Chapter 18
every sleep is a truce
between the world
and the mind behind the world
She barely fills the bed. A thin scrap of grey against the sheets. The slow rise and fall of her chest a half-glimpsed movement. The High Lady of the Grey Towers. Everything that remains of his wife.
Declan steps closer and bends to twist the lamp into life, the soft glow sliding across her face like a caress.
The rest of the room is thrown into sharp relief and he becomes painfully conscious of its contours and its filth, the sharp sting of piss rising from the sheets and beneath it, the sweet, thick stink of a body emptied of purpose.
He steps quietly to the edge of the bed and begins unwrapping her.
She fights him feebly, making small wet noises in the back of her throat, but there’s no strength left in her. Declan flips her with the ease of long practice, peeling back sheets foul with her waste. Another servant to flog bloody.
Within minutes she lies thin and naked. Slowly, methodically, he soaps his hands and cleans her. As he does, he sings to her, the low, wordless songs he remembers his father singing in high pastures and damp byres, as the rain lanced downwards and he softly coaxed new life into the world.
She sighs raggedly as he works, tense muscles scored and straightened by seizures loosening under his touch. Before he was Lord of Hesper, these hands were the centre of his work and his world. They know bodies well, whether beast or man.
He wants to call her name as he works, but of course, he can’t. It’s vanished, taken by Crowkisser. He can feel his tongue slip around the space where the syllables used to be. For a moment, his fingers tighten involuntarily on her shoulders and she flinches in pain.
His hands jump back instantly, cradling her head, smoothing the furrows of her brow.
‘I’m so sorry, love.’ Again, that slip where her name would be, the feel of something thick and oily in his mouth.
Every time he sees her, he remembers the night it happened.
The pair of them, laughing over dinner. Was it something she’d said?
Or something Quickfish had said? He forgets.
No, it was when they’d found Quick in the stables, trying to pretend that carpenter boy wasn’t in there with him.
His breeches half drawn up and misbuttoned – the belt of his trousers clanging like a watch bell every time he moved.
‘He’d almost pulled it off until the hay bale sneezed,’ she’d said, and they’d collapsed into laughter.
One of those evenings he can barely remember now, because it seems impossible.
Impossible to have laughed that much, to have held her in his arms; impossible to have turned wine in crystal glasses that caught the light and eaten food that tasted of anything.
He could remember her favourites, those little birds that thronged the fields outside of Hesper, herbed and buttered; some kind of red syrup that fizzed up in the glass and tasted like morning.
That’s what she’d said, anyway, it tasted like fruit to him.
But good fruit. He could remember the food she’d eaten, but he couldn’t say her name, the crow-witch’s magic keeping it locked somewhere in the crumbling pit of his brain.
He curses. That whole evening lurks in the back of his mind like a rat in a rotten attic, filling his head as he turns the pillows and takes herbs from the bedside drawer. He crushes them between his fingers, holding them to his nose for a second before placing them underneath her head.
She’d smelt the same on the night it happened, almost two years ago.
She was never one for perfume, but that bag of herbs was always in her drawer.
He’d hated it at first, its scent cloying and thick.
He hadn’t even really liked it that night, as they danced, his face buried in the curve of her neck, her fingers tight around the small of his back.
They were out on the balcony of one of the Towers, just the two of them and the night, with the lights of the city spread out below.
The sky was a low red, fading to purple as the last of the sunlight burnt off into the dark.
He’d spun her then, which was tricky, but she’d ducked accommodatingly under his upstretched hand, flashed a smile, and turned.
It was when she’d turned that the crow hit, a ragged ball of feather and muck falling out of the twilight, moving faster than anything had a right to.
She’d shuddered, coughed, doubled over. He’d run to her, cradled her heaving back, her writhing spine, even as he called for a cutter, and a physicker.
Her hands clawing at her mouth, her stomach moving in great retching gasps.
He’d seen it tunnelling down her throat, bowing out her ribcage. He could swear he remembered hearing her bones creak. She’d screamed, wet and wordless, blood on her lips, the shape of it still burrowing under her skin, moving downwards.
He’d taken his knife from his belt, said a useless prayer, and stabbed.
He had caught her before she hit the cobbles, and felt something wriggling away from under the blade, tearing into shreds, dissolving in gobbets of black feather, briefly wrapped with something silver that faded like morning mist.
Her eyes turned back in her skull, her breath soft and scurrying, all the strength flown out of her. He’d held her in his arms and tried to call her name.
It hadn’t come. The physickers had, eventually, following the sound of his voice trying to make a noise it no longer could. They had taken her, eventually, after a few broken noses and blackened eyes and dosed him with something so he slept.
Had dosed her too, with everything under the sun.
She’d never awoken; would never awaken. Now she moved only in that last dance, where he’d hated the smell of her against his skin.
He rubbed the leaves between his palms again, bent forwards, and kissed his wife’s sweat-cold brow.
‘I miss her.’
The voice slides out of nowhere, the body holding it coalescing out of the dark corners, solid only in the corner of the eye.
‘I miss her,’ the voice says again, and Declan is moving even as his head turns, one hand snatching the lamp from the bedside, the other pulling back into a fist.
The figure in the corner flickers, and one arm extends in a series of fluid clicks, a gun barrel unfurling like a forgotten petal to touch lightly against his sternum.
‘No, Declan,’ the voice says.
Declan stops. He can still feel the oily taste of forgetting on his lips as he mouths the words. ‘Slickwalker.’
The body in the corner inclines itself briefly.
‘I suppose I am now.’ Slickwalker tips his head towards the bed. ‘I mean it though, I do miss her.’
Declan’s eyes flick to the barrel resting against his chest.
Slickwalker smiles slightly, a grey ripple in the shadows. ‘No, Declan,’ he says.
Declan spits. ‘No what, you ratshit?’
Slickwalker pushes the gun forwards slightly. It whines hungrily. ‘No, you’re not fast enough.’ Slickwalker shrugs. ‘Anyway, I’m not here to fight.’
Declan sets the lamp down and flexes his shoulder.
‘Just here to reminisce about the time your slit girlfriend sucked the soul out of my wife?’ He grins, all teeth and gums, ‘If you breathe wrong for an instant, I’ll rip out your throat. Just so we’re clear.’
Slickwalker shrugs again, fluidly. ‘Perfectly. Like I said, I’m not here to fight. What you do … well, I can’t do anything about that.’
He tilts the gun barrel slightly. ‘Can I get this out of the way though?’
Declan tips his head. ‘I suppose.’
The gun coils back in on itself like a well-fed snake. Slickwalker shudders and his outline solidifies into the tall, lean man that Declan recognises. Almost recognises.
‘Oh dear, ratshit. Shacked-up life not agreeing with you?’
Slickwalker smiles ruefully and runs a hand through short-cropped hair now frosted with grey. ‘Oh, this?’ His laugh is loose and easy. ‘Perils of the job. I can’t always look like me. This is,’ – he tilts a hand – ‘a familiar mode.’
Declan curls a lip derisively, ‘Can’t look like yourself. Can’t show yourself. Can’t fuckin’ name yourself. What are you, exactly?’
Slickwalker smiles again and glances down at the shadow of a woman in the bed.
‘Content, mostly. Which is more than I can say for you. It’s a pity you both acted the way you did.
It’s not too late though.’ He tugs at his earlobes.
‘I’d vouch for you, you know, if it came to that.
Crowkisser’d stop all of this. We could bring Hesper into the fold.
You’d be safe. Your wife would be safe. Your son would be safe. ’
Declan’s voice is slow and hot when he speaks. ‘Where. Is. My. Son?’
Slickwalker shrugs like a long-boned cat. ‘I wish I knew. We’d be as delighted as you to see young Quickfish returned.’
Slickwalker runs a hand through the sleeping woman’s hair.
‘You could at least give her a new name you know? I admit it’s closing the stable door after the horse, but these things have power.
’ He glances towards Declan, runs his gaze over the man’s flat, narrow eyes. ‘It’d give her something, at least.’
Fallon’s fist hits from the right, and Slickwalker feels his cheekbone shatter even as he falls to the floor. The boot that comes after would catch him, but he’s up and moving, flowing into the shadows of the room as easy as breathing.
He watches Declan spin and search, running a hand over the bones of his face even as he feels them start to wriggle and knit together. ‘God, old man. You are fast. And brutal. No one’s hit me in years.’
Scanning the shadows, Declan snarls, ‘Maybe if they’d started a damn sight earlier, we wouldn’t be in this situation.’
Slickwalker smiles and reforms as easy as an exhalation. ‘Maybe, maybe. But we are where we are. And I am not here to fight.’ He raises a hand in warning, fingers splayed, dropping them one by one. ‘If I was, you’d be gone. Your wife, your son, gone. Your city, gone. No one wants that.’