Chapter 27
the naked work of the heart
follows raw rhythm
and we follow the rhythm
to better run the working heart
—Aestering Knotsong, No. 17
Shipwright looks down at the body on the bed, bandages wet with blood. Beside her, Shroudweaver slips his fingers into her broad palm. She squeezes tight, but doesn’t look at him.
‘We fucked up.’ It’s not an accusation, just an observation. She licks her lips, sucks at her gums. The faint taste of something sweet and spicy lingers.
She feels Shroudweaver nod.
‘Will he make it?’ It comes out drier than she meant, rasping the words. Her throat feels like a shaved plank.
‘Perhaps. I’m better at corpses.’ Shroudweaver’s voice is soft, rational. He sounds tired. He is tired. Long hours spent with Fallon, mending the great rips in the man’s body, salving the burns that crawled over his skin.
Working where the old bull had fallen.
She can read the guilt in his bones, in his wide eyes, his shallow breaths, his bird-cage ribs. He knows what’s coming. Best to get it over with.
‘You put a god in me.’
He nods. ‘I did. More or less. Something small, something hasty.’
The guilt hangs in his eyes like mist. ‘Borrowing a bit of power from the dead.’
Her ribs hold more than a borrowing. She feels fractured inside, filled with brittle glass and wet light.
She smiles sadly, sucks her gums again. That sugary taste lingers. ‘I thought you said raising a god burnt out everything it touched.’
Shroudweaver winces. ‘A controlled burning. A few scraps of dead soul. We were desperate. I would never,’ his shoulders slump. ‘I would never.’
‘Seems like you already did.’ A little cruel, that, but she can’t help it. When she turns her head, someone else’s ghosts dance across her vision.
‘What was I like?’ she asks, curious, in spite of the fire on her tongue. Slipping the words through that golden hum in her ears and over the electric feeling skirting the edge of her teeth.
He runs shaking fingers through his hair. A few strands drift loose and waft slowly to the floor.
‘Terrifying. Beautiful. Perfect.’
She puts a hand on his shoulder, pulls him close. ‘I never want to be perfect.’ She’s impressed by how steady she sounds. Inside her chest, someone’s screaming. Not her own voice. Not even close.
His reply is quiet, muffled by the weight of her body. ‘Do you forgive me?’
Does she? What’s she forgiving, exactly? Nothing worse than the years before this. She knew what she signed up for. And despite what Fallon says, she has never flinched from a fight.
She holds him tighter, her fingers exploring his shoulder blades, his spine. ‘Always, dearest. Always and ever.’
And even if it’s not easy, it’s true, and it’s what he needs. She sees him come loose, and fall into her. There. Was that so hard?
She tightens the hug, ‘You can’t be perfect either. Deal?’
His voice is quiet, reflective. ‘Perhaps.’
He’s not really picked up on the imperative. She wonders whether to push it.
There’s a pause as she feels the guilt curl in his brain, stretching its little sharp teeth. ‘I’m a long way from perfect. Other end of the scale, I think,’ he says. ‘Do you know what they would have done to me, in the Aestering? For what I just suggested?’
She turns as Declan coughs raggedly and holds a cloth to his lips, catching the thick black clots, cleaning the corners of his mouth. She knows.
‘Do you think he understands the cost? The bodies? The risk?’
Shroudweaver’s voice seems far away. ‘We left a lot of dead up there. And they all need to burn.’
Shipwright bites her tongue and fights down a flare of annoyance.
She doesn’t look at him as she brushes hair away from Declan’s sweat-slick head.
‘Of course he understands. He’s squared it already.
’ She laughs dryly. ‘Anything that stops that slit right?’ She turns to face him.
‘Except we both know she’s a lot more than that. ’
Shroudweaver moves closer to her. He lifts Fallon’s lips and pushes his gums, watching the blood flush back. ‘We do. But I have to stop her. For her sake. Before she goes any further.’
She flashes him a dark glance. ‘She’s gone a fair road already, love.’
The room stinks of copper and rot. She cracks a window, listening to the sound of the port flood in. The sea isn’t far, not far at all.
Turning back to face Shroudweaver, she says ‘We can’t lead her here? You’re sure? We’ve pulled her and Slick a pretty dance before.’
‘No,’ Shroudweaver muses. ‘Not here, not Hesper. She knows we’re here. She’ll be expecting us to lure her in, find some way to force her to make a stand. And even if the guilds are leery of sallying out, they’ll fight like cornered rats for their home. For their purses.’
Shipwright adjusts the covers, rubs contorted muscles. ‘So, you’re taking me back. To Thell. Both of us.’
She runs a critical eye over Fallon’s scorched body as she kisses the taste of burnt sugar from her teeth. ‘Like we didn’t have enough problems.’
Shroudweaver looks up at her, one eyebrow raised. ‘Where else do you suggest we go? The Halls are far and roaming. The Burners are all held under root and briar. We need something to end this. We need somewhere to end this.’
His voice drops. ‘This needs to end.’
Shipwright sighs. ‘Don’t take that tone with me.’
Shroudweaver smiles sadly. ‘Love. Salt-hair sweetheart. We knew it would come to this.’
‘You knew,’ she says, and there’s that knife again like a hot blade turning in her heart, cutting hope from under her ribs. ‘You knew. And you said nothing.’
‘I’m sorry, Ship. I am. I didn’t think I had it in me. That she would push us this far.’
She stands, pushes her hair back. Below her, Fallon twists in the bed and moans. That sound, ragged and wordless, almost stops her throat. Almost.
‘You knew. You’ve always had it in you. And I’ve loved you for it. You don’t back down. Not even when you should. But you should have told me.
‘You should have told me.’ Again, and fiercely.
Shroudweaver places a hand on either side of her hips. ‘I should have. I did.’
She pushes his hands away. ‘Not in front of fucking Fallon. Not spilt out over some maudlin breakfast in the same wretched tower where my best friend fights for every spit-flecked breath.’
Her voice shakes. Worse, it burns. ‘Not when we are going back there. To the blood, and the dark.’
His answer is weak. He doesn’t even convince himself. ‘We survived it before.’
Shipwright shakes her head. Feels tears burning at the back of her eyes. ‘Not all of us. Barely any of us. Never enough of us.’
He moves into her again, kisses her chest along the sternum, up the collarbone. ‘It’s different now. We’re different now.’
She winces. ‘We might be, but are they? Do you remember the last time we were there? Do you remember their faces? Probably not. You were watching our friends. Our allies.’
She shifts uncomfortably, moving to swipe the cloth across Fallon’s stubbled jaw. ‘Me, I was watching your back. Which meant I was watching the rest of them.’
She moves her hand across the covers to take his. ‘Do you know what I saw, love?’
His says nothing. His mind focused on diagnosis and remedy, on spittle and blood. So she says it for him.
‘Rage, love. Rage and hunger. We ran with a wolf and we pulled it back right before the kill.’
He slides his hand loose. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
She feels the anger inside her and handles it, like she always does, pushing it down until it barely frays the edge of her voice.
‘If it wasn’t that bad, then why have we never gone back? Three wretched years getting harried from pillar to post. Three years of drownings, deaths and burials, and we have never once gone back.’
‘No need,’ he murmurs. ‘We still had options. There was still a chance.’
She almost thumps the covers, but stops herself short of Fallon’s chest.
‘No need? Sure. Then why no messages from our allies after the south melted to howling glass? I mean, Kinghammer always feared you. You were a shade too close to his enemies for anything else. But Skinpainter too? Quiet as a mouse for three whole years?’
She takes his shoulders, makes him look at her.
‘They never asked because they never wanted to see us again. And we never went, because we were scared of what we might find.’ She catches her breath, blowing a strand of hair clear of her face. ‘Admit it.’
Shroudweaver’s voice is quiet, clipped. ‘You’re right. I don’t find it particularly charming, but you’re right.’
Shipwright snorts. ‘Well, you’ve had years of charm. A little truth won’t kill you. But now’ – she gestures vaguely northwards – ‘now you want to go back. For the dead. For Fallon’s bloody composite.’
‘There’s no place like it,’ he says. ‘What happened there, what we did there? There’s more bodies in the fields of Thell than anywhere else.’ He rubs at tired eyes. ‘And the world’s thinner there. I can reach through easier, bind them tighter. And …’
‘And we’re desperate enough now,’ she finishes.
He pulls her a little closer. ‘Yes, we are. But not done, right?’
She tries to hold herself stiff, tries to keep some of that anger against her lips.
Because he lied and he might well lie again.
Yet, there’s his face, held in the light from the window, those same clean lines, and bright bones, those hollow cheeks.
Those pale eyes watching her, waiting for the answer that will keep him going; that will keep them both going.
One last light against the dark. Her anger drains like spring rain.
‘Not done, love. Not yet.’ And it’s still true, it still feels good to say. She steels herself, then pulls him close, lays her lips on the top of his head, breathes him in. ‘OK. This is going to happen, isn’t it? Again.’
He nods against her, his cheekbone pushing her shirt against her skin. ‘It has to. I’m out of ideas. Out of time.’
She holds him at arm’s length. ‘Thell, then.’
Shroudweaver’s smile could bury bodies. ‘Thell.’