Unraveller, p.28
Unraveller, page 28
‘She’s got terrible taste in men,’ Kellen said aloud.
‘It might not be her fault,’ said Nettle. ‘Maybe terrible men just have taste in her.’
CHAPTER 35
SHATTERING
By the time they got back to Linnet’s house, Kellen was shivering badly. Linnet found dry clothes for Kellen to wear while his own dried. He felt weird putting on the Carpenter’s garments, but by then he was too cold to argue. He discovered fat leeches on his legs and ankles, and when he pulled them off the wounds oozed.
I need more plans that don’t leave me neck-deep in marsh, he thought.
While Nettle made them all soup in the little ember-kettle, Kellen asked Linnet about the highlanders she met with in the reed-forest. At first she didn’t want to talk about it.
‘It’ll wait till tomorrow, won’t it?’ asked Nettle. ‘She’s had a long day!’ This was presumably her tactful of way of saying, She’s still half-statue, and her homicidal husband just died.
‘No, it can’t wait!’ exclaimed Kellen. ‘We’re running out of time!’ I’m running out of time, was what he really meant. The Carpenter’s clothes were made of woven cloth, and already he could feel a few loose threads starting to pull free from the cuffs and tickle his wrists. ‘Linnet, you know what those highlanders are, don’t you?’
Linnet’s honest face took an expression both furtive and mulish. Yes, thought Kellen. She knows.
‘They’re not bad people!’ she said defensively. ‘Just unhappy and unlucky. They won’t do any harm if you leave them be.’
‘They’re cursers!’ said Kellen. ‘It’s their nature to do harm! They can’t even help it. Listen to me!’ He hadn’t planned to tell Linnet all about Salvation, but now he did. He told her about his own curse and the Leona-bat. When he described the nine-year-old cloud-girl, Linnet turned pale, and finally relented.
‘I’ll tell you where I met with them,’ she said at last. ‘But . . . believe me, they’re not all bad. Maybe some of them did what you say, but the ones I met just seemed frightened.’
Kellen remembered the words of one of Linnet’s neighbours. That girl never knew when to be afraid. She’d clean the fangs of a snake if it said it had toothache.
After the soup, Linnet went to bed. Kellen and Nettle kept an eye on her for a while, to make sure the weight of her remaining carapace wasn’t suffocating her in her sleep.
‘She shouldn’t be alone tonight,’ said Nettle. Kellen noticed that she looked pale and anxious, but wasn’t too surprised. Nettle often seemed tense and concerned after an unravelling, just when he was starting to relax.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s night already. I don’t fancy paddling back to the storage tower in the dark.’
Nettle nodded silently, frowning into space.
Kellen found some more blankets, and laid them on the floor near Linnet’s bed, so that he and Nettle would be close at hand if the cursed woman called out or had trouble breathing. Then he looked over his shoulder to speak to Nettle, and realized she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the Carpenter’s workshop either.
Opening the main door, he looked down and spotted her standing on the moonlit wharf. Her head was bowed, and she was hugging herself tightly, as if cold. She didn’t seem to notice him calling her name, or the creak of the rope ladder as he clambered down to join her. Only when his feet hit the wood of the wharf did she give a start, glancing at him over her shoulder.
‘Didn’t you hear me calling you?’ he asked.
‘No.’ She frowned down at the marsh water. ‘Sorry. The wind . . .’
‘What wind?’ A faint breeze stirred the reeds, but not loudly enough to drown out a voice. He decided not to make an argument out of it, however. ‘What are you doing down here?’
Nettle didn’t answer, but raised her head to look at him with dark, troubled eyes. She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself, and he knew that something was badly wrong.
‘Kellen,’ she said in a small, tight voice.
‘What is it?’ His imagination scampered anxiously through possibilities. Was she injured or ill? What had he missed?
‘What are you planning to do?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to tell Gall what Linnet told us? Are you going to give him the directions?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ asked Kellen, baffled.
‘Do you really think he’s going to stick to your plan?’ asked Nettle. ‘Yannick’s missing! Right now we can’t send a message to Chancery. Do you think Gall’s going to sit around waiting for Yannick to find us? I don’t. I think he’ll change the plan.’
‘Change it how?’ Kellen hadn’t even considered the possibility.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nettle darkly. ‘But he didn’t want us along, did he? What was he planning to do if he found Salvation by himself? Kidnap Ammet, maybe? Or just run amok and kill as many cursers as he could before they killed him?’
‘That’s insane!’
‘Haven’t you been paying attention?’ said Nettle bitterly. ‘Gall’s changing! I tried to tell you before. He’s going feral!’
Kellen hesitated, trying to think. Perhaps Nettle was right. Perhaps the marsh horseman had become greyer and more deathly as they went deeper into the Wilds.
Everyone has anchors, Nettle had said before. Perhaps Harland had been Gall’s anchor, and later Leona. Now Gall had lost both of them. He still had his marsh horse, but Kellen didn’t think it was a stabilizing influence.
‘All right, we’ll keep an eye on him,’ he said. ‘But we have to tell him, Nettle! We’ll need his help! Do you really want to go looking for Salvation without his protection?’
‘Kellen.’ Nettle closed her eyes tight, and took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to go looking for Salvation at all!’
Her words took the wind out of Kellen’s sails. He couldn’t make sense of them.
‘What—’
‘We shouldn’t have come – let’s just go back inland, Kellen! We can tell Chancery as much as we know, and leave it at that! That way, nobody needs to die!’
‘And let Salvation win?’ Kellen couldn’t believe it. ‘If we don’t do something, Ammet will make his deal with Chancery—’
‘So what?’ exploded Nettle, with startling force. ‘Would that be so bad? What if a deal was possible?’
‘Don’t you remember what Salvation’s asking for?’ yelled Kellen, forgetting all about keeping his voice down. ‘They want Chancery to hand me over!’
‘But Chancery doesn’t have you, so they can’t hand you over!’ Nettle sounded desperate and wretched. ‘Salvation will have to settle for something else!’
‘They’re not going to “settle” for anything, ever!’ interrupted Kellen. ‘They’ve got cursers! They’ll just hold Raddith to ransom over and over again!’
‘How do we know?’ shouted Nettle. It was jarring and strange to hear her voice raised. ‘What do we really know about Salvation? We’ve been taking Leona Tharl’s word for everything! What if there’s another side to the story?’
Kellen couldn’t believe what Nettle was saying. Aside from Nettle’s usual doubts and quibbles, it had felt as if they were marching to the same tune. He couldn’t work out how they had fallen out of step, or when.
‘They curse people!’ he pointed out.
‘Yes,’ said Nettle. ‘But curses can be lifted. They haven’t killed anyone.’
‘We don’t know that!’ said Kellen. ‘And we know they’ve tried!’
‘Do we?’ asked Nettle. ‘They’ve turned up armed to ambush us, but it’s always Gall who starts the bloodshed, isn’t it? They’ve always tried to capture us alive. What if they really haven’t killed anyone? What if they’re just trying to defend themselves? What if Chancery can make peace with them before anyone else gets hurt?’
‘Of course they can’t!’ Kellen raked his fingers through the weed-stiffened tangles of his hair. ‘Look – even if a deal was struck, what do you think would happen then? You think that army of cursers would just sit there happily in the reed-forest, not cursing anybody? That won’t happen! You know what cursers are like as well as I do! Better than I do!’
Kellen saw Nettle flinch, and felt bad. She didn’t like being reminded of her time as a heron, but he’d come too far to stop.
‘Once somebody has a curse egg in them, they curse!’ he continued. ‘They always curse! And they nearly always keep cursing!’
‘What if that’s not true?’ asked Nettle, and Kellen was thrown off balance again.
‘Of course it’s true! Everyone knows—’
‘Everyone could be wrong!’ insisted Nettle. ‘We only know about the cursers that get caught! Of course they stay angry enough to curse again. We lock them away for years in windowless rooms in chains and iron helmets! But what if there are lots like Clover, who only curse once and never get caught? Or people with curse eggs who don’t want to curse. Linnet said—’
‘What does it matter?’ Kellen waved his arms. ‘We can’t just leave them running loose! If they’re not stopped—’
‘Stopped?’ said Nettle in a small, quiet voice.
‘I don’t know!’ Kellen kicked at the planks of the wharf with a thump. ‘Yes! Stopped!’
‘Then I suppose Gall’s way of “stopping” people would do, wouldn’t it?’ said Nettle in the same cool way. ‘Much less trouble than dragging them to the Red Hospital. But do we really want to be a part of that?’
It was too much, that quiet accusing tone, and Nettle’s refusal to look him in the eye.
‘Where the hell did this come from?’ he yelled. ‘What’s got into you? You’ve been acting weird since . . .’
Suddenly, he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Since they came to the Wilds? No . . . earlier. Mizzleport? Earlier than that? He wasn’t sure. He’d thought that he’d learned to understand all Nettle’s silences, but had he been mistranslating some of them for ages? Could she have been silently screaming something that he’d never heard? This was stupid! Why did he have be a mind-reader, anyway?
‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ he exploded. ‘Why are you like this? Why don’t you ever, ever, EVER just . . . talk to me properly?’
‘I want you to understand,’ said Nettle in the same tight little voice. ‘If you tell Gall where to find Salvation, there’s no going back. Something will happen. Maybe he’ll get killed or captured. You too, if you go with him. Or maybe Gall and his horse will run amok and start murdering people. Bloodshed in the Deep Wilds, Kellen – it always means something, and usually something bad. Whatever happens, there won’t be any making peace with Salvation afterwards. No bargains, ever. Only war and the bloody path. Is that what you want?’
Kellen listened, open-mouthed. All he really heard was Nettle saying ‘you’ instead of ‘we’.
‘Aren’t you coming?’ he blurted out. The possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. That wasn’t the way things worked. He and Nettle bickered, and they tugged the plan to and fro like two terriers with a slipper, and sometimes he pulled harder and sometimes she did. But after that they always plunged into the mission together, side by side. Neither let the other go into danger alone.
Nettle gritted her teeth, and still wouldn’t look at him.
‘No,’ she said.
All his arguments wilted before the frosty finality of that one small word.
‘Fine,’ he said, but nothing was fine. What he felt, but couldn’t say, was that he had counted on her. The nuisance who followed him everywhere had become someone he trusted more than anyone. He had known – or believed – that she had joined the hunt for Salvation because she wanted to help him lift his curse. It had bothered him, and had made him feel guilty, stressed and grateful.
But apparently his fate wasn’t that important, after all. He didn’t have the right to be upset about that, but he was.
He turned, and climbed up the ladder, leaving Nettle staring out at the shivering of the moonlit reeds.
CHAPTER 36
SWAN
Everyone has anchors.
Nettle hugged herself, her fingers biting into her arms. It was a warm night, but she shivered with a cold that only she could feel. Her bones felt old, damp-soaked. Her mind was blistered raw.
She could see that the water was unruffled, the reeds and leaves barely trembling in the night air. And yet, in her ears and mind, the wind still howled.
Kellen hadn’t heard it. He hadn’t felt the wood of the wharf furtively squirming under their feet. The moon he saw didn’t weep secretive silvery tears down the black fabric of the sky. She couldn’t tell him about any of it, and he couldn’t hear, in that other world with a normal moon.
Everyone has anchors. But the ropes break one by one. You feel the whiplash in your heart. You know you’ll be adrift when the storm comes. And sometimes you have to loose the last anchor yourself.
There was a rising note in the wind that wailed as though it had a throat and a breaking heart. There were words in that wail, drawn out and distorted out of shape.
From the depths of the reed-forest, Nettle could hear a thrashing, crackling sound. Looking out across the grey sea of the reeds, she saw a distant turbulence, where the feathery tips were twitching and parting, as if a big creature were forcing its way through the reeds.
Nettle’s chest tightened. She knew exactly what was approaching. She could picture it in her mind’s eye with nightmare vividness.
It’s coming, she thought with a despair that was almost like relief. I always knew it would come back. I couldn’t stop it in the end.
Nettle dropped to her knees, and tugged at the mooring rope of the pearl-pale boat with shaking hands. The knots were stubborn, and loosened resentfully, the bristles biting her fingers. As she stepped aboard the boat, it bobbed unsteadily under her feet, like a beast nervously sensing a change in routine.
Kneeling at the prow, Nettle snatched up the paddle and struck out, carving the water fiercely with stroke after stroke. She could hear the words called by the wind-voice now.
Take it, it cried in a tone of maddened anguish. Take it, take it, take it . . .
Fleeing was hopeless. Nettle knew that. All the same, she gritted her teeth and paddled. Cold water coursed down her arms, drenching her sleeves. Amid the reeds hung the Carpenter’s dolls, and it seemed to her that some of them had faces. Then she was in new channels, walled in by quivering, grey reeds. She could navigate only by memory of the directions she’d been given, and by the weeping moon above in the bright black sky.
Even when the nameless village was left far behind, and Nettle’s breath was coming in little sobs, she didn’t dare slow. Still she heard crashing and rending behind her, and sometimes a sound like the beating of wings.
Blind with tiredness and the moon, she didn’t notice the trap until it was too late. She did not see the two low boats that had lurked like logs among the reeds to the left and right. Even when figures rose up in them, and grabbed at the sides of her boat, she was slow to react. She had not been ready for them, so they seemed unlikely and unreal.
‘No!’ She realized too late that her flight had been halted. The paddle was snatched from her hand. ‘No!’
In panic, she twisted in her seat to stare back the way she had come.
Behind her she could see the rushes thrashing in turmoil, as something large struggled through them. Something black, something taller than a man, with wings spread wide.
Nettle screamed as a vast, black swan crashed into view, its wings half-furled, its neck moving snake-like, seekingly. Its black feathers were sticky and bedraggled. The moon glinted on the human eyes set in its head.
It saw Nettle and came for her with the lopsided frenzy of a wounded thing, leaving dark, red stains on the broken reeds.
With two pallid, child-like arms the Swan held something out towards her – a veined, squirming thing with a drooping head and bulging, pink-skinned eyes.
Take it, the Swan insisted, eyes glossy and maddened with despair.
Nettle screamed and thrashed as one of the men grappled her. It took her several moments to realize that he was trying to talk to her. It was hard to hear him with her ears full of the wind and the cries of the Swan.
But then she remembered where she was, and why. So she closed her eyes, clenched her teeth, and forced herself to listen.
CHAPTER 37
THROAT
Kellen woke up feeling cold. The blankets hadn’t fallen apart this time, but there was no warm curve of Nettle’s back against his.
He sat up blearily. From the light seeping in around the door, Kellen could see that the sky was starting to get light. In the dim room, he could just make out the shape of Linnet, still breathing peacefully in her bed. Loose fragments of stone littered the bedclothes around her.
There was no sign of Nettle. With a sinking of the spirits, Kellen remembered their argument.
She’ll be sleeping in the workshop, he told himself. We’ll talk everything through once it’s morning. We were just tired and strung out – that’s why we ended up yelling. It’ll be all right. His mind would not lie quiet, however, so he tiptoed groggily to the door to look for Nettle.
He searched in vain. The poker-faced puzzle that always followed him like his shadow was nowhere to be found.
Kellen was sitting on the wharf, staring at the place where the pearl-pale boat had been moored, when Gall and his horse arrived. One moment Kellen was alone, the next he looked up and saw horse and rider looming over him. Dank weed trailed in the horse’s mane and across the shoulders of its rider. It didn’t look as though Gall had shaved.
‘You weren’t at the storage tower,’ Gall said in a flat tone that somehow implied an accusation. ‘We only found you because we could smell your blood in the water.’
