Chapter 195
It doesn't show a fox. It shows a woman: sharp, fine-boned, with freckles across the nose, wild loose red hair a shade more orange than crimson, a mouth made for grinning, and green eyes. Older than Rougeina. Younger than her sister. A face like Rougeina's, if Rougeina had spent her life laughing at things instead of killing them.
on the glass floor where she fell, staring.
The fox face lifting at the edges like a wet leaf peeling off a window. The amber of her eyes draining from the rims inward, green coming up underneath.
dropping to her knees beside her and catching both her hands, holding them away from her face.
A gale of faces. Hundreds of them, peeling off a kneeling woman all at once and flying, streaming away up the endless Hall like autumn leaves in a storm, every one going home: an Order officer's face, a harbour clerk's, a fishwife's, a laughing child's, a weathered old sailor's with a short beard, laughing at a fire, a huge, merry woman's with her mouth wide open in a laugh. And last of all, small and spinning, a red fox kit's face, tumbling away up the hall and out, toward wherever foxes go.
In the middle, on her knees on the glass, with her niece holding her hands: a woman with Rougeina's face. Freckled, green-eyed, orange-red hair wild. Bare. And behind her, still curled round her like a question, a big bushy fox's tail.
Drekk sitting at the field's edge beside Nässla, the panther at his boots. Out of the great silver mirror drifts one face, like a leaf, down across the nettles, and settles under his bell-rope mask. He goes completely still.
lifting the edge of the woven rope an inch. We see only the lower half of his face: the long beard, and a mouth. It moves.
(And Drekk laughs: one short, cracked bark, the first with his own face since he lost it.)
One face hasn't flown away. Big and merry, mouth open in a laugh, it circles the Hall twice like a gull with nowhere to land, and then dives, straight into Smurjan's chest, and sinks in under the skin, a warm gold glow over his heart in the shape of a laughing face.
and the voice that comes out of him is not his, not Kali's, not Bakasura's. A big, rough, laughing woman's voice, the rarest lettering in the series.
(Räva, on her knees, bursts into tears and laughter at the same time.)
wiping her face with both hands, her own face, feeling it like a stranger's. Her plate flickers, rewrites itself, settles.
RÄVA · DRIFTING-7 · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist: — (her own face. Really.)
and Räva getting up and walking to the glass. Not afraid now. The two of them face to face for the first time since a night on a jetty.
both hands on the glass.
her one green eye going from face to face: her sister, her daughter, Kali in Smurjan's shadow, Bali. Something in it hardening, the way a soldier's face hardens before a charge.
The Echo. Out of every mirror left in the Hall, seventy-two of the same silver hand at once, reaching. Öde dragged toward a mirror by her reflection, heels skidding. Trollmage hauled off Smurjan's back by his. Kompis yanked a step, Mingus's teeth in his hood. Isa and Rougeina, still, untouched. Vigolas, untouched, punching the hands off Öde.
Smurjan: the Triple Pulse. Three hearts, one beat: a crimson Sightline, Kali's black-glass sickle and Bakasura's jaws, all at once, in three directions. Six mirrors burst. The hands holding Öde and Trollmage let go.
sorrowful again.
Smurjan's voice: gone. His mouth working, nothing. His three shadows tangling. The Pulse trips, and he goes to one knee.
Bali stepping between his mother's mirror and the fallen man, cracks on his face catching the grey light. He turns his open palms toward the glass.
RETURN. The silence lifts off Smurjan's throat like a small grey moth, and flies back to its source: across the floor, into the dark mirror, onto Echo's mouth.
her mouth moving, and nothing: an empty silver balloon, and an empty echo-outline behind it.
facing his mother, hands still raised.
his voice cracking with his face.
(In the glass, Echo, silenced by her own silence, stares at him.)
The silence wears off; her voice comes back, very quiet.
Bali's cracks run, all at once, from his cheek down his throat, across his chest, through the backs of both hands, fine silver fractures spreading like frost on a window. He staggers. Kali is there, out of Smurjan's shadow, catching him with her one arm before he hits the floor.
stepping up to the dark mirror, close enough to touch it, standing very still.
flat on the glass over her mother's.
beside her, hands in his coat pockets, serious.
tears running from her one green eye, her voice breaking.
the grey of her missing half spreading a hair further across her face as she speaks, eating at the corner of her mouth.
lying flat on the glass floor with her ear to it, listening the way she listens to whales.
pressing both palms flat to the inside of her glass, her one eye blazing, her hair streaming sideways.
The whole Hall Between bursts. Every mirror in the endless corridor explodes outward at once: walls, reflections, reflections of reflections, ten thousand pieces of flying glass, and in every shard, her face. The glass floor under the crew's feet breaks away in great slabs into the grey below. Only the small plinth of black glass sand under the dark mirror still stands.