Chapter 273
A kitchen, long ago. A low window full of morning. A coil of half-braided rope on the table. A woman at the table with her back half-turned, braiding, humming: four notes, over and over.
A toddler, two years old at most, black-brown hair sticking up in every direction, sitting on the boards in a patch of sun, holding something he's found, fallen out of his mother's apron pocket: a seashell, pink inside, the size of his palm. Staring at it with enormous eyes. Greed, at two, looks exactly like wonder.
getting up, wobbling, and tottering across the kitchen to the woman, holding the shell up over his head in both hands as high as he can reach.
turning. Her face: warm, freckled, Vigolas's eyes, laughing with her head back. Bending down to him.
And the boy, holding the shell out to her, his very first word, small and clear:
taking the shell, laughing, scooping him up, kissing his hair, setting the shell on the windowsill in the sun.
the kitchen, the morning light, the shell on the sill, the laughing woman, the boy, and the whole picture whiting out from the edges inward, gently, like breath fading off glass, until there's nothing in the panel at all.
(Blank.)
at the foot of the Great Root, the heartwood fist coming down on him. A tear on his face he doesn't understand. His mouth already open on the word that has just come home.
coming up, open, toward Gnag's chest. Not toward the fist: toward the white-gold glow of the heartwood inside him, the mouthful of the world tree.
The giant of heartwood frozen mid-swing over a small man with an open hand. And out of the giant's chest, pulled, as if on a line: the bite, a mouthful of pale, living, glowing heartwood, streaming back out through the bark and across the air in a long white-gold ribbon, back into the Great Root, into the raw white wound it was torn from, which closes over it. Not healed: un-bitten. The bark knitting back as if no tooth ever touched it.
And as the heartwood leaves him, Gnag shrinking, mid-swing, the swelling heartwood draining out of him, eight metres, five, three, back to a 2.9-metre man, half man and half oak again, his fist the size of a fist.
Gnag's fist, man-sized again, coming down on Vigolas, and Vigolas catching it in one torn palm, lightning crackling.
staring at his own fist in Vigolas's grip. At his own arm, bark and man again. Feeling for the strength of the tree inside him, and finding it gone.
Every root in sight going still. The arches settling. The roots that bent and whipped at Gnag's command lying down again like dogs. The tree's scream stopping.
under the Cave-Bear, her hands coming slowly down from her ears. Sap pouring down her carved face like tears. Listening through the roots.
the place where the bite was. Bark, whole and old and grey. Not a scar on it. Flisa's hand flat against it, the side of her face pressed to it.
looking across at Vigolas, at the ∞−1 over his head blinking gold. Seeing something in his best friend's threads: one, very old, very small, very warm, that ends now. Neatly. A fresh cut.
still holding Gnag's fist, frowning, wiping the tear off his face with his shoulder, puzzled.
glitching gold over his head. For one panel, very faint, inside the glitch: a pink shell on a windowsill. Then gone.
tearing his fist free, staggering back from the little greedy man. His one human eye wild. His stomach growling: a sound like a whole forest creaking.
the amber book glowing through the oak, ravenous.
The Cave-Bear, at the edge of the clearing, slowly, carefully, setting down the torn vault of roots on the ground beside the Great Root, arch by arch, gently, so nothing breaks. Both crews coming out from under its belly, battered, on their feet.
limping up beside Vigolas.
at the back, squinting at Vigolas with one eye shut, measuring.
beside him, quiet, his ringed hands in his pockets, looking at Vigolas with the eyes of a man who has bought and sold a thousand memories.
Gnag, half oak and starving, wheeling round on the clearing. On the strippers. On the roots. On the crews. On the moored ships far off in the harbour. Everything here made of wood, and all of it food.
unhinging, iron teeth bared, wider than ever, drool like sap.
Gnag lunging, not at the crews: at the nearest root-arch, biting a chunk out of it, KRNCH, swallowing, and going for the next, and the next, eating his way across the clearing toward the harbour and the ships, growing again with every mouthful, bark creeping up his neck.
far off in the harbour on the Marka's deck, seeing the thing come eating its way through the root forest toward his ship.
standing up at the foot of the Great Root. Small, 1.06 metres of chipped and leaking cork-oak. Looking at Gnag eating her roots. And he isn't made of her tree any more. He's made of stripped bark and stolen bridges, dead wood, stripper's wood. She can hit him now.
over her heart, beginning to glow sap-gold. Her splinter-teeth showing in a grin that is not cute at all.
Gnag stopping mid-bite, turning, a mouthful of root in his iron jaw, at the sound of her voice. And the little splinter-girl walking across the clearing toward him, alone, sap-gold light leaking from every crack in her bark, both fists full of shards of herself.