Chapter 5
every map different
every river returning to
the same source
A few hours later and the Volante’s unlucky crew are just more bodies in their wake.
Shroudweaver sucks on hard tack and looks at Shipwright with narrowed eyes as she buffs the scratches out of her thick deck-boots.
Her broad lips curl as she spits and polishes, and he falls in love again.
Almost twenty years now. Always the same motions when she’s worried.
Boots polished and socks darned. Small repairs.
Always the same motions. Probably the same boots, come to think of it.
He waves the biscuit pointedly. ‘Old habits, huh?’
She nods, tongue on teeth.
He grins. ‘So, what’s the plan?’
There’s barely a beat before she replies. ‘Two more days up the coast to Hesper. We see what’s left of their fleet, we talk to Fallon and we take on who we can. Get the civilians up the coast some before Crowkisser comes to stir up trouble. She’ll head for Hesper next.’
Shroudweaver frowns, tips his head. ‘And then?’
Shipwright snorts, slips thick grey socks on her broad feet and buckles up. ‘Then we find out if anyone else is as pissed off as we are, and we start to dream up some really inventive ways to fuck her shit up.’ When Shroudweaver laughs it’s dry as sand swilling around a glass.
‘Poetry,’ he says. ‘Pure poetry. Maybe just a hair short on ideas though.’
She sets the boot down, fixes him with a look. ‘We have thirteen fresh bodies in the hold. I’m a little light on ideas.’
He picks sand out from between his toes. ‘Me too. Well, I have one or two, but it depends on Fallon. And I don’t know if he can be depended on.’
She watches him. ‘That’s a little … off-putting.’
He flicks with a nail. ‘Sorry. Sandals.’
She shakes her head despairingly. ‘It’s just as well you’re cute. Do you think Fallon’ll be happy to see us?’
Shroudweaver shrugs and looks out to the coast. ‘I think so. We’re all he has left at this point, since the north shut its gates. Since Riss, and then Quickfish.’
She follows his gaze to where white-bellied birds wheel around the headland. ‘Time was we would have run north first. We had that heroic glow about us. A bit of cred to lean on.’
He snorts, but she continues. ‘Now, I wouldn’t set foot up there without someone watching my back. Too much god-stink clinging to our boots. Then after the fleet burnt, after we lost the ships, after the south …’
‘Hard to hold your head high’, he finishes
‘Hard to hold your head high.’
She moves closer to him, undoes a strap, starts rubbing the blood back into his feet.
‘I really thought it would work, you know? Time was, I thought there was nothing the three of us couldn’t achieve.’
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 were laughing.’
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.’