Chapter 313

The sap-light filling the bowl, warm and slow. The tree's heart beating once, a long time ago, and not again for a long time yet. Round the grove, the Finished, standing still where they stopped: a ring of grey statues with peaceful faces, facing every way. And among them, back from the roots, the Bark Monks, quiet as ever, laying fresh robes of bark over grey shoulders, one statue at a time.

The grey boy in the knitted cap, sitting against the wood where Roffe first put him, mouth closed, finished. A Bark Monk kneeling beside him with a sheet of shed bark and a sap-pen, waiting. Roffe sitting cross-legged opposite, a steaming bowl set on the floor at the boy's feet.

(The monk writes ABBE on the bark, and sets it at the boy's feet beside the bowl.)

Runa, very old and very small on it now, wrapped in her robe of cork and rowan leaves, her braid running down into the great dark knot of a hundred rings in the floor. And on the floor at her feet, her back against the stool's leg, her staff across her knees: Emma. Her auburn braid silver from temple to tip in a broad streak. The gold line of the oldest ring behind them quiet and plain, just wood again.

a small tired smile.

looking at her own hands, the gold threads at her wrists.

the huge old troll and the healer at her feet, both looking out over the grove.

(Under them, very far off, the great slow heartbeat. They both listen to it.)

The Upp Igen's crew round it, eating. Krydog sitting on the floor with a bowl, back straight, the shadows under his eyes black, his bandages new. Blinking. Blinking slower.

Krydog's eyes closing. Opening. Closing.

His chin going down, very slowly, toward his chest.

His whole body tipping sideways, like a felled tree in slow motion, sitting up all the way down—

—and his head landing, softly, on Roffe's knee.

Krydog asleep.

two metres of man with a captain's head in his lap and a full spoon halfway to his own mouth. Freezing. Not one muscle moving. Tears beginning in his beard.

every face round the fire turning at once, appalled and delighted.

(Tihi, deaf, both hands clamped over her own mouth, bells already tied silent, eyes enormous.)

The sleeping captain at the centre, his head on Roffe's knee, Roffe not moving.

Perne, first watch, sitting on the end of the rowan stool's shadow with Fjärran across her knees, both eyes open for once, watching nothing come.

Flexsnus, second watch, leaning on a column of grain at an impossible angle, tin closed in his hand, not tapping it.

Daniel, third, standing like a sentry, one hand on the certificate in his pocket, as if someone might try to appeal this.

Tihi, fourth, sitting cross-legged an arm's length from Krydog's face, staring at it, not laughing, not laughing, not laughing.

Jeppson, writing in the margin of the Book of Works, where builds go and nothing else ever has: "The captain. Asleep. One."

Emma, from the stool, watching all of them watching him.

wandering over, coat clinking quietly, seeing it, stopping dead. The loudest man in the Current with his mouth shut.

FLEXSNUS, PERNE, DANIEL (together, very quietly): …Our captain. · Our watch.

(He sits down anyway, a little way off, back to them, facing out into the grove. Saying nothing. For three hours.)

Krydog's eyes opening. Looking up at the underside of Roffe's beard. At a ring of faces. At a pirate's back.

reading from the Book of Works, small exact numbers.

deaf, signing at Runa across the grove with both hands, fast, big, eyebrows up. Kompis beside her translating with his voice.

the rope sandals kicked off, flat on the warm wood of the grove. Her eyes widening. Through the soles: the great slow tide of the tree's heart, a long way off. And close by, quick and warm and steady, a smaller one. She looks round. Mingus is lying a foot away, chin on his paws, tail thumping the floor.

kneeling by the fan of eight blades she laid out on a terrace above, which someone (Svala) carried down for her. Buckling the harness back on. The X of eight hilts over her shoulders again.

(Svala, behind her, winding her white scarf back round her own neck, grinning.)

bowing low before the stool, three shadows bowing with him.

kneeling. Runa's knotted old hand opening over hers and dropping into her palm a single red rowan berry, off the tree above the stool.

(Öde closing her fist round it. Grass growing round her knees out of the wood.)

standing in front of the stool, hands in his coat pockets, not quite knowing what to do with himself.

(He grins so wide it nearly falls off his face.)

last, kneeling at the foot of the stool. His crown in one hand. With the other, unwinding from his own neck a knitted scarf: lumpy, uneven, the stitches dropped in three places, the colours not quite matching. Grandmother Ulla's scarf.

winding the scarf, very gently, round the shoulders of a very old troll woman who has not had a gift since she walked into a tree three hundred and ten years ago. Runa looking down at the dropped stitches.

standing, crown back on, ears drooping.

both knotted hands on her knees, Ulla's scarf round her shoulders, her braid running down into the knot in the floor. Her clouded sap-amber eyes on the great-great-grandson she taught in his sleep and met awake.

The two ships carried back down the long throat of grain, the Heartwood's night fallen behind them, the Lumen wicks their only light. Vigolas at the Marka's bow, as before, first into the dark, as before, Aska's ember glowing in his bandaged fist, humming four notes. Kompis beside him. Mingus against his leg. And on his other side, this time, awake for once, crown on crooked, Trollmage, looking back over the stern into the dark where the light was.

Not the branch. The throat has carried them down and down through the body of the tree, and the door that opens ahead of them now is low in the trunk, at the waterline: the bark folding back in two great leaves onto black water, no horizon, no sky, and one small white star low in the dark: Lumen's Seventh. The Deep.

as she slides out over the sill. And up through the wood of the rail, one last time, faint and grainy, a voice in a woodgrain balloon:

(Both crews, at both rails, laughing. On the Upp Igen, Krydog the loudest, standing at the rail with the shadows under his eyes a shade lighter than they've been in years.)

Out of the black, on no tide anyone can feel, islands drifting in: a hill with one bent tree and turf houses with a lamp in every window; a skerry with a chapel no bigger than a shed; a long low island of heather with goats on it; rafts of boats lashed into floating streets. Never charted. Never named on any map. More every night. And over every head on every shore, where the rest of the world has a rank plate, nothing.

among them, the smallest: bare grey shingle, one flat grey rock. And on the rock, sitting as comfortably as a man in his own study, a tall, thin, stooped old man in a long grey coat that was once fine, a short white beard, reader's grey eyes, the ink-stained fingers of his right hand bound in a strip of black bar. Black censor-bars drifting slowly round him like the shadows of birds. On his knees, an open book.

His kind, tired, lined face lifting from the page, and turning, across a great distance of dark water, toward the place where a world-tree stands in the black, and a door in its bark is closing on two small lights.

He doesn't say anything. He turns a page.

Jorvand.