He catches her fingers in his free hand. ‘I’m more worried about what she’s going to do with me.’ He waves at the shifting circle of refugees. ‘She’s got numbers on her side.’
Shipwright starts absently polishing a scuff on her boot. ‘Well, whatever it is, I think we’re about to find out.’
Shroudweaver watches Crowkisser raise Icecaller’s body into a sitting position, beckoning in an old woman with a face hard as salt tack, her back a mess of mud and blood, her fingers curled to stiffness around a blackwood club. A few business-like words later, and the older woman takes the dead girl’s head on her lap like a babe, runs fingers through her hair, crooning something low and warm as a stove fire.
Then Shroudweaver’s daughter is walking towards him. Her mother’s shoulders on his stick legs and a face above them that’s a mix of them both. Hard to read. Sad, maybe, or angry. All he wants is to hug her and take her home, but she’s years grown from the girl he knew, and he doesn’t have a home to go to.
So instead, he stands and refastens red threads on his hands. As he does, she slows and holds a palm out to him, like he was a wary dog. He risks a smile, and watches it catch her face, pulling the corners of her mouth up. Crowkisser has a different face when she smiles, small bright teeth and a light in her eyes.
For a moment, they stand there. He feels the sharp little sherd in his pocket, watches the mud well up between her bare toes.
She steps up next to him, and hovers there for a second, that tension back in her shoulders.
Then she’s in his arms and he hugs her, reflexively, instinctively. Her voice is a soft curl against his breastbone. ‘I thought I was going to have to kill you.’
He kisses her brow. ‘I know.’
She stiffens slightly. ‘I still might.’
‘I know,’ he repeats.
‘I’m so tired, Dad,’ she says and the tears come from her like rain.
‘I know, love,’ he says, and his hands trace the blades of her shoulders in small circles, like ripples on the sea.
81
the little quail of dusk
small minnow of the hedgerow
berrybob, beetlebeak
—Birds of the Barrowlands, Chalkwitch
Thirty miles and three days later, there’s a brazier, a tent. It’s dark and functional, but warm with leather and fur and a fierce little draught that tastes of berries and winter.
Shipwright stays outside, with her usual quiet sense of dignity and timing. If she’s sad, she doesn’t let it show. She buries it, in fire and drink and jokes that scorch the air with silence before melting into horrified laughter. The old woman, Sandsinger, matches her beat for beat, shadow-puppeting gestures that flicker obscenely against canvas and fall apart into a mess of cackling and flapping for breath.
Somewhere, Icecaller’s body lies silent in the quiet dark between the tents. There’s been no time for a burial yet. All the rituals for dealing with death were sealed within the Stump. No one wanted to touch the corpses, and there was no one left to perform the rites, anyway. Skinpainter and the Deadsingers were all buried within that mountain. With nothing else to do, Crowkisser’s refugees had fled.
Half a week of walking, a ramshackle slide south, unspoken, and barely directed, just a few hundred tired bodies, sloping seaward in the soft dark, framed by the scents of night-time bush and blossom as the cold hills of the Barrowlands gave way to the warmer plains skirting the Midlands. The smudged shadow of the Burners’ forest off to the east brought seeds drifting lazily on the evening air, something in their movement soothing Shipwright’sheart. Subconsciously, she steered them a little closer to the trees each day, until the night’s camps were struck in the shadow of oak tree and beech hedge, the slender trunks that rose on the forest’s western-most edge.
Like a crowd of revellers after a best-forgotten night, the remnants of the two armies travelled south together, incorporated by exhaustion, shepherded by Shipwright. A strange care in it all. Even the most troubled survivors were offered a little companionship around the fires, as if the sound of voices raised in something other than pain might help heal them. Shipwright was too tired to hope for much more than that. She crouched on her haunches, stirring her sadness into the embers, and watching it flare.
At her back, in a small dark tent, Shroudweaver and Crowkisser eye each other like cornered cats, his daughter’s face alternately warmed and harshened by the light. Time passes in anxiously knit fingers and half-formed sentences, much as it’s done for three days now. Until, eventually, she begins.
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I thought it was the best thing.’
‘Not for Mum. Not for me.’
‘You were too young to remember. Twenty years gone.’
‘I got older.’
‘Did she ever talk about me?’
