Reluctantly, she removes her fingers, wet with sweat and dries them on her shirt, then fixes the spinner. It’s the work of minutes. As it steadies, the scouring heat in the room fades to a hearth-fire glow. Shipwright watches its curve, and smiles. Enough of thinking she knows best. Enough of change and ending without consent.
As she finishes her work, the singing of the homestead’s children winds its way down from above, distorted and slowed by the looping corridors. It’s an old tune, a Midlands rhyme:
Come the green, the summer-heat,
bring copper knife and ruddy meat.
Come the rain, the growing wet,
bring calling bird and tight-strung net.
Shipwright shivers as the lyrics fade. She turns as she hears Shroudweaver enter. His face lean and wary, hands fresh with thread and powder.
‘Did you fix it?’ he asks.
‘I did,’ she says and smiles. ‘What happened with the body?’
‘There was a boy,’ he says.
She steps forwards, takes him softly in her arms, and they leave. Behind them the spinner continues to sing, steady, constant and strange.
mist lifts the skin of the world
pale feet beneath black water
the pull of green moss
congregation
They leave after three days. There are no heartfelt goodbyes, no friendships formed. At another time, perhaps, but here their hostgathers at the door with wife and children to watch them leave, back down the path. The fox skulls clack mournfully in the wind as Shipwright passes, and a black cockerel shrieks indignantly, pointlessly. She feels eyes on her back until every one of the refugees has crossed the fence-line. Then quietly, finally, gate and door are closed against them. But the Green stays with them. The damp myths of the Midlands seeded like spores in the tales of the train. For days afterwards, the talk around the fires is of damp meadows and their dreamers. The weather is better now, but the fields on either side of the raised stone roads are still wet enough and deep enough that a tired mind can imagine a half-glimpsed light, a hand stained dark as wood, nails crooked above the water.
Strangely durable, those Midlands legends, worming their way into any old brain. For the people of Thell, these stories are hard to resist; strange, foreign horrors washing out their own nightmares for a night or two, as they scare each other every evening in the drifting woodsmoke, relaxing as the monsters, this time, never appear.
Another couple of days, and another handful of miles brings them close to Hesper, the ridged roads of the Midlands fading down to broad traders’ tracks, cluttered with travellers. And if she never thought she’d be glad to see that battered squab of a city on the horizon, her heart proves her wrong.
As the road pulls her back towards the sea, the people of Hesper’s outskirts come to watch them. Farmsteads and staging inns cough up gawkers who line the verge in clumps, hesitant, wondering, watching hundreds of strangers lurch from the north with narrowed eyes and tense hands.
Shipwright flicks her eyes over their murmuring bodies, digs her heels into the flanks of her weary dray, and rides on into the long shadow of the grey towers.
85
I won’t say anything agin’ her
I won’t
she knows, she always knows
—Last words of Pineye, glimmer, shanksman
Messy little bits. Scraps and shavings. Metal spiralled off with quick, careful movements. Pins held between mummed lips. Fingers quick and deft, livered and blotched. Powerful chemicals and strange acids. Nails chipped and filled full to gumming with oil, rust, picky little grubbings.
A steady, white-powdered hand over stubble. Sucked teeth, hen clucks. Springs teased and poked and tickled. Just so. Wires slimmer than fingers, pushing, prodding, waiting for the click and drop. A surge of adrenaline. Glass stressed. The murmuring creak of an almost crack. Something bitter and burning inside. A twist, hold the pressure in the wrist, run a thumb up the nose and lick the lips.
There, there we go. Easing off, soft, goosey interlockings, downy little leavings. Coaxing sluggish bolts with black oilings. One drop, two, the pull and spin and then the swing. Slow, heavy. Hands through mussy, mussy hair. Little grey wires. Little grey wires. She straightens, runs a hand down her aching spine. Waves a hand.
‘There you go.’
Fallon smiles at her, squats down by the opened belly of the safe and digs his hands in. He withdraws oilcloth bundles, bags, papers, a box, Arissa’s hands light on his shoulder.
