He swallows, coughs and slides himself into his robes, cleaned and folded at the foot of his bed. He can smell Shipwright onthem, and it’s like soft armour. As the collar strings the back of his neck, he feels the ghost of Declan’s fingers, and the warmth that goes with them.
Funny how you could miss someone so completely and not realise until you saw them in front of you. The things the three of them had shared and seen, from the walls of Luss in the north to the burning south.
He shivers, and steps into the sun by the window. In front of his sleep-tired eyes, Hesper spills down to the sea, full of life and lustre. Worth fighting for.
Worth killing his daughter for?
The stone is rough on his tightening fingers. How many daughters out in Hesper today? How many fathers? And beyond the city, how many countless more, strewn in the path of Crowkisser?
The breeze freshens on Shroudweaver’s face and he sucks teeth grown thin and pale from hunger.
He can feel her out there. He could let her find him, if he chose. But if he does, she turns her gaze to Hesper, and if she does that, people begin to die.
With a short, frustrated sigh, Shroudweaver turns from the window and finishes dressing.
Breakfast first.
18
every sleep is a truce
between the world
and the mind behind the world
—Aestering Knotsong, No. 3
She barely fills the bed. A thin scrap of grey against the sheets. The slow rise and fall of her chest a half-glimpsed movement. The High Lady of the Grey Towers. Everything that remains of his wife.
Declan steps closer and bends to twist the lamp into life, the soft glow sliding across her face like a caress. The rest of the room is thrown into sharp relief and he becomes painfully conscious of its contours and its filth, the sharp sting of piss rising from the sheets and beneath it, the sweet, thick stink of a body emptied of purpose. He steps quietly to the edge of the bed and begins unwrapping her.
She fights him feebly, making small wet noises in the back of her throat, but there’s no strength left in her. Declan flips her with the ease of long practice, peeling back sheets foul with her waste. Another servant to flog bloody.
Within minutes she lies thin and naked. Slowly, methodically, he soaps his hands and cleans her. As he does, he sings to her, the low, wordless songs he remembers his father singing in high pastures and damp byres, as the rain lanced downwards and he softly coaxed new life into the world.
She sighs raggedly as he works, tense muscles scored and straightened by seizures loosening under his touch. Before he was Lord of Hesper, these hands were the centre of his work and his world. They know bodies well, whether beast or man.
He wants to call her name as he works, but of course, he can’t. It’s vanished, taken by Crowkisser. He can feel his tongue slip around the space where the syllables used to be. For a moment, his fingers tighten involuntarily on her shoulders and she flinches in pain.
His hands jump back instantly, cradling her head, smoothing the furrows of her brow.
‘I’m so sorry, love.’ Again, that slip where her name would be, the feel of something thick and oily in his mouth.
Every time he sees her, he remembers the night it happened. The pair of them, laughing over dinner. Was it something she’d said? Or something Quickfish had said? He forgets. No, it was when they’d found Quick in the stables, trying to pretend that carpenter boy wasn’t in there with him. His breeches half drawn up and misbuttoned – the belt of his trousers clanging like a watch bell every time he moved.
‘He’d almost pulled it off until the hay bale sneezed,’ she’d said, and they’d collapsed into laughter.
One of those evenings he can barely remember now, because it seems impossible. Impossible to have laughed that much, to have held her in his arms; impossible to have turned wine in crystal glasses that caught the light and eaten food that tasted of anything. He could remember her favourites, those little birds that thronged the fields outside of Hesper, herbed and buttered; some kind of red syrup that fizzed up in the glass and tasted like morning. That’s what she’d said, anyway, it tasted like fruit to him. But good fruit. He could remember the food she’d eaten, but he couldn’t say her name, the crow-witch’s magic keeping it locked somewhere in the crumbling pit of his brain.
He curses. That whole evening lurks in the back of his mind like a rat in a rotten attic, filling his head as he turns the pillows and takes herbs from the bedside drawer. He crushes them between his fingers, holding them to his nose for a second before placing them underneath her head.
She’d smelt the same on the night it happened, almost two years ago. She was never one for perfume, but that bag of herbs wasalways in her drawer. He’d hated it at first, its scent cloying and thick. He hadn’t even really liked it that night, as they danced, his face buried in the curve of her neck, her fingers tight around the small of his back. They were out on the balcony of one of the Towers, just the two of them and the night, with the lights of the city spread out below. The sky was a low red, fading to purple as the last of the sunlight burnt off into the dark.
He’d spun her then, which was tricky, but she’d ducked accommodatingly under his upstretched hand, flashed a smile, and turned.
It was when she’d turned that the crow hit, a ragged ball of feather and muck falling out of the twilight, moving faster than anything had a right to. She’d shuddered, coughed, doubled over. He’d run to her, cradled her heaving back, her writhing spine, even as he called for a cutter, and a physicker. Her hands clawing at her mouth, her stomach moving in great retching gasps.
He’d seen it tunnelling down her throat, bowing out her ribcage. He could swear he remembered hearing her bones creak. She’d screamed, wet and wordless, blood on her lips, the shape of it still burrowing under her skin, moving downwards.
