When the lane outside grew quiet, Pip backed away from the shutter on its six mismatched legs, gently tipping its head so the mouse could slide down from its antler-root back into the open wooden box of oat-straw. Then the creature walked over to the low grain-chest where Ysabet and Osha were wrapping dried fish in oiled linen.
Pip did not tap for food. It reached up with one front claw, touched the rough green-and-white patchwork of its own shell—right where the white Little Harbor seam met the newer green clay from the high marsh—and then pointed toward the cracked alley shutter where the children in their painted masks had gone.
It opened its sideways jaw, worked its scarred tongue carefully against its blunt mineral tooth-plates, and forced out two rasping, scraped words:
“Stop... growing?”
The effort made its throat contract, and it swallowed hard afterward, looking from Osha’s ink-stained fingers to Ysabet’s face. Through the bond came a tangled knot of pictures that Pip had been carrying without a name: the huge, suffocating shadow of Azhrak’s war-form towering over Falling Bells; the crushing weight of the overhead river at the Upside Ford; the vast, lonely terror of becoming something so huge that every breath broke a roof or demanded a kneeling crowd. Pip had thought the only road away from becoming Azhrak was to become another kind of giant—an endless, sleepless wall of bone and shell holding up every falling bridge in the world.
