Chapter 168

The one acre, gold and quiet. The grey edge still lies along the rim, but it hasn't moved all night. The seventy islanders are cooking breakfast. Wreckage from the Gleaner fleet bobs far out on the water.

sitting against the third fence post, sleeves rolled, reading her arms aloud the way she does every morning.

Her thumb moves down the stalks, and stops at a gap. Bare skin. Wide, where a thick, heavy stalk must have been.

staring at it. She counts, lips moving. Then counts again.

both hands pressed to the gap now, as if she could feel the shape of what was there through her skin.

walking over with two cups of tea, seeing her face, stopping.

crouching, holding out a cup. She takes it without looking.

carefully.

a long, long beat. Then she shakes her head.

understanding that completely. He sits down beside her in the barley.

turning her head to look at him properly, for a long time.

clinking.

Creaking oars. Out of the haze glides one last Gleaner barge, low and quiet, half a dozen scavengers aboard with ropes and hooks. They're not attacking. They're sneaking, rowing round to the north end of the field, toward the scarecrow with the old felt hat.

sailing through the air and snagging the scarecrow's coat, yanking it half out of the ground. The felt hat tumbles.

on her feet, tea flying, eyes blazing.

already up and running, a golden streak through the barley toward the barge.

And Öde, running behind him, eyes shut for one stride, remembering one dog so completely:

For one heartbeat, out of thin air beside Mingus, running stride for stride with him: a shaggy black-and-white farm dog, mouth open, ears flying, barking at everything.

Two dogs, gold and black-and-white, in the same leap.

The Gleaners on the barge scream, drop the rope, and fall over each other backwards. The scarecrow springs back upright in the soil. And Bonde is gone, as if he'd never been. One heartbeat, exactly. Mingus lands alone at the field's edge and keeps barking for both of them.

stopping beside the scarecrow, picking up the old felt hat out of the barley and brushing it off. Her face goes blank for a second.

watching from the farmhouse roof, eyes half-open, saying nothing. He writes something small in the margin of his book.

The Gleaner barge backing off fast, and behind it, sliding out of the grey haze, the throne-barge. Almost empty now. A handful of Gleaners at the oars. And on the throne, very small, burned hand wrapped in rags, Mother Skrap.

looking at Öde across the water. Her bright gull-eye is tired.

at the rail, eyes gold, seeing it again: every thread from Skrap runs down into a hundred dead flags, and one, the oldest, runs to the small blue-and-white flag over her heart. Still bright. The only thing she has ever loved that isn't dying.

walking to the very edge of the field. The grey water at her toes. She calls across to the throne-barge, steady and plain.

very still, her burned hand going to the flag. For a long time she says nothing.

her lips moving, as if the word is rusted in place. Then, hoarse, for the first time in sixty years:

With the reed pen and the darker ink, between the emerald stalks, under FJÄLLMÅ, she writes one more place: LÖVHOLM. Then, smaller, beside it: birches · bees.

watching the girl write her island down. Something in the old, gull-bright eye breaks open. She doesn't cry. She just looks very, very old.

(She turns to her Gleaners.) …Row.

The throne-barge slides off into the open Current, away from the grey for the first time, its coat of a hundred flags trailing in the water behind it. Öde watches it go.

The one acre of gold, and the grey edge along its rim. And slowly, very slowly, the grey pulls back: a hand's breadth, then a pace, then a stone's throw, sliding away across the water like a tide going out, toward somewhere easier. Not beaten. Refused.

On the rim, Mingus sits up, ears forward, and watches it go.