Chapter 63 #2
He pats her on the shoulder. ‘The simpler solution, it seems to me, is to take people out of the equation completely. To weave a composite with no body, no vessel, just will. If I could bind all the souls in here’ – he taps his chest – ‘with all the dead of the Barrowlands, for just long enough, I could take out Crowkisser.’
‘Take her out?’ Shipwright’s voice is steadier than she feels.
‘Incapacitate her, I hope. I can’t think of anything more powerful.’ His voice drops, slinks low around the cooling barrow stones. ‘I don’t want to kill her, Ship.’
‘I know love,’ she says. ‘But this sounds dangerous.’ Are you sure there’s not a better way? She bites her lip. ‘I could do it again, for you. If that’s what needed. I could hold the composite.’ Even as she says it, her heart lurches with terror, and her lips grow sticky with spice.
He watches her closely, and she can see him run the numbers before he shakes his head. ‘Dropping that many souls into someone would change them so profoundly they’d never come back. I could never do that to you. I can’t have that on my conscience. There’s enough roosting in there as it is.’
He takes her hand again, his eyes bright in the failing light. ‘I can do this. Trust me. I’m the best weaver there is. I can do it.’
She squeezes his fingers and chokes down the sadness sitting in her chest. ‘You’re the only weaver there is.’ She holds his gaze for a second, before she looks away. ‘What other choice do I have?’
He kisses her softly. ‘Well, if I’m wrong, none of us will be around to regret it.’
They stop for a moment, and he leans his back against a way marker, his fingers tracing the carvings. ‘Would you look at that? Less than fifty miles now.’
Shipwright nods. ‘We’re close, but we won’t make it before nightfall. The sun’s tiring and I’m not keen to travel through the night out here.’
Shroudweaver nods. ‘Me either.’ He scans the horizon, sighing wearily. ‘Can you believe it? Burials as far as the eye can see. No wonder I’m blue. Still, there’s a lot of forest out here. Beyond the hills. Not that far away. I’d like to see it sometime.’
Her heart warms a little at that. ‘I could take you,’ she says. ‘I have friends there.’
He grins. ‘That’ll be our post-catastrophe vacation, will it?’
She tweaks his ear. ‘You got it, hot stuff. And maybe after that, somewhere by the sea. Or on it.’
‘Either’s fine, as long as you’re there,’ he says, and leans into her.
She’s quiet for a spell, as they press on in the last scraps of light, trying to imagine what the future might feel like.
‘Do you miss the ship?’ he asks, eventually.
She looks at him. ‘Only like a limb.’
The driving wind pushes her hair forwards over the angular planes of her face and feeds him strands of his own. He coughs.
‘Do you want me to take any of that?’ She gestures at his pack, hung with the bones and thread of his trade. Weavers travelled as light as they could, but that wasn’t saying much.
‘No, I’m good. We won’t be walking for much longer.’
She studies the horizon. ‘It’s getting late, and cold. There’s ruins down there, maybe a few miles off. Should get us out of the wind at least. Away from those creepy fires.’
They’re there inside an hour, setting up inside the scoured courtyard of a squat tower attached to a number of curved, low-slung buildings that might once have been byres.
The soft glow of a fire on the stones dries out his clothes and a tarp strung between the corners puts an end to the teeth of the wind. The small horse is staked out gratefully with some dry grass and a blanket over its back.
A little of the chill fades from his bones. A little of the weariness from his soul follows it.
Shipwright sits next to him, working her boots from her feet, rubbing the life back into them.
‘Here,’ Shroudweaver says, patting his lap. She moves them over and he sets to, his fingers tracing calluses and curves.
She sighs happily. ‘Now I really know how you bring the dead back to life.’
He shoots her a look. ‘A bad place for that kind of chat.’
She kicks to remind him to keep working. ‘Why?’
‘I’ll show you once your socks are on.’
A little later, he hangs the soup over the fire, and pulls a lit branch gingerly out of the larger logs.
Shipwright sits close to the flames, her fingers working over something brass which spins and clicks.
‘Come on,’ he smiles. ‘I’ll give you the tour before dinner.’
She grins up at him. ‘Give me a kiss before that and you’re on.’
He pulls Shipwright to her feet, and presses himself against her. She can taste the desire on the edge of his lips.
‘If we keep this up, I’m going to bed hungry and uneducated,’ she mutters. ‘Plus, you’re getting cinders in my hair.’
Shroudweaver steps back. ‘Romance is dead,’ he intones.
‘In its place, we present history.’ He moves the torch closer to the outer wall, past a series of small regular hollows.
‘See, here, bread ovens. Set around the edge of the house to heat it all evenly. The warmth would have been channelled down through tiles.’ He points at her feet.
She scuffs experimentally and something clinks.
‘Hah, I knew it.’ He pulls her back towards the fire. ‘Here, living quarters. You see the outlines? Sleeping quarters over there.’
Shipwright turns, waves her arms up at the tower. ‘And this?’
He frowns. ‘I’m not sure. A watchtower, probably. Times gone by, you’d want eyes on the north. On the forest too probably.’
She watches him explain the finer details, eyes alight.
‘Here, a well,’ he says, ‘and here, if you dug, the midden.’ His fingers linger on a wall, a brick scratched with marks. It pulls loose with a little knife work.
In the hollow behind they find some ancient coins, stones worn smooth by the wind. Something that might have been a bracelet once. A cat collar.
She stands behind him as he turns them over slowly in his hands.
He looks up at her. ‘So many generations before us.’ A soft smile. ‘Isn’t it a relief?’
She puts an arm around his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I’m quite fond of this generation. It has us.’
Shroudweaver leans into the curve of her. ‘True. Lucky.’
Her fingers trace the hard lines of his skull as the wind blows down from the sleeping barrows. ‘Thell tomorrow?’
He nods. ‘Thell tomorrow.’
Shipwright furrows her brow, and harrows a hand through his hair to pick out windblown seeds, hooked as claws. ‘And after that, what’s the plan?’
Shroudweaver’s voice is soft. ‘First, we speak to Skinpainter. Get a handle on the situation.’
She works at a particularly stubborn burr. ‘And after that?’
‘We wait for Crowkisser to come to us. We can’t match her on the field, but if I can get her out onto the Barrowlands, we have the advantage.’
‘Because of Skinpainter?’
He nods. ‘A little. Because of the mountain, and the dead.’
Her fingers stop working. ‘And then you’re going to try raise a god. One of those composites. Without a vessel. Uncontained.’
He demurs. ‘If it comes to that.’
She tilts his head towards her. ‘You know it’ll come to that,’ she says, and there’s a shake in her voice. It feels good to say it though, to look it in the eye.
He takes her hands. ‘I know it’s not ideal, but like I said, we need something big. Bigger than ever before. A deterrent.’
She resumes stroking his hair. ‘Because your daughter is so easily deterred.’ She sighs, ‘I’m sorry, it’s just … not exactly a neat solution is it?’
He takes the tips of her fingers, squeezes them. ‘No such thing as neat solutions.’
She kisses the crown of his head. ‘They died in the south, that’s what you mean.’
He wriggles his shoulders downwards, settling into the cool grass at her feet.
‘If I can unbind the dead, weave them into a composite, even for a few moments, we give Thell a weapon Crowkisser can’t fathom.
With a little luck she’ll struggle to match us, no matter what she has up her sleeve.
’ He picks blades of grass, splits them with a thumb.
‘If we can make it too expensive for her to lay siege, she’ll have to rethink.
And she can’t stay penned in the south forever.
The land won’t support it indefinitely. She’ll starve. ’
Shipwright flops down onto her belly, her face close to the fire. ‘You mean expensive in bodies, don’t you? That scares the shit out of me.’
He splits the blades again. ‘It’s what she understands. Raw power. It’s what’ll stop her. She cares about her people.’
Shipwright raises an eyebrow. ‘How do you know that?’
Shroudweaver twists his lips. ‘Why else try to eke out a living in the south, why not throw everyone at Hesper straight away? Damn the cost? She wants her people alive, and she wants the people of Thell alive.’ He sucks his teeth. ‘Mostly.’
Shipwright runs her hands through her hair, half-heartedly twisting braids. ‘That’s an awfully thin assumption to stake this on.’
‘I know my daughter, Ship.’
‘You knew your daughter. How many years since you were both together?’
‘Twenty. Twenty-one, though that cuts my heart to say it. Even if I hadn’t seen her for a hundred though, I’d know she hasn’t changed. She’s still clinging on to what she cares about. Regardless of the cost.’
Shipwright frowns. ‘How can you know that for sure, Shroud?’ It’s hard to keep the frustration out her voice.
He splits the grass down to the base, loses it into the earth.
‘Because I’m still alive.’