The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver
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Synopsis
MEET YOUR NEXT EPIC FANTASY OBSESSION
No one remembers the calamity that killed the gods and stole the names of their people. Now Shipwright and Shroudweaver are known only by their professions.
She's a master of magical shipbuilding. He's a maker of the gilded gods that fuel their sails, stitched from the souls of dead sailors.
When a chance to save their world calls the veterans back to shore, they decide they'll stop at nothing to vanquish the ultimate evil, embarking on a deadly race against time to beat the grief-wracked sorceress known as Crowkisser to the notorious mountain kingdom in the legend-infested north before she unleashes the ancient power entombed at its heart - the one waiting to finish what it started.
The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver introduces a trail-blazing new voice in Scottish fantasy with an epic adventure of ancient gods, apocalyptic magic, and love that can survive the end of the world - unmissable for fans of The Will of the Many by James Islington, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
Release date: November 27, 2025
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 784
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The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver
Rafael Torrubia
first light
dawn
water moving onto water
Shipwright’s hands.
Coarse, heavy things.
Fit for spars and oars and swallowing skies.
Shroudweaver’s hands.
Thin things, light-boned as a bird.
Fit for cerements, the twisting and weaving of linen, brief touches on shoulder blades.
Both bent to their tasks with quiet focus. Each living in the hush of their own heads, the ship pitching and bucking in a ceaseless swell.
The ocean rocks the wet timber like a wolf at the door, seeking gaps and weaknesses. The Shipwright feels it under her as she stands on the deck, feels it run up her legs, a slow rhythmic push in her muscles. A gentle, hungry flexing. The first whispers of a challenge. She drives and hammers pegs, splits wood, retwists twine with raw fingers. She’s quiet as she works, letting the sea fill the spaces in her mind. Above, clouds ravel like skeins of old wool, spitting the first few drops of new rain. She raises her head, sticks out a dry tongue and catches the cool water. The ship rocks, the sea waits, the crew watch, callow and listless. She splits wood, strings sail, slops tar in silence.
The Shroudweaver stands below decks, a slip of a man, his body built from forgotten pieces and then trimmed by a life in lightless places, by years spent in the hollow of other lives, gently shaping and weaving and sending forth. He feels the sea against the hull, sees its slow salting into the barnacle gaps, hears its dripped-out irregular rhythms, feels its predator sway. He works efficiently, binding and parcelling, making swift stitches and careful knots to hold what remains of the spirit within the body under his fingers. Much of it is likely lost already; the man has come to him late in the day. A lesser worker would have given up long ago, but Shroudweaver is practiced and stubborn and knows the ways to carve a god from a man.
Heavy boots sound on the stairs down, the hatch thumps, and Shipwright joins him, broad-shouldered in the drip-down light.
‘This war’s too fucking hungry,’ she says, and the curl in her lip stretches the scars on her face as she glances down at the corpse.
He’s a light thing, slim, roughly hewn. Ribbon threading his fingers, neat red stitching on his eyes and lips strangely out of place on a face that looks fresh off a mason’s block.
‘Did he come in on West Tide?’ she asks.
He doesn’t look like a West Tide boy. Too raw-boned – skin clear of ash – his teeth still straight and proud in his head.
Shroudweaver purses his lips, shakes his head, slowly darns and stitches. ‘I don’t think so. He floated in at dawn with a few others. Kisser’s been hunting again.’
The needle moves, silver swift.
‘Too emptied. I couldn’t do anything for them.’
If there’s a frown there, it fades like breath on a mirror. She claps him on the shoulder. ‘I’m going to take a look topside.’
The deck greets her listlessly. What remains of the crew tend their tasks with quiet persistence. This close to land, even the great ships are vulnerable. She reaches the rail in measured strides and scans the shoreline with a spyglass.
Despite the distance, as the shingle gives way to scree and scrub, she can see that they’ve hung up gallowswatchers – limp-fleshed, their stretched necks craning ceaselessly, the hollows of their sockets filled with a bright hungry light. Dead men dancing a salt-jig, as their eyes comb the coastal paths. No one is making it out of the port of Astic tonight, not without attracting their stares. It’s not worth running the gauntlet to get out to open sea.
The ship is dubious shelter at best, despite her efforts. She shifts her wide hips uneasily, plants her feet more securely against the shuck and roll. She’s done what she can, Shroudweaver too.
The rig spirits are tightened, lashed steadily to spinning copper bearings which whine gently in the stiffening wind. Whether it’ll be enough – that’s another question. This voyage has been long, sucking life from the spinners like meat from a bone.
On the grey coast, the port spits out a flock of questing crows. They wheel drunkenly.
Magic is being worked ashore. She can taste it on her tongue, bitter as burnt sugar. Staying here is a fool’s game.
There’s only one thing for it. Shipwright fills lungs built from bellows-brass and gives the order.
‘Raise sails!’
Shroudweaver hears the shout thunder above decks, watches the corpse’s fingers stiffen. Even in death, a sailor wants to sail. He leans low over the dead man’s cool skull and rubs saltpetre into its temples. A little touch of the soil to soothe the spirit. His long fingers move with exaggerated care, his thin heart flutters like a bird in a paper cage.
The raising of gods is a dicey business. Decades he’s been doing it now, with a catch in his throat every time. He still hears his teacher’s voice in his head. Red thread for binding. Holding the scraps of the soul in the body long enough for him to push them together into something new. Old notes reused for a new song. Stale air slipped into fresh lungs.
Above, the gunshot snap of canvas as the sails unfurl. The cries of the crew given sudden life. More distantly he senses the hot toffee taste of magic, a flash of crow wings, and stifles a frantic fear of being torn asunder.
Shroudweaver finishes his preparations and, inside the body of the dead man, a small god begins to sing. A halting thing, at first, for the god is fragile and unreal. Stitched from scraps of spirit and nested in a dead man’s chest. Yet it sings as it grows, its fledgling body stretching through meat and muscle. Filling dead flesh with golden light.
The song filters up through straining timbers and curls around Shipwright like a cat. The crew’s backs straighten and the sails fill with a wind hung with spices.
The ship is brightest in motion. Shipwright’s face is split by a broad grin and she throws back her whipcord arms to greet the freshening wind. Shroudweaver appears by her shoulder, his thin grey hair spidering in the breeze. She drops the grin on him, broad white teeth and sharp eyes.
‘Nice work,’ she says.
He shrugs diffidently. ‘I had good materials.’
The ship kisses the ocean, the tops of the waves a brief press against her surging bow.
‘We couldn’t move like this without you.’
Another shrug. ‘You couldn’t move like this without the god.’
She cuffs him around the head. ‘And who makes the gods?’
This time, with the shrug, a sly smile.
the body chases the flame of first creation
the name burns like tinder
the mouth still holds the song
Eventually they stop running, the crows far behind, the last gilded breath fading from the sails. They’ve both left the rail by the time the last swell subsides, sprawled around a bottle of wine in Shipwright’s cabin.
She takes a deep draw of her pipe and speaks through the smoke.
‘How long can we keep this up?’
Shroudweaver waves a hand loose with drink.
‘There’ll be gods as long as there’s corpses.’
Shipwright coughs, spits.
‘We can run a while yet then. Up to Hesper at least.’
She stretches, shoulders popping. ‘We need to do something more than just harry her though. Our luck can’t hold, not with the north locked down.’
Shroudweaver pours, marvels at the steadiness of his hands. Amazing what a drop of something good can do. ‘Locked down? Is that what we’re calling it? Last I talked to Fallon he said they were’ – he sips, adopts an enraged expression – ‘“Pissing over everything between hill and coast”, by which I think he meant, getting a bit more aggressive about their borders.’
‘Hard to tell with Fallon,’ Shipwright says. ‘He’s so understated.’ Shroudweaver raises an eyebrow and clinks her glass. Shipwright leans back, crosses her legs, drinks deep. It is good, this one. Nabbed out the hold of some unlucky merchantman a few days back. A bit opportunistic, perhaps, but if Kisser was sinking ships, there was no reason to let the wine drown as well. She swills it a little as she wriggles her toes to warm them up. ‘I think aggressive is putting it mildly. Some of the caravels that used to run north have given up entirely. Trade routes are all locked down from the coast on in. Heard tell there’s towns burning there that haven’t been touched by Kisser.’
Shroudweaver’s expression is perplexed. ‘Why would they?’
‘Why do people do anything these days? Fear. There are still the remains of temples up there, still pilgrim routes that might pull people north. It’s clear they have no interest in that. Not in money, not in the war. Thell wants one thing, to be left the fuck alone.’
She sips again. ‘I can sympathise’.
After a moment, she takes her glass to the cabin window and looks out across the waves to the shore. She watches distant, small lights bob as patrols of people who want to kill her tread the coastline, waiting for any ship stupid enough to court the rocks.
‘Ah, no peace for us until we finish this.’ She reaches up with a hand, pulls the curtain against the growing chill, turns the lamplight down softer, before she sits back on the bench, arching a spine grown weary from standing.
Shroudweaver’s breath catches in his throat and he rubs his brow with tired fingers.
Shipwright sees the movement and her smile is softer than her face should allow.
‘It’s alright,’ she says. ‘I’m not quite done yet.’
‘We’re getting closer though,’ he says.
Her rough hand is heavy on his knuckles and when she leans in to kiss his forehead she smells of tar, split wood, and sweat.
‘Close isn’t done,’ she says and there’s steel in it.
She pours more wine, raises the glass.
‘Kicking and screaming?’ she says.
Shroudweaver’s smile could light lamps.
other temples
whalebone arch
willow bower
lover’s arms
mother
In the city on the shore, the crows return. She waits for them, watches their wings beat over lamp-lit streets, between smoke-stained buildings.
People are avoiding the curfew, she notices, in small defiant clumps. Tiny rebellions. Irritating.
The crows descend, in ones and twos, pressing themselves against her body, clustering on the pale branches of her arms. Their small insistent hearts hammering with secrets.
She opens her mouth and they crawl inside, sharp claws on her lips and tongue, small bones crunching under her teeth.
She swallows feathers and blood, feels them wriggle down her throat and settle in her stomach. Their quiet cawing threads through her muscles. Their knowledge fills her brain.
She swallows the flock piece by piece, as the lamps wink out and the streets are filled by loyal men with sharp blades.
The ship is long gone, sped across the sea, its body mended and its sails filled with a new god. She’d almost had them, Shipwright and Shroudweaver both. That would have been a thing, an end to at least one annoyance. She couldn’t move anything up the coast because of Hesper and the remnants of her bastard fleet; couldn’t move anything overland while the republic in Thell was marking its borders in bronze and blood. So she stayed here – her people stayed here – slowly starving.
She steps to the side of the room, pours a pitcher of water and begins to wash herself. The water darkens with swirls of blood and feather.
It takes some time for her hands to scrub clean. The blood has worked in deep, under the nails, dark against her skin. She works studiously, precisely, like a surgeon, feeling her throat contract as the last scraps of bone and flesh wriggle downwards.
The Crowkisser seems small in this room, as if it were designed for someone larger, bolder. She could get lost in the shadows of the great pillars. Her thin hair could be pulled by the wind that howls through the shattered panes and be lost.
When she straightens and stands her spine is picked out in the moonlight like a half-finished carving. The harshness of her breathing is the only sign that she might be anything less than utterly calm.
Inside her skull, her mind runs like a rat. Testing out theories. Scurrying to conclusions. None of it made sense. She’d won; had won for three years now. Three years where her enemies had refused to die, and where she’d been kept penned in the south by a mountain of fundamentalists, and a handful of ships’ captains.
She swirls water, spits redly. One ship the worst of them, ruddy as the dawn, and pushed along by some foreign magic she barely understood. Sails always bright against the dark rocks of the coast. Every one of its damned voyages heralded by the lighting of the signal beacons. Great piles of bleached wood, coughing flame up into the sky.
The Teeth, the people of this city called them. The people of Astic. Her people, looking up at her over cups or across scattered maps and shaking their heads ruefully.
‘When the Teeth spit fire, the sea burns.’
And wasn’t that the truth? She sits, straightens the coarse line of her skirts, half spattered with blood, feather, other darknesses.
As long as the ship remained on the sea, she would never truly have won. Faster than the rest. Stronger. Worse than that, a symbol.
As long as that pair remained aboard the ship, that symbol actually held meaning. The last Shroudweaver. Perhaps the last Shipwright.
Her fingers run over the map before her, digging in.
Patience. She needs patience. Patience and a drink of water. And him, much though she hates to admit it.
As if the shadows hear her, he approaches from behind. Soft-booted in the half-light, announced only by the faint clink of harness and clasp, he steps lightly over tilted flagstones, strewn with the bones of small creatures and wet with the insistent, driving rain.
She steps quietly backwards into his opening arms and he pulls her towards him until she rests on her heels and can flick her eyes up precariously to meet his.
‘Long night, Crowkisser?’ he says, his lips grazing her neck as his fingers tighten against her ribs.
She opens her mouth to reply but her first words are feather and gristle. She coughs and wriggles free self-consciously.
‘Yeah, too long,’ she says, and her fingers flick anxiously at the corners of her lips, brushing away the ghosts of birds.
He steps towards her again, and staggers. Beneath his jacket, under the armour, there’s blood, ragged and spreading.
‘You’re hurt,’ she says, and it’s an accusation.
He shrugs apologetically, lopsidedly. ‘They got lucky.’
Crowkisser shakes her head tersely and walks towards him.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I got lucky. Which means you, you get to stay alive. And be safe.’ Each point punctuated by a prodding finger in the middle of his chest.
He winces and nods, slower than she is, less confident.
‘Fine, fine. I hear, I obey. Help me off with this, will you?’
The rifle over his shoulder is almost as tall as he is. She slips behind him and unclasps buckles that retract back into the weapon with a satisfied hiss. He stands clear, and Crowkisser does something quick and clever with her fingers. The rifle clicks, folds, collapses, until it’s no more than a sullen, wrought, jagged spike in her hands, a foot long, if that. It smells acrid and she sucks at her gums subconsciously.
‘Who was aboard?’
Another shrug. The Slickwalker is full of them tonight.
‘More of Fallon’s diehards,’ he mutters. ‘Change is hard for some people.’
Crowkisser purses her lips. ‘They shouldn’t take it out on you.’
For a second, his face flickers into something sharper, more remorseful.
‘They’re paid to. Besides, who else are they going to take it out on?’ He raises his arms in exasperation, ‘We pulled the trigger. We … we set all this in motion.’
His shoulders slump, the anger flows out of him like water. He holds her at arm’s length, runs a finger along the proud, sharp jaw he’s known since they were kids, remembering her jutting defiance at children twice her size, at anyone who said no.
‘We did this, Crowkisser. We can’t step back from that.’
Her eyes flick up to meet his and he flinches back in shock at their flat hardness.
‘We set them free.’ Crowkisser’s voice is the first stones of the landslide. ‘We set them all free.’ She pitches and cracks, boulders crashing in the mountain heights. ‘Every. Single. One. Of. Them.’ Her eyes are black fire and her voice is the roll of distant thunder.
He barely sees the slap coming, but feels the whip-crack sting on his cheek, spits blood into the dust and bones.
‘Every. Single. One.’ She repeats and her voice is hollow as the high valleys.
‘Every one,’ she says, in the husk of a whisper. He pulls her close with aching arms and feels her heart hammer against his chest.
‘Every one,’ and her breath lurches ragged and wet.
‘Oh gods,’ she breathes.
Slickwalker rocks her like a baby.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not anymore.’
on anatomising the hearts
we found them strange
nacreous, rigid,
ringing like a struck bell
—Excursions in the Near Wreck, Wicktwister
Dawn rises shyly off the Hesperian coast, East Tide retreating from the beaches where grey gulls sweep, cackle and war with fat green crabs over the bounty of last night’s swell.
Four or five fresh bodies, bloated and scoured by the sea. Shroudweaver watches them. Shipwright watches Shroudweaver.
Her arms enfold him from behind and she murmurs in his ear.
‘Recognise them?’
Shroudweaver squints and his mind falls into a quieter space, rattles and hums with detail. The weave of cloth, the cut of boots.
‘Wreck of the Volante,’ he says and feels Shipwright’s arms stiffen. His sharp eyes scan cuts, abrasions, peeled-back grimaces, and the crabs squabbling over charred fingertips.
‘She went down to something big and noisy. Maybe guns. Maybe magic. Maybe sabotage.’ He rolls his shoulders. ‘Lots of fire. Not quick. Not pretty.’
Shipwright snarls, ‘Fucking Crowkisser.’ She ruffles Shroudweaver’s thin hair. ‘No offense, but your daughter’s a cunt.’
She turns to the crew.
‘Bring us in.’
A few minutes later and they’re standing knee-deep in the surf, watching the broken boards of the Volante make their way to land for the last time. The crabs have retreated to a safe distance, their slick bodies jostling in oily, boisterous heaps.
The crew fan out, searching for salvage, and more importantly, for bodies. Names and faces to bring home to the widows on shore. Scoured fingers to break fathers’ hearts and salted hair to be clasped in lockets and shaking hands.
Shipwright squats on the tideline, an ache in the small of her back, and a harder ache in her heart. Never too many drowned young faces for the sea. She fishes around, pulls up a shattered plank, its edges burnt and curved smooth as glass. She sniffs it – lemon and grease – and bites her cheek to stop her breakfast from coming up.
‘Slickwalker. He’s getting better.’
Shroudweaver turns. He’s shivering already, the cold of the water stealing up his thin legs.
‘He shouldn’t even be able to get aboard. I thought you fitted the remaining ships with spinners?’
She nods, sloshes towards him to push him gently out of the water and up the beach.
‘That I did. Stay dry.’
He pulls his hood higher, tightens a scarf against the wind. ‘I’ll try.’
His eyes wander up the cliffs, lingering on the distant spike of a gallowswatcher against the skyline. Closer, one of the Teeth smoulders. ‘We shouldn’t hang about. Any clue on the spinners?’
Shipwright rolls her eyes, hikes her trousers and heads back to the swelling scurf of the wreck. She lets her fingers sink into the waves, reading their rhythm, and trying to feel the hum of a spinner somewhere amid it all.
‘Nothing.’
Up the beach, one of the crewmen yelps, trips, flounders in the surf and dark sand. Shipwright glances across, down at his feet and sees it buried, just at toe height. Fairly rough and ready as spinners go, but she’d been working fast, and the smiths in Hesper hadn’t seen one for years.
When she draws closer, the problem is obvious – half the facing torn off, that same lemony stink.
‘The bastard shot them off,’ she calls.
Shroudweaver turns. ‘Shot them. From where?’
She shrugs. ‘The shore, I’d guess. I should have seen that coming.’
Shroudweaver’s eyes scan the distance between shore and deep sea. ‘You have to be kidding me,’ he mutters.
‘What?’ she shouts.
He walks closer. ‘What did she do to him that he can do that?’
She shrugs, pockets the spinner. ‘A mystery for another day.’ Then, rubbing a hand across her brow, asks, ‘Can we go? This is breaking my heart. And Fallon needs to know.’
He nods, places a hand gently in the small of her back.
‘Of course.’
From the gangplank, they look back at the shore as the ship casts off.
Shipwright’s eyes are narrow against the wind, her hair pulled across her face.
‘One of the last,’ she says.
‘Last what?’ he asks
‘Last of the great ships.’ Her hands tighten on the rail. ‘One of the last to sail south with us. One of the last still standing. One of the last with a crew still breathing. I should have seen this coming.’ The tears on her cheek are dragged by the wind. ‘She’ll come for all of them, eventually. Then us.’
He turns her face towards his. ‘We won’t let that happen.’
‘They took me in,’ she says.
He frowns, ‘Who?’
‘The Volante’s crew, when I first got here. Not a damn crew would turn their head. Afraid of me, afraid of the ship.’ She smiles wistfully. ‘Not the Volante though. It was two minutes of bristling then days of drinking something red and foul.’
‘Buckwater,’ Shroudweaver mutters, and grimaces.
She nods. ‘That was it. Tasted like burning goat’s piss.’ Her face softens. ‘They didn’t care that I wasn’t from here; that they’d never seen a ship like mine.’ She snorts. ‘I mean, they offered to sell their captain to me in trade for it, but I don’t think they were serious.’
Her face clouds again. ‘Wish I could remember his name. Poor sod never lived long enough to take a new one. I suppose he’s just blowing ash somewhere in the south now.’ She shakes her head. ‘Last of the great ships.’
Shroudweaver taps her arm, ‘Wait here.’
The shore pulls up to the horizon before he returns with two leather cups and a bladder that reeks like a drunkard’s nightmare.
She stares at him.
‘That isn’t?’
He grins, ‘I got the taste for it a while back, on the voyage down.’
He leans on the rail and pours, passes her a cup. Turns to the sea, and raises it.
‘To the Volante.’
She mirrors him, ‘The Volante. Those shabby bastards. The sea’s too good for them.’
every map different
every river returning to
the same source
A few hours later and the Volante’s unlucky crew are just more bodies in their wake. Shroudweaver sucks on hard tack and looks at Shipwright with narrowed eyes as she buffs the scratches out of her thick deck-boots. Her broad lips curl as she spits and polishes, and he falls in love again. Almost twenty years now. Always the same motions when she’s worried. Boots polished and socks darned. Small repairs. Always the same motions. Probably the same boots, come to think of it.
He waves the biscuit pointedly. ‘Old habits, huh?’
She nods, tongue on teeth.
He grins. ‘So, what’s the plan?’
There’s barely a beat before she replies. ‘Two more days up the coast to Hesper. We see what’s left of their fleet, we talk to Fallon and we take on who we can. Get the civilians up the coast some before Crowkisser comes to stir up trouble. She’ll head for Hesper next.’
Shroudweaver frowns, tips his head. ‘And then?’
Shipwright snorts, slips thick grey socks on her broad feet and buckles up. ‘Then we find out if anyone else is as pissed off as we are, and we start to dream up some really inventive ways to fuck her shit up.’ When Shroudweaver laughs it’s dry as sand swilling around a glass.
‘Poetry,’ he says. ‘Pure poetry. Maybe just a hair short on ideas though.’
She sets the boot down, fixes him with a look. ‘We have thirteen fresh bodies in the hold. I’m a little light on ideas.’
He picks sand out from between his toes. ‘Me too. Well, I have one or two, but it depends on Fallon. And I don’t know if he can be depended on.’
She watches him. ‘That’s a little … off-putting.’
He flicks with a nail. ‘Sorry. Sandals.’
She shakes her head despairingly. ‘It’s just as well you’re cute. Do you think Fallon’ll be happy to see us?’
Shroudweaver shrugs and looks out to the coast. ‘I think so. We’re all he has left at this point, since the north shut its gates. Since Riss, and then Quickfish.’
She follows his gaze to where white-bellied birds wheel around the headland. ‘Time was we would have run north first. We had that heroic glow about us. A bit of cred to lean on.’
He snorts, but she continues. ‘Now, I wouldn’t set foot up there without someone watching my back. Too much god-stink clinging to our boots. Then after the fleet burnt, after we lost the ships, after the south …’
‘Hard to hold your head high’, he finishes
‘Hard to hold your head high.’
She moves closer to him, undoes a strap, starts rubbing the blood back into his feet.
‘I really thought it would work, you know? Time was, I thought there was nothing the three of us couldn’t achieve.’
He sighs, half relief, half regret. ‘We’re bad losers, that’s our problem.’
She tries to hold back a smile, fails. ‘Among other things, maybe.’
He wriggles his toes. ‘Can you do the other one?’
She taps her thigh. ‘Yes. Bring me your manky feet. Something I can actually handle.’
Her tone’s light enough, but he’d have to be an idiot to miss the edge on her words. Eighteen months of skirmishing and running fraying at the edge of her smile. Crowkisser hadn’t sat meekly in Astic while they starved her out.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘that it’s partly our fault.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Thanks for that. Very uplifting.’
Above them, a spinner whines like a wet cat. A wave breaks over the side of the ship, salt water sliding down the curve of the spinner’s vibrations, leaving the deck untouched.
He smiles. ‘You know what I mean. We were cocky. We’d won one war already. Liberated Thell. Founded the Republic. Defeated a monster.’
She dries off his foot, slips the sandal back on. ‘Do you ever think we were a bit rusty? Decades between saving the Republic and sailing south.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I remember sitting with Declan and his wife. Before’ – she waves a hand – ‘all of it. And we were laughing.’
She puts her head in her hands. ‘I remember her saying to me … she was holding that battered sword of his, and she turned and she said to me, “how much damage can one girl do?”’ She winces again as the spinners whine, and the whole ship bucks. ‘I guess we all found out the answer to that.’
Shroudweaver says nothing, re-straps his sandals quietly. The ship cants again, and she sways. ‘I guess we’re still finding out.’
She reaches into a pouch, digs out some shards of metal and starts whittling, bending them gently with her hands. ‘Gods. What were we thinking?’
He watches her hands move over the brass. ‘That we had an alliance of the biggest cities on this side of the world? That we, somehow, had Hesper and the whole of the Republic at our back. That we’d had more than fifteen years of peace. Tenuous peace, but real peace. Growing peace, farming peace.’ Her fingers tighten. Metal snaps and she curses. ‘Didn’t save us.’
He takes her hands, checks them for cuts. ‘What are you working on?’
She gestures up at the spinner. ‘That one’s off by a tone. Ten, twenty more big waves and we’re getting wet.’
He follows her finger up to the tiny brass sphere strung impossibly high above. ‘They still amaze me.’
She clenches her jaw. ‘They didn’t save us either. We all sailed down there. That big beautiful fleet. All those people.’ She breathes deep. ‘They didn’t save us either.’
Shroudweaver brushes faint flecks of metal from Shipwright’s hands, takes her face and pulls it down to his shoulder. ‘You know why though, love?’
She settles into the curve of his neck. ‘No. Hair, please.’
He starts moving his fingers through it, teasing out the burrs and snags, and wishes he could hold the world there for a while, with just her slowly relaxing breath, and the rock of the ship under them. The world had never seemed interested in waiting for them.
He kisses the top of her head. ‘Nothing would have saved us. We sailed down looking to win a war. Instead, we got the end of the world.’
Her voice is sleepy with the rhythm of the sea, the rhythm of his fingers. Her hand snakes around his ribs. ‘Not yet.’
He brushes the salt from her hair. ‘What, love?’
‘Not the end of the world yet.’
What does the sea take
But everything
But everything
But everything?
Everything
but light.
—Burial litany, Heron Halls
The ship takes on water at night, and they bail during the day. Salt moves into the skin, and into the blood. Shipwright feels herself aching with every swing of the bucket, a tiredness burning deeper than muscle.
It’s dark down in the bilges. What little sun there is has been snagged in the rigging and spilt over the deck boards, as the ship noses her way up the coast.
Hesper waits. Distant, still, b
dawn
water moving onto water
Shipwright’s hands.
Coarse, heavy things.
Fit for spars and oars and swallowing skies.
Shroudweaver’s hands.
Thin things, light-boned as a bird.
Fit for cerements, the twisting and weaving of linen, brief touches on shoulder blades.
Both bent to their tasks with quiet focus. Each living in the hush of their own heads, the ship pitching and bucking in a ceaseless swell.
The ocean rocks the wet timber like a wolf at the door, seeking gaps and weaknesses. The Shipwright feels it under her as she stands on the deck, feels it run up her legs, a slow rhythmic push in her muscles. A gentle, hungry flexing. The first whispers of a challenge. She drives and hammers pegs, splits wood, retwists twine with raw fingers. She’s quiet as she works, letting the sea fill the spaces in her mind. Above, clouds ravel like skeins of old wool, spitting the first few drops of new rain. She raises her head, sticks out a dry tongue and catches the cool water. The ship rocks, the sea waits, the crew watch, callow and listless. She splits wood, strings sail, slops tar in silence.
The Shroudweaver stands below decks, a slip of a man, his body built from forgotten pieces and then trimmed by a life in lightless places, by years spent in the hollow of other lives, gently shaping and weaving and sending forth. He feels the sea against the hull, sees its slow salting into the barnacle gaps, hears its dripped-out irregular rhythms, feels its predator sway. He works efficiently, binding and parcelling, making swift stitches and careful knots to hold what remains of the spirit within the body under his fingers. Much of it is likely lost already; the man has come to him late in the day. A lesser worker would have given up long ago, but Shroudweaver is practiced and stubborn and knows the ways to carve a god from a man.
Heavy boots sound on the stairs down, the hatch thumps, and Shipwright joins him, broad-shouldered in the drip-down light.
‘This war’s too fucking hungry,’ she says, and the curl in her lip stretches the scars on her face as she glances down at the corpse.
He’s a light thing, slim, roughly hewn. Ribbon threading his fingers, neat red stitching on his eyes and lips strangely out of place on a face that looks fresh off a mason’s block.
‘Did he come in on West Tide?’ she asks.
He doesn’t look like a West Tide boy. Too raw-boned – skin clear of ash – his teeth still straight and proud in his head.
Shroudweaver purses his lips, shakes his head, slowly darns and stitches. ‘I don’t think so. He floated in at dawn with a few others. Kisser’s been hunting again.’
The needle moves, silver swift.
‘Too emptied. I couldn’t do anything for them.’
If there’s a frown there, it fades like breath on a mirror. She claps him on the shoulder. ‘I’m going to take a look topside.’
The deck greets her listlessly. What remains of the crew tend their tasks with quiet persistence. This close to land, even the great ships are vulnerable. She reaches the rail in measured strides and scans the shoreline with a spyglass.
Despite the distance, as the shingle gives way to scree and scrub, she can see that they’ve hung up gallowswatchers – limp-fleshed, their stretched necks craning ceaselessly, the hollows of their sockets filled with a bright hungry light. Dead men dancing a salt-jig, as their eyes comb the coastal paths. No one is making it out of the port of Astic tonight, not without attracting their stares. It’s not worth running the gauntlet to get out to open sea.
The ship is dubious shelter at best, despite her efforts. She shifts her wide hips uneasily, plants her feet more securely against the shuck and roll. She’s done what she can, Shroudweaver too.
The rig spirits are tightened, lashed steadily to spinning copper bearings which whine gently in the stiffening wind. Whether it’ll be enough – that’s another question. This voyage has been long, sucking life from the spinners like meat from a bone.
On the grey coast, the port spits out a flock of questing crows. They wheel drunkenly.
Magic is being worked ashore. She can taste it on her tongue, bitter as burnt sugar. Staying here is a fool’s game.
There’s only one thing for it. Shipwright fills lungs built from bellows-brass and gives the order.
‘Raise sails!’
Shroudweaver hears the shout thunder above decks, watches the corpse’s fingers stiffen. Even in death, a sailor wants to sail. He leans low over the dead man’s cool skull and rubs saltpetre into its temples. A little touch of the soil to soothe the spirit. His long fingers move with exaggerated care, his thin heart flutters like a bird in a paper cage.
The raising of gods is a dicey business. Decades he’s been doing it now, with a catch in his throat every time. He still hears his teacher’s voice in his head. Red thread for binding. Holding the scraps of the soul in the body long enough for him to push them together into something new. Old notes reused for a new song. Stale air slipped into fresh lungs.
Above, the gunshot snap of canvas as the sails unfurl. The cries of the crew given sudden life. More distantly he senses the hot toffee taste of magic, a flash of crow wings, and stifles a frantic fear of being torn asunder.
Shroudweaver finishes his preparations and, inside the body of the dead man, a small god begins to sing. A halting thing, at first, for the god is fragile and unreal. Stitched from scraps of spirit and nested in a dead man’s chest. Yet it sings as it grows, its fledgling body stretching through meat and muscle. Filling dead flesh with golden light.
The song filters up through straining timbers and curls around Shipwright like a cat. The crew’s backs straighten and the sails fill with a wind hung with spices.
The ship is brightest in motion. Shipwright’s face is split by a broad grin and she throws back her whipcord arms to greet the freshening wind. Shroudweaver appears by her shoulder, his thin grey hair spidering in the breeze. She drops the grin on him, broad white teeth and sharp eyes.
‘Nice work,’ she says.
He shrugs diffidently. ‘I had good materials.’
The ship kisses the ocean, the tops of the waves a brief press against her surging bow.
‘We couldn’t move like this without you.’
Another shrug. ‘You couldn’t move like this without the god.’
She cuffs him around the head. ‘And who makes the gods?’
This time, with the shrug, a sly smile.
the body chases the flame of first creation
the name burns like tinder
the mouth still holds the song
Eventually they stop running, the crows far behind, the last gilded breath fading from the sails. They’ve both left the rail by the time the last swell subsides, sprawled around a bottle of wine in Shipwright’s cabin.
She takes a deep draw of her pipe and speaks through the smoke.
‘How long can we keep this up?’
Shroudweaver waves a hand loose with drink.
‘There’ll be gods as long as there’s corpses.’
Shipwright coughs, spits.
‘We can run a while yet then. Up to Hesper at least.’
She stretches, shoulders popping. ‘We need to do something more than just harry her though. Our luck can’t hold, not with the north locked down.’
Shroudweaver pours, marvels at the steadiness of his hands. Amazing what a drop of something good can do. ‘Locked down? Is that what we’re calling it? Last I talked to Fallon he said they were’ – he sips, adopts an enraged expression – ‘“Pissing over everything between hill and coast”, by which I think he meant, getting a bit more aggressive about their borders.’
‘Hard to tell with Fallon,’ Shipwright says. ‘He’s so understated.’ Shroudweaver raises an eyebrow and clinks her glass. Shipwright leans back, crosses her legs, drinks deep. It is good, this one. Nabbed out the hold of some unlucky merchantman a few days back. A bit opportunistic, perhaps, but if Kisser was sinking ships, there was no reason to let the wine drown as well. She swills it a little as she wriggles her toes to warm them up. ‘I think aggressive is putting it mildly. Some of the caravels that used to run north have given up entirely. Trade routes are all locked down from the coast on in. Heard tell there’s towns burning there that haven’t been touched by Kisser.’
Shroudweaver’s expression is perplexed. ‘Why would they?’
‘Why do people do anything these days? Fear. There are still the remains of temples up there, still pilgrim routes that might pull people north. It’s clear they have no interest in that. Not in money, not in the war. Thell wants one thing, to be left the fuck alone.’
She sips again. ‘I can sympathise’.
After a moment, she takes her glass to the cabin window and looks out across the waves to the shore. She watches distant, small lights bob as patrols of people who want to kill her tread the coastline, waiting for any ship stupid enough to court the rocks.
‘Ah, no peace for us until we finish this.’ She reaches up with a hand, pulls the curtain against the growing chill, turns the lamplight down softer, before she sits back on the bench, arching a spine grown weary from standing.
Shroudweaver’s breath catches in his throat and he rubs his brow with tired fingers.
Shipwright sees the movement and her smile is softer than her face should allow.
‘It’s alright,’ she says. ‘I’m not quite done yet.’
‘We’re getting closer though,’ he says.
Her rough hand is heavy on his knuckles and when she leans in to kiss his forehead she smells of tar, split wood, and sweat.
‘Close isn’t done,’ she says and there’s steel in it.
She pours more wine, raises the glass.
‘Kicking and screaming?’ she says.
Shroudweaver’s smile could light lamps.
other temples
whalebone arch
willow bower
lover’s arms
mother
In the city on the shore, the crows return. She waits for them, watches their wings beat over lamp-lit streets, between smoke-stained buildings.
People are avoiding the curfew, she notices, in small defiant clumps. Tiny rebellions. Irritating.
The crows descend, in ones and twos, pressing themselves against her body, clustering on the pale branches of her arms. Their small insistent hearts hammering with secrets.
She opens her mouth and they crawl inside, sharp claws on her lips and tongue, small bones crunching under her teeth.
She swallows feathers and blood, feels them wriggle down her throat and settle in her stomach. Their quiet cawing threads through her muscles. Their knowledge fills her brain.
She swallows the flock piece by piece, as the lamps wink out and the streets are filled by loyal men with sharp blades.
The ship is long gone, sped across the sea, its body mended and its sails filled with a new god. She’d almost had them, Shipwright and Shroudweaver both. That would have been a thing, an end to at least one annoyance. She couldn’t move anything up the coast because of Hesper and the remnants of her bastard fleet; couldn’t move anything overland while the republic in Thell was marking its borders in bronze and blood. So she stayed here – her people stayed here – slowly starving.
She steps to the side of the room, pours a pitcher of water and begins to wash herself. The water darkens with swirls of blood and feather.
It takes some time for her hands to scrub clean. The blood has worked in deep, under the nails, dark against her skin. She works studiously, precisely, like a surgeon, feeling her throat contract as the last scraps of bone and flesh wriggle downwards.
The Crowkisser seems small in this room, as if it were designed for someone larger, bolder. She could get lost in the shadows of the great pillars. Her thin hair could be pulled by the wind that howls through the shattered panes and be lost.
When she straightens and stands her spine is picked out in the moonlight like a half-finished carving. The harshness of her breathing is the only sign that she might be anything less than utterly calm.
Inside her skull, her mind runs like a rat. Testing out theories. Scurrying to conclusions. None of it made sense. She’d won; had won for three years now. Three years where her enemies had refused to die, and where she’d been kept penned in the south by a mountain of fundamentalists, and a handful of ships’ captains.
She swirls water, spits redly. One ship the worst of them, ruddy as the dawn, and pushed along by some foreign magic she barely understood. Sails always bright against the dark rocks of the coast. Every one of its damned voyages heralded by the lighting of the signal beacons. Great piles of bleached wood, coughing flame up into the sky.
The Teeth, the people of this city called them. The people of Astic. Her people, looking up at her over cups or across scattered maps and shaking their heads ruefully.
‘When the Teeth spit fire, the sea burns.’
And wasn’t that the truth? She sits, straightens the coarse line of her skirts, half spattered with blood, feather, other darknesses.
As long as the ship remained on the sea, she would never truly have won. Faster than the rest. Stronger. Worse than that, a symbol.
As long as that pair remained aboard the ship, that symbol actually held meaning. The last Shroudweaver. Perhaps the last Shipwright.
Her fingers run over the map before her, digging in.
Patience. She needs patience. Patience and a drink of water. And him, much though she hates to admit it.
As if the shadows hear her, he approaches from behind. Soft-booted in the half-light, announced only by the faint clink of harness and clasp, he steps lightly over tilted flagstones, strewn with the bones of small creatures and wet with the insistent, driving rain.
She steps quietly backwards into his opening arms and he pulls her towards him until she rests on her heels and can flick her eyes up precariously to meet his.
‘Long night, Crowkisser?’ he says, his lips grazing her neck as his fingers tighten against her ribs.
She opens her mouth to reply but her first words are feather and gristle. She coughs and wriggles free self-consciously.
‘Yeah, too long,’ she says, and her fingers flick anxiously at the corners of her lips, brushing away the ghosts of birds.
He steps towards her again, and staggers. Beneath his jacket, under the armour, there’s blood, ragged and spreading.
‘You’re hurt,’ she says, and it’s an accusation.
He shrugs apologetically, lopsidedly. ‘They got lucky.’
Crowkisser shakes her head tersely and walks towards him.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I got lucky. Which means you, you get to stay alive. And be safe.’ Each point punctuated by a prodding finger in the middle of his chest.
He winces and nods, slower than she is, less confident.
‘Fine, fine. I hear, I obey. Help me off with this, will you?’
The rifle over his shoulder is almost as tall as he is. She slips behind him and unclasps buckles that retract back into the weapon with a satisfied hiss. He stands clear, and Crowkisser does something quick and clever with her fingers. The rifle clicks, folds, collapses, until it’s no more than a sullen, wrought, jagged spike in her hands, a foot long, if that. It smells acrid and she sucks at her gums subconsciously.
‘Who was aboard?’
Another shrug. The Slickwalker is full of them tonight.
‘More of Fallon’s diehards,’ he mutters. ‘Change is hard for some people.’
Crowkisser purses her lips. ‘They shouldn’t take it out on you.’
For a second, his face flickers into something sharper, more remorseful.
‘They’re paid to. Besides, who else are they going to take it out on?’ He raises his arms in exasperation, ‘We pulled the trigger. We … we set all this in motion.’
His shoulders slump, the anger flows out of him like water. He holds her at arm’s length, runs a finger along the proud, sharp jaw he’s known since they were kids, remembering her jutting defiance at children twice her size, at anyone who said no.
‘We did this, Crowkisser. We can’t step back from that.’
Her eyes flick up to meet his and he flinches back in shock at their flat hardness.
‘We set them free.’ Crowkisser’s voice is the first stones of the landslide. ‘We set them all free.’ She pitches and cracks, boulders crashing in the mountain heights. ‘Every. Single. One. Of. Them.’ Her eyes are black fire and her voice is the roll of distant thunder.
He barely sees the slap coming, but feels the whip-crack sting on his cheek, spits blood into the dust and bones.
‘Every. Single. One.’ She repeats and her voice is hollow as the high valleys.
‘Every one,’ she says, in the husk of a whisper. He pulls her close with aching arms and feels her heart hammer against his chest.
‘Every one,’ and her breath lurches ragged and wet.
‘Oh gods,’ she breathes.
Slickwalker rocks her like a baby.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not anymore.’
on anatomising the hearts
we found them strange
nacreous, rigid,
ringing like a struck bell
—Excursions in the Near Wreck, Wicktwister
Dawn rises shyly off the Hesperian coast, East Tide retreating from the beaches where grey gulls sweep, cackle and war with fat green crabs over the bounty of last night’s swell.
Four or five fresh bodies, bloated and scoured by the sea. Shroudweaver watches them. Shipwright watches Shroudweaver.
Her arms enfold him from behind and she murmurs in his ear.
‘Recognise them?’
Shroudweaver squints and his mind falls into a quieter space, rattles and hums with detail. The weave of cloth, the cut of boots.
‘Wreck of the Volante,’ he says and feels Shipwright’s arms stiffen. His sharp eyes scan cuts, abrasions, peeled-back grimaces, and the crabs squabbling over charred fingertips.
‘She went down to something big and noisy. Maybe guns. Maybe magic. Maybe sabotage.’ He rolls his shoulders. ‘Lots of fire. Not quick. Not pretty.’
Shipwright snarls, ‘Fucking Crowkisser.’ She ruffles Shroudweaver’s thin hair. ‘No offense, but your daughter’s a cunt.’
She turns to the crew.
‘Bring us in.’
A few minutes later and they’re standing knee-deep in the surf, watching the broken boards of the Volante make their way to land for the last time. The crabs have retreated to a safe distance, their slick bodies jostling in oily, boisterous heaps.
The crew fan out, searching for salvage, and more importantly, for bodies. Names and faces to bring home to the widows on shore. Scoured fingers to break fathers’ hearts and salted hair to be clasped in lockets and shaking hands.
Shipwright squats on the tideline, an ache in the small of her back, and a harder ache in her heart. Never too many drowned young faces for the sea. She fishes around, pulls up a shattered plank, its edges burnt and curved smooth as glass. She sniffs it – lemon and grease – and bites her cheek to stop her breakfast from coming up.
‘Slickwalker. He’s getting better.’
Shroudweaver turns. He’s shivering already, the cold of the water stealing up his thin legs.
‘He shouldn’t even be able to get aboard. I thought you fitted the remaining ships with spinners?’
She nods, sloshes towards him to push him gently out of the water and up the beach.
‘That I did. Stay dry.’
He pulls his hood higher, tightens a scarf against the wind. ‘I’ll try.’
His eyes wander up the cliffs, lingering on the distant spike of a gallowswatcher against the skyline. Closer, one of the Teeth smoulders. ‘We shouldn’t hang about. Any clue on the spinners?’
Shipwright rolls her eyes, hikes her trousers and heads back to the swelling scurf of the wreck. She lets her fingers sink into the waves, reading their rhythm, and trying to feel the hum of a spinner somewhere amid it all.
‘Nothing.’
Up the beach, one of the crewmen yelps, trips, flounders in the surf and dark sand. Shipwright glances across, down at his feet and sees it buried, just at toe height. Fairly rough and ready as spinners go, but she’d been working fast, and the smiths in Hesper hadn’t seen one for years.
When she draws closer, the problem is obvious – half the facing torn off, that same lemony stink.
‘The bastard shot them off,’ she calls.
Shroudweaver turns. ‘Shot them. From where?’
She shrugs. ‘The shore, I’d guess. I should have seen that coming.’
Shroudweaver’s eyes scan the distance between shore and deep sea. ‘You have to be kidding me,’ he mutters.
‘What?’ she shouts.
He walks closer. ‘What did she do to him that he can do that?’
She shrugs, pockets the spinner. ‘A mystery for another day.’ Then, rubbing a hand across her brow, asks, ‘Can we go? This is breaking my heart. And Fallon needs to know.’
He nods, places a hand gently in the small of her back.
‘Of course.’
From the gangplank, they look back at the shore as the ship casts off.
Shipwright’s eyes are narrow against the wind, her hair pulled across her face.
‘One of the last,’ she says.
‘Last what?’ he asks
‘Last of the great ships.’ Her hands tighten on the rail. ‘One of the last to sail south with us. One of the last still standing. One of the last with a crew still breathing. I should have seen this coming.’ The tears on her cheek are dragged by the wind. ‘She’ll come for all of them, eventually. Then us.’
He turns her face towards his. ‘We won’t let that happen.’
‘They took me in,’ she says.
He frowns, ‘Who?’
‘The Volante’s crew, when I first got here. Not a damn crew would turn their head. Afraid of me, afraid of the ship.’ She smiles wistfully. ‘Not the Volante though. It was two minutes of bristling then days of drinking something red and foul.’
‘Buckwater,’ Shroudweaver mutters, and grimaces.
She nods. ‘That was it. Tasted like burning goat’s piss.’ Her face softens. ‘They didn’t care that I wasn’t from here; that they’d never seen a ship like mine.’ She snorts. ‘I mean, they offered to sell their captain to me in trade for it, but I don’t think they were serious.’
Her face clouds again. ‘Wish I could remember his name. Poor sod never lived long enough to take a new one. I suppose he’s just blowing ash somewhere in the south now.’ She shakes her head. ‘Last of the great ships.’
Shroudweaver taps her arm, ‘Wait here.’
The shore pulls up to the horizon before he returns with two leather cups and a bladder that reeks like a drunkard’s nightmare.
She stares at him.
‘That isn’t?’
He grins, ‘I got the taste for it a while back, on the voyage down.’
He leans on the rail and pours, passes her a cup. Turns to the sea, and raises it.
‘To the Volante.’
She mirrors him, ‘The Volante. Those shabby bastards. The sea’s too good for them.’
every map different
every river returning to
the same source
A few hours later and the Volante’s unlucky crew are just more bodies in their wake. Shroudweaver sucks on hard tack and looks at Shipwright with narrowed eyes as she buffs the scratches out of her thick deck-boots. Her broad lips curl as she spits and polishes, and he falls in love again. Almost twenty years now. Always the same motions when she’s worried. Boots polished and socks darned. Small repairs. Always the same motions. Probably the same boots, come to think of it.
He waves the biscuit pointedly. ‘Old habits, huh?’
She nods, tongue on teeth.
He grins. ‘So, what’s the plan?’
There’s barely a beat before she replies. ‘Two more days up the coast to Hesper. We see what’s left of their fleet, we talk to Fallon and we take on who we can. Get the civilians up the coast some before Crowkisser comes to stir up trouble. She’ll head for Hesper next.’
Shroudweaver frowns, tips his head. ‘And then?’
Shipwright snorts, slips thick grey socks on her broad feet and buckles up. ‘Then we find out if anyone else is as pissed off as we are, and we start to dream up some really inventive ways to fuck her shit up.’ When Shroudweaver laughs it’s dry as sand swilling around a glass.
‘Poetry,’ he says. ‘Pure poetry. Maybe just a hair short on ideas though.’
She sets the boot down, fixes him with a look. ‘We have thirteen fresh bodies in the hold. I’m a little light on ideas.’
He picks sand out from between his toes. ‘Me too. Well, I have one or two, but it depends on Fallon. And I don’t know if he can be depended on.’
She watches him. ‘That’s a little … off-putting.’
He flicks with a nail. ‘Sorry. Sandals.’
She shakes her head despairingly. ‘It’s just as well you’re cute. Do you think Fallon’ll be happy to see us?’
Shroudweaver shrugs and looks out to the coast. ‘I think so. We’re all he has left at this point, since the north shut its gates. Since Riss, and then Quickfish.’
She follows his gaze to where white-bellied birds wheel around the headland. ‘Time was we would have run north first. We had that heroic glow about us. A bit of cred to lean on.’
He snorts, but she continues. ‘Now, I wouldn’t set foot up there without someone watching my back. Too much god-stink clinging to our boots. Then after the fleet burnt, after we lost the ships, after the south …’
‘Hard to hold your head high’, he finishes
‘Hard to hold your head high.’
She moves closer to him, undoes a strap, starts rubbing the blood back into his feet.
‘I really thought it would work, you know? Time was, I thought there was nothing the three of us couldn’t achieve.’
He sighs, half relief, half regret. ‘We’re bad losers, that’s our problem.’
She tries to hold back a smile, fails. ‘Among other things, maybe.’
He wriggles his toes. ‘Can you do the other one?’
She taps her thigh. ‘Yes. Bring me your manky feet. Something I can actually handle.’
Her tone’s light enough, but he’d have to be an idiot to miss the edge on her words. Eighteen months of skirmishing and running fraying at the edge of her smile. Crowkisser hadn’t sat meekly in Astic while they starved her out.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘that it’s partly our fault.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Thanks for that. Very uplifting.’
Above them, a spinner whines like a wet cat. A wave breaks over the side of the ship, salt water sliding down the curve of the spinner’s vibrations, leaving the deck untouched.
He smiles. ‘You know what I mean. We were cocky. We’d won one war already. Liberated Thell. Founded the Republic. Defeated a monster.’
She dries off his foot, slips the sandal back on. ‘Do you ever think we were a bit rusty? Decades between saving the Republic and sailing south.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I remember sitting with Declan and his wife. Before’ – she waves a hand – ‘all of it. And we were laughing.’
She puts her head in her hands. ‘I remember her saying to me … she was holding that battered sword of his, and she turned and she said to me, “how much damage can one girl do?”’ She winces again as the spinners whine, and the whole ship bucks. ‘I guess we all found out the answer to that.’
Shroudweaver says nothing, re-straps his sandals quietly. The ship cants again, and she sways. ‘I guess we’re still finding out.’
She reaches into a pouch, digs out some shards of metal and starts whittling, bending them gently with her hands. ‘Gods. What were we thinking?’
He watches her hands move over the brass. ‘That we had an alliance of the biggest cities on this side of the world? That we, somehow, had Hesper and the whole of the Republic at our back. That we’d had more than fifteen years of peace. Tenuous peace, but real peace. Growing peace, farming peace.’ Her fingers tighten. Metal snaps and she curses. ‘Didn’t save us.’
He takes her hands, checks them for cuts. ‘What are you working on?’
She gestures up at the spinner. ‘That one’s off by a tone. Ten, twenty more big waves and we’re getting wet.’
He follows her finger up to the tiny brass sphere strung impossibly high above. ‘They still amaze me.’
She clenches her jaw. ‘They didn’t save us either. We all sailed down there. That big beautiful fleet. All those people.’ She breathes deep. ‘They didn’t save us either.’
Shroudweaver brushes faint flecks of metal from Shipwright’s hands, takes her face and pulls it down to his shoulder. ‘You know why though, love?’
She settles into the curve of his neck. ‘No. Hair, please.’
He starts moving his fingers through it, teasing out the burrs and snags, and wishes he could hold the world there for a while, with just her slowly relaxing breath, and the rock of the ship under them. The world had never seemed interested in waiting for them.
He kisses the top of her head. ‘Nothing would have saved us. We sailed down looking to win a war. Instead, we got the end of the world.’
Her voice is sleepy with the rhythm of the sea, the rhythm of his fingers. Her hand snakes around his ribs. ‘Not yet.’
He brushes the salt from her hair. ‘What, love?’
‘Not the end of the world yet.’
What does the sea take
But everything
But everything
But everything?
Everything
but light.
—Burial litany, Heron Halls
The ship takes on water at night, and they bail during the day. Salt moves into the skin, and into the blood. Shipwright feels herself aching with every swing of the bucket, a tiredness burning deeper than muscle.
It’s dark down in the bilges. What little sun there is has been snagged in the rigging and spilt over the deck boards, as the ship noses her way up the coast.
Hesper waits. Distant, still, b
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The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver
Rafael Torrubia
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