Chapter 172
The thawed wave, a thousand years late, roaring across the still sea toward the beach, a wall of glassy water twice the height of a house, sweeping frozen crests away in front of it.
on the shore, planting her bare feet, eyes going clear, hair lifting and stopping mid-swing.
(Rougeina, Kompis and Öde slap their hands onto her shoulders.)
The wave stops over the beach, curled, enormous, glassy, foam hanging in the air like lace, its shadow over all of them. Blue-white. Frost at the borders.
outside the chain, frozen mid-step, and Vigolas beside him crawling in syrup, trying to drag Smurjan out of the wave's shadow an inch at a time.
And through the stopped world, behind the frozen wave, something moves. The seventh ship glides into the thawed channel the wave left. Its bow touches the beach. A tall, thin figure steps down onto the sand, walking normally, inside a hold where nothing should move.
seeing him come. Inside the ice, fear.
(Thought, frost-edged:) …no. no one moves. no one moves in here but the dog.
Young: twenty-six, tall, gaunt, with high cheekbones and dark, sleepless circles under grey eyes. Close-cropped black hair. A Timekeeper's long brass-buttoned coat, the gear-badge torn off the breast, leaving a pale circle in the cloth. A glassless pocket-watch on a chain, its hands spinning freely. Bare hands.
And his hands are old. Liver-spotted, knuckles swollen like walnuts, shaking. Above his wrists the old skin climbs his forearms in a ragged line, wrinkled, spotted, to just below his elbows, where it stops and the skin is a young man's again. An age-line.
TÖVIND · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,090 · Prior of the Thaw
bowing slightly to the frozen girl, very polite, his voice gentle and precise, like a priest reading out the hours.
touching his own chest, over his heart, briefly. A tiny tick of light. He moves another step through the hold. Then touches his chest again. Another step.
On his forearm, the age-line creeps up a hair.
inside the chain, watching.
reaching up as he walks, almost absently, to a gull that has hung in the air over the beach, wings spread, for longer than anyone can remember. Its feathers are white and perfect.
(He touches it.)
1. It flaps, alive, free, shrieking.
2. Its feathers go grey at the tips.
3. Its wings shrivel, its eye clouds, its beak cracks with age.
4. It falls onto the sand as a small heap of dust and feathers.
brushing feathers off his old fingers, sad, sincere.
A frozen tear.
(Thought, tiny:) …i didn't steal it. i kept it.
Rougeina breaks from the chain, letting go of Isa's shoulder, and the moment she does, she freezes mid-leap. Isa's hold catches her too.
and her eyes, and the sheer effort. A hairline crack of frost spreads from her feet across the sand. She is holding a wave, a beach, a battle, a frozen Rougeina, and a man who won't stop moving.
(Thought:) …i can't hold much longer.
barely moving, and a word, breathed:
She releases. The wave, held over the beach, falls: but in the last second Smurjan's been dragged clear by Vigolas, and the wave crashes down on the seventh ship's bow, smashing its bowsprit and driving it back into the channel. Rougeina lands her leap and swings eight blades at Tövind's throat.
Tövind steps aside from the blades without hurrying and touches Rougeina's sleeve. Her blade-arm jerks forward, catching up on the half-second Isa held it, and her strike finishes before it arrives, eight blades sweeping through empty air a hand's breadth short of him.
Vigolas, at full speed now, green lightning in both fists, slams into Tövind with an Emerald Knuckle. Tövind takes it on the forearm and slides back through the sand, and he's smiling, and the age-line on that arm leaps up an inch.
The beach in chaos. Thawed waves crashing in from the sea in every direction, a thousand years of held water let loose, foam and spray flying. In the middle, Tövind walking calmly through it all, coat flapping, touching things as he passes: a frozen crest falls, a hanging spray-arc drops like rain, an ancient driftwood log he brushes rots to splinters. His old hands shake. His face is serene.
Around him the crew, mid-fight: Vigolas lightning-lit, Rougeina in a whirl of silver-rose, Smurjan's three shadows rising, Öde with her scythe, Kompis with Ivar raised.
And behind them all, on the shore, Isa, small and white, hands over her heart, the Backlog hammering through her, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum, staring at the old hands.
Tövind brushes past Kompis and touches his cheek, where a bruise from yesterday's fight is purple. In one second the bruise goes yellow, then green, then gone: a week of healing caught up.
overhearing that, on her knees in the sand. Her face goes white.
very still, the Backlog fading, the horror dawning on her face. She does the sum.
as if he understands, stepping in front of Isa, legs planted, hackles up, golden and growling at the man with old hands.
Smurjan's Triple Pulse: three strikes, one beat, into Tövind's chest. Tövind thaws the blows as they land, making them catch up on themselves and spend their force in a burst of dust, but even so, the third strike lands. He's thrown back across the sand into the shallows.
getting up out of the water, wet, still calm, flexing his old fingers. The age-line on his right arm is past his elbow now.
his grey eyes travelling past the crew, up the beach, to the small white girl kneeling in the sand. And to her throat, where on a cord hangs a disc of clear blue ice the size of a palm, carved with twelve numbers round its rim. A clock-face with no hands.
softly, almost reverently.
Tövind backing away into the thawed channel, his Thaw-Brothers dragging him aboard the damaged seventh ship. It pulls back into the churning, half-melted sea, the Cult's six ships closing round it.
kneeling on the beach, her hand closed tight round the clock-face at her throat, knuckles white, frost spreading from her bare feet.