Chapter 198

The Hall Between is gone. The two great mirrors, silver and rose, stand at either end of the field split top to bottom, reflecting nothing whole. The crew lie scattered in the nettles where the collapsing Hall threw them out. Silver dust falling over everything, slow, like the first snow. Nässla standing among them, untouched. Drekk running across the field toward them, bell-rope mask pushed up off his face.

kneeling, hands open on her knees, silver dust settling in her palms. In front of her, fanned in the nettles, eight blades, bright and whole. Her black panther pressed against her back. Mingus lying across her feet.

in Kali's one arm. The cracks across him are opening. Silver flakes lifting off his cheek, his hands, his coat, drifting away like the dust.

looking at the eight bright blades in the nettles, and shaking his head, which costs him a piece of his ear.

Smurjan, on one knee in the nettles, third eye opening, crimson-rimmed. The Sightline: a crimson line from his third eye sweeping the field, past cracked glass and cracked glass and cracked glass, looking for one reflection in the world that isn't broken, and stopping on the black-glass sickle in Kali's hand.

Kali thrusts the sickle up in front of her brother's face. Bali, half gone, looking into the black glass. Almost smiling.

And he falls into it, the last silver flakes following him like sparks up a chimney.

in Kali's shaking hand. Deep in the obsidian, faint, a black braid.

Smurjan getting up slowly, looking at the sickle, at Kali, at nothing. Behind him, in the low starlight, his shadows on the nettles: his own, Kali's, Bakasura's, and, very faint, a fourth, with a long braid.

Räva, sitting apart in the nettles with a fist-sized piece of cracked mirror in her lap, looking at her own face in it, in pieces. Her tail wrapped round her knees. Drekk stopping beside her, the bell-rope mask pushed up on his forehead. Under it, his face: weathered, deep-lined, the long beard, small sharp eyes that have looked at a lot of horizons.

taking the cracked mirror-piece from her and looking at himself in it for the first time since a fire on the Marka's deck. A long beat.

He pulls the bell-rope mask back down over his face.

laughing, her own laugh, out of her own face, and nobody's face goes anywhere at all.

standing at the little heap of black sand and broken blue-grey steel where the dark mirror stood.

Vigolas kneels and lays his palm on the broken steel. Black-green script flickers across his knuckles. It's a mirror, a thing he could carry, within his measure, so there's no memory to pay, only breath: he sags, sweating, as the pieces rise, turn and fit together, backward through their breaking, until it stands on its plinth again exactly as it was: tall, narrow, blue-grey, with eight long slivers missing from its left edge.

And in it: only Rougeina.

Rougeina picking up her eight blades from the nettles, one at a time, and laying them into the eight gaps in the mirror's edge, one at a time. Each one fits, click, like a key. The eighth goes in. The mirror is whole for the first time in twenty years, and in it, whole, a crimson-haired woman with short hair, looking back at herself.

looking a long time. Then, one by one, taking them back out.

(She leaves the mirror standing in the Nettle Field, between the two cracked great mirrors.)

sitting down beside Rougeina, a reed pen and a little pot of silver ink.

Öde writes it on the inside of her forearm, apart from the emerald names of Värn and the dark place-ink of FJÄLLMÅ, LÖVHOLM and SNÖBERGA: TINDRA, in silver.

leaning over to look.

(Somebody laughs. Nobody can tell who.)

flat on his back in the nettles, one eye cracking open at the blades on Rougeina's hip.

sitting with his back against a cracked mirror-tower, one hand flat on his chest over a faint warm glow in the shape of a laughing face. The burn of the Triple Pulse is in him: the voices louder than they've been for years.

The Marka at anchor offshore. Vigolas at the waterline, skimming broken glass across the water. Rougeina walking down the sand toward him, eight blades on her back.

A real spar under the lantern-stars. Swap, fist, Swap, the green lightning crackling low, her silver-rose trails crisscrossing the sand. Then she goes for it, the first step of the twelve thousand and one, and her body doesn't know it. Her feet reach for a step that isn't there. She stumbles. She tries again. Nothing. The dance is gone.

kneeling in the sand in front of her. She grabs his coat in both fists, and it clinks, thirty-six shards in the lining, and she presses her face into it and cries like the six-year-old she was.

in the sand, the coat round her shoulders now.

Night. The black water at its foot settling after a shiver. Pim, holding up Siv's lantern, its little mirror-reflector cracked.

Ögar, blindfolded, her long fingers on the stone, climbing names. Stopping on a new one, very small, settling into the black rock as they watch: TINDRA.

She bows to it, low, the way she bows to Rougeina's dead.

1. A fishing boat leaving the black-glass shore for Rävgrytet: Räva at the stern with one face, her own, waving her tail.

2. The Marka's galley: four bowls on the table, Kali's black-glass sickle leaning against the fourth, and deep in the obsidian a faint black braid.

3. A harbour, any harbour: people holding up cracked mirrors and pointing, talking about the night every mirror cracked.

4. Drekk at the rail at dawn with a razor and no glass, trimming his long beard square by feel.

The crew eating. Nobody mentions mirrors. Nobody mentions the empty place where a woman stood in a bucket of water. Kompis passes Rougeina the bread without being asked.

Rougeina alone by the Kettle's bell, sharpening her eight blades in the same order as every night. She lifts one to check its edge. In the steel: her own face. Whole. Uncracked. Only hers.

(The blade shows only her.)

The Marka sailing north, small under Astralis's last lantern-stars, a crimson-haired woman at the bow and a golden dog asleep against her feet, toward a thin grey line of dawn on a horizon that sits, if you look closely, a little too close.