Sleep came for Almond like a wave.
It did not hurt. That was the worst of it. It felt like the end of the longest day of his life, and a soft bed waiting, and someone he loved telling him he had done enough.
His knees started to bend.
Deny.
He threw it at the wave the way he had once thrown it at a beak, and at a falling leg, and at a strike that should have killed him.
The sleep did not arrive.
It stood just outside him, pressing, the way the Closer's beak had hung in front of his eyes. He could feel it leaning on him with the whole weight of a creature miles long. It would not stay out for long. He had a few heartbeats at most. He had held a falling tree with that imprint for two heartbeats, and this was heavier than any tree.
He did not waste them.
He looked up at the Lull's head, ten yards away. At its great pale eye, open for the first time in two hundred years. At the heavy gray lid above it, which had been closed for so long that grass had grown along its edge.
