A lovely little lie, that all the power of a composite could scour Crowkisser from the earth, and still leave the world untouched, leave Shroudweaver’s daughter standing.
The sort of thing they used to sing to the wee ones back home,Lu-lay, your mother will be safe, and lu-lay, the sun will still shine.
Still, that was the fiction Shroudweaver clung to and the hope he had sold Fallon. That they could make something that would finally put an end to this, and still be able to look each other in the eye after. Which made it a hope not just for Shroudweaver, but for everyone north of the Rim villages, north of Crowkisser.
Shipwright didn’t really have the heart to burst that bubble. She might yet be wrong. She would love to be wrong. And she wasn’t surprised Fallon had bitten so readily. To him, the composite was just another weapon, a means of gaining access to the real prize – the mountain. It’s people. Allies. She knew that old bull well enough to hope that if he could lay his hands on Thell’s steel and see its soldiers arrayed in squares, if he could imagine those soldiers driving that steel into Crowkisser’s body, then it might kindle the spark he needed to win this war.Might.Bloodand brass, that was a long shot. She had a hunch that even if Crowkisser could be knocked on her heels at Thell, it would take more than a miracle to drag Fallon outside the walls while Arissa still faded in a high tower bed.
So, why call down that fire? It was easier if she told herself rousing Fallon would save everyone in Hesper. It was the closest place she had to a home here.
Something in that felt right. Or close enough to right that she could live with it for now. And maybe saving Hesper would … Well, she didn’t know what it would do, exactly. Slow things down at least. Slowherdown, Crowkisser. And give Shipwright time to breathe. There wasn’t much to be aimed for beyond that at the moment, not in her mind. All of it had happened too fast, over the last three years. The little she knew about this world, the little she’d learnt of its people, its places, its logic, had been ripped out from under her, burnt to glass and ruin in the destruction of the south. All of the years after that nothing but a whirl of sea under her keel. Of sailing from city port to village port, to hidden cove. Trying to help Shroudweaver make sense of it all. Trying to find something to salvage. Some solid ground to build on in the ruins. Something in the shape of a life.
All Shipwright needed was for things to slow down. A beat to figure out what could be done. She was sure if she just had a moment or two, she could do so much better.
The little horse crests a rise, stumbling slightly as scree shifts under its hooves. They’re pushing further across the Midlands now, the landscape rumpled like a poorly laid cloth. Beyond the rise, the trade roads cut onwards into shallow curving hills that hold mist against their flanks. The wide, broad plains of the Midlands narrow to shallower bowls of green which shelter villages skirted by knolls and hillocks, small outposts of stone in the great ripple of the land. To the east, the dark scrape of the Burners’ forest colours the horizon, and somewhere beyond that, the other sea. Somewhere on that sea, home. Home that she hasn’t seen for twenty years or more. Twenty years of being a little more foreign than usual.
Two decades, and she was still struggling to catch up, to understand these people, and their hatreds. All of it was still so alien to her; Crowkisser, angry enough to turn half a world to ash and kill its gods. Somehow, that girl had to be stopped. Fallon would kill her in a heartbeat. The wound of losing Arissa wouldn’t permit anything less.
And yet she was the daughter of the man Shipwright loved. Shroudweaver would never let Crowkisser be killed, not that child who held the shape of his dead wife inside her bones, her face, her movements. Which left Shipwright, as always, to find some way in between. Her stomach twisted at the thought, the last dregs of that dark Burners’ bread threatening to come back up her throat.
The little horse fidgets, and she clucks consolingly. She has no idea how to begin. She needs time, for things to move just a little bit slower, to open up their options. Thell, if nothing else, gave them a chance at a different way out, of defeating Crowkisser without killing her. Threading that impossible needle. A chance at peace.
That’s what she really wanted – peace. An end to wars – toanywars – just peace. She can barely imagine it, time to get bored, to have your biggest concerns be an unplanted field or an early frost or the cat lost after dark.
But she can’t make it happen all at once. So here she is, on the wet back of a tired horse, stumbling north through the Midlands to Thell.
She feels Shroudweaver’s arms tighten around her and wonders if he can hear her thoughts. The two of them ride together now. Their other little horse had disappeared in the night, its hitching undone, its trail vanishing in the hard scree which collected between the rolling hills.
He shifts his head against her shoulder blades and murmurs softly. ‘Not long now.’ His voice is slurred with sleep.
‘I know,’ she says.
‘Skinpainter won’t be happy,’ he says.
‘Won’t be happy with what?’
‘When I turn them loose.’
She pulls the reins, steadies the horse as it picks its way past the wreckage of a cart abandoned in the road, axel broken, sides scarred.
‘What are we setting loose? I thought we were raising a …’
She chokes on it again, coughs the feeling of honey from her lips. ‘What did you and Skinpainter do in there? Nearly twenty years and you’ve never really told me.’
There’s silence for a while, nothing but the horse’s hooves, and the rattle in his lungs. She feels the words form in his chest, feels them fall back unspoken.
She pushes. ‘It was bad enough that I had to knock you out at Luss. I remember that. I can still feel your idiot skull on my knuckles.’ A tightness in her voice. ‘Why does this feel similar?’
She turns her head slightly, so that her cheek is touching his unshorn stubble. ‘What happened in Thell? What did youdoin there? What are wegoingto do in there?’
Still, he’s silent. His breath is ragged on her shoulders, stiff with tension.
‘Shroud?’ her voice low and wary. ‘What are we setting loose? I need to know.’
His voice, when it strokes the back of her neck, is the barest ghost of a whisper. ‘The dead.’
She turns to glimpse him. ‘The dead? Aren’t they all buried up there?’
She turns her gaze to the black line of mountains on the horizon, the spill of barrows pocking their skirts.
