Chapter 306
Emma walking along the terrace with her ash staff, looking for her captain. And out of the amber air above, turning over and over, a sliver of mirror-steel falling, and standing in the wood a stride ahead of her, quivering.
looking at the blade. Then up: at the highest rib in the bowl, at a tiny barefoot figure perched up near the ceiling, a black panther beside her, and, along the rib, the faint grey stripe of the groove.
not shouting, not climbing, not giving an order. Looking up and asking, her voice low and warm, a question even though it barely ends like one.
High on the rib, Rougeina's green eyes finding the blade standing in the wood beside Emma's boot. A pinpoint of silver-rose in her pupil. Blink: she is standing beside Emma, barefoot on the terrace, and up on the high rib, where she was, the blade lies on the grain beside her seven others. A faint silver-rose afterimage hangs in the air between them.
Her face doesn't look like her face. Something has gone out of it.
(Beside her ear, still, the grey sharp-tailed balloon: …Let them be nothing.)
(Rougeina, after a moment, nods once.)
Emma walking a circle round Rougeina and herself in one unbroken walk, the white-iron ring at her staff's tip scribing a line of chalk on the pale wood, never lifting, round, round, until the two ends meet.
(A gold hairline runs round the line. The gold threads at Emma's wrists glow.)
at Rougeina's ear, still there, still whispering. It hasn't gone. Emma looks at it, and doesn't pretend.
Up through the wood, Runa's deep voice, woodgrain-bordered, from the grove far below.
(Rougeina's head turning slowly toward the far galleries, toward hundreds of grey shapes standing in the dark.)
her staff planted, her feet planted. Inside the line.
looking at the grey balloon. At the gold line. At the far grey galleries. And speaking, for the first time, to the whisper, quietly, plainly:
(The grey balloon hangs there a moment longer. Then cracks across, and falls apart like ash, outside the gold line.)
Rougeina looking up at the high rib, where all eight blades now lie. Cross-Swap, eight times: each blade trading places with a chip of bark at her feet, blink, blink, blink, the blades landing in a row inside the circle and the bark chips pattering down onto the rib far above, a silver-rose afterimage for every one. Her feet rooted for a heartbeat each time.
Her fingers unbuckling the harness across her back. The X of eight hilts coming off her shoulders for the first time we have ever seen.
Her hands laying the eight blades on the wood in the order she sharpens them: one, two, three… eight. Fanned. Like the hands of a clock.
kneeling, looking at her blades laid out on the floor, her hands empty. The panther padding in over the line and sitting down at her back.
doing something she has never once done on any page: lying down. On her side on the warm wood, knees drawn up, her cheek on her own arm, crimson hair falling over her face. The panther settling in a long black curve against her back. Her eyes closing.
Outside the gold line, the grey groove circling in the grain: round once, round twice, a dozen small grey balloons drifting up from it and bumping against the line and sliding off, unable to find a sleeper to ride.
asleep. Smooth. Young. Lying down.
A quiet splash. A broad pale terrace high in the dimming bowl of the Heartwood, the sap-light going amber-dusk, the great ribs of grain rising round it into shadow.
In the middle, a thin gold chalk circle on the wood. Inside it, the assassin asleep lying down, crimson hair across her face, one hand open on the floor, the black panther curled in a long dark crescent at her back with its yellow eyes half-shut. Beside her, eight thin blades of mirror-steel laid out in a fan like the hands of a clock, each catching a sliver of the last light.
At the circle's edge, Emma, sitting cross-legged with her ringed staff across her knees, a few grey threads in her auburn braid, watching over her.
Outside the line, drifting in the dusk like lost moths, the grey cracked balloons of the whisper, unable to come in.
The crews coming back up the ring-stair from wherever they've been, lamps swinging, and stopping dead at the edge of the terrace.
SMURJAN, KOMPIS, EMMA (together): …Shh.
Vigolas taking off his long coat to lay over her, realising halfway that it clinks (thirty-six shards, a dozen cubes), and very slowly putting it back on.
Svala, unwinding her long white scarf, the one like a contrail, and kneeling at the gold line, and asking Emma with her eyebrows. Emma nodding. Svala reaching in and laying the scarf over Rougeina's shoulder. ("Tell me his face. Then there's two of us." Svala doesn't say it. She doesn't have to.)
Tihi, deaf, tiptoeing in exaggerated silence, bells tied silent with her ribbon for the first time in the arc, finger to her lips at everyone.
waddling up the ring-stair with the crow on his head, seeing the gold circle, and stepping into it without a word. Lying down flat beside the line, cheek on the grain.
The grain warm. Far below, the slow vast tide of the tree's heart, one beat a season, not due for a long while. He's waiting, in the tree's time.
alone at the line now, the crews gone back down to the grove for Roffe's supper. Up through the floor, the woodgrain voice.
on the gold line, not crossing it.
Warm air rising off the falling amber in a steady updraft. Levla and Flexsnus on the landing beside it, flying a kite: a sheet of shed bark with a copied rune on it that came out crooked, which a Bark Monk gave them with a small bow, rising on the warm air off the fall, climbing, steady.
along the ring-edge, sap-stained hands folded, watching the first kite ever flown inside Ferdinand, their mouths very slightly open. One of them, the youngest, lifts a hand and waves at it.
The crews asleep round Roffe's fire inside the glowing ring of the Rowan Ward. The sap-light ebbing. The Rune Wall's twenty-four silver runes the only bright thing, Hold brightest at the end.
last up as always, banking the fire, and stopping by the foot of the Wall to straighten the grey boy's knitted cap. Patting the wooden head.
on her stool, still blind, leaning slowly sideways until her cheek rests on the Rune Wall. Listening to the heart. A long, peaceful panel.
in the dark at the foot of the Wall, a hand's breadth from the blank swirl in the grain. Smooth. Peaceful. Mid-nod. Mouth a little open.
And the lips moving.
Not speaking. Shaping. The grey wood of the mouth flexing like a carving trying to remember it was a mouth.
in the dark between the grey lips: a thin stripe of grain gone smooth, a groove of nothing, very small, coiled there like a seed. It came in with him. It has been inside the Ward since the first night.
asleep against Kompis by the fire, his head coming up. Ears forward. Lips pulling back from his teeth.
And Runa, blind, her cheek on the Wall, her milky eyes snapping open.
The foot of the Rune Wall. The grey boy's lips forming the last of a shape, one careless dry sound, "…kh—". And the dark glossy heartwood under the blank space after the twenty-fourth rune splitting: a single straight crack running down through the frozen swirl, clean as a knife-cut, and from it, the first thin pale line of something welling.