He sighs, half relief, half regret. ‘We’re bad losers, that’s our problem.’
She tries to hold back a smile, fails. ‘Among other things, maybe.’
He wriggles his toes. ‘Can you do the other one?’
She taps her thigh. ‘Yes. Bring me your manky feet. Something I can actually handle.’
Her tone’s light enough, but he’d have to be an idiot to miss the edge on her words. Eighteen months of skirmishing and running fraying at the edge of her smile. Crowkisser hadn’t sat meekly in Astic while they starved her out.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘that it’s partly our fault.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Thanks for that. Very uplifting.’
Above them, a spinner whines like a wet cat. A wave breaks over the side of the ship, salt water sliding down the curve of the spinner’s vibrations, leaving the deck untouched.
He smiles. ‘You know what I mean. We were cocky. We’d won one war already. Liberated Thell. Founded the Republic. Defeated a monster.’
She dries off his foot, slips the sandal back on. ‘Do you ever think we were a bit rusty? Decades between saving the Republic and sailing south.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I remember sitting with Declan and his wife. Before’ – she waves a hand – ‘all of it. And we werelaughing.’
She puts her head in her hands. ‘I remember her saying to me … she was holding that battered sword of his, and she turned and she said to me, “how much damage can one girl do?”’ She winces again as the spinners whine, and the whole ship bucks. ‘I guess we all found out the answer to that.’
Shroudweaver says nothing, re-straps his sandals quietly. The ship cants again, and she sways. ‘I guess we’re still finding out.’
She reaches into a pouch, digs out some shards of metal and starts whittling, bending them gently with her hands. ‘Gods. What were we thinking?’
He watches her hands move over the brass. ‘That we had an alliance of the biggest cities on this side of the world? That we, somehow, had Hesper and the whole of the Republic at our back. That we’d had more than fifteen years of peace. Tenuous peace, but real peace. Growing peace, farming peace.’ Her fingers tighten. Metal snaps and she curses. ‘Didn’t save us.’
He takes her hands, checks them for cuts. ‘What are you working on?’
She gestures up at the spinner. ‘That one’s off by a tone. Ten, twenty more big waves and we’re getting wet.’
He follows her finger up to the tiny brass sphere strung impossibly high above. ‘They still amaze me.’
She clenches her jaw. ‘They didn’t save us either. We all sailed down there. That big beautiful fleet. All those people.’ She breathes deep. ‘They didn’t save us either.’
Shroudweaver brushes faint flecks of metal from Shipwright’s hands, takes her face and pulls it down to his shoulder. ‘You know why though, love?’
She settles into the curve of his neck. ‘No. Hair, please.’
He starts moving his fingers through it, teasing out the burrs and snags, and wishes he could hold the world there for a while, with just her slowly relaxing breath, and the rock of the ship under them. The world had never seemed interested in waiting for them.
He kisses the top of her head. ‘Nothing would have saved us. We sailed down looking to win a war. Instead, we got the end of the world.’
Her voice is sleepy with the rhythm of the sea, the rhythm of his fingers. Her hand snakes around his ribs. ‘Not yet.’
He brushes the salt from her hair. ‘What, love?’
‘Not the end of the world yet.’
6
What does the sea take
But everything
But everything
But everything?
