Chapter 219
Everyone asleep but Vigolas, sitting cross-legged on the deck with the warm black shard in his cupped hands like a sparrow.
A faint glow at its broken edges.
(Vigolas doesn't answer. He doesn't put it away either.)
Vigolas again, alone, the shard on his knee. Kompis awake in his hammock, watching from the dark, eyes gold.
A thread running from the shard to Vigolas. Not one. Seven strands, braided together, old and thick as a mooring rope, each strand a different shade of grey.
The whole crew, this time, sitting in a ring round Vigolas and the shard on the deck, under the stars, because nobody can sleep through this any more. Rougeina with a hand on a blade. Trollmage holding the Gluttony Codex shut with both hands; it's twitching toward the shard.
its voice warm and amused.
at the edge of the ring, no shadow on the moonlit deck, very still, her hands clenched.
looking at her, then down at the warm shard in his hands.
A fog-bank on the sea ahead. Grey. Silent. The stars over it gone.
ear to the deck, then up, a beat late.
Out of the grey fog-bank, silent: skiffs. A dozen grey boats rowed by grey figures with blank, soft faces and no plates. The Unwritten. They row straight for the Marka.
RANK PLATE ×30: — · UNWRITTEN · —
in Vigolas's hand, its voice suddenly urgent.
The night boarding.
Grey hands reaching up over the rail, and the crew standing in puddles: Bror shoving sea-water over the whole deck so it's wet ground everywhere ("Make it rain, Lillebror!").
Vigolas, deeper Greed-sight, punching only what they still love: a ring, a ribbon, a locket.
Ysel, who was one of them once, on the rail, talking to them as they climb, quiet and flat: "I went back. It's better here. It hurts. It's better." Two of the Unwritten stop climbing.
Öde, the Roll-Call, the crew shouting each other's names whenever a grey hand lands on one of them.
An Unwritten slips through and grabs for the shard in Vigolas's hand, and Mingus gets there first: a golden retriever leaping, catching the grey sleeve in his teeth, the grey not taking to him, dragging the figure back off its feet.
The Unwritten retreating into the fog in their silent skiffs. Two of them not retreating: sitting down on the Marka's wet deck in their grey robes, hands in their laps, faces flickering. Ysel sitting down beside them.
The Marka at night on a dark sea, the fog-bank retreating behind her. On the wet deck under a sky with stars missing, the whole crew in a ring, and in the middle, Vigolas cross-legged with the black shard glowing in his palms: not cold any more, warm, its broken edges lit like coals, and rising from it, faint as smoke, the outline of a room: a desk, a chair, shelves of blacked-out pages, a window. An office, folded small.
At the edges of the ring, two grey figures with flickering faces sitting with Ysel and Öde, talking about plums.
Vigolas alone again, the shard warm in his hands.
very still.
remembering, in a tiny inset panel, the very first chapter: a woman with a stamp and a ledger saying "edited seven times. Not by me."
sitting down beside Vigolas in the dark, not asking permission, Mingus flopping across both of them.
softly.
holding the shard up to his face, eye to eye with a broken piece of black.
its glow pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat.
very awake now.
her hand going to her blade, then away from it. She remembers a blind old man in a well of pages, and a whisper that climbed the whole stair after them as they left: "Forgive me, Jorvand."
(The shard says nothing at all.)
The Marka turning her bow back north, toward the Marhold Spine, toward Glasheim on its peak with the grey stain creeping up its flank. Drekk at the wheel, Ysel at his side.
warm, glowing, speaking very softly: