Chapter 31
neither thigh crack, nor ice
so long as the blood thrums
—Inscribed handbell, found in the ruins of Luss
The ice was always thickest in the morning. Barely visible in the heights of the mountain, more a blue haze that crept downwards over the rock, congealing into sleek, black sheets that limned the stone.
Bitter cold. Even beneath layers of fur and wool, bitter. Big as he was, bitter. Even with another body in the bed. Even with a few other bodies in the bed.
Thell’s cold ate through everything it touched, the mountain bowing with the weight of the glacier.
It was worse today, because Kinghammer was alone.
And he was thinking. There were no soft legs twined over his hips, no arms over his chest. He’d needed space, needed time.
Needed a little quiet for once. Thell would sit in his lap all year if he let it, and he couldn’t think like that.
So he was alone, in bed, shivering like a skinned sprat.
A dull ache pulsed in the back of his head, and a hotter ache matched it by his hip, the result of a few mistimed thrusts on the practice ground, and later.
He was showing his age, the machine of his body slowing down, beginning to fray at the edges.
Little tears spidering into torn seams, a burning on the inside, as the heat of his life sputtered and sparked.
He snorts. Indulgent shit. If anyone else brought this whining to him, he wouldn’t give them the time of day.
The world carried on, bigger waves of pain moving across the land. He stretches, and his back pops. A chill breeze steals beneath the covers.
One of those waves was breaking on his own shores, as if he’d not been working these past three years to keep Thell high and dry from all the other chaos.
Tired young bucks walking endless patrols along tight closed borders.
Skinpainter run ragged with the weight of it all, slapping ink and charm on every road leading to the Stump, and bindings on every barrow.
When that wasn’t enough, Kinghammer applied a little violence; a few calculated burnings.
Those border towns were mostly ghost villages anyway, hollowed out after Crowkisser’s great fuckery.
It was a small price to pay for peace, and didn’t Thell deserve some peace, after all they had been through?
Didn’t he deserve some? A little quiet? A hand off the hammer?
He shivers again. That was all sifting to dust now.
War inexorably arriving on the slim shoulders of a dandelion-haired boy and his young lover.
He could see a little of Fallon in Quickfish, in the cut of his jaw, the set of his shoulders.
He saw more of Arissa though, that flash in the eyes, like steel drawn underwater.
The boy looked soft, but there was something inside him that wasn’t built for breaking.
And that scared him, the spirit of that woman come back to haunt Thell again.
He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow, muttering a curse his grandfather taught him. Fucking Fallon. Fallons. All of them. Stormriders, black dogs, cursed family.
And yet, he owes them, whether it sits in his guts like a goose egg or not. He’d bet rats to ribbons that Quick has come to collect, even if the boy doesn’t know it.
Whatever he wants, it’s going to pull Thell back into Hesper’s orbit, and back into Crowkisser’s shortly after that.
Kinghammer shivers again. Bitter, bitter cold. It’ll get worse before it gets better. The morning sun hauling itself across the mountain takes a long time to bounce its way down into the dark.
He can feel the stubble speckling his jaw like spoil in the field – fuck it, a shave at least, a good way to start.
Right, feet on the cold stone. Chipped nails and blue veins. Old man’s feet, his grandfather’s legs stuck on his own aching hips. It’s a miracle he can talk anyone into warming his bed.
He stands, and makes a noise like an old bellows, and a few other noises that don’t bear mentioning.
He steps to the bowl, the polished bronze of the mirror.
There’s enough of the man he recognises in the reflection to take the edge off.
The Kinghammer still looks back at him, shoulders as broad as an ox, ribs like temple beams, and all the scars of all the wars he’s ever fought and won.
Thell’s free now, but it’s freedom balances on the thump of a skittish heart, and he knows that better than most. Fretting. Pointless.
A shave then; the badger-hair brush, and the soap that Ice gave him, all sharp herbs and something musky beneath. She must have traded a pretty penny for that, listening to tattles and twits down in the Still Market.
He splinters the crust of ice in the bowl with the back of the brush, watching the little floes disappearing as he dips and soaps.
The blade itself is the same one he’s had for a long, long time.
It’s shaved a lot of throats, and slit a few too, in the early days.
When he was desperate, before he’d properly learnt to fear the spilling of blood.
A pull, a scrape. The dipping of the blade. The movement of the ice. Water sliding across water. Silence rising to fill the room, threading the great cracks that lead to the mountain and the high ice.
Peace. Water splashed across the face. Bitter cold. Fingers through his hair, shivers along the scalp. Peace.
He hears her coming before she arrives, but it’s still not enough time to prepare.
‘You absolute feral little stoat! Give it back.’
Nigh enters a scuttling length ahead of her sister and positions herself neatly behind Kinghammer’s legs. He ruffles her hair affectionately, accidentally dripping soap on her head. Icecaller is a beat behind, red-faced, wheezing.
She skids to a stop and glares at Nigh, who leans around her dad’s thighs and shakes a necklace clutched in one grubby fist.
Kinghammer laughs. ‘Morning, girls.’
Icecaller hisses. ‘Dad, she … I … that little rat.’ She stops, takes in the scene. ‘Father dearest, everything in the shop front’s on display.’
He grunts. ‘Wasn’t expecting company this early, was I? I should know better with you too.’
He slopes to the bed, dragging Nigh with him on one leg like a lead weight. Militantly slips some breeches on by unpeeling her fingers one by one, freeing the necklace at the same time and tossing it back to Ice.
‘Thank you very much’, she grins, sticking a tongue out at Nigh. Kinghammer lifts the little girl to sit next to him on the bed. ‘Get me her brush would you, Ice? She looks like she’s been wrestling a fox.’
Icecaller pulls the brush from a drawer, a pretty little tortoiseshell thing, with a stylised dog on it.
‘Good fucking luck with that tangle of vines.’ She sits next to Nigh on the bed and taps a few quick gestures on her shoulders and hands, laughs and kisses her neck as she coories in to her sister.
Kinghammer smiles. ‘You two friends again?’
Ice nods. ‘Aye, for now. A truce with the stoat.’
‘Thank all that’s good. I have enough fracturing alliances today without adding one more to the list’.
He brushes Nigh’s hair with all the practice of years. ‘Stone’s teeth, Nigh, this is like wire.’
She giggles, and he pulls her to sit in his lap. ‘Prison for you until you look more presentable.’
Ice laughs. ‘You not gonna do mine, Da?’ She tilts her shaved scalp towards him.
‘Spit and polish would do you, you scruff.’ He puts his free arm around her and squeezes.
‘So, what are they like?’
Icecaller pouts. ‘“Morning darling daughter, so nice to see you, what an unexpected surprise when my raggedy old cheeks are still catching the breeze.” No? None of that?’
Kinghammer pins back Nigh’s hair and starts on another section. ‘None of that. You know it all already.’
‘I do, but I like to hear it.’
‘Fine, beloved daughter, sweetest little eagle that ever flew the coop, what are they like? What do you think?’
Icecaller’s face goes still as she looks up. High above, the light is beginning to cut through the cold. Thell is waking.
‘I think they’re trouble, whether they know it or not.
They probably don’t. Quickfish seems … wet.
He wouldn’t survive up here. His mama’s ghost is sitting on his shoulders.
’ She slowly refastens the necklace around her neck, settles it on her collarbone.
‘That’s what he’s here for. One last swing at bringing mum home, using our mysterious mountain ways.
’ She smooths the beads of the necklace, garnet glistening against the skin.
Kinghammer nods, picks something out of Nigh’s hair. ‘What the fuck is this? Fish skin?’ He waves it at Icecaller. She takes it between finger and thumb. ‘Bit of old lizard, I think. They’re moulting down in the low galleries, and little Miss Maggot here thinks they are cute.’
Kinghammer smiles. ‘We should get her one. Might do her good, having a wee thing to care for.’
Ice looks at her sister ruefully. ‘Can’t say as it did me much good.’ She elbows her father and he kisses the top of her head.
‘I’m trying to figure out which way to jump, Ice. It’s a big risk.’
She nods. ‘It is. And you’ve been awfully shy of risk the past while. Why is that?’
Kinghammer looks at her flatly. ‘Think, beloved.’
Ice rolls her eyes. ‘We are big enough and ugly enough, Da.’
He tuts. ‘You might be. She isn’t.’
He adds another burnished clip to Nigh’s hair, gives her a toy to tinker with. A square of beautiful, polished little tiles that slide and click.
‘That used to be mine,’ Ice says.
‘Yeah, and you were too daft to solve it,’ he grumbles.
She mimics his tut, pulling a face. ‘I can solve this for you though.’
His glance is sceptical. ‘Can you, aye?’