Chapter 188
The siege is over. Guild barges gone. The Lantern Hall smoke-blackened but standing, Bror's beam wedged in the rock above its door. The lantern-children re-lighting their lanterns along the ledge. The gentle dead in their grey boats, reading the Pillar again as if nothing happened.
glittering: hundreds of silver coin-tears, the ones Ögar wept in Endless Mourning and the ones Silversten wept out of himself. Pim and the children gathering them in baskets, by touch.
sitting propped against the Pillar, wrapped in a blanket, pale and exhausted, blindfold back on.
tied to the ledge. Smurjan and Bakasura's shadow carrying out crates of jars, every stolen tear the Guild ever kept, and setting them at Ögar's feet. Kali reading the labels aloud, appalled.
at the end of the ledge, alone, half his face flesh and half cracked silver, wrapped in his torn white robes. On his knees in front of the Pillar, reading names. Slowly. Out loud.
sitting down next to him, without being asked, reed pen and dark ink in her hand.
Between the emerald stalks, under FJÄLLMÅ and LÖVHOLM, in the darker place-ink: SNÖBERGA · seven houses · bees · the Ekbergs' porch.
bowing his head, silver tears still leaking from the cracks.
as Kompis kneels in front of her. She reaches up, and her long fingers find his face again: brow, nose, braided beard, the dried line of blood under his nose, and his mouth, which is smiling.
both hands still on his face, and from under the blindfold one silver coin forming, slowly, deliberately, rolling down her cheek into her palm.
the single coin-tear on it, catching the light. She presses it into Kompis's hand and closes his fingers over it.
threading the coin onto the fishing-line that ties his beard-braid, beside the green strand of lake-weed.
flopping across Ögar's lap with a groan, shedding gold hairs everywhere. Ögar laughing for the first time in the series, a small surprised sound.
picking one long gold hair off her blanket and, without hesitating, weaving it into the black-green thread of her blindfold, one strand of gold among the cypress.
the freckled lantern-girl, standing in front of Kompis holding her lantern in both hands. Her flame is low. Flickering.
his hands round hers on the lantern.
The black water at the foot of the Pillar of Names in a pale dawn. A small grey boat, one of the gentle dead's, waiting at the ledge with no one in it. A little freckled girl stepping into it, barefoot, her milky eyes clearing to bright brown as she steps aboard, turning to wave. Her lantern left on the ledge, still burning, small and steady.
On the ledge: Kompis on his knees with a hand raised, Mingus beside him, Pim and the lantern-children holding their lanterns up in a row like a guard of honour, and the crew standing behind.
The boat drifting out across the black water toward the mist, and the light at the mist's edge, warm, like a summer morning.
High on the Pillar, a new name settling into the stone.
picking up Siv's lantern from the ledge.
Kompis standing at the foot of the Pillar, looking up at the endless names. Then, slowly, down: to the very bottom, low on the stone, among the old, small, shallow names worn soft by twenty-two years of hands.
A cluster of names, very old, very small, cut in the same week: seven houses' worth. And one of them, the smallest.
resting on that one small name. Then lifting. Cut small and shallow, worn soft by twenty-two years: SLIMO.
standing a little way off, looking up at the Pillar, his face unusually serious.
rising unsteadily, leaning on her bell-staff, Pim guiding her elbow. She lays her long hand flat on the Pillar and reads, climbing names with her fingertips the way you'd climb a ladder.
under Ögar's fingers, a column of entries, one under another, in seven different hands, down three centuries, all the same name:
VIGOLAS — scored through.
VIGOLAS — scored through.
VIGOLAS — scored through. (Four more, the same.)
Seven. Every one crossed out with the same long, patient line.
An eighth entry. Being cut, right now, by no hand: the letters appearing in the stone one at a time. V. I. G. And then stopping. A pause. The G being smoothed away again, as if by a thumb. Then cut again. Then stopping.
her hand jerking back from the stone as if it had burned her.
staring at the half-cut V I on the stone.
The Marka casting off from the ledge. The lantern-children waving lanterns. Silversten still reading names on his knees at the far end, Öde's ink-pot left beside him. Ögar at the very edge of the ledge, blindfolded, the gold hair in the black-green.
reaching out a beat before Rougeina passes, and catching her wrist. Holding it tight.
Rougeina alone at the little table, sharpening her eight blades by lamplight. She lifts one to check its edge. In the mirror-steel, her own reflection.
And then not her reflection: a woman standing exactly where Rougeina sits, the same crimson hair, older, softer, with a face like Rougeina's would be if it had ever been allowed to rest. Smiling at her.
Every mirror on board, all at once: the brass binnacle by the wheel, Drekk's shaving glass, a bucket of still water on the deck, the eight blades fanned on the cabin table. In every one, the same woman, standing where Rougeina stands. Smiling. And from all of them together, very softly: