Mav didn’t remember the rest of that day.
He remembered Ronald’s face above him, and Ronald’s hands pressing on his chest. He remembered Tamsin’s voice, high and frightened, telling someone to bring water. Then nothing at all.
He woke two days later in the room at the top of the hall, the same room with the three beds and the window over the cloud. The wound across his chest had closed. It was still red and raw, and it pulled when he breathed, but Regeneration had done its work. He had never needed two days to heal before.
Tamsin was sitting on the next bed with her slate. When she saw his eyes open, she put it down very quickly.
"Don’t get up," she said. "If you get up, I’ll hit you."
He got up a little. She didn’t hit him.
"How bad?" he asked.
She knew what he meant. She picked up her slate again, because it was easier for her to read it than to say it.
"Fern is alive, but she has a hole in her side. Sela thinks that she won’t hunt for a month." She stopped and swallowed. "Mav, you lost more than half of the young spined fish. Eighteen is alive. Two is alive. Seven is fine. Birch has a spear cut on her shoulder, but she’s fine too. Ronald has a broken finger. He says that it doesn’t count."
Mav closed his eyes. He felt for the points in his head. There were so many holes among the spined fish that it was like reaching into a net that had been torn. The grief came slowly, the way that cold water comes through a crack, and he let it.
"And the guards?"
"Most of them are dead or hurt. The ones who aren’t surrendered when the stone burned." She paused. "Hessan was the first to put down his spear. He told everyone that the Speaker had ordered him to lie to us. He asked Tova to put him in a cage. She told him not to be stupid."
-----
Tova came that evening. She stood in the doorway for a moment before she came in, as if she were not sure that she was allowed.
She looked older than she had a week ago. She had a bandage around one arm, and her scarred wing was torn again along the old line. But she stood straighter than before, and Mav noticed that the guard at the door stepped aside for her without being asked.
"The city wants to see you," she said. "I told them that you were sleeping. Some of them don’t believe me. They think that you went back into the cloud."
"What happened while I was asleep?"
She sat down on the edge of Ronald’s bed and folded her wings.
"Everyone came to the hall," she said. "Everyone who could walk. They looked at the stone, and at the Speaker’s robe inside the bars. Then they looked at me, because I was standing there. Somebody had to say something." She looked down at her hands. "So I told them everything. About the Awakened who fell from the sky, and what the old ones did with them. About the master’s hall, and his bones, and what he wrote on the wall. I told them that the Speaker had known all of it."
"What did they do?"
"Some of the old ones cried. Some of them said that I was lying. Old Hesk stood up in the middle of the hall and said that I was telling the truth, because she had been there when the last Awakened went on the stone. Nobody argued with Hesk."
Mav thought of the old woman’s black eyes on the terrace. I knew your kind once.
"Then they asked me what we should do," Tova said. "They have never asked anyone but the Speaker. They didn’t know how."
-----
The choice was simple, and it was terrible.
They could go on feeding the stone with their own people, one every month, as they had for a hundred years. Or they could stop, and let the stone go dark, and the Drift would break. The old ones wanted the first. The young wanted the second, and they wanted to leave through a vortex before the end.
"But only the hawks know which vortex leads somewhere," Tova said. "And the hawks are yours now. Even if you showed us, most of my people would die in the crossing. The old ones can’t fly that far. The children can’t."
"So what did you tell them?" Ronald asked from the door. He had come in without anyone noticing. His finger was tied to a stick, and he was holding it up as if it were a trophy.
Tova looked at Mav.
"I told them that there was a third way," she said. "I told them that we would feed the stone with beasts again. Only beasts, never our own people. We would go to the far islands and bring them back."
"You said that you’re builders," Mav said slowly. "That you can’t hunt."
"We can’t hunt the way you do." Tova’s eyes were bright. "But I watched the young cut a door through a mountain in six nights. I watched two boys wall up a room full of guards without waking them. We can’t kill a stonehide. But we can raise a wall around one, as high as a house, in an hour. Then another wall, and another, until it’s in a box of stone. Then we carry the box."
Ronald laughed out loud, and then he winced and held his finger.
"That’s brilliant," he said. "That’s completely mad, and it’s brilliant."
"It’s slow," Tova said. "And it’s dangerous. Some of us will die doing it." She looked at Mav again. "But nobody will die on the stone."
-----
They stayed three more days.
Mav’s wound was still healing, so he didn’t fight. His Subjects did. Every morning, the young carried him to the far islands, and he cast his dome on the rock. His army hunted while the young watched, learning. Twice, the young tried Tova’s idea, with Sela’s water movers showing them how to drive a beast into a narrow place. The second time, it worked. They raised three walls of stone around a stonehide cow in less than an hour, then carried the whole block back to the city with 40 of them holding ropes.
The rest of what Mav’s army killed, they kept.
There were rank C beasts on those islands that had never seen a hunter. There was another stonehide bull, older than the first. There were white-eyed serpents that came up out of the cloud at noon. There was a pack of tall, thin birds that couldn’t fly, with beaks like axes. By the end of the third day, his Subjects had killed nine of them, and the young had brought two more back alive for the stone.
Mav felt the Essence of every kill go into his army, and he was proud of every one of them. He felt Two’s needlefish grow, and the spined fish that were left, and the hawks. He felt One grow too, slowly, pushing at something that hadn’t moved in a long time.
On the last night, Tova came to the terrace where he was sitting.
"I want to give you something," she said. "Something that the Speaker would never have given you."
"You don’t owe me anything."
"I know. That’s why I want to give it." She sat down beside him. "You can hunt here, green one. Whenever you want, for as long as you live. The far islands are yours, and every beast on them that we don’t need for the stone. Nobody else will ever have that right."
Mav looked out at the sky, and he felt a strange sadness. The islands were drifting in the dark, slowly, like boats on a lake.
He had the coordinates in Tamsin’s slate. With them, he could open an arch to this World from the Nexus, whenever he wanted. Nobody else knew those numbers. Nobody else knew that this World had survived for 300 years.
"I’ll come back," he said. "I’ll bring you beasts for the stone. That’s a promise."
Tova smiled. She looked happy for the first time since he had met her.