She digs her nails into the palms of her hands. Focus. That is not now. She isnothere, not really. She is an interloper in a runaway boy’s dream. Nothing more.
She edges closer. Something stirs in the fountain. She stiffens and stops. Every muscle in her body tight, her nerves alight.
Impossible. She can only make out the kiss of gold light around the rim, watching the buttery, liquid glow wax and wane. Impossible. But then, there’s only one thing that casts light like that.
She tastes blood in her mouth and realises she’s bitten through her lip. She is back in her body, back in the temple. This is a strong seeing, maybe a stronger dream. She needs to be careful.
More than that though, she needs to get closer.
As she moves, Quickfish talks to the thing in the fountain. She hears nothing in reply, but he seems amused, friendly even. He leans over further, exposes his palm, winces. She rushes forwards, setting her toes carefully around the scraps of seared glass and bone. She can remember the shapes of them all. She can remember the moment she set it all in motion.
She digs deeper and almost screams with the pain. Focus.
Her arched feet bring her up just shy of the fountain’s opposite lip where it crouches, drinking from the palm of Quickfish’s outstretched hand like a grateful dog.
She barely manages to choke down the outraged scream in her throat. Barely. Instead, she lets herself run butcher’s eyes over its body. It is broken in ways she had never realised something could be broken. Joints and wings twisted and torn at such impossible angles. And yet when it moved, it was still, almost, beautiful. She fights the urge to find a rock, a sharp shard, something with which to crush and bleed it back into stillness.
But there’s no point. She is not really here, just a passenger in the dream of a stupid boy.
Instead, she watches it like a child watching a wasp with a crushed wing, flinching at its every pulse, wanting to kill it, but not daring to get close. Hoping for its own quiet death.
A living god. Impossible. The unfairness of it. The offense of it.
She watches it feed, desperate and hungry. It’s weak, and alone, the very last, perhaps.
Something in her thrills at that thought.
She hovers on the edge of the fountain until it has drunk its fill. Quickfish withdraws his arm, rubs at the palm where the needle-marks of teeth even now close over. As he raises his head, he meets her eyes.
Crowkisser smiles, raises a finger to her lips and then pushes him out of the dream. As he leaves, she does too, the world dissolving around her, back into the formless space of seeing, back into the between. She reorients herself and lets her shadow fall down on the land, on the couple below.
As she watches, they wake, rise, kiss, talk. Barely disturbed by the dream, if at all. They are altogether too perfect. Quickfish has done well for himself.
In Astic, in the temple, Crowkisser throws her head back far enough to make her spine crack; the crows bicker and scuff, and the blood in her throat pulses. The landscape unravels before her, the men shrink to a point and she can see the road in front of them. Another two, three days and they’ll be on the outskirts of the Republic, of the mountain city. Of Thell.
She can see it now, crouched in the shadow of the mountains like a low cat. She hasn’t forgotten Thell, or its people. She lets her eye run over the stooped dwellings, the smithies and stables woven among the cairns. The people outside of the mountain liked to live close to their dead, their doors hung with bone and dark wood.
Above the fringes of Thell lies the Stump, hewn into the mountain itself, its endless hollows open to the biting wind, the dark sockets in its stone corpse alight with fire, and metal and the ceaseless march of men.
Thell is preparing for war. News travels fast and even in the broken north, there are rumours of what has happened in Astic. Men’s tongues are loose things and they spit secrets faster than a ship sails. They’re afraid of her, of what she’s achieved.
She watches them gather themselves on the battlements, tallmen, old men, young men, broad-shouldered women, fierce-faced girls.
Jostling each other, wheeling, cursing. Painting each other in bright geometric patterns, inked into the skin and brushed onto the bone.
She smiles at that, and crooks her fingers. Above her head, the crows grow in volume, their black beaks plucking at bloody scraps.
In the deep sockets of the Stump, the people grip their weapons tighter.
Cold winds blow in the north and riding the edge of them, the promise of war. Beyond that, the promise of freedom, real freedom – if she gets her way, and she will.
So, two days to Thell for the lovers. Two days until they slip inside the Stump and things get complicated. She can’t catch Quickfish now, not before he bolts into Thell like a mouse. So be it, she’ll take him when she takes the whole of the mountain.
Crowkisser pulls her gaze back from the brutal canker of the citadel, out across the cairns, windblown, threaded with stubborn, long-bladed grass. She lets her mind’s eye run along the upper edge of the Barrowlands.
The dead of Thell sleep uneasily. This has always been the way in the north. They’re a people who find it hard to stay buried, a legacy of the old Empire, and its Emperor’s peculiar gifts. So her father used to say, and he would know. Her eye is drawn to the symbols on the stones, harsh and angular beneath the scudding clouds, a little echo of mountain paint.
The dead of Thell, stacked in their barrows.Stay asleep, she thinks. The living have enough trouble as it is.
