Everything
but light.
—Burial litany, Heron Halls
The ship takes on water at night, and they bail during the day. Salt moves into the skin, and into the blood. Shipwright feels herself aching with every swing of the bucket, a tiredness burning deeper than muscle.
It’s dark down in the bilges. What little sun there is has been snagged in the rigging and spilt over the deck boards, as the ship noses her way up the coast.
Hesper waits. Distant, still, but sat in her mind like a toad in a well. A great, grey body hauled atop the stark cliffs by pure pride, a city with money in its bones. Once fat on trade from the South, now wasting away, as this war that is not a war drags out, year on year. The city hollowing out, building by building; any life that’s left sparkling like fever in the eyes of a corpse.
She stoops, scoops, tosses.
In Hesper, the Fallons are the only named lords left: Declan and his wife. And beneath them, a guddle of guildmasters and ships’ captains; the dark jars of the Glass Archive and the hammering fire of the forges. Hesper was a body built from smaller bodies, guilds and captaincies, fraternities and consanguinities.
She stoops, scoops. The water is black in the bucket, shot withsmall, silvered fish dancing within, barely fry. Little scraps of flesh and electric movement, swept up by the waves and driven here. What must it be like for them? The world so dark, huge and irresistible.
She dips her fingers in the bucket and lets them nibble at her skin, feeling the tingle of their energy against her palm. As if their bodies had tiny spinners nestled amid their soft bones, their thrumming hearts.
Unexpectedly, she feels like weeping. Instead, she murmurs a small blessing and tips them over the side into the wider, drowning dark of the sea.
Her fingers are numbing, but she persists. Stoops, scoops.
Hesper was a body built from smaller bodies, and stitched together with lies. The reason the Fallons stayed on top of the pile was that they knew who was lying, and why.
‘Nothing wrong with it,’ Fallon had said, before they last sailed out. ‘Human nature.’ This as he pored over charts and ledgers of debts owed, every inch the responsible businessman.
He had to be responsible. With Arissa gone, Hesper scented weakness like sharks chased blood, and for a while, after the South fell, Shipwright had felt a stirring of something dangerous; rats looking to climb to the top of the pile. Fallon had responded as he always had, by looking at those with debts due; by finding the strings wound tight around half the city’s worthies, and then yanking them until they choked.
Fallon was many things, but he was not shy to wield the knife. The days were long gone when he had needed to do it personally, although Shipwright had seen what that could do.
She stooped again, letting her hands sit in the black water, feeling the salt pick at the cuts in her palms. No, these days, she was the knife.
She had brought it on herself, of course. She had come here, and she had made herself useful. Young enough to view the whole coast as a basket of opportunities ripe for the plucking, with a heart full of hot blood and ambition, and a love for that wild, howling sea. The trouble was, the sea was attached to the landand she’d quickly realised that what this country needed wasn’t a shipwright, but a surgeon.
Even before the South burnt, a host of petty rivalries and ancient grudges boiled up and down the continent, and she had followed like a good dog, year falling on year as plagues raged, and cities fell.
She’d done a lot of good, she knew it – even if you were a knife, you could choose how to strike. Amid it all, somehow, she’d made friends. Some of them on the crew, others stowed inland, tucked away in the Burners’ forest and along the trade roads wending through the Green.
Easy to make friends, and easier still to stay with the friends that had found you. It had been painless working for the Fallons after the war for the Republic. Hard to imagine it any other way, in fact. How could you leave the side of someone who had walked through fire with you? And after Arissa was lost, how could she have left Declan to pick up the pieces by himself?
She scoops again. Bangs her knuckles on the edge of the bucket. Curses.
That was the rub of it, really. Too many years piled on top of each other, and too many people who it would hurt to leave. So she stayed as Fallon’s knife; against the Herons when they tried to lock down Serpent. When the plague hit Errant. When Crowkisser burnt the South.
And that last one was killing them all. Nothing to fight. Nothing to save. A nightmare so vast she still struggled to comprehend it. A disaster that had split the seams between Hesper and Thell wide open. That purple sky stooped over the South as a reminder that the wound wasn’t healed, but growing, festering into new and dangerous shapes. It wouldn’t close until Crowkisser was done. And she wouldn’t be done without the application of a little corrective force.
Shipwright was trying to stitch the world, and Crowkisser was a half-step behind, ripping at the seams. Sometimes it felt like crafting a spinner. You made something you hoped would work, and when it began to spin erratically, you hammered it back totrue. So, she did what she could, harried supply lines and chased down spies. Always Fallon’s first choice because her ship was bigger, faster. Because she made people afraid.
Again, she feels like weeping. Something filling up her chest, salt water in the hold of her heart.
She could let it go. She could begin to do the work. She knows what drowns inside her ribs. Another life, where she was not a knife. Where she moved by her own tides. She’d like to see it, some day.
Not now though. Not with the wolf at the door. She hears her father’s voice, down here, rocked by the creak and swill of the ship, ‘Try to drink the sea all at once, and you’ll choke.’
So, drop by drop, she bends her aching back, swallows the salt inside her, and bails.
7
