The other woman glanced up briefly. “If you plan on using ‘bad dreams’ as an excuse to share my bed … Well, to be honest it’s worked before—a few times, actually—but I’m busy right now.”
She was wearing a black half-robe tied with a dark blue sash, and had shrugged one shoulder free. Tam did her best not to stare at Agani’s flaming crown arching across Cura’s shoulders. A selection of knives and needles were laid out on a cloth beside her. An array of coloured ink vials was clustered just shy of one knee, a bottle of wine near the other.
She’s carving a new tattoo, Tam realized, discerning lines of black ink on the inside of Cura’s left forearm. The flesh around it was raw and red, so she couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to be. A woman, maybe? Or a twisting flame?
The summoner looked up again, her expression pained, and Tam was suddenly struck by the impression she’d intruded on something profoundly intimate.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“Stay. If you want to,” Cura added, before returning her attention to the work in progress. “I heard you scream,” she said eventually. “Roderick’s not sleepwalking naked again, is he? He does that, sometimes, and I’m never sure he’s actually asleep.”
“There was a rat,” Tam explained. “It was dead, but … not.”
Cura set one needle down and selected another, smaller one. “Like a zombie rat?”
“Exactly like that.”
“Did you kill it?”
She nodded. “With a book.”
Cura’s grin became a wince as her eyes strayed from her work. “You’re a real hero, Tam. Now sit. Or sleep. Whatever you wanna do, do it quietly. I need to concentrate.”
The bard sat down on the rug beside her. The fire’s heat washed over her like bathwater, seeping through her skin and warming her bones. Tam hadn’t realized she’d been cold until she wasn’t anymore.
For a while she reclined on her elbows, listening to the fire’s crackle and the scratchscratchscratch of the summoner’s needle gouging the skin of her arm. Cura’s eyes were narrowed as she worked, her teeth bared in a grimace. Now and then she would stop, gasping in quiet anguish. She discreetly brushed a tear from her cheek, and Tam pretended not to notice.
“My uncle Yomi was a summoner,” Cura said eventually, drawing Tam’s gaze from the fire. “He was a plainsman from out west. He and my father were both flagged to be Ravenguard, but my father—fool that he was—got caught stealing horses, and was sentenced to death.”
Tam was shocked. “For stealing a horse?”
“The Carteans take their horses very seriously,” she said. “If you kill a woman’s husband you owe her ten sheep, or six goats, or two camels. If you kill her horse … Well, then you’d better kill her before she kills you.”
“So your dad was executed?”
“No. He ran. And my uncle ran with him.”
“To Phantra,” Tam presumed.
Cura nodded, dipping a needle in crimson ink. “They met my mother in Aldea. She was a sailor. A smuggler. Fierce as a squall, and pretty as sunrise on the open sea—or so my uncle used to say. They were both in love with her, but since Yomi was kind and caring, and my father was a self-obsessed piece of shit, she chose him.” A snort. “Obviously.”
She wiped gore from her needlepoint on the rag beside her, dipped it, and continued her work. Tam had yet to get a good look at whatever it was she was drawing, and didn’t try to.
“Remember when I told you about summoners? How they use wood, or glass, to give shape to their summons?” She didn’t bother waiting for Tam to nod. “Well, my uncle did things differently. He would make these little figurines out of clay, and then glaze them in a kiln, like teacups. He painted every one with painstaking detail. Birds, snakes, dolphins …”
Tam was dying to know what a dolphin was, but she dared not interrupt—not when Cura’s rambling monologue was answering every question she’d been dying to ask since they’d met.
Also, it was best not to piss the Inkwitch off when she had something sharp in her hands.
“We used to make them together,” Cura went on. “His were brittle, beautiful, perfect. Mine were ugly, misshapen things.” A throaty chuckle. “Monsters, really. I brought one or two of them to life—Yomi showed me how to smash them and summon them into being.”
“Does it hurt?” Tam asked.
Cura paused, eyes roaming the blood-blurred lines on her arm. “Yes,” she said finally. “But not in the way you think. It’s exhausting, yeah, but it takes a mental toll as well. To bring something to life—whether it’s made of stone, or glass, or whatever—you have to imagine it’s real. You have to see it, and smell it, and feel it. And it requires … a spark, or something. I don’t really know how to describe it. You need to give yourself over to it. The more you give, the more powerfully whatever you’re trying to summon manifests. Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” Tam said. “Sort of. Not really, no.”
Cura snorted. “And that’s why I don’t bother explaining it,” she said. “Anyhow, I couldn’t bring myself to break all the monsters my uncle and I made, so I hid them in my room, under my bed.” Scratchscratchscratch. “We got by for a time—my parents and Yomi and I, all living under the same roof—before things inevitably went to shit. My uncle picked a fight with one of the nastier dock gangs. They were trafficking boys along the Silk Coast, and Yomi set a whole shipload free and then burned their boat. He staggered in the door one day, still alive, but stuck through with so many swords it was a wonder he could even walk. And you know what my dad’s last words to his dying brother were? He said, You’re too good, Yomi. You had this coming.”
Cura wiped her needle down before using it to apply a colour close to gold. “My mother was away most of the time, smuggling swords across the Bay, and with Yomi gone my dad got worse and worse. He fought more, drank more, stole more, and started”—scratch … scratch—“taking liberties, with me, that he wouldn’t have dared with his brother around. Or Mom, for that matter.”
She said nothing for a few moments. The fire muttered and Cura’s needle turned her blood into ink.
“It didn’t last long. I was never very good at playing the victim. One night I fought back, so he fought back. He might have killed me, except I grabbed all those monsters I’d hidden under my bed and I smashed every one of them.”
Tam shivered. Her skin prickled, and she tried not to envision Cura’s father being torn apart by a child’s disfigured nightmares. She failed, miserably.
“Funny thing is, my mom never did find out what a vile sack of shit she’d married. A pair of the Salt Queen’s corvettes intercepted her run. They chased her out to sea and into a storm. Her ship was destroyed. Every woman but one was lost to the sea, and the girl who survived was stark raving mad. When I sought her out in the infirmary she told me Kuragen herself had killed my mother. Said the Goddess of the Great Green Deep rose up from below and broke the ship in two.”
Cura straightened, examining her work. “I was twelve years old. I’d lost my uncle, murdered my father, and this salt-crazed bitch tells me a sea monster killed my mom?” The Inkwitch scoffed and shook her head. “I had nightmares for months.”
Her needle nipped the gold ink again. Scratchscratchscratch. “I went a bit mad myself, after that,” she said. “I’d got a taste for summoning and wanted the whole feast, but I was on the street by then, with no clay to mould, and no kiln to fire it. But I did have knives, and needles, and a powerful urge to hurt myself.” She set her tool aside and brushed ink-stained fingers over the tattoo on her thigh. “So I used my body. My own flesh and blood. Kuragen was first. My uncle Yomina was next.”
Yomina? It was a moment before Tam recalled where she’d heard that name before. The vulture-necked creature she summoned to fight the wargs back in Piper.
“So that’s what these are,” Tam said. She reached out and grazed her fingers over the ink on Cura’s calf: two women with scales for skin, li
nked together by heavy iron manacles. “Your fears …”
Cura put away her needles and returned the ink vials to her pack. She began coiling a waxed bandage over her latest tattoo, regarding Tam with a bemused expression.
“What?”
Cura’s eyes flickered to the bard’s hand, which was still pressed against her bare leg.
“I’m sorry,” Tam said, but before she could remove it, Cura clamped hold of her wrist.
“Are you?” She was on her knees, and used her leverage to pull the bard toward her. She placed Tam’s hand where it had been before—on the portrait of two women coiled around, and bound to, one another—and then guided it up, around her knee, to the blues and golds and greens of Kuragen’s scales.
Tam could feel Cura’s skin raise beneath her touch. The summoner’s thighs were trembling, her nails digging in hard—drawing blood, maybe. Tam didn’t care. Glancing up, she felt Cura’s eyes hook her own and hold them captive as their fingers traced the swirl and scar of Kuragen’s snaking limbs.
By now Tam was unsure which of them was the guide and which the guided as they followed the trail of ink where it led, up and up, curling beneath the summoner’s robe. Tam’s heartbeat was as slow and measured as a thief’s footsteps. Her breath dripped like honey from her lips. A brush of her fingertips drew a harsh gasp from the woman above her, and then Cura was opening like a flower to her touch.
A log in the fire snapped, throwing a handful of cinders onto the carpet beside them.
Cura hissed and put them out with her fist, then stood, swaying, as though in danger of losing her balance. She clutched her satchel of inks in one hand, and with the other pulled the sash from her robe, revealing a swathe of pale skin and the sickle curve of her breasts.
“Put the fire out,” she said to Tam. “I’ll go get the bed warm.”
Never in the long, hot history of fires was one so thoroughly extinguished as the scatter of stamped-out ashes Tam left behind in that room.
She tried to blow it out at first, but soon realized she knew less about how fires worked than a girl her age ought to. The flames flared brighter, and Tam got a face full of ash for her trouble. Driven to resourcefulness, she used an iron poker to knock the logs to char, then stomped the coals to a fine dust. By the time she finished her pants were soot-blackened, her boots crusted with clinging ash that she tracked halfway across the carpet before stopping, sitting, and yanking them off.
Her hand struck something, knocking it over.
The wine bottle, she realized, snatching it up before it could empty itself onto the carpet. She set it down carefully, but then thought better of it and took a swig, then another, before eventually deciding to finish the bottle.
“I’ve been around these people too long,” she muttered, getting to her feet.
Boots in hand, she padded down the cold, dark hall. As she passed the library, she spotted the moon-glazed bones of the rat she’d bludgeoned to death earlier that evening.
Wish me luck, pal.
She eased open the door to Cura’s room. A candle’s fitful light greeted her along with the summoner’s familiar scent: a heady blend of lemon, liquorice, and sugarcane rum. Tam closed the door and shuffled slowly forward, hoping her eyes would adjust before she tripped over a stool or cracked her knee against the edge of the bed. She was about to say something, to offer an excuse for how long it’d taken her to put out a simple fire, when she heard the soft, unmistakable sound of Cura snoring.
Well, damn.
Tam considered waking her, but decided against it. Cura would be exhausted, she knew—drained both physically and mentally by the act of engraving her latest tattoo. The bard set her boots on the floor, stripped off her sooty clothes, and lowered herself onto the bed as gently as she could. Her head had barely touched the pillow before Cura stirred restlessly, murmured something unintelligible, and threw a leg across Tam’s waist, effectively pinning her.
It wasn’t the welcome she’d been hoping for, but nor was it unpleasant. Tam lay awake for some time. Her thoughts were racing, her heart a quiet clamour in her breast. She’d been offered a rare glimpse of Cura’s true self tonight, a peek behind the black silk curtain at the shattered mirror of her soul.
Are all of us broken? Tam wondered. Each of us scarred in some way by our fathers, our mothers, our harsh and heartless pasts?
After a while Tam could feel herself dozing, drifting toward sleep as she listened to the deepening rhythm of Cura’s breathing, as slow and steady as waves crashing and crashing and crashing upon some faraway shore.
Chapter Twenty-eight
A Cold Breakfast
It turned out that Grudge was not just Ruangoth’s only remaining servant, but its cook as well. Which meant that by the time the old turtle made breakfast for six and pushed it on a rattling cart from one side of the castle to the other, everything was cold. There were chilly eggs and lukewarm sausages, frigid porridge topped with dollops of crunchy brown sugar, and slabs of stale toast that were not much improved by spreading hard, saltless butter across them.
Cura, too, was acting cool. She’d been up and gone before Tam awoke this morning, and had responded to the bard’s cheerful hello with a curt nod.
So that was shitty.
The others—Rose, especially—were too preoccupied to notice the tension between Tam and the summoner, although Brune gave them each a suspicious glare when he pretended a sausage was an erection sprouting from his forehead and neither of them laughed.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked Cura.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing my ass. You love when I do the dickhead joke.”
The Inkwitch shrugged and spooned cold eggs into her mouth. “It got old.”
The shaman scoffed at that. “Dick jokes never get—”
He clammed up as the Widow of Ruangoth swept into the room. Their host wore a high-necked black gown beneath a shawl trimmed with glimmering green scrollwork, and a layered cravat of dark blue silk fastened beneath her chin by an emerald brooch. Her fingers were sheathed in sharp silver talons, and Tam made a mental note to find a set of those for herself if they survived long enough to see a city again.
The Widow’s black hair was bound in a silver net studded with smaller versions of the emerald at her throat. Her face was masked by a mourning veil weighted with tiny silver bells.
Hawkshaw entered after her and took up position by the door. The Warden had shed his straw cape, but was wearing the same scuffed leathers as before. The snowmask remained in place, all but confirming Tam’s suspicion that he was hiding some gruesome defect.
“Thank you for coming,” said their host. The bells on her veil tinkled softly as she took her seat at the head of the table. Roderick, Brune, and Tam were seated on her left; Rose, Freecloud, and Cura on her right. Tam tried to catch Cura’s eye, but the Inkwitch seemed to be pointedly avoiding her gaze.
Rose cleared her throat and pushed her plate away. “Yeah, well, a shot at the Dragoneater is a hard thing to pass up.”
“Is it?” The Widow’s voice was guileless. “I think many of your fellow mercenaries would balk at this contract. Despite their conceit, most of your kind are afraid to face a monster beyond the confines of an arena.”
Tam expected Rose to bristle at the remark, but she only shrugged.
“You’re right. But we aren’t. The Raincrows weren’t either, apparently.”
“Would that they had been,” said the Widow, inflectionless. “They might still be alive. I hope you prove more capable than they did.”
She didn’t sound like she hoped anything as far as Tam was concerned.
Rose’s chair creaked as she leaned back and crossed her arms. “So what did the Simurg do to warrant this contract?”
“Warrant? The beast’s very presence warrants its destruction. It is a monster in the truest sense. A threat to this world and everything in it.”
Something mischievous tugged at the corner of Rose’s mouth. “
Philanthropy, then? How noble of you. Your late lord husband would be proud.”
“My late lord husband was killed by the Simurg,” said the Widow. “Compassion is no motive of mine, I assure you.”
Roderick rapped the table. “Revenge it is, then.”
“Revenge it is,” she echoed, and something in her voice sent a chill up Tam’s spine.
The silence stretched until Freecloud spoke up. “We’re sorry for your loss. The Marchlord—”
“Was an intolerable dullard when he was sober,” said the Widow, “and an insufferable boor when drunk. He was lonely, and bitter, and still very much in love with his previous wife. Sara.” She spat the name like a fly from her mouth. “He never intended to marry again, but men like him are expected to pass their titles on through their children. And so he wed me, and assumed I would bear him sons to carry on his line. Alas, I would sooner swallow a blade than bring another child into this world.”
“Here’s to that.” Rose drained her cup as though her cold tea was a shot of whiskey.
Freecloud shot her a withering glance before putting on a smile for their host. “You’re a mother already, then?”
“I am,” said the Widow without elaborating further.
The sound of slapping feet preceded Grudge into the dining hall. The ancient aspian began recovering plates, stacking them on the cart he’d used to bring them in. Tam ducked as the turtle’s flabby arm reached over her shoulder. The steward smelled like radishes and rain-soaked leather.
Brune stole one last link of sausage before Grudge cleared them away. “If you disliked the Marchlord so much,” he wondered out loud, “why marry him in the first place?”
Tam discerned the flash of teeth behind the Widow’s veil. “Because he was rich. And had a very big castle. Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s rather cold outside.”
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