The raider was still smiling when he died.
Slowly, his hand came up to close around the shaft of the harpoon. He didn’t pull at it. He held it gently, the way that someone holds the rail of a boat. His pale eyes stayed on Mav’s face. Then the light went out of them, his hand opened, and his body went soft in the water.
At the same moment, his four eels vanished.
They didn’t swim away. One moment they were there, coiled around the stems, and the next they weren’t. Mav knew what that meant. When an Awakened died, his Manifestation faded, and his Subjects went home to a World that no longer had a master. Far above, at the edge of the forest, one of the white reefs shook and broke apart into nothing.
When Mav pulled his harpoon out, the body sank toward the mud.
That was when he saw the threads.
As the body turned over in the water, they came out of the back of the raider’s neck, from under his collar. At first, Mav thought that it was hair. But then they moved. They were black, finer than thread, dozens of them. They reached out into the water slowly, as if they were feeling for something. For a few seconds, they waved. Then they curled up on themselves, went gray and stopped.
Mav didn’t move.
Under his shirt, One had gone tight around his chest, so tight that he could hardly breathe. From One, Mav had felt hunger, warning, and sometimes something like pleasure, but never this. It took him a moment to understand that his seaweed was afraid, and once he understood it, a cold unease went through him too.
The gray threads at the back of the dead man’s neck looked like something that he knew very well. He didn’t want to think it, but he couldn’t stop himself.
They looked like roots.
-----
Around him, the battle in the Tangle was ending.
He felt it through his Subjects more than he saw it. Moss had her crab. Fern and Reed were finishing the shark that had stuck between the stems. Log had sunk back into the mud with something large. He wasn’t coming up. The needlefish had driven the last of the eels out into the open water, where they fled toward the reefs.
Then someone shouted from above.
Mav went up through the leaves to see. At the edge of the forest, the two remaining raiders were standing at the very edge of their coral. One was a young woman with a seal at her feet. The other was a boy who couldn’t have been more than 20. Both of them had their hands raised high over their heads.
"We yield!" the woman called. Her voice cracked. "We’re leaving. Don’t come up."
Mav looked at them. They were only a stone’s throw above him, at the tops of their towers. With Dart and Water Jet, he could reach both of them before they found their arch, and they knew it. Both of them had watched the man with the fair hair die.
He could have done it. Nothing in the law of the trial forbade it, and they had seen everything: his stalkers, his mire jaw, the way that he fought in the forest. But he wanted them to go home. He wanted them to walk into House Tidecaller and tell everyone what was waiting in his forest. The next raiders would come into his World already afraid, and frightened people made mistakes.
He lowered his harpoon.
The woman let go of her Manifestation first. Every beast of hers in the Tangle vanished at once, the trapped ones with the rest, home to her own World. The boy did the same a moment later.
Before she climbed into the arch, the woman looked down at Mav for a moment. He couldn’t read her face. Then the arch closed, and they were gone.
-----
He brought the body back to the city.
At first, he didn’t know why. Then he understood that he couldn’t leave it in the mud for Log. Whatever the man had become, he had been a man once. Sela’s builders laid him in a cave below the Tangle and closed it with stones, while Mav watched. Nobody touched the back of his neck. Mav didn’t let them.
Ronald came through the arch that evening with a sack of goat. Mav took him and Tamsin to the first air hall and told them everything. The man had stayed under the water without air. His eels had moved without a word or a whistle. He had smiled. Last of all, Mav told them about the threads.
Tamsin had stopped writing halfway through. Now she was sitting very still, with her slate in her lap.
"Could it be a talent?" she said. "Something that lets him breathe under water?"
"Maybe."
"But you don’t think so."
Mav didn’t answer, because he didn’t want to say it aloud. In the end, Ronald said it for him.
"They looked like your seaweed," Ronald said slowly. "That’s what you’re thinking. Like roots."
"They were black," Mav said. "Mine are green."
Nobody said anything for a while. Outside, the city was settling down for the night. The builders were closing their new gray doors one after another, and the young fish were swimming back into the dens.
"He was looking at you before he died," Tamsin said at last. "You said so. Not like an enemy. Like he was pleased to see you."
"Yes."
"I don’t like that," Tamsin said. "I don’t like that at all."
Ronald didn’t say anything. He only reached over and put his big hand on Mav’s shoulder, and he left it there until Tamsin had finished writing. It was the first time since the court that he had touched Mav without hitting him.
Mav didn’t like it any more than Tamsin did. Long after they had gone, he lay awake on the roof, thinking about that smile. Who smiled at the person who was killing him?
-----
The next morning, House Sunspire’s show said that a raider of House Tidecaller had died in the trial of tides. It gave his name, his age and his school. His house mourned him, the show said, but such deaths were the price of an old and honorable law.
Nothing was said about how he had died, and nothing about the threads. Marek would have known about the death the moment it happened, because a liege was always told when a vassal died. But if he knew anything about the threads, he didn’t show it. As far as Mav could tell, nobody on Marek’s side had noticed anything at all.
That morning, he went through the city again, as he had after the first raid. The dens, the gate and the edge of the Tangle all got a visit while he worked out what the second raid had cost him. It was much less than the first. Two needlefish were dead. Fern had a long cut on her side, which was already closing.
Twelve always brought the bodies of the dead home. Mav went to see them in the old larder, but there was only one.
He asked Twelve, and Twelve asked the needlefish who had fought in the forest. One of them had seen a seal grab something small and silver in its mouth, a moment before all the seals vanished. Nobody had thought anything of it, because seals ate fish.
Mav stood in the larder, looking at the empty place on the stone table. A slow, cold unease went through him, and he couldn’t have said why.
One of his dead fish was gone.