He shakes his head. ‘I don’t believe that.’
She steps closer, her fingers clasped around his collar, voice tight and fervent. ‘I do. I’ve seen it. You think you’re working with them. Calling them. But it’s all a choice. They help because theychoose.’
‘Which means?’ he leaves it hanging.
‘Which means they can choose not to.’ Her forehead presses against his chest.
He holds the back of her skull gently. ‘Your mother.’
She looks up. ‘Wherewereyou?’
He looks at her wide eyes, her flushed cheeks. Finally, he relents. ‘In the north. Beyond the Spires.’
‘You could have saved her.’
He hesitates. ‘Perhaps. I don’t think so.’
She steps back. ‘But you didn’t.’
He shakes his head. ‘I had to save something else.’
She glares at him. Her shoulders shake.
‘It was the hardest choice …’ he begins.
‘It was thewrongchoice.’ There’s something dark and grating in her voice, but she doesn’t stop. ‘So, I promised her. I promised myself. No more unknown bargains, no more feelings that aren’t our own. No more binding our lives to theirs.’
‘We’re never separate like that, love,’ he says, but in his heart it feels more like scripture than truth. The passion in her voice calls to him.
‘We are now,’ she grins, waving a hand towards the refugees gathered around the campfires. ‘Theyare. I did it, Dad. I did it for Mum. And I did it for me.’ Her knuckles hit her breastbone with a thump. She stares at him defiantly, ribs rising and falling.
He sips, grimacing. ‘But something else happened, didn’t it? Something must have happened.’
He sees her hesitate. She needs a push. ‘In the south.’
She tenses, shoulders heaving. For a moment feathers flicker around the outline of her bones, then she raises a hand, slowly, resignedly. ‘The unlatching,’ she says, the unfamiliar word hanging in the air between them. ‘There were so many locks holding the gods to us. So tightly bound. They needed so much power to open.’ She half-glances at him. ‘I knew I had it. I could feel all the catches. I had all the keys. But they still held. The gods clung on. Dug in, like … like ticks on a dog. But I pushed and I pushed and I pushed.’ She turns back to him, eyes wide. ‘And on that last push, something pushed back from the other side. And the locks opened, and the light changed.’
Shroudweaver feels something click into place and marshals his face into blankness even as his mind reels in shock. ‘The light?’
She crosses back to his arms. ‘The light, Dad. And something behind the light.’ A breath for fear to grow in her voice. ‘An eye. Looking for us, Dad. Looking for us.’
He twines his fingers in her hair, soothes her cheek and tries not to scream.
She looks up at him again. ‘It was using our names, Dad. Finding them. Like beacons. Licking down towards the light and pushing it all into darkness.’
She sinks against him, her voice quieter now, muffled by his hammering heart. ‘It took so many before I could think. Ripped the names right from them. Ate every bit of who they were, and who they might have been, and who they weren’t.’
Her hands are tight against his chest. ‘Do you see? Dad, do yousee?’
‘A loss of self,’ he says. His voice struggling for calm.
‘Worse than that,’ she says. ‘Every restraint, every border, everylimit, ripped out.’ Her fingers like claws now. ‘Nothing to shape you.’ Her voice lowers. ‘Nothing to hold you back.’ Barely a whisper. ‘Nothing to remind you that you’reyouat all.’
Shroudweaver looks at her, at his sweet, scared, terrifying daughter, as it all finally falls into place, and his heart breaks. ‘So you did the only thing you could.’
‘I took their names, Dad.’ Her voice fractures, strings ragged. ‘I took them and I flung them as far and as hard as I could. Stitched a ritual to rip them out of the world. Like ripples torn from a pond.’ She frowns. ‘It wasn’t enough though. I had to learn to move faster than the eye hunted and Slick was the only way we could do it. Pulled through shadow and veering into crows. Slicing names off stragglers that dodged the ritual. I wasn’t always fast enough to stay ahead of it. But then when I got good enough, I didn’t need to be.’
He almost smiles at the genius of it. ‘Because we played right into your hands.’ He tips her chin up. ‘We were so afraid of you. Of the rumours from the south. So afraid of you that we gave up our own names to the echoes of the ritual. Didn’t even fight it. Even though you were a thousand miles away.’
