Chapter 204
Torches along the Bastion's jetty. Inside Aldhrun's wall of light, the stone is grey in patches, spreading slowly from the wall's foot like damp through a cellar floor. And a bucket-chain: crew, Bastion guards, Lärka, all passing buckets hand to hand from a great barrel at the end of the jetty, where Drämmen stands knee-deep, water pouring off him to fill it.
being sloshed over a grey patch of stone. Where the water lands, the grey stops. Holds. Then, slowly, starts creeping again round the wet edges.
still kneeling at the foot of his wall with his scarred hand flat on the stone, holding the wall up. He hasn't moved since dusk. Lärka sits beside him, wringing out cloths.
at the end of the jetty, Bror aimed at the black fjord water outside the white, BRA-DOOM, shoving great sheets of real sea up over the wall and down onto the jetty in a cold, glittering rain.
At the end of the bucket-chain, apart from everyone, at the very edge of the jetty where the wall meets the cliff: Drekk, sitting on an upturned crate, not passing buckets, staring through the light of the wall at the white beyond. His bell-rope mask hanging loose round his neck. His face bare.
sitting down on the stone beside him without asking, grass springing up round the crate, holding out a cup of something hot.
very plainly.
a long, long silence. He takes the cup. He doesn't drink it.
A younger Drekk, no mask, a fuller beard, hauling a net out of the shallows, and in the net, tangled, half-drowned: a girl, soaking wet, one side of her face grey and faint even then, eyes shut.
The Kettle's tiny cabin, a stove. Marka, enormous and laughing, wrapping the shivering girl in a blanket the size of a sail.
The Kettle's deck at night, the girl in a hood at the stern, alone. Humming a tune, very softly, to herself. Drekk on watch, pretending not to hear.
Drekk teaching her to tie a bowline on the Kettle's rail, his big hands over her small grey-and-pale ones. She gets it on the first try. She doesn't smile. But she ties a second one, and a third, and a fourth, all along the rail.
The Kettle on fire, Saga I: flames racing along an oil-soaked deck, and at the bow, untouched by the fire, Ysel, hood back, watching.
present day, his jaw working.
A memory spread across both pages, warm, in the colours of an old lamp: the Kettle, a small, scruffy, much-patched fishing boat with a bell at her bow, at anchor on a calm evening sea. On her deck: Marka, huge, laughing, an anchor on a chain over her shoulder; Drekk, younger, at the tiller, counting under his breath; and at the stern, a small hooded girl with a half-grey face, sitting with her knees drawn up, humming, her shadow lying exactly where a shadow should, for once.
Above them, a sky full of stars, every one of them still there.
And in the corner of the spread, small, present day: Drekk and Öde on the crate on the greying jetty, Drekk's mask in his hands.
very still, then reaching for her reed pen and dark ink. She doesn't write on her arm. She takes a scrap of sail-canvas and writes, carefully, everything he said: Lillskugga. Five notes up, three down, never finished. Best knots. Three years. Hummed when nobody heard.
surprised into a laugh.
Drekk talking. Öde writing. The bucket-chain behind them, endless. Fragments in the balloons: "…slept in the bilge, said it was quieter…" "…Marka used to braid her hair and she'd let her…" "…she could find the way into anywhere, like she'd been there before…" "…she cried once. Just once. When the gull died."
now covered on both sides in small, careful writing. She folds it and tucks it inside her shirt, over her heart.
looking out at the white again, the mask in his lap.
turning to Öde, and for the first time in the series his voice is steady, very quiet and very hard.
The bucket-chain still going, the crew grey with exhaustion. The seep inside the wall slowed to a crawl, held back by water and stubbornness. Aldhrun still kneeling, hand on the stone, new scars on his arms from blows nobody saw.
carrying a bucket past Drekk, squeezing his shoulder without stopping. Mingus stops and leans his whole weight against Drekk's leg.
on the gate-tower, ear pressed to the stone, then lifting her head, a beat late.
No grey tide. No Unwritten. Just one figure, small, hooded, wading out of the blank sea toward the wall, slowly, alone. Behind her, her shadow standing a second late.
on the wall, raising his crossbow.
in Ysel's raised grey hand, catching the dawn light. It isn't white. It's a small, faded, ragged triangle of red canvas, with a crude kettle stitched on it in black thread.
on his feet so fast the crate goes over. The mask falling. His bare face going white.
(It didn't. She kept it.)
Ysel stopping at the foot of the wall of light, on the white side, the red pennant raised, her half-grey face tilted up toward the jetty. She doesn't look at Vigolas. Or Aldhrun. Or the crew.
through the shimmer of the wall. Her whole face, the pale half and the grey half, calm, and in the pale eye, something that might be fear.
her voice small and flat, carrying through the light.