Shroudweaver stayed in Shipwright’s shadow, watched her open palms dance. Her smile, slow and easy, slipping out of the corner of her mouth.
People listened, people talked, sometimes guardedly, sometimes not. Once there was the flash of a knife, a quick twist, the soft pop of a joint coming loose.
He had held her close that night, his forehead pressed against the planes of her chest, counting heartbeats, listening to valves open and close, trying not to throw up from fear.
She had been quiet too, in those small towns, even more than usual, keeping her fears tight against her chest, as though letting them out would make them real. As though he couldn’t read them in the stoop of her shoulders, the shiver of her bones. Neither of them wanted to talk about Thell, which drew closer in their minds, even if it remained only a dark stain on the horizon. Occasionally, heather-hued clouds would flow down the mountain passes, rolling over the Midlands in squalling, chill showers. It was then Shroudweaver felt the snap of damp cloth against his skin, heard water dripping into a great black lake, and saw the face of the Emperor turned towards him, high-cheekboned, imploring. ‘Don’t let them do this to me.’
When those nightmares came, he would wind red threads tight around his hands, until he felt his fingers go numb. Eventually the rest of him would numb too, and he could sleep.
When the sun eventually rose, they began searching again.
As time passed, Shipwright and Shroudweaver grew rumours like a coat, darned and stitched from a thousand loose lips and tongue slips. Eventually, those whispers called them inland, and they had to leave the coast-roads behind.
Cast off, the ship slept in harbour at the last small village, lashed to a grey dock that had never seen anything bigger than a few barnacle-wracked salt scows, Ropecharmer pacing her decks like a lonely cat. He’d sail her south again in a week or two, if no news was forthcoming. Hesper’s blockade was thinner than ever without the ship, and he was captain enough to harry what little trade still limped down the coast. Thell was not a place for ships, in any case.
And before Thell, the rivers and rills of the uplands weren’t fit for a rowboat, flowing fast and fierce with clear water and small brown fish. It was legs or nothing.
So here they were now, off ship, their tired feet edged against the hills that skirted the cairns of the Barrowlands, wandering into green fields where they could watch small dun birds twist twig and leaf into a shelter against the rising spring rains.
Breathing out a sigh of contentment, Shroudweaver let himself fall back onto the grass, his vision tilting up to the blue bowl of the sky. He loved northern skies, fierce, empty things, scratched by the bodies of hawks, coloured by sudden storms which dropped rain in cold spears.
Southern skies were cluttered, ruddied by sun and muddled with cloud, shadowed by cookfires and bonfires, floated with marsh-light and ghostflame.
The dun bird leaves again, whirring across the sky in a bobbing weave, the soft peeps of its chicks subsiding as they retreat into the nest.
As Shroudweaver watches their mother flit out against the wind, a pair of familiar booted feet obscure his view, setting themselves either side of his hips. He squints up, smiling softly.
Shipwright looks down at him, her hair still mussed from sleep, a mug in either hand.
She offers him one, letting her fingers linger on his wrist for a second. ‘Making friends, Shroud?’
He laughs. ‘I don’t know. They don’t seem that interested in me. Lack of worms.’
Shipwright slips forwards on to her knees, the weight of her hips settling over his. Her hand comes up to the side of his face, still warm from the heat of the tea. ‘That’s grim even for you.’
He frowns. ‘Is it?’
She tilts his head to the left gently, her fingers light on his jaw.
The curve of the skull is barely visible beneath the summer grown grass. Bleached and burnished by months of low winter sun, scoured by the freshening winds. Its lower jaw long since gone, one socket cracked and crazed, threaded through with small white flowers.
Shroudweaver looks into its empty eyes and thinks of the weight of the Shipwright above him. His hands find her hips,and his tongue brushes against her lips, sharpened and bitter from tea.
And for a time, he thinks only of her, and of the warmth of the sun. Of a dun bird’s wings, and the round stones under the earth.
53
A man cannot hold a lit match without seeking tinder.
—Proverbs of the Burning Forest, Heartshamer
Shipwright clicks her tongue softly, the horse moving steadily under her. It’s a sturdy little mountain thing, its mane wiry and coarse, piebald flanks working stoically as it climbs the rolling hills of the Midlands.
It whickers gently as it picks its way down the steepening side of another barrow. She can sympathise. This was treacherous terrain that had turned her boots at every step, until in frustration, she’d harried Shroud towards a small Burners hamlet that nestled on the edge of the Barrowlands, and borrowed some sturdier legs to carry them onwards.
The pair of them were exhausted, hammered down by the sheer repetition of travel. The wet socks. The blisters. The aching bones. The rain. Shipwright was used to it. Two decades of it, since the war with the Empire, scurrying over this blasted continent, stamping out fires, or arriving late enough to sift through the ashes. She was used to it, but that didn’t take the edge off, didn’t stop the lurch in her heart at every near miss, every arrow peeling the air near her head. Every sword blade that bit loam instead of blood. Every time Shroudweaver skipped along the edge of death, and teetered on the brink. He couldn’t let well enough alone, whether it was a stranger’s war or a friend’s mistake, Shroudweaver couldn’t stand by. His greatest curse – the heart to not abide suffering and the arrogance to think he could make a difference. It had only worsened with the disaster in the south and with Crowkisser, with the risk that he was somehow personally responsible for every new catastrophe, every loss, every misery his idiot daughter inflicted.
So, he’d kept flinging himself against the world. Swimming in strong tides that most sensible, younger men would steer away from. Even if it tired him out, again and again and again. Every morning, his fingers stiffer, his knuckles swollen in the cold, or the damp, or dried to creaking in the summer heat. Those skinny legs of his shaking as he folded bedrolls, or stooped to drink from creeks.
