Chapter 160

changing. The starlight sea is paler here, the stars thinning, the colours draining out of the water, as if someone had left a painting in the sun too long. Far off on the horizon, a grey smudge with no stars at all.

The crew at the rail, uneasy. Vigolas at the bow beside the Kettle's bell, where a plank with his old ship's name, bought back on Skatt, is nailed to the rail. He keeps touching it.

eyes gold, squinting at the grey.

at the wheel, counting under his breath, uneasy.

On the grey water ahead, floating alone like a raft, is one acre of golden barley. A single field, ripe, swaying in a wind that isn't there. At one end, a small stone farmhouse with a thatched roof. A scarecrow in the middle, wearing an old man's felt hat. A dog-kennel. Around the edges of the acre the grey water laps at the soil, and the soil holds.

ears straight up, tail starting to wag, staring at the kennel.

In the middle of the barley, walking slowly along a furrow, a girl of about seventeen: square-shouldered, sunburned, a straw-coloured braid as thick as a rope, a scythe on her back with a worn ash-wood handle. Wherever her boots touch, even on bare packed earth, fresh grass springs up. She's talking. To no one. Steadily.

sleeves rolled. Up both arms, written in emerald script like barley stalks, names, dozens of them, glowing faintly as she says each one.

watching from the rail, very quiet.

flickering over the girl as the Marka draws close:

ÖDE · DRIFTING-8 · K-I UNMARKED (Värn's records, never updated) · Scalelist: — (her world is uncounted)

Chains. Creaking timbers. Gulls screaming. From the grey, a fleet: a dozen ugly barges lashed together from the wrecks of other ships, hung with salvage (anchors, bells, door-frames, a church weathervane), nets and hooks dangling. On their decks, figures in patched scavenger leathers.

RANK PLATE ×30: GLEANER · K-II MARKED · scavengers of dead islands

pointing at the acre with a long boat-hook, hungry.

in the barley, turning toward the fleet, slowly. She doesn't run. She takes the scythe off her back.

already climbing onto the bow, grinning.

The crew leaps onto the acre and into the fight:

Gleaners swarm off the barges with shovels and sacks, digging the barley up by the roots, stuffing soil into bags.

Öde swings her scythe in wide, practised harvest-arcs, a farm girl's motion, and mows a line of Gleaners off their feet.

Vigolas punches lightning through a barge's salvage-mast.

Smurjan's Triple Pulse knocks three shovel-wielders into the grey water.

Rougeina Moth-Swaps with a barley-moth onto a Gleaner's head.

Mingus runs straight to the empty dog-kennel, sniffs it, and whines.

There are too many: a hundred Gleaners, a dozen barges, hooks biting into the acre's edges, dragging the field apart, soil crumbling into the grey sea.

back to the farmhouse wall, scythe up, breathing hard, a Gleaner's net over one shoulder. Around her the field is being torn up by its roots.

landing beside her, firing Lilla Ulv, cutting the net off her.

the biggest, at the back, a throne of salvage on its deck. A figure on the throne in a long coat sewn from a hundred flags, every flag a different colour, faded. She doesn't move. She watches.

hearing it. Her jaw sets.

turning to the crew around her, very calm suddenly.

planting the butt of the scythe in the soil. Kneeling. Both hands on the ash-wood handle. The emerald names up her arms blaze.

eyes closing. Not praying. Remembering.

A low woof from inside it, from nothing.

Öde, kneeling with the scythe, whispering into the barley, and colour flooding outward from her: the grey sea going blue, the stubbled soil going gold, a summer sky unrolling overhead like a blanket thrown over the world, and the edges of something huge beginning to appear around the acre.