As Osha lifted the last wet linen thread away from the Unfinished One’s hip, the god slowly tilted its shoulders toward the cold pool at the back of the hollow. One basin after another spilled gently over the smooth gray skin, washing streams of tiny silver glassfish into the dark, iron-cold water beneath the slate overhang.
One fry did not slide toward the pool. Caught on a dry ridge near the Unfinished One’s elbow, the finger-long fish flipped twice, missed the runoff trickle, and dropped straight onto Pip’s warm left shoulder fold.
Before Ysabet could reach out a wet palm to scoop it up, Pip instinctively curled the soft inner crease of its side fold—not the deep lined pouch where the mouse lived, but the shallow, damp pocket behind its second foreleg—to keep the tiny thing from hitting the sharp gravel.
Inside the warm fold, the glassfish stopped thrashing. Its transparent flank pressed flat against the thin skin over Pip’s ribs, where Pip’s slow, heavy heartbeat pulsed through the mineral-warmed tissue. Within three breaths the tiny silver gill-fringes began opening and closing in exact time with Pip’s pulse.
The Unfinished One paused with one knee in the cold pool and looked back through a single large eye it had shifted toward its shoulder.
