The puddle is the size of a wagon wheel and still trembling from the last fat raindrop when King Ted steps directly into the center of it. Not the edge. Not the slightly raised stone he had a clean shot at. The center. His left boot sinks until the mud closes brown and patient around his ankle, and he says, with the particular dignity of a man whose crown has slipped slightly forward over one eye, "Ah. Yes. I meant to do that." No one in the forest believes him, including the forest.

Bellyroo, three paces behind, makes the small chuffing noise that, in Bellyroo, passes for laughter. Bellyroo is roughly the height of a tall child and roughly the shape of a small barrel with opinions, and Bellyroo's pouch, slung across the chest like a satchel, sloshes audibly with each hop. It sloshes because it contains, at present, a spoon, two acorns of suspicious origin, a length of green ribbon, a pebble Bellyroo is fond of for reasons Bellyroo has never explained, and a small jar of something that was once jam and is now closer to a hobby. We will, in time, come to know that pouch better than we know some of our cousins. For now: it sloshes. "You could just go around," Bellyroo offers. "A king," says Ted, attempting to extract his boot, "does not go around." "A king," Bellyroo says, "is standing in a puddle."

Ted concedes the point with the grace of a man who has no choice. He plants one hand on his knee, leans, pulls. The boot comes free with a noise like the forest clearing its throat. Mud spatters his cloak. The crown slips further. And it is precisely at that moment, in that ungainly half crouch, that Ted notices the gleam. It is not the gleam of a coin. Coins gleam silver or gold or, in the cheaper sort of kingdom, suggestion. This gleam is wrong for any of those. It is faintly warm in color, the way a window looks from outside on a cold evening. And it is under the mud. "Bellyroo," Ted says quietly. "Come look at this."

Bellyroo hops over and peers down. The two of them squat at the edge of the puddle like men reading bad news in a newspaper. Ted reaches in. His fingers close on something papery, which should be impossible, because paper does not survive a forest puddle, and yet here it is, intact, when he draws it up. He rinses it as best he can in the cleaner water at the puddle's edge. Mud sloughs off in dark ribbons.

What's left is a square of something that is almost paper and almost not. It is the color of cream left out too long. There are markings on it, faint, brown, careful. And it is, Ted realizes as he holds it between his palms, warm. Not the warmth of a thing that has been sitting in the sun. The sun has not been out in two days. The warmth of a thing with its own opinion about temperature. "Huh," says Ted. "That's not a puddle thing," Bellyroo says, which is, in its way, a complete and accurate review. Ted turns it. The markings do not resolve into anything he recognizes. There is a shape that might be a coastline, or might be a sleeping animal, or might be a smear. He squints. He tilts. The lines slide under his attention, which is unusual behavior for lines.

Above them, the clouds, which have been a single gray ceiling all morning, part. Not dramatically. Just enough. A pale shaft of light finds the path, finds Ted's muddy boot, finds the back of his hand. He does what a more cautious man would not do. He lifts the map into the light. The paper, if it is paper, warms further against his palms. The brown lines flare gold. They go on flaring, slow and steady, the way a coal does when you breathe on it, until the whole square is glowing in his hands like a held candle, and the shape that was almost a coastline is suddenly, unmistakably, a coastline. An island. A familiar one. The little hook of its northern cape. The two bays. The cluster of hills at the center where the old stones lean. "That's home," Ted says.

"That's home," Bellyroo agrees, in the voice of someone who has just seen their kitchen on a stranger's wall. But it is not only home. Ted tilts the map, and the glow shifts, and beneath the inked outline of the island, beneath it, where there should be sea or the back of the paper or nothing at all, there are points of light. Small. Scattered. Cold and silver in a way the rest of the map is warm and gold. They are arranged the way stars are arranged, which is to say, not arranged at all, and yet looking right. The island is floating in them. Ted opens his mouth. Closes it. The glow at the edges of the map is already beginning to dim, retreating inward like a tide. "Bellyroo," he says, "the root. The dry one. Quickly."

Bellyroo hops to a thick root arching out of the bank, scrubs it with one paw, and Ted lays the map flat between them. They crouch over it shoulder to shoulder, the king with one muddy boot and his crown askew, the companion with a sloshing pouch and very round eyes, and they watch. The gold pulls in further. The coastline holds. Below it, in that impossible dark, the little silver stars pulse once, together, like something taking a breath. And then they hold. Neither Ted nor Bellyroo speaks for a long moment. Somewhere up the path, a last drop falls from a leaf and finds the puddle, and the puddle, having done its work for the day, accepts it without comment. "Well," Bellyroo says finally, very quietly. "That's not a puddle thing at all." Ted does not answer. He is still looking at the stars under his island.

Wobble's workshop sat at the crooked end of Marigold Lane, behind a hedge that had given up trying to be a hedge years ago. If you walked past it on a regular Tuesday, you'd hear three different kinds of clanging and at least one apology. Today there were four kinds of clanging, which, for Wobble, counted as a slow morning. King Ted arrived at the door out of breath. He was not a king who ran often. He was, by his own admission, a king who ambled. But the map was warm in his coat pocket, warm in a way maps were not supposed to be, and Bellyroo was already three bounces ahead of him, tail thumping the cobblestones like a drum that had opinions.

Ted paused before knocking. This is worth noting. Two days ago, Ted would have walked into Wobble's workshop without knocking, the way you walk into your own kitchen. Today he raised his knuckles to the door and waited. He was, without quite knowing it, asking permission to bring something serious into a place that had only ever held tinkering. The door opened on its own, because of course it did. Wobble had wired it to a pressure plate last spring and forgotten to unwire it.

Inside was the usual situation. Half a clock the size of a wagon wheel leaned against one wall, ticking once every minute or so, as if thinking about it. A copper octopus held seven different screwdrivers and looked vaguely betrayed. On the workbench, under a tarp, was something tall and curved and yellow that Ted very deliberately did not ask about. He had learned not to ask about the things under tarps. The answers took an hour and usually involved diagrams. Wobble himself was upside down inside a barrel, muttering. Only his boots were visible, and they were not matching. "Wobble," Ted said. "Busy," said the barrel. "Wobble, I need you to look at something." "Busy being upside down. It's important. I'm checking if the spring works differently when blood goes to my head. Preliminary results say yes, but also, ow."

Ted took the map out of his coat. In the workshop's dim light, the lines on it were not just glowing. They were pulsing, slow and even, like something asleep but breathing. "Wobble. Please." It was the please that did it. Ted did not often say please to his friends. Kings, even soft ones, forget. Wobble extracted himself from the barrel one limb at a time, hair full of sawdust, goggles askew, and looked at the map. He looked at it for a long time. He did not speak. This was, for Wobble, alarming.

Bellyroo, meanwhile, had wandered. Bellyroo always wandered. He was, at this moment, reaching into his pouch for what he believed to be a fig, and his elbow, which was an elbow with a long history of poor decisions, struck a tower of gears stacked beside the workbench. The tower considered itself for a moment. Then it became a landslide. Gears rolled. Big ones, small ones, one shaped like a flower for reasons that probably made sense at three in the morning. They rolled across the floor, under the bench, and into a slot at the base of the tarp-covered thing. There was a small, polite click. Then another. Then six at once. The tarp-covered thing began to hum. Bellyroo froze, fig halfway to his mouth, looking exactly like a kangaroo who had not done it and was prepared to argue the point in court.

The humming climbed. From the top of the tarp, a beam of pale blue light shot up to the ceiling and bloomed outward, and suddenly the workshop ceiling wasn't a ceiling. It was sky. Not the sky over Marigold Lane. A deeper one. Stars in clusters Ted had never seen, drifting in slow spirals, and threaded between them, a path. A path of dotted light that curved and dipped and ended at a single bright point that pulsed at exactly the same rhythm as the map in Ted's hand. The map and the ceiling were the same drawing. One was just much, much larger. Wobble took his goggles off. He looked at the map. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the bright point at the end of the path, which was, very gently, moving. Drifting sideways, the way a leaf drifts on a pond.

"Oh," Wobble said. "Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear." "What is it," Ted said. He had meant it to be a question. It came out flatter than that. "It's real," Wobble said. "And it's leaving." Bellyroo finally ate the fig. He needed it. Wobble crossed the workshop in three long strides and yanked the tarp off the tall yellow thing. Underneath was a craft. There is no other word for it. It had portholes. It had fins. It had, running along its curved spine, a long ridge that suggested, very specifically, the seam of a banana.

"I was going to sell fruit," Wobble said, sounding a little stunned at himself. "I was going to sell fruit from a cart. I don't know why I gave the cart engines. I don't know why I gave it a porthole. I just kept building and it kept asking for more." He patted its yellow flank. It thrummed under his palm, friendly. "I think," he said slowly, "I think it knew." Ted looked at the ceiling. The bright point had drifted a finger's width further. He looked at the map in his hand, which had stopped pulsing now and was simply, patiently, waiting. He could put it back in his coat. He could walk out of the workshop. He could go home, eat toast, and let the sky keep its secrets. Kings were allowed to do that. Kings were, in fact, encouraged to.

Ted folded the map carefully and put it in his coat. Then he turned to Wobble. "How long," he said, "to make her fly." Wobble blinked. Then he grinned, and it was the grin of a man who had been waiting his whole life to be asked exactly that question. Bellyroo, behind them, reached for another fig and knocked over a bucket of bolts. Nobody noticed. The bolts rolled quietly toward the engine, where, in their own time, they would also turn out to be useful.

The launch pad sat at the lip of Crownstone Island, a wide flat slab of moonwhite rock that the locals had been using to dry laundry for about three hundred years. Today, instead of bedsheets, it held a spaceship shaped like a banana. The banana ship, for the record, was Wobble's eighth design and Wobble's first design that hadn't caught fire during the blueprint phase. It curved upward at both ends. It had a peel that unzipped. It had a cockpit window the size of a soup tureen, and a kitchen the size of a soup. Wobble considered this a balanced ratio. Wobble considered most things a balanced ratio.

King Ted stood on the slab in his second-best traveling cloak, watching three monkeys disassemble what appeared to be a critical structural bolt. Ted had known these monkeys for most of his life. He had not, until this morning, considered them coworkers. "Friend," Ted said carefully. "Friend monkey. That bolt is what we call load bearing." The monkey, whose name was Pim, looked at Ted. Looked at the bolt. Held the bolt up to the sun. Put the bolt in her cheek for safekeeping. This is what you should know about Pim. She had been the one to find the map. Ted didn't know that yet. Ted had assumed the map was simply on his pillow one morning because pillows occasionally have maps on them.

Bellyroo loped over with the easy roll of someone who has never once in his life thought of his stomach as anything but storage. Bellyroo was a kangaroo, technically, but he had stopped letting taxonomies define him in his late teens. His pouch was, by most reliable accounts, larger on the inside. "Ted," Bellyroo said. "The engine is on." "The engine is not on," Ted said, with the calm certainty of someone who had not yet turned around. The engine was on. The engine was, in fact, beginning to hum the specific hum that engines hum when they are several minutes from doing something irreversible. Wobble was hanging upside down from a strut, both hands occupied, shouting cheerful instructions at a monkey who had climbed into the fuel line.

"Ito," Wobble called. "Ito, friend, that is the fuel line, please come out of the fuel line, the fuel line is for fuel, you are not fuel, Ito." Ito emerged from the fuel line holding a wrench he had not been given. Here is a thing about King Ted. He had spent most of his kinghood saying no to launches. No to expeditions, no to half built bridges, no to the cousin who wanted to invade the neighboring duchy on a Tuesday. Ted was, by temperament, a man who liked to check things twice. The map had been the first thing in a long while that he had not checked twice. He had simply looked at it, and felt the small click in his chest of a door opening, and said yes. He was still living inside that yes. It was, he was finding, a drafty room.

"Wobble," Ted said. "How long until liftoff if we do nothing." "Four minutes," Wobble said, from inside a panel. "And if we fix it properly." "Six hours. Possibly nine. The bolt situation is, ah. The bolt situation has become philosophical." Ted looked at the bolt situation. The bolt situation looked back. One of the monkeys waved. The sensible thing was to delay. Ted had been the sensible thing for forty one years. He had a small reputation for it in three principalities. He opened his mouth to say delay, and instead heard himself say, "Everyone aboard." Bellyroo blinked. "Everyone." "Including them," Ted said, gesturing at the monkeys, who were now braiding each other's tails into what appeared to be a lanyard. "They've earned it. I don't know how. But they have."

This is the moment, if you're keeping track, where things stopped being a king's expedition and started being something else. Ted didn't announce it. Ted rarely announced anything. He just turned and walked up the peel ramp, and the monkeys followed, and Bellyroo followed the monkeys, and Wobble fell out of the strut and followed Bellyroo. Inside, the cockpit smelled like solder and overripe fruit. Ted strapped himself into a chair that had been designed for someone six inches shorter. Through the soup tureen window he could see the long curve of Crownstone Island falling away into morning. A crack ran across the glass. The crack had not been there yesterday. The crack was the approximate length and shape of a monkey's enthusiasm. "Bellyroo," Ted said.

Bellyroo was already reaching into his pouch. He rummaged for a long moment, the way a person rummages through a drawer they haven't opened in years, and pulled out a small glass jar. The jar was full of light. Not lit from within. Full. The light moved like liquid, slow and considering, and where it touched the glass the glass forgot what cracks were. Ted didn't ask. There was a list of things Ted had stopped asking Bellyroo about, and the list, lately, was getting longer. Bellyroo uncapped the jar. Poured a careful thread of starlight along the crack. The crack closed the way a mouth closes around a held breath. "Ready," Bellyroo said. "Not even slightly," Ted said.

The engine made a noise that was less a roar and more a question. The banana ship leaned. Wobbled. Squeaked, somewhere structural. A monkey screamed with joy. Ted closed his eyes, and then, because he did not want to miss it, opened them again. The island dropped away beneath them. The sky went from blue to deeper blue to the particular violet of a sky that has remembered it is mostly space. Somewhere in the back of the ship, a bolt rolled across the floor and was caught, neatly, by a small brown hand. They were airborne. They were, by any reasonable metric, not ready. The map sat folded in Ted's pocket, and the next mark on it was a long way out, and getting longer. Ted looked over at Bellyroo, who was watching the window with his jar still glowing faintly in his lap.

"What else," Ted said quietly, "is in that pouch." Bellyroo smiled, and did not answer, and the stars came up to meet them.