Her gorge rose at the thought. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re skin and bones, girl.”
“I just need some air. Just need to breathe.”
Isern pushed the door creaking open and bright daggers glittered along its edge, stabbing, stabbing. Rikke closed one eye altogether and the other to a slit, groaning as they helped her through the doorway. She felt weak as a newborn calf. Everything hurt. The soles of her feet. The tips of her fingers. The inside of her arse.
They helped her onto her father’s favourite bench in the overgrown garden, with the view of Uffrith’s steep streets sloping down to the glittering sea. “Oh, the sun’s a bastard,” she muttered, but she managed to smile as the salt breeze came up and kissed her clammy face. “But the wind’s a good friend.”
“Other way around where we’re going,” said Isern, dumping a sheepskin about Rikke’s shoulders. “Up into the hills.”
“Everything’s a matter of where you stand.” Rikke’s father took both her hands in his. “I have to get back to this bloody moot. If I’m not there, they’ll argue.”
“They’ll argue more if you are there. They’re like bloody children.”
“We’re all like children, Rikke. The older you get, the more you realise the grown-ups won’t suddenly walk in and set things right. You want things right, you have to put ’em right yourself.”
“With your bones and your brains, eh?”
“And your heart, Rikke. And your heart.”
She squeezed her father’s hands, so thin and crooked. “I worry they’ll wear you down.”
“Me?” He gave a smile that was convincing no one. “Never.”
“They already have.”
He smiled again. Truer this time. “That’s what it is to be chief. You make the hard choices so your people won’t have the trouble of ’em.” He glanced about at the weed-choked beds as he stood, brushing off his knees. “One day I’ll tame this bloody garden, you’ll see. You just sit in the breeze, now. Sit and rest.”
Wasn’t like she had much choice. Didn’t have the strength to do much else. She sat and listened to the gulls squawking on the rooftops and the bees busy at the garden’s first ramshackle hints of blossom. She watched the fishermen on the wharves, the women at the well, the carpenters still mending the wounds Stour Nightfall had cut into Uffrith. She wondered if her father would live to see it put right again, and the thought made her feel sad. Sad and lonely. Who’d she be when he was gone?
She closed her eyes again and felt tears prickling. She hardly dared look these days in case she saw something that wasn’t there yet. Hardly dared breathe in case she choked on years-old smoke. Isern had always told her that you cannot force the Long Eye open, but she’d tried, when Leo fought his duel against Stour Nightfall. She’d tried, and seen a crack in the sky. She’d tried, and seen too much, and now she couldn’t force the Long Eye closed again.
“Hear tell you had a fit.”
A shaggy shape loomed over her, a dull glint where one eye should be. “Hey, hey, Shivers,” she said.
He sat beside her, looking out towards the sea. “Hey, hey, stringy.”
“That’s rude.”
“I’m an infamous killer. What d’you expect?”
“One can still kill politely.” It was then she noticed a building not far away was on fire. Going up like a torch, it was, flames gouting from the windows and burning straws whirling from the thatch.
Rikke gently cleared her throat. Even that made her head pound. “That building over there…” She watched a fire-wreathed figure stagger from the doorway and flop down near the well, no one taking much notice.
“What, the inn?”
“Aye. Is it… would you say… on fire, at all?”
Shivers raised his brows at it. Or he raised the one that worked, at least. “Not that I can tell. Does it look on fire to you?”
She winced as the tottering chimney stack collapsed into the charred rafters in a gout of sparks. “Little bit. But I’ve a habit of seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Getting worse?”
“Despite my efforts to look on the sunny side, it seems so.” Rikke felt tears in her eyes and had to wipe them away. The left one was hot again. It was always hot, now. “Isern says there’s someone up in the mountains might help. A dead witch whose face is stitched together with golden wire.”
“That’s your help?”
“Help with strange problems comes from strange people.”
“I guess,” he said.
“At this point, I’ll take any I can get. What’ve you been up to?”
“I was sitting in this moot of your father’s. They’re talking of the future.”
“And what’s in it?”
“You’re the one with the Long Eye.”
Rikke stared at that burning building that wasn’t really burning. The one next door had caught fire, too, now, just patches among the thatch. By the dead, she wanted to reach for a bucket, but how do you put out flames that aren’t there yet? Or that burned out long ago? “Fire and discord,” she muttered.
Shivers gave a grunt. “Takes no magic to see that coming. Red Hat thinks the Protectorate should be part o’ the Union, with seats on their bloody Open Council and everything, I daresay.”
“Hard to imagine.”
“Oxel thinks we should kneel to Stour Nightfall.”
Rikke curled her lip and spat, but weak as she was, she got most of it down her front. “Give it all away before he tears it from us?”
“Or bargain for something while we’ve still got something to bargain with.”
“What about Hardbread?”
“He can’t decide one way or the other, so he agrees with whoever’s talking. No one reckons we can stay as we are once your father’s gone. And no one reckons he’ll be around much longer.”
Rikke blinked at him. “That’s harsh.”
Shivers’ metal eye twinkled with the colours of fire. “I’m an infamous killer. What d’you expect?”
By the dead but the whole of Uffrith was burning now, clouds lit orange and yellow and red and the air heavy with screams and clatters of war, and Rikke gave a groaning sigh, right from her hollow belly, and closed her smarting eyes, and clapped her sore hands over ’em, but even then she could feel the heat pressing on her face, the smoke harsh in her nose.
Something was forced between her jaws and she gagged, tried to twist in a sudden panic but couldn’t move, gripped tight as swelling ice might grip a drowned corpse.
“She’s coming back.”
“Thank the dead,” Rikke heard her father say in the fizzing blackness. “But that’s four times this week.”
She jerked up, pain stabbing behind her eyelids, and spat out the dowel. “Fits are getting worse!”
She was in her room again. Her teeth ached. Her head was splitting. She stared up bleary at her father’s worried face, trying to make sense of it.
“What did you see?” asked Isern. Again.
“The river of corpses and the old men fighting and the young women holding hands and the flag with the eye and an old woman…” blathered Rikke, pressing her hand against her left eye, burning hot. “And her face was stitched together with golden wire.” The same words slobbering out. The same words as before. “She said I had to choose.”