The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  Worse, when the priest walked by again, the speaking horn to his lips, his face a mask of religious ecstasy, Clara found herself wanting to take comfort in his words and slogans. You are the chosen of the goddess. She will protect you. She wanted to give herself over to the hope that it might be true, that Jorey was blessed and special and that he, at least, would live to see his wife and baby.

  She didn’t know she was weeping until Vincen took her hand. He didn’t speak, but his gaze met her, and she found herself taking some strength from his simple presence.

  A roar went up. A thousand voices lifted together. The first of the siege engines had loosed its stone. Clara watched it arc up over the newly made wasteland and strike the wall. The sound of the impact came with the stone already falling to the ground, and four more catapults swung. Four more stones battered at the vast and uncaring walls of Porte Oliva. For hours, Jorey’s forces flung stones, trying to crack the battlements and the great gate. Many of the shots fell against the wall’s face, but some few scraped across the top or fell past it into the city to effects Clara could not guess.

  She heard the horns sound, the orders called out, but she couldn’t make out the words. Men streamed forward around her and the rest of the caravan. Thin, hard-faced men in motley armor and beards. Her countrymen. The servants of the Severed Throne, as much as was she, rushing to spend their deaths to avenge Geder Palliako’s sexual humiliation. And Jorey at their head. The ranks formed in the ashes. The catapults threw their last rounds before the advance. Six siege towers began the slow approach through the ruins, each following a trail the scouts had marked out for them. They were like slow giants, lumbering forward, the forces of the army advancing behind them, using them as cover. For now, the defense from the wall began in earnest. Great bolts from ballistas arcing over the ashy land. And in the siege towers, answering bolts, and also, more terribly, the voices of the priests, shouting their dreadful certainties. From where she sat, they were only muddled echoes that bounced from the wounded side of the wall. She wondered what the defenders of the city heard and if they believed. And if they did, how would they react? She closed her eyes, back again in another battle, Dawson at her side, as Basrahip shouted to a square that they had already lost, that everything they loved was gone, that there was no hope. There was no hope here. No victory was possible. Geder’s priests would win or else Jorey would lose, and there was no ending that would not pour acid on her heart.

  “Ah, Vincen,” she said.

  His gentle grip on her hand tightened and did not let go.

  On the field, a covered battering ram rolled toward the gates, arrows and stones raining down onto it. Two of the siege towers had become fouled in the debris of the burned city, and men were scampering out in front, pulling away blackened beams and stones. Smoke rose where the passage of the army had exposed coals still hot from the night’s long fire. The air all around her stank of ashes. The first of the siege towers came to the wall, throwing ladders up to reach the last distance to the wall’s top. The queensmen of Porte Oliva swarmed toward it, their little swords no bigger than needles at this distance. The battle along the crest of the wall began. Far away to the south, a column of black smoke was rising until it found some barrier of air and grew flat along the top. She couldn’t imagine what it came from, but it added to the sense of doom that covered the battlefield. The image of humanity locked in violence forever, without hope of peace.

  The deep, drumlike report of the battering ram filled the air. The covered ram had reached the gate and was worrying at it like a terrier killing a rat. A shout rose, though whether from the defenders or the Antean army, she could not say. A great stone fell from the top of the wall over the gate. It struck the battering ram’s protective roof a glancing blow, but perhaps something within the structure was affected. The steady boom of its attack stopped and the mechanism began, slowly, to roll back out of the way. A second tower reached the wall. More ladders rose. As she watched, a man scrambled up toward the enemy and was cast down. He fell slowly, his arms spread, his axe turning in the air beside him. Clara watched him all the way down. When he landed, he lay still. Dead, no doubt. Like that, between one breath and another, a man died before her. It wasn’t the first slaughter she’d seen, and oddly, she found comfort in it. These were only men. This was merely violence. Terrible, yes. Useless and wasteful, yes. But also human. She could not say what part of the carnage that forgave.

  A loud splintering came from the left, and the second siege engine to reach the wall was listing to the right. She couldn’t see what had broken it, but it tipped over, not quite falling, but scattering the men who had been on its height. The ladders wheeled toward the ground, but already another tower was approaching a few dozen feet down, and a third far away to the right. The defenders would have to split their attention four ways. Maybe five. She wondered if they could.

  A second battering ram made its way toward the gate, but its movement was slow, and the rain of arrows and stones seemed more concentrated now, as if with a little practice the men at the top of the wall were improving their technique. The voices of the priests still rang out, louder than the clashing of swords or the screams of the soldiers. She could not make out the syllables, but she knew the sense of them.

  A horn sounded, and a company of soldiers raced across the battlefield, the banner of House Flor streaming above them. She caught sight of Jorey’s banner. Banner of the Lord Marshal. It stood back from the wall, nearly as far from the violence as she was, hanging limp in the still air. She pulled her hand from Vincen’s and tapped his knee. It was a moment before he took her meaning and handed her the little spyglass. It took her a moment to find him, but then there he was, sitting high in his saddle with a spyglass of his own, surveying the battle. He looked thinner than when he’d left Camnipol. His cloak was thrown back, his jaw set, and his shoulders bent in an attitude of supreme concentration. She had seen his body take that shape since he’d been a boy too small to walk. His mind was bent entirely upon the scene before him. She would have given a great deal to know what was in his mind just then.

  Vicarian sat a horse just beyond him, and his expression chilled her. His smile was wide and bright, his eyes flashing in the grimy sunlight. She had also seen this—pleasure, laughter, joy—but never in this setting. To look upon this and rejoice seemed monstrous. There, in those priestly robes, was a thing that had been her son. A thing that had eaten him and now wore his skin. She had known that, but being reminded felt like being struck. She wanted to shout to Jorey to run, to get away before the corruption spread to him.

  Jorey’s attention shifted just as Vincen murmured, “Oh God.”

  A second column of smoke was rising in the south, and for a moment she thought that was what Vincen had seen. Then the flames took the crippled siege tower, lighting it like a pitch-dipped torch. The fire’s soft murmur was as loud as the shrieks of the men dying within the tower. The oil that had poured down to drench it and then be set alight left a trail of flames up the soot-black side of the wall. Another of the towers stood alone, trapped, it seemed by some misfortune of the path far from the wall. The other towers had reached their places. Soldiers swarmed up the ladders, either rising to the wall through sheer will and the force of numbers or being thrown back. She couldn’t guess how many men had died before her so far that day, but there were more, and with priests there to urge them on, she had no doubt that they would either win the city or die to a man. She wondered what she could write to Paerin Clark and the bank in Northcoast. The war is a madness unto itself, and there is no ending it short of complete slaughter. The first blow has been struck, and there is no path to victory nor reconciliation nor peace.

  And yet there had to be. There must, and she—God help her—had to find it. If she did not…

  “You cannot fail,” she said with a sigh, “for if you do, the consequences will be unimaginably dire.”

  “What, m’lady?”

  On the wall, a roar went up. A th
ousand voices lifting together in chorus that overcame mere human sound. It was like floodwaters rushing in a gully. On the top of the wall, the battle had changed, though she couldn’t quite make sense of how. The motions of the men seemed more frantic, if that was possible. At the westernmost of the siege towers, a man panicked and ran off the wall, arms and legs flailing in the air as he fell to his death. Clara stepped forward, a thick dread growing in her throat. The crowd shouted again, a vast sound that seemed to echo more deeply than the space could explain. A cunning man’s trick, surely. Some magic to frighten them and put the army to flight.

  The dragon rose up from within the city. Its wings were spread like a monarch raising hands to claim a kingdom. The great jaw swung open, showing sword-cruel teeth and the black flesh of its tongue and mouth. It screamed again, and Clara understood. The echoing roar had not been the summed voices of the clashing armies, but this one throat opened in rage. It wheeled in the air, flame pouring from its mouth. Another of the towers close against the wall caught fire, and the screams came from all around. She felt Vincen step back, but was unable herself to move. The beast was beautiful and terrible. Its movement in the air was like a dancer’s. It cried out again, and she thought there were words in the call.

  Jorey’s banner fell slowly, arcing down to the earth. She turned her spyglass back, fear possessing her. When she found her son, it was only his bearer who’d fled. Jorey sat where he had been, fighting to control his mount. Other men of noble blood were beside him now. Ceruc Essian, Assin Pasillian, Myrol Caot. They wore a form of armor she had never seen before, something between scale and leather that caught the light of the burning fires. Vicarian had twisted in his saddle and was shouting at them. Jorey had eyes only for the enemy. His smile spoke less of joy than a grim and violent satisfaction.

  “They knew,” Clara said. “Jorey knew. He’s ready for this.”

  “I don’t think I am, Clara,” Vincen said. “We should pull back. I don’t think we’re safe here.”

  Clara put up her hand, waving him to silence. By his fallen banner, Jorey lifted his fist.

  The horns blew a new and unfamiliar command. The one siege tower that stood back from the rest—the one that Clara had assumed trapped by some unfortunate ground—opened, and men spilled out of it. And with them, new machines such as Clara had not seen before. Or had, but only in the carts that had made their way past her during her travels.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vincen said. And then, “A trap.”

  Cithrin

  The ships that remained of the Antean Navy came as Barriath and Marcus had warned that they might, great and small, their sails catching the wind and riding into toward the port, but not so near as to be endangered by the complexities of the harbor. The guide boats remained at the docks along with the trade ships and the captured roundships now under the command of Barriath Kalliam. Three times before, Cithrin had found herself in cities under threat of violence. In Vanai, she had escaped before the battle. In Camnipol, she had hidden until the fighting had passed. In Suddapal, she had put her tribute in the streets and prayed that the sacking army would take the wealth and spare the people.

  It had never occurred to her to treat the battles as theater.

  “More wine, Magistra Cithrin?”

  “Thank you, Governor,” she said. “I think I will.”

  The viewing platform had been erected by the seawall, letting them look down over the port itself and then out over the wide blue water to where the enemy waited. The sandbars and reefs stood as the first protection of the city, the ancient ballistas and greenwood catapults along the seawall were the second, and Barriath Kalliam was the third. Three circles of defense, and only one of attack.

  But the one was devastating.

  The first of the enemy roundships was already burning, a plume of smoke rising up from it, black and greasy. The heat from the flames lifted it higher and higher until it seemed more like a storm cloud than the ruin of any human thing. At its top, the smoke plume flattened and began to drift. The servant poured Cithrin a fresh cup of wine as Governor Siden stared through his spyglasses and chortled. He seemed to take great pleasure in watching the enemy soldiers burn or drown or both. Cithrin preferred to see the destruction at a distance. It let her celebrate the victory with fewer pangs of conscience.

  Inys, flying low along the coast, angled out again. The tip of one wing dragged along the surface of the water, leaving a spreading line of white where he turned. His back was to the city and Cithrin when he loosed his fires again, and the flame was bright as a rising sun. When Inys pulled up, working his wide wings up into the sky, a second ship was afire. The governor clapped his hands. Cithrin drank her wine and made the smile that was expected of her. It might only have been that she’d had so much trouble sleeping of late, but the victory at sea didn’t fill her with joy. If anything, it seemed like a waste. All those lives. The labor that had gone to making the ships. And everything that they could have done, all of the work they might have accomplished, had they not instead been doing this.

  To no one’s surprise, the remaining ships began to scatter, leaving the burning hulks of their comrades behind to char and sink. A second column of smoke began to rise alongside the first. The governor stood and held his hand out to her.

  “Shall we repair to the defensive wall?” he asked with a grin.

  “I think we should,” Cithrin replied.

  The streets of the city were thick with people, but the queensmen cleared the path for them. Porte Oliva had always been a mixed city. Firstblood and Kurtadam and Cinnae. As she passed through the streets, she couldn’t help picking out the dark-scaled faces of Timzinae. Refugees from Suddapal, many of them. Even with the Antean forces broken, they would shoulder much of the burden for the war. Many, many people in Porte Oliva had lost their homes and businesses already in the fire outside the wall. The Timzinae were and would be the faces that had brought the conflict to Birancour. Theirs and Cithrin’s. But in the mind of the city, she had also brought the dragon, and so she would be honored, carried with the governor, plied with wine and honeybread, invited to the best viewing points to watch the slaughter. It wasn’t fair, but so little was. This at least was injustice in her favor.

  The viewing tower was in the highest spire of the cathedral. Walking up the tight-spiraling staircase made her legs ache and left her dizzy. The high, open air at the top did little to steady her. Yardem Hane and Pyk were there already, as was the captain of the city guard. Far below, the square that had once housed the condemned seemed terribly far away. The wall of the city stood to the north, and from her vantage, Cithrin could just see over it to the blackened ruins beyond. One siege tower stood alone and forlorn in the ashes. The others, against the defensive wall, were hidden from her sight, though a column of smoke marked where one had been set alight.

  The violence was so near to her, and also separate, as if the clear air between her and the fighting were like the edge of a stage. What happened there happened there. She could imagine the press of bodies, the weight of sword and armor, the fear. She could imagine the sudden pain of an arrow in her throat, the way sound might grow distant as death came close. She could watch it all safely, from here.

  “All is progressing as we’d hoped,” the captain of the city guard said.

  “Excellent, excellent,” the governor said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Yardem,” Cithrin said. “Where’s Captain Wester?”

  “Had some things to see to, ma’am,” Yardem said, his ears canted forward politely. She wished that the tiny stone deck were large enough to take the Tralgu aside and speak to him in something like privacy. Nothing could be said here that wouldn’t be heard by everyone present, and Yardem’s reply had been so diplomatic it could only mean he didn’t want to say it in front of the governor. Her curiosity itched, but she turned her eyes toward the northern wall.

  “What have we seen, then?” she asked. />
  “A little light assault by their siege engines,” Yardem said. “A few small scars in the stone, I’d guess, and a few that managed to get over. One hit a stable and seems to have taken down a wall. That’s the worst of it. They keep trying to scale the walls.”

  “Are we worried about that?”

  “No,” Yardem rumbled. “They’re heartfelt, but the road’s worn them down. Our side’s rested, fresh, and guarding their own city. If it weren’t for the priests, I’d call the day ours now.”

  “But they don’t have our dragon!” Governor Siden said. “The enemy ships are already put to fire or flight.”

  “Yes, sir. Saw the smoke.”

  “And now…”

  Inys flew in low over the city, wings spread wide. He passed through the square below Cithrin, the sun shining on his scales, and glided north toward the wall. Even so far above the city, she could hear the voices rise like a surge in the waves. In the square and on the wall, the citizens of Porte Oliva raised their fists and called out. It might only have been her imagination that Inys flew where the adulation was loudest. The dragon screamed once, then again, and then cleared the wall, his shadow falling over the battlefield. This third shriek was the loudest, and the violence of it set Cithrin’s heart turning a little faster in her chest. She couldn’t imagine the fear it would inspire in the soldier who had to face it. Inys wheeled, wings scooping the air, and set another of the siege towers alight. The enemy’s horns blared.

  Something happened at the lone siege tower. It opened, and groups of men spilled out of it. From so high up, Cithrin couldn’t make out the devices they were carrying. They appeared to be oversized crossbows or perhaps very small ballistas. The bolts they threw seemed no larger than needles from this distance. She could hardly believe they could do a dragon harm.

  The needles caught the thin membranes of Inys’s left wing, and the dragon’s head turned, biting at the air below the new wounds. She glanced at Yardem, but his ears were forward in concern and confusion. Her heart began beating faster, driven by an unexpected sense of threat. Threads seemed to be rising from the ground up toward the dragon, though she couldn’t imagine that was true. Inys fought to keep aloft, blasting fire toward the ground, but more needles rose to touch him. Leg, wing, neck. More threads rose. Cithrin leaned forward, her hands on the railing, clutching so hard that her knuckles ached. The dragon turned, laboring in the air that moments before he had owned. He disappeared behind the wall. A great shout rose up. The dragon had fallen. Cithrin heard herself gasp, and the sound was almost a sob. Antean horns sounded a charge.