"I'm here , aren't I?" she said to Malingo, holding onto the mast to steady herself.

Malingo joined the laughter now. "Of course you're here," he said. "Where else would you be?"

Candy shrugged. "Just… somewhere I dreamed about."

"Chickentown?"

"How did you guess?"

"The tears."

Candy wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks with her free hand.

"For a minute—" she began.

"You thought you were stuck back there."

She nodded.

"Then when I woke up I wasn't sure for a moment which one was real."

"I think they probably both are," Malingo said. "And maybe one day we'll catch the tide and go back there, you and me."

"I can't imagine why we'd ever do that."

"I can't either," Malingo said. "But you never know. There was a time, I daresay, when you couldn't have imagined being here."

Candy nodded. "It's true," she said.

Her eyes had gone again to the laughing fish. They seemed to be competing with one another to see which of them could leap the highest, and so gain her attention.

"Do you think maybe a part of me has always been here in the Abarat?" Candy asked Malingo.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well… it's that this place feels as though it's home. Not that other place. This ." She looked up. "This sky ." Then at the water. "This sea ." Finally she looked at her hand. "This skin ."

"It's the same skin here as it was there."

"Is it?" she said. "It doesn't feel that way somehow."

Malingo grinned.

"What are you laughing at now?"

"I'm just thinking what a strange one you are. My heroine." He kissed her on the cheek, still grinning. "Strangest girl I ever did meet."

"And how many girls have you met?"

Malingo took a moment or two to make his calculations. Then he said: "Well… just you, actually—if you don't count Mother."

Now it was Candy who started to laugh. And the leaping fish joined in, jumping higher and higher in their delight.

"Do you think they get the joke?" Malingo said.

Candy looked skyward. "I think today the whole world gets the joke," she said.

"Good answer," Malingo replied.

"Look at that," Candy said, pointing up into the heavens. "We must be moving toward a Night Hour. I see stars."

The wind had carried all the clouds off toward the southwest. The sky was now a pristine blue, darkening to purple overhead.

"Beautiful," she said.

Staring up at the pinpricks of starlight, Candy remembered how she had first noticed that the constellations were different here from the way they were in the world she'd come from. Different stars; different destinies.

"Is there such a thing as Abaratian astrology?" she said to Malingo.

"Of course."

"So if I learned to read the stars, I'd maybe discover my future up there. It would solve a lot of problems."

"And spoil a lot of mysteries," Malingo said.

"Better not to know?"

"Better to find out when the time's right. Everything to its Hour."

"You're right of course," Candy said.

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now—in this bright, laughing moment—and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.

Appendix: some excerpts from Klepp's Almenak

FOR A TRAVELER IN THE ABARAT there can be few documents as useful, or as thorough in their contents, as Klepp's Almenak .

It was first published some two hundred years ago, and it is a stew of fact and fiction, in which the author, Samuel Hastrim Klepp, writes one moment as a practical explorer, the next as a mythologist. There are significant errors on every page, but there is some reason to believe that Klepp knew that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. He speaks at one point of his "leavening the flat bread of what we know, w ith the yeast of what wedream may come to pass ."

However questionable its value as a work of truth, there is no doubting the hold Klepp's Almenuk has on the hearts of the people of the Abarat. The Almenak is updated yearly by the current descendant of Klepp, Samuel Hastrim the Fifth. He has kept the contents of the pamphlet much the same as it always was: it chronicles holy days around the archipelago; carrier tables of tides and stars; lists all manner of event, mythical and actual. It carries the rules of two of the Abarat's favorite sports: Mycassian Bug Wrestling and Star-Striking. It also lists Celestial Events, both Benign and Apocalyptic, carries news of appearing islands, and for those with a taste for grim inevitability, it chronicles the– steadyif infinitesimalsinkage of other islands. Besides these, contained within the Almenak 's pages are news of Extinctions, Migrations, Emancipations, and Redefinitions of the Infinite, while for those seeking more practical information it contains maps of every major city, including those that have been destroyed by time or calamity.

It is, in short, the essential guide to the archipelago. Even if (as one Jengo Johnson once calculated), no less than fifty-seven percent of its information is for some reason or other questionable, every sailor and traveling salesman who crosses the Abarat, every pilgrim and pig farmer about the business of worship or gelding, has a copy of the Almenak within reach, and each finds in its contradictory pages something of value.

I would, if I could, reproduce it all here. But that's of course impossible. I will limit myself instead to Klepp's eloquent descriptions of the major Hours, including the Twenty-Fifth, with a few references to what the author dubs "Rocks of Some Significance" (though it is necessarily incomplete; small islands appear and disappear in the Sea of Izabella all the time; a complete listing would be out of date the moment it was printed).

I will list the Hours, as Klepp did, beginning at Noon.

However, I strongly urge anyone tempted to use the information that follows as a literal guide to the islands to proceed with extreme caution. It is worth remembering Samuel Klepp the First died having become lost on one of the Outer Islands. He was found, dead from exposure, with a copy of his own Almenak in his hand. According to a detailed map in the Almenak that he himself had drawn, there was supposed to be a small town that bore his name on the very spot where he had perished; he had no doubt been looking for the town when exposure overtook him. As it happened, no such town existed.

But since his death a town has been founded at that place, to service the sightseers who come to see the spot where the great Almenak maker perished. And yes, it is called Klepp.

His map, then, was correct. It was simply premature.

Such things happen often in the archipelago, especially on those islands closest to the Twenty-Fifth Hour. So be warned.

Here, then, are some brief excerpts from Klepp's descriptions of the Twenty-Five Islands of the Abarat.

"Of the island of Yzil , which is Noon, let me say this: it is a place of exceptional beauty and fruitfulness. Furthermore it does a soul good (sometimes) to stand with the sun directly over his head. Here at Yzil, a man hoping for fame might be reminded to live in the moment and not care too much where his shadow may fall tomorrow, but rather concern himself with where it lies today.