Quickfish shakes her hand. It’s warm, firm, the bones beneath the skin smooth and long. She holds him for a second, her fingertips kissing the pulse of his wrist. Her eyes are bright, shivering.
‘I’m taking a chance’, he says. She grins.
‘Pretty and smart, eh? Maybe not a total disappointment to your big daddy just yet.’
She leans in and plops a kiss on his forehead. Laughs with her lips against his skull.
‘Steel, I’m going now. I’ll catch Da while his farts are still cooking. Look after the maggot and these two.’
She turns at the curtain, and smiles again. That warm, soft smile that’s only escaped twice now. ‘Something new at last, lads. Let me go piss of my dad so we can wake up your mum.’
It’s quieter after she leaves. Steelfinder fusses with Nigh, adding some more honey to the kettle. Quickfish leans into the crook of Roofkeeper’s arms and breathes. For the first time in months the weight in his chest shifts. Something else is stirring there, a little bird of hope fluttering in the dark. He lets himself rest for a second as he takes in the soft light of the room, the curls behind Nigh’s ears, the clunk of the ladle against the rim of the kettle. Steelfinder’s fingers move delicately as she crushes herbs and makes small talk. He drains the last of his cup and listens to the mountain. There is water running somewhere. He stands, lets his mind and his feet follow the sounds, crossing over soft rugs, to the dark curve of the walls, finding little green hollows where meltwater courses behind the stone, dipping into carefully carved cups, that hold plants, dark earth, pale blossoms.
The ice doesn’t seem to touch them. Steel catches him looking and smiles. ‘You like them?’
He leans in and sniffs, inhaling the lightest sweet scent, rising like morning. ‘Very much.’ Saying it cracks that stone in his heart and tears pool hot behind his eyes.
The young woman moves to stand with him, putting a hand lightly on his shoulders. ‘Spitethorn. Terrible name for a lovely wee thing. Never understood it. No thorns on the damn thing.’ She strokes the thin green shoots. ‘They only really grow around here, over the top of the mountain and in the slopes of the glacier. Amazing. The bulb generates its own heat. Here, see.’
She takes his finger and sticks it in the earth. Distant, faintly, he feels a soft warm glow. She must see his smile, because she laughs. ‘I know, right? Stubborn bugger. Melts its way right through the frost, the cold. It just wants to grow. It’s burning to grow.’
She brushes the earth off his fingers. ‘All it needs is a little space. A little time. Then something beautiful arrives.’
As she moves back to the kettle and the herbs, Quickfish turns to look at the small room, Roofkeeper dozing on the cushions, Nigh playing on the rug.
Perhaps that really is all that’s needed. A little more space. A little more time.
Until something beautiful arrives.
31
neither thigh crack, nor ice
so long as the blood thrums
—Inscribed handbell, found in the ruins of Luss
The ice was always thickest in the morning. Barely visible in the heights of the mountain, more a blue haze that crept downwards over the rock, congealing into sleek, black sheets that limned the stone.
Bitter cold. Even beneath layers of fur and wool, bitter. Big as he was, bitter. Even with another body in the bed. Even with a few other bodies in the bed.
Thell’s cold ate through everything it touched, the mountain bowing with the weight of the glacier. It was worse today, because Kinghammer was alone. And he was thinking. There were no soft legs twined over his hips, no arms over his chest. He’d needed space, needed time. Needed a little quiet for once. Thell would sit in his lap all year if he let it, and he couldn’t think like that.
So he was alone, in bed, shivering like a skinned sprat.
A dull ache pulsed in the back of his head, and a hotter ache matched it by his hip, the result of a few mistimed thrusts on the practice ground, and later. He was showing his age, the machine of his body slowing down, beginning to fray at the edges. Little tears spidering into torn seams, a burning on the inside, as the heat of his life sputtered and sparked.
He snorts. Indulgent shit. If anyone else brought this whining to him, he wouldn’t give them the time of day.
The world carried on, bigger waves of pain moving across the land. He stretches, and his back pops. A chill breeze steals beneath the covers.
One of those waves was breaking on his own shores, as if he’d not been working these past three years to keep Thell high and dry from all the other chaos. Tired young bucks walking endless patrols along tight closed borders. Skinpainter run ragged with the weight of it all, slapping ink and charm on every road leading to the Stump, and bindings on every barrow.
When that wasn’t enough, Kinghammer applied a little violence; a few calculated burnings. Those border towns were mostly ghost villages anyway, hollowed out after Crowkisser’s great fuckery. It was a small price to pay for peace, and didn’t Thell deserve some peace, after all they had been through? Didn’thedeserve some? A little quiet? A hand off the hammer?
He shivers again. That was all sifting to dust now. War inexorably arriving on the slim shoulders of a dandelion-haired boy and his young lover. He could see a little of Fallon in Quickfish, in the cut of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. He saw more of Arissa though, that flash in the eyes, like steel drawn underwater. The boy looked soft, but there was something inside him that wasn’t built for breaking. And that scared him, the spirit of that woman come back to haunt Thell again.
He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow, muttering a curse his grandfather taught him. Fucking Fallon.Fallons. All of them. Stormriders, black dogs, cursed family.
