Dane's POV:
First it is impossible to tell where the noise is coming from, because it seems to exist everywhere at once, swelling and compressing like something alive, a living mass of sound and heat and breath that presses in from all sides until the street itself feels like it is pulsing beneath my boots.
Drums beat somewhere close enough that the rhythm vibrates through my ribs, not fast but relentless, a steady animal heart that never speeds up and never slows down, while pipes scream out of tune above it, their thin notes warping under the weight of shouting and laughter.
There are bodies everywhere.
Men pressed shoulder to shoulder, women shoved between them, hands raised high with wooden cups sloshing ale that spills freely down arms and onto faces, onto stone, onto skin.
The girl.
She stands in the middle of it.
Ale runs down her pale body in thick, sticky rivulets, dark against skin that has gone tight with cold.
