The road home was the easiest ice I’d laid all day, because for once nothing in the swamp was lying about where the water was.
We walked it in a loose line, boots ringing on pale blue, and behind us the drowned forest stood dark. Lucy kept glancing back over her shoulder at the dark with her hammer down and her mouth shut.
“I still wanted its teeth,” she informed the swamp eventually. I made the ice thicker under her step, and she stumbled. “Hey!”
“You said that five times already,” I explained, and she just grinned back.
The ship waited where we’d left her, dark against darker trees, and Red Beads waited with it.
She hadn’t moved from the bow. She sat exactly as I’d left her, bow across her knees, broad face turned out toward the drowned forest, except the forest she watched now had no lights in it, and she was staring at where the lights had been like it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
She heard us come up onto the deck, and her eyes went straight past me, past Lucy, past all of us, and found Yuki.
“Quiet,” Red Beads said. Her voice came out cracked. “Spirit. It's quiet now.”
“It’s gone,” Yuki said gently. “The thing making the lights. It’s gone.”
“No light.” Red Beads’ knuckles were white on the bow. “No call. All day, Tork sit here. Tork hear thing and now—”
I’d heard nothing.
The whole way in, the whole fight, the whole way back, I’d heard the dragon’s borrowed thunder and Lucy’s swearing and the wet awful gulp of the Lurefin, and under all of it, the thing Mok had warned us about, the voice in the dark that calls you by name, I’d heard none of it.
“Yuki,” I said. “Did you hear it? Any of it?”
She’d drifted up beside Red Beads, one tail curled loose around the Tork’s shoulders without Yuki appearing to have decided to do it. “No. Nothing. I kept waiting for it. Mok made it sound like the worst part, and it never came.” Her ears tipped. “Which is interesting, because it should have. We were standing right on top of it.”
And then she got the look.
If you’d spent any time around Yuki, you knew the look. It was the one where the fear and the worry and the responsibility slid off her face all at once because something more interesting had just walked in, and what was left was a historian with a thread to pull and no intention of letting go.
“Yuki this—”
She didn’t let me speak. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s okay. It didn’t work on us because it didn’t know us. It couldn’t. Think about how it lures, not generic, right? Not just ‘a voice.’ Mok’s daughter. By name. It knew their dead. Killed them.”
Her hands were moving, drawing it in the air. “You can’t fake that out of nothing. It’s been here longer than the Torks have had a word for it, listening the whole time. Learning the village. It’s a specialist.”
“There was a thing in one of the river kingdoms,” she went on, and she’d stopped talking to us and started talking to the problem, “down in the delta, a lure-predator that did exactly this, and the records are wonderful, because some magistrate tried to relocate it. Caught it, hauled it three valleys over to a lake that was eating swimmers, dropped it in to do the same job, and it starved.”
She blinked and came back to the deck and to us.
“And ours was the same. It only ever knew Torks. So when seven strangers came walking in over the top of it, a queen, a pirate—”
“Me a fine admiral, thank you!” Lucy pointed out as she was kicking lazy sailor.
“—admiral,” Yuki continued, “me, it had nothing to call us with. We brought it, no dead it could borrow.” Her ears flicked. “That’s the only reason the voices never touched us. We were too new to haunt.”
She looked extremely pleased with this, and then she looked at Red Beads and remembered it wasn’t a lecture. “Sorry. The point is, it’s gone, and you’ll never have to sit on a bow with your hands over your ears again. That part’s done.”
Red Beads looked at her for a long moment. “Spirit kill the lie,” she said. “Spirit free Tork.” She pressed the tail to her forehead. “Tork hear only quiet now. Quiet good. Quiet so good.”
Yuki sat still and let herself be held by the tail by a Tork, and shot me a look over Red Beads’ head that was equal parts overwhelmed and don’t you dare. I gave her nothing.
“You solved it,” I told her.
“I just looked at it.”
“That’s the whole job.”
The ship came about under us, Lucy bawling orders she was thrilled to have a reason to bawl, and we turned north for the village, the dead forest going dark and silent behind us and a Tork at the bow who, for the first time in her life, had nothing left to fear in the water.
⸻
The village had not gone to bed.
It was past midday by the time the dead trees gave way to living ones and the rope bridges came back into view, and the whole tribe was on them, every tier, every walkway, hundreds of green faces hanging over the rails.
Red Beads hadn’t been the only one to notice the water go quiet.
Yuki stepped off it onto Tork ground, and the village made the sound I’d heard it make once before, when she’d hung three meters in the air with a sword of morning in her hands. Except this time it wasn’t awe. It was louder, and worse for the eardrums, and a great deal happier.
“They sure are loud,” Phèdre complained.
I couldn’t stop giggling. “Yeah, but hey we did something for them.”
Lumi stood next to me and glanced around, looking pleased. “Loud’s good. Yuki is popular.”
Old Mok came down the central stair faster than his ancient legs had business moving, beads and bone and dried flowers flying, headdress askew, and he did not stop at a respectful distance to plant his staff and orate. He walked straight into Yuki, wrapped both arms around her middle, and held on.
“Spirit,” he said into her stomach, muffled and fierce. “Spirit go in. Spirit come back. SPIRIT COME BACK.” He pulled back just far enough to look up at her, his old face wet and folded and shining. “No more lights. No more call. Mok send scout to the water, no call! First time. First time since Mok grandfather grandfather.” He thumped his staff, decided the staff was insufficient, and thumped his own chest. “Spirit kill swamp dragon. Tork free. Tork FREE.”
“It wasn’t actually a dragon,” Yuki began, helplessly, because she physically could not not, “it was more of a—” Mok beamed up at her with total uncomprehending joy, and she folded. “It’s dead. That’s the important part. It’s dead, it’s not coming back, and the lights are gone for good.”
The clearing came apart all over again.
It took a while to get Mok back to anything resembling formality. Food arrived as a Torkling delegation attached itself to Lucy and demanded the full account of the lizard, which Lucy supplied at length and with editorial improvements Yuki didn’t approve of.
Luminaria accepted a flower crown like a medal of state.
Phèdre was fed something that was between grapes and apples she had not asked for by three separate admirers and met the situation with serene good grace. Llama stood at the edge of all of it and informed a small child that the new bonfire was also too close to the western root cluster; the child gave him a tuber.
And then Yuki found Mok in the noise, crouched down to his level, and got serious. “Mok. Can I ask you something? A real thing.”
The old Tork went still and attentive, because apparently when a spirit went quiet, you listened.
“You’re free now,” Yuki said. “The dragon’s gone, the water’s safe. The swamp’s still dying back, but that’s a slow problem, and there are people who can help with it.” She tipped her head toward me, just slightly. “That’s Charlie. She’s a queen, not of the Torks, but of a kingdom that’s spread all over the land now. Lots of villages. Lots of people who used to be on their own and decided they’d rather not be. She looks after them, they look after each other, and she’d like the Torks to be part of that. If you wanted to be.”
Mok’s eyes went huge. He looked at me, at the whole drowned-rat collection of us, then back to Yuki, and drew himself up to his full and considerable lack of height.
“Tork join,” he declared, staff already rising. “Tork do as spirit say. Always. Forever. Spirit say join, Tork—”
“No—” Yuki put a hand out fast. “No. That’s the thing, that’s the actual thing I need you to hear. Not because I say so. You can say no. That’s the whole point of it. If the Torks join, it’s because the Torks decided to, not because a spirit told you to. You’re allowed to want things for yourselves. You’re allowed to say no to me.” She said it as if it mattered more than anything else she’d said all day, and for her, I thought it did.
Mok considered this with enormous seriousness, beads going quiet, the festival roaring on around the small grave island of the two of them.
“Spirit say Tork can say no,” he repeated, working it through. “Spirit say Tork choose.”
“Yes. Exactly. Whatever you want.”
He frowned, and looked out, past the bridges, past the lanterns swaying on their cords with real lamplight in them and not one lie among them, out south to where the water ran on into a dark that for the first time in living memory had nothing in it at all.
He looked for a long while.
Then he turned back, and his old face cracked into the widest smile I’d seen on it yet.
“Before,” he said, “Tork stay close. Always close. Go far, dragon take you, voices take you. Tork small, Tork hide, Tork never go past the water. Many many year.” He spread his ancient arms wide, taking in the bridges, the fire, the whole hanging city of his people. “Now. No dragon. No danger. Tork can go now. Tork can go ANYWHERE.” His eyes shone. “So Tork choose. Tork not hide no more. Tork choose this. Free.” He thumped the staff once. “Tork say yes, because Tork can say no. Yes?”
Yuki actually blushed, but then gave him a bright smile. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly it.”
So that was how the Torks joined Rimebreak: a man in a moth headdress deciding out loud that he didn’t have to be afraid anymore and could therefore afford to be generous.
I left them to it; Yuki had a congregation to glow for and a tribe to be a goddess at, and she’d finally stopped flinching every time they called her one. I found a quiet spot at the edge of the firelight where I could watch the whole bright chaos of it, and I let the others know the only royal decree I had left in me.
“We’re done. It’s dead, they’re safe, the favor’s paid. We’ve got until tomorrow before we have to think about anything that isn’t this.” I nodded at the village, the fire. “So that’s free time. Stay here, eat their cooking, let a Tork put flowers in your hair—” Luminaria, already crowned, declined to dignify this “—or log off, go home, sleep, be a person on Earth for a night. Your call. Nobody marches anywhere until morning.”
Lucy was already deep in negotiations for the dragon’s teeth with a child who kept patiently explaining there had been no teeth. Phèdre had also acquired a flower crown. Yuki, faintly glowing gold, was telling a rapt circle of Torklings where dawn came from.
I smiled to myself and willed to move to Earth.
—
When I went to Rimelion, I’d been standing near Lola’s desk, and that was exactly where I returned. I grinned at her, but she didn’t return the smile.
“My Queen,” she spoke in a more formal voice than normal, “you are late for the brunch.“