Chapter 70
The rain withdraws over the hills
but the hills remain
the hills withdraw over the horizon
but we remain
—Drykesang
They try to kill her in the third week. She stands barefoot on a low boundary wall, moss rough between her toes, her tongue alive with certainty.
The rising sun is warm on her back, her calves ache from walking, her thighs ache from riding. Her teeth are still thick with the taste of sleep, of Slickwalker, of a scorched meat breakfast.
Crowkisser watches her people watching her.
Her army hangs on the edges of her words like birds on a branch.
They’d hated her at first, god, how they’d hated her.
Almost as much as they’d feared her. Kept her cowering behind the broken temple columns, hiding in Slickwalker’s protective shadow.
Now here they are, choosing to march, to fight; not just for Astic, but for everyone still held in place by the old systems. She couldn’t be prouder.
They’d given up their names, but they’d received themselves in return. New people, for her new world, stronger and braver and free from the gods. Free from any authority but her guiding hand.
She wished Slick could see them, could see the world he was helping to build.
This morning, like every morning, he was out scouting, tirelessly, flowing over field, hill and hamlet.
Ferreting out the secrets of the Midlands, and the Barrowlands after that, always finding a way to make the land cough up enough food to keep them moving.
Steering her people clear of the dangers; of the swamps and the scree slopes and the great storms that rolled over the plains like hammers, turning the earth to mud, and pounding the trees down into the soil.
This was an unforgiving land. Half his time was spent finding the lees of hills, dry hollows where branches cut the wind into softness and offered up space for fires, for catching breath; they would be in trouble without him.
The locals fled before her army, sealing their doors with unfriendly eyes.
Their minds heavy with stories of children lost to older wars, taken by bright-eyed leaders who threw them onto blades and spears, or left them to drown in that rain and mud.
They couldn’t understand that this was different, that she was different.
In time, she would make them understand, as she had helped Astic understand.
For now, she drove onwards, turning her eyes from their warding gestures and their tense hands.
Victory at Thell would persuade them more than days of talking ever could.
For that she needs her people. The people in front of her now.
In the crowd, she sees so many familiar faces, hundreds of miles from the winding Astic streets they called home.
Crabflick, with his chipped tooth and easy smile, a boy with mussable hair who used to leave offerings on the temple steps, who now sits and breakfasts with her, complaining like clockwork about fish-bones and dry bread.
A bit behind him sits Sandsinger, one of the oldest to march, grizzled and whiskered, her wiry arms loose on the buckthorn club she’s taken such a shine too.
She was fast with it, too. Before the south, she’d told Crowkisser she’d been a netwife, mending ropes for her husband, mending herself when he drank.
Crowkisser had opened him throat to gut one day, took him apart, tore his essence out and let it wither against the sky.
They’d been close ever since. Sandsinger was like her grandmother, if her grandmother had drank too much, and licked the sea from her chapped knuckles each morning.
So many more familiar faces. Men and women that she treasured, from their scarred faces to their hopeful eyes.
Above all, at the edges of the crowd, her long men lingered, quiet and watchful, palms light on the fishers’ knives that gave them their name.
Sea men, quiet men, brave enough to find the dangerous voices raised against her and hush them with salt and rope.
At home in Astic, she’d felt them gather in the evenings, seasoning their ale with weeping, holding each other close and telling themselves they were doing the hardest, proudest work.
If only they knew how right they were. Her new world rested on the shoulders of brave, uncomplicated men.
Atop the wall, she keeps talking. Exhorting them towards the battle to come.
As her voice rises and falls, her mind wanders to the faces that didn’t make it this far.
There were always a few dissenters. Named ones first, like Fallon’s poor wife, her first, most brutal example.
A necessary evil, to show the repercussions of clinging to an old name, and old ways.
There hadn’t been many after the Lady of the Grey Towers, and none of them with her fortitude.
Perhaps she’d lost patience with the later ones and dealt with them too harshly.
She could still taste the first names she’d taken.
The Lady Fallon strongest among them, like a wet, oil-slick hole in her tongue.
Of the later ones, those idiot rebels, nothing remained.
She’d shredded them like so many strips of carrion.
After that, no one clung to their old names any more.
Still, other, smarter opponents took new names, and nursed old grudges.
She was hated for so many reasons – cartels she’d pushed from business, soldiers and dignitaries she’d cast down, every criminal who felt aggrieved to be punished for a crime.
A whole corrupt rats’ nest was flushed clean when the south burnt, and still they chittered at her from the wreckage.
Most of them had come around in time. She’d talked to them, over tea, by fires, under temple pillars strung by wet-hung ropes.
Most of them came around. Some grudgingly, some dissembling, but that faded over time.
Resignation drifted into acceptance. Acceptance into compliance.
Compliance into furtherance of her goals.
For those that didn’t recant there were the long men, and beyond the long men, Slick. She would have been lost long ago without him. His laugh, his crooked shoulders and slender hands, his steady fingers.
It’s the fingers that pull her back to the present.
Fingers tensed in the crowd, pushing through knots, past smiling faces.
A set face above them, the man’s lips white, one hand moving bodies aside, the other unpicking the clasps on a tight-drawn cloak.
He moves fast, and as he does, Crowkisser catches just a glimpse of red thread, and a brief flash of gold light. God light.
His head is thrown back as he leaps for her, that light blossoming like a struck flame, spilling from his eyes and mouth, that smell of spice, a taste of honey. The sickly twist of magic on the tongue. Her heart lurches in panic.
She stumbles backwards off the wall, hands raised. She can feel the heat rising against her and the rage of the god inside him. This shouldn’t be possible. But he’s here, it’s happening and she’s going to die.
As he leaps for her, her heart is filled with a blind fury. How dare he? How dare he, when she’s so close? She bares her teeth in rage. A last defiant scream, as her skin starts to blister from golden fire, as a god who should be dead uses this man to reach out for her.
He never makes it. Instead, he finds hands at his ankle, pulling down hard. Crowkisser winces at the wet sound as his skull strikes stone.
Crabflick’s fingers are locked around his foot, straining backwards.
As the young fisherboy hauls with all his might, others crowd in to help.
For a moment, the waves of golden heat are submerged beneath a grey-clad tide as her people pile on bodily, swarming to her defence.
Axes and clubs rise and fall, as her army strives for their first real blood on this long march.
They’re not quite quick enough. As she struggles to her feet, Crowkisser watches the man rise with a ruined face, gold pouring out between the meat and bone, the crushed rasp of his breath strangely loud as he heaves himself upright.
As he stands, a knife in his hand rises and falls, and Crabflick’s suddenly a slick of red below the chin.
Crowkisser feels a buzzing like a drowsy hive, a pressure in her skull she’s not felt in an age.
The man shouts something to her, his teeth white, his fingers wet with gore.
The words are lost in the light and the pressure, but still she sees the red threads on his knife arm as he charges, weaver’s threads.
Her heart quails at the buzzing hum of a composite god being unleashed.
‘Back!’ She screams. ‘Back!’
It takes them a moment to react. A moment too long. The long men shouldering through the crowd pause uncertainly.
As they do, light blossoms and the god pushes its way out. The man’s eyes boil. His skin burns and runs, then splits at the seams, rays of gold driving his spine and legs into unholy angles.
Crowkisser looks at the low wall in front of her, and knows it’s not nearly strong enough.
She looks at the fleeing crowd and knows they’re not fast enough.
The grass vibrates under their feet. The pressure builds. The sky is alive with burning, boiling, golden heat.
She has a second to be heartbroken that it ends like this.
The detonation tears the sound from the air, lifting her up and slamming her down until her teeth rattle. She feels a rib snap, hears screams. It’s raining in the gold light, soft, drifting wet scraps.
Then a steadier fall. Larger chunks that might once have been fingers, or limbs, or an ear.
Somehow, she’s still here to see it all.
She staggers as strong hands help her to her feet. Waves of dizziness crash over her as the colour of the sky slides back from gold, through red to blue.
She spits, tastes honey, spice.
The whole world is ringing.
She slides up onto her knees, peering over what remains of the wall, its stones shattered and twisted into slag.
Beyond it she sees crumpled heaps, staggering, helping one another up. Her people. Her army piecing itself back together. Others bringing buckets of water to douse a circle of burning grass. Astic pragmatism even under a cindered sky.
There’s a lump in the middle of that circle, a mess of burning red and gold light, barely in the shape of a man, reeking of burnt sugar and cooked skin. Sandsinger stands at the circle’s edge, her arm outstretched.
It takes Crowkisser a moment to see what the old woman has clasped in her blistered hand. When she does, her stomach twists, and she retches the last of her breakfast into the smouldering grass.
Another arm, scorched, sundered at the elbow.
Slowly she sees a second shape atop the pile. Hunched protectively, its spine charred into an arc of bone.
She staggers forwards. The ground is wrong, and the sky is singing.
She falls to her knees beside the flames and sifts the ashes, heedless of the tugging at her shoulders, her arms. Eventually, she finds a few shreds of mussable hair, what might once have been a jaw that once made a smile with a crooked, chipped tooth.
She takes Crabflick’s jaw in her hands and turns it slowly, listening to the chimes it makes when it moves the air. After a moment, she looks at Sandsinger. The old woman watches her levelly, holding Crowkisser’s gaze as she sets the arm down.
The words don’t leave Sandsinger’s lips on the first try. Instead, she shoulders her club, runs a blackened hand through her hair, then looks to Crowkisser and tries again.
‘This won’t stop us,’ she says.
Later, her people lift Crowkisser and rinse the pieces of Crabflick from her skin. They miss a few. She finds shreds of boy and bone in her hair for a while after.
In the evening, the army builds a fire to send him on, their grey backs fading into the mist rising off the land. Crowkisser talks to them of endurance, with the heat of the flames on her face. She talks to them of freedom, with the cold of the night behind her.
Eventually, they leave her for the comfort of their tents and the pyre burns low. As she watches the embers wink out, she twines a piece of charred red thread around her fingers. She barely notices when the first crow lands, but by the time the fire is cold she can no longer see the stars.