Chapter 189
From the last page: Rougeina at the little table, one blade lifted to check its edge, the other seven fanned on the wood. In the steel, where her face should be, another face.
A woman standing exactly where Rougeina sits. The same crimson hair, but long, loose to the small of her back and drifting slowly sideways, as if under water. Older, softer. Drawn in silver like any reflection, except for the hair, and one green eye. The other side of her face isn't there: wiped away along a ragged edge, a grey the eye slides off.
— · K-? · Scalelist —
She doesn't move. Not a muscle. She has stood still against worse things than this, and it's the only thing her body knows how to do.
looking at her the way you look at someone across a station platform after a very long time. Her balloon is silver-rimmed, with a faint second outline just behind it, like an echo.
The blade slips out of Rougeina's fingers, clangs on the table, and spins. In every turn of the steel, the woman, turning with it, her hair a beat behind. Rougeina is on her feet with her back against the bulkhead.
A bellow through the planks.
Lanterns swinging. The crew stumbling out of hammocks and hatches: Vigolas in his shirt with the coat half on, Kompis in his hood, Smurjan with three shadows already standing, Öde with her scythe, Isa barefoot and silent, Trollmage asleep on his feet in a coil of rope with the crow on his crown. And in every reflecting thing on board, the same woman: in the brass binnacle by the wheel, in Drekk's shaving glass where he props it on the rail, in a bucket of still water by the mast. All of them facing the cabin hatch.
ears flat, staring at the bucket. He doesn't bark. He walks to Kompis and stands in front of him, four legs planted.
Rougeina coming up through the hatch, slow, barefoot, one blade in her hand. As she crosses the deck, the woman follows her from glass to glass, binnacle to shaving glass to bucket, always arriving a moment after Rougeina moves, the way a reflection does.
1. The binnacle's brass, where the woman just was: flat grey. No shine. Not even a lantern in it.
2. Drekk's shaving glass, where she just was: grey, dull as slate.
3. Drekk holding it up to his bell-rope mask, turning it in the lantern light. Nothing.
(Empty SFX box.)
The threads on deck. From Rougeina's chest, one thick, old thread, red-gold, running straight down into the bucket of water. And from the woman in the water, a thousand fine silver threads running away over the rail into the dark, to every mirror in the world. And one more thread going down, through the bottom of the bucket, into a grey that isn't anywhere.
eyes gold, very quiet.
kneeling at the bucket. The crew in a loose ring behind her, nobody coming closer. Her voice is a blade.
No hesitation. Gentle, the way you'd wake a child.
moving with the words, silently, a beat behind them. One. Two. Three.
Something in her face giving way, and her voice going very small, a voice the crew has never heard.
The Marka's deck at night, lanterns low, the masts black against the stars. In the middle of the deck, a wooden bucket of still water. Kneeling over it, a barefoot woman with short crimson hair and eight blades on her back, one hand stretched toward the surface.
And in the water, kneeling to meet her from the other side, upside down and the right way up at once, a woman with the same face: long crimson hair drifting in a slow underwater cloud, a soldier's night-blue coat with silver star-buttons, half of her missing, as if wiped from the glass. Her one hand reaching up.
Their fingertips meet at the surface. One ring of ripple spreading out.
Round them, at a distance, the crew in a ring, lantern-lit: a pirate who has forgotten to put his other arm in his coat, a man with a dog standing in front of him, a tall grey man whose three shadows lean away from the bucket, a farm girl gripping a scythe, a silver-haired girl perfectly still.
her one eye wet.
It doesn't ripple now. It parts, like glass melting. A silver hand rises out of the bucket, wet and solid, and closes round Rougeina's wrist.
And pulls. Not hard. Inevitably. Rougeina's arm goes into the bucket to the elbow, then to the shoulder, though the bucket is no deeper than a forearm. The water rising up her skin like silver. Her face a hand's width from the surface, her reflection rushing up to meet her.
The crew moving at once: Vigolas has Rougeina's belt, Smurjan has Vigolas's coat, Öde has hooked the bucket's handle with her scythe and is hauling the other way. The bucket slides across the deck toward the mast and doesn't spill.
Bror already in his hand, the five-year-old's face flickering anxiously in the steel.
BRA-DOOM. A wide wave of warm gold force rolls across the deck like a shove from a big brother, and tips the bucket over. Water slaps across the planks. The surface breaks. The hand is gone. Rougeina falls backward into Vigolas and Smurjan, all three of them sprawling, her arm out of the water, wet to the shoulder and whole.
across the deck: a hundred little puddles, and in every one a sliver of the woman, reaching. Then, one by one, the puddles going grey. Flat. Dead. A deck full of puddles that reflect nothing.
(Every SFX box: empty.)
fallen from the cabin table and lying where she dropped the eighth on the hatch. In their steel, the woman again, and this time her voice is broken.
The woman fades out of them, and the steel goes blue-grey and bright again. Not grey. Not dead.
sitting against the mast with her knees drawn up, soaked, a blade held against her chest like a child holds something. Kompis sitting down beside her, Mingus flopping across both their feet.
crouching in front of her, his coat finally on properly. He doesn't joke.
apart at the rail, very still. His three shadows on the planks are all leaning away from the eight blades, the way they did once in a dream. His hand is pressed to his chest, over the place where he carries a shard.
drawing out the fracture-record shard, the Archive glass he has carried since Saga I, and holding it to the lantern. Frozen in it, as always: a mirror, a soul breaking into pieces of light, and inside the mirror the small silver silhouette taking the smallest piece.
And for the first time in three hundred years, the silhouette turns its head. Its hair, the only colour in the shard: crimson. It looks straight past Smurjan, at Rougeina.
the third eye opening, crimson-rimmed.