They didn’t go back to the marsh for six days.
Tamsin’s arm needed that long before the old woman in the healing room let her leave with a sling. Mav paid for all of it. Tamsin wrote the price on her slate, so that she could pay him back. He told her not to, but she wrote it down.
Ronald was the one who talked about the dead men.
He did it on the third evening, on the roof of Wildroot, with a loaf of bread between them. He had been quiet for three days, which Ronald never was.
"Can I ask you something about the causeway?" he said.
"Yes."
"Did it have to be all three of them?"
Mav didn’t answer at once. He had asked himself the same question every night, so he answered it honestly.
"The brother with the spear was standing over Tamsin. I didn’t have time to do anything else. The bald man was at the edge of Log’s channel. I had told Log that anything on that edge was his. I didn’t choose that one, but I gave the order that killed him." He looked at his hands. "Dunmoor was different. I could have stopped at his knees. He had come to sell me, and he had said that the two of you weren’t part of the price. If he had gone home, he would have come back with more men. So I didn’t stop."
Ronald chewed for a long time.
"I would have killed the one with the spear too," he said at last. "I’m not angry at you, Mav. I only want it to stay hard for you. My father says that a man should worry on the day it gets easy."
"It isn’t easy."
"Good," Ronald said, and he broke the bread in two.
-----
It was Tamsin who decided that they would go back.
"We have to," she said. "It’s the only World with rank D prey that we can afford. I’ve checked the board every day. But we never go two days in a row, and you smell the landing island before we take one step."
She was afraid, and Mav could see it. But she had thought it through, and her fear hadn’t changed her answer. He respected that more than he could say.
So they went back. This time, they went all the way to the east of the marsh.
The sheet from House Gravemoor called that place the Deep End. It was a wide black lake with dead trees standing in it. At least 20 mire jaws lived there. They were bigger than Log. The sheet said that the oldest of them were rank D.
Mav had thought about how to hunt them, and the answer was Log himself.
It wasn’t really bait. Log was as strong as any jaw in that lake, and he wanted the fight. But a male mire jaw didn’t allow another male in his water, and Log was a male. As soon as he slid into the lake, the nearest log on the nearest bank opened its yellow eyes. Mav didn’t have to give an order. The wild one came across the water by itself, as fast as a boat, with its jaws open.
Then everyone did their part.
Tamsin’s moths flashed from the bank, and the wild jaw went blind. Seven rose under it, and her lightning stopped it for one second. In that second, Log closed his own jaws on its front leg and used his second skill, so that nothing in the marsh could have opened them again. Twelve’s needlefish went for its eyes, and Eighteen’s spined fish packed themselves under its belly, so that every time it rolled, it rolled onto their spines. The two spitters shot water into its eyes each time it came up. On the bank, Ivy, Oak and Elm ran beside it to keep it from turning toward land, and Ronald’s boars waited behind them.
Mav was already in the water.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Sting.]
His lightning only made a rank D beast shake, but it gave him the moment that he needed to drive his harpoon into the soft skin behind its leg, and after that, the beast was slow.
It still took them a quarter of an hour to kill it. When it finally stopped moving, a wave of Essence went through Mav’s chest. It was larger than anything that he had ever felt from a kill.
’One trench lobster gives 50. This one gave 800. That’s 16 lobsters in a single beast.’
"Again?" Ronald asked. He was soaked to the neck, but he was grinning.
"Again," Mav said.
-----
They hunted the Deep End for two weeks, and Mav’s side killed 14 mire jaws.
Mav was careful about who struck the last blow, because the Essence of a kill went to the killer. He shared the jaws between four of his own: One, Two, Seven and Six. They were his oldest fighters, and he wanted them to rise first. Ronald’s boars took three others, and two of them reached rank E+.
The plates of a mire jaw sold for 1,200 Essence at the Great Market. After the tax and the price of the passage, the three of them had earned almost nothing. But that wasn’t why they had come.
Mav also learned something during those two weeks. Every time they stepped out of the arch, he borrowed Ivy’s nose, and the landing island was clean. Nobody was waiting for them. Nobody followed them. House Ashgrove had lost a noble’s son in this marsh, and it had done nothing at all.
’They aren’t afraid of me. So they’re waiting for something, and I don’t know what it is.’
That thought stayed with him, and he didn’t like it.
On the last day, they found the largest jaw of the lake. It was almost twice as long as Log, and its back was white with age.
It was Mav’s turn to strike the last blow. The old jaw was blind and slow, with Log locked on its tail, and it opened its mouth to roar at him. He drove his harpoon up through the roof of that mouth.
Letters filled his eyes before the beast had stopped moving.
[A Subject has reached Rank D-.]
He knew at once that it was One, because the whole marsh changed.
He could see each drop of rain as it fell. The weight of his wet clothes was gone, and so was the pain in his shoulders. When he closed his hand on his harpoon, he felt the metal bend a little under his fingers.
He had been rank E+ for a few weeks. Now his body was a full letter above almost every first-year in the Nexus, and none of them knew it.
More letters followed.
[Skill developed: Sap.]
[Skill: Sap]
[The seaweed shares its own strength with its host. The host tires more slowly, and it resists pain, cold and poison better. The higher the rank, the stronger it is.]
It was the second skill of his species. It had come the moment One grew into rank D-. A species always gained its first skill at rank E-. After that, new skills came when it grew, changed or understood something new, and this jump had been the biggest his seaweeds had ever made. Seaweed was his own species, so Sap was his too. It worked by itself, like Regeneration, and it didn’t count among the skills that he borrowed.
Something else had changed too, and he tested it at once. At rank E, he had been able to use two borrowed skills together. So he tried to reach for three.
[You have borrowed a skill: Stone Shell.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Dart.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
All three answered.
A smaller jaw had come to see what the noise was, and its mouth was open. Mav looked at it. Then he did something that made Ronald shout. His skin turned to stone, Dart threw him forward, and he went straight into the open mouth. The jaws closed on him and broke two teeth. He let his lightning go from the inside, where there were no plates at all.
His Discharge had grown with him, and from the inside, even a rank D beast couldn’t shake it off. The jaw went stiff from its nose to the end of its tail. Six finished it before it could move again.
Mav climbed out of the mouth, covered in things that he didn’t want to name.
Ronald was staring at him from the bank.
"You jumped into its mouth," he said.
"It was the only part without plates."
"You jumped into its mouth!"
Tamsin had her slate out. She had taken off her sling two days ago, and she was writing very fast.
"Three skills at once," she said. "That’s the rule for rank D. But your World is rank E, so your body should be rank E. How can you..." She stopped, and she looked at the green scarf. "It isn’t your World that decides. It’s that one."
"Yes," Mav said. "It’s One."
She closed her slate without writing it down.
They were halfway back to the landing island when the letters came again.
[A Subject has reached Rank D-.]
Mav stopped walking. He looked for the change in his own body, and he found nothing.
It wasn’t One this time.