Netmaster Grip

• Build & height: 1.80 m, straight-backed, long-limbed, a falconer's poise. She stands like a heron in shallow water: still, patient, all attention.
• Face: handsome, fine-boned, unlined, about thirty-five, which is the age she chose ("Nobody obeys a woman who looks like their daughter, and nobody fears one who looks like their grandmother."). She is ninety-seven. At rest: a small pleasant smile. Her eyes never close.
• Hair: glossy black, in a severe knot pinned with a hundred tiny bird-bones. After the Arena (ch. 247): a white streak at the temple, the first in eighty years. After ch. 253–254: white all through.
• Eyes: pale grey, each iris ringed in rose. She blinks, but she never closes them. She sleeps sitting up with them open in a room full of candles. Drawing rule: never draw her with her eyes shut until ch. 253 P24.
• Skin & sin-mark: smooth and pale. Envy, rose. Fine rose script runs from the corners of both eyes down her cheeks like the tracks of tears. It's a Codex's script: it is made of sentences, and the sentences are creeping toward her heart (77 Codices, Part One rule 2). When she watches someone, the script brightens.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a high-collared dark grey silk dress · a long coat knotted from grey net-cord, like a fishing net worn as lace, lined with oilcloth · a falconer's gauntlet on the left hand · a belt of brass lure-whistles, a hundred bird-calls · soft fowler's boots.
• Signature item: the gilt birdcage at her hip, the size of a lantern, and inside it a book bound in rose-red leather that beats its covers against the bars like a trapped bird. Her Codex. She caged it because it kept straining toward laughter.
• Movement: still, then sudden, like a hawk off a glove. She watches before she moves, and she steps out of a line before it's flown (she reads Svala's arm the way a fowler reads a bird's shoulders).
• Voice: soft, pleasant, unhurried, never raised; she calls everyone "little bird". Her balloons are thin and pale, with a fine net-mesh border. When she's frightened the mesh tightens.
• Variant looks: Spring (twenty and glowing faintly rose, the hair glossier, a girl's speed) · After the Arena (lines at the eyes and mouth, the white streak) · The Great Watch (twenty-five on the Eyrie, a rose haze streaming into her eyes from a whole netted island) · Netted (in her own Lace, eyes wide) · Ninety-seven (white-haired, bent, the rose rings gone from her eyes, asleep with her eyes closed beside her sister's body: ch. 254).

Every hour she watches someone younger, she takes an hour of their youth.

• Watching: eyes on the target, deliberate. She can watch everyone in sight at once, which is why the House keeps the young near her and why her cabin is lined with mirrors.
• The rate: an hour for an hour, per face. One person watched for a minute loses a minute: nothing you'd see. Crowds and decades are what make her young: three thousand faces watched for one night is years. A child watched every hour since birth ages twice as fast (the House's young: Nine is nineteen with a face of thirty-five).
• "Younger" means younger by the count, the soul's own years, not the body's. So she can't take from:
  • Isa (born six hundred years ago by the world's clock: "Older than me. How rude."),
  • Vigolas (eight lives counted: "Liar." / "Eight lives. Give or take."),
  • the Trinity (centuries old),
  • Mingus: the haze slides off him like rain off a roof. "There's nothing in him to take. He's what the time's counted in."
• What it can't do: take through the Null (the grey takes the count, and there's nothing left to watch); take from anyone she can't see (darkness, a hood, a wall); give years back. It takes youth, not life: nobody dies of an afternoon of being watched.

• Tempo: 380.
• Home tempo: the Hour-Room aboard the Gilded Cage: a long cabin of a hundred candles that never go out, a hundred mirrors, and hammocks of sleeping children. With every young face in the room in her sight at once, she's fastest there.
• Heartbeat technique: THE SPRING BEAT. She burns one borrowed year inside one heartbeat, and for that beat her heart beats like the heart of the youngest child she ever robbed: quick as a sparrow's. Her tempo doubles (760) for the beat. No one else spends someone else's youth as tempo. (Trollmage banks his own waiting; Krydog borrows his own sleep; Grip spends other people's years.)
• Burn cost: the year is gone for good: on the page, a grey hair growing back at her temple after each Spring Beat. Two years in one beat would overflow her (she has never tried). And in the Arena, every beat she burns is wagered: losing made her walk out older (ch. 247).

If she ever stops, every year she took comes back onto her in one night, and she remembers every face.

• "Stopping," exactly: her eyes shut for one whole heartbeat (one of Mingus's). A blink isn't stopping. Sleep would be, so she hasn't closed her eyes since she was seventeen: she sleeps sitting up with them open, in a room of candles that never go out. A bright flash makes her squint, never shut. A real laugh shuts the eyes. That is why she has never laughed, and why her book's lock is a trap she half-understands.
• On the page, when it comes (ch. 253–254): at her sister's deathbed, Tärna finishes the joke from their girlhood ("…A chicken, Grippa.") and Grip laughs, eyes shut, one beat: ba— —DUM; every rose thread snaps (pt pt pt); "…I stopped." Then one night: the black hair greying and whitening panel by panel, faces going past behind her eyes, her lips moving with each one. At dawn she is her true ninety-seven. "Now I look like you."
• The deeper price: eighty years of being afraid. She outlived her children because she watched them. She never learned the names, only the faces.

• Her eyes. Everything she has hangs on them staying open. Kompis reads it: "Every thread runs out of her eyes. If she shuts them, they all snap." (ch. 252). Nobody can force them shut; she has to close them herself.
• A laugh. The one thing she wants (to open the book) is the one thing that would end her. She clamps her jaw against Tihi's giggle (ch. 245, 251) and tries to copy it with her eyes open instead (ch. 250: "Because you're copying it. Not laughing.").
• Anyone older than her by the count: Isa, Vigolas, the Trinity. Mingus.
• Fliers she can't read before they launch. She sidesteps Svala's lines by watching the arm, so Svala + Rougeina beat her with a line whose end is the trap: Rougeina Swaps in at it (ch. 252).
• CROSS-SWAP (Rougeina): her own Lace traded for her own coat.
• The Drum is a rhythm, and Tihi's Hiccup takes a beat out of it.
• The Sky-Net's crown-knot (Vigolas's KEYSTONE).
• Grief. Her sister.
• The Arena: spending years there is wagering them. She lost to Svala and walked out older.

• The Lace and the Gaff.
• The gilt birdcage and the rose book in it.
• The belt of lure-whistles (a hundred calls; the wing-keeper's among them, perfect, without the crack).
• The Gilded Cage: the House's flagship, masts built like the bars of a birdcage, gilded, lantern-lit; figurehead: the Skrattmåsen's brass laughing gull with a bell at its throat, bought for the brass at the Order's impound auction nine years ago. Below decks, the Hour-Room.
• The House of Grip: her descendants and hired Fowlers. Sigil: a gold griffin clutching a net, on grey (grip is the old word for griffin). Creed: "Everything that flies comes down." The House's young are numbered, never named: "Names are for things you keep." Ranks: FOWLER · K-II MARKED · the House of Grip · NET-CAPTAIN · K-III TESTED · the House of Grip.
• The auction at the edge: the Current's black-market auction, where the House sells netted islands now that Skatt is gone. Never shown on the page in Arc 2.

A fowler's fight: let the bird come to the net. She opens by watching: who is young, who flies, where an arm lights up. She lets her House throw on the drum while she places the Lace at the end of the line the enemy is about to commit to. She never chases; she steps aside. Up close she spends years (Spring, the Spring Beat) and fights like a twenty-year-old with the Gaff. She finishes by taking the thing they love (a boat's figurehead, a sister's island, a child's laugh) and waiting for them to come and get it. Team combos (the House): the Drum + the Lace (forty nets on the beat, hers at the end of the line) · the Lures + the Sky-Net (call the birds home into the mesh) · the Hour-Room + the Great Watch (keep the young in sight, always).

• Wants: never to be old. Never to fall. To own what she couldn't be: a bird.
• Fears: heights ("a bird afraid of heights, on an island in the sky"); closing her eyes; the night the years come home; her sister's pity.
• Contradiction: a woman who has spent eighty years watching the young has never once looked at one of them and seen a person. She remembers every face and never asked a single name.
• Humour: dry, pleasant and cruel. "Levla of Skatt! My best customer. You look poor." · "A man with no mark at all. How restful."
• Habits: never closes her eyes; keeps candles lit; lines her rooms with mirrors; calls everyone "little bird"; talks to her caged book.
• Alone: she sits in the Hour-Room in the middle of the night, watching sleeping children, trying to remember the end of a joke.

• Tärna: her older sister, the wing-keeper, the one face she could never take (always two years older). "You got old." / "I got to." · "Still afraid, Grippa?" / "Always." · "…A chicken, Grippa." · "There. You remember how."
• Svala: the daughter of the flier she netted, and the only soul ever to beat her in the Arena. Svala had a clear line to her heart and didn't start (ch. 252).
• Tihi: the laugh she hunted all arc and never got. She netted Tihi by making her sad (the gull), caged her, and tried for a whole day to make her laugh. "You don't blink." / "I blink. I just don't close them."
• Nine: her great-grandson, nineteen with a face of thirty-five. Tihi saved his life. He turned the House around ("Stand down. She's done.") and took its young away to find out how old they are.
• Sparv: her great-grandson, twelve, dead on her order and Svala's line.
• Levla: her best customer (two islands: goats, and a lake that sang). "You look poor." / "I am."
• Kompis: saw the threads out of her eyes. Mingus: nothing to take; and the gold Griffin that caught her as she fell was her own House's sign, alive ("It never looked like that.").
• Vigolas, Isa: older than her by the count. Daniel: "How restful." Trollmage: his Gluttony Codex lunged for her book, and she was afraid of it.
• Öde: sat with her the whole night the years came home. "Tell me their names." / "I never asked their names. Only their faces." / "Then I'll ask for you."

• "Everything that flies comes down."
• "Hello, big sister." (ch. 244)
• "Net that child. I don't care about the island tonight. Bring me that laugh." (ch. 245)
• "I blink. I just don't close them." (ch. 249)
• "You can't get up if they never let you fall." (to Krydog, ch. 250)
• "…I stopped." (ch. 253)
• "Now I look like you." (ch. 254)