She grins. ‘Sometimes, I think your mum was just lazy, and liked having a god to blame.’
Crowkisser grits her teeth. ‘Did the gods ever help you?’
Chalkwitch is silent for a moment. ‘It depends what you mean by help, little crow. They kept us alive. Healed us. Stopped time from touching us. Closed the wound and sealed the scar.’ She runs a hand over her face. ‘They let us glimpse the future. They let us see the pattern of the past. Was that help?’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t know, but that’s not what you’re asking me.’
Crowkisser frowns. ‘It’s not?’ An odd feeling in her throat as she speaks, like choking on a stone.
Chalkwitch’s face is soft. ‘No, you’re asking me why your mother’s god let her die.’
Crowkisser says nothing, her lips pressed tight, but the tears come anyway as Chalkwitch takes her hands. She nods, briefly.
Chalkwitch makes a low noise in her throat. ‘Five years you’ve been building up to asking me that.’
Crowkisser clears her throat. ‘And?’
Chalkwitch shrugs. ‘And I don’t know, little crow.’
She sees the clouds forming over Crowkisser’s face and tries to head them off at the pass.
‘I’ve asked myself the same thing. Perhaps the disease took it too. Perhaps it was so bound up with her body that what she suffered, it suffered.’
‘A disease that could kill a god?’ Crowkisser asks, sceptically.
Chalkwitch raises her eyebrows. ‘Implausible, after what you’ve done? I don’t think so.’
She frowns. ‘Perhaps it just didn’t understand. They never consciously seemed to feel helpful, when we got sick, or injured. They just fixed it reflexively, like blood filling a wound. Perhaps it just didn’t know she was dying.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘Perhaps it just didn’t care.’
Crowkisser’s expression is pure fury.
Chalkwitch gently loosens her grip.
‘This is what you need to understand little crow, to make peace with this. The gods were always beyond us. We were like pots to be filled, or a coat to be worn. You darn a coat if it frays, but if it rots, you cast it off.’
Crowkisser’s breath is a low hiss. ‘Parasites. They deserved everything they got.’
Chalkwitch’s voice is thoughtful, as she turns her ruined eyes to the sun. ‘Perhaps, little crow. But the killing of the gods changed us. The south changed us. We’re all just unfilled pots now. Undarned coats, waiting to unravel.’
She gets stiffly to her feet, and holds out her hand. ‘But until then, we hunger. Do you want to try and teach me how to cook one more time?’
Crowkisser smiles. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
Chalkwitch’s hands linger on her own burnt skin, and scorched hair. All the deeper aches beneath it, where the fire of her god’s death throes seared along her bones as it tore itself loose.
She kisses the girl lightly on the forehead. ‘Yes, child. I expect it is.’
57
notgonebutbrokenis
hollowthefluteandthemouthoftheflute
hardthestoneandharderthesky
—memoryhereeyeseaten
She is nothing. She is a heart in the darkness. The sky wraps around her. She is grey and boneless. She dreams of breathing. She sweats. Her legs run wet and hot.
There are edges to her, to the place in which she finds herself. She presses against them. They fill the curve of her neck, her spine, her thighs.
