“I cannot speak to that,” Brook said.
Seven laughed. “Death is real. It cannot be ignored. You cannot ignore the rush toward death. It is in everything. It is in you.”
“In labor, just before I started to push, I thought I was going to die,” Swallow said.
Seven stood up. “Perhaps you are right, you easterners. Perhaps the storm is real, and your houses are illusions. But I am of Delta.” He shook his head. “You are wrong to give up, to cringe before the storm.” He forded the shallow stream, stepping lightly from rock to rock.
“What are you going to do?” Brook asked.
“Wait until your ships are mended,” Seven said. “And then I shall build a boat.”
Three days later, on a secluded beach at the north end of the island, Seven opened like a flower to the sun, long-sword whistling through the mid-morning air. He faded back; slid forward, slow as a drop of water rolling from an icicle; exploded into a whorl of moving steel; came up; poised; still as a crane, meeting the gaze of a snow-white woman with golden eyes.
“The morning to you,” he said politely, standing with one knee raised to the top of his chest. Toe pointed. Motionless.
It was early autumn, and cold. “Am I interrupting you?” Jo asked.
Seven furled, spun down to the ground, rose like a tide and fell like a flood—stood calmly before her and bowed. “Not at all.”
Jo nodded sardonically, studying Seven for signs of intelligence. “You wear woodlander clothes. I am surprised.”
“The style of the islands is a good one and very comfortable. But my friend Shale has also made herself some woodland gear; shirts and pants are more convenient if you want to run or stretch.” Seven paused, pulling on a sealskin tunic. “And your name?”
“Jo. I fear our first meeting was rather confused. You thought I was—”
“Hazel Twist! And then you turned into a gull and flew away. You are the haunt of whom Foam and Shale spoke. And it is you we have to thank for stopping the woodlander invasion.”
Jo laughed. “And you are the man who held the forest people at bay. So now the war’s two heroes meet in a place where the war itself was never more than a rumor.”
“It was known out there, lady,” Seven said, pointing into the east. “Out where the Gull Warrior ranges.”
“You are from Delta. Tell me: on the night we left the Arbor, we met a woodlander who said he had spent some years in your city. His name was Bronze Switch. Did you know him?”
Seven sheathed his sword with curious slowness. “Bronze? Bronze Switch?” Jo nodded.
The surf was a shiver along the cold shore. There were no trees nearby. The beach smelled of seaweed and shells. The greatest warrior of the sea people stood for a long moment, listening to the waves heap and fall and run hissing over the sand. The same sound he had heard all his life, while time took away the people he loved. While time slowly took away everything he had.
“I met him,” Seven said at last. “Bronze Switch. But I did not know him.”
* * *
“There you are,” Rope said, later on that chilly afternoon. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Jo sat far over Teardrop Pond, on the elm’s long arm. “How brave of you! I doubt your wife would approve.”
“I haven’t seen you for a long time. I wanted to know if you were all right.”
Jo ran her hand along the rough grey bark. “Don’t the trees look different without their leaves? So empty.” She stared up through the scraggly branches to the vacant blue sky. “I wonder if Seven would take me with him.”
Rope sat on a boulder near the creek’s mouth. The scrub pines to the west made the clearing dim and gloomy. His hands were stiff in the chill and his fingernails were tinged blue. His breath smoked when he breathed. “Did it mean anything to you, what we did?”
Jo sat twirling her feet idly above the black water. “Do you really want an answer?”
Rope picked a twig off the ground. Leaning forward, he painted flowing patterns on the water. A jackdaw croaked, fluttering in the bare branches of the elm. Rope’s twig stilled, its ripples drowned. “Because when I think back on it, I sometimes wonder if I was really there.” He glanced up at pale Jo, sitting over the black pond. Her hair whispered around her face like drifting snow. “For a very long time I hated myself for it. For betraying her. But I could live with that, in a way, because at least it was something I did. It was my story.”
Jo said nothing. The jackdaw croaked and cocked its head. Watched. Listened.
“But sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t between you two all the time. Was I ever really part of it? Or was I just a baited hook?”
The cold wind blew through Jo’s heart. She laughed to let it out. “Did it matter to you?”
Rope coughed, and steam coiled from his mouth. The cold made his fingers hard and stiff as leather. He refused to look around to see if anyone was listening. “Yes,” he said steadily. “It meant something to me. I wanted to be close to you. I desired you. You are beautiful, you make yourself beautiful, I do not apologize for desiring you. But I also wanted to be close. You were in pain.”
“Pity! So that is what I felt between my legs that day. How noble.”
“I have already said I desired you. I said that.”
“You did,” Jo said sadly. “And you did pity me.”
A deeper, colder blue was creeping from the east. The pond was black with the elm’s hard shadows. The jackdaw croaked and sailed into the dim copse beyond. There would be frost in the morning. “What do you want me to say?” Jo asked. “Should I say that I love you, that I need you more than Brook, that you should leave her? Or should I say it meant nothing, that there is no guilt, that Brook and I, we settled it between ourselves.”
“I don’t know.”
Rope stood up. The cold was getting to him faster than it once had. “I don’t know what I want you to say.” He stepped over the creek and walked slowly around the pond’s rim. “The truth, I suppose.”
“What if I do not know it?”
“Did I make a mistake?”
“By staying with Brook?”
“Mm.”
Jo looked away. “Do not ask me to say that.”
“You are both movers. I get stuck. I don’t move very much, so I get friends who do.” Rope stopped, leaning against the trunk of the elm, resting one arm along Jo’s branch. “I have learned some things I did not want to know.”
“That must be hard.”
“You even sound like her.” Rope smiled in frustration. “May I come up?”
Jo looked back along the branch. “Do you think that would be wise?”
“May I come up?”
Jo looked out over Teardrop to where Sage Creek slipped silently between the darkening trees. “All right.”
The branch shuddered as Rope inched sideways and settled himself beside the haunt. They sat together over Teardrop Pond. The setting sun withdrew its warmth and left the world to blue-black shadows.
He put his cold hand over hers. “Don’t leave without telling me.”
She nodded. Wind played between the bare branches of the elm. And the wind pulled her story from her, whispering her life at last to Rope and Teardrop and the hard shadows. A flood of old sorrow poured from her; she was draining into the cold dusk. “I don’t remember much about my parents,” she said. “Except that they never wanted children.
“I was born on Mona. My parents were not cruel, they never beat me, but I was lit from the last spark of their passion. However hard I looked, I never saw any sign of love between them.
“I grew up without friends; the only child born within two years of me was trapped under a dock and drowned when I was three. So my only playmate was my sister.
“She was very pretty and terribly bold and she had a voice like silver bells. She was not really my sister. She came out of the fog when the light was still grey. We met at my secret cave. When we played, we did what she wanted: naughty things I would neve
r have dared on my own. No matter how often I got in trouble, she never got caught. She never let a grown-up see her. She whispered at other children only once or twice, to scare them.
“You should not think I saw her every day. Most times I just crouched by myself in the secret cave, hoping she would come, listening to voices approach and fade away. As I grew older she played with me less and less. Finally she would only come on foggy mornings when the moon was new.
“The last time she came to the secret cave I was eleven years old. I had just bled for the first time, so my Naming was only days away. She would not play with me but stood at the edge of the Mist shaking her head. I thought she hated me for bleeding and I was horribly ashamed. I cried because I was so lonely. So terribly lonely. I begged her not to go.
“Then she crossed her arms and said, If you want to play, come with me.”
The sorrow spilled out, leaving Jo empty. She was crying; she was crying, but she no more felt her tears than a statue felt the rain. “So I went. Into the Mist. Only there I lost my way and wandered into the Gull Warrior, and forgot my secret sister, and forgot my name, and forgot myself.” A sob shook her empty body. “And there I will return.”
Rope looked at her in grief and wonder. The day had given way to cold twilight. He had to do something. Stop staring and do something. He squeezed her white hand and put his arm around her shoulder.
Jo glanced up at him, startled, gold eyes flaring. “I did not ask.”
“I know.”
She reached to touch his hand. “Anything I take from Brook I have to give back.”
“You are taking nothing,” Rope said. “This is mine to give.”
* * *
When two weeks had passed and the ships had been mended, Seven asked Stone for permission to use the boathouse.
He worked each day, all day. He no longer went down to the sandy beach to train. He shaped the timber with his adz and plane, bent it in the steambox, and tacked his boat together, piece by piece.
Stone was no fool. When he heard that the son of Delta’s most famous shipwright was building a boat in his yard, he asked if Seven would let the villagers watch. So the men of Clouds End cut back on their fishing and gathered each day in the boathouse, asking polite questions and helping Seven when he needed a spar cut, or a plank planed.
Although they always observed a respectful distance, there was something soothing in their company. Seven found himself looking forward to each day’s work. Not that he meant to give up his voyage. Not that his heart did not ache. But at least when he woke in the morning he knew there would be something awaiting him besides his ghosts.
Foam and Shale dropped by at least once a day to watch and talk about old times, when no other islanders were around. “Getting on,” Foam said one afternoon, surveying the work.
“Yes,” Seven said. His ship was shaped like a leaf, with a strong oak hull.
“Why willow-wood for the deck and rails?” Shale asked.
Seven’s hands fell still. “For his wife.”
“Wife?”
Seven’s eyes were colder than the grey sea, his voice more empty. “I heard her screaming for days afterward. Weeks. And the children.”
“You need not tell us anything,” Foam said.
“He just would not stop talking. It was pouring rain; I could not think for the sound of it.” Seven blinked and shrugged. “I put my sword through his throat just to shut him up.”
The boathouse smelled of wood. Wet spars, aging timbers, fresh sawdust, curls of planed wood they would gather at the end of the day for kindling. Seven heard again the sad sound of rain. “Someone had to be blamed, you see. So I found someone to be responsible. Someone wise and loving. Someone who meant everything to someone else. And once I found him, he started talking, trying to make me go away, twisting me around. But I was stupid. I could not let him do that to me. Not again.” The old pain squeezed at Seven’s chest. “I should have listened. But I thought I had already learned everything he had to teach me. So I killed him. I killed him for Pond. And do you know what I had then?”
Foam shook his head.
“Two dead people.”
Shale looked away.
Foam said, “Seven, if it means anything—”
“Don’t,” Seven said. “My sins are between me and my dead.”
He launched his ship on the last day of autumn. The villagers watched from the rocks. Foam and Shale walked out to the end of the dock carrying a large bag between them.
“Morning,” Seven said, squinting over the rails. His hull was smooth and bare, without the usual knotwork carving.
Shale scowled. “Going without us.”
“Yep.”
“Nice ship,” Foam remarked. “Got a name for her yet?”
“Not yet. I will by the time I return.”
“Speaking of returning,” Foam said, “we wondered if you were taking adequate precautions. We thought we should help out.” He and Shale lifted the large bag over the rails and set it on the foredeck.
“Where am I supposed to stow it?”
“In your cabin, I guess.” Shale shrugged. “In that bag you will find plenty of rope and a deal of biscuits.”
“More pepper than you could use in a lifetime,” Foam added.
Seven studied the bag. “If you don’t leave soon, I think I risk crying.”
“We would never tell,” Foam said.
Shale nodded. “Promise.”
The Deltan eased his slender ship out of the harbor, turned her nose eastward, and sailed into the rising sun. Some time later Foam and Shale walked back up the dock. If Seven wept they never told of it to any soul.
CHAPTER 27
THE TWINS’ STORY
ONE MONTH later the last of the jerries had run. The fish barrels were full, the gardens dead, and the harvest feast would soon mark the start of the hungry part of the year.
Sweetpea was complaining more frequently of arthritis. Shallot had left Finch. Gone to visit relations on Trickfoot, he said, but nobody expected to see him again. Finch left her empty home and brought her baby to live with Brook and Rope, severely testing the twins’ patience. They did not for an instant believe they had ever been so much trouble.
The harvest feast was delicious, as always. “Here we are stuffing ourselves because we know food will be scarce by spring,” Jo said sardonically to Rope. “Much like erecting a funeral pyre in a drought-stricken forest, is it not?”
“Mm.” Rope was remembering Jo taking the shape of the Emperor, running her nails along Bronze Switch’s throat. Remembering the puppet play they had seen in the Arbor. Wondering if he had put out Rowan Hilt’s life when he doused the fire eating the puppeteers’ paper screen.
Skinny, energetic Twig boasted to the other children about his grandfather Stick, now dead two years: the first person to spend a night on Shale’s island. Shandy told a story of Queen Lianna, and Foam contributed one of the Gull Warrior’s less likely adventures. “Anyone else?” Shandy said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes when Foam had done.
“We have a story!” Feather cried.
Brook smiled at her daughter. “I think Shandy wanted a grownup story.”
Boots frowned. “It is a grown-up story. I mean, we’re kids, but the story is for grown-ups.”
Brook glanced at Shandy, who smiled, shrugged, and gave in. “All right. Who will tell it?”
“Me,” Feather said.
Boots nodded.
“Ahem!” Feather glared around the room, waiting for silence. Parents quieted children who didn’t see why they had to hush for a mere kid.
“What kind of a story is it?” Foam asked.
Feather glanced quickly at Boots. “One Twist Ring,” he muttered. “Second half of one, anyway.”
Brook could not help glancing at Jo. Their eyes met and held for the space of a long heartbeat. They were two halves of a one twist ring, Garden had said. Two shadows of a single flame.
Feather said:
&n
bsp; “This is a story of the real world, where everything is true, and nothing is what it seems to be.”
* * *
Inside-Outside
After Seven stowed the bag Foam and Shale had given him, there was barely enough room to lie down inside his tiny cabin.
As he sailed he thought about old Craft, his father, still making ships back in Delta. Craft would be pleased with this boat. She handled well, swift and sure as a gull in flight.
He was eager to plunge into the Mist before his fear could grow. He thought often about Chart, the greatest explorer of all time, with his endless supply of rope and biscuits and pepper. He thought about Foam and Shale. And Pond.
The Mist came over him at twilight. Moonlit clouds swallowed the sky, luminous grey. The Mist began to thicken, taking shape. Fear rose in him. He knew it would work the Mist, but he couldn’t stop it surging from his wrists and ankles. Fear trickled like grey fog from under his tongue.
The first ghost he saw was that of Bone, the sentry he had slain on the beach after swimming away from the disastrous raid on Delta. Then came Ash Spear, sick and burning. The four soldiers he had killed in his father’s house. Hazel Twist, steel in his throat. Brine. Rose. Shoal screaming as pale flames danced above his shrivelling skin. Two bandits with black tongues.
Pond.
He threw himself into his tiny cabin and pulled the hatch closed. He huddled in the darkness, surrounded by willow-wood, locked in a floating coffin.
The casket began to rock, dipping and plunging amidst the waves. The swell was growing. He heard the wind’s cry and the willow’s tears. What kept him sane was the smell of pepper, overpowering in the tiny crawl space. Pepper and biscuit.
A knock crashed above his head. “Who floats in the hollow log?” roared a hurricane voice.
“Seven. Who are you?”
And the waves cried, “Fathom!”
Then there came a great storm upon the sea.