the wind first, because nothing else on the island mattered as much.
It never stopped, but it changed. Every day, around noon, it grew stronger. Every evening, it fell. The islands moved with it. Before long, Tamsin worked out that the whole sky turned in a huge, slow circle, like water stirred in a pot. If she was right, every island would pass close to every other island sooner or later.
She also wrote about the serpents. Mav watched them from the mouth of the cave, lying flat on the rock with only his eyes above the edge. They came up out of the cloud at noon, when the wind was strongest, and they hunted on the wind itself. They never landed. They flew along the edges of the islands, and anything that stood too close to an edge was taken.
One evening, a serpent passed so close to the cave that Mav could see its eyes. They were small and white, like Seven’s, and he wondered whether it was blind too. It turned its head toward the cave as it went past. For a moment, he was sure that it had felt them. Then it was gone.
"It hunts by feeling," he told Tamsin afterward. "Like Seven does. I think it felt us, but we weren’t moving."
Tamsin wrote that down too, with a hand that shook a little.
At night, when the fire was low, they talked about home. Ronald was worried about his boars’ winter food, because nobody would bring it in. Tamsin was worried about Quill, who would think that they had run away from the tournament. Mav didn’t say much. He was thinking about Juno, and about the letter.
He also thought about the hawks.
They hadn’t fled from the funnel. They had flown into it, as if they knew where it went. So somewhere in this sky, there might be hawks from the cliffs. If birds could come here through a tear, perhaps something could also leave through one. It wasn’t a plan yet, but it was the beginning of one.
He told Tamsin about it that night. She listened without interrupting, which was rare for her.
"A vortex that goes both ways," she said slowly. "Quill said that nobody knows where they lead. But if the hawks know where they go, maybe we can learn it from them." She stopped and shook her head. "We’d need to find a hawk first, in a sky full of things that eat goats."
"Yes," Mav said.
"Then we’d need to understand it."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a while in the light of the fire. Then she picked up her slate again and began a new page.
-----
She was right about the islands. The next day, a second island drifted toward theirs. It came very slowly, until there was only a gap of 30 meters between their edges. There was a forest on it, with gray stone above the trees.
"Something’s been built there," Mav said.
The gap held for almost an hour. That was long enough.
Tamsin’s moths spun a line of silk across the gap, and Ronald tied it to a tree on their side. Mav crossed first, hand over hand, with the cloud far below his feet. He tried not to look down. Once, he did, and his stomach turned. Then he tied the line on the other side, and Ronald came across with Tamsin on his back. She kept her eyes shut the whole way.
They were barely on the second island when the gap began to open again.
-----
The building stood in the middle of the forest. It had been a hall once, long and low, cut from gray stone. Its roof had fallen in a long time ago, and trees had grown up through the floor. Moss covered everything.
But the door was still standing. It was a single slab of stone, taller than Birch, with words cut into it in neat lines. They were in the common letters of the Nexus, the ones that every school on Earth still taught.
Tamsin brushed the moss away with her sleeve and read them aloud.
"Here lived our master, who made this World. He went into the cloud in the 204th year of the Genesis, and he did not come back. We keep his stone." Her voice slowed. "We keep his stone until he returns."
The hall behind the door was empty, except for the trees. Mav walked through it slowly with his harpoon in his hand. There was a long stone table at one end, cracked down the middle, and a dry basin where water had once run. The walls were carved from floor to ceiling, but the carvings had worn away until they were only shapes. He could make out wings in some of them, and tall, thin figures carrying stones.
’Builders,’ he thought. ’Tall builders, with wings.’
He thought of the dry smell on the first island, and he understood it a little better. He still didn’t say anything. He went back to the door, where Tamsin was still reading.
Under the words, someone had carved a small picture. It showed a man standing with something coiled around his neck and shoulders, like a scarf or a rope.
Mav looked at the picture, and his hand went to his own neck without his deciding it. One was there, cool and quiet under his scarf.
It was a crude carving, made by someone who wasn’t an artist. But the thing around the man’s neck was thick and it curled, and it went down across his chest. Mav had seen that shape every morning for four months, when he washed.
Ronald had seen it too. He looked at the picture, then at Mav’s scarf, and he didn’t say anything. Mav was grateful for that.
"The Genesis came 500 years ago," Ronald said slowly. "So that’s almost 300 years."
"Yes," Tamsin said. She turned to Mav, and he saw that she was frightened. "When an Awakened dies without a liege, his World becomes an Orphan World, and it breaks after one year. This World’s master died almost 300 years ago."
"Maybe he had a liege," Ronald said.
"Then the World would belong to the liege, and there would be an arch. There’s no arch. Nobody has come here." She looked at the words again, as if they might change. "An Orphan World breaks after one year. That isn’t a rule that someone made. It’s what happens when nobody feeds the Heartstone."
Mav understood what she meant before she finished.
The sky above them was whole. The islands were still floating, and the wind was still blowing. This World was alive.
Something had been keeping its Heartstone alive.