Chapter 56
The circle of sleepers on the deck. Smoke from dead Nightmares still drifts across the planks. Kali sits on the rail, exhausted, her one arm hanging. Lärka kneels at the hub of the circle with her ear on Kompis's chest.
listening, eyes shut, afraid.
ba……dum.
ba…dum.
ba-dum. ba-dum. ba-dum.
her eyes flying open. Faster. Stronger. Coming back.
opening. Brown. Not grey. His.
inches above his, upside down, wide-eyed.
waking on his chest, tail thumping on the deck like a drum. WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP.
Rougeina wakes a heartbeat later. Her eyes open, she sees a pale Bastion hunter bent over Kompis, and she Swaps, instantly, before thinking. She's behind Lärka with a blade at her throat and a second blade at her kidney.
Lärka feels it and moves. She's out from under the blades in a sidestep, stiletto up, and the two of them face each other over Kompis, both barefoot, both deadly.
The rest of the crew stir awake into chaos. Vigolas sits up coughing seawater. Drekk grabs for an axe that's normal-sized again and stares at it, disappointed. Trollmage rolls over and falls asleep again.
Rougeina Swaps again. Lärka sidesteps again. A blade-flurry in the space of three panels, too fast to follow, both of them bleeding a little.
throwing herself between them, one arm out, furious.
Everyone freezes. Rougeina, blades out. Lärka, stiletto up. Kali between them, arm spread.
eyes narrowed.
sitting up slowly, a hand on Rougeina's wrist.
She nods once.
She looks from Kompis to Lärka. Slowly she lowers her blades. Not trust. Not yet. But the blades come down.
Her lips move silently first, practising. Then, out loud, careful, each word an effort, like lifting stones:
grinning, worn out.
Something almost like a smile. Then she stands, steps up onto the rail, looks out at the Current and back at them once.
She steps off the rail onto the starlight and walks away across it, small and grey, into the Shallows.
Bandaging. Drinking water. Mingus going from person to person, checking each one. Kompis sits against the mast with the wooden box of Ivar's pieces in his lap again, very quiet.
sitting down beside him.
staring at nothing.
quiet, his hand at his own throat, where his mother's song used to be.
Two men sitting against a mast, each missing a piece of someone.
Smurjan stands near Drekk at the wheel. Drekk doesn't look at him.
nodding slowly. He leaves it there. Inside his chest, faintly, among the eighteen voices, one of them goes very quiet.
suddenly remembering, sitting bolt upright.
waking up just enough to answer, face in a coil of rope.
The sun of the Current rises: a gold seam opening along the horizon, the starlight sea turning pale. In the sky above, the Arbiter's sentence still hangs, ONE MATCH. OF MANY, minus its full stop.
And across the brightening water, galloping toward the Marka out of the last of the night, comes a horse made of shadow, frost streaming from its hooves, and on its back Mörda: grey, thin, her black hair blowing in the wind of riding. Her red-rimmed eyes are open again. But they don't look a thousand years old any more. They look like someone who slept one night.
On the deck, the whole crew is up and armed, Smurjan's third eye blazing, Rougeina's blades out, Drekk's axe raised, Vigolas's fists green.
The shadow-horse stops at the rail, its hooves on the starlight. Mörda looks down at the crew, at their weapons, and doesn't seem to mind.
stepping out in front of everyone, open-handed. Mingus beside him, tail wagging slowly.
his throat working.
For the first time, she smiles: small, startled, real. Then she turns the horse and gallops away into the last strip of night on the western horizon, and is gone.
The Marka sails on through the Shallows, past a drifting island with a market on it: tents, flags and a crowd around a fire. The crew lines the rail, tired, alive.
as they pass. Somewhere in the crowd a woman laughs: a big, booming, generous laugh that rolls across the water like a wave, the kind of laugh that makes strangers grin.
at the wheel. His hands let go of the spokes. The wheel spins free. His face is white.