Mav had 10 days to get a whole sea ready for a war, and he spent almost all of them at the bottom of it.
The rule of the trial was simple. A raider had to lay his hand on the Heartstone. Everything else, the dens, the larders, the island and the farthest corners of his World, could be burned or broken, and the claim would still not be won. So everything that he built in those 10 days was built around one block of dark crystal.
Sela understood that before he finished explaining it.
She stood in the main street with her hands behind her back while he talked. Then she sent her builders to the dome of the Heartstone, all of them, even the ones who were cutting stone on the island. Two days later, there was a new wall around the dome, as thick as Mav was tall, with only one narrow gate. Two days after that, there was a second wall outside the first. The builders lifted every block with Telekinesis, in teams of six and eight, while Sela walked along the top and told them what they had done wrong.
"Your city will look like a prison," Mav told her.
"My city will still be standing in a month," Sela said. "It can look like whatever it wants."
The shell plates went faster too. Every spined fish in the army wore one now, white and curved along his back, from his head to his tail. Sela’s builders had worked out how to make smaller ones for the young. Mav watched a line of them swim past the larders, stiff and proud, like children in new boots, and he felt very fond of them.
-----
Two split the army while the walls were going up.
He did it the way that he did everything now, slowly and carefully, hanging in the water in front of the dome with all the leaders around him. Mav listened, but he said almost nothing. It was Two’s army, really. Mav had only lent it his name.
"Four groups," Two said. "Twelve takes the needlefish. They’re fast, so they go wherever the raiders go. Eighteen takes the spined fish. They’re slow, so they hold the walls and the gate." He turned his long jaws toward the two flat silver fish at the edge of the circle. "Pip and Puddle take the spitters and stay near the surface. Anything that comes down from above, they shoot."
"Together," Pip said at once.
"Of course together," Puddle said.
"Yes, together," Two said in the voice of someone who had known that this would happen. "Seven guards the Heartstone. Nothing that she can feel gets through the gate."
Seven hung above them in the dark, pale and blind. "Nothing," she agreed.
The spitters had changed since the final. Puddle’s eggs had hatched into hundreds of tiny silver fish, and they were already as long as Mav’s finger. They lived in the hollow below the dens with their parents, and they spat at everything that moved, including each other. Mav had watched one of them knock a shrimp off a rock from a whole arm’s length away. He had laughed out loud, and the young spitter had looked so full of itself that it spat at him too.
Six didn’t get a group, but Six had never wanted one. He said that he would stand next to Mav, the way that he always did, and that someone should make sure that there was food afterward.
Below the city, where the rock was thickest, the deepest dens took the young needlefish and the young Reefkin, with all the eggs. The builders who had been living at the small post in the trench wall came home. Mav didn’t want anyone out there alone when the arches opened.
He thought about where to fight. Out in the open water, the raiders could choose their ground, but in the city, every wall was his. So he decided to let them come.
-----
His vassals came too.
Halfway through the 10 days, Brann followed Mav through his arch, cast his Manifestation on the island and let his 14 wolves out onto the rock. A Manifestation stood for as long as its owner stayed beside it, so Brann moved onto the island with a blanket and a bag of bread. His wolves ran around it twice, as Oak, Ivy and Elm had done. Then they found Ivy and her four pups behind the eastern ridge. Mav held his breath. But Ivy only looked at them, and after a while, Brann’s wolves lay down a polite distance away. Brann said that it was the first time in his life that a wolf had told his wolves where to sit.
Ivo cast his river in the largest air hall of the city, where he could breathe, and let it run out of the door into the sea. His otters went with it. They took to Mav’s fresh water at once. Ivo’s World was rivers, so they had never known salt. They chased Two’s needlefish through the streets of the city until Twelve lost her patience and chased them back.
Tamsin couldn’t fight under water, and neither could her moths. But she spent three days on the island with her builders, the small furry creatures with huge ears, and they made silk. Her moths made three times as much of it as any moth should, because of her talent. By the end, she had sheets of it rolled up on the rock, pale and shining.
"I don’t know what they’re for yet," she said. "But I’d rather have them and not need them."
Nell asked for only one thing. She wanted to spend her nights on the island, with her small dark cave cast on the highest ridge, so that her bats could hang over the sea.
"You’ll never sleep," Mav said.
"Bats sleep in the day," Nell said. "So do I."
The hawks would watch the sky by day, and Nell’s bats would listen to it by night. Between them, Mav thought, nothing would come through an arch without his knowing.
-----
He tried to find Ronald twice.
The first time, he went to the roof room with a whole bag of bread from the stall at the corner. Ronald wasn’t there. The second time, he went to the door of Ronald’s room at Wildroot and knocked for a long while. Nobody answered. Ronald’s neighbor, a boy with a pet lizard, told him that Ronald was in his own World most days now, with his boars.
Mav left the bread outside the door. He felt like a coward for doing it, but he didn’t know what else to do.
-----
Thalia came two evenings before the end.
She was waiting at the gate of Wildroot when he came back from the arches, with her white coat buttoned to her chin and a folded paper in her hand. Osk was watching her from his chair, as if she were a thief.
"Your old man at the gate doesn’t like me," she said.
"He doesn’t like anyone."
"Then I’m in good company." She held out the paper. "My house films everything, so I looked. There are 31 people sworn to House Tidecaller whose Worlds are rank D. These are all of them, with every beast that they’ve shown in a duel. I marked the ones who’ve raided before." She paused. "Six of them are old. Their Worlds stopped years ago, but their beasts didn’t. Those are the ones that I would worry about."
Mav unfolded the paper. Her small green writing filled both sides.
"Tidecaller has won 11 trials," Thalia went on. "I watched what was left of the old ones. They never attack the same way twice. They come from the deep, then from the surface, then at night, then at noon. Whatever you’re ready for, they won’t do it." She looked at him. "Your first raid will tell you nothing about your second."
He was so grateful that he forgot to be careful.
"Thank you," he said. "I mean it. I don’t know how to..."
"Stop. I told you never to say anything kind again." But she was pleased, and she didn’t hide it very well. "Now you owe me a dinner. I hear that you eat ration bars."
"Who told you that?"
"Everyone knows." She turned to go. Then she stopped. "Silkborn. Don’t let him win because you’re too proud to run."
She was gone before he could answer.
-----
He spent the last night on the roof of his cabin, and he didn’t sleep. With Thalia’s paper on his knee, he went through it in the light of One, every name and every beast. Then he sat with the points in his head, hundreds of them, from the oldest needlefish to the youngest spitter. They were all where they were supposed to be. They were all waiting.
Six had fallen asleep beside the cabin, with one claw over his eyes. Two hung in the water at the edge of the roof. Neither of them said anything, and Mav was glad of it.
Near midnight, he felt Nell’s bats move. They were faint points at the edge of his mind, hundreds of them, hanging in the dark over the island, the way that he felt the Subjects of all his vassals when they were close. All at once, every one of them turned toward the trench.
Then the first arch opened over the trench.