When the crows come, they come quickly, black motes silhouetted against the pulsing ground. She watches as they push through the storm in ones and twos. High above, Skinpainter’s no fool. They’ve sensed her attempts at sabotage. Thunderheads wheel towards the gathering birds, but the storm is an unwieldy weapon, listing like an overloaded cart as their arms strain and pull.
Still the crows come. Crowkisser flinches as lightning picks at the edges of the growing flock. Feathers pinwheel in small explosions as the storm fights for space in the sky. Every strike punches against her heart. She grits her teeth and reaches deep inside herself, wrenching the darkness under the earth upwards, hurling it into the storm, filling the air with crows. The effort drives her to her knees. She chokes, coughing clots of blackness up into the clouds, watches as they grow feathers, talons, beaks. Little black tongues.
The sky grows noisy with wings. The light fades from the day as the sun is pulled behind a thronging mass of birds, the storm muzzled behind their bodies. There are distant flashes of blood and feather as the lightning pounds against the flock like a muffled drum. Crowkisser shakes with each impact, her head tilted to the clouds. A writhing cord of black power shudders from her throat, blossoming into a thousand squalling bodies. A few of Thell’s warriors come for her. The long men meet them on the slope of the barrow, bending around spear hafts like ship spars and driving blades deep under ribs. She has time.
Holding the storm at bay isn’t enough. She feels it shaking the flock like a wild dog in a hen house. She has to destroy it.
With a scream, she drives the crows inside the thunderheads. A thousand little black bodies riding the lightning, pulling it with their wings. Burning as they fly.
The Barrowland rings to the sound of a skyful of birds on fire. The day grows shadowed. The storm swells like an overfilled waterskin, billowing like a torn sail, writhing with wings and lightning.
Its belly is a mass of beaks and wings and thundering hearts, a clot in the throat of the storm, pulling the lightning inwards, threading it back into the heart of the clouds. Weaving a mesh of static and electricity and bone that hums and screeches.
Crowkisser screams with it. Her own throat chokes with darkness, lightning burning along her veins. Each tiny hammering crow heart igniting inside her own. Skinpainter battles frantically against her, but they’re too slow, too cautious, too old. She closes her eyes, thinks of her mother and pushes. The effort nearly finishes her. Dark bruises blossom under her skin.
Miles above, she feels Skinpainter stagger; feels the storm stagger with them.
Overhead, the clouds shift, and realign, turning their lightning inwards. Each jagged stroke dragged back into the heart of the storm on burning black wings. The whole mass glows red as a fired coal. The air is thick as an unstruck match. The armies below reel under its weight. The grass driven flat as cat ears. Every flag on every cairn bowing and splintering as the detonation builds. Pressure, such pressure. Ears bleed. Noses. Soldiers on both sides fall moaning to their knees. The lines waver, too heavy to fight. The weight of storm and sky pressing down into the land. The clouds swell. Wings batter them from the inside. thousands of small bodies filling the space, crows upon crows until the sky is a thing of black and moving wings. The belly of the storm stretches, distended. The sky howls in pain and Skinpainter howls with it. Staggering back, clutching their side, where blood flows fresh under their robes. They lash out with a hand. Theair is tattooed red and black and red again, geometric lines of control. Too late, too late. Crowkisser’s heart surges with fierce elation.
The pressure builds. On skulls and temples.
Crowkisser feels Skinpainter falter. She has them. She has them all.
She reaches, tries to twist the neck of the storm, to detonate it in the sky.
And just as she holds the thunderheads pulsing in her fist, a tone rings out. A clear bell, light and sharp. She feels it shiver the field, cutting the sweating air like a cold knife, striking like the flat of a great blade. It catches her on the temple, lifts her, rolls her down the side of the barrow. Her head cracks loosely against a rock. Dazed, she loses control of the storm, control of the flock. The sky spins.
Her head lolls to where she can groggily see the two armies locked against one another, straining like tired horses, almost too exhausted to move.
She hears that rolling knell again, and her gaze is pulled back to the battlements. Where Skinpainter had stood, a woman leans into the storm, tall as mountain ash. In her hand, a thick iron bell. Her gaze locks on Crowkisser’s crumpled form far below.
Belltoller, stiff-backed, grey-haired, the flat planes of her brow unmoved by the storm. Her eyes are as still as the mountain. Her ribs move in slow, easy exhalations. Crowkisser can feel the steady shudder of her breath from a mile away. She tries to rise, but her head is swimming with chimes, bursting into purple and yellow light behind her eyes.
She stands, staggers, falls against the side of a barrow. The world is tilted, singing, slipping under her feet.
One of the few remaining long men helps her rise. He’s mouthing something, but his lips move uselessly in the wet, thick air. He points urgently towards the mountain, and her head turns, just in time to see Belltoller’s brown arm swing the bell towards her with a resounding crack.
Belltoller’s wrist snaps like whipcord. Her whole body reelingback from the lash of the stroke. A faint smile on her lips. Her eyes locked on Crowkisser.
The sound of the bell travels down the mountain with the speed of a galloping horse. Ice and rock follow in its wake.
When it hits the Barrowlands, the land splits.
The earth fleeing a deep cleft ravine, which tears across the ground with a snarl, the ring of the bell at its back, driving the debris onwards and upwards. Shards of stone flung skywards, fountaining the air.
Crowkisser is trying to run, but her legs are weak, twisted by the bell’s echoes, still sick from battling the storm.
The long men haul on her arms desperately. She feels her shoulders pop. Her legs won’t work.
A second peal, hard as cracked iron, and the ravine convulses and deepens, as if punched down into the dark earth by a swung axe. Distantly, Belltoller’s body jerks and lashes like a struck chord, blood on her teeth, and death in her heart.
Crowkisser watches as the ravine hits the eastern flank of her army, as the earth bucks like a wild horse and throws off the men and women desperately fleeing the spreading darkness. She watches bodies arc through the air. A few beats of horrified wailing, before the steady crunch of stones rising to welcome spines, hips, and skulls.
The earth yawns in front of her as the Barrowlands split like ripe fruit and give up their dead. She glimpses old bones, severed roots. The ground is torn away, and with it the power she needs, the thick might of the old dark draining down these new wounds in the skin of the land.
The speed of it stops her heart. There’s nothing she can do. She stays on her knees, rests her hands on the shivering ground and bows her head for the end.
And suddenly, she’s moving.
