Chapter 193
The woman's face fills the great silver mirror, silent and enormous, her hair drifting across the glass like weed in a current. At the field's edge Räva stands with her back to it, eyes squeezed shut, tail wrapped round her legs.
Rougeina draws all eight blades, one after another, and lays them in the nettles at her feet in a fan, the way they were laid beside her once, though she doesn't know that yet. In every blade, the woman's face.
stepping up beside her. His three shadows lean away from the blades. He holds up the fracture-record shard.
A long beat.
(Pages 3–8: her memory. Drawn in silver-grey line. The only colours are crimson hair and, once, green eyes.)
A small cottage on the black-glass shore, a blue door, a thunderstorm over the sea. In the doorway a tall soldier-woman in a night-blue coat, both halves of her face, laughing, a crimson-haired toddler on her hip with both small fists up at the lightning. Behind them in the hall, seen only from the back, a younger girl with wild red hair (no tail), leaning on the doorframe.
A red-wax order on a desk among birthday cards, in a kind old hand: ROUTED BY ORDER OF ARCHITECT THREE. A Trisdel post on a black-glass road. A ribbon of light. The soldier-woman's eyes going wide.
The surf at Gate City, grey dawn. An old woman in a soldier's coat three sizes too big, on her knees in the foam, clutching her chest, gasping, her hair white and thin. Only her eyes are still green.
A neat gloved hand writing a second routing slip in rounded script. Soldier, female, Astralis. Deliver to:— And a chipped teacup, steaming, set down right on top of it. When it lifts, a brown ring of tea where the destination should be.
A woman-shaped light falling, falling, through grey, fading at one edge, until it fetches up on a shore of nothing: the edge of the count, flat and white-grey and soundless.
(Empty SFX box.)
Sentinels in old, heavy, white armour wading the grey shallows, finding a half-erased silver woman lying in it like driftwood. Behind them, a clerk holding up a decree in white wax: BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL: ONE SOUL, DIVIDED, TO BE HELD IN TRINITY.
A grey stone hall. The silver woman standing upright and rigid as glass. Before her, a soul of light held up by armoured hands, and in her reflection it breaks: four pieces flying. Three go where a clerk's finger points, into one tall grey body on a slab: a soul, a maw, and a sharp, grinning, two-armed girl with a red braid. The fourth, the smallest, a boy with a black braid no bigger than a candle-flame, is cupped in two silver hands inside the glass.
The inside of the little cottage on the black-glass shore, lamplight, rain on the window. A tall mirror of blue-grey mirror-steel standing against the wall. In front of it, a soldier-woman sitting on a stool brushing the crimson hair of a four-year-old girl on her knee, humming, both of them smiling into the glass.
And inside the mirror, in the reflection, where the reflection of the soldier-woman should be: the same woman, older, silver, half gone, standing with both hands pressed flat against the glass from the inside, mouth open, shouting something nobody will ever hear.
The woman in the great silver mirror turns her missing side toward them. The ragged edge where her face stops, and the eight long notches in it, each the length and shape of a blade.
lifting one blade from the nettles and holding it up against the image of the notch, from where she stands. Same length. Same curve. It fits.
ECHO · K-? · Council instrument · Scalelist —
the blade in her hand, looking at her own face in it.
gentle, and for the first time, a soldier's plainness in it.
(She doesn't say what came in where she cut. At the edge of every notch, the grey shimmers.)
Rougeina sinking slowly to her knees among the fan of blades in the nettles. At the field's edge, Räva, back still turned, shaking. Isa standing beside her, not touching her, just near.
his third eye fully open, crimson-rimmed, his voice very quiet and very level.
The Sightline: a thin crimson line from Smurjan's third eye straight across the Nettle Field to the heart of the woman in the silver mirror, and he walks it, step by perfect step, crimson script lighting along his arms, open palm drawing back.
sorrowful.
And Smurjan's mouth keeps moving, and nothing comes out. His own voice, the one that says we, gone. His three shadows tangle on the nettles, tripping over each other. He goes down on one knee.
out of his shadow, talking for the whole body, fast and frightened.
The great silver mirror in grey diagram lines. The woman's clear half drawn in hard, solid lines: real, a person, the crimson point of the Sightline resting on her heart. Her missing half: no lines at all. Not even a hole. The diagram simply stops.
on one knee, slowly lowering his palm. The silence lifts off his throat like a breath. His voice comes back, hoarse and level.
(Behind them, Bali looks up from the nettles.)
turning her one green eye back to her daughter.
(On Trollmage's chest, the sleeping Gluttony Codex twitches toward the mirror. Trollmage, half asleep, puts a big hand on it without noticing.)
on her knees, looking up.
her gaze moving off her daughter to the one-armed woman standing half out of Smurjan's shadow. Tender, and terrible.
rising out of the nettles, alarmed.
The scales of Bali's coat ripple, and out of them, out of her own steel, come silver hands, a dozen, reaching through him. They close round Kali's arm, her waist, her braid, and pull: out of Smurjan's shadow, across the nettles, into Bali's glittering coat as if it were a doorway, and through it into the glass.
The Nettle Field. Smurjan on his knees, and on the nettles behind him, two shadows where there were three. Bali on his knees too, staring at his own empty hands, new cracks racing across his cheek. In the great silver mirror, far down the endless hall of reflections, a tiny figure with a red braid, being led away by the hand.