Even taking down theVolantehad stretched his nerves to thelimit, his heart beating like a six-tap drum. No, best they weren’t on the sea.
According to Crowkisser, Shipwright and Shroudweaver had already moored that golden monster of a ship, slotted it into the dock of some unsuspecting north coast village and struck out on horseback across the Midlands, skirting the western edge of the Burners’ forest and then on into the Barrowlands, into the shadow of Thell.
Smart. The coastline past their anchorage was vile, and the tides were worse. His dad had always told him there was an old sea monster down there, its ragged, broken lungs sucking the water in and out, spitting it up in spumes and whirlpools, shipbreakers all.
Sure, cutting across country would add on a few weeks, but they’d arrive alive, and they’d be able to glean information on the way. Maybe tap into the Burners’ networks. The sootfaces might stay in the forest, but their traders ran like lice across the body of the Midlands.
A few weeks, and they’d be in Thell. Where, if you believed the wind and the crows, Quickfish and his lover were too, either hoping to get safe passage through, or somehow leverage the Republic’s inkmagic to save his mother.
Slickwalker shakes his head ruefully. Idiots. Romantic idiots. The mistakes people made for love.
He’d fretted about Quickfish too, of course. The possibility of Fallon’s son and Shroudweaver together, with Thell’s armies at their back, hadn’t seemed like an ideal situation. Give them a few months, and they could mobilise, push southwards with a force that would turn Astic and all its brave little satellite villages to dust.
Crowkisser had shaken her head when he told her his worries, a dark little smile on her wet lips.
Not a problem, she’d told him, not a problem at all. She knew all the Republic’s sins, she said. And they would come due with just a little push. And then, she’d said, her fingers twining in the soft hair of his chest, then they would have all of them.
All of their enemies, in Thell, like a corked bottle.
Fallon would stay mired in his port city, scared behind his bristling walls, counting his dwindling, useless ships, and in the north, in the mountain, everyone he loved would bend the knee, or burn.
It seemed harsh, but Slickwalker had seen it work over and over again, in every village, with every group of refugees fleeing the south. Given the choice, most everyone bowed. Perhaps they might tell themselves they were rebels, that they were brave, that they would fight. But most fought only to the first broken bone, the first gunshot. At worst, to the first sundered name.
What she’d explained to him, and what he’d come to understand, was that most people simply wanted to get on with things. Almost any change, any loss, could be factored in, ground under the wheel of time and persistence.
Fighting got you killed. Bowing, bending the knee? It might leave you in the mud for a little, but in the end, it let you get on with things. Bar a few empty houses and forgotten names, the cost was slight.
Getting on with things was all that Slickwalker really wanted, too. To get all this over with, to put an end to the last of these diehards, and begin building a life with Kisser, here, or wherever she chose. To have a shape to that life that was more than prophecies and crows and scheming.
He rolls his shoulders; a nice dream. To get it started, he needs to get moving.
His boots carry him down the grey wood of the pier, passing hawkers and traders hollering their wares. Boats coming in now, rather than going out, trade picking up as the years rolled on. People got on with things. War came and death came and people got on with things.
The boats were few now, but given time, people would forget that Astic was a conquered city.
Crowkisser was winning. All she needed was time, and all she had to do was wait. Except she’d always had trouble with that, couldn’t let well enough alone.
He juked to the left to avoid a gaggle of boat-jumping children, their shrieks of joy wobbling out over the water. Not much younger than him, now he thought about it. For a moment, his feet long to leap from pillar to pillar with them, to find the swaying trees of the south again, somehow. He contents himself with a swipe at one of the passing lads and a sly wink.
He understood where Crowkisser was coming from. Maybe it wasn’t impatience. Maybe what she really wanted was momentum.
And so, boots marched north and west, crossing the hills and bluffs to Hesper, nosing into the Midlands with one eye on the rotten bulk of the Stump; the vanguard of the army that would roll out within the month. Soldiers, nameless and fearless, who remembered what had happened when the gods walked. Good men and women who wanted freedom for their children, whose boots turned old bones and knew that with only a few more they could build a better world.
Slow progress for those grey-clad legions. Sailors and fisherman not accustomed to the land, waiting for the hills to roll, or the valleys to squall with sudden storms. Finding themselves met instead with rain, chill winds, cart roads turned to mud and fields sown with stones.
They’d have an easier time once he left to find them swifter tracks north. He had one or two things to take care of first, then the shadows could slip him away from their dripping noses and numb feet. For now, their ranks were peppered with long men who slunk ahead with noose and rope, clearing the way as best they could.
Apparently there had been little resistance so far. Hesper drew into herself like a bearded boar, her towers hung with fire and fury. She wouldn’t fall easily, not with Fallon striding the walls. She didn’t need to. They could slip past on the landward side like a wolf skirting the fold. Funny how things changed.
Time was, Hesper had been the only curse on his lips. Near three years of keeping them penned in the south, starving their supplies, sinking their boats with the remnants of that great fleet.Shipwright and her ship at the fore of every sortie. He curled a lip and spat off the side of the pier. Three years of that golden nightmare harrying their trade routes and their supply lines, trying to either splinter them where they stood, or force Crowkisser into some kind of reckless assault on Fallon’s stronghold.
Either the walls or the ships of Hesper could have broken her; they still might.
It was ridiculous how long they’d schemed over how to crack that city. It said something for Fallon that it had taken them years to turn their eyes away.
Then, a few months ago, Quickfish had run for Thell. Nothing to do with them, just an unexpected benefit from tearing out Fallon’s wife’s name, all that time ago, a panic from a boy who didn’t want his mother to die. So, perhaps a little to do with them … In any case, Slickwalker had never met the kid, but he owed him one.
Once they knew Quickfish was headed to Thell, all they needed to do was spook Shipwright and Shroudweaver into running there as well. Convince them the people they loved weren’t safe, that Hesper wasn’t safe, if they didn’t do something.
