The second ship came up over the horizon before first light, a darker shape against the dark, and settled outside the buoys in the lee of the first. It rode low, the way a hull rides when there is a great deal in it. Then it did nothing at all. It sat there through the morning and into the afternoon with its sails furled and its ramps up, and every so often someone on the green would look out at it and then look away again, and the looking away was the harder of the two.
Under the Main oak, the council was at work.
Valena had the summer side of the trunk. She was on her knees among the roots weaving a throne out of the living tree, drawing down supple green boughs and bending them into a seat and a back, threading hawthorn blossom and primrose through the withies as she went, and the grass came up thick and green wherever she knelt. She looked like a woman who had been ill for a fortnight and had decided not to be. Drax had the other side. He stood with one hand on the low boughs and the ice ran out from his fingers along the bark, and where it ran the leaves went brittle and white and the icicles came down like teeth, until the tree was two trees with a line down the middle of it. Nana had brought her cauldron down to the roots and was feeding the refugees mushroom stew out of it, ladle in one hand and the other on somebody’s shoulder, and looked, as she always does now, the least tired person on the green.
“We need until dusk,” said Master Elizar, looking up from the runes he was chalking on the bark, and went back to them.
The Pledging
The Rite is Summer and Winter held against each other, with something between them that belongs to neither. It wants sides. Anyone who stands on the green tonight stands for one court or the other, or for the thing in the middle, and the Rite will know which.
So they chose, out loud, under the boughs, with the village watching over its bowls.
Solder went to Winter. He went to where Drax had sat down on a root on the frost side, the Winter’s Mask across his knee and one hand resting over the scar in it, the way you rest a hand on an old injury. Solder pushed back his sleeve. His forearm is stone and iron under the skin like the rest of him, and he worked at it with two fingers until a sliver of bright silver came out of it, the length of a finger, and held it out. It was not a large thing. Drax took it without a word and closed his fist on it, and the frost on his knuckles crept over it, and it was gone.
Slox went to Winter. She unwound the prayer beads from her wrist — black obsidian, one of the precious few things she has from before, from the years when she was bronze and belonged to someone — and held them out on her flat palm. Drax looked at them a long time, his other hand still over the scar. Then he reached across and closed her fingers back over the beads, and held them shut, and let go. When she opened her hand one of the beads was cased in crystal clear ice. The ice did not melt against her palm. The intent was enough. Nobody said so. She stood a moment looking at them, and then put them back on, and the cold of them sat against her wrist all day.
Lindon went to Summer. He did not have to say anything. Valena looked up from her weaving and smiled at him with her over-bright eyes, and the grass at her feet ran across the roots and up over his boots and held there, green to the ankle.
Veyer went to the cauldron, and pledged herself to Nana Fogbreath. Nana smiled, and ladled, and said something to her too quietly for anyone else to hear. Veyer has not repeated it.
The Solicitor
Vaelthris was leaving.
Her hull had sat at the Cove for a week — black iron, all hard angles, with a furnace burning somewhere in the belly of it and the glow leaking through every seam, so that at night the silver round it glowed a dull red — and she had the writ read and her clients signed, and the particular composure of someone whose paperwork on this property is about to become somebody else’s problem.
She gave the Watch one more chance. On the dock, with her document case under her arm and her wings folded as neat as a coat, she offered Oakhaven the protection of the Eighth Bureau as she had offered it to the council, on terms. The Watch said no. She had expected them to, and said so, and was courteous about it.
Then thirty or so of the village went up her gangplank with their bundles — people the Watch knew by sight, a few by name, none of whom had come to say goodbye — and the iron hull put out from the Cove and went away across the silver, trailing sulphur, until it was an ember on the horizon and then not.
Nobody said much on the way back up the lane.
The Spear
It had stood in the burn for days, and the fey would not go near it.
Slox tried it alone first, because of course she did. She walked into the burn where nobody else would walk, set her boots in the ash, wrapped both hands round the shaft and pulled until the fissures in her arms glowed through the soot, and the spear did not move at all. Then Veyer came down into the char and took hold above her, the goliath’s hands over the genasi’s, and the two of them leaned back into it together. It did not want to come. The ground had closed on it like a fist, and they hung off it with their boots skidding while the whole green watched from the rim and nobody came closer. Then something gave, deep down, and the spear came up out of the burn in one long tearing pull and took them both over backwards into the ash.
Veyer was laughing before she had her breath back. Slox was not. She was already turning the spear over in her hands, thumb on the metal, and she had it stripped of its pennant and its chain before she stood up. There is mithril in a Crusade spear, and Tink would want it.
Where it had stood there was a hole, and the ground round the hole was already going grey.
Offshore, the hulls moved. Not much. A change of station, one hull sliding a length along the line. A ramp lowered on the nearer of them, and stayed down long enough for everyone on the green to see it, and was raised again. Everyone looked at the Watch, and then at the hole in the burn.
Where Everyone Went
Brunna and her three dwarves went to the village, to hold it if it came to holding. Talia‘s Wayfarers — the wood elves and pixies who ride the shard’s giant dragonflies — went up the Main mast for whatever the Rite needed from the crown. Erwin‘s centaurs took the boundary, going round the whole edge of the shard again with the marking powder the Watch had given them, the sacks slung across their backs.
Nana saw them off. She stirred a powder of her own into the sacks before they went, dried mushroom ground fine, pale as flour. For the ground, she said. So the island would know where it ended.
The Cliffs
The centaurs came back at a canter, bloodied, with bolts in them. They had laid all but a hundred metres. At the last hundred, at the Taproot cliffs where the shard tore, the Gith had been waiting in the trees, and scuffing out what was laid.
The Watch went, all four, hunting.
They came up through the trees along the raw edge, quietly, and found nothing. No tracks. No sound. The Gith were in the branches above them, sitting still, waiting for the Watch to walk underneath.
So Lindon called up monkeys — a dozen of them, brown and screaming, out of nowhere — and sent them into the canopy. They found the Gith inside a minute and threw rocks at them.
After that it went the way it goes. Gith in the branches with heavy crossbows, dropping out of one tree and blinking into the next, bolts coming down through the leaves. And one without a crossbow, who put his hands up and took the light away — a sphere of black cold dropped over Slox and Lindon and Solder with something in it that moved against their legs, wet and many. Lindon went up a tree to get out of it. Then the same one turned on Solder and threw bolts of astral light at him, pale and silent, and they went through the plate as if it were cloth. Solder went down on one knee, and got up.
The Watch killed them all. The last of them ran for the edge and very nearly made it. Then the cold Drax had laid on Slox and Solder that morning reached out after him, and frost climbed his legs from the boots up and turned his sprint into a wade. He was still trying to run when they caught him. Winter keeps what it is given.
Dusk Coming
They laid the last hundred metres themselves, on their knees along the raw edge with the Void a step to the left and the powder going down white on the black earth. Then they walked back with the light going.
Behind them, the boundary, closed. Ahead, the Main oak, half in flower and half in ice, and under it the council, who need until dusk and are going to get it. On the green, a hole where a spear used to be.
Out past the buoys, two hulls. One of them riding a little higher above the Silver Void.
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