After a moment, she takes her glass to the cabin window and looks out across the waves to the shore. She watches distant, small lights bob as patrols of people who want to kill her tread the coastline, waiting for any ship stupid enough to court the rocks.
‘Ah, no peace for us until we finish this.’ She reaches up with a hand, pulls the curtain against the growing chill, turns the lamplight down softer, before she sits back on the bench, arching a spine grown weary from standing.
Shroudweaver’s breath catches in his throat and he rubs his brow with tired fingers.
Shipwright sees the movement and her smile is softer than her face should allow.
‘It’s alright,’ she says. ‘I’m not quite done yet.’
‘We’re getting closer though,’ he says.
Her rough hand is heavy on his knuckles and when she leans in to kiss his forehead she smells of tar, split wood, and sweat.
‘Close isn’t done,’ she says and there’s steel in it.
She pours more wine, raises the glass.
‘Kicking and screaming?’ she says.
Shroudweaver’s smile could light lamps.
3
other temples
whalebone arch
willow bower
lover’s arms
mother
In the city on the shore, the crows return. She waits for them, watches their wings beat over lamp-lit streets, between smoke-stained buildings.
People are avoiding the curfew, she notices, in small defiant clumps. Tiny rebellions. Irritating.
The crows descend, in ones and twos, pressing themselves against her body, clustering on the pale branches of her arms. Their small insistent hearts hammering with secrets.
She opens her mouth and they crawl inside, sharp claws on her lips and tongue, small bones crunching under her teeth.
She swallows feathers and blood, feels them wriggle down her throat and settle in her stomach. Their quiet cawing threads through her muscles. Their knowledge fills her brain.
She swallows the flock piece by piece, as the lamps wink out and the streets are filled by loyal men with sharp blades.
The ship is long gone, sped across the sea, its body mended and its sails filled with a new god. She’d almost had them, Shipwright and Shroudweaver both. That would have been a thing, an end to at least one annoyance. She couldn’t move anything up the coast because of Hesper and the remnants of her bastard fleet; couldn’t move anything overland while the republic in Thell was marking its borders in bronze and blood. So she stayed here – herpeoplestayed here – slowly starving.
She steps to the side of the room, pours a pitcher of water andbegins to wash herself. The water darkens with swirls of blood and feather.
It takes some time for her hands to scrub clean. The blood has worked in deep, under the nails, dark against her skin. She works studiously, precisely, like a surgeon, feeling her throat contract as the last scraps of bone and flesh wriggle downwards.
The Crowkisser seems small in this room, as if it were designed for someone larger, bolder. She could get lost in the shadows of the great pillars. Her thin hair could be pulled by the wind that howls through the shattered panes and be lost.
When she straightens and stands her spine is picked out in the moonlight like a half-finished carving. The harshness of her breathing is the only sign that she might be anything less than utterly calm.
Inside her skull, her mind runs like a rat. Testing out theories. Scurrying to conclusions. None of it made sense. She’d won;hadwon for three years now. Three years where her enemies had refused to die, and where she’d been kept penned in the south by a mountain of fundamentalists, and a handful of ships’ captains.
She swirls water, spits redly. One ship the worst of them, ruddy as the dawn, and pushed along by some foreign magic she barely understood. Sails always bright against the dark rocks of the coast. Every one of its damned voyages heralded by the lighting of the signal beacons. Great piles of bleached wood, coughing flame up into the sky.
