Chapter 47

sailing out of the Shallows. Behind it the sky still reads ONE MATCH. OF MANY with a gap where the full stop used to be.

waking at the bow with a jolt, gasping like a man surfacing from deep water. His breath smokes, though the morning is warm.

The hoodie is frosted white in one place: a handprint, long-fingered, a woman's hand. The frost melts as we watch.

Mingus is standing over him, stiff-legged, hackles up, growling low at the empty air above Kompis's chest.

rubbing his face.

ambling over with two mugs.

Kompis asleep in a hammock, twitching, his fingers clawing at the canvas.

Mingus beside the hammock, awake, ears flat, staring at something nobody else can see.

Morning: Kompis at the rail, a dark bruise along his ribs. He holds his side and doesn't mention it.

watching from the rigging. She has noticed. She notices everything.

The crew eats. Trollmage is explaining something with a spoon. Drekk is mending the cut anchor chain. Smurjan is quiet, with three shadows on the wall behind him, one of them restless.

staring into his bowl. He hasn't eaten. On the bench beside him sits the wooden box with Ivar's pieces.

sliding the box gently out of reach and pushing the bowl back.

quiet. Only Drekk is at the wheel, half asleep.

Kompis's hammock. He lies perfectly still. Too still. Then his eyes open, and they are filmed over grey, like frost on glass.

in his basket, lifting his head. A low, terrible growl.

Kompis walks up the ladder barefoot, slowly, smoothly, in a way he never moves: as if someone else's legs were walking his body. His grey eyes see nothing.

at the wheel, squinting.

turning his head. Too far. His mouth moves, and the voice that comes out is his, but slowed, like a record played wrong:

Kompis is across the deck in a single step that shouldn't be possible. He catches Drekk's wrist and spins him into the wheel. Drekk's head cracks against the spokes. He drops.

The hatch bangs open. Rougeina is first up, blades in both hands, the panther behind her. Vigolas follows in his underwear, hair wild. Trollmage is halfway up, tangled in a blanket. The crow screams.

untangling himself.

Kompis walks out along the yardarm, arms loose at his sides, toward the end of the spar, toward nothing. Below him: thirty metres of air, and then the starlight sea of the Current.

stepping off the end of the yardarm into empty air.

He falls. Arms loose. Eyes shut. Not even trying.

raising a hand, the green crackling at his fingertips, too slow. Too far.

A golden blur goes up the rigging: Mingus, just a dog, all eighty pounds of him, scrambling up the ratlines like they were stairs, leaping off them, and catching Kompis by the hood of his old hoodie in mid-air.

Dog and man come down together onto a heap of sails on the deck. THUMP.

in the pile of sails, eyes still grey, still asleep. Mingus stands on his chest, teeth gently in the hoodie, growling at the air right above Kompis's face. Not at Kompis. At something sitting there.

A fresh bruise is spreading across his forearm. Then, as the crew watches, a cut opens along his ribs, clean, as if from a blade, from nothing. Blood seeps into the sail.

very pale.

kneeling by his friend's head.

Smurjan steps out from behind the mast, where he has been watching everything. Behind him, his three shadows are all pointing the same way, toward Kompis's chest.

opening, rimmed in crimson.

In grey diagram lines, the world as Smurjan sees it. Kompis lies in the sails. And sitting on his chest, light as smoke and heavy as a stone, is a thin grey woman, long black hair floating around her as if she were underwater. Her eyes are wide open, red-rimmed, unblinking. Behind her stands a horse made of shadow, breathing frost.

She turns her head slowly. She looks straight back through the third eye, at Smurjan, and smiles.