Death and the Merchant (River's End Book 1)

by C. H. Williams

  It is with eager anticipation that I hope this is a night of becoming, not only for young Desdemona, but for us, as well.

  If all goes as planned, this will be a night I become free.

  ~Sam Alderton,

  excerpt from a letter dated December 3rd

  TEDDY

  “Behind the mask, who truly be,

  Behind the mask, you truly see.”

  ~Emilyon Dresada, ‘Child’s Chant’ from ‘Collected Dradan Poetry’

  Long ago, in a time before recollection, there had been a child who’d fallen through a mirrored meadow lake. It’d been enchanted, or so the tales said, and instead of drowning, the child found a grotesque carnival of the unimaginable, delightful and frightening, all at once. No earthly bounds constricted the realms beneath the glassy surface, leaving it a barren canvas upon which only the gods could paint a picture, both terrible and fantastical.

  The carriage jostled to a stop, and Teddy swallowed hard, his throat burning with the taste of polished leather seats and saccharine vanilla hangings.

  Through the lacy windows lay the manor, set aglow against the burgeoning twilight.

  His personal mirrored meadow lake.

  Already, Sam had taken the plunge, stepping onto the smooth walk, a brilliant smile sketched across his lips—a smile that did not reach his molten cinnamon eyes buried inside the scarlet-rubied mask. He offered a hand, and Teddy took it, willing his jellied legs to work.

  The chilled air was perfumed with the stench of anise and orange, the whole manor transformed—presumably transformed, he supposed, from Sam’s vague recountings—into a glittering palatial monstrosity, the walkway decked with swaths of shimmering white satin, patterned lanterns throwing out bursts of textured light against the pale stone walk, great sparkling spheres illuminated from within suspended in an arbor above them, scattered in between the thin paper snowflakes drifting lazily from ribbon in the whispered breeze.

  He was frozen where he stood, hand closed tightly around Sam’s.

  Whatever else it was below this glassy surface, it was hellishly beautiful.

  “Shall we,” Sam prompted softly, giving Teddy’s fingers a squeeze. Even his voice had changed. The edges of his words had been squared off, any lilt that betrayed his birth choked out of the air.

  Teddy gave a small nod, eyes flickering back as his heart heaved into motion once more.

  Fashionably late, that’s what they were. Only a few pastries lingered, the distant ringing of conversation echoing from somewhere unseen as they crossed into the marbled foyer. And it was better this way, he had to remind himself. The more eyes that could linger on the two of them, the fewer that might stray where they ought not to.

  Even still, there was a haughty sort of confidence about Sam.

  He would revel, tonight, in the falling of the Commissioner, revel like one first tasting freedom.

  Summiting the landing, Teddy caught a reflection of a man glinting back at him in a garish mirror against the damask wallpaper.

  Lingering a handful of inches above Sam, the man was slender, with reddish-brown hair that’d been tamed in a side-part, smooth and soft and already betraying the tousled frame it usually held. A silken vest sat beneath a black suit, a deep purple cravat beneath that, dotted with a glimmering silver pin that matched cufflinks peering out on crisp-white sleeves, and he looked, to Teddy’s eyes, a painting. A surreal painting—one Sam might’ve conjured in his adolescence, if he’d been asked to paint himself a husband at fifteen.

  The man in the mirror reached up to touch the sapphire mask, and Teddy felt his own hand brush against the feathered temple, felt the settling of felt against his hot skin beneath.

  Sam was offering an arm, now, a booming voice echoing beyond the doors cracking open like some horrendously encrusted egg, shrouded in paint and jewels and bearing flocks of pastries within, and their names almost ripped him from himself, hearing them scattered down the grand staircase now flowing down before them.

  “Master Samuel Carson” —no, no, no, that isn’t right, everyone thinks he’s Samuel, but he’s just Sam, it isn’t short for anything, and he’s Alderton, they got it all wrong— “and Theodore Mirabeau” —so empty, it’s so empty, Master for the Commissioner, Mister for the Merchants, and then there’s just me, it’s just me, empty, empty empty—

  You are not empty.

  He could feel the stitches prickling in his chest, angry to be bottled in his blood when they ought to have been floating in his palm.

  You are alive.

  He had to remember to breathe as they took the first step down together, and he couldn’t recall so many eyes ever watching him.

  Crystal chandeliers threw the ballroom floor into the light of a sugar-spun fever dream, the wild colors and diamond teeth the makings of some sort of dessert-cart menagerie, only here, beneath the lake, it’d be the pastries and the tarts that gobbled them all down.

  Another step.

  He had a tight grip on Sam’s arm, fingers digging into the suit coat fabric, and Sam—Sam’s snowy smile was white, bright as he waved—actually waved—and Teddy realized there was applause rippling through the crowd beneath them, cheering—

  Painted faces were gawking, bedecked fingers pointing—pointing at him, he realized, salacious grins sparking with hunger.

  And another step.

  He could do this. Was doing this.

  His eyes scanned the crowd, searching—

  There she was.

  Her deep green gown clung to her like a second skin before flaring out below her hips, belted in a single row of black diamonds Sam had carefully set by hand the night before.

  Elsie was grinning, arms folded across her chest, eyes caught in the emerald mask.

  She felt miles away.

  But seeing her—it helped.

  He forced a small smile, eyes not drifting from the back of the ballroom.

  A silver-masked man, a head-and-a-half over El, lingered uncomfortably close at her side.

  Augustus.

  The suit did little to conceal the lethality about his movements. If anyone took notice of him, though, it didn’t show—whether this wasn’t so much Augustus’s discretion as his imposing physique, Teddy could only speculate.

  Beyond the garden hedges were the rest. Rodion, with his mop of curly black hair, his boyish face, his rich mahogany skin that seemed to radiate warmth. Mia, with her cropped strawberry-blonde hair and her almost impenetrable accent, so thick it verged on unintelligible. Isa, walking somewhere between definition itself, ready to mend whatever waited beyond the production facility walls.

  Teddy ripped his eyes from Elsie and Augustus as he met the ballroom with Sam. The others had their work.

  And he and Sam, they had theirs.

  The eyes of Commissioner Clark Carson were needles from beneath the pearlescent mask as he murmured something to the chittering little desserts clustered around. Tittering, they scattered, and Teddy was left with the distinct impression of roaches skittering away at the strike of a match.

  Sam paused under the pretense of straightening Teddy’s cravat. “Well,” he breathed, and there was a faint smile of reassurance lingering on his lips. “That’s our invitation.” His eyes flicked up, some cynical amusement deep in the brown. “I suppose, after nine years, it’s rather time I introduced you.”

  “I think we could’ve made it a nice round ten, and I wouldn’t have complained,” Teddy said hoarsely, glancing over his shoulder.

  Sam’s smile faltered as he brushed a speck of dust from the spotless lapel. “In another life, maybe. So it goes, though, that this,” he quoted, “this be the river we’re destined to sail.”

  “Your authors wouldn’t’ve been so complacent if they’d had to talk to Clark.”

  “No,” Sam sighed, taking Teddy’s arm as he plastered an artificially cheerful smile on once more, beginning to steer them towards the Commissioner's vacant patch of ballroom. “But it’s the best we’ve got at the momen
t.”

  Books and tea and we’re going to stay locked in this damn apartment, just the two of us, for days, Sam had promised that morning, as dawn had crept steadily on and they’d lain beneath the sheets, passing the moments of a sleepless night. And we won’t say a word. I’ll paint you in kisses, and you’ll understand.

  He clung to that promise, now, watching one last time as Sam betrayed himself.

  FLETCHER

  “It is nature not to see the trap until it is sprung, lest traps we would not call them.”

  ~Dryadic Proverb, from the Book of Adagic Texts

  Whispers of mercenaries rippled across the grounds, heavy boots clodding across dampened soil, ripping great chunks from the muddy earth with squelching disregard as they stomped through the night.

  Eyes pressed closed, Fletcher let the calamity overtake him, fill him, become him.

  This, he knew.

  Snakes of magic, unfamiliar and warning, came across the hissing grass, an echo of unbelonging.

  The Commissioner had a keen taste for talent, talent he ought not’ve known, talent that ended not with the kobalde in the brambles. Employ of thugs like these wasn’t unheard of, in the depths of the wild, where the treaty did not reach and all sorts of sordid creatures roamed unchecked, pillaging as they went. Here, though, where the humans had been cordoned off from magic, where the greatest threat wasn’t the formidable beasts from the shadows but overdue taxes and mis-matched finery…

  No, there was only one reason the Commissioner would find use for such unsavory types.

  Wood groaned, a door slamming shut to the sound of bloodied promises, lest posts they abandon.

  A round dozen.

  Outnumbered three-to-one.

  If he could not do this, blood would be shed, and he could not guarantee none of it would be Dradan.

  Fletcher exhaled, letting his shoulders fall down.

  And with the snap of his wrists, he encased the warehouse. Just like the teapot.

  It was a careful play of pressures, draining the air from the shield, and he reveled in the rush of air burning against his skin, the sensation of utter satisfaction of crafting something new with his own two hands, something practiced in the dead of night as Elsie slept, in the training hall under Augustus’s watchful tutelage, with every waking breath.

  He was air, packed tightly between the membranous wall of magic.

  He was nothing, a calm void inside the warehouse, spreading silently into lungs now choking on what little air they’d wrung out in their sputtering breaths.

  He was the grass that hissed, he was the dark stars singing, he was the gritty earth sighing beneath his boots, he was everything, and nothing, and it was freedom.

  His eyes snapped open as the last body hit the floor, unmoving.

  Done.

  A faint smile was tugging on his lips, and there was a rush of pride deep in his chest as the wall fell, a rush of air quelling the vacuum within in one chilled gust. This was not the beluae, a victim of careless distraction, snarling beast though it’d been.

  “Move.”

  Rodion clapped him on the back, grinning like an idiot before jogging forward, and with Mia’s help, pulled open the warehouse door with a bone-chilling screeeeeetch, and breathless, Fletcher stopped a few feet out from the threshold.

  No. No, no, no, no, no—

  Swearing, he gave an angry swat of the air, furious.

  There was no victory here.

  RISA

  “Bitter are the meetings of our childhood, for they remind us of times we wish were simpler.”

  ~Greysha Boewliç

  Any sense of victory sparked by returning home remained somewhat overshadowed by the overtly dubious means by which Risa had arrived.

  Ideally, it wouldn’t have been by extortion. Appear, and you’ll get the dossier. Appear, get the dossier, and the Rescindants could go on protecting the girl in their charge with the information therein.

  Then, too—ideally—she wouldn’t have been sequestered to the curio-cabinet manor, the frozen, fairy tale relic on a bluff above the town, stuffed into a moth-balled gown dragged reluctantly from a trunk of theater costumes.

  But home was home, even if she couldn’t see it from within the manor, and none of that really mattered, anyway, because she was here for one thing, and one thing alone, on that, Adrian had been painfully clear.

  The dossier would not collect itself.

  The Commissioner wasn’t difficult to spot, nursing a snifter of brandy.

  “Charming little shindig, Clark,” Risa remarked dryly, purple dress whishing as she came to a stop at his elbow, displacing a stuffed-suit doll in the little circle of adoration he’d no doubt summoned to soothe his perpetually ruffled feathers.

  She wasn’t a sadistic woman.

  But watching him squirm through her painted mask—his buggy little eyes bulging, his thin little lips pressing into an impenetrable line—a wave of chills left her arms covered in goosebumps of satisfaction. “Commissioner,” he corrected stiffly, the refrain another verse in their eternal give-and-take of Mr.-no-it’s-Commissioner-no-its—

  “Oh, you,” she simpered, draping her fingers on his arm with an air of jovial fondness. “I’ve told you, there’s no need to call me Commissioner. Ms. Barrett will do just fine.”

  Laughter—suspiciously authentic and a bit too robust to be feigned—rippled through the tight circle.

  Clark, it seemed, wasn’t amused.

  “You’ll excuse us,” he snipped to the adoration, hand already on her elbow, dragging her away, “my…associate…odd sense of humor…”

  “Odd? I’d say brilliant—”

  His glare snapped into place, tone shifting from familial embarrassment to utter outrage as he took refuge in the shadow of a towering pillar, sculpted to perfection from the sweetest butter-marble. “They say discretion is the better part of valor…”

  “Well, mercifully for you, Clark, I’m not a heroine, I’m Adrian’s lackey on an errand,” she bit back, smile faltering. “Where’s the dossier?”

  It suited him, the opulent mask hiding his crows-feet skin, home to the coal she’d come to know so well. Beneath the Chancery lights, bright and unforgiving, he had looked old, worn, a corn-husk doll painted pretty but fraying all the same. But there was room to hide, here, beneath the warm cascade of chandeliers. Room to obfuscate.

  “Patience, patience, all in good time…”

  “She doesn’t have time, Clark. Every minute we’re running blind, we risk losing her, and if we lose her, you can guaran-gods-damned-tee that I will make sure you’re begging on the streets—”

  “Hush, love.” Clark was nodding to the grand staircase, a half-smile now playing at his thin lips. “All in good time.”

  Her eyes flicked to the top of the staircase.

  A small piece of good news, at least.

  “Master Samuel Carson…”

  A rush of silence fell across the buzzing bees below as a man in a ruby mask stepped onto the carpeted landing, a dazzling smile greeting them all.

  It’s Sam, not Samuel. That much, he’d been clear on, the one—and only—time they’d met.

  If Clark could not deliver the dossier, at least he could bring forth its author. Not quite enough to forgive his sins.

  Close, though.

  A fine young thing was draped across Sam’s arm, too. The man seemed to have the good sense to look slightly alarmed, though, glancing about the ballroom—

  “…and Theodore Mirabeau.”

  Risa froze.

  Him.

  It was him.

  She couldn’t seem to rip her eyes away.

  “Ah,” Clark simpered, his breath in her ear. “So lovely, isn’t it? To see such a familiar face.”

  It wasn’t familiar, though.

  Hidden beneath that shining sapphire mask, it was hard to tell, but nothing about it was the way she remembered. He’d been a boy, then, so there was that—but he’d grown up different.
/>   Skinny.

  His shining chestnut hair was hers, though, his eyes almost inseparable from their jeweled encasement—

  “Theresa, love,” Clark was saying, his hand on her elbow, and she forced herself to blink that blue-eyed boy back, because somehow he was there, right there, standing in front of her— “You know Teddy? It is Teddy, isn’t it,” Clark mused, cocking his head to the side, studying the boy. “And of course, I am Commissioner Carson, though I daresay Sam has filled your ear with such tid-bits, already—and Sam, you remember Risa?”

  A whirlwind introduction if she’d seen one, and it left her reeling.

  Sam. The dossier.

  And him.

  “Pleasure seeing you again,” Sam nodded, offering her his hand. “I imagine it isn’t recreation that brings you back to the manor?”

  “Nor does it bring you, Sam, don’t be coy,” Clark mused.

  Sam, though, ignored the remark, his eyes looking past Clark and glittering with mischief as he beckoned someone forward. “El, love,” he murmured, brushing a kiss across the cheek of a dark-haired woman in an emerald gown, “excellent of you to come…this is Risa Barrett, a mutual friend of Clark and myself. Risa, this is Elizabeth Mirabeau, Teddy’s sister.” His eyes locked on hers, molten.

  And with deafening realization, she saw.

  It’s her.

  Risa blinked, trying to clear her head, because the whole world had gone off-kilter.

  She’d been knocking back champagnes, safe in Clark’s little dollhouse, because hadn’t that been the condition? Hadn’t Adrian said there was to be no contact with the girl, much less that blue-eyed boy now standing before them? And Adrian was right, unequivocally right, because one breath of Rescindancy in that dilapidated little farmhouse, one whisper that the political persuasion was bleeding through this back-water district, and they were dead, all of them. The girl. The blue-eyed boy. All of them.

  They conspired to release a flood of magic, her and Adrian and all the rest, and the girl—Elizabeth—she was supposed to be safely tucked away until the time was right, stowed away from any whispers of influence from the City, away from suspicion.