‘No, no. It’s fine. I just … miss them.’ A pause, a sly smile. ‘Besides, Ilikeyour mouth.’
Roofkeeper bends, kisses his neck, speaks along the collarbone. ‘Do you think your dad’ll come for us?’
Quickfish wriggles, only half-pleasurably.
‘I hope not. How long have we been on the road now? A month? More? Hopefully we got him good and pissed enough that he won’t think to come chasing after us for a while. Safer for him. And Mum.’
Roofkeeper stands, stretches, heads to the fire and gets two mugs from their packs. ‘Do you honestly think we can find someone to help her?’
Quickfish shrugs himself into a shirt, and buttons it thoughtfully. ‘I hope so. We’ve got a better chance the further we get from Astic. And you know, there’s stories about the mountains.’
Roofkeeper strolls across, sipping pensively. ‘There’s always stories about the mountains, Fish. No one would bloody go there otherwise.’
Quickfish snorts in exasperation. ‘Well, if nothing else, we’re a step ahead of the mess brewing back home.’
Roofkeeper sits next to him, cups the mug to his chest. ‘You sure of that?’
Quickfish’s arm takes in the river, the trees, the sky. ‘You see any fucking crows around here?’
Roofkeeper laughs. ‘Point taken. Drink your tea, love.’
22
the blessed song, the blessed life
the lightest touch of bloody knife
—Paean to the Gold
Crowkisser cuts the meat from the bone in small, precise strokes. The scrape of blade against scapula, then sharp, savage cuts loosening tendon and cartilage. She works quickly, deft fingers peeling shreds of flesh loose and threading them wetly through the ropes which nest just above her head. The crows watch her quietly, hopping two-legged along the spans, chucking quietly to themselves.
Crowkisser cuts the meat from the bone, and the body beneath the blade gets whiter as she works.
Outside in the streets of Astic, the city stirs to life under a sluggish grey sky.
She turns to the bowl beside her, steeps her elbows in cool water which flushes red.
The crows alight on the scraps, worry at the meat with bright eyes and dull beaks.
She watches them as they move in feathered formation, and slowly, surely, prophecy starts to move on the edge of their wings. She can feel her mind loosening in her skull, ready to travel. She dreams constellations in front of her waking eyes.
A quick dip of her hand in the bowl, bloody water smeared across brow, lids and lips. The room is blurring. The soft-feathered shuffling growing in intensity until it’s a solid hiss in her head. She is a thinly tethered thing, haltingly bound to her own meat and bone.
Her eyes roll back to kiss the inside of her skull and she can see.
The uplands, a few dozen miles out from the Republic. The jagged, flint-streaked bones of the foothills incongruous amid swathes of wide green grass, where the first flowers of spring battle the thawing ice for space. Some she recognises, Burners’ Bridle and Hollowcrown. The earth is dark and rich and hard. Small, hot lives burrowing in it, skittering through it. Hawks stooping and hunting.
And two men. Two young men asleep around the remains of a campfire, tucked in the bend of a river, twined around each other. The smaller one she recognises, sandy-haired like a half-blown dandelion. Quickfish takes after his mother. The larger man she doesn’t know. He’s young, dark haired. She smiles. Handsome.
Quickfish dreams. Something swirling in his skull like a storm or sickness. Hands twitching fitfully, like a sleeping dog, adorable. She lets her consciousness dip lower, hooking onto the edges of his dream. It smells familiar, has a familiar feel, like burnt glass. She briefly wants to recoil as she feels it sliding over her skin, but she takes a hold of herself. As always, the curiosity overwhelms the pain. She touches down on canted stones. She is in the city, in the south. It’s still burning. She recognises the melted curve of the plaza, the broken snag of the fountain where she made the first cut. Her fingers clench reflexively. Her breathing is speeding up. The pressure of the memory is too much for her. She can feel the panic growing in her chest, like suffocating; like a clot.
She shouldn’t be back here. She shouldn’t be back here.
Then she sees Quickfish, and the curiosity takes hold again. He … he shouldn’t be here at all.
He’s never been here. He wasn’t here three years ago. And he can’t be here now. And yet, here he is, sitting on the edge of the fountain, trailing his hand into the bowl like some debutante.
She edges closer and tries not to think about the feel of melted stone under her feet. Tries not to breathe in the air that still smells of terror, somehow. Tries not to remember that moment when the world fell into itself, when sounds became thick and solid and flesh, and caught fire, and you could breathe in the ash of peoples’ screams as they burnt.
