“And then Travers turns him into a damned bloodhollow.”

Isabelle forced a thin smile. “But you still wouldn’t have the shard. Besides, I’ve brought people back from being bloodhollows before.” She pointed at Marie with her nose.

Ivar squinted at Marie as if he couldn’t quite see her properly. “You?”

“You couldn’t tell from my weather-baked skin tone?” Marie asked.

Isabelle said, “You’ve said your piece. Now consider an alternate arrangement: You sail away and no one gets hurt. You might be able to take us, but the Skaladin will make you pay for it, and I’ll drop the shard in the Gloom before I let you have it. There is no victory here for you, only shades of loss.”

Ivar glowered. His fist slammed into Isabelle’s jaw so hard that she left her feet and fell backward. She hadn’t even seen him move. Stunned and dizzy she flopped on her side to see him holding Marie’s guns, and aiming both at her head.

“The jackhand you aren’t!”

Bang!

Terror tore at Isabelle’s throat even as she lurched to her feet, “Marie!”

But it was Ivar who stumbled backward, the smoking pistols clattering to the ground, clouds of gray smoke swirling around his face. Ivar’s time shadows ran out in all directions, or tried to; they shattered into a hundred incoherent fragments before they left his skin.

Marie stepped forward, spit out a metal tube, and blew a thread of gun smoke as if she were a human cannon. “You didn’t think I’d give you loaded guns, did you?” With two swift blows she brought him to his knees and then to the ground. The gray smoke resolved into a fine spray of silvery particles coating Ivar’s face and upper body. She pulled another pistol from behind her back a shoved it in his mouth.

“Be warned,” she said. “I don’t need you alive.”

“What just happened?” Isabelle asked.

Marie said, “He can’t see the future while he’s shifting time. He can’t shift time while he’s holding anything denser than bone. Grabbing my decoys slowed him down, which gave me the chance to fire my bite gun. Now he’s got a gram of iron dust embedded in his face. It’ll be weeks before he sweats it all out, if I don’t empty out his skull first.”

Ivar made a furious helpless noise around the barrel of the gun.

“You actually hid a gun in your mouth,” Isabelle said, incredulous.

“Only a small one. I like my teeth.”

“Have I mentioned lately you are an absurdly dangerous person?”

“Not since Flotsam.”

Isabelle dragged her attention back to the skyland. Sedgwick and Czensos had closed ranks, or at least Sedgwick had eased up to take cover in Czensos’s shadow. The Last Man quaestor leaned on his staff, looking surprisingly unperturbed by Ivar’s defeat.