She checks the compass again and then leads him down to the captain’s cabin. There is a long table in the center covered in beeswax candles. Leather armchairs are tucked into the corners next to a potbellied stove with a pipe that leads up and out through the deck. Along the back there are multicolored stained-glass windows. Ropes and ribbons and a large hammock covered in blankets hang from the beams in the ceiling. A stuffed bunny with an eye patch and a sword sits on a shelf, along with various other objects. An antlered skull. Clay mugs filled with pens and pencils, jars of ink and paintbrushes. Strings of feathers hang along the walls, drifting as the air changes around them.
Eleanor walks to the far end of the table. In between the candles there is a pile of paper, all different textures and sizes and shapes. Some of it is transparent. Most pieces have lines and annotations.
“It’s hard to map a place that changes,” she explains. “The map has to change along with it.”
She picks up one corner of the pile of paper on the table and attaches it to a hook hung from a rope on the ceiling. She does the same with the other corners and turns a pulley on the wall and the map pieces lift up, attached to each other with ribbons and string. It rises in layers, fluffing up like a multitiered paper cake. The topmost levels are filled with books, Dorian finds the ballroom and then the Heart (a small red jewel of a heart hangs there along with the remains of a watch) and a tall empty space below, cutting through multiple layers. Below there are caverns and roads and tunnels. Looking closer he can see paper cutouts of tall statues, stray buildings, and trees. Gold silk snakes in and out of the lower layers, a tiny boat pinned onto one near the center. The silk trails all the way down to the surface of the table where it pools in waves surrounded by paper castles and towers.
“This is the sea?” Dorian asks, touching the golden silk.
“Sea is easier to say than ‘complicated series of rivers and lakes,’ isn’t it?” Eleanor answers. “It’s all connected but there are different pockets. We’re in one of the higher ones. It goes down here,” she points to the lower levels that are not as detailed as the rest of the map. “But it’s not safe down there if you’re not an owl, it changes too much. This is only what I’ve seen for myself.”
“How far does it go?” Dorian asks.
Eleanor shrugs. “I haven’t found out yet,” she says. “We’re here,” she touches a minuscule boat on one of the golden waves in the center. “We’ll follow along here and turn here,” she indicates two swirls of silk that move upward, “and then I can leave you here.” She points at a series of paper trees.
“How do I get back here?” Dorian asks, pointing up to the Heart.
Eleanor considers the map and then moves to the other side of the table. She gestures toward the opposite side of the forest.
“If you come out here and then go this way,” she points to a path that leads up from the trees, “you should be able to find the inn.” Here there is a building with a tiny lantern. “From the inn you should be able to change roads to get up here.” She brings him around the corner of the map and shows him the paths closest to the Harbor. “Once you’re there your compass should work again and that always points you back here.” She indicates the Heart.
Dorian looks at the chain around his neck that holds the key to his room and the locket-size compass. He opens it and a small amount of honey drips out but the needle spins wildly, unable to find its way.
“Is that what this does?” he asks. No one had explained it to him before.
“It won’t be the same when you get back,” Eleanor says. “Sometimes you can’t go back to the same old place, you have to go to the new ones.”
“I’m not trying to get back to the place,” Dorian says. “I’m trying to get back to a person.” Admitting it aloud feels like an affirmation.
“People change, too, you know.”
“I do know,” Dorian says, nodding. He doesn’t want to think about it. He had always wanted to be in the place but he didn’t understand until he was finally there that the place was merely a way to get to the person and now he has lost them both.
“You might have been gone for a long time already,” Eleanor says. “Time is different down here. It passes slower. Sometimes it doesn’t stop to pass at all and it just skips around.”
“Are we lost in time?”
“You might be. I’m not lost.”
“What are you doing down here?” Dorian asks. Eleanor considers the question, looking at the layers of map.
“For a while I was looking for a person but I didn’t find them and after that I was looking for myself. Now that I’ve found me I’m back to exploring, which is what I was doing in the first place before I was doing anything else and I think I was supposed to be exploring all along. Does that sound silly?”
“That sounds like a great adventure.”
Eleanor smiles to herself. She and Mirabel have the same smile. Dorian wonders what happened to Simon, now that he understands how much space and time there is to be lost in down here. He tries not to think about how much time might have passed above already as Eleanor collapses the map, folding the Heart down into the Starless Sea.
“We’re near a good place for the goodbye,” she says. “If you’re ready.”
Dorian nods and together they return to the deck. They have traveled into another cavern, this one carved with massive alcoves, each alcove containing a towering statue of a person. There are six of them, each holding an object though many of them are broken and all of them are covered in crystallized honey.
“What is this place?” Dorian asks as they walk toward the bow.
“Part of one of the old Harbors,” Eleanor answers. “The sea level was higher the last time I passed through. I should update my map. I thought she’d like it here. She told me once that people who died down here were supposed to be returned to the Starless Sea because the sea is where the stories come from and all endings are beginnings. Then I asked her what happens to people who are born down here and she said she didn’t know. If all endings are beginnings, are all beginnings also endings?”
“Maybe,” Dorian says. He looks down at Allegra’s body, draped in silk and tied with ropes to a wooden door.
“It was all I had that was the right size,” Eleanor explains.