Ysabet put her hand in front of Pip.
The creature came against her palm, not quite touching. Its jaw worked. She felt the small currents of its breath between her bent fingers.
“That’s enough.”
Edris remained crouched. “The second eye is newly formed?”
“Last night.”
“After the fire?”
“After an animal died.”
His gaze lifted to hers.
She regretted the answer immediately. Not because it was untrue, but because she had given him something he wanted without knowing what he intended to do with it.
“What animal?”
“A hare.”
“Did this one kill it?”
“No.”
He looked toward the shelter, at the clean board leaning against the wall. “You are certain?”
“I watched it die from burns and smoke.”
“Then the eye may correspond to a different pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“May I ask you something first? Has it responded to an injury you could not yet see?”
The moth’s fragile body seemed to lie between them. Ysabet looked at the iron band on his hand.
“What does your ring do?”
He turned the hand slightly, as if only now noticing it. “It is an instrument used in recognizing certain remnants.”
“The lid recognized it well enough.”
“The lid evoked a response.”
“And the ring?”
“Sometimes confirms one.”
“No.”
He was silent. She thought he would argue, but instead he shifted his weight and began to stand. Pip moved at the same time, stepping around the shelterward side of Ysabet’s hand. The creature had seen something at Edris’s cuff: a loose gray thread, perhaps, or the movement of his coat.
Edris reached down.
Later she would go over that reach so often that she could no longer trust the exact angle of his wrist. She remembered the ring facing outward. She remembered his other fingers curved away, leaving the metal nearest to Pip. It had not looked like an accidental collision.
His knuckle touched the pale mark above Pip’s eyes.
Pip screamed.
Ysabet grabbed Edris’s wrist with her left hand and pulled it away. The sound tore through her teeth. The yard disappeared beneath a white pressure, not light exactly, something that made her eyes water though she had shut them.
She was standing. She was higher than she ought to be. A line of people waited for something she could not hear.
Then paving broke beside her shoe.
A black point came through the earth.
It rose faster than a pole thrust from a window. Ysabet fell backward. The point passed Edris’s shoulder, struck the laundry roof and kept going. Tiles burst outward. A pigeon lifted from the gutter in a cloud of white dust and gray feathers.
Its left wing caught the edge of the broken roof.
The bird fell.
For a moment the spear went on growing after it had nothing left to strike. It was ribbed, dark at the center and wet-looking along the edges. One branch forced its way through the hole in the roof and laid a row of narrow barbs against the tiles. Nothing in the little body beside Ysabet could have held so much bone.
Pip was on its side.
Its legs clawed at the paving. The loose folds flattened, rose and flattened again. Through the broken scream came a clicking she recognized, thin and terrified.
Edris had struck the wall. One guard was running toward him.
“Stay back!” Ysabet shouted.
The guard stopped. His hand was on a short baton. He stared at the spear instead of drawing it.
Mara caught Ysabet beneath the arm and hauled. Ysabet’s right fingers struck a stone; pain brought the yard sharply back. She got a foot beneath her and turned.
The pigeon was flapping at the base of the wall.
Pip saw it.
The creature rolled upright, fell, and tried again. One of its small middle legs folded under it. It dragged that side across the paving toward the bird.
“Don’t touch the point,” Edris said. Blood was running from a cut near his ear.
Ysabet had no intention of touching the point. She snatched the clean cloth from the bench and put it over the pigeon. The body thrashed beneath her left hand. Pip pushed its jaw against the edge of the cloth.
“Give me room.”
It pressed harder.
“Pip.”
The little feet scrabbled beside her wrist. She could feel no words from it, only the ordinary weight of a panicking creature in a yard full of broken stone.
She lifted the cloth just enough to see.
Blood had spotted the gray feathers below the shoulder. The wing hung at an angle she could not judge while the bird fought.
Mara knelt beside her with an empty hamper.
“Here?”
“Linen first. Fold it thick.”
A tile slipped above them. The spear caught it on a barb. It hung there, rocking.
Edris said, “It is still responsive to injury. That is significant.”
Ysabet looked up at him.
He stopped speaking.
“Take that ring away,” she said.
He began, “I did not intend—”
“Take it away.”
The woman guard seized his sleeve before he could step closer. She pulled him toward the gate. He looked at the spear one last time, and in that look Ysabet saw neither apology nor surprise.
She saw recognition.