She had to summon every reserve of courage to touch him. She lifted him by the shoulders, and, just as Tastion had said, he felt as light as a handful of sand. She stood him in the case. It might indeed have been his coffin. She closed the false bottom; it fitted perfectly over him. As she started to shut the lid, she paused. The cave seemed to tilt, her stomach to flip. In the midst of the moment’s vertigo she experienced a premonition that this had been pre-ordained, that no accident had provided the perfect coffin for her enigma, just as no random sea dragon had swum into her lagoon. From her mother to her, from the sea to this empty figure, forces were at work, conspiring, aligning. She was supposed to go. She was certain of it now. Nothing was going to stand in her way, she couldn’t be stopped.
The moment passed but her fingers trembled as she snapped shut the lid. She tipped, lifted the case, almost expecting the thing inside it to rap on the bottom and kill her with terror. But it did nothing. It weighed nothing. The case might have been empty.
In utter darkness she shuffled back the way she’d come, traveling by instinct this last time through the uterine cave and out the narrow cleft.
Soter asked where she had been, but she said nothing to him as she handed over the case. He held it in puzzlement, and she imagined that he was trying to feel the weight of whatever she’d added, and couldn’t. He set the case down beside the puppets, opened it. Before she could stop him, he pulled up the bottom. A small sound emerged from him—the word “What?” He dropped the false bottom back into place and immediately began replacing the puppets. After a moment he said, “Later you’ll tell me what that is and where it came from and why it’s going with us. Right now you’d better hurry. We don’t want to arrive on Ningle too late, or no one will take us in. Get your belongings and hurry back quick as you can.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Go!”
Obediently she hurried out and along the dark path.
In the boathouse she saw that the light in her garret was lit, then chided herself for having left it burning. She hoped Tastion hadn’t come back.
She crept up the stairs, but it was impossible to be silent in that building. Every step creaked or groaned. She sensed rather than saw movement behind her, but before she could turn something caught the braid of her hair and yanked so hard that she was lifted off her feet. Her scalp blazed with pain. She dangled, swung like a bell once, and flew the length of the room. She slammed into the wall beside the windows. An arm’s length to the left and she would have plunged through it to her almost certain death. The wall didn’t kill her but it knocked her half senseless.
She didn’t have to see or hear him to know it was Gousier. She tried to react. Her mind screamed; her body refused to respond.
Gousier lurched across the garret, caught her hair again, dragged her across the floor to the post beside the stairs. He hauled her up again and, with his hand on her throat, crushed her hard against it.
His face was all but inhuman, and his sweat stank of liquor as well as fish, but he wasn’t drunk. Drunk, he might have been escapable. “Well, my girl, you’ve done me up good, haven’t you? Bare-tit riding their dragons? I’m lucky they haven’t just come and cut my head off and burned my house down. They’ve condemned you. No wedding. No anything. And worse. They say they’ll find someone else to haul their fish up to market. Unless—” He winced as if saying this hurt, and his head swiveled as if the room were moving around him; he let go of her throat, let go as though forgetting she was there; she sucked in a desperate breath, but before she could act he struck her so hard across the mouth that the back of her skull hitting the post exploded lightning in her head. Colors, lights, blackness spun together, shattered.
The floor scraped her chin. A splinter stung her awake. She tasted dirt but couldn’t focus on it. She wasn’t even sure how she’d fallen—the memory had been knocked out of her. She