Chapter 251
The island hanging in the Sky-Net, three thousand of the Flock in throw-nets along its rim. High above them at the net's crown, on the Eyrie, Grip, young now, twenty-five and glowing faintly rose, eyes wide open, watching all of them. She has watched all night.
gathered behind the Wing-Keep, out of her sight.
standing up.
looking at his own hands. They're shaking: a day's tremor from the ladder. He sighs, kneels on the flat stone roof of the Wing-Keep, the highest point on the island, in sight of every net on the rim.
(skrrt-skrrrt, wobbling lines; TOK; VRRRMMP: a pale chalk stage rising on the Wing-Keep's roof, a little crooked.)
on the chalk stage, the Warm-Up: juggling the painted leather balls (eight faces of her crew and one of a golden dog) high over her head, cartwheeling between catches, bells flying. Down on the rim, a few netted Flock children watching. One or two smiling. Not enough.
Both crews, on the roof and the stair and the meadow, slowly turning, every one of them, to look at Trollmage, who is asleep standing up against the Wing-Keep.
A whole panel of it. Then, from Smurjan's shadow, slow and deep and enormous, rising out of the stone:
staring at a maw the size of a barn door laughing at the worst joke ever told, and absolutely losing it: a real laugh, helpless, eyes crinkled shut, bells going everywhere.
bursting up out of the shadow, red braid whipping, one hand out.
Lent, not taken, so nobody goes dark: the Giggle shared. Two gigglers back to back on a crooked chalk stage, at full volume, out over the whole island.
Rose bubbles lettered tihi pouring off the chalk stage on the Wing-Keep and drifting out across the whole netted island, into the nets, into three thousand balloons: the Flock laughing in their nets along the rim (children, mothers, old men, a cluster of fliers with Svala in the middle of it, furious and laughing anyway, scarf over her face), and for one breath every laughing face drawn freckled, with bells. Tärna on the Wing-Keep, cackling. And every net on the rim going slack at once, plink plink plink plink plink, like a whole field of flowers opening. Through it, the crews moving fast: Ysel's knife, Rougeina Swapping from net to net, Öde mowing, Roffe lifting nets off whole families with Sleven, Bror's gold shove blowing nets off the rim like leaves. Fowler net-hands on the kite-platforms laughing too, the throw-nets drooping out of their hands.
slipping out of a sagging net, laughing, springing up onto a nest-house roof to perch.
on the Eyrie. The giggle reaching her. Her mouth twitching. And she clamps her jaw, eyes wide, every muscle in her young face fighting it. She wants the laugh in her hand, not in her chest.
turning to the ring of kite-platforms where her net-captains hang, nets drooping, laughing helplessly. Her voice carrying, pleasant, terrible.
On forty kite-platforms, forty net-captains stopping laughing. Terror. Then burning: tempo full, eyes blazing, hearts hammering, every one of them winding up a throw-net on the drum.
on the stage, Kali's minute running out beside her, seeing the drum-count, the forty arms winding up on the beat.
Jeppson's dented tin of cork earplugs going hand to hand down the line with a wink from Tihi; crew after crew corking up. Isa, a beat late, corking. Down on the meadow, Emma, inside a Rope Ring with the Flock's smallest children and oldest elders, handing corks round the ring.
Tihi's giggle, and in everyone who hears it, one beat skips. Drawn on the page as the drum's rhythm with a hole in it:
Forty nets thrown on the beat, landing on a beat that doesn't count: falling on empty air, missing everything, tangling into each other and dropping away into the dark under the island.
A net-captain at full burn, the 9 on his collar: Nine, clutching his chest. The skipped beat had nowhere to go. Everything it held is crowding into the next one. Light starting at his sternum, a crack of it, a heart that can't close.
cork in one ear, eyes gold, seeing Nine's threads blaze white.
(And Tihi, on the stage, seeing it too: the light pouring out of a chest. She's seen it before, on Fyren, in a Wrecker girl.)
Tihi looking for Emma: there, across the meadow, inside her Rope Ring with twenty children and a dozen elders, a hundred yards from Nine. She can't leave a circle that holds.
The giggle still running in everyone. The skipped beats still coming. Nine's light spreading across his ribs. There's only one way to switch it off. She has to be sad.
taking the ribbon from her wrist, and tying her bells silent.
On purpose. And a run of tiny panels behind them: the keyhole of a costume trunk. A clown making a face at it. A little girl laughing behind it. A woman's back going up the gangplank of a prison-barge. A line of an Order ledger in Daniel's neat hand: LO. WINTER COUGH. SECOND WINTER.
Completely still. The rose marks on her cheeks going grey. And across the whole island, the giggle dying: the rose bubbles popping one by one in the air, three thousand people stopping laughing mid-breath, the skipped beats ending.
His heart finding the next beat, and closing on it.
The light sliding back into his chest. He folds onto the kite-platform, gasping, alive.
Tihi, sad, small and silent on it, bells tied. Kali, her borrowed minute over, dropping to her knees beside her.
(Nothing.)
climbing up onto the crooked stage and sitting down next to her. He doesn't try to make her laugh. He doesn't say anything. He sits.
(Krydog nods.)
The Flock free on the meadow, nets cut and lying everywhere. The House's throw spent and tangled in the dark below. But the Sky-Net still holds the island fast, and on the Eyrie at its crown, Grip, young, furious, still watching. On the Wing-Keep's rail, Svala, standing up. Behind her, along the nest-house roofs, a hundred of the Flock's fliers pulling on their glider-cloaks, hooked knives in their teeth.
Perne, left eye to the scope, looking down the line from the rail to the Sky-Net's anchor-row: a hundred anchor-lines side by side, like the strings of a harp.
crouched on the rail, the crimson line on her arm blazing, and behind her a hundred cloaked shapes crouched along the rooftops in the dark like a held breath.
Vigolas on the rail beside her, lifting one arm and pointing straight up: at the crown of the Sky-Net, the woven Eyrie, and the young woman standing on it, watching everything.