“Is the almanac lying when it doesn’t rain on a day it called for rain? Or was it simply wrong? Being mistaken isn’t lying.”

  “I know that,” said Plato.

  “Then indeed you have the wisdom of Socrates.”

  There was not a sign that Plato knew who Socrates was, let alone that he had anything to do with the ancient Greek Plato he had been named for.

  Calvin held out the cube of crystal to Goody Lamb.

  “Is it heavy?” she asked.

  “Do I look like a massively strong fellow to you, ma’am?” asked Calvin. “Whereas you are well-muscled and strong.”

  “Are you talking about my wife’s body, sir?” asked Plato.

  “Indeed I am, because I can see that she is strong enough to carry this crystal, as can any man. Am I not to speak of what is plain to see?”

  Plato was seething, and Calvin knew why. It had nothing to do with Calvin’s speaking freely about Goody Lamb’s musculature, and everything to do with the fact that Plato thought his wife was too enamored with Calvin by far.

  As she should be, thought Calvin. I’m giving her what she wants.

  “It won’t bring Nat back to us,” said Plato.

  “I just want to see if he’s still alive, and maybe where he is.”

  “And if you see a vision of him dead at the bottom of the sea?”

  Goody Lamb gasped and turned away from him. Several of the watching men said things like, “That was harsh, Plato,” and “Have pity on the lady,” and “Have some manners, man.”

  Goody Lamb turned back around to face him. “If that’s what I see, then I’ll know.”

  Calvin felt obliged to intervene. “Even if you see just what your husband said, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. It might be a sign of something that might happen. Sometimes visions in the crystal don’t have any meaning we can guess at.”

  “Then why are we doing this?” demanded Plato.

  Mildly, Calvin said, “Sir, this is what your wife asked for. Have I promised her a clear vision of something true? By word or hint?”

  “No,” said Plato.

  “We’re here because your wife wanted a chance to learn something about what your son is doing now. I told her that the quest might be fruitless, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” said Goody Lamb, defending him.

  The onlookers nodded and murmured their agreement.

  “He promises nothing, and yet fools like us keep coming to him hoping for … something.”

  “Hope isn’t foolish, so you’re not fools. Nor am I. I didn’t ask to be a seventh son like my brother. Nor have I sought to have the same powers as him, only whatever I’m granted by birth. I try to help when people ask, but if nobody wants what it’s in my power to give, I won’t force anybody to take it as a gift. Nor do I ask for payment of any kind, any more than Alvin does. How can I deal with you more honorably than I have?”

  Of course, he knew exactly which of his statements were lies, and the whole gist of this little speech was dishonest. Of course he would have his payment. Of course he knew that by using Goody Lamb’s blood to make a crystal cube out of muddy river water, more people would to come to him, asking for this or that miracle.

  “I’ll carry it for you,” Plato said to his wife.

  “I wish you could,” said Calvin, “but it’s her blood in the crystal, and only she can carry it, if there’s to be any hope of vision in it.”

  Plato looked at the crystal in consternation.

  Goody Lamb reached out again to take the cube.

  “Wait,” said Plato. “Her wrist is wounded. What if it weakens her hand and she drops it?”

  “Then we’ll find out if the crystal is too fragile to be dropped,” said Calvin. “No one will take sick, no boat will sink, no bridge will collapse, no farm will get a blight—so, what if she drops it?”

  While Calvin was talking, he watched Plato Lamb examine his wife’s wrist, turning it over again and again. “You gave me the wrong wrist,” said Plato.

  “That’s the one,” she said.

  “Give me your other wrist.”

  She rolled her eyes at Calvin—she’s on my side now! he gloated—and held out her other wrist to her husband. He examined that one, too.

  “Blood came out of the wound,” said Plato.

  “I think we all saw that,” said Calvin.

  “Where did the pin go in? Where did the blood come out?”

  Calvin handed the cube to Goody Lamb, who held it easily. Then he bent down and picked up the pin from the grass. “I see no blood on this pin,” he said. He handed it to Plato. “Can you see any sign that this pin ever made anyone to bleed?”

  Not for the first time, Calvin wished he had paid more attention when Alvin tried to teach him how to heal deep. He could close up the superficial wound and block up the blood from coming out anymore, but injuries deeper in along the pin’s trajectory through her wrist, he had no idea what to do about those things. So blood would continue seeping out within her wrist, and the bruise would be vivid and sensitive, and Calvin knew that Alvin could have made it like new. But making it look healed was enough for these trusting folk. And it should be enough. Alvin put himself to a lot of trouble that nobody would ever understand but Calvin, and he thought it was all wasted effort. What mattered was that they were content, they believed she had been healed.

  Calvin didn’t bother claiming that he had done it. Who else could it have been?

  “It isn’t heavy, Plato,” said Goody Lamb, “and it doesn’t slide in my grip, so I’ll carry it.”

  “Where to?” asked Calvin.

  “Why…” It was clear she had given this no thought. “Home?” she asked.

  “It’s your crystal cube,” said Calvin.

  “But you don’t think I should take it home.”

  Calvin shrugged. “What do I know? Alvin probably could answer you. He’s older and more experienced and more powerful, so all I can say is, there’s a reason Alvin puts the crystals all together to make walls and towers. I think the crystals give each other clarity and strength. I think that in isolation, you may see far less than your blood has earned you the right to see.”

  The whole assemblage followed Goody Lamb and her husband up the hill to the main hall of the Crystal Palace, as many called it. Crystal fortress, that’s what it looked like to Calvin. In the first hall, Goody Lamb stopped. “Where should I put it?” she asked.

  “I think you shouldn’t remove any blocks that are already there. Though your crystal has as much right to be in the wall anywhere you see fit.”

  Then Calvin turned to the onlookers. “You’ve seen all there is to see. None of you should know where Goody Lamb chooses to put her crystal. Not even you, Plato, my friend. It’s hers to gaze into, not for anyone else. Her blood may have opened vistas into memories and histories that no one but her has a right to know.”

  Heeding his words, Goody Lamb simply stood there, waiting for the others to take the hint. One by one, and then in bigger clumps, they broke away and left the building. Plato was last to go. “I want to know where you put it,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked. “It’s not yours to look at.”

  “What if you need help putting it into place?”

  “I’ll choose a place where I can put it without any help,” said Goody Lamb.

  Calvin thought: When I’m out of sight, she will remove one of Alvin’s crystals and replace it with this one of mine. They always did.

  “I’m going,” said Calvin. “This is a matter for Goody Lamb and the walls and no one else.”

  Calvin walked down a hall, not toward the door they had come in through.

  When he was far enough away, he sat down with his back against a wall and perused the blocks opposite him. The light was still good and he could see little scenes playing out. The people couldn’t be real—they were too small—so this was only a vision, or several visions, Calvin couldn’t be sure if the scenes all worked together somehow. He saw boats sailing on a choppy sea. They were small, and many of them shouldn’t be on a rough lake, let alone on the open ocean, yet he could see that that was where they were.

  Then he saw that Alvin was standing in the lead boat—standing! Had he never been in a small boat before?

  He didn’t have to stay here and watch Alvin do some amazing thing. He stood up and walked by another way to where he sensed Goody Lamb would be.

  She wasn’t there. He kept looking, and soon found her. She was sitting, sprawling really, with her head leaning against the wall. She was weeping.

  Calvin knelt beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder. It was a gentle touch, but he made sure that it felt electric to her, not a shock but a trembling that went right through her. It was, by his power, as intimate a touch as was possible while she was wearing clothing.

  She calmed and stopped crying. “Calvin,” she said. “I can’t see him.”

  “Crystals don’t always begin to work until they’ve had a chance to clarify,” he said. A lie—Alvin’s crystals worked the moment they were set in place. “May I see?”

  Goody Lamb placed her palm flat on a block that was, of course, a perfect cube. She had to have removed a block of Alvin’s in order to put it where it was.

  “The crystal that was here before,” Calvin said.

  “I pushed it back so this one could take its place.”

  “But none of these blocks are cubes,” he said.

  “When the other one was gone, the adjacent blocks stretched to fill the gap,” she said.

  “Well, then, of course it will take some time for the crystal to get used to its new place, and for the adjacent blocks to welcome it.”

  “So it might still work?” she pleaded.

  “I don’t know,” said Calvin. He moved his hand across her shoulder to her other side, then drew her closer to him, folding her shoulders into his embrace, and turning her to rest her face against his chest. Again, he sent a trembling through her body, the kind of trembling that he knew women liked to feel.

  “Is there anything I can do to help it now?” she asked.

  Calvin held his silence, wanting it to unfold gradually. Wanting it to come from her.

  “It’s my blood in the cube, isn’t it? Can’t I … do something to call forth visions? To call my son to show himself?”

  “Your son has no control here. If it shows him, he won’t know you’re seeing him. As I told you.”

  “I know, but … he is my blood, and the crystal has my blood.”

  “And my power,” Calvin reminded her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Your power and my blood.”

  Almost there, thought Calvin.

  “Can we … join together somehow, to make it come to life?”

  “I don’t know,” said Calvin. “It isn’t magic, and I don’t know the science behind it.”

  She rested a hand on his chest, then his neck, then his cheek. “What if we drew closer together? Combining, the way the blood and water are joined in the crystal?”

  “I have no idea,” said Calvin, once again giving her a thrill of pleasure. Encouraging her to speak boldly.

  “I’m a good woman, Calvin,” she said.

  “I know you are,” said Calvin. “A mother who longs for her son, who will do anything that might bring you word or sight or sound of him.” Too obvious? thought Calvin.

  Her hand stroked his cheek, then moved up into his hair. “You have shown me such kindness,” she said. “You understand me so well.”

  “I think I do know the longings of your heart,” he said. Another thrill through her body.

  She leaned up and put her lips on his. A sweet kiss. And then another. And then a hungrier kiss. Of course Calvin cooperated.

  “I do feel closer to you,” he whispered.

  “And I to you,” she said. And then, “Would you … would you be willing to call me Jane?”

  That was not her name, he knew. “Why that name?” he asked.

  “My name before I married Plato, it wasn’t Lamb, it was Grey. And my mother always called me Lady Jane Grey. The Nine Days Queen. I … want to be your queen for a little time, Calvin.”

  In reply he reached up, loosened his tie, took off his collar. Then he knelt up and shrugged off his coat.

  She was already halfway down her bodice, unbuttoning as she went. “Oh, Calvin, there are so many clothes.”

  “And inside them,” said Calvin softly, “our truest selves, waiting to be joined together in power and love … for your son, for Nat.”

  And as he kissed her again, and then took off his shirt, he sent his doodlebug to close off both ends of this corridor by shutting some doors and opening others. No one would disturb them.

  15

  THIS WAS THE tedious kind of job that wore Alvin out. Every board in every ship and boat had to be joined to the boards next to it, with an unbreakable bond, as if the boards had grown together in the same tree. It would not guarantee that the hull would not be shattered by some outside force—two boats ramming each other, or being attacked by a whale or shark in arctic waters—but the hulls would be all of one piece, so that the normal flexion of the wood in shifting water would not cause friction between them or spring leaks in the hull.

  Or so he reasoned. He had carefully done something like this with the hull of the ship that brought him and John and Measure over to Ireland, and the main result was that he heard the captain and first mate of the ship talking about how strange it was that they couldn’t pump out the bilge, because there was no water in it. Apparently, larger ships were equipped with pumps, because hulls always leaked. And Alvin’s version of their hull didn’t.

  That had been one ship, bigger than any in Alvin’s little fleet, and it had exhausted him the first two days of the voyage. He had been working at a greater distance from the wood that time, because he didn’t think the crew would look kindly on a passenger wandering around in the bowels of the ship. Here, he could see the boards he was joining. He wished now that he had brought Verily Cooper along to help, to do half the boats, at least. But Verily was needed back in Crystal City, to help fend off any legal challenges to the Crystal City charter that gave the city virtual independence from the Noisy River state government.

  This boat was done. Ship. One of the seafaring folk had called it that. He didn’t ask what the difference was, because they called some larger vessels boats, so it wasn’t just a matter of size. Every board in the hull was part of a single, well-shaped board. How strange the tree would have looked, that could have this hull-shaped board cut out of it.

  He lay down in the bottom of the … ship. Under the deck. Was it having decks that made a boat into a ship? He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

  And opened them almost immediately, because of some called-out commands and the sounds of heavy feet on the deck above him. Apparently they were loading this ship and reinstalling some of the fittings that he’d had them pull out while he was working on the hull. The fittings all had to be removable during the voyage, without harming the integrity of the hull. It wouldn’t do to have a bulkhead that was not movable because Alvin had accidentally fused it to the hull.

  Alvin sat up, feeling strangely refreshed, stooped under the rafters, or whatever they were called on a ship, everything had different names on the sea. He made it to the ladderway up to the lower deck, and then the next ladderway up to the top deck, the one that got sunlight in good weather and rain the rest of the time. Which in Irish waters meant nearly every day, or so it seemed.

  Sunny today.

  Sunny this morning. The sun was a hand above the horizon on the east side of the ship. Alvin had not taken a quick nap, he had slept through the night.

  Jedediah was supervising the loading of stores aboard the ship. He was having various crates and barrels arranged on the deck, to balance the load before it was hauled below deck.

  “Leave some room for the passengers,” said Alvin cheerfully.

  “Still alive,” said Jedediah. “Had us worried.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You don’t think we tried?” said Jedediah. “I never heard there was a knack for sleeping like the dead, but if there is, you’ve got it strong, boy-o.”

  “I never sleep that sound,” Alvin began.

  “We didn’t say you was noisy!” said Lovey Maloney, who was loading candles into the cabin under the poop deck. “You slept silent, sir. But Sheen even tried tickling your nose with a feather, and you never even changed your breathing, you like to sucked in the whole feather, but Sheenie didn’t let go of it, no sir. That’s why you don’t have a feather in your chest.”

  Alvin could picture Rosheen doing that—she was respectful, but she would also do what it took to make sure whether Alvin was breathing or not.

  “I’m glad she held on tight,” said Alvin.

  “She always does,” said Lovey. “But it isn’t her knack, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s just careful, and I’ve felt her grip before, sir. It’s no knack, it’s just brute force, about as strong as Da.”

  Since Alvin had never met Rosheen’s and Lovey’s father, he couldn’t size him up in his mind. Maybe Lovey was exaggerating. Or maybe Da gripped with only a part of his strength, while Rosheen would clamp down with all her force on her sister’s arm. And anyway, gripping a feather had more to do with the strength of her fingers. “Where’s your sister now, Lovey?”

  “Bandaging some injuries. That’s what she mostly does, cause people keep getting bashed and sliced and broken.”

  Jedediah spoke up again, having placed the last of the casks and ascertained that the ship was level in the water. “A lot of landlubbers who can’t get used to walking and working on a deck with a bit of movement to it. I think during the voyage we’re going to need to keep everybody tied to a rope so they aren’t always falling overboard.”

  “Sliced and broken?” asked Alvin.

  “And bashed,” said Lovey.

  “Looks like you’ve done a fine job here, Jedediah,” said Alvin.

  “A perfect job, cause nothing less will do at sea,” he said. “Now if we can just stow it below exactly as it is right now on deck.”

  “I’m curious how you knew to plan out the lading on deck like this.”