The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  “There might have been news,” Isadau said, her voice careful.

  Cithrin hunched with guilt. “I’ll attend next time.”

  In the common room, a boy cleared his throat and began a slightly off-key warble while an older man, clearly his father, hauled out a pair of puppets. The song was an old romantic ballad, but the words had been changed here and there to make the romantic conquests of the hero into something more martial. The puppets were a seducer and his prey, but they were also Imperial Antea and… well, and whoever got in its way, Cithrin presumed. Every now and then, she caught the singer’s gaze cutting back toward the little cove where she and Isadau sat. The piece had been chosen with them in mind, then. Know your audience, Kit would have said. Know them, and know how to flatter them. The piece told Cithrin something about how the city saw her. She tried to ignore it.

  Isadau did not. Her gaze fastened on the little mannequins on their strings, and her eyes filled with tears. When she spoke, her voice was calm and matter-of-fact. “If he comes, he will kill us both.”

  “All three,” Yardem said. “I’ll go first. Captain’d want it that way.”

  Halvill stepped through the front door and shook the rain from his shoulders, blinking into the dim as his eyes adjusted. Cithrin took the opportunity to watch the other patrons watch the young Timzinae man. The truth was that Halvill had been in Porte Oliva at least as long as Cithrin had, and likely longer, back when they had called him Roach. But he was Timzinae, his new bride and their nearly arrived child natives of Suddapal. There was distaste in the keep’s expression, a distrust that had not been there before. Geder and his armies had changed what it meant simply to be a Timzinae. After all, no one liked to share cake with a leper.

  It was hard to reconcile that Geder with the frightened man she’d hidden with in the days of the failed Antean coup. It was also very, very easy.

  Halvill caught sight of the three of them and stepped to the booth. The little curtain jingled as he pushed it aside.

  “Magistra Cithrin. Magistra Isadau. Yardem,” the guard said, nodding to each of them in turn. “The man from the holding company’s arrived.”

  Paerin Clark sat in the counting house, leaning back on his stool. The slate on the wall behind him had marked odds back when the building had been a gambler’s stall. Now it listed the guard rotation. Pyk was just pouring a fresh cup of water for him when Cithrin and Isadau came in. The pale man smiled and nodded to them both.

  “Paerin,” Isadau said, walking to him.

  “Isadau,” he said, standing and taking the woman in his arms as a brother or dear friend might. “Ah, it’s been too long.”

  “You should have come to Elassae more,” Isadau said, releasing him. “You look fatter. Chana has been seeing you fed.”

  “She does watch after her investments. Cithrin.”

  For a moment, Cithrin thought he might be about to embrace her too, and her body went stiff and awkward. But Paerin only nodded and smiled and sat back down. Pyk grudgingly poured out water for Isadau and Cithrin as well and then took her own low, sturdy seat. Cithrin sipped at the water to have something to do with her hands while Isadau sat across from Paerin. Paerin was Komme Medean’s son-in-law, and third in command of the holding company. Isadau was the voice of the Suddapal branch, which no longer existed. Pyk was nominally Cithrin’s notary, but under instructions to run the Porte Oliva branch. Cithrin had no clear idea where she stood in the hierarchy of people in the room.

  “I’ve just come from Sara-sur-Mar,” Paerin said, “and a very short audience with her majesty the queen followed by a very long meeting with her master of coin.”

  “That can’t have been pleasant,” Isadau said.

  “It wasn’t,” Paerin said. “The opinion of the throne appears to be that the bank has filled her cities with impoverished refugees and brought her the displeasure of Imperial Antea.”

  Pyk cleared her throat and spat. “Clear grasp of the obvious, that one.”

  “Yes,” Paerin said. “It was hard to argue the facts. The more interesting issue was what remedy we intended to offer her.”

  Cithrin’s belly went tight. “Handing me back to Geder won’t stop him.”

  “That wasn’t on the table.”

  “Bullshit.” Pyk chuckled.

  “I took it off the table,” Paerin said. “It was never a serious proposal. If we started handing over our people, we wouldn’t have anyone manning the branches before long.”

  “She wants a payoff, then?” Pyk said.

  “Her master of coin was kind enough to call it a loan, but that’s what it comes to, yes,” Paerin said, and in Cithrin’s memory, Magister Imaniel said, We never lend to people who feel it is beneath their dignity to repay.

  When Isadau spoke, her voice was tight and passionate. “If we spent every coin we have from every branch standing against those bastards, it would be cheap.”

  Paerin Clark’s eyes were soft. He sipped his water, leaned forward, and let his stool’s legs return to the ground. “With respect, Magistra Isadau, the bank doesn’t see it that way.”

  Isadau’s face went still and her inner eyelids fluttered in distress. Cithrin stepped forward, putting herself between the Timzinae woman and Paerin Clark by instinct. “Are you going to give them the money?”

  “We can’t,” Paerin said. “If the holding company were to offer a loan to the throne of Birancour, we’d wake up the next morning with Herez, Narinisle, and Northcoast on our doorsteps demanding the same terms. Open that pipe, and it won’t close.”

  Pyk nodded her approval, but Cithrin tilted her head. Something in the way he had said the words, and the words he had chosen, plucked at her. He didn’t meet her eyes. “When you say, We can’t, you mean the holding company.”

  “I do.”

  Pyk’s expression clouded and she sucked mightily at the gaps where her tusks had been. “You aren’t saying my branch ought to carry the burden.”

  “I told her majesty’s master of coin that I was unfamiliar with the details of the branch, and would come to Porte Oliva and discuss what amounts might be available to contribute toward funding the defense of the realm.”

  “Well,” Pyk said, “you can go right straight back up there and tell her majesty that defending the realm is her part of the bargain and paying the tax is mine. I’ve kept my end, now she can keep hers.”

  “I think I might rephrase it,” Paerin said. “But I think first I will stall for as much time as we can manage. We’re in a bad position here.”

  “Some foreign king has his cock in a twist,” Pyk said, waving her massive hand. “We haven’t even got a branch in his puffed-up empire. Let him stew. He won’t come here.”

  “He will,” Cithrin said.

  “The letters we’ve had from our nameless friend in Camnipol say the army is already on its way. It will be here before the middle of spring.”

  “Army of stick men too damned tired to lift their own swords,” Pyk muttered. Isadau rose, stepped over to the Yemmu woman, and put a hand on her shoulder. Pyk sobbed once, and clamped her jaw. Cithrin had never seen the Yemmu woman frightened before. It shook her more than she’d imagined. She felt a sudden and unpleasant sense of protectivness toward her notary.

  “We’ll stop them, then,” Cithrin said.

  “That would be lovely,” Paerin said. “How do you propose to manage it?”

  Cithrin took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. Geder was coming with swords, arrows, fire, and the spider priests. She had an accounting book and a strongbox of coins and jewelry. Perhaps she could hire a mercenary company. Or increase the bounties offered by the imaginary Callon Cane. Or…

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I will find a way.”

  Paerin’s disappointment hissed out between his teeth. All four of them were quiet for a long moment. Carts rattled past in the street. A pigeon fluttered at the window and flew away. Cithrin folded her hands over her belly where the sick knot was tying itse
lf tight in her gut.

  “Work up a proposal,” Paerin said. “Send it to Carse when you have it. And we will see what we can do.”

  “How long do I have?” Cithrin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paerin said. “It isn’t my deadline to set. Until Palliako’s forces come. Or until the queen decides to trade you for peace. You have all the time there is between right now and whenever it’s too late.”

  He left that night, but Cithrin barely noticed. Her world narrowed to a single, overwhelming question: how to buy herself out of a war. She spent hours talking to Yardem Hane about the fine points of hiring mercenary companies: the distinction between guarding and a field contract, the structure of payments that was least likely to have the paid swords turn aside, the delays of travel and how to overcome them. She went through the bank’s books and ledgers going back as far as she could find, looking for any precedent that might apply. She reviewed the payments given out by Callon Cane, the estimates for fraud, the challenges of increasing the practice both in Herez and in other cities throughout the world.

  Four days, she went without sleep. When Isadau came on the fifth day, Cithrin didn’t at first notice that the woman’s scales had an ashy dullness or that her movements were slow and careful. She didn’t see anything of Isadau’s sudden fragility until she spoke.

  “I’m afraid we’re too late, dear. They’ve blockaded the harbor.”

  Cithrin sat at her desk, blinking and confused. Which harbor? she thought. And then, Who blockaded it? How does that change the pricing? And then the sense of the words penetrated the armor of her focus, and she rose.

  Viewed from the seawall, the Antean fleet looked like a busy day in port. Twenty ships ranging from the vast, canvas-strewn roundships to small, nimble-oared warships with bronze rams at their prows haunted the water just beyond the place where depth turned it a deeper blue. Fewer than half a dozen defending ships hunkered down in the bay. The harbor was too dangerous for the Antean fleet to traverse without a guide. The power and threat of the attackers was too great to permit any traffic to leave the port or enter it.

  All along the seawall, men and women stood and gawked. A half dozen queensmen were shouting at one another as they assembled a ballista that hadn’t seen daylight in a generation. The sound of their voices in Cithrin’s tired ears was like the gabble of frightened chickens. Porte Oliva was under blockade. Antea had come by water, and no one would enter or leave the city that way. She knew that she should have been worrying about an army, a full siege, but all she could think was that the trade ships from Stollbourne would not come.

  The implications spread out before her as clearly as and automatically as breath. The backers of the ships would all fail. Even if the cargo did manage to come in later, any loans used to finance them would have come due. If the goods landed at some other port and came overland, there would be tariffs and shipping, and bandits alerted to the possibility of wealth making its way down the dragon’s roads. All the insurance contracts would pay out, and anyone who had taken on too many would be crippled or driven out of the market…

  “I’m damned,” Cithrin said. “Pyk was right about something.”

  Marcus

  What needs to happen,” the innkeep said, his expression soft and ruminative, “is they slit the Cinnae bitch’s throat and hang her on the wall as a warning to sluts.”

  The other people in the common room, men and women both, added their voices to his in a chorus of support. There weren’t more than a dozen of them all told, but the violence of their fantasies made them seem more. Marcus leaned forward, looking into his cup. Across the table from him, Cary’s smile was empty and her eyes as hard as stones.

  “From what I heard, she was working with the Timzinae from the start,” one of the other men said.

  “All them Western Triad bastards are the same,” the innkeep said. He was a gentle-faced man, his voice soft and melodious. Any words he said, however harsh, seemed to take on a kind of philosophical sorrow. “Look different on the outside, but inside, they’re the same. Not saying they’re all like that Cinnae piece of shit. I’ve known some Cinnae were fine people. Just it was in spite of what they was, if you see what I’m saying.”

  “Birancour’ll give her up,” a woman in the back said.

  “Unless they were part of it all from the start,” the innkeep said. “All those roaches that scuttled out of Elassae headed west, didn’t they? There were caravans of them ready to go, and houses in Porte Oliva and Sara-sur-Mar already bought and fitted out for them.”

  “No, really?” the woman said, pausing in her path.

  “Oh yes,” the innkeep said. “Only reason Lord Geder didn’t root out all the conspirators was they knew he was coming and they had their retreats in mind. They’ll be running out of land soon, though. Then they can swim for blue water, and good riddance.”

  Marcus stood.

  The keep looked over to him, eyebrows raised in polite query. “Need anything else there, friend?”

  “Just going to stretch my legs and check on the others,” Marcus said.

  “Well, if there’s anything else you need, just say it. We’re all looking forward to the play tonight. Sent my boy down to Lesser Bronlet to spread the word. We should have a full yard, and no mistake.”

  “Kind of you,” Marcus said.

  They had thought to travel through Antea by avoiding the main roads and attracting as little attention as was plausible for a theater troupe. They could not have done much better. The town was hardly more than a cluster of houses at a place where dirt paths crossed. The dragon’s road ran ten miles to the northwest, carrying most of the carts and carriages between Sevenpol and Camnipol. Without it, the merely human paths and roads that laced the plains and farmlands of Antea might have earned the dignity of pavement. But the eternal jade was so near and so effortless that the need never rose above the effort required. The land all around was the fresh green of springtime, the days warm, and the nights not quite cold enough to freeze. After Hallskar, it felt like the jungles of Lyoneia all over again.

  Antea itself had altered. Marcus had walked its length already in his life, and while the shape of the land, the accent of the voices, and the flavors of the food remained the same, there were changes that soured all the rest of it. It wasn’t only that it was near to a starving spring. Those came from time to time, and then they went. A blight might cause it, or a rogue storm. Or a war. The men who had farmed these lands were soldiers now, and some had been since the invasion of Asterilhold. The labor to manage the lands had been spent elsewhere, until now. The planted fields that the players passed were tilled. The first sprouts of a bountiful summer were pushing through the dark soil. That hadn’t changed. But the men who worked the lands weren’t Firstblood farmers, subjects of the Severed Throne. They were Timzinae, and they were in chains.

  The first time they’d seen it had been half a day out of the port of Sevenpol. There had still been snow on the ground then, and the morning ground was covered with frost. The horse Master Kit had bought, using his unnatural magics to negotiate a price so low it was barely fair, had hauled the reconstructed and creaking cart down a long, tree-lined road, heading toward the wide jade of the dragon’s road, and then south. Charlit Soon had been huddled on the driver’s bench, Marcus and Smit walking beside the wide, slow, turning front wheel. To their right, an old Firstblood man had been in the middle of a field, screaming in anger. The boy absorbing his abuse was perhaps as old as Magistra Isadau’s nephew. The Timzinae was stripped to the waist and shivering. The morning light played off his dark scales. The old man brandished a whip made from thorn branches, not striking the boy—not yet—but terrorizing him.

  Marcus had seen the shock in Smit’s face. The actor was a man of good years who’d been walking the world for most of them. Marcus knew he’d seen ugly sights before, and that he would again. Scenes like it had played all through the countryside. A tree in the middle of a half-tilled field with five Timzinae
men tied to it by the neck like dogs. A dead Timzinae woman, abandoned by the side of the road, her back split open by some violence Marcus hadn’t seen. But no children. That had been the Lord Regent’s great plan. Take the children of Sarakal and Elassae as insurance of their enslaved parents’ good behavior. It left all of them ready to see Antea’s far border, and Marcus only hoped when they crossed it things would be better. Not here, of course. Antea had declared the Timzinae inhuman—dragons fashioned in human form and thus the ancient enemy of the spider goddess. The atrocities would continue, but since Marcus didn’t know how to stop them, at least he didn’t want to watch.

  In the yard outside the little inn, Kit and Sandr had lowered the side of the cart, making the little stage where they would put on their show. Hornet was placing small, dense candles in tin cups that would throw back the light all around its edge. Marcus nodded to him as he hauled himself up and into the cramped space behind the soft red curtains at the stage’s back. Kit was in the long purple robes sewn with spangles at the edge that would transform him into Kil Hammerfrost, tragic king of the imaginary Kingdom of Clouds. Sandr was hunched down over a little mirror of polished metal, putting on eye-grease and rouge to become the sickly Prince Helsin, and applying it a little too thickly, Marcus thought. He shook his head.

  Marcus Wester had been the most celebrated general in Northcoast, and its most feared regicide. He had trekked across two continents to confront a goddess who didn’t exist and woken a dragon from the age of legend. And with all those marvels and terrors, that he had strong opinions about men’s eye-grease still had the power to astonish him.