The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  I continue my correspondence in hopes that you have some knowledge or perspective of which I am at present unaware. My hope is that you have hope. The forces of Antea are leaving Porte Oliva today and moving north along the dragon’s roads toward Sara-sur-Mar and Porte Silena. It is possible that the Lord Marshal might make the turn toward Herez and Daun, though the news that Callon Cane and his bounties are no longer welcome in Herez make this seem less likely to me. The Lord Marshal has had news that, ejected from Daun, Callon Cane has taken up his trade in Sara-sur-Mar. If, as he believes, Cane is an adventure of your bank, I must urge you to withdraw him to safety at once.

  Vincen’s voice came through the door as a murmur. “The supply carts are lining up at the gate.”

  “You aren’t anywhere near where you could see that,” Clara said.

  “You aren’t anywhere near where you could be sure they aren’t.”

  Jorey Kalliem has divided his force, leaving Porte Oliva under the protectorship of his brother, a priest of the spider goddess with all the powers and compromise that implies. A small occupying force will also remain. The majority of the army will proceed with the two remaining priests. If there is any hope of victory, it is in this: the priests are few, and their power is great. Should they be absented from the army, it is possible that Lord Marshal Kalliam might not push on. He is reluctant to conduct a second winter campaign, and should he be sufficiently slowed, the army may retreat to Porte Oliva to winter. I do not know what, if anything, can be accomplished with that time, but

  New voices came, sharp and masculine. Vincen responded in kind. Clara grabbed a handful of blotting sand, cast it on the paper, folded the letter, and stuffed it down the front of her dress as the door opened and the younger son of Cyrus Mastellin came in. He had his dead uncle’s unfortunate roundness of face, but he wore it better.

  “Lady Kalliam, please forgive the intrusion, but if you wish the escort of the Lord Marshal on your return journey—”

  “I shall be there at once,” Clara said. “I was only tying up a few last little things.”

  Mastellin nodded, but did not retreat. Jorey had apparently told the boy to come back with her in tow or with permission to leave without her. In the corridor behind him, Vincen stood quiet as a ghost, his expression too innocent to miss his meaning. Yes, you said as much, she thought. You’re very clever. And I am damned if I know how I’m to get this letter free without drawing stares.

  “My lady,” Vincen said as she passed. He was enjoying himself entirely too much.

  They left the gates behind before midday, Clara riding with Jorey behind the advance guard. She’d said her farewells to Vicarian at his new temple the night before, speaking carefully and pleased to have the occasion behind her. The sun was warm, and the grasslands wide and fragrant with the ripeness that came in the falling point between midsummer and harvest. The story was that she would return to Camnipol, the army acting as her escort until their paths diverged. A small group of sword-and-bows would see her safely back through the pass at Bellin and have her back in the heart of empire by the close of the season. It wasn’t what Clara wanted or hoped, but she’d had to resign herself to it. Otherwise her agreement would have been a lie.

  The strangeness of it struck her. All the despair and fear in her letter was truth. When her mind turned to the war, and the spider goddess, the fate of her house and her kingdom, the world looked bleak and empty of redemption. But flirting with Vincen when no one was there to see or riding through the high, green grass with her son at her side and the sun in her eyes was still pleasant. Even a burning world had its moments of peace and sweetness. Perhaps even more, since they were so rare and the alternative so bitter.

  The advance guard pushed on, flattening the grass as they passed so that ambush from the sides became less likely. Clara found herself imagining the track they left as the belly marks of a great dragon scratching itself on the ground. The crushed blades were prettier that way, even if it wasn’t truth.

  “Mother,” Jorey said, intruding on her private, meaningless thoughts, “I have a favor to ask. When you turn aside, I’ll be sending a courier with you. Reports for Geder.”

  “Will you?” she said. That was interesting. Perhaps there would be a chance to see them on the road. Copy them. Change them, even, if there were some advantage to be had.

  “I also have a letter… for Sabiha. I was going to put it with the others, but if you carry it, I know it won’t be delivered to the wrong place by mistake.”

  “Ah, one of those letters. I understand. I have a collection of them your father wrote to me, once upon a time.”

  “Mother!”

  “Jorey, dear, one thing that you must be aware of by pure force of logic if nothing else? You were not the first generation to discover sex.”

  “I’m not having this conversation,” Jorey said, but there was laughter in his voice. Real laughter, not its bitter twin. “And thank you for agreeing to carry it. And not read it yourself.”

  They rode on for a time. The land was surprisingly flat, and the wind made waves in the grass like it was water and their horses were sailboats. It was lovely. That it could not last made it more so.

  Cithrin

  Five days after Barriath Kalliam’s departure for Sara-sur-Mar in his new and unlikely role, a great pod of the Drowned appeared. They stayed with the fleet as the ships floated north, passing the rough, cruel coast that separated Herez and Princip C’Annaldé. The pale bodies floated beneath the ship where Inys lay. Sometimes they crowded so thickly there seemed more flesh than ocean. Occasionally, the dragon reached over and sank his vast head beneath the waves, and the drag set the sailors crawling over and around him, to keep the ship’s course true. A few hours later, the Drowned would swarm and lift up the shining corpse of some great beast—grey-skinned squid half as long as the ship or silver-scaled tuna or ink-black flesh in a form no sailor had ever seen—from the depths like tribute being offered to a king.

  Some days Marcus would take a ship’s boat over and try to talk to the dragon, but more often he wouldn’t. Cithrin would watch when it occurred to her that she might, but she made no point of it. Her world had changed, not to a nightmare. Nothing so bright and passionate as terror lived in her. Disappointment, yes. Despair, certainly. More than anything else, Cithrin was profoundly aware of distance. In her cabin, she would hang in her hammock, wearing the same clothes she had for a week, thick sweat making her skin sticky. Her belly was too tight for food, but she forced down bowls of salted fish as hard as leather. Her gut rebelled every time, and she kept it down through force of will. It was easy to do, because her body with its struggles and the suffering was so far away. She saw all the symptoms of her illness, but couldn’t bring herself so far as alarm. If she wasted and died, she did. If not, then the world would go on taking its cuts at her until she did. Everyone died eventually. Except the dragons and the spiders and their hatred. Those, it seemed, would live forever.

  Cithrin didn’t sleep, though she sometimes lost consciousness. No dreams bothered her, and she was not refreshed by it. Instead, she experienced it as a stuttering of time. It was day, and then night. The sun was low in the east, playing above the coast, and then it was overhead. She felt as through her mind had developed a bad limp, one that was growing slowly worse. She drank what there was to drink, not because it helped, but because she did. She waited without knowing what she was waiting for. Her body shuddered sometimes, trembling without cause. Occasionally, late at night, she wept and put no particular importance on it. It was simply a thing that happened.

  It was an oddly peaceful sort of violence. The worst of it was when someone tried to help her.

  “You should come out to the light,” Isadau said.

  The cabin was small. There was hardly enough room to stand straight, and the walls—if the slats and beams could deserve the name—were close enough to touch both sides without stretching. Someone outside the room coughed and muttered a florid obscenity. C
ithrin could hear everything around her perfectly. She assumed they could hear her too. She wished Isadau wouldn’t talk, but not so much that she’d object.

  “I’ve seen sunlight,” Cithrin said. “Has it changed?”

  “It’s not healthy to stay too long in darkness.”

  The magistra of Suddapal hunched against the wall, the black scales of her skin seeming to blend in with the shadows. She was beautiful, and Cithrin wished there was something to do for her. She would have liked to be kind to her. Isadau smiled tentatively.

  “There’s nothing out there,” Cithrin said.

  “There is a great deal,” Isadau said, and her hand found its way into Cithrin’s. “We have lost a battle, but it is not the last. Even with his priests, Geder cannot press his campaign forever.”

  “He can, though,” Cithrin said. “Because we can’t fight him. It all keeps happening, again and again and again. Nothing will be different in Stollbourne. They’ll use their fear of him to demand our gold, just the way the prince of Vanai did. And the queen of Birancour. And we’ll be in the same position we had in Porte Oliva, trying to balance being too useful against not being useful enough. It hasn’t worked. It’s never worked. It won’t.”

  “We can send your plans and schemes to Komme,” Isadau said. “The branch in Porte Oliva didn’t have the coin to make them work, but—”

  “What will be cheaper for him?” Cithrin said, gently, softly. She felt she was breaking hard news to a dear friend. “Bankrupting his bank to fight a war he wants no part of, or handing me to Geder?”

  “You know Captain Wester and Yardem will never let that happen,” Isadau said. “You know I won’t either. You are loved, Cithrin.”

  Her throat felt thick, and for a moment, she mistook sorrow for mere nausea. They sat in the dark, weeping quietly together while two sailors on the other side of the thin wall argued about oiled ropes and iron nails. When at length Cithrin spoke, her voice was low and rough as a child at the trailing end of a tantrum.

  “I was so sure we’d win.”

  The books and ledgers were in the hold, and Cithrin went there sometimes. She looked through the accounts for three dead branches—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—not because there was anything to learn there. It was like sitting with old friends and recalling sweeter times. The oldest entries were in Magister Imaniel’s handwriting, the newest in Pyk Usterhall’s. The dead before and the dead behind. Their voices mixed in her half-hinged memory. It’s bank policy never to lend to people who consider it beneath their dignity to repay became When we’ve won, we have less risk and more money. She thought of Besel and of Smit. She still wore the necklace poor lovestruck little Salan had given her before going off to man the walls at Kiaria. A silver bird to care for until the war was over. Only they hadn’t known then how terribly, terribly long ago the war had begun.

  Her own notes were among the pages Marcus Wester had saved. Her plans and schemes from before he and the players had arrived strapped to Inys’s great legs. Schedules of mercenary companies, of crop prices and iron prices and coal. A long examination written in cipher of what resources could be choked off to limit the ability of Antea—of anyone—to make the instruments of war. Alum and salt and cotton. All of it rigorous and logical and impossible as a dream. The roundships held the remaining wealth of Suddapal that Pyk had been so conservative in lending, the swollen coffers from the wise buying out letters of credit when they fled before the storm. Likely, they had more wealth on board now than all the pirates in the fleet had ever captured. It would be a miracle if they weren’t all slaughtered in their sleep and their bodies thrown over the side for the sharks. Except Master Kit was there to nose out any mutiny, and Marcus would stop them, and if he didn’t Inys might still take offense at what the pirates would have to do to Marcus. Fears laid against fears, making a fragile kind of stability. Not that it mattered.

  In among her notes, she found another page, one not written in her hand. She knew the words without looking at them. They’d burned themselves into her eyes.

  Cithrin I love you. I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known. All this time that I’ve been running Aster’s kingdom and fighting to protect the empire, it’s been a way to distract myself from you. From your body. Does that sound crass? I don’t mean it to be. Before that night, I’d never touched a woman. Not the way I touched you.

  She had had so few professions of love in her life. Sandr had muttered something along the lines, she thought, back when they were drunk and skating and stupid. Even then she’d known better than to believe it. Salan, in his boyish, fumbling way. Qahuar Em, the first lover she’d ham-handedly tried to betray. Had he ever pretended to love her? She didn’t think so. He had respected her too much for that. None of them had been as heartfelt and sincere as Geder, and none of them had made her skin crawl. Even now, Geder’s words felt like she’d brushed her arm against a snake.

  If only there were an exchange where people could trade love for love. She could have sold Geder’s devotion to some status-struck girl at the Antean court and gotten the admiration and desire of… oh, an ambassador, perhaps. Some merchant prince who’d put his heart in an awkward position and would have been much better paired with the voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. Only at some point, she would have to have fallen in love with someone as well, and she was fairly certain she never had. Loving her would have been like lending to a king, a weight on her scales that would never be brought to balance. And anyway—

  The profound moment appeared silently and with no fanfare. It cleared its throat, almost in apology, and between one breath and the next changed Cithrin forever. She didn’t catch her breath, didn’t shout. There was no feeling of exultation that demanded it. The sick chaos that she called her mind resolved like a choir lost in pandemonium suddenly finding a chord. Though she had not been asleep, she woke.

  The hold all around her was as it had been: shadows and light, the acrid smell of cheap lamp oil and salt and tar, the soft paper in her hand that had once been in Geder’s. She tucked the letter away, sighed, went to the ladder, and rose from the darkness into the moonlight.

  She went to find the two men she needed. Marcus Wester and Kit.

  “There, upon the horizon stand!” Sandr said, gesturing at the rising hills of Borja in the imagination of the sailors and the guards. Cithrin could almost imagine the red-brown earth.

  Kit turned to follow Sandr’s finger, his jaw tight. He was the perfect image of Sebbin Caster, the evil queen’s crippled brother and, through poetic justice, the last of his house. “No rising sun e’er burned so bright! Her castle falls, and so makes right.”

  The applause began, Cary and Mikel leading it and the wider audience taking it up. Sandr and Kit stood motionless as the first waves of sound passed over them. Their eyes were still on fire and death, and then their false selves fell away, and they smiled and bowed. The sailors hooted and clapped their hands against their thighs. The bank guards, more accustomed to theater, showed a degree less excitement, but their pleasure was unfeigned. Across the water, Inys blew a bright plume of flame out over the waves. The silver of the moonlight and the smoky red of dragonfire seemed like a painter’s contrivance. Cithrin found herself smiling and wondering if it had been only coincidence, or if the dragon had been able to follow the performance even across the wide water. She moved through the little crowd, dodging Chisn Rake when the old Tralgu and a young Dartinae sailor began to pantomime the final duel scene. Marcus and Yardem were on the port side, leaning against the railing. Yardem’s eyes found her first, and his wide, canine smile was a pleasure to see.

  Marcus straightened, tugged at his sleeve, and tried to look nonchalant.

  “Captain,” Cithrin said. “I wondered if I might have a moment?”

  Marcus and Yardem exchanged a glance. Yardem flicked an ear.

  “Of course,” Marcus said. Cithrin nodded and walked toward the ship’s bow. He took two long, fast strides to catch up and then walked beside h
er. The half moon hung low in the sky and stars spilled across the darkness. In the night, she couldn’t make out the coast away to the east. Or maybe they’d pulled farther away from land, tracking toward the Thin Sea, Narinisle, and Stollbourne.

  “You’re looking… better,” Marcus said. “Are you feeling well?”

  “I am,” Cithrin said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to need to change our plans.”

  The moonlight made Wester a drawing of himself in black ink and watered paint. Still, she could see the skepticism in his expression. “I’m listening.”

  “We’ve made a mistake. I’ve made it. And I think I see the way to… well, not win. Nothing so straightforward as that. I think I see the way to start fighting the right battles.”

  “We lost. Doesn’t mean it was the wrong battle.”

  “Battle’s the wrong word. I should have said struggle or… oh, there aren’t words for this. The mistake we made, that we all made, is thinking that we’re fighting Antea. That we’re fighting Geder.”

  “All right,” Marcus said, pulling the syllables out. “And who is it we’re actually fighting, then?”

  “The idea of war.”

  Marcus nodded. The grey at his temples caught the light. His boots scraped against the deck as he shifted, and when he spoke, his voice was calm and careful.

  “Grief’s a terrible thing, Cithrin, and everyone comes to it differently. You’ve lost a lot in the last years, and I know how that can affect—”

  “I haven’t lost my mind. I’m saner now than I have been in weeks. Listen to me. Listen to my voice.”

  “You sound like Kit now.”

  “Listen. In Porte Oliva, we thought of it as a normal war. The enemy came, and we prepared for a fight. And we fought. Even though we know that the spiders are there to make us fight, we still fought. This has been going on since the beginning of history. Geder wasn’t there when it started. This isn’t about him or Antea or me. This is Morade wrecking humanity by making us fight.”