That night, Mav sat on the roof of his cabin and looked at what the tournament had cost him.
He had won three matches. Wildroot was in the semifinals for the first time in its history. Quill had received 19 applications. The whole Row knew his name.
He had also lost 51 fish since the first match against Emberhall.
Most of them were young. Some had died in the steam of the smoking hounds in the canyon, and some in the salt pools of Deepwell. He felt each of them missing in his head, small empty places among the points that remained. He had stopped trying not to feel them. He thought that he owed them that much.
Moss had been hurt badly in the canyon. A hyena had torn her leg, and a second one had opened her side before Fern and Reed could reach her. She was lying in the dens now, with her seaweed working slowly on both wounds. She didn’t complain. Moss never complained. But when Mav went to see her, she turned her flat head toward him and pressed it against his hand, and she stayed like that until he left.
Birch was still healing from the bears. Oak’s leg was held straight with pieces of whale bone that Sela had tied around it, although Mav’s World had no whales. He didn’t know where she had found it, but he didn’t ask. Elm’s burns had closed, but the fur on his back had grown back white.
Ronald’s best boar was gone too. Grandfather had died under the rhinos of Goldgate, in the second match of the first round. Ronald hadn’t talked about it since. He had stopped eating bread in the roof room. That worried Mav more than anything.
‘This is what it costs,’ he thought. ‘Every win.’
He didn’t regret it. He knew that he would do it all again. But he wanted to remember the cost every time, so that he never started thinking that it was free.
—–
He found Ronald the next morning, sitting alone on the steps of the hall of records with his elbows on his knees.
Mav sat down beside him. He had brought bread from the stall at the corner, still warm. He held it out. Ronald looked at it for a moment, then took it, but he didn’t eat it.
“He was the first one,” Ronald said at last. His voice was rough. “On my first morning, there was only him. A little boar, no bigger than a dog, standing on a hill. He bit me. I named him Grandfather because he looked so grumpy.” He turned the bread over in his hands. “He was with me in the marsh. He held your road across the marsh. He was there when Tamsin got hurt.”
“I know.”
“I keep thinking that I should have pulled him back. I saw the rhinos jump. I had a second.” Ronald’s jaw was tight. “I didn’t do it. I wanted to win.”
Mav didn’t say that it wasn’t Ronald’s fault. Ronald would have known that it was a lie, or at least half of one.
“I lose them every time,” he said instead. “Every fight. I feel every one of them go. I used to try not to.” He looked at the crowd moving through the Proving Grounds below them. “Now I let myself feel it. It’s the only way I know to make it mean something.”
Ronald didn’t answer at first. Then he tore off a piece of the bread and ate it.
“That’s a terrible way to live,” he said, with his mouth full.
“I know.”
“I’m going to do it too.” He swallowed. “Thanks for the bread.”
He got up to go. Then he stopped on the step, and for the first time that morning, something like a smile crossed his face.
“Grandfather left me something, though,” he said. “Six piglets. They were born the week before Emberhall. I’ve been feeding them every bit of Essence from that wager, and they’re already as big as dogs. They bite everything.” He shrugged. “Tamsin’s moths laid eggs too. Fourteen of them hatched. She won’t let anyone see them yet. She says that they’re shy.”
Mav looked at him. Ronald had lost his best boar, but his World hadn’t stopped growing. Neither had Tamsin’s. He was glad of it, more than he could say.
“Bring them to the final,” he said.
“That’s the plan.”
—–
When he came home that evening, the main street was full of work. Two Reefkin were carrying a new door down to the dens. A line of young needlefish swam past with bundles of weed for the larders, herded by an old one who snapped at any that drifted. In the square in front of the dome, a builder was teaching six small Reefkin how to cut stone, and none of them were listening. Mav stopped to watch for a moment. Not long ago, all of this had been one cabin and a crack in the rock, and he stood there a little longer than he needed to.
Sela was waiting for him at the gate that evening with something to show him.
She led him to the old larder at the end of the main street, which Six had always considered his own. She had cleared it out. Inside, on a long stone table, there were 20 curved plates of white shell. Each of them was as long as his forearm and as thin as a fingernail, with small holes drilled along their edges.
“Lobster shell,” Sela said in her dry, small voice. “From the new depths. The fish kill them, and nobody does anything with the shells. That is wasteful.”
“What are they for?”
Sela looked at him as if he were very slow. Then she picked up one of the plates and held it against the back of a young spined fish who had followed them in. It fit perfectly, from his head to his tail. She tied it on with a thread of woven weed through the holes.
The spined fish swam in a slow circle, surprised. The plate shone white on his back.
“Armor,” Sela said. “For the spined fish. They hold the line, so they get hit the most. Now they’ll get hit less.” She sniffed. “My builders made 20 yesterday. They’ll make 20 more today. I told them that if any of them are crooked, I’ll make them wear one.”
Mav looked at the plates, then at Sela.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me. Fight better, so that they don’t need it.” But she looked very pleased.
—–
Two found him on his way back. He came out of the dark beside Mav, slow and serious, the way that he always moved now that he spoke for every fish in the sea.
“The spitters want to talk to you,” he said. “Both of them. At the same time.” He paused. “They always do everything at the same time.”
Mav followed him to a hollow in the rock below the dens, where the two flat silver fish had made their home. They were waiting for him side by side, so close that their fins touched.
Mav hadn’t felt them rise. It must have happened while he was looking at the shell plates. Both of their seaweeds had reached rank D- in the same hour. Of course they had.
“We have names now,” said the first one. His voice was quick and bright, like a stream over stones.
“We gave them to each other,” said the second. Hers was softer. “You can use them too, if you like. He’s Pip.”
“She’s Puddle,” Pip said. He sounded so proud of it that Mav had to bite the inside of his cheek.
‘Pip and Puddle,’ Mav said. ‘They’re good names.’
“We know,” Pip said. “We thought about them for days.”
Puddle moved aside a little, and Mav saw what was behind her in the hollow. The rock was covered with tiny, clear eggs, hundreds of them, each with a silver dot inside.
“They’ll hatch soon,” Puddle said. “They’ll be yours, like the young needlefish.”
“They’ll be ours,” Pip said. “But yours too.”
Mav crouched in front of the eggs. He was so happy for them that he couldn’t think of anything clever to say.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ he said at last.
“We tell each other everything,” Puddle said.
“Everything,” Pip agreed. Then they turned back to their eggs, side by side, and forgot that he was there.
Two waited until they couldn’t hear him. “They’re like that all day,” he said, in a voice of deep suffering. “All day.”
Mav was still laughing quietly when he swam away.
—–
He was on his way back to the cabin when he felt One change.
It was the same feeling as before, when it had reached rank D-, and then rank D on the night of the raid. A pressure that had been building for weeks suddenly gave way, like a door opening in his chest.
[A Subject has reached Rank D+.]
He stopped in the middle of the street and stood very still.
The change went through his whole body. He felt it in his arms, in his legs and in his eyes. When he looked down the street, he could see every crack in the stones and every thread of weed on the roofs, even in the dim light of the city. His body followed One, and One was rank D+ now. He was a full step stronger than he had been that morning.
The Reefkin walking past him didn’t notice anything. One of them stopped to ask him, in pictures, whether he was ill.
He laughed and sent her a picture of himself perfectly well.
—–
The letter came that night, through the Arbiter’s post at Wildroot.
It was from Juno. It was short, as her letters always were. She wrote the way that she talked, with no greetings and no pretty words.
Mav,
Father is a foreman again. He wears the coat now, but he doesn’t like to. He says that it feels like borrowed clothes. Mother says that he’s being foolish, and then she cries in the kitchen when she thinks nobody can hear.
People on the street wave at me now. A boy from the foundry asked me to walk with him on rest day. I told him no. He only asked because of you.
The man in the red coat is gone. Nobody has seen him for three weeks. I don’t know if that’s good.
I watched the match against Deepwell. You looked bored. Don’t look bored on the screen, Mav. It makes people angry.
My Bestowal is in six months, Mother says. I wish she’d stop saying it like that, as if it’s the date of my funeral. If the stone lights up, I want to come to Wildroot.
Don’t die before then.
Juno
He read it on the roof of his cabin, slowly, and he stayed on the last lines.
He thought about the stone in the school hall, and the Officiant’s flat voice. He thought about Juno walking up to the black slab, with everyone watching, because she was his cousin. He thought about the people who would be waiting for her on the other side, if it lit up. He was afraid for her in a way that he had never been afraid for himself.
He folded the letter very carefully and put it inside his shirt, next to One.