Ruins

didn’t speak of his facemask as some kind of friend.

“Hard to believe it’s a facemask,” murmured Olivenko.

“Something like it,” said Rigg. “I think we’ve answered the question of how they breathe.” He said this in the language of Odinfold, which they had spoken so long in the library that it was the first that came to mind.

Loaf stepped forward. “Can you show us how this mantle lets you live in the water?”

“You don’t know?” asked a woman.

Loaf shrugged.

“Then what is that for?” she asked, pointing to his face.

“Ugly. Ugly,” murmured the other two women, as if they were captioning a picture of Loaf’s facemask.

And it was true. Where Loaf’s facemask made him misshapen, replacing his eyes with asymmetric imitations, their mantles seemed to blend seamlessly into their bodies. When they moved, it was as if the women’s own skin moved. And maybe it was part of their skin now.

The woman who had fed a bug to Rigg passed her hand up the front of her body and closed her eyes. At once her mantle shifted, rising up her neck like someone pulling off a sweater. It covered her whole head, then suddenly sucked in and clung as if to a skeleton. New eyes—bigger ones—extruded from the sides of her head, like the eyes of a fish. And when she opened her mouth to speak, a membrane covered her mouth. It deadened her voice, though she could still speak through it.

“I can go in the water now,” she said. “But I know that I am not myself a waterbreather. My friend breathes the water, and passes the result to me in my blood.” She looked at Loaf. “He can’t go in the water, not with that one. It’s only an animal.”

“And your mantle is not?”

“It is the companion of my heart,” she said. “It is the sister of my soul.”

“Air in the water,” chanted another.

“Light in the darkness,” murmured the third.

“So you all have these mantles?” asked Rigg.

“Without them we would die,” said the leader.

“So why did you murder my father?” demanded Param.

So much for diplomacy, thought Rigg.

“Your father?” asked the woman who led them.

“Knosso, king of Stashiland,” said Param.

“He crossed over far to the west of here,” said Olivenko. “Then you dragged him out of his boat and drowned him.”

The women backed away, puzzled by the accusation and by Param’s vehemence in saying it.

“Do you mean the man who dances on water?”

To Rigg that seemed as apt a description of travel in a small boat as these people were likely to see it. “Yes,” said Rigg.

“But he isn’t dead,” said one woman.

“Should we fetch him?” asked another.

“Yes,” said Rigg. “In our wallfold, we thought him dead.”

“Why should he be dead?” they asked. “Was he deserving of death?”

“No,” said Olivenko, perhaps a bit too fervently. “So are you saying that this man-who-dances-on-water is still alive?”

“Of course,” said the leading woman. “Shall we bring him now, or do you have more questions to ask us first?”

“Please bring him, yes,” said Rigg.

“I thought you’d want to see him as soon as I saw you,” said one of the other women.

“I know he’ll want to see you,” said the third.

“Let me send out a call for him,” said the leader. Without further discussion, she ran to the nearest water— the river, in this case—and ducked her mantled head into it. She stayed a long time—at least it seemed long to Rigg, who instinctively held his breath as if his own head were also underwater.

Then she lifted her head out of the water, dropping a spray of water that caught the sunlight like stars.

She sat on the riverbank and laughed. “He’s very happy,” she called out. “He’s coming now.”

“Knosso,” murmured Olivenko. “Is it really possible he didn’t die?”

“They must have had a mantle waiting for him,” said Loaf.

“Of course we did,” said one of the remaining women. “Didn’t the Landsman tell us he was going to float to us on the waves?”

“So when you dragged him under the water—”

“It was to keep his evil wife from killing him,” said a woman.

“And he had so many questions saved up for us,” said the other woman.

“I can’t wait like this,” said Param, sounding distressed. “I can’t. I won’t.” And then she disappeared.

Of course, thought Rigg. By slicing time until she sees Father Knosso come out of the water, she will spend only moments waiting, while we might spend hours.

But it wasn’t hours, it wasn’t many minutes, until, out of the waves of the sea and the currents of the river, there arose a host of hundreds of mantle-wearing people, men and women, striding out of the water, their mantles receding from their faces, eyes appearing where they should be in human faces, mouths opening, smiling, calling greetings to the women, who called out in reply. Here, meet these people from overWall.

Then the Larfolders turned and parted and made a way for one man who strode laughing from the waves and fairly ran up the beach toward them. “Where’s my Param?” he cried. “They said my daughter was here!”

Rigg knew that Param couldn’t hear when she was slicing time, but she didn’t have to. She must have recognized his face as soon as it emerged from under the receding mantle, and she became visible again, running across the sand to embrace her father.

He held her for a long time, stroking her in the gentle way the women had stroked Rigg after their embrace. “Param, Param,” he murmured, and other words that Rigg could not hear at a distance. He did not want to interrupt their reunion, but this was Father Knosso, and he could not stop himself from walking tentatively nearer.

The man looked up from his daughter’s hug, and then managed to step from the embrace without quite breaking it. Instead he gathered her into his forward movement as he strode to Rigg and then stopped only a couple of meters from him.

In Fall Ford, Rigg had rarely seen himself—only a few people owned mirrors, and since he didn’t shave, there was no reason for him to consult the mirror in Nox’s house. But once they arrived in O and later in Aressa Sessamo, Rigg had many opportunities to see his own face looking back at him from the glass; in Flacommo’s house, there were so many mirrors that one could hardly escape from the sight of oneself.

So Rigg knew what he was seeing when he looked for the first time into his father’s face. There were no images of him in Aressa Sessamo—a dead male from a female-centered royal line that was utterly discredited by the People’s Revolution? It would be twice-over treason to treasure his visage.

Still, someone might have told Rigg how perfectly he resembled his dead father. Especially since he wasn’t dead after all.

Umbo came up between them, looking back and forth. “No wonder my father hated the sight of me,” said Umbo. “Never once, when he looked into my face, could he see his own face looking back at him like this.”

“He said you would grow up to cross the Wall,” said Knosso.

“He never told me you existed, or that I was your son,” said Rigg.

“He wasn’t supposed to. How could a child keep a secret like that? Better for you not to know until it was time.”

“And is it time now, Father?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, and past time.” Knosso opened up his arms and Rigg stepped into the embrace that Ramex, the Golden Man, had never given him, though Rigg had always called him father, and had loved him. But that love had been misplaced. This was the man, and Rigg was his son, and he belonged inside these arms the way these Larfolders belonged inside their mantles. I am a part of him. I was made from him. I am his. He is mine. And Rigg wept against his father’s shoulder as his father’s hands stroked and stroked him, and Knosso murmured again and again, “Rigg Sessamekesh, my son, my son.”