And the Emperor said to him, ‘I don’t want to die.’
And the Shroudweaver, he looked away.
And the Emperor fell on bare knees and said, ‘I have lookedbeyond the world. I have seen the eye. I have seen the void behind the eye. I have felt the gods die. What is there now for me?’
And the Shroudweaver smiled a thin smile and said, ‘Only ending.’
And then the Emperor wept, even as the Shroudweaver’s footsteps left him in shadow and sorrow.
When the morning came, the revolutionaries came to the Shroudweaver with wet lips, and said, ‘It is done.’
And the bright banners on the cairns snapped and cracked.
And the Shroudweaver saw their red hands and their slick teeth.
And who knows what might have happened then beneath the bright sky, with the rage of one man to answer a whole nation.
Until the Shipwright came to him and said, ‘Let us away from here,’ and took him in her arms. And perhaps it was the Shipwright who had saved Thell then, in truth.
Icecaller remembered the nodding heads of the Deadsingers, the faint smiles as they spun the soft, unsatisfying end to the tale. ‘And they went to a place where ships could sail, and where her name meant more, and never more would they return to the cold north.’ Horseshit, she knew now. Then, she’d eaten it up like honey.
She still enjoyed recalling the theatrics of it, the Deadsingers placing their heads in each other’s open hands, the whispered end to the tale, sliding like a snake into her brain. Never more would the Shipwright and the Shroudweaver return, until the division that was made was to be erased, and the living and dead peoples of Thell united again.
She’s jerked back to reality by a blast of chill air that plucks at her collar. She’s near the outlook. For a moment, she glances back down into the mountain, at the drowsy spiral of its lights, ten thousand souls, still here, despite it all. The Deadsingers had a good enough story, she supposed. Icecaller didn’t much care for its moralising though. People died. People died all the time. People were cunts, all the time. But Thell now was something better than it had been; her city.
Icecaller hoped Shipwright and Shroudweaver would comeback. She had questions for them, but neither of them were the weight of that story. Not even Fallon’s wife, as thrilling as her big horse and bright sword were. There was a hole there. A gap noticeable only by its absence.
Declan Fallon. The named and bloody Lord of the Grey Towers.
She wanted to know how he’d done it. Icecaller didn’t regret letting go of her old name. It had no claim on her. She was Icecaller and she knew that in her soul, or the meat that clothed it. It made no difference.
She owned herself. Always had.
But Fallon, he’d kept his name, when it seemed as though the entire world was abandoning itself, when the crows had come, and Astic had fallen. But even the crows had no name, and the woman that led them, she was only Crowkisser. Had she ever had a name? And why had she thrown it away?
Only Fallon kept his name, only Fallon. And perhaps, for a time, his wife. She shudders, remembering the whispers of what had happened there. But before her thoughts can finish walking that road, she skids into one of the wide overlooks where the Stump empties out into the cold of the night sky.
She is not alone. A familiar figure rests there, their broad shoulders flush against the rock, nested close to a brazier, in a wealth of coloured rags, checked and ribboned and wound around. Icecaller catches their eye. A brief moment of shock, followed by a sly magpie glint. They slip her the shadow of a smile, and gesture urgently to the alcove.
Icecaller squeezes herself in against the rock, the frost chill against her back. She buries her face against the dark stone, and watches, her breath still in her throat.
A moment later, there’s a shudder in the air. It feels like a bubble bursting, as Skinpainter moves to put their body between the light of the fire, and the dark where she hides.
‘Hello,’ she hears Skinpainter say. And Icecaller stares in wonder as the shadows opposite her grow wings, and reply.
51
Wings even in the dark, in the second sky that sleeps
beneath the skin of the world.
Little things in the black, that know how to thrive
in the absence of light.
—What Is Born Beyond Blades, Heartshamer
Crowkisser comes to Thell in the cold shadow of the night, in the dip of the flame. She peels loose from the high walls with a flutter, a scuttling spider-like flowing, quick and economical.
