Chapter 301
Both crews running along the terrace toward the mouth of the side-gallery, lanterns swinging. Mingus already at the gallery mouth, legs planted, hackles up, growling low at the grain inside.
The stub of candle still burning. The empty skiff. The jar on the floor, rolled a little way off. And against the column of grain: the fisher-boy, grey, smooth as driftwood, his chin halfway down in a nod, his face half-turned toward the gallery mouth, his mouth a little open.
two metres of man going down on his knees beside the statue, his big burn-scarred hands not quite touching it. A spoon in his beard.
kneeling on the boy's other side, her ash staff laid down, the white-iron ring at its tip.
(She touches his cheek with two fingers. Cool. Smooth. Wood.)
eyes filmed gold, looking at the space around the statue where a person's threads should be. One thread, running from the boy's chest out of the gallery, back up the dark channel toward the Burn, toward a jar of ash. Not cut. Not tied. Hanging still in the air, like a rope with nobody at either end.
hood down, no shadow at her feet, looking not at the boy but at the column of grain beside his head, where the wood has gone smooth and grey in a long faint stripe, like a road through snow after the cart has gone.
Up through the floor, the deep grainy voice, its balloon woodgrain-bordered and tailless.
getting his arms round the statue and lifting it, a boy of wood as heavy as a mast-step, onto his own back where the cauldron Mätt usually rides. Tihi steadying the grey head. Roffe's voice like a kitchen at night.
the top of the ring-stair. Both crews filing down, Roffe and his burden in the middle. Vigolas, last, swinging one boot down onto the first step.
boot in mid-air, looking round.
Vigolas stepping down onto the stair, and the step folding back into the ring-cliff like a drawer sliding shut. He's standing on the edge again.
Vigolas jumping off the edge, coat flaring, grinning, and landing on the terrace below, and the grain of the floor flowing under him like a river, carrying him back to the cliff and up it and setting him down on the first ring exactly where he started.
Vigolas climbing down a rib of grain hand over hand, and the ceiling's grain catching his coat-tails, so he hangs there, swinging, clinking.
Vigolas sitting on the edge, legs dangling, scowling, his hair more windswept than ever.
on the third step, half-turned, looking up at his friend, then down at the dog at his heel. Everyone else going on down.
Something he almost never does: sending the dog away from his heel.
(Mingus trots back up the three steps and sits down against Vigolas's side, heavy and warm. Kompis goes on down without him, and looks back twice.)
Bark Monks in a ring-gallery: shaven-headed, robed in shed bark, fingers stained amber with sap, copying runes onto sheets of fallen bark at long tables of grain. They don't speak. They bow, all at once, as the crews pass.
Svala bouncing on her toes at a ring's edge, a wing-blade in each hand, eyeing a straight line down to the grove, crouching to launch.
RUNA (from the wood): "Do not fly in here, swallow. Whatever your line cuts first is HIM."
Svala freezing mid-crouch. Then standing up very carefully. "…Walking. Walking's good. I love walking."
Isa, a beat behind everyone, stopping to look at a sap-fall frozen for one instant as she stands still to watch it, then moving on before anyone notices.
The crews arriving at the bottom of the bowl. The rowan tree. Runa on her stool. And all round the grove, set into the floor in a ring, small silver runes shaped like rowan sprigs, each glowing faint red like a berry under ice: the Rowan Ward.
(Everyone steps over. Krydog very high. Roffe very carefully, the grey boy on his back.)
Behind Runa's stool, curving round the back of the grove like the inside of a cupped hand, rises a wall of the darkest, oldest heartwood, black-brown and glossy as polished stone, taller than the rowan. Cut into it, in a long curving line, twenty-four runes, each as tall as a man, each made of a few clean strokes, burning silver in the wood like wire just out of the forge: the first writing in the world.
The rowan above it, heavy with red berries. Sap-light falling through the grain from far above like light through a cathedral roof. The crews small at the bottom of the frame, heads tilted back; Trollmage among them, crown in his hands, mouth open.
And at the end of the line, close by Runa's right hand, after the twenty-fourth rune: a space. Smooth. Blank. The grain of the heartwood there swirling, slow and round, like a whirlpool frozen into wood.
her great scarred hand pointing to the floor at the foot of the Wall, at its end, by the blank swirl.
setting the grey boy down gently at the foot of the Rune Wall, sitting him against the wood, straightening the knitted cap on the wooden head. Beside the statue's half-open mouth, a hand's breadth away, the blank swirl in the grain.
The sap-light ebbing: the Heartwood's night, the amber falls dimming to embers, the ribs of grain going dark one by one, the great bowl filling with shadow from the top down. On the edge of the first ring, two small figures: a man in a long coat and a dog.
the dark coming up round him. His breath short. One bandaged hand curled into Mingus's ruff; in the other, Aska's ember in its curl of smoke, a dot of warm orange light the size of a thumbnail against a dark the size of a world. He starts humming the four notes, and his voice cracks on the third.
(Mingus leans his whole weight into him.)
ringing with thin gold, like coins seen edge-on: Greed-sight. Because if it's dark, he can at least look at something shining.
The dark bowl blazing gold. Every ring a band of treasure. Every sap-fall a river of liquid coin. Every rib of grain a golden pillar. And at the bottom, at the heart, a light so bright and so valuable it hurts to look at: the most precious thing he has ever seen in his life.
reaching out over the edge toward the gold, fingers spread, the old pirate's hand that has grabbed first and thought after all its life. And under his other palm, on the floor, the wood flinching away from him, the grain shrinking back a finger's width, the way skin shrinks from a cold hand.
pulling the hand back. Looking at it. Laughing, short and honest.
(Mingus thumps his tail once.)
letting the gold go out of his eyes. The dark coming back. He doesn't look away from it this time. He looks down, past all the rings, to the bottom of the bowl, where there are a few tiny warm lights round a grove: a lantern, a cook's fire, the white flame of a Lumen wick. His crew. Too small to see faces. He knows every one.
(what Iskall's lamp once showed him): the Marka's deck at night, everyone asleep round the fire, himself awake on the rail watching them.
sitting back on the edge of the first ring, both hands open on his knees, palms up, empty. Talking not to Runa, but to the floor. To the tree.
The grain moving: flowing, folding, unfolding, rising into a step. Then another below it. Then another. A stair unrolling down the ring-cliff out of the living wood, step after step after step, amber light running down its edge like a banister.
Vigolas standing at the top of the new stair, coat clinking, the dark all round him and one line of amber light running down into it toward his crew. Mingus already three steps down, looking back, tail going.
The grey boy sitting at the foot of the Rune Wall, his half-open mouth beside the blank space. In the blank space, the frozen swirl of the grain turning, very slightly, the way the hand of a clock moves when nobody is looking.
Runa on her rowan stool in the dark grove, her sap-amber eyes lifting toward the top of the bowl, where a single line of light is coming down the ring-cliffs. Her heavy brows going up, for the first time in three hundred years.