It might have worked on her once, a decade ago, two decades ago.
She glances at Shroudweaver to see if he is similarly impressed. The fingers of his left hand flash a quick response in Katkani tip-speak.
Let the bag empty itself.
She chokes down a smile and turns back to Declan. ‘We agree the problem is serious.’
The large man’s face purples in rage. ‘Serious? No. Serious iswhen the crops are slow. Serious is when the rifles run out of bullets. Serious is maybe,maybewhen my feckless son disappears two ruddy months before our fucking chat here. Serious is when my wife can’t …’
Shipwright lets it all flow over her like the tide.
‘How is your wife?’ she asks quietly.
Fallon deflates like a sodden bellows.
‘She’s …’ His voice falters, fades into emptiness. ‘She … is. I suppose.’
For a moment, Declan Fallon is not the Lord of the Grey Towers, he’s something smaller, more delicate. If Crowkisser could see him now, Shipwright thinks, she’d break him into a thousand pieces.
Perhaps she can. Shipwright’s eyes flick over the shadows in the room. Shroud’s right. This isn’t a war anymore. She doesn’t really know what it is. Somewhere between a losing battle and a reluctant surrender.
She watches Declan shrink in on himself. Three years ago, he’d been planting trailing vines over the high balconies. Getting drunk mid-day. Talking about another kid, maybe. Three years ago, Shipwright had been thinking about a life on land. What it might be like to dig the earth. She hadn’t thought about children, but she’d dreamt spaces where they might be.
Now, she watched the shadows, and waited for the hammer to drop.
11
Mind your mother’s words boy
Mind your father’s tongue
Mind the trade in liars’ coin
Beneath the turning sun
—Tannery kids’ kick song, Hesper
Fallon watches Ship and Shroud leave. Pathetic. He knows how it looks. He can’t make it look any another way. Grief hangs on him like whaler’s tarp and their sympathy is a finger in the wound.
He’d liked that decanter. He’d liked running this wild dog of a city. Riding home with his wife after the Revolution like the land itself had been carved for him. A proper victor’s return, stomping stallions and tossing banners.
A bit of peace after that. The world luring him in, letting him get soft. Arissa finally untensing and revealing the girl that lived inside the soldier, inside the diplomat. Quick smiles and soft touches, kisses in the stairwell that ran straight to his hips.
Mornings dicing and dickering with all the squabs and vultures that made up the shape of the city, Quickfish at his elbow, learning the trade. How to spot a bastard. How to slip a lie between two sheets of paper. How to hang a smile on your face and leave it clear of your heart.
Hesper had disagreed with herself since her founding. Founded by a guddle of captains rich enough and lazy enough to crave a big house on high cliffs, and just smart enough to realise they could run coin through their fingers from tariffs and trade, give their sword arms a rest, turn their criminal brains to more mercantile pursuits.
Brilliant idea. A potage of colossal egos and miserly cunts. That had been before his time of course. Over the years, all those captains and corsairs had fucked hard and brewed up a whole passel of mewling babes that craved not just money but legitimacy. So they had stopped calling themselves captains, and stopped sailing forth. Put down roots, hard, like a vine twining the throat of a tree, moving into all the trades that kept Hesper’s blood pumping. Forges, tanners and bilge-merchants. Cutters, crossers and crooks, the lot of them. Guilds. With guildmasters to lead them. Every one of them snakes in sharp coats, but wielding real coin, and wearing big, flashy hats, so impossible to ignore. The city needed money to turn, and Fallon needed the city to turn to keep his hand on the wheel. It was exhausting. Hard to believe he’d married into this. Stepped in that nest of snakes. All for her hand. For her smile. For Arissa.
The loss of theVolantewould worsen things. The captain had been insufferable, a real preening prick, but he’d known what side his bread was buttered. And he’d survived the South.
That was how it was these days. Your friends were just those folk who’d stayed alive. Couldn’t be pickier than that, unless you were down in the Archive kissing glass.
Precious few friends for Declan Fallon, High and Knackered Lord of Hesper. Ship and Shroud, he’d grant. They’d stuck to him like barnacles on a bilge pump, even after the South burnt to glass and Crowkisser boiled up from her rancid nest with a pile of grey-cloaked, sharp-eyed menaces. Loyal to a fault, both of them, even when it cost them time together. Or space to breathe. Now, even that loyalty was showing cracks. Arissa lying between them all like a corpse in the wedding bed.
He knew everyone could smell it on him. The stink of grief. And he didn’t mind Ship or Shroud clocking it. He could wash off that shame with a few swigs of something amber and warm. But the other vultures squatting on Hesper’s corpse could see it too, and for them it was like chum in the water.
That’s why he’d held off going cap in hand to the guilds. Courting them was weakness. They came to him. He flattered himselfthat he was still the last word, despite it all. No one twitched in Hesper without his say.
