The carter's name was Holt and the flexible labour turned out to be two days of loading and unloading barrels of pickled herring at every stop between Solmere and the north coast, which Finn had not anticipated and which he described afterward, to nobody, as the most educational forty-eight hours of his life. He learned that herring barrels leak. He learned that they leak specifically onto the person carrying them and specifically at the moment that person has stopped paying attention. He learned that Holt did not talk, at all, about anything, for two full days, and he learned what it was like to spend two days beside a person who did not talk while having nobody else to talk to, which was a thing he had genuinely never experienced and which he found, by the second afternoon, close to physically painful. He got off the cart at the north coast on the third morning smelling of fish, with three coppers, the button that was not his, and a ferry ticket Holt had bought him out of what was evidently the man's first and only visible feeling in two days.
HOL: You worked.
FNN: I did.
HOL: Most don't.
That was the entire conversation. Finn thought about it for most of the crossing. The ferry took an hour and a half across grey open water with a cold wind coming off it, and for the first hour there was nothing to see except the water and the coast going away behind them. Then the islands came up out of the haze ahead, and Finn Jota, who had lived in Solmere for a year and had considered himself by now a person who had seen things, stood at the rail with his mouth open and did not close it for some time. There were dozens of them. Small green islands scattered across a wide shallow bay, some no bigger than a field, some large enough to hold whole streets, and every single one of them was joined to its neighbours by wooden bridges, long ones and short ones, some high and arched and some flat and low to the water, strung across the whole bay in a web that went further than he could see. There were lamps along the bridges, lit even in daylight. There were flags on half the islands in colours that did not match. There was music coming off at least three of them, none of it the same tune, and a noise underneath the music that took him a while to identify, which was the sound of a very large number of people enjoying themselves at the same time.
FNN: That's a lot of bridges.
The man next to him at the rail, who was elderly and well-dressed and had not asked, looked round.
MAN: Two hundred and eleven.
FNN: You've counted?
MAN: Everyone counts. It's the first thing everyone does. My wife's counted every summer for thirty years and she gets a different number every time.
FNN: Who's right?
MAN: Nobody knows. That's the charm of it, apparently.
The ferry put in at the southernmost island, which was all docks and customs and people carrying things, and Finn got off it with three coppers and walked up the first bridge he came to because it was there, and spent the rest of the day finding out what Portvale was. It was everything. That was the only answer he ever arrived at. Every island was something different and nobody seemed to have planned any of it. There was an island that was entirely food, stall after stall along a single winding street, smoke going up from all of it, a smell that made him briefly forget the herring. There was an island with a beach on its seaward side where people lay in rows on the sand doing absolutely nothing, which Finn stood and watched for a considerable time with the fascination of somebody observing a foreign religion. There was an island with a stage on it, and a troupe performing something with a great deal of shouting and a man in a false beard, and a crowd of perhaps two hundred who all seemed to know when to laugh. There was an island that appeared to be only gardens. There was one that had, as far as he could establish, a single enormous tree on it and nothing else, and a small queue of people waiting to stand under the tree.
FNN: What's the tree for?
WOM: It's the tree.
FNN: Yes, but what's it for?
WOM: It's the tree, love. You stand under it.
He did not stand under it. He had three coppers and a strong suspicion that standing under things was not free. He found work on the food island by the late afternoon, mostly by walking up and down the street until somebody looked overwhelmed. The somebody was a broad woman called Oona with a chowder stall and a queue of eleven people and a boy who was meant to be helping her and was not there.
FNN: You need someone.
OON: I need Teddy, and Teddy's gone to watch the beard man.
FNN: I'm better than Teddy.
OON: You don't know Teddy.
FNN: No, but he's gone to watch the beard man, so I've already won.
She looked at him for about two seconds and handed him a ladle. He worked the chowder stall for three days. It paid a copper an hour and a bowl at the end, and the bowl was the best thing he had eaten since leaving Solmere, and on the second day Teddy came back and was comprehensively outworked and left again in what Oona described as a sulk. Finn was good at it. He discovered this with some surprise. The queue was the thing, it turned out: a queue of eleven tired people on holiday who wanted chowder and had been waiting, and a boy at the front of it who talked to every single one of them. He asked where they were from. He asked what they had seen. He guessed which island they had come from by what they were carrying and was right about half the time, which people found delightful, and the queue moved faster because nobody minded being in it.
OON: You don't stop.
FNN: Talking?
OON: Ever.
FNN: It's been a hard few weeks. I've been saving it up.
That was truer than he meant it to be. He noticed that about the third day. He had been on his own since Solmere, first with Holt who did not talk and then on the ferry and then on an island full of strangers, and the chowder queue was the first place in nearly a week where he had been able to be entirely himself at full volume without anybody asking him to stop, and he had fallen on it like somebody who had not eaten. He thought about the others, which he had not let himself do much. Briar at home with his brothers. Arthur and the girls walking west. Corin on his horse. He thought about Tam at the bridge saying I'd feel it anyway at seven when you weren't here, and found he understood that considerably better than he had at the time. He had twenty-six coppers by the end of the third day. It was not very much. It would not have bought him a single night in any of the lodgings along the bridges, and he was sleeping in a boathouse Oona had pointed him at with the words don't ask me about it and don't let anyone see you. But it was a stake. It was, for a person with a very particular kind of plan, exactly enough to begin with. He had seen the card island on the first day and had not let himself go near it. It sat at the far eastern end of the archipelago, larger than most, reached by the longest bridge in Portvale, a high arched thing with lamps every ten feet that came on properly at dusk and made the whole span glow across the water. The island at the end of it was quieter than the others. That was what he had noticed first. Every other island in Portvale was loud, and that one was not. It had long low buildings with shutters and light coming out of the gaps, and people going across the bridge in ones and twos in good clothes, and nobody coming back across it laughing. He stood at the landward end of the long bridge on the third evening with twenty-six coppers in his pocket and the smell of chowder on his shirt, and looked at it for a while. He thought about Briar, who would have done the sums and told him not to. He thought about Yseult, who would have said you cannot do magic in that voice, and been right. He thought, briefly and with a sensation he did not enjoy, about a sentence he had said himself, standing on packed earth at the end of a quarterfinal, blind and unable to move: you don't get to keep rolling and only ever like the answers. Then he thought that there was nobody here to tell him no. That was the whole of it, really. There had always been somebody. There had been Briar at the betting sheet and Briar at the cave and Briar at every table he had ever sat at in a year, and Briar was four provinces south and did not know where he was, and nobody on the whole of this archipelago knew his name except a woman who sold chowder and a man who counted bridges. He walked out onto the long bridge. The lamps came on one after another ahead of him as the dusk thickened, ten feet apart, all the way across the water, and he walked out along them toward the quiet island with his hands in his pockets and his three days' wages under his fingers, and did not look back once.