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afraid. The wordless, communicating voice was frightening, and she didn’t know whether her grandfather was referring to it or to the view. He saw her fear and took her off the rail, assuring her softly, “It’s all right, child, it’s all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, you know.” She knew this to be true, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.
    The moment he’d touched her, the ocean call had ceased. She listened hard, but it didn’t reappear.
    She would not hear it again for years, but on that day—she was certain of this now—the caller had located her. It had sought her, knowing she was somewhere. Now it would be able to find her again.
     . . . . . 
    Throughout the next year Leodora spent nearly every day on the span. It teemed and surged with life, with the noises of excitement, the smells of otherness, newness. Bright costumes and plumed caps dazzled her, and facial adornments from rapier-sharp beards to spiky stiffened eyebrows, beauty spots to shaved scalps drifted past to amaze her. One day she saw a man with wide and tightly waxed mustachios, the tips of which burned with blue fire that didn’t consume them. And on another evening a raggedy fellow walked the thoroughfare with a box dangling from a lanyard around his neck while he cranked handles on either side of it, which in turn caused two metal hooks facing each other through the top of the box to spark and burn and glow in the space where they didn’t quite touch. The ragged man looked lost as he went by, and she heard someone say, “From a Dragon Bowl, that. Ruined him.” But when she asked her grandfather about the man, he replied, “Nothing to do with us, Lea, so never you mind it.”
    Her grandfather did not always accompany them. As often he stayed below, on Bouyan, in his workshop, crafting or mending their furniture. Like her uncle Gousier, he was a big man, barrel-chested and powerful.
    The buildings on Ningle, all made of stone, were nothing like the structures she knew on the island. Her own house and those of the fishing village were mostly made of wood and woven thatch. Houses on Ningle were dark and roughly finished, and not quite true. Their angles, as her grandfather showed her, were all slightly off the square. He took her to one street not far from the market where the buildings were so crooked that she couldn’t understand how they didn’t fall over.
    The market comprised a stretch of mismatched awnings, boxes, carts, and poles. In comparison with many of the others nearby, their own stall was clean and orderly. On three sides of the center, whole fish and cleaned fillets lay in ceramic boxes, atop ice chipped from the depths of Fishkill Cavern. Deep blue awnings kept the stall in shadow and cool.
    Gousier usually had someone working for him, someone on Ningle who set up the stall before they arrived and took it down at night, as well as someone to help haul the fish and watch that the clientele didn’t steal. She could remember none of these men—for they were always men—during that year. None of them remained for long. The work was too hard. And—she would later learn—descending to the island for work was considered beneath the dignity of most of Ningle’s denizens; but there were much more reprehensible acts that were not.
    Her uncle seemed to enjoy her company. While they walked and climbed to market each morning, he taught her the names of the fish in his baskets and described how they were caught, what they could be used for. Once the stall was set up he put her right up front, and when someone came by and inquired about one of the fish, Leodora would proudly repeat what she knew about it. Most of the time after listening to her recitation, a customer would buy the fish, and Gousier would tell her, “Why, you’re a fishmonger, child. Look at what you
sold.
” He would give her a coin and let her buy something for herself. Eventually he let her parade up and down the boulevard, calling