Chapter Fifty-One Patrick
Patrick carried Nina not to Trunk Antiques, but away from Lavnonshire.
She was shivering by the time they reached the marsh. Larks soared overhead like demons, and the stars winked themselves out, not caring to witness them sludging through the wet taproots.
Tunnels were no good. No point trekking back the way they’d come. They would have to venture on until they found a boatman dumb enough or scared enough to hand over his vessel.
Here and there, Patrick stumbled in the bog under Nina’s weight, John cursed and lit a cigarette from a seemingly endless supply, and Nina didn’t speak. Patrick counted the seconds passing in silence and waited.
“You went in,” John finally uttered, when it seemed he could remain silent no longer. He pulled forcefully at his own collar where it rubbed against the burnt ring around his neck. “Against all fuckin’ reason, Patty. You went in.”
Patrick ground his molars together. There wasn’t a single mite of patience left in him. “Your thoughts on what I do no longer have much bearing on me.”
“I went in,” Nina said in a voice not quite present. Her face rested against Patrick’s sternum.
John groaned, pulling a moth-eaten cap from his head and slapping his thigh in frustration. “Followin’ her into the fuckin’ fray again,” he muttered to the sky. “You didn’t think to stop her?”
He’d thought about it plenty. “No one stops her,” he said, blood boiling. “No one takes her liberty away.”
“God have mercy! She almost got us all fuckin’ killed, Pat!”
Nina lifted her head suddenly, pushed away from him. “I can walk,” she said.
He put her on her feet. She seemed unsteady, teetering. One gust of wind might carry her off. “I’m sorry,” she said to them both. Her cheeks were tear-stained. Her fists balled, and she was trembling in the chill of the night.
Patrick felt murder come over him. “No,” he said. “Don’t apologize.”
“You told me not to go,” she said blankly, as though every ounce of energy had been wrung from her. “It was stupid.”
“I don’t care, darlin’.”
“I didn’t listen.”
He put his hands on his hips and breathed out heavily, trying to warp his face into something that would calm her. “And when have you ever listened?”
She didn’t smile. Didn’t lift her eyes to his. She stayed swallowed by that which had gradually consumed her from the day her mother swung.
“They burned Polly’s hands,” she said, her lip trembling.
He nodded. The unraveling had arrived.
“They took the book.”
“It’s all right. We’ll figure something out. There’s a fix, I promise.”
“They’ll have the Seam,” Nina said.
And we’ll have nothing.
He needed to get back to Kenton Hill. He needed to think.
He needed to get Nina into the safety of his own parish, where he wouldn’t worry for her every fucking minute of the day.
He’d walk all night if he had to. Walk all the way north.
And while he walked, he’d think. He’d think of a way out of this new trouble.
The Miners Union wouldn’t surrender. Couldn’t surrender.
He went to Nina and pulled her against his chest, lines be damned. He wrapped his arms around her back and felt her face press into the hollow of his throat. His shoes sank into the mud of half-tilled pasture.
Beetles swooped in the night, emitting their strange clicking, drawn to the warmth of the marshlands while the rest of the continent iced over, and Patrick thought at first that the itch he felt came from them.
That the night bugs had burrowed into the sleeve of his shirt and were digging beneath his skin.
Then he halted.
The sound, though… the sound of the scratching reminding him of Polly’s scribbles.
The skin of his forearm felt like it was being incised with the tip of a quill.
He drew away from Nina with a frown, looking down at his sleeve.
Something dark was seeping through the fabric. Like he’d been cut, and the night had turned his blood to ink.
He pulled the cuff down to the crook of his elbow.
On his forearm was a haphazard scrawl of words, badly smudged. Wet and stinging.
Too dark to read them. Too difficult to separate the bleeding letters.
“Dad!” he called over his shoulder. “I need a light.”
Orange flame from a match caught the very last letter scratching itself into the crease of his wrist. Nina touched his skin with her chilled fingers and read Polly’s scribble aloud.
“They were Idia’s own countrymen, who came to those soft hills of widow’s lace.”
Nina looked up at him, her eyes seeing everything. “The translation,” she said.
The one Polly had blotted to high heaven before Lord Shop had burned her.
The ones she could no longer trade for safe passage off the continent.
Yet here they were.
Patrick breathed. He held his arm still, as though the words would turn to sand and slip away. His eyes ran over them, again and again.
“There was no foreign enemy,” Nina said, her eyes closing. She pushed at them with the heels of her hands. “It was her own people.”
“They were Idia’s own countrymen,” Patrick read beneath his breath. He looked up at Nina, imagining her forearms bleeding again, the wounds ripped open. “Belaverians killed the three daughters?”
“And took the magic,” Nina said, still in a far-off voice. “Those were the first Artisans.”
They all stared at the sloped writing, shining wetly in the glow.
Patrick imagined a woman who looked something like Nina.
Not mounted on a horse and armored, riding off into battle, but a woman with soft skin and warm eyes.
A woman whose blood was pulsing in the milk of her wrists, in the slope of her neck.
He imagined a woman cornered by her own countrymen.
The pieces of her harvested and bled and burned.
Polly, Rose Harrow, Nina.
Joan, Dione, Idia.
“It don’t say where, though,” John bleated, taking Patrick’s wrist in his hands.
“It does,” said a small voice. Nina swayed where she stood, bending slightly at the torso as though her middle was crumpling. She looked at Patrick as she spoke, the hazel of her eyes barely discernible in the dark. “Widow’s lace,” she said. “Only one place it grows on the continent.”
Those soft hills of widow’s lace.
Patrick’s heart thundered.
Nina’s eyes dulled. “Scurry,” she said.
In the distance, the screech of metal rent the air in time with the fracturing of his mind, an uproarious crash of iron he couldn’t place, sending larks into the night.