Chapter 81
the little quail of dusk
small minnow of the hedgerow
berrybob, beetlebeak
—Birds of the Barrowlands, Chalkwitch
Thirty miles and three days later, there’s a brazier, a tent. It’s dark and functional, but warm with leather and fur and a fierce little draught that tastes of berries and winter.
Shipwright stays outside, with her usual quiet sense of dignity and timing.
If she’s sad, she doesn’t let it show. She buries it, in fire and drink and jokes that scorch the air with silence before melting into horrified laughter.
The old woman, Sandsinger, matches her beat for beat, shadow-puppeting gestures that flicker obscenely against canvas and fall apart into a mess of cackling and flapping for breath.
Somewhere, Icecaller’s body lies silent in the quiet dark between the tents.
There’s been no time for a burial yet. All the rituals for dealing with death were sealed within the Stump.
No one wanted to touch the corpses, and there was no one left to perform the rites, anyway.
Skinpainter and the Deadsingers were all buried within that mountain.
With nothing else to do, Crowkisser’s refugees had fled.
Half a week of walking, a ramshackle slide south, unspoken, and barely directed, just a few hundred tired bodies, sloping seaward in the soft dark, framed by the scents of night-time bush and blossom as the cold hills of the Barrowlands gave way to the warmer plains skirting the Midlands.
The smudged shadow of the Burners’ forest off to the east brought seeds drifting lazily on the evening air, something in their movement soothing Shipwright’s heart.
Subconsciously, she steered them a little closer to the trees each day, until the night’s camps were struck in the shadow of oak tree and beech hedge, the slender trunks that rose on the forest’s western-most edge.
Like a crowd of revellers after a best-forgotten night, the remnants of the two armies travelled south together, incorporated by exhaustion, shepherded by Shipwright.
A strange care in it all. Even the most troubled survivors were offered a little companionship around the fires, as if the sound of voices raised in something other than pain might help heal them.
Shipwright was too tired to hope for much more than that.
She crouched on her haunches, stirring her sadness into the embers, and watching it flare.
At her back, in a small dark tent, Shroudweaver and Crowkisser eye each other like cornered cats, his daughter’s face alternately warmed and harshened by the light. Time passes in anxiously knit fingers and half-formed sentences, much as it’s done for three days now. Until, eventually, she begins.
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I thought it was the best thing.’
‘Not for Mum. Not for me.’
‘You were too young to remember. Twenty years gone.’
‘I got older.’
‘Did she ever talk about me?’
‘Sometimes. Less so as time went on.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I didn’t say she was kind.’
‘I suppose I can’t expect that.’
‘You can’t expect anything.’
‘True. This is all unexpected.’
She sips, eyes him over the rim. ‘So you don’t want to tell me why you left?’
He shakes his head. ‘We’re not on the same side in this. Not yet, anyhow.’
She sloshes the glass. ‘Fine. I’m too tired to argue. Saving you was hard work. Give me this then. If you won’t tell me why you left, tell me why you never came back.’ She leans forwards, taps on the table. ‘Tell me why, when Mum was dying, you didn’t come back.’
Her father’s face is hollow. Sadness shadowing his eyes.
‘I would have, if I could.’
She snorts. ‘And yet, predictably, you didn’t.’
He turns the glass against the table-top and drains it. ‘I didn’t.’
‘You let her die.’
‘I couldn’t have saved her.’ There was something raw in his voice, shivering the back of his throat.
She watches his leg dance under the table. ‘You could have tried.’
He catches her gaze. Eyes dark and steady. ‘I was trying. I was trying to save everything.’
She looks away, turns to the lamp where moths dance against the flame.
‘Of course. Trying, in the hidden places, doing whatever hidden things you wouldn’t trust me with. Won’t trust me with.’
He laughs a little at that. It irritates the hell out of her.
‘Can I trust you, Crowkisser?’
She brushes her hair from her eyes, turns back to him. ‘I saved your life.’
Nothing for a moment. The crackle of the lamp wick. Moth wings and the night air. ‘Did you now?’
And the tone of him. The disappointment in it.
She chokes down the rage she feels. She can’t lose her temper. It’s what he expects.
Instead, she refills her glass and imagines leaving him down in the dark.
‘It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t save Mum. Her god wouldn’t save her. Everyone that could have made a difference turned tail and ran. It was just me and her, in the end.’
He opens his mouth, but she waves a hand. ‘Spare me. So, it wasn’t missing me brought you back. Wasn’t the death of your wife. Of my mother. Did you even know where I was? What was happening? Or were you too busy trying to save the world?’
The scorn thick in her voice.
‘I was— I had to …’ he stammers.
She smiles, bitterly. ‘Oh, of course. But something made you give a shit about me. When did I catch your attention again?’ She studies the scuffed cuffs of his robes, the stains. ‘What made you remember you had a daughter?’
He doesn’t answer, at first, his fingers working at the red threads strung over his wrist, half-crusted with blood. He’s picked up a lot of little cuts in the mountain.
Eventually, he gets there, with a little prompting.
‘When did you first hear about me? When did you start to care again?’
‘When we lost the south.’
A little coil of relief inside her. Of course. ‘That’s diplomatic. Don’t lie to me.’
‘Fine. OK.’ A deep breath. ‘After I heard about what you’d done.’
‘And what did I do, Dad?’
He winces. ‘Do we really need to do this?’
‘Yes.’ She straightens her legs. ‘I want to know what you think of me.’
He reaches for her hand, and she pulls it away, but not far.
He picks his words carefully – hangs them around the rim of his cup. ‘You killed the gods. Broke them, at the very least. Destroyed a city in the process. Used our names to hunt us if we kept them.’
She leans forwards, her eyes deep and black, fingers steepled. ‘Go on.’
‘Left the south with Slickwalker. Took Astic in … a night, two. Hung everyone that refused to change for you.’ He breathes out, knocks a shot back. ‘And now … raised an army. Marched north. Destroyed a mountain.’
She blinks, smiles without joy. ‘Wow. I’m … terrible.’
He reaches for her hand again, misses again. ‘I’m not saying that, I just have to know why.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Would you believe me if I told you?’
‘I’d try.’
She presses her lips together.
‘Why should I? I don’t owe you anything.’
He tilts a hand consolingly. ‘No, but I owe you a chance to tell your side. Who else do you talk to? Slickwalker?’ He reaches, finds her fingers and holds them tight. ‘It can’t have been easy.’
She tugs a little, gives up. ‘What is? Fine. You want to know? Fine.’
She rolls her shoulders, pulls him closer, conspiratorial.
‘I did it. I broke the gods. I found their little latches and I snipped them off. Because we shouldn’t have to think like they want us to think, or feel like they want us to feel.
You know where that gets us. More than anyone, you should know!
’ Her voice pitches a moment, raises up.
She takes a second, gathers herself, ‘You should know. Mum did at the end. And it was only me left to see it. To see her starving for their touch. And how many others? How many other mothers and fathers and children? Abandoned.’ Her hands wild, agitated.
‘They cling. They stick like honey. They never let go. Not really.’ She pauses.
The glass in her hand creaks. ‘So I learnt. I studied. I went places and I dug deep, to find some answers.’ She swallows, winces.
Reflexively, Shroudweaver puts a hand to the side of her face.
She flinches. ‘And I found things, in the south. In forests, behind waterfalls. Under fountains. I found things.’
She wipes her lips, her teeth wide and wet.
‘And the more I found, the more there was to find. Like something knew I was searching. Like it was calling to me. Scraps at first, then, then …’ She waves the empty glass.
He refills it, watches the oily liquid slosh around the lip. Pours a splash for himself, corks it.
He laces her hands around the glass. ‘Scraps.’
She nods. ‘About the gods. Where they came from. How to kill them.’ She stands, paces, tugging fingers through her hair.
Outside there’s raucous laughter. She shoots a venomous glance towards the mouth of the tent, then turns and waves the glass.
‘The gods. They’re not from here.’ She chews her lip, worries a thin strip of skin loose.
‘We made them, or they came here. I don’t know.
It’s not clear. Not clear at all.’ She fixes him with a wide-eyed look.
‘And I searched, you don’t know how I searched.
In the mud and the bone, and under that.
’ She slumps. ‘I’ve peeled the skin off this blasted world. ’
She swallows and sets the glass down unsteadily. ‘And where were you? Where were you? For years. When I was lost down there with all that black earth?’
She raises a finger like a dagger, swaying slightly. ‘Off making them. Making new gods. Stitching them into people. Or with her.’ She spits. ‘Shroudweaver. You’re a parasite. No, worse than that. You’re a vector. A dirty, crusted knife.’
He stands slowly, walks towards the tip of her finger. ‘I heal people. I give peace and use to the dead.’
Her eyes are flat as stones. ‘Some of us can’t be healed.’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t believe that.’