It had been a gift, originally. She’d brought it to him in those early days. A dull grey morning like this, the sky a hammered pan. A bit before they’d taken Astic, in a herder’s hut south of here, jam on her lips and her fingers worn raw. The time it must have taken. And there it was, given without ceremony. ‘This is yours,’ she’d said, and pressed it against his chest. Then pressed herself against him. They’d fallen into rough wool and rushes, the air outside heavy with the scent of hill-flowers, split with the lone piping of a startled bird.
She’d taken him by inches. Teeth running over shoulders, hips. Her body a slim, insistent thing, her legs woven like wire along a branch. Her spine always out of reach, pale in the soft light, until his hands could bring her into him, could lace her with fingers and tongue. Her wrists light against his palms, toes pointed. Her heart a hammer in a bone box. And then her mouth open and a soft, lilting cry, that built like a banked fire. Softness, softness and release.
Leaving the next day, the jacket had felt light and strange on his shoulders, like the touch of a friend just met. The linen tight on his throat, his breath catching when he looked at her. The last scraps of forest falling to the gullies and scree paths of what would become the Rim villages, the people following them picking their way gingerly over stones that turned easily, gave up flints, fossils. The land alive with tall grey grass which shivered white in the breeze, holding tan foxes, and slim, wary deer that emerged at twilight, their coats shimmering with the mock and sway of the grass.
They’d only lost one man on the way to Astic, fallen on the trail, convulsing, spine arched and mobile, his lips bubbling with gold. Crowkisser held him as he talked, her mouth close against his, her cheeks flecked with spittle, thumbed by his desperate hands, her own hands working his body, stopping the worst of the change, until he quieted and she motioned Slickwalker to bring the gun and put a bullet into him.
The gun was hungry even then. Spitting forth death that slunk through the air like a scolded cat, falling on flesh and bone and bubbling gold and burning it all to merge with the rock beneath. Chips of flint, chips of bone.
Over time they moved north and west, seeking the sea, the coast, and the purification of salt before eventually finding Astic. As they travelled, the gun grew sleeker, lighter and the jacket picked up darknesses, blood, tears and blemishes. Still whenever he wore it, he thought of her, with sweetness on her lips and the shudder of silver grass beneath an empty sky.
55
stay warm, beloved ghost
the fire is dipping lower
night still calls you home
—Southern funeral prayer
Digging. So much of power lay in the willingness to dig – in earth, in minds, under skin. Pulling truth into the light, turning it white and slick against the sun and then learning to use it. Crowkisser hadn’t had much to go on at first, some vague memory of her father sitting her on his knee, combing tangles from her hair. That birch sap smell he always used to pull home from the Aestering. Light little kisses on her neck. Her mother tickling her toes slyly with an open hand as she passed, making her squirm. She’d felt so safe then, had barely stopped to absorb the tales of ruins, of buried civilisations, sunk down and down into the earth, each more fantastical than the last, sometimes wondrous, sometimes terrible. Legends of hollow cities spun around underground suns, their roofs held aloft by great brass spinners that groaned and shuddered with the weight of the earth above, and the strain of pushing air down into the ground.
She’d had no clue who had lived in those cities, if they had ever in truth existed. Just a vague, confused memory of feeling her heart flutter in her chest at the tales. Watching the excitement and wonder hang on her father’s lips before her mother called them out into reality again, to pluck a bird, to rinse bloody hands in hot water, to twine her fingers with her daughter’s and play forest princess with the salvaged, prettiest feathers.
No, the great cities were either gone or buried, deep and distant, beyond her reach. She’d never heard a whisper of them,though she’d scoured the libraries of the south for a full year, following hints of names and the half-erased traces of old maps. She took what she needed from those shelves, and then when she could get no further beyond tight lips and tighter attitudes, she’d taken the rest of what she needed on the point of a knife.
She’d never picked up much of shroudweaving, but in those blank wolf years after her mother’s death she’d tried to revisit what her father had taught her and found she remembered enough. Red thread for binding; enough of it and you could hold a soul into flesh that desperately wanted to die. Make it tell you anything just for the relief, for the promise of release. But even that small gesture made her so very tired. She had no idea how her father did it. Ten minutes of questions and she’d been racked with the weight of it, every muscle in her body shuddering in protest at the reflected suffering. He must have had a trick or two. Or maybe he just knew how to hold pain.
Not like the hapless targets of her questions. Despite their suffering, she’d felt next to nothing for them, something inside her scoured blank by the thought of her mum long gone. Somewhere deep beneath that memory lurked a hollow loss she didn’t ever dare touch. She never dug there.
Her mum, who had loved her curious girl.
stay warm
beloved ghost
A summer’s day, years ago, and she’s bent over an insect, stretching it out towards Crowkisser; the girl who would be Crowkisser. Whatever her name had been before she’d torn it loose. Her mum points at the creature, delicately. ‘See how he turns. See the joints at each angle.’ She gives a gentle flick to the insect’s bright green head. ‘See how he pulls tight to protect himself?’
Crowkisser had pressed her face up close, then screamed in indignation when tiny pincers found the soft part of her nose.
Her mum had laughed, gently wiggled the beast free and sent it into the grass. She’d held Crowkisser tight, wiped her bloody noseon her skirt; hunkered down, knees out and rubbed her shoulders consolingly, with just the faintest hint of laughter hidden behind a sympathetic pout.
‘Little bird. There’s a lesson there though. What do you think it is?’
Crowkisser had pouted, scuffed the dirt at her feet, not wanting to answer, wanting to stay in that moment, with the dry dust on her shoes, the sun on her back and her mum hanging in the light of her eyes, feeling the warmth of her hands and the blackbird shine of her hair.
She’d answered anyway. ‘Don’t pester ’em.’
Her mother had shrugged and smiled. A little pit blossomed in Crowkisser’s stomach. The wrong answer?
Her mum pulled her close, pressed her forehead against hers. ‘Baby, there’s always going to be things, people in the world that don’t want you to pester them. You know that, right?’
Crowkisser had nodded, even though she hadn’t.
Her mum had grinned that wicked grin she gave Crowkisser’s dad sometimes, when Kisser had said something cheeky. ‘They’ll always try to put you off if you get too close.’ She’d made her hands into pincers, tickled her daughter’s sides. ‘Nip you, get you all kinds of nasty ways. But’ – and her eyes went wide and serious – ‘but tell me something.’ She flicked the cut on Kisser’s nose.
A squeal. The tiniest bit of blood.
