He breathes, thin and shuddering. ‘Perhaps though, if it was big enough. There’s only once place we could get the bodies for it. Only one place where enough of the dead will linger long enough.’
Fallon frowns. ‘I don’t follow.’
Shroudweaver glances up at him, then takes his hand. Traces his fingers over scar and callus as he talks.
‘Calling a god. It’s like striking a light. Building a home. Making a body into tinder and kindling.Buildinga god? That’s like taking every light you could have struck, and stitching them into a sun. Everything burns. And the light of its burning takes on a life of its own.’
His fingers tighten. ‘I can’t begin to describe the scale of it. The cost of it. It took years for me to grasp it, even though they hammered it into us day after day. The cost of creation. Thehowling flame of gathered fire. The forging of a new god. A composite thing.’
Shroudweaver drops Fallon’s hand, the blood leaving his face. ‘Put it this way, Declan. Only Thell has seen enough death. The death it was born in, the death we caused. The death that came before.’
Fallon’s eyes are wide. Shipwright can sympathise. He’s touching on the wild edge of the world where only a Shroudweaver walks. That kind of talk does strange things to the heart.
Shroud himself is oblivious, running the numbers again. He coughs and dabs at his lips. ‘I think if we can beat Crowkisser to Thell then I can summon something that will be strong enough to stop her.’ He pauses. ‘If she gets there first? At best she takes the city; at worst she finds allies. We can’t let her do that. We won’t survive that.’
There’s something else in his tone there. Shipwright sees it for a second, like a grey fish dipping under grey water, another lie slipping beneath the first. She grips the stem of the glass hard enough that it creaks. Now is not the time.
Shroud is still talking, leaning into Fallon’s arm, his irritatingly attentive head.
‘Stopping her though. That needs something that can knock her flat. That needs a composite. A gathered flame. I can do that.’
His voice quietens, drops into his chest, emerges cold, and thin. ‘I’ve become the kind of person that could do that.’
The admission knocks something out of him and he shrinks in on himself.
Shipwright watches Declan. She’s expecting a clever line or some brutal sentence that still gets him what he wants, but that stupid, bullish man surprises her again.
Shroudweaver flinches when Fallon puts an arm around him and pulls him tight. It feels genuine. She desperately wants it to be genuine. They stand like that for a moment, his slim frame held close to Fallon’s broad chest, his forehead light against his ribs. Shipwright wants to hold on to the fury inside her, to nurse it until it’s a knife that will cut away the half-truths still cloudingthe air. But thelookof them, the pair of them – a wounded deer and a ruined house.
Shipwright watches Shroudweaver unravel, and when he begins to cry, she feels something hard break inside her. Something that’s been inside her since Astic. Since Crowkisser. Since the end of the world.
That knife she wants to keep hold of crumbles into nothing. And Declan Fallon, that big, drunk, arrogant prick, he puts one broad hand on Shroudweaver’s shaking shoulders and he kisses the top of his frail head.
‘It’s OK,’ he murmurs. ‘It’s OK. We’ll put it all back together. You and me and Ship.’
Shroudweaver shakes quietly. And Declan Fallon, Lord of the Grey Towers, Warden of the Free City of Hesper, holds him as he cries.
Shipwright smiles softly, despite herself. When Declan beckons her with one broad arm, she joins them, and it almost feels like coming home. It almost feels like coming home, even though the blood thunders in her head, and her palm aches from the pressure of near-shattered glass.
15
there are men in the far sea
who swim up rivers
the sea unzips their spines
lays salt into their bones
—The Blue Beyond the Halls, Hallowfeather
Afterwards, the sun sets over the great grey towers, quieted now by the oncoming night. Shipwright looks down at Shroudweaver, asleep again, covered with thin cotton, his chest rising and falling with a steady, child-like rhythm. For the first time in weeks, she lets herself relax.
He needs the rest, and so does she. She sits on the corner of the bed and unclasps her boots, peels back thick socks and stretches her toes with an audible sigh.
Shroudweaver mutters in his sleep, and she watches his bone-spun body writhe as she runs her hands through her braids, unpicking them one by one, setting the pins to one side. There’s never enough time, every day a little wearier. Her fingers linger on a pin, carved from the shell of one of the turtles that used to cluster around the pillars of her house, red as a low fire. She turns it once, twice, fingers catching a little jagged edge she hadn’t noticed before.
The knock on the door startles her. He’s standing there, filling the frame.
