Mav didn’t move.
He floated on his back with only his face above the water, and he watched the bird. It went on turning in the same wide circle. Each time it passed over the city, it dropped a little lower.
It was gray from its beak to its tail, with a white streak along each wing. Its wings were as long as he was tall. It didn’t look like any bird that he had seen on Earth.
But it didn’t belong to him. He reached for it in his head, and there was no point there. It was a stranger in his World.
’Sela, go back to the city. Slowly. Tell Two that I want the spitters here, both of them, and nobody else.’
She sank out of sight without a sound.
The bird circled twice more while Mav waited. On the second pass, it was low enough that he could see its head turning. It was looking down at the water, at the place where the light of the city showed faintly through the deep blue.
He felt the two spitters arrive below him. They were flat silver fish as long as his forearm, with their eyes on top of their heads and mouths like short pipes. They had no skill yet, but they had never needed one for this.
’When it comes lower, take it down.’
The bird came lower. It dropped to the height of a house and skimmed along the surface toward the ridge, as if it wanted a closer look at the stones.
The first spitter’s jet caught it under the left wing. The second one hit its head.
The bird tumbled into the sea a few meters from Mav, and he had it in his hands before it could rise. It was strong and furious. It tore a line across his wrist with its beak. Then he broke its neck, and it stopped moving.
He held it up out of the water to look at it.
There was a thin ring on one of its legs. A small cloud was cut into the metal, with three lines of rain falling from it. He had seen that sign once before, on a banner in the Great Market.
It was the mark of House Stormveil.
-----
He took the bird to Wildroot that evening, wrapped in a piece of sailcloth, and he put it on Quill’s desk.
Quill unwrapped it, looked at the ring and wrapped it up again. She didn’t swear. He thought that it would have been better if she had.
"Was it alone?" she asked.
"I only saw one."
"They always fly in pairs." Tamsin was standing behind him with her slate pressed against her chest. She had been reading about Stormveil every night since Quill’s warning. "One stays to watch, and the other one goes back at once. Their skill lets them travel along a fresh thread, all the way to the World at the end of it, without a Manifestation. That’s why everyone is afraid of them. When the first bird finds the World, the second one is already gone, and it takes the coordinates home in its head."
"So the second one left before I saw the first," Mav said.
"Probably on the first day."
He made himself think about it calmly. A bird could only follow a fresh thread, and he had been careful for weeks. He had changed arches every day. He had gone home with the crowds. So when had he not been careful?
Then he knew, and he felt sick.
It was the night of the ice World. He had been the last to leave the breaking World. Birch had just gone home to his sea with no one there to meet her except Sela, so he had crossed the Nexus as fast as he could. Then he had gone through the first arch that he saw, alone, in an almost empty plaza.
He had broken both of Quill’s rules in a single minute, and he hadn’t even noticed.
"It was the night of the ice World," he said. "I went home alone."
Nobody said anything, but Ronald put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.
Mav was angry with himself, and the anger was so strong that it was hard to breathe. But anger wouldn’t change anything now. He pushed it down, and he made himself think about what came next.
"What happens now?" he asked Quill.
Quill sat down behind her desk. Her scarred hands were flat on the wood again, and this time, they were steady.
"Someone has your coordinates. Stormveil will sell them to whoever paid for them, and that buyer will come. A raider can’t choose where his arch opens in your World. It opens close to your Heartstone, because that’s what he came for. He arrives inside his own Manifestation, and his arch stays open until he leaves." She looked at him. "Your World is rank E, so anyone of rank E or higher can come. Whoever paid Stormveil’s price won’t send first-years."
"When?"
"Soon. Days, not weeks. The longer they wait, the more chance you have to prepare."
"Can you come?" Ronald asked her.
"No. An instructor may not enter a student’s World. If I did, House Frostmere would hang me, and Wildroot would be closed the next morning." She said it without any feeling, as if she had thought about it before. Then she looked at Mav again. "Listen to me, Silkborn. You’ve never fought in your own World against people. You’ve only fought beasts there. People are different. They come for your stone, and they don’t stop when they’re hurt."
"I know."
"No, you don’t. Not yet." Her voice became very low. "So I’ll tell you the only thing that matters. When they come, none of them can be allowed to leave. Every one of them will have seen your sea, your city and your Heartstone. If one of them goes home, he’ll sell what he saw, and the next ones will come with the right beasts."
Mav looked at her for a moment. She had run from his father’s death. She had told him so herself. But she hadn’t forgotten anything that it had taught her.
"None of them will leave," he said.
He walked home through the busiest arch on the plaza, with the bird still wrapped in its sailcloth under his arm. He didn’t need to hide his trail anymore, but he hid it all the same, because it was the right habit, and he never wanted to break it again.
When he came out at the bottom of his sea, the city was lit and quiet. The young needlefish were sleeping in the dens. Sela was still awake, going over the plans for the broken roofs.
He stood at the gate and looked at all of it.
Someone was coming.