Chapter 81 #2
She steps closer, her fingers clasped around his collar, voice tight and fervent. ‘I do. I’ve seen it. You think you’re working with them. Calling them. But it’s all a choice. They help because they choose.’
‘Which means?’ he leaves it hanging.
‘Which means they can choose not to.’ Her forehead presses against his chest.
He holds the back of her skull gently. ‘Your mother.’
She looks up. ‘Where were you?’
He looks at her wide eyes, her flushed cheeks. Finally, he relents. ‘In the north. Beyond the Spires.’
‘You could have saved her.’
He hesitates. ‘Perhaps. I don’t think so.’
She steps back. ‘But you didn’t.’
He shakes his head. ‘I had to save something else.’
She glares at him. Her shoulders shake.
‘It was the hardest choice …’ he begins.
‘It was the wrong choice.’ There’s something dark and grating in her voice, but she doesn’t stop. ‘So, I promised her. I promised myself. No more unknown bargains, no more feelings that aren’t our own. No more binding our lives to theirs.’
‘We’re never separate like that, love,’ he says, but in his heart it feels more like scripture than truth. The passion in her voice calls to him.
‘We are now,’ she grins, waving a hand towards the refugees gathered around the campfires. ‘They are. I did it, Dad. I did it for Mum. And I did it for me.’ Her knuckles hit her breastbone with a thump. She stares at him defiantly, ribs rising and falling.
He sips, grimacing. ‘But something else happened, didn’t it? Something must have happened.’
He sees her hesitate. She needs a push. ‘In the south.’
She tenses, shoulders heaving. For a moment feathers flicker around the outline of her bones, then she raises a hand, slowly, resignedly.
‘The unlatching,’ she says, the unfamiliar word hanging in the air between them.
‘There were so many locks holding the gods to us. So tightly bound. They needed so much power to open.’ She half-glances at him.
‘I knew I had it. I could feel all the catches. I had all the keys. But they still held. The gods clung on. Dug in, like … like ticks on a dog. But I pushed and I pushed and I pushed.’ She turns back to him, eyes wide.
‘And on that last push, something pushed back from the other side. And the locks opened, and the light changed.’
Shroudweaver feels something click into place and marshals his face into blankness even as his mind reels in shock. ‘The light?’
She crosses back to his arms. ‘The light, Dad. And something behind the light.’ A breath for fear to grow in her voice. ‘An eye. Looking for us, Dad. Looking for us.’
He twines his fingers in her hair, soothes her cheek and tries not to scream.
She looks up at him again. ‘It was using our names, Dad. Finding them. Like beacons. Licking down towards the light and pushing it all into darkness.’
She sinks against him, her voice quieter now, muffled by his hammering heart. ‘It took so many before I could think. Ripped the names right from them. Ate every bit of who they were, and who they might have been, and who they weren’t.’
Her hands are tight against his chest. ‘Do you see? Dad, do you see?’
‘A loss of self,’ he says. His voice struggling for calm.
‘Worse than that,’ she says. ‘Every restraint, every border, every limit, ripped out.’ Her fingers like claws now. ‘Nothing to shape you.’ Her voice lowers. ‘Nothing to hold you back.’ Barely a whisper. ‘Nothing to remind you that you’re you at all.’
Shroudweaver looks at her, at his sweet, scared, terrifying daughter, as it all finally falls into place, and his heart breaks. ‘So you did the only thing you could.’
‘I took their names, Dad.’ Her voice fractures, strings ragged.
‘I took them and I flung them as far and as hard as I could. Stitched a ritual to rip them out of the world. Like ripples torn from a pond.’ She frowns.
‘It wasn’t enough though. I had to learn to move faster than the eye hunted and Slick was the only way we could do it.
Pulled through shadow and veering into crows.
Slicing names off stragglers that dodged the ritual.
I wasn’t always fast enough to stay ahead of it.
But then when I got good enough, I didn’t need to be. ’
He almost smiles at the genius of it. ‘Because we played right into your hands.’ He tips her chin up.
‘We were so afraid of you. Of the rumours from the south. So afraid of you that we gave up our own names to the echoes of the ritual. Didn’t even fight it.
Even though you were a thousand miles away. ’
She smiles in relief. ‘And then you were safe, Dad. You were all safe. It couldn’t find you.’
He shakes his head sadly. ‘Yes, love. But we weren’t us anymore.’
‘There was no other way, Dad. No other way.’
‘You don’t know that,’ he says.
‘Don’t say that,’ she screams. ‘Don’t you dare!’
She pushes him two-handed in the chest and he sprawls to the floor. Moves to stand over him, her hips casting sharpened shadows.
‘I don’t regret it for a second, Dad. I’d do it all again. We’re free. And we’re going to stay free.’
He looks up at her from the floor, her flushed cheeks and clenched fists.
She glances at her hands, at him, shock flitting across her face, and slowly lets them fall.
He makes a note of that. Levers himself to a sitting position, ‘What do you mean, stay?’
She offers him a hand, lifts him with steely ease. Straightens his clothes, brushes imagined dust from his shoulders.
‘Stay free,’ she says, her voice banked low. ‘Stay nameless. We have to.’ She sits again. ‘It’s the only way to be safe.’
He sits next to her, tentatively, leaving a little distance. ‘That could be tricky. A lot of people want their names back.’ He pauses. ‘I want my name back.’
She shakes her head. ‘It can’t happen. The eye will find them. Strip them. Strip you.’
He shifts his shoulder carefully, opens up a space for her. She settles her head under his arm.
‘There are others, you know?’ he murmurs. He waits, then decides to risk it. ‘Fallon …’
‘He’s already lost,’ she mutters. ‘If it hasn’t taken him already, it will soon.’
He runs a hand down her arm. ‘Nonsense, Fallon’s fine.’
She smiles sadly. ‘You can’t prove that.’
Crowkisser turns to face him and crosses her legs.
Fumbling for the bottle, she struggles the stopper loose and pours.
‘You think it’s not patient? Not clever?
’ She drinks deep with barely a flicker, waves the cup.
‘Sure, first it gorges. Fast and messy. Like a starved child. But,’ she raises a finger.
‘But why rush now? We can’t get away. It’s filled itself so’ – she stops, coughing – ‘so incredibly full from the south that it has the luxury of time. We,’ she says unsteadily. ‘We don’t.’
Shroudweaver reaches out his glass, his mind half on her words, half on her mother’s mannerisms moving her hands.
Outside, the fires have fallen to embers, and the camp is slowly filling with the sounds of people crumbling into sleep.
Someone’s fucking, hard and low and breathless, and he smiles a little at that sweaty little comfort.
Shipwright’s shadow lingers briefly against their tent.
A moment for her to listen and hearing their voices, move away, but not too far.
Crowkisser pours, empties the bottle down to the dregs and twists it thoughtfully in the light.
‘I used to hate this stuff. All those greasy little fishermen in their fishy little cottages.’ She half-laughs, then sits down woozily, holding the glass up between thumb and finger, and sniffing it. ‘But now, now it tastes like home.’
Shroudweaver sips. ‘It reminds me of my father. He loved this. Loved anything with a fire in it.’ He smiles. ‘He would’ve loved you.’
‘You’re drunk,’ she says.
‘I have to be,’ he replies.
She smiles, and for a little while they let the smoke hang in the air, watching the shape of the flames, the shapes of each other.
Eventually, he forces himself to speak. ‘We can’t stay like this forever.’
She shoots him a look, half-angry, half-sad. ‘Like this?’
He nods. ‘Hiding. We can’t stay hidden forever. Even if I did agree with you.’
She makes a noncommittal noise.
He forges on. ‘People want their names. No, not even that. They want revenge. Fallon’s raising an army even now.’
‘I can take care of him,’ she shrugs.
Shroudweaver feels the stress in his voice for the first time.
‘That’s not the point. There’ll always be another Fallon, another army.
The only way out would be to convince people that they’re better off this way which is’ – he laughs – ‘a tough sell, to say the least.’ He leans forwards.
‘You couldn’t do it without telling them the truth.
And even if … even if you get them to believe you, the panic you cause will be like nothing under the sun.
’ He composes his face carefully. ‘I mean, I damn near shit myself. And I just found out.’
She snorts. ‘And you my big strong Da?’ She grins. ‘I know, I know. It’s a gift of crabs, this whole thing, but this just makes things clearer.’
Her smile softens. ‘I’m glad we talked. I know what I have to do.’
He watches her bright eyes. ‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to kill it.’
He almost laughs, and then feels a dread set into his stomach like thick green ice.
She steps closer, puts her hands on his shoulders. ‘I can do it, Dad. Then we’ll really be free. Help me. It’ll be easier with you.’
His heart breaks. ‘I can’t, love.’
Her voice is low, soft, betrayed. ‘Why?’
He tries to martial his screaming brain, tries to arrange his words cold and clear as knives on a plate. ‘First, to get that kind of power, whatever it might be, you’d need to raise an army. Fund expeditions. Make deals.’ His face twists sympathetically. ‘They just won’t let you.’
She bites off the words. ‘Won’t let me?’
He looks her in the eye. ‘People aren’t on your side. Not enough, at any rate.’
She gestures out towards the campfires. ‘These ones are. More will come.’