Roof is there. Not that there’s anything more dangerous down below than gorse and sheep skulls, but he’s there, and his grip is strong on Quickfish’s wrist. He’s light-headed for a second, and not just from the dizziness. But from the intimacy of it, the tightness.
‘Again?’ Roof says, and he means the seizure.
Quickfish tries to focus. There’s a strange light creeping around the edges of his vision, as if the air is burnished and twitching. He blinks, and it clears.
‘Again,’ he says, his voice more pathetic than he would like.
There’s no judgement in Roof’s face, just the same soft lines he’s grown to love over the days they’ve been on the run, and in the years before that – the sharp twist of his jaw where it broke as a child and the way the stubble shadows under it.
He knows how it feels against his skin. Part of him wants it now, to burrow into that hollow like a rabbit pulling against the cold of the night.
‘How many times now?’ Roof says, as Quickfish’s vision steadies. The feeling is fading like a dream, like the echoes of a small spell. He scratches at his palm.
‘Five? Six maybe?’
‘Worse since we left Hesper?’
Quickfish thinks of the nights before that, when he’d been awoken by the feel of the night pressing on his chest, by sweat dancing on his skin. Too many to count.
The lie is easier. ‘Worse. Maybe just … adjusting to the road.’
Roof frowns, ‘Worry does strange things to a body, Quick. If you need to stop, or turn back?’
‘No.’ And there’s the voice he wants to find, strident and commanding. He regrets it immediately as Roof’s expression slumps. Tries to prop it up again with a smile and a shrug.
‘What I mean is … there’s no time. The Teeth are burning. Signal fires all along the coast. Crowkisser is moving, and we have—Ihave run out of options.’
Roofkeeper opens his mouth to say something, and Quick stops it with a kiss. He lingers for a second then pulls away.
‘Trust me. You don’t know how hard I’ve searched.Everyonewashes up in Hesper. Quacks and cursers and healers of every stripe under the sun, and none of them have been able to help her.’
He puts a hand on Roof’s throat, just below the chin. ‘I have to help her, Roof. I’m all she’s got.’
‘Your father,’ he says, and Quickfish winces. ‘Declan’s … not reliable when it comes to my mother.’
‘And they will be?’ Roof can’t quite keep the scorn from his tone. It’s to be expected, he was raised near the south, and all the ghouls of his childhood live in the wild north.
‘Thell will be,’ Quickfish says.
Which isn’t to say he wasn’t nervous. He hadn’t even thought of Thell for years, save for when another messenger failed to returnand his Da cursed the mountain city to the bottom of a bottle.
Not many folk knew what happened up there, especially since the rebellion. Quick had picked up a little as he grew, first playing beneath the tables while the guild heads bickered and carped, later finding the gaps behind the walls and tapestries where he could peek out and glimpse the pirate finery of Fallon’s confidants as they complained.
And if Roofkeeper was sometimes hiding with him, and if he sometimes forgot to concentrate, what of it? It was basically a bunch of adults telling each other ghost stories anyway.
The empty mountain; rumours of a deposed king; a new leader with the unsubtle name of Kinghammer; a leader disinclined to play the usual games of copper and compliments. Thell had had its revolution, and it wanted to be left alone.
Things had got worse since the south burnt. If Thell had been standoffish before, it was actively hostile now, patrolling its borders with enough vitriol to send the odd unlucky plaintiff home feathered in a pine box.
It isn’t worth dwelling on, not with his head still ringing six bells. They have more pressing problems.
The last few feet are a scramble to a twisted thorn tree clinging grimly to the crown of the hill, desperate for rain. Beyond that, a gentle course down the valley, to where the town should be.
Roof’s breath hisses between his teeth, and Quickfish steps to join him. Even from this distance, it’s clear the town is gone, little left except charred wood and broken stone; dark marks on the land like blood under the skin. Whatever has passed through here has been merciless.
Even the small stable is shattered, the bleached bones of its last horse sinking slowly into the earth. A few echoes remain of what might have been here – the stone shaft of a well, the pillars of something slightly grander behind.
Quickfish hates that he isn’t surprised. These little towns have never been particularly safe, shielded only by the lee of softer hills, the goodwill of the landholders, and the billhooks of a fewsecond cousins and energetic uncles who drink too much cider at the weekends.
