A strip of blue sky caught in Adra’s hair. She pulled it free, ducked beneath it, and kept walking.
Yesterday the sky had been where it belonged. Yesterday there had been a road to the bridge. Her father had changed both things before the regent put him in prison.
Now Adra carried the book under her coat, with its clasp pressed into her ribs.
The court hill hung above the lower town. From the riverbank it looked like a tray someone had lifted away from a table. The houses on it were still upright. Their windows shone in the afternoon sun. Beneath the hill, a great split ran through the cart road to the bridge.
Floodwater was rising along the banks. Across the bridge, the road climbed to high farms. People with carts full of bedding stood on the broken approach, unable to reach it.
Adra turned away before any of them asked what she was carrying.
At twenty-three she had delivered messages through two border wars and one winter when the passes closed. She meant to leave the valley after this journey. She had a place booked in a wagon going west, and no intention of being her father’s clever daughter forever.
First she had to get him out.
That morning she had stood before Regent Caur and the prison officer. The bargain was simple: the intact book for Bir’s freedom. Caur had signed the pardon and given it to the officer to hold until the exchange.
He had also hired Adra to help run the river ferry during the flood. There were too few people who knew both banks. She had accepted the advance because a courier without money got very little delivered.
The wagon west would not wait three weeks. She had decided to think about that afterward.
Where the bank path bent, the ground rose under Adra’s feet like a folded rug. She slipped. One shoe slid into a deep crack.
She knelt to reach it, but the sole caught on a stone. The book struck the ground under her coat.
“That’s expensive luggage,” a man said above her.
Issen stood by a small raft. He traded flour and lamp oil across the river. He looked at her bare stocking, then at the clasp showing beneath her coat.
“I need the prison landing.”
“You and thirty others. The upstream ferry’s shut.”
“Will you take me?”
He named a price.
“For one person?”
“For coming back with an empty raft while everyone else needs to go the other way.”
She paid him from the advance. He helped her free the shoe with his boat hook, then waited while she climbed aboard.
The raft moved slowly against the swollen river. Adra sat with the book on her lap. Through her stocking she could feel cold water in the shoe.
“Why doesn’t Caur raise another hill?” Issen asked.
“You need a dry ring around the ground. One unbroken line of chalk.”
She had watched Bir practice with a little patch behind their house. Fold the pictured page outward, and the patch rose. Open the book all the way, and it came down. The person holding the book had to stand inside the ring to begin either movement. Closing the cover left the land where it was. During one trial, rain washed the ring away after Bir began lowering the patch. It still came down, but he had to wait for dry ground before drawing another ring to raise it again.
Her father had forbidden her to tear the pages. Without the pictures, he said, nobody could put things back.
“The bank won’t stay dry long enough now,” she said.
“Then he’d better use his boats.”
“The court hill is dry.”
Issen looked up at it. From the raft, they could see people standing along its edge. Beyond them, the prison’s old foot stair had stretched into a long, sloping climb. A person could still get up it. A cart could not.
“How many can he fit?” Issen asked.
Adra knew the hill. Kitchens, chambers, gardens, a narrow parade ground. It had room for the court and a few hundred more. The lower town held thousands.
She did not answer.
At the prison landing, Issen told her he would stay to ferry people until dark. They would pay for passage. He still had a crew to feed.
Bir stood in the prison yard with his palms against the bars. The officer let Adra speak to him through them. The signed pardon waited in a locked drawer inside.
“You’ve got it,” her father said.
“I’ve got your freedom.”
She showed him the clasp.
Bir looked beyond her at the carts on the broken road.
“I raised the hill too close to the bridge. I thought the road would stay.”
“You thought a great many things.”
“I did.”
He had gray mud on his trousers. She could not tell whether it came from his arrest or from leaning against the yard wall afterward.
Adra lowered her voice.
“Once I hand it over, you’re free. We can leave tonight. I can take you west.”
“And leave this?”
“We could come back.”
“When?”
She hated the question because he was asking it properly. After the flood? After her wagon left? After Caur had learned to raise more ground and the book was locked away?
“You liked showing them,” she said. “All those people watching you open it.”
“Yes.”
She wanted a better defense from him. He gave her none.
Boots sounded behind her. Caur came into the yard with two soldiers. His coat was muddy too.
“Time to finish our exchange,” he said.
Adra held the book against her stomach.
“Put the hill back first.”
“The water will reach the lower chambers tonight.”
“People can go across the bridge if the road joins up.”
“People with nowhere else to go are already on that hill.”
It was true. Adra had seen their bundles between the court windows.
“Warn them,” Bir said. “Open the gates to the farm road.”
Caur looked at him through the bars. “The farms aren’t yours.”
“Neither is the flood,” Adra said.
For a moment nobody spoke. On the other side of the wall, a cart wheel knocked against stone over and over. Someone was trying to push it across the split.
Caur offered his hand for the book.
Adra backed toward the foot stair instead.
The soldiers followed her. She ran up the first steps, slipped on the wet shoe, and caught the rail with both hands.
“Stop,” Caur called.
She kept climbing. Her legs shook by the time she reached the hill. The chalk ring lay around its edge, pale against dry paving. Bir’s broad line was still unbroken.
Above her, the sky was white and deep. Below, the low blue strip bent across the town as if someone had stretched it too far.
A woman beside the gate lifted a child out of Adra’s way.
“I’m bringing the hill down,” Adra told her. “Keep people away from the edge.”
The woman began shouting to others. Adra could hear Caur calling orders from the stair: clear the bridge, open the farm gates, get the carts ready. He had chosen evacuation once she made staying impossible.
She stepped inside the chalk line and opened the book completely.
The three pictures lay flat: a hill on the ground, a hill among clouds, a hill returning. She pressed the returning picture with her palm, as Bir had taught her years ago.
The hill began to sink.
It did not fall. The steps shortened beneath Caur’s boots. Windows slid down past the prison roof. The woman with the child sat on her bundle and held him while the paving trembled.
Adra kept the book open. A gust turned one corner of a page. She caught it before the cover could shut.
Below them, the broken road edges drew together. The man pushing the cart stopped, watched, then shoved again. This time his wheel rolled across.
The blue strip lifted clear of the rooftops. The air above Adra opened into one ordinary sky.
As the hill settled, water spread over the lowest paving. It soaked the chalk at Adra’s feet. The return continued, just as Bir’s small patch had come down in the rain. A new movement needed a fresh dry line, and there was no longer dry paving along this edge.
Caur reached her as she closed the book.
“Give it to me.”
She did.
He took her wrist, less gently than he had offered his hand in the yard.
“You used it before delivery.”
“You have it intact.”
Behind him, people were leaving the court gate for the restored road. A soldier had abandoned his post to help carry a trunk.
Caur looked at the wet chalk. He could not raise this hill again now. Later he might find another place.
“The pardon,” she said.
He led her down to the officer.
Bir left prison at dusk under the bargain Caur had signed that morning. Adra watched the officer hand him the paper.
By then carts were moving over the bridge toward the farms. Issen’s raft carried people who could not reach the road. Adra spent the night at the landing, guiding it against the bank and holding a lamp for the next load.
Three days later, Bir found her there. She wore borrowed boots. Her western wagon had gone.
“How long?” he asked.
“The three weeks I was paid for. Longer if the water stays.”
“You could leave.”
“I spent their money. I said I’d work.”
She pulled the rope tight while two passengers stepped ashore. Bir caught the far end before she asked.
“Are you angry with me?” he said.
“Yes.”
He nodded. She had imagined saying more. There was plenty more, but a woman on the raft was trying to lift a crate that would not fit between the seats.
“Will one of you stop talking and take this?” the woman asked.
Bir bent to receive it. Adra held the raft against the landing. Across the river, the last light touched the road to the farms, and another loaded cart climbed out of the valley.
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