The morning the sea turned to glass, Edda woke to total silence. No waves, no birds. From her window the whole harbor looked frozen smooth and shining. She sat at her desk and, almost without thinking, dipped her pen and inked a brand-new coastline onto a blank chart: cliffs, a bay, a row of sharp rocks. None of it was real. By the time the ink dried, a fisherman was pounding on her door, shouting that ships were sailing toward land that had never been there before.

Edda didn't run to the docks or grab her pen. Instead she asked the question that scared her most: why now, and why her? She rolled up the chart and hurried across town to old Mistress Pell, the one person who might know what her ink had done.