Tap, tap of the needle dipped in the ink, the needle so white and the ink so black, white as snow, black as coal, and Caurib’s soft singing and the smell of sweat and spice and sickly sweet herbs burning on the brazier. Tap, tap. Someone held her hand. Held her hand tight and Rikke squeezed it back.
“I’m sorry,” came a whispering, choking voice, breath hot on her ear. “But it must be done.”
A burning pain in her cheek and she snapped and snarled but could not move even a hair’s breadth. Stabbing, stabbing in her face, around her burning eye, and men spilled over a snow-patched hill, an army, while shadows swarmed across the land from the racing clouds above.
“Yes. Hold her tight. Calm, now, calm.”
She stood upon a wharf, rain falling, clothes clammy on her, and a ship rocked and tossed on the unquiet sea, shields on its top strake battle-scarred, oars struggling like the legs of a woodlouse tipped over as it crawled closer.
“Time to settle some scores,” said the Nail, all shoulders and elbows and fierce grin, and behind his back he held a knife.
“Scores have to be settled,” said Shivers, grey hair plastered to his scarred face with the rain. “But don’t expect it to feel good.” And he charged towards a gate, and men charged after him, their boots hammering on a wooden bridge, tap, tap, tap.
Tap, tap. Like nails hammered into her forehead and she gasped and twisted and spat.
“I can’t stand it!” she whimpered. “Let me up, I can’t stand it!”
“You can and you will.”
The bench had ropes around it. And on the polished-smooth cave floor salt had been scattered. Circles and lines and symbols in salt. Candles burning in the darkness. A joke of a witch’s cave.
“Here is your couch, girl,” said Caurib.
“Looks like a joke,” whispered Rikke as she walked towards it, stone cold under her bare feet.
“You will not be laughing.”
Clip, clip, and the hair scattered across her bare feet.
“Fucking a crown prince is no great distinction,” Orso laughed. “But being brought breakfast by one…”
She closed her eyes, strained up towards him and he kissed her lids, kissed her forehead, kissed her cheek, and his kisses became a numb pressing, then a sharp jabbing, then a brutal stabbing, and she growled and twisted but she was so weak. Steaming waves on the shore. Footprints, burning footprints in the shingle.
“Hold her, then, she’s twisting like a salmon!”
“I am bloody holding her.”
“This is fine work. It must be fine work.”
The bench hard against her hard shoulder blades and her body rigid and trembling and the jab, jab, jabbing at her face, and she could see a wagon made of bones, rattling along behind skeleton horses. She heard Caurib clicking her tongue.
“That one is done. That one will hold.”
Hiss of more herbs on the brazier and her face stung and sweated and stung and she was so thirsty, so thirsty, her eye burned. A wolf ate the sun and a lion ate the wolf and a lamb ate the lion and an owl ate the lamb.
“By the dead, it hurts,” she croaked.
“Did she speak?”
“She said it hurts.”
“You can tell that just by looking, d’you see?”
“Shut up and light that candle.”
“Why did I ever trust you?”
Old men gathered around a bed. A deathbed. A dead king, and her eye burned.
“Hang a hide in the mouth of the cave to keep the wind out. Now!”
A woman stood on a high wall. A terrible woman holding a terrible knife. A man leaned beside her on the stones, and she smiled as she raised the blade. “Break what they love,” she said, merciless, ruthless, and Rikke screamed as the needle jabbed at her face, merciless, ruthless.
“Send him down, then.”
“I’ve changed my mind!” she screeched, slobbering, desperate, eyes fixed on the needle, trying to twist away.
“Too late now, girl.”
She sat down beside Shivers, frowned across the fire at the Shanka, gathered in a half-circle, light dancing in their black eyes. One got up, and Shivers reached for his sword, but all it did was sprinkle salt on the cooking fish. A little flick of salt, with a neat flick of its crooked wrist.
“I can’t tell what’s real and what’s a vision,” Rikke heard herself say. “I can’t tell what’s then and what’s to come. It all runs together like paints in the water.”
She gasped at another stabbing twinge through her eye. Gasped, and retched, but there was nothing to come up. Felt like she’d puked out everything she’d ever eaten. Everything anyone had ever eaten. A great building burned. A high dome crumbled inwards, sparks showering into the sky, showering down the shingle.
“You must make of your heart a stone,” said Isern.
Candle flames glinted in Shivers’ metal eye. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
So cold around her feet. The lake to her calves. She saw her own reflection, a knobbly clipped head against the racing clouds. Turned her face this way and that. Something written there. Eleven wards, and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven.
“How does it look?” she asked.
“Never mind how it looks,” said Isern, frowning. “Will it work?”
“One eye fights the other.” Caurib lifted the needle. “You must choose. You must choose now.”
Silence for a moment. Stillness for a moment. Rikke stared up at them, the cold fear spreading through her.
“Choose… an eye?”
Let Ring the Bells
Savine studied her face in the mirrors from every angle, no fewer than nine maids fluttering nervously about her: Freid with powder and brush, Metello with comb and scissors, Liddy with a mouthful of pins, May with four different colours of thread woven around her fingers. Aside from a wrinkle or two about the eyes—and unless great Euz could turn back time for her there was no help for that—she saw no opportunity for improvement.
“Perfection,” said Zuri, with the quiet pride of a painter placing the last brushstroke on a masterpiece.
“Hardly.” Savine took one last surreptitious sniff of pearl dust then carefully brushed clean the rims of her nostrils. “But as close as we’ll get under the circumstances.”
She had never worked so hard as she had in preparation for this event. There were a great many things that fell short of her standards, but then she had only been given a few days to prepare for seven hundred and fourteen guests, and at this particular wedding she was not the only bride.
Indeed, the thing that fell furthest short of her standards was the other one.
Isold dan Kaspa, soon to be Isold dan Isher, was waiting at the vast, inlaid doors, breathing faster than an untried soldier about to meet a charge of horse. She was very young and rather chinless, with a scattering of freckles across her nose and big, brown eyes that looked constantly on the point of brimming with tears.
“I… never saw such a dress,” she murmured as Liddy stooped to make some tiny adjustment to Savine’s train.
“My dear, you’re so kind. But it really was thrown together.” And it had been, in six days. By two corset-makers, a goldsmith, three dealers in pearls, an expert in working with them, and nine seamstresses going through the night by candlelight. “You look magnificent, too.”