“’Course, it’s prolly too much work, haulin’em somewhere else—though it’s winter, prolly wouldn’t start to stink. Prolly jus’ freeze.”
The problem with the Muscle was that he was too dumb to be afraid. Convenient, in this line of work, the Beast supposed. But difficult when it came to discipline.
“It’s like I keep sayin’, though,” the Muscle carried on, boots scuffing the cobblestones with plodding steps, “too many questions an’ we’ll be movin’ camp before the fortnight—”
The Beast gave a snapping snarl at the Muscle’s ankles.
Faithless doubter.
A god did not fear the curses of ants scuttling before the rain. He would only watch, and laugh, as the flood swept them all away.
The worries of impertinent fools did not concern the Master.
The Master lived to serve the Blood.
And in the Blood, Death.
And in Death, Life Eternal.
Blessed be the words.
Blessed be the Master.
So it is written.
So shall it be.
TEDDY
“They tower above us, unmoving. But given the test of time, they, too, will wear away to nothing. An echo of their grandeur, and so, the mountains fade.”
~Greysha Boewliç
The weeks had worn him down.
And today had been no different than the last fourteen.
Elsie would awake, cold fury in her green eyes.
Sam would awake, cinnamon eyes dead.
And they would sit across the table in silence.
Glaring.
Until Teddy sat down, and they’d eat, and drink tea, and he’d force out a few words.
And they’d both force a few words back at him. But never to each other.
Sam would retreat to the sewing room.
And Elsie—he didn’t really know where she went, during the day.
She was never there when he got home.
One thing he knew, though, was that she didn’t spend her days with Fletcher.
He knew this because Fletcher had taken to loitering in the store, investigative duties permitting.
Fletcher didn’t stay away long.
A couple nights at home. Probably good for him, really. It sounded like he saw his family. Who knew, though.
He didn’t really talk about it much.
He talked a lot about Elsie, at first.
And after he’d talked about her until there was nothing else to say, he talked about everything else.
Caelaymnis.
His sister, Alva.
His brother, Augustus.
His other sister, Cam, who was four years older, and he used to get along with, but didn’t, anymore.
How he’d been different, and he thought he was maybe more human than Drada, but he didn’t know how that was possible, except the Praequintelyas might’ve had a human in their line, once, a millennia ago, so maybe that was it.
And after Teddy’d listened and worked and stocked and rung up customers and listened some more, they’d lock up and leave.
Sam cooked dinner, mostly. Idle time didn’t suit him, oddly.
Teddy had sort of imagined he’d fall back on his merchanted pastimes, like watercolor or cards or hell, even smoking, but he didn’t.
It seemed like he mostly just sat.
Thinking.
But he’d cook dinner, and Elsie’d show up, cheeks flushed from the cold, and she’d glare at Sam for his eavesdropping, and she’d glare at Fletcher for not knowing how to tell a disbelieving young woman with a very sharp knife he was a mountain elf, and she’d glare at Teddy for letting Sam and Fletcher sit at the table with them, and then she’d curl up in the far corner of the couch, eyes fixed at the same point on the same page of the same book, pretending not to listen to the quiet conversation, because she was too stubborn to give in yet too lonely to leave.
And Sam would sit in his armchair, as far away from her as possible, giving her frequent glances, trying to catch her eye as they talked.
And Fletcher would sit on the far end of the sofa, staring at his hands, listening.
And Teddy would sit in front of the fire on the hearth rug, half-reading—half-escaping, more like—and half-talking, until he could barely keep his eyes open, and he’d sink into a hot bath, or else fall into bed, to do it all again the next day.
And anymore, he was just a mountain.
Distant and cold with rockface still, encased in stone and rubble and roots, beyond where living souls could see.
The lock clattered shut with a snap, keys jingling as Teddy stuffed them in his coat pocket.
Gas lights flickered in the corners of his eyes, egging the world to spin a bit faster, the town around him melting into a place that mountains didn’t know.
He should go home.
His boot slipped off the slicked curb, jarring his bones.
He should pay attention.
A tavern door opened, a rush of tobacco and ale burning his nose.
His stomach turned, nauseous, but he didn’t feel it, not really, because this wasn’t his body, walking down the side-walk.
It couldn’t be.
He was a mountain.
Mountain, mountain, mountain…
That wasn’t right.
Someone else was a mountain. Not him, though.
He was not a mountain.
He was not immovable and strong.
He did not withstand the battering.
In the barrage, this, he knew.
They’d taken everything, it felt like, today.
Every flicker of personality.
He was playful, sometimes, that’s what Sam had said.
You. Are. Playful.
Even the thought didn’t stick in the slant.
He wasn’t anything.
He had died, the day she had.
This much, he knew.
No.
You.
Are.
Alive.
A jolt hit him square in the chest, knocking the breath from his lungs and he caught himself against the brick wall. There was something caustic in the air, burning away the town, making his eyes water, and he blinked back the sting, sucking down mouthfuls of the crisp air.
And it hit him again.
You.
Are.
Alive.
He stumbled back, clinging to the wall, clutching his chest stinging with—with what, exactly?
Panting, his gaze flitted up and down the street.
Nothing.
Alive.
It barreled into him again, and his eyes snapped shut, a sharp inhale echoing in the night. Something crackled, hot stone—
His palms had singed the brick.
He jerked his hands from the wall in shock, trying to catch his breath, something like embers fizzling out beneath his gaze, a pleasant heat still lingering in his fingertips. Bile was biting at his throat as he glanced at the dusky street, ignored by the passersby. His knees were shaking, he realized—with adrenaline or fear, it was hard to tell.
“Alive,” he whispered to the night, trying to catch his breath. Some days it didn’t feel like it. Some days he was just a mountain—
Alive, it echoed back, threatening sparks beneath his skin. You are alive.
Listen to me, it seemed to say. Go.
It was tugging on him, he realized, pulling him forward, not just from the rubble and wreckage of who they’d told him he was, but down the street.
His feet were moving, his lungs drawing in the crystalline air carried on the roaring wind. The stars above glittered behind their gossamer clouds, and his movements were deliberate, focused, each step a promise. He moved through the saunterers, idly winding their way home, their tired eyes glazed, cracked only with the lucky grins of friends passing by, cracked with grab a drink and a bite, cracked like ribs and the medicine was time.
This, he could do.
He could mend.
Heal.
Help
them, help them all.
He wouldn’t have seen them, if the Thread hadn’t pulled him down the alley.
Elsie’s shadowed silhouette, though, was unmistakable, the crouched figure beside her undeniably Fletcher. And the slumped form against the garbage pails—
His chest was tight, and he jogged the last few steps, needing to move, needing to see, needing to make sure—
The crumpled wrappings of a woman lay discarded before them, eyes wide and glassy with fever, even in spite of the chemise, bloodied and half-torn from her twisted form.
Knees smarting as he hit the pavement, his fingers brushed her hair aside, checking for a pulse, scanning her up and down, trying to find the source of the bleeding. A faint quiver kissed his fingertips, the spark against her skin sending a shudder through her freezing limbs.
She was drowning, fluid rattling in her lungs as she tried to suck down another uneven breath.
“It’s alright,” he soothed, his voice oddly calm as he shrugged off his coat, “we’re gonna help you, it’s gonna be alright…”
Maybe she tried to grip the coat, to pull it around her more, but the movement was nothing more than a convulsive twitch.
He found her hand, cold and raw—
The Thread recoiled violently. It—he—could see the tears, the rips, the cuts, could see what needed mending, and it was all of it, all of it was disintegrating before his eyes, dark and unnatural. This was not a slipped paring knife or a scraped knee on the gravel. It was slick and oily, a frozen wasteland of disbelonging, sludge in her veins where blood ought to be, blood that had retreated, finding solace in the slants between the cobblestones.
He had been too late.
There is no tear that can’t be mended. That was what Sam said. No cuts that cannot be fixed.
No wounds that will not heal.
But even he couldn’t fix her threadbare heart. There was nothing to push through the veins.
There was no room for a mouthful of air.
He felt it, when she died.
It was a shock wave, resonating through the Thread and deep into his heart.
He did not know her.
But he would miss her, all the same.
Falling back onto his heels, he let his hands drop—hands coated in her blood, he realized, stinging cold as the wind nipped at them.
Something warm and heavy was being set gently onto his shoulders, and Sam was crouching down beside him, running a soft hand against his damp cheek, and he realized his eyes were flooded with tears for the woman he would never meet.
He pushed himself up, Sam’s hand around his arm, pulling him up. “H-here, I d-d-don’t want—”
“Just take it,” Sam breathed, eyes darting for a split-second to the coat around Teddy’s shoulders.
Threading shaking hands through the sleeves, his breath was frosting in the air, taunting them all.
Why.
Why were they all here.
Together. Elsie, and Sam, and—
And Fletcher.
He met the Drada’s gaze—Drada, unmistakably, even in the dim-lit alley, lit—
Teddy did a double-take. What he’d taken for a sconced light flickering in the wind wasn’t a lamp at all, but a shimmering orb, hanging gently over the body, casting a dim light across her.
“I didn’t know you were a Healer,” Fletcher said quietly.
I just have a knack for helping. That’s what he’d meant to say. But the words got caught in his throat.
Just a knack.
Just nothing.
Because she was gone.
ELSIE
“What was birthed in the ashes of her fire, none could say. Mortals worshiped it. The gods feared it. And even the light of the stars could not rival it. From death it was borne, and death, it would bear. Such is the word.”
~Emilyon Dresada, ‘Sermons’
“She has to burn.” Fletcher’s soft voice split the air, and Elsie ripped her eyes away from her brother, pale and shaking, his hands frozen in helpless grasp, painted with the woman’s blood.
It felt wrong, being spurred to action so quickly. But four and one, loitering—it was bound to draw attention, and even in the shady quarter, it’d be difficult to explain away the bleeding body heaped against the garbage bins.
Already, Fletcher was stooping down, threading his arm beneath her shoulders with heartbreaking gentleness, his other coming deftly beneath her knees.
He wasn’t a strong man. Still, he seemed to lift her small frame with ease, her head falling limply back as he rose, her arm sliding off her chest to dangle towards the ground with his movement as Teddy’s coat sloughed off into the pile of rubbish.
And for a split-second, a spark of jealously flared in Elsie’s heart.
The way he cradled her in his arms, the way he drew her so near his chest, his fingers digging into her, only his white knuckles betraying the strain, and it was pathetic, to envy the dead.
But she did, anyway.
He wasn’t the bulking mass of a warrior the tales boasted that he ought to be.
He’d never whisk her off her feet, in illness or romance, it made no difference, because he wasn’t a strong man, and she wasn’t that tiny little thing he’d scooped up a moment before from the alley refuse, and she wondered if he wished she was like the dead woman, thin and delicate and dead, dead, dead, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wished you DEAD—
And he was gone.
Vanished, in a whorl of mist and sparks, he’d left nothing but the darkened alley.
Teddy’s eyes were fixed on the blood-soaked refuse nested around where the woman had been, the crumpled newspapers and rotting food now nothing more than a darkened splotch. Then, with shivering breaths frosting in the dark, his canvas shoes ground against the grit as he took a hesitant step, then another.
Bending over, he gingerly picked his coat from the mess.
Teddy had clung to the coat, only relinquishing it to quickly clean his hands, watching Elsie do the same, and Sam, and he seemed to be thinking what they were feeling, namely, that the hot water did very little, in the end.
How did it come to this.
She knew, objectively, how they had arrived here.
She’d seen Fletcher, moving purposefully down the street.
He hadn’t been coming for her, though.
Even if that’s what she’d been hoping.
He’d paused for a split-second, pain in his eyes. He nodded down the alley, and she’d known, too, that there’d been another one.
That he’d felt a tripwire snap, or else, had heard something as he’d patrolled the streets.
She knew that, in spite of her anger, she’d followed Fletcher into the alley, because this investigation somehow overtook her resentment.
For all his lies, he was trying to stop a very, very bad person.
Teddy tossed the dishrag aside, moving to wash his hands once more, but Sam stopped him, putting a hand against his cheek, eyes worried. “You’re warm.”
Teddy made a small noise of protest, and Sam let his hand fall.
Elsie knew, too, that Sam had stepped out for something. Cigarettes. A bottle of wine. Some merchant bullshit he couldn’t live without.
Or worse, he’d left the apartment with the specific idea of seeing Teddy.
Of walking him home.
And it wasn’t fucking fair.
He had betrayed her.
He wasn’t supposed to be kind and loving like that.
Yet he, like her, had followed his companion down an alley, getting more than he bargained for.
Beyond it all, it’d been shadows, pulling them together.
Tendrils of death, bringing them all forth.
Elsie watched the haze of mist on the welcome mat, glaring.
“Sorry,” Fletcher breathed, eyes catching her before turning to Sam, then to the floor, his face flushed with something beyond cold. “I—I didn’t mean—well, I-I did, I just…nobody—I—”
“What’s
wrong,” Teddy frowned, looking panicked.
Elsie turned for her coat, tossed haphazardly on the back of a dining chair. “It’s unacceptable to evanesce directly into a residence,” she snipped, an answer to her brother’s query and a reprimand, all at once. He had no business acting like he had a right to be here. “It’s a gross violation of privacy, presuming you’re welcome whenever you fancy.”
“Sorry,” Fletcher echoed again.
“It’s fine,” Sam muttered, hand on the small of Teddy’s back as he ushered his companion to the door.
Elsie ground her teeth, swallowing a retort, because a moment later, the three of them were gone.
Gone, to the wherever-it-was-you-burned-them place.
The silent minutes ticked away.
And she did not relish being alone.
As with every parting, Elsie couldn’t say whether Fletcher’d come back or not, but that was sort of a lie, because he always came back.
This time was no exception.
You sonofabitch—
“Shall we,” he edged, offering his hand, misty haze still fading from where it swirled about his boots.
Her weeks of staunch resentment had undone any resistance she’d built to the stomach-twisting sensation of being torn apart as the world dissolved before them, and bile was biting at the back of her throat as the shadows of an unfamiliar glade pieced themselves together before her light-tainted eyes.
Deep breaths did little. The air was thin—too thin, she realized, straining to push the blooming lights from her eyes even as cold air filled her lungs.
And before them, mountains.
Beneath the starlight, they sat, cragged and majestic, great stalwart guardians before the pines, sending long moon-shadows pouring down into the valleys.
If she’d had any breath left, they’d have taken it away.
And for a moment, she forgot to be angry.
It came back quick enough, though, with one glance at the whitewood pyre. Teddy was tucking his coat around the limp form, and even in the darkness, she could see his cheeks were streaked with dampness.
A nudge on her arm, and she started, head snapping to Fletcher, a retort on her tongue, but he preempted her admonition.
Death and the Merchant (River's End Book 1) Page 12
