Funny how you got used to it.
The drunk hadn’t left her alone. He’d retreated to the corner to mutter and glower about the dangers of foreigners, their magics, their strange food, their pretty hair. Then lurched into her in the alley afterwards, at least until theVolante’s captain had broken his wrist and his nose.
TheVolante’s captain, too, used to have a name, used to exist, beyond memories. She could remember the cut of his hair, the gap in his teeth. She could remember the way he laughed higher than you’d think and the way he swung that big brutal sword; even the colours of his shirts, bright blue and gold.
It had been his fault she’d stayed, mostly. A few weeks arrived from the east and already her heart had been bursting for home. She’d been more or less ready to turn around, to see the end of this strange city, and its stranger people. Until she’d met theVolante’s captain, and his crew.
They’d run the place once, he’d told her, his arms waving with the assured confidence of every drunk man that’d ever given a tour of his city to a pretty girl. Every whitewashed loop given up to the greatest ship’s captains. Even once they were dead and gone, and their skulls, as he’d put it, ‘gone to glass’, the loops had kept their names. Bitterhaven. Mirestem.
It had been theVolante’s captain who had first taken her to Thell.
Too busy with his own schemes, maybe a little too pleased with himself, he’d brought her along to a meeting with a bear of a man, broad like a bull was broad, with hair black as sea-rock, and an easy smile under a loud, ridiculous moustache.
Declan Fallon, she now knew. He hadn’t changed much. Not that she’d ever thought he’d be such a constant in her life. Big enough to be an anchor, as he’d put it the one time she’d tipsily, stupidly brought it up.
Back then, twenty years ago, she’d been young enough andnew enough to think him just another lord of another big city. A fan of himself. Looking to make a mark on the world, by hitting it hard and often.
But if Declan loved himself, he loved his wife more. He held her close during his councils, kept her stood at his side, like a pillar, and stopped everything the moment she spoke to listen her advice. That, more than anything else, had won Shipwright over. Both Declan and Ship sat in the shadow of Arissa Fallon, the Lady of the Grey Towers. Not just that stern dockside figurehead, but the real power in Hesper, the actual noble blood. Shipwright had pegged that the moment she saw the pair of them together, watching Declan with his loud mouth and busy hands, while Arissa stayed quiet as a still pond, eyes reading the room with ceaseless precision.
It had been Arissa that had looked her up and down, like a drover reading horseflesh. Leant into Fallon’s ear, and murmured. ‘This is the one I told you about.’
He’d straightened up at that, focused in on Shipwright in a way that moved fast beyond courtesy. He obviously knew plenty about her, she didn’t doubt that, but all he’d said, as he fixed her with an appraising look was, ‘My wife says you have the most incredible ship.’
They needed a fleet, he said. But before that they needed a few good captains. Ships to run up the coast into the forbidding north. Word had come of this city, this Thell and its Emperor. It was, somehow, on the march.
The details, Fallon said with a swig and a smile, were vague.
That was where she would come in.
Not to sail so far as Thell, oh no, because who would ask that of her, and who would sail to a mountain, anyway?
Laughter. Some real, some forced.
No, with a bottle wave, just up the coast to the city of Luss, a big city, a proud city, and most of all, a rich city. A city dear to Hesper, and dear to Fallon’s heart in the same breath.
TheVolante’s captain was already committed, he had contracts, and gold that pulled him north surer than any lodestone.
Would she, they asked sweetly, consider coming along?
29
where that fire touched the world, the sky
flushed a darker blue
like a bruise
like light seen inside the lid, when the eye is closed
—On Swallowing Gold, Heartshamer
‘Thell?!’
Slickwalker throws his arms up in exasperation. ‘Why the fuck would we march on Thell?’
Crowkisser pours from the copper kettle and watches the leaves split and bleed into the water. ‘Because Fallon’s son is there.’ She strains, blows, sips, then smiles.
Slickwalker throws himself down opposite her and begins worrying at his bootstraps. ‘So?Fallon’sin Hesper. Along with hisarmy. And Shroud and Ship.’ He peels off a boot, taking the sock with it, and winces.
