Everything remains as it was. There is still time perhaps, to save a little blood. If she can hollow out the mountain before her father arrives with his time-worn lies and false promises.
She stands slowly, swaying gently. For a second, she feels the brief hearth fires of the city spreading out around her. The night is studded with fragile hearts flickering against the darkness. She feels the world outside stretching out to snuff them, and something in her stomach aches. She feels like a mother. And she is hunger, and pain and vengeance.
48
hung by their neck, where the wind is howling
hung by the tall bones, the long bones
the ones that stretch close to the gods.
—Headsman’s Cant, Mirth
The wind is high on the coastal road, scouring down from the eastern hills and meeting the air off the sea in violent gusts.
The bleached wood of the Teeth list against its force. The base of each signal fire scorched black from the countless flames lit in their depths.
Crowkisser stoops against the nearest pyre, resting her fingers on the cold, damp wood as she lets her lungs snatch a breath from the gale. The burning in her legs is cooling as she pauses from her ascent. She’s exhausted. It’s her third night of no sleep, her mind skirling with visions, her ears still slithering with voices.
She lets her head lean back and inhales the lingering scent of smoke, only half-tamped by the rain.
For years this shoreline has danced with warning fire, as the fleets of Hesper harried and burnt any ship that tried to bring her people aid. Years of waking to that line blazing in the night. Knowing it meant death in the morning and empty stomachs for weeks after that.
She knuckles the sleep from her eyes. Enough. That ends soon.
All she needs is to break Hesper. To take Fallon, and her father, and that damned Shipwright out of the frame.
Now, there might even be a chance to do that without sinking the world further into death. Thanks to Quickfish.
A brave boy, running all the way to Thell. Stupid, of course. No magic in that mountain would bring his mother back hername half-torn as it was, a lingering ghost between worlds. A half-remembered thing. Stupid, stubborn woman.
But, with Quickfish in Thell, Crowkisser had everything she needed. A few light nudges, a few strings pulled, and the stars had started to align.
Her dad had jumped at just the right moment. The slightest push from Slickwalker, the slightest threat to Fallon and his friends, and he’d run north. Seeking an army in the livingandthe dead, she suspected. A rekindling of that old alliance that had won him the last war, and the electric taste of new souls for the pyre. Predictable. Admittedly, the prospect was worrying, on some abstract level, but she doubted he had the stomach to pull it off, or whether the welcome that awaited him would be as warm as he hoped. And beyond that, she wondered if he’d really turn the dead against her, even if they could be brought to heel. She couldn’t quite imagine it. He was still her father. Somewhere, out there, under all the rest of it.
Five years and more since she’d defied him. Left him with the corpse of her mother and his excuses.
All those years, and he’d never lifted a finger against her. Not directly. True, there’d been a lot of noise and fuss around the edges hampering her, holding her back. But nothing direct. He didn’t have the guts for it.
Or he hadn’t, until now. She wondered if Shipwright would push him to attempt something more final. If Fallon’s bitterness would give him enough sway to send some red-threaded death her way, a little bit of payback for his dreaming wife.
She needed something to tip the scales.
And she hadn’t found it.
Not that she’d let on to Slickwalker, or to her people. Astic was prepared for war. Slickwalker already yearning to stalk off across the country, living out all his dreams of the bold, lone hero.
And she hadn’t found her ace in the hole.
Months of searching, and cutting, and bleeding questions into the dark, and she hadnothing. Her blood lit with fire at the thought of it.
The prophecies were too vague. The omens could mean pretty much anything. A mess of squawks, of hints that echoed some great defeat for her enemies, and an unsuspected alliance. But nothingconcrete, just a sense of the change to come, the sense of her own surprise when it would hit her.
All she had for certain was Fallon’s son, in that mountain. And if there was a place more foreign to her on this entire blasted earth, she didn’t know it. Locked down on land by an army still hardened from their last war, and in the air by the wild, strange warlock that stalked the mountain scarp.
She would have to go there herself, alone, before she dragged her army halfway across the world. She needs to see the mountain, and see what she can use to make its people bow.
She doesn’t want them dead. She doesn’t want her father dead. However much she hates him for what he did or didn’t do, she can’t wrap her head around a world without him.
