Chapter 305
The crews waking round Roffe's fire inside the Rowan Ward. Runa on her stool, her eyes still milky white.
(Halfway up the ring-stair already: Drekk, stomping, not looking back.)
Drekk, up the stair to the first ring, muttering about bilges.
Öde, scythe on her back, a sack of Värn barley over her shoulder, heading for a terrace where a sap-river has laid down a bank of soft silt: "If I'm stuck in a tree, I'm planting something."
Isa wandering up three rings to sit by a sap-fall.
Kompis and Mingus with a fishing line, toward a sap-pool.
Svala pacing a ring-edge, hands twitching.
Smurjan sitting cross-legged on the bank of a sap-river to meditate, three shadows behind him.
Rougeina, gone, as always, nobody saw where.
Tihi, deaf, trailing after whoever looks most interesting, which today is Isa.
The Marka at her mooring in the sap-pool. Drekk on her deck with a bucket, and, as he does every time he comes aboard, counting heads on his fingers, though there's nobody aboard but him.
The bark-wood of the Marka's own deck going smooth and grey in a stripe. By his ear, his own rope-bordered voice, drawn grey, cracked, tailless.
Small, wiry, his own face back these days, lined and stubborn, his cracked spyglass in his belt. He doesn't look at the groove. He looks at the Kettle's brass bell on the bow.
(The grey slides off the plank like water off a waxed deck.)
Öde on her knees in a bank of sap-silt, sowing barley in neat rows, grass growing round her ankles out of the wood. The grey groove sliding along the silt toward her hands.
not stopping her sowing. Saying, plain and slow, aloud, to the groove:
(The groove stops, an inch from her hand.)
(With each name, the grey backs off another inch, as if each one were a stone set down in its path.)
sowing the next row.
(The groove withdraws into the grain. Öde keeps sowing. She keeps saying the names, all afternoon.)
A slow amber waterfall spilling from one ring-cliff to the next. Isa sitting on the ledge beside it, slight and upright, the handless ice clock-face at her throat, watching the falling sap. And beside her, the grey groove.
A beat after the whisper. Then her shoulders settling. Her breath stopping. Her eyes going perfectly still.
And behind her, the sap-fall stopping: a curtain of amber light frozen in mid-air, every drop hanging. THE HOLD. Time stopped round a girl who isn't moving.
At the tips of her fingers, the skin going grey. Smooth. Wooden. Creeping toward the knuckles. In the still world, the only thing moving is the grey.
On the ledge behind Isa, Tihi, who sat down there a minute ago and, as she always does near Isa, rested one hand on her shoulder (the Pickpocket's Hold habit). So when the world stopped, she didn't: she moves in the held moment, the only other moving thing. Deaf, she heard none of it. She leans round and sees Isa's grey fingers. Her face going white.
jumping round in front of Isa, and doing the dance: the one from Lumen's beach, the worst dance in the Current, elbows everywhere, knees inward, tongue out, bells jangling silently (she can't hear them), and the worst face she can pull.
One beat late, as always. Her mouth twitching. And then a laugh: small, bright, real, a beat late, and moving: her shoulders shaking. And the instant she moves, the Hold breaks: the sap-fall crashing down again behind her, SHHHHHHHH, and the grey at her fingertips draining back out of her skin like ink running out of a cloth.
Kompis sitting on the rim with a fishing line in the amber, Mingus lying against his back. His eyes gold: in this tree he can see more threads than anywhere in his life, threads in the grain, threads to every Bark Monk, to every sleeper on every root in nine realms, a sky full of threads, and every one of them tugging at him. A thin trail of blood from his nose.
reaching back without looking and finding Mingus's head. Resting there.
(Mingus lifts his lip at the groove, one long growl. It goes round them both.)
The whole bowl of the Heartwood seen as one great cutaway, ring above ring, at the same noon hour, every one of them in their place, and beside every one of them a grey, cracked, tailless balloon in their own shape:
Drekk counting on the Marka's deck. Öde sowing names into silt. Isa and Tihi by the sap-fall. Kompis and Mingus at the pool. Svala crouched on a ring-edge. Smurjan meditating by a sap-river, three grey balloons round him, one huge and round. Vigolas halfway up a ring-stair in a dim gallery. Levla and Flexsnus on a landing, Flexsnus with a hand on his friend's collar just in case. Krydog on the first ring, alone, shadow-eyed. Bark Monks at their tables.
And running among them through the grain of the whole tree, from ring to ring, one long grey groove, branching like a crack in ice, reaching for every one of them at once.
In the middle of it all, Tihi: the only figure in the whole picture with no grey balloon beside her, looking round at everyone's stricken faces, deaf, bewildered.
And at the very bottom of the bowl, the grove, ringed in red rowan-light, where no balloon can reach.
Smurjan, cross-legged, eyes shut, three shadows behind him. Three grey balloons at once: the first in his own quiet measured voice, the second jagged and over-full (Kali's), the third huge and round and nearly empty.
rising out of Smurjan's, the colossal maw with its white streak, opening slowly, and saying, deep and calm:
(The grey balloon sliding off him like a crumb off a plate.)
Svala, crouched, wing-blades in her hands, staring at a straight line of empty air she isn't allowed to fly.
standing up, sheathing the blades crossed at the small of her back.
Vigolas, coat clinking, climbing toward the first ring alone, a Lumen wick on a stick held up in front of him. The sap-light low here. Dark at the edges. His shoulders up round his ears.
The groove in the floor under the wick-light. The whisper patient.
(He walks on, up into the dark, the wick shaking in his hand.)
Runa on her stool, blind, her cheek against the Rune Wall, listening to the whole tree. Every offer, every refusal, coming to her through the wood like voices through a wall. Her great scarred hands opening and closing on her knees.
her milky eyes turning toward the edge of the grove, where the Rowan Ward glows. Inside it, untouched, the grey boy at the foot of the Wall. Outside it, the grey groove sliding past, past, past, never in.
Up near the ceiling, where the ribs arch over into the golden haze: a slim figure perched on the very top of a rib like a bird on a mast, barefoot, crimson hair ragged at the jaw, the black panther lying along the rib behind her. Rougeina. Her eight blades laid out on the grain in front of her in the order she always sharpens them, a whetstone in her hand.
Going smooth. Going grey.
still sharpening.
Mirror-steel, blue-grey, reflecting too well. In it, her own face: young, pale, the scar through the eyebrow, and so tired the reflection looks older than she is.
The whetstone stopping. Her green eyes on her reflection. Something in her face going loose that has never gone loose before.
The fingers loosening.
One of the eight blades slipping out of her fingers and falling, turning over and over in the amber air down the long drop beside the rib, a sliver of mirror catching the light, toward the floor of the rings far below.