They went the next morning, before the yard woke up.
Mav told Ronald and Tamsin everything that Nell had told him, except where it came from. He said only that someone had seen Ivo at the wall at night. Ronald listened with his arms crossed. Tamsin went pale and didn’t say anything, which meant that she was thinking very fast.
"You don’t need coordinates," she said at last. "You’re his liege. But we do."
"Do you have them?"
"Ivo gave them to me during the trial, in case he ever needed help." Her mouth twisted. "He said that he was the kind of person who always needed help."
Mav opened Ivo’s World from the plaza of arches without any numbers at all. He only thought of Ivo, the way that his Status showed him, a pale line among his vassals. The arch went dark, and it smelled of reeds and river mud.
-----
He came out inside his own dome, in fresh water, over the bottom of a slow brown river.
Ivo’s World was all rivers. Mav had seen it once before, in a picture that Ivo had drawn for the first-years: a wide flat land under a soft gray sky, cut by many channels of water, with reeds as tall as houses along every bank. Now he saw it for real. The river ran past his dome toward a great dam of mud and sticks, as high as a wall, where the beavers lived. Beyond the dam, on a low island in the middle of the water, there was a dark stone, waist-high, beating slowly.
Ivo’s Heartstone.
Ivo was sitting beside it, on the grass at the edge of the island, with his long legs in the water.
Mav’s needlefish came out of the dome behind him in a silver line. Twelve led them, with her young host close behind her, the quick female that had taken the first seaweed of the new roots. Eighteen’s spined fish followed in their shell plates. Six climbed out onto the mud of the bank, slowly, with his claws open. Moss came out last and went flat in the reeds. In a moment, Mav couldn’t see her at all. He had left the spitters, the wolves and the big ones at home. He hadn’t come here to fight a war.
On the bank above the river, two more domes appeared. Ronald’s gray hills came first, with his boars snorting in the wind. Then Tamsin’s night forest rose beside them, dark and tall, with her moths folded in its branches.
Ivo must have heard them, but he didn’t turn around.
"Ivo," Mav called. His voice carried over the water, very clear in the still air. "We need to talk."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then Ivo stood up, slowly, and turned to face them.
It was Ivo. It was his long, cheerful face, his wet-looking black hair, his coat with the mended elbows. But the smile on his face belonged to someone else. It was wider than any smile that Ivo had ever smiled, and it reached all the way up to his eyes. Mav had seen it before, in the stands of the Proving Grounds, three rows above a duel.
"Maverick," Ivo said.
The voice belonged to someone else too, soft and warm and very happy.
"You came. I hoped that you would. I’ve been sitting here for a whole day, waiting."
-----
Behind Mav, Ronald said a word that his mother wouldn’t have liked.
"Let him go," Mav said.
"Let who go?" Khan-Amet laughed with Ivo’s mouth. It was a terrible thing to watch. "He’s right here. He’s fine. He’s a little tired, I think. He’s been fighting me for weeks, in his sleep, the poor thing. He didn’t choose this, you know. Nobody ever does." Ivo’s head tilted to one side, in a way that Ivo’s head had never tilted. "That’s what makes it fun."
Mav felt a cold, steady anger, the kind that made his hands very still.
"Get out of him."
"Make me," Khan-Amet said pleasantly.
Ivo raised one hand. Along the banks of the river, Ivo’s beasts came out of the water: otters as long as a man, brown and sleek, with flat heads and small black eyes. There were dozens of them. Behind them, on the dam, the great beavers lifted their heads.
The otters looked at Ivo. They looked at Mav. They didn’t move.
"Go," Khan-Amet said through Ivo’s mouth. "Take them."
The otters went for Mav’s fish.
They came off the banks into the water in a long brown wave. They were fast, much faster than Mav had remembered. Twelve’s needlefish scattered in front of them. One otter caught a young spined fish in its jaws and shook it.
Mav didn’t fight them.
He reached out with his will instead, the way that he reached for his own Subjects. These weren’t his. But they were his vassal’s, and a vassal’s Subjects obeyed his liege first. That was the rule. He had never used it. He had never wanted to.
’Stop,’ he told them. ’All of you. Stop.’
Every otter in the river stopped.
They hung there in the brown water, all of them at once, with their whiskers spread and their eyes on Mav. The one with the spined fish in its mouth opened its jaws, and the fish swam away, crooked but alive. Then the otters turned slowly toward Ivo’s island. Mav could feel them. He could feel what they felt when they looked at their master’s body. It was fear, and something else, something like grief.
They knew that it wasn’t him.
On the island, Ivo’s face went very still. Then the smile came back, wider than ever.
"Oh," Khan-Amet said softly. "That’s a lovely rule. I’d forgotten that one."
-----
He held out Ivo’s hand toward the river, open, with the fingers spread.
Mav saw the black threads come out of it. There were five of them, as fine as hair. They went out across the water to the reeds on the far bank, where the black water snakes lay in the mud, long and thin, coiled in the shallows.
The threads went into the snakes, one by one.
The snakes lifted their heads all at once. They were Ivo’s strongest species, rank D, as long as rowing boats and as thin as a man’s arm, with small white eyes. Mav reached for them with his will, the way that he had reached for the otters.
Nothing answered. The snakes had stopped being Ivo’s.
They came across the river toward his dome.
Twelve’s needlefish met them in the middle of the water. They went in turning, the way that they had learned in the ruin, and Drill took the first snake through the side of the head. Eighteen’s spined fish packed together in front of the dome with their spines out. On the bank, Tamsin’s moths flashed, and the snakes that were close to the surface went blind and thrashed in the reeds.
The snakes were dangerous, but Mav knew that they didn’t matter. Ivo mattered.
He let go of Drill.
[You have borrowed a skill: Clamp.]
He felt Log’s grip settle into his hands, far away in his own sea, slow and heavy and patient. Then he went out of the top of his dome and across the river toward the island, with Ronald’s boars charging down the bank beside him and Six coming up out of the water behind.
Ivo stood beside his Heartstone and watched them come. He didn’t move. He was still smiling.
Mav came up out of the river onto the grass and hit him.
He didn’t use his harpoon or Discharge, only his own arm. Ivo went down on his back in the grass. Mav landed on top of him and got his right hand around Ivo’s wrist.
Clamp locked.
For 10 seconds, nothing in that World could have opened Mav’s grip. Ivo’s hand, with the black threads still coming out of it, was pinned to the ground. The threads went slack. Out in the river, the snakes stopped, confused, and Twelve’s needlefish took two of them.
Ivo looked up at Mav. The smile didn’t change at all.
"Well done," Khan-Amet said. "Now what?"
-----
Mav knew what.
It was the easy thing. He had done it before, in the mud of the Tangle, with a young raider who had smiled at him while the harpoon went in. When that man died, the black threads had come out of his neck, curled up and gone gray. They had died with him.
If Ivo died, the thread in him died too. Khan-Amet would lose his ears and his hands in the Reef. Nobody would ever stand at the wall at midnight again.
He raised the harpoon in his left hand.
Under him, Ivo’s face changed. For one moment, the smile went away, and something else came up from behind it, from very far down. It was Ivo’s own face. His eyes were wet. He looked at Mav as if he were drowning and Mav was standing on the bank.
Then the smile came back over it, like water closing over a stone.
"Go on," Khan-Amet said gently. "It’s all right. I have others."
Mav meant to do it, but his hand didn’t move. The point of the harpoon hung over Ivo’s chest.
Behind him, Ronald came up out of the water, breathing hard. He stopped a step away. Mav didn’t turn around, but he could feel Ronald looking at the harpoon, at Ivo’s face, at him.
"Don’t," Ronald said.