Over The Sea Read Free Page B

as were her eyelashes.
    I pointed at the railing. “Is it marble?” I’d read about marble, but I hadn’t seen any. You didn’t see marble in my neighborhood.
    â€œNot marble.” She smiled. “Other than that I don’t know. Someday I’ll find out, if I can. My cousin says it’s rock-like stuff that only forms on our world, but you don’t quarry it, like rocks. See? There are no stones joined together. It’s shaped by magic, and though our histories claim the mages made it, somehow I don’t think they did, I think they found it.”
    She turned around, her white hair swinging, white against the glistening white walls of a —
    A palace . Above rose towers, with more balconies, reaching toward a sky so deep a blue it was almost like the blue just before sunset, after a rare rain, at home. Because there sure was no smog here.
    â€œA palace?” I said. “It looks like a fairy tale castle!”
    â€œIt’s not a castle,” Clair said. “No walls, see? No arrow slits for windows, nothing for defense. That’s because we’re on a cloud.”
    She pointed back over the balcony, and I stared. Right below was a terrace of the white stuff, and beyond it a garden. But beyond the edges of the garden, nothing, and beyond that a spectacular view. We were high above a vast woodland, for greenery stretched almost to the horizon to the west, and south. I leaned out and peered to the northwest, and saw that the woodland ended, and there was farmland, broken into smallish plots, and little city, with a palace in its center, looking like a toy in the bright sunlight. Hills rose like knuckles in the north.
    In the southwest several mountains, like old volcanic cones, reached skyward, their tops cloud-wreathed; more directly south, beyond the woodland below, the bluish sparkle of a lake threw back the sunlight in a million shards. The southeast appeared to be farmland, just barely discernible squares of different colors.
    I looked beyond the edge again. Realized how far down that woodland was, and I got that stomach-drop squinch you get inside when you first start swinging high, and fall back down.
    â€œCastles — palaces — can’t be on clouds,” I said, holding on. As if that would keep me from falling! “Clouds are vapor. I know that much.”
    â€œIt’s cloud if you see it from below,” Clair said. “But we’re really standing on part of the ground-surface lifted into the air. Remember what I told you about the Chwahir?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, the entire city was lifted — again by great magic — as a defense against them.”
    â€œYikes,” I managed, thinking that the crashing down of a city in the sky would be a million times worse than the earthquakes at home. “Do, um, spells run out? Like batteries?”
    â€œSpells do diminish over time, but you know of it,” she said. “And this one is good for another five hundred years or so. Maybe more.” Her forehead was broad and mostly smooth; when she said those words a faint pucker shadowed it. I’d figure out way later that she wasn’t all that sure about five hundred years of a city above another city, even if the Mearsieans were on the top and the Chwahir below.
    â€œWow,” I said, and looked up again, seeing archways and windows and balconies, most of them with curves, few square angles. It was beautiful. “Floob,” I added, because Wow just didn’t seen strong enough.
    Clair laughed, so quiet a sound you almost couldn’t hear it, but her mouth curved up and her eyes turned into crescents, looking at that moment far more green than they usually did.
    It was then that I connected what I was seeing with her stories. And what she’d said just after our arrival.
    Another world? Over the sea — as in one of the summer stars?
    I looked around again, wonder making my heart go