Chapter 82
hush the babe and crack the branch
send out sound to shore and sea
if the forest was my home
happy I would ever be
—Marriage song, the Cut
A day later, and the sun is haloed like a smudged nail in butter.
The refugees are squabbling among themselves as tempers fray in the pollen-hung heat.
Divisions are appearing, alliances and fault lines.
Crowkisser is at the forefront of the march, the wind driving her cloak back against her shins and shoulders, her thin legs.
They forge inexorably southwards in her shadow.
The soft turned rocks of the Barrowlands give way to richer Midlands soil, and the rooted edges of the Burners’ forests linger to the east, their broad branches soughing in the breeze, the creak and tick of old growth.
No sign of the Burners themselves, but the refugees still clot together in huddles, scanning the treeline with slitted eyes.
Wary and weary, but not broken. Stitching each other’s wounds, changing bandages, boiling run-off water from the forest’s brooks until it sings pure and healthy.
They’re talking more as the days pass and the numbness of death slowly falls from their lips.
Low conversations held in closed huddles, backs to the campfires, eyes off into the treeline, scanning the forest, imagining the mountain behind and the cities beyond.
It’s a mixed blessing. Talk was a healer, but tales were a worry.
Shipwright caught fragments on the smoke-stained wind.
A stew of comfort and questions. Who did this, what happened, who’s responsible?
If anyone looked to the head of the column where Shroudweaver’s daughter stalked like a hunting dog, she didn’t mark it.
The bulk of the worrying is confined to cook-fire gossip, cosseted around embers and picking over fish-bones.
Shipwright’s not a welcome guest at these campfire meetings.
She was a stranger before, and she’s a problem now.
Both Shipwright and Crowkisser had come to the mountain a moment before it all came down, but Shipwright hadn’t had the nous to resurrect the first daughter of the Republic in front of her grieving people.
It wasn’t surprising that the refugees had a little trouble deciding who to love and who to lynch.
Shipwright couldn’t bring herself to abandon them though, and Shroudweaver wouldn’t abandon his daughter.
So, she kept busy each evening, moving from fire to fire, stoking and tending, stirring pots, her mind still ghosted with memories of a ladle rocking back and forth against a copper rim.
She missed home. Here she was, thousands of miles away from her father’s soup, over the wrong sea.
There’s not much that soothes the ache of it.
She talks to Shroudweaver between times.
He’s the closest thing she has to family here, so she does some work on all the little knots that hold them together, reminding herself of the shape of his hips and the taste of his lips.
He unlocks a little as his strength returns.
Day after day, flesh slides back onto his frame in slow, steady blooms. She rubs his legs at night when the pain comes, her fingers steady over familiar scars.
He confides in her, as he always has, shares the shape of his conversations with his daughter, with Crowkisser.
There’s been near a week of talking, on the road south, the pair of them edging closer, nervous as debutantes, and all the while, Shroud’s been wrestling with the unspoken knowledge that Crowkisser’s caused all this.
The bare fact that he’s powerless to do anything about it is eating away at him, and at Shipwright too.
She can’t let it show though. He leans on her like an old cane, burying his secrets and fears deep in her chest. She takes them all, takes him, and holds both afterwards, cooling in the night.
He tells her things he won’t even tell Fallon, that he barely admits to himself, old anxieties and guilts running like rats around his skull, and out into her heart.
She struggles with it sometimes, the weight of his worries and her own bowing her like a yardarm.
On those nights she slips into the Burners’ forest and climbs trees, imagining them masts, the windblown leaves a stand-in for spinner and sail, branches cradling crows’ nests mercifully free of crows.
She breathes in the night air as it races across the tree-tops, watches seedlings and insects ride the currents and strains her ears for the sound of waves on the shores she knows are out there somewhere.
Later, she finds strong nooks and broad-armed branches and settles into the rhythms that hold her steady; buffing boots and darning socks.
Her fingers and mind focus on needle and cloth, and when that’s done, run over the curve and knot of those branches, dreaming of the ships that could be called forth from beneath the bark.
As they march south it becomes harder to chase the worry from her mind.
She watches the edges of the refugee column become an army again, as the surviving soldiers form outriders and flank guards.
The Burners come to the wood’s edge to watch.
They are squat, sturdy men and women with lips wrapped around long-stemmed pipes that glow thoughtfully, their wild hair held in raw twists and strung with sweet smoke.
The forest’s verge is lined with patient eyes alternately haloed and shadowed with the black ash of their trade and their faith.
A few spy her, and offer a slight nod of recognition.
The Burners had taught her long ago that sometimes there was nothing to do but endure.
So Shipwright followed the old tracks towards peace, pulling her body out onto the coast or up into the forests, finding spaces to stay sane.
The Burners’ villages were a blessing she had never thought to find again, filled with sly, berry-faced women that reminded her of her own dear mum, though their skin was darker and their jokes filthier.
Fuck, she missed her mum. Shipwright wondered if she was still out there somewhere. She was probably stooped and silvered now, but Ship could just imagine the corners of her smile, still smell butter melting on bread and feel strong fingers combing the tangles out of her hair.
‘Little muss-rat,’ her mum had called her; the snort of her father’s laughter always burbling somewhere out of sight, and within the circle of firelight, her mother’s hands and a hair brush, its rhythm smooth and steady.
She’d never felt so safe. So safe. She tried to pass that on to Shroud.
Tried not to think of saying goodbye to her parents, of her father pretending the salt stung his remaining eye as he brushed her cheek with gruff admonishments to be careful, to make him proud; her mother never even given to such pretence, but throwing herself around her only daughter, her tears wet and wild and her fists gripping the cloth at her shoulders.
‘Come back to me, esvel,’ she’d said. ‘You come back to me.’
She hadn’t come back. She’d sailed out from the east twenty odd years ago and never come back.
Thousands of miles had drowned under her keel and she hadn’t cried since then, for all she’d wanted to.
Because for all she’d wanted to, that would let Shroudweaver see just how much she hurt, just how lonely she was. And he would never forgive himself.
She wished she still had her mum and dad. She wished she had Arissa and Declan, but that was the way the world was now. The world killed couples. You made your family where you found it, and you pretended it was only the wind that drew the salt from your tears.
Ship had always promised herself she’d sail back east, but there had never been time.
The fifteen years since the fall of the Empire had slipped away, day by day, in running contracts and rebuilding; in putting bread on the table and keeping him alive.
And slipping more into herself with every passing moment.
She can feel that old isolation washing back over her again.
On the loneliest days, even the forests and the tall trees are not enough.
She follows the Burners along their game trails, mends their snares, and pulls worrying brown-winged birds from nets.
She builds fires and makes stews of thin bones that peel under the teeth, placing herself among bodies separate from all the horror she’s felt, admiring their smiles, their hands, their easy movements and fast rills of laughter.
She drinks deep of foresters’ brew, rounded and musked, held within hollow logs and fed with grain roasted over fires, washing down breads studded with nuts and fruits from the trees and black-thorned bushes, their sweet cracked tops decorated in dizzying patterns by old men who placed slivers of heat-honey with the care and precision of craftsmen.
She lives, briefly, a gentle double life beneath the branches.
For once, she feeds her own heart and bones before anyone else and returns stronger to the camp in the daylight, her fingers quietly stroking a handful of bright flowers, twined around dark thorn.
Carefully, deliberately, Shipwright puts some space between her and the suffering.
She swaps tales with women who don’t want to kill her; bright-eyed hedgecallers with impish laughs, and faces flushed as half-bit blackberries, enjoying their chat of sex and craft and pride, even as their sticky lips twist wryly over charms scavenged from broken and burnt barrows.
She embraces this tree-line witchery in deep earthen culverts, softly lit and hung with herbs, as she helps to braid feathers into silvered hair, and rubs warming ointments into tired bones, old and young.