Chapter 177

on her side on the new lake-ice, eyes open and unfocused, lips blue. Her chest is jumping with every beat: not a race now but a hammering, too fast to count.

skidding to his knees beside her, pressing two fingers to her throat, then his whole palm to her chest.

kneeling on her other side, grass spreading under all three of them on the ice.

swaying, still half asleep, very quiet and very serious.

lying pressed against Isa's back on the ice, chin on her shoulder, calm. Breathing. ba-dum… ba-dum… Steady, slow, warm. The only steady thing on the lake.

looking at Mingus. Then at Isa. Eyes going gold. His face changing.

one on Isa's chest, one buried in the golden fur of Mingus's neck. Gold light running between his palms.

A golden thread pulled taut between a girl's racing heart and a dog's slow one, Kompis's two hands tying them together in the middle.

blinking. Colour coming back into her lips. She turns her head, slowly, and finds herself nose to nose with Mingus.

sitting back on his heels, letting go, shaking. The Knot fading to a faint gold line between girl and dog.

The aftermath on the lake. The Thaw-Brothers sit roped together on the floes, their brittle lances in shards round them. Out at the rim of the still circle the Cult's ships are turning away, the channel behind them already freezing over again as Stilla's stillness settles back over the sea.

sitting on the ice, old, wrapped in his Timekeeper's coat, which hangs off him now. His hands no longer shake any more than the rest of him. He looks at the pocket-watch with no glass, its hands spinning.

Coming down the hill toward them, very slowly, one step a minute: the Still Folk. The man with the bucket. The woman from the doorway. The skipping child. An old man. They've been walking since the battle began. They arrive now.

sitting up against Mingus, translating for the slow old man at the front, whose mouth has been forming one word for the last ten minutes.

staring.

crouching in front of the old man, elbows on knees.

(Tövind looks at him for a long moment. Then he closes the glassless watch, and puts it in his pocket.)

holding out the ice clock-face on its snapped cord.

each holding one long brass clock-hand, the hour hand and the minute hand. They look at each other, then at Isa.

looking at the hands, frightened of them.

holding out his palm.

the two brass hands crossed on it. Green light, small and precise.

(The hands fold, and fold, and fold, into a small brass-and-ice die, a cube no bigger than a sugar lump, the shapes of the two hands faintly visible inside it like insects in amber.)

watching, expecting him to tuck it into one of his thirty-six coat pockets the way he keeps everything.

and instead he takes Isa's hand, turns it palm up, and puts the little cube in it, and folds her fingers closed over it.

staring at her closed fist, then at him. A long, long beat, much longer than her usual one.

very still, looking at Vigolas with something like wonder.

The crew carrying Isa up the hill on a stretcher of whale-leather, Mingus trotting beside her, the Still Folk escorting old Tövind slowly up behind them. Snow hanging in the air like stars.

Isa, on her feet again, standing at the water's edge on a patch of Öde's grass. Before her, the still sea, the frozen waves, the frozen spray. Far out at the rim of the circle, a speck of lantern-light: the Marka at anchor, Drekk waiting.

the clock-face at her throat, the little cube in her fist, her breath hanging in the air in front of her and staying.