She’s pulled back into herself by a sudden feeling of loss. Her mind hits the meat of her body with bruising force, and she staggers, leans on the table for support. The world spins and the crows above her head explode into the sky in a cawing frenzy.
There’s a voice in the room, a voice not her own. A voice between the pillars of the halls, soft and sibilant.
‘… Kisser.’
The echoes fall thick around her, licking the stone at her back, pushing against the blood in her temples.
‘… Kiss kiss kissssssssss-errrrrr.’
Ragged flesh moves under her hands. The soft grind of bone against bone. The drip of thick blood. Until the meat on the bone speaks, ragged and hoarse, the words forcing themselves up from a torn throat, sockets of red ruin twisting and searching for her face.
‘Kisssser.’
Crowkisser moves with the speed of terror. She can feel her lizard brain screaming at her to run. But she’s never been a runner, and the knife is close. It fits neatly into the palm of her hand like an old, heavy friend.
The first cut slashes the vocal cords. The second the tendons of the wrist. The third the tendons of the feet. Neither walk, nor hold, nor speak.
This is how the dead are bound. Her father taught her this. The corpse’s empty eyes meet hers and for a second she hears something. Something that comes from beyond lips and tongues and falls into her brain like a shard of ice.
Crowkisser screams in rage, and drives the knife downwards to cut the meat from the bone.
Down and down and down again.
The blade doesn’t drop from her hands until her arm is too sore to move.
23
the bare mountain
the ice house
death’s hold
old Blood-belly
ever-hunger
witherfell
heartbarrow
—Travellers’ names for the Republic of Thell (trans.)
The three of them sit around the table.
The fire is going, as it always is at this time of year, cooking the cold out of the stones, swallowing logs away into itself. Soot scorches the breast of the chimney, where a fire was laid yesterday, and the day before, and almost all the days before that. The chill creeps in under every door this close to the mountains.
A small crowd tonight, but a good one. All the usual faces, Tapshuck at the bar, pulling draughts of something bitter and fine. The dog is at his feet, farting up a storm and cadging what it can. Dampstrand’s got her feet up on the table already, boots caked with river mud. She’s still red at the wrists from gutting the catch, but already winkling and salting all the little molluscs that have sat at the bottom of the net. They go nice with a sharp pint, those. A lick of butter and a sniff of pepper, and you’re set.
So she’s sprinkling all over the plates, and there’s Thinshanks next to her, leaner than he used to be, ruddy at the nose where the hill winds have picked the skin off the bone. He’s trying hard to catch his crumbs, and harder to catch her eye. It’s been that way since Damp was widowed, and Thinshanks is nothingif not an optimist. You have to be, to tend sheep this close to the mountains.
He laughs as he talks, widemouthed and flat toothed. And if there’s a knife by his side, they all know why it’s there.
And the last of them, of course. All the best crews come in threes, and Rustneck’s been the top of this triangle for a long time now, for she’s the only one with the nerve to go delving the barrows. That’s how she got the name, of course, from years of stooping below those low lintels and grubbing in the dirt for all the tarnished treasures of the barrow folk, and the mountain. It’s slicked her shoulders with a thick brown line, like a half-caulked boat. She’s peacocking it tonight, letting her shirt slip down as she fleeces Damp at another round of dice, reminding everybody who the real thrill-seeker in this town is.
Town, such as it is; a village, if that, contracting in on itself, after the wars and the south. Flinching inwards like a snail in the shell, abandoning the high roads, because Thell is marching them, the horizon lined with brass. It’s better to stay home.
So, the town’s become a village, and the village has become a huddle of little cottages, with the tavern at the heart of it, and busy every night, because no one wants to be alone, not this close to the mountains.
