“So you never saw one?” asked Lovey.

  “Never even heard of one, and truth to tell, I’ve been in every part of the United States, a couple of places in New England, and even spent some serious time in the Crown Colonies and Nueva Barcelona.”

  “And none of them places had cheese bushes?” asked Lovey.

  “If they did, nobody told me a thing about them,” said Alvin.

  “Are you lying to me?” asked Lovey.

  “About what?”

  “About cheese bushes.”

  “I didn’t tell you a blamed thing about them,” said Alvin. “Because I never heard of them.”

  “But you’re from America!”

  “True,” said Alvin, closing his eyes again.

  “Elisha Kent Kane said they grew in every state and Crown Colony and even in New England. Everywhere.”

  “Then don’t you think it’s Brother Kane’s job to lead you to one of these cheese bushes?”

  “He said he won’t have time.”

  “That’s a crying shame. Because I don’t even know where to begin looking.”

  Alvin could tell from her breathing that Lovey was still there.

  She poked him.

  “I’m already awake,” said Alvin, allowing himself to sound a little irked, since poking sleepers wasn’t the smartest habit to let her develop.

  “I been thinking, while you was lying there pretending to sleep. First thing is, you’re older than Elisha.”

  “I imagine that’s so, though we haven’t traded birthdays yet.”

  “And you been everywhere in America, right?”

  “Everywhere a White man is allowed to go, and even a few where he isn’t.”

  “And you never heard of cheese bushes even though they’re supposed to be everywhere.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “That’s three things. You’re older so you’ve experienced more than Elisha Kent Kane. Second, you’ve been all over America, at least way more than Elisha Kent Kane.”

  “Way more than most anybody,” said Alvin, but he thought of his old friend Taleswapper and was pretty sure Taleswapper would mock him for making such a claim.

  “Third, you never heard of cheese bushes.”

  “Not yet, except from you.”

  “And you aren’t lying to me now because I’m a child?”

  Alvin sighed. “You have the impression that adults lie to children?”

  “A lot.”

  “Wow,” said Alvin.

  “All the time,” said Lovey.

  “So why did you believe that yarn about cheese bushes?”

  “Because Elisha Kent Kane has been to Yale!”

  “Do you even know what Yale is?” asked Alvin.

  “It’s where you learn everything, and he’s been there.”

  “Then I’ll expect you and him to lead me to a cheese bush as soon as we get well ashore.”

  “When will that be?” asked Lovey.

  “I wish I knew. We’ve been caught in this strange patch of still waters, which I never heard of happening this far north, so I don’t think we’re making much progress.”

  “Are we going to starve to death?” asked Lovey.

  “I don’t plan to. Is that something you wanted to do? Because you could have stayed in Ireland for that.”

  “Sheen says that Elisha Kent Kane never been to Yale,” said Lovey.

  “I wonder how she came to know that,” said Alvin.

  “Because she says that if he went to university, he’d be smarter than anybody who hadn’t.”

  “I wonder if that’s true,” said Alvin.

  “Sheen doesn’t lie, not to me.”

  “Who does she lie to?”

  Alvin could hear Lovey catch her breath. “Never known her to tell a lie.”

  “That’s what I might have said of you, till you laid that whopper on me just this minute.”

  “What whopper!”

  “That you never knew Sheen to tell a lie. You’ve heard her lie all the time. So have I.”

  “Not bad lies.”

  “Does that mean there are good lies?”

  “If somebody is hiding and if you tell about them, they’ll be arrested and maybe kilt, so you say you don’t know where they be, and the bad men ride away.”

  “That’s a good lie, you think,” said Alvin.

  “And when you tell a child everything’s going to be all right when you know that it isn’t true, but if you tell her the truth it won’t make her any happier, so why not tell the lie that keeps her happy?”

  “Good lies, happy lies.”

  “Why would Brother Elisha tell me all about cheese bushes if there’s no such thing?”

  Alvin chuckled. “Because you believed it. And it was fun for him to make up all kinds of facts about those bushes, because he did go to Yale, so he knows how to talk pretty scientific about a lot of things in the natural world.”

  “He went to Yale so he could tell better lies?”

  “What do you think, Lovey?”

  “I think I’m never going to believe him again.”

  “Well, I hope he’s never the one they send to call you to supper.”

  Lovey stood there beside Alvin’s hammock a little longer.

  “Still got a question?” Alvin asked.

  “In all our talking about cheese bushes, you never once called Mr. Elisha Kent Kane a liar.”

  “Of course not, because he’s not a liar.”

  “He lied to me all morning.”

  “Did he?”

  “Are there cheese bushes?” demanded Lovey.

  “As far as I know, there’s—”

  “Don’t lie. ‘As far as I know’ is a lie. Don’t say it. Say what you know.”

  “What I know is that cows, goats, and sheep all give milk, and if you put it in cheesecloth and tie up the top and hang it in a springhouse or some other cool place, some of the milkwater seeps out of it and when you open it, there’s cheese.”

  “No bushes,” said Lovey.

  “You said for me to tell you what I know. I helped my parents and my sisters make so many pounds of cheese—good cheese, too, which we sold to our neighbors around Christmas and they called it the best cheese in the county.”

  “Your sisters. Why not your brothers? I know you’ve got at least the one.”

  “I was laid up with a bad leg, so I couldn’t go out and earn money by working like my brothers could. So I stayed home and learned women’s work from my ma and my sisters.”

  “Women’s work?” asked Lovey.

  “Not when I was doing it. Then it was lame boy’s work.”

  “So a lame boy is as strong as a regular woman?” asked Lovey.

  “Lovey, when a woman comes out in the field to split rails or lay fences or dig ditches, she’s slow and clumsy because that’s not the work she’s used to doing. She doesn’t have the muscles for it. If I handed her my hammer and tongs at the forge, she wouldn’t even know how to begin doing my work, because I prenticed with a blacksmith and I learned everything he knew, plus a few things he never dreamed of.”

  “So women are bad at men’s work.”

  “Everybody’s bad at work they don’t know how to do. Did your ma teach you how to sew a seam?”

  “As straight a seam as you ever saw,” said Lovey

  “I can’t do that,” said Alvin. “I’ve tried, but it keeps wiggling away and tries to get off the seam.”

  “That can’t happen if you’re watching.”

  “What about if I’m watching, but my fingers don’t push the needle up through the cloth from the right place on the underside?”

  “You said you did women’s work, so you should know.”

  “I didn’t say I did it well,” said Alvin.

  The boat moved. Or the ship, rather. It had masts and sails for a breeze to catch.

  “Either a huge shark just bumped into us from below,” said Alvin.

  “Or a whale,” said Lovey. “They’re nice.”

  “Not all, but mostly, yes. Either it was some big swimmy thing that made us move, or…”

  “Wind.” said Lovey.

  “How can we be sure? Whale or wind?”

  “We could go outside and look,” said Lovey.

  “That feels a bit like cheating to me, but we’re not in school, so if you want to get all empirical about it, by all means go and see.”

  Lovey burst back into Alvin’s cabin only a few seconds later. “Not a whale,” she cried. “Not a shark! Not a dolphin, not a conspiracy of seagulls, not a thousand flying fish circling over the boat—”

  “Wind?” asked Alvin softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Waves?” asked Alvin.

  “A little bit of chop, but no, it’s the wind driving us, the sail is full.”

  Alvin smiled, lying there in his hammock.

  “You smiling because we’re moving again?”

  “That, and also smiling about why we’re catching this breeze.”

  “So tell me why?”

  “The calm water we were caught in, that wasn’t natural.”

  She thought a moment. “Somebody’s knack?”

  “Not exactly, but close. The water was flat and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Neither could any of our knacky folk, even the ones who had a tolerable good relationship with the wind or with water.”

  “Who was doing it? Making the water still?”

  “I’ve heard you children calling boat to boat, talking about the follower.”

  “Little ship, two-man crew, never gets close enough to hale or far enough to lose sight of us,” said Lovey.

  “Starting to talk like a sailor.”

  “Sheen says she’ll feed me soap if I ever talk like a sailor!”

  “Oh, there’s no bad-talking sailor in our flotilla right now. I just meant that you know something about the sea, about the ships and sails. And you see well afar off.”

  “Thank you,” said Lovey, “but that’s not my knack.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it would be so dull if I didn’t have a really useful knack. So I’m still waiting to find it.”

  Good luck, thought Alvin. Them as don’t have a knack wish for a really extravagant one—walking on water, raising the dead, turning foul water into pure, getting dolphins to bring us fish. But us as has that kind of flamboyant knack, or several, or a lot of them, we’uns wish we could just eat and drink and plow and plant like everybody else. Just wield a hammer at an anvil beside a forge, a man’s work to make a man’s living. I didn’t ask to be the seventh of seven. And why not the seventh child? Why weren’t girls in the count? That would be his sister Matilda, still living in Vigor Church because she said, “I don’t like to leave the old homeplace.”

  Matilda was the seventh child of our parents. She had knacks, some good ones. Nobody made tighter baskets than Matilda. Folks said, you get you one of Matilda’s baskets, you’ll never want for a bucket, cause her baskets hold water better.

  Matilda laughed at such praise. “I try to weave a tight basket, but you go carrying water in baskets, the handle will break or the reeds will get too soft and spring leaks. Just isn’t practical. What I ask of my basket is that no berries fall through, and no snake get in.”

  Alvin realized now, for the first time, that Matilda might have been claiming her real knack. Berries falling through, that was about the weave. But no snakes inside? A basket with an open top would be no barrier to any self-respecting snake. But snakes never got in her baskets, and Alvin believed it. It’s a knack right enough. He just wondered if the barrier was only against snakes or if it kept other bad things out, too.

  Can’t ask her now, too far away, though maybe I’ll pass through Vigor Church as I lead this company to Crystal City.

  Not exactly on the way, but they weren’t in a race, now, were they. No reason they couldn’t stray from the road for Alvin to take a visit home.

  Alvin swung his legs out of the hammock, which pushed it back against the wall, so he was immediately balancing on his feet. Hammocks are the most ridiculously unmanageable bed you could imagine, except that there was nothing better in a ship at sea. Wooden beds would keep sliding all over, or be hinged to a bulkhead, and no matter what you did, they were still made of wood. The hammock swayed with the motion of the ship, but it never jolted unless something was wrong that made it necessary to stand up and go somewhere.

  He stood up from the hammock and saw that Lovey was already gone, the door to the cabin open. Didn’t matter. Nobody came in without knocking either way. Alvin strode out onto the deck and saw that everybody was securing the sails. Alvin imagined they might have slacked off in their duties, during so long a time without wind or current.

  Alvin looked back at the followers. He knew one. It was Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, Scottish Rite preacher, graduate of a seminary, who came out to the American West to convert the Reds. A man who had truck with the Unmaker and thought it was an angel. If Thrower had a useful knack, Alvin had never seen a sign of it. Certainly calming the sea and stilling the wind were not in his toolkit.

  So Thrower had gotten the Unmaker to do it. The Unmaker worked powerful strong on water. Alvin knew that all too well. So many times he came near to death from water, and yet always something saved him at the last moment. Now he knew it had always been Margaret, who pulled a caul from his face when he was first born, so he could draw breath. She kept that caul, because it had been part of him in the womb, and when it dried, she would pinch off just enough of it to give her part of Alvin’s power. She used bits of his power to save baby Alvin’s life from whatever danger had caught him. She was just a child herself, but she took on the responsibility of keeping him alive, because she had seen in his heartfire and he knew she had seen him dying a hundred times in a hundred ways, and it was her job, she had decided, to keep him alive.

  That wasn’t why he married her—gratitude. Margaret didn’t need someone to marry her for any reason but her own beauty, her grace, and her marvelous knack of always knowing what was in the other person’s heart.

  “You’re thinking about her,” said Elisha, standing beside him now.

  “I was looking at the followers.”

  “Oh, I know, I saw you. But then that look came over your face, the look you always get when you think of Margaret.”

  “Do I?”

  “I hope someday I’ll love a woman the way you love her.”

  “I hope that for you, too. But there’s no other such, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to make do.”

  “What do you see in the followers’ ship?”

  “I know one of the men, knew him immediately. Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, a preacher in my family’s church when I was a child.”

  “Why doesn’t he come forward and give us good-day?”

  “Because the highest ambition in his heart is to murder me, in the service of his god, the Unmaker.”

  Elisha looked shocked. “Wants to kill you?”

  “Oh, he’s tried. Never can bring it off.”

  “How do you stop him?”

  “He stops himself. Whatever else is true of him, he’s not a killer in his heart. Not even when he’s convinced that his victim is the most evil human being ever born, worse than Judas Iscariot, worse than Pharaoh, worse than all the priests of Baal put together.”

  “So why did he follow us?”

  “I connected this calm we were in to the Unmaker, which was why my knack couldn’t do anything against it, not out here surrounded by water. But for all that the Unmaker was able to do, he couldn’t make us sink, he couldn’t pry apart the boards of the hulls of these ships. Even his little ship is one I fused together to have a perfect seal.”

  “So did the … the Unmaker change his—its—mind?”

  “Not even sure if it has a mind,” said Alvin. “But no. You can see the sea is still flat, except for the tracks our moving vessels leave behind them in the water.”

  “So it’s wind alone moving us now.”

  “I toyed with asking whales to give us a push, but so many ships go out to kill whales for lamp oil and ladies’ corsets that I didn’t want to give any whale a reason to trust men in boats.”

  Elisha swallowed. “You can talk to whales?”

  Alvin chuckled. “Margaret Larner had me read Shakespeare and memorize some lines. My favorite has always been, this Welsh military man brags, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep!’ and Hotspur answers him, ‘Aye, so can I, and so can any man. But do they come when you do call for them?’”

  Elisha laughed. “Henry the Fourth, right?”

  “One of the Henrys. Miz Larner never insisted that I know the play, the act, the scene. She knew I wasn’t headed for a life on the stage.”

  “You still haven’t told me where the wind came from.”

  “Not sure that I should. Where the Unmaker can hear.”

  “It has ears? It can hear?”

  “Reckon so, but as I said, not all that sure of how smart it is. Thrower’s companion and crewman on that ship, he came with Thrower intending to do slaughter at his command. But he also had a plan of his own. Because he’s one of us—he has a knack.”

  “A knack for wind,” whispered Elisha.

  “I didn’t know, but I hoped. I suspect he and Thrower are running low on food and water, and he thought we must be the same, so out of mercy he ended our captivity and freed himself and Thrower from their vigil.”

  Elisha said, “Won’t they still come after us and do it again?”

  “Do you see any wind in their sail?”

  “Oh,” said Elisha. “It’s slack against the pole.”

  “No, blowing in the opposite direction from ours,” said Alvin. “That’s some powerful knack.”

  “You don’t think Thrower will notice?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he already has. He knows that his servant has risen up against him and is helping his enemy—that would be me. You know how I said that Thrower wasn’t a killer.”

  “Of you, he’s not a killer of you.”

  “Not really of any man. Or animal. Don’t expect him to slaughter a pig. He’s fine with swatting flies, though.”

  “So his companion the windmage is safe?”

  “Oh, no. Thrower is probably planning to give him a push into the water. He just doesn’t know how strong a swimmer the fellow is, I bet.”