The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  “Just thinking,” Geder said. “It’s nothing.”

  “I wish I could go,” the boy said. “I don’t see why it’s safe enough for you to go but not for me.”

  You’re still a boy, Geder thought but restrained himself from saying. It was true, but it wasn’t what Aster could hear. There was no way to explain war to someone who had never seen it. Never been touched by it. Never heard the voice of the fire in Vanai in his nightmares or seen a woman’s silhouette against the flames and thought, I’ve done this.

  “Glory’s all well and good,” Geder said. “But you’ll have your chance later. Once you’ve taken the throne.”

  “It’s all going to be over by then,” Aster complained. “The wars will all be ended, and the dragons and the Timzinae will all be dead, and it’ll be nothing but peace.”

  “I know,” Geder said. “That won’t be a bad thing.”

  “I just wish I could see it before it ends.”

  “The triumphs when you come back are the best part,” Geder said. “Before that it’s mostly a lot of camping and a little bit of shouting.”

  Aster managed a wan smile. “You’re just trying to make it sound bad so I’ll feel better.”

  “Is it working?” Geder asked.

  On the way back through the gates, Basrahip rode beside Geder, Aster riding a length or two ahead. The small people of the city bowed their heads as Lord Regent, high priest, and crown prince passed together surrounded by his guard. Three of the most powerful and noblest men in the empire. Geder put out his hand in a gesture of blessing.

  “You are well, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked. “You have lost your doubts?”

  “I have,” Geder said.

  “This is as it should be,” Basrahip said. “All of this is very, very well.”

  “Do I have time to make a stop before we call the march?”

  “What you do, you may do,” Basrahip said. “You have no need to ask me.”

  “I’d like to stop by and see Sabiha Kalliam before we leave. And her daughter.”

  “As you wish,” Basrahip said.

  Still, Geder had seen Aster back to the Kingspire and made his farewell there. The prince had been brave about the whole thing, and his tutor had been there to whisk him away to lessons. Best to keep the boy’s mind occupied. He’d spend less time chewing at himself, worrying for Geder and envying him. Basrahip and half a dozen priests rode back for the army beyond the gates, and Geder had sought out his best friend’s wife. She was, after all, as near as he could get to saying goodbye to Jorey himself.

  “Yes,” Lady Skestinin said. “I suppose anything is possible. I know I never imagined myself living through times like these.” For a moment, her reserve cracked and tears touched her pale eyes.

  “If there is any way to bring Lord Skestinin back safely, we will do it,” Geder said. “And if he’s harmed, I will see that a thousand of the enemy are killed in his name.”

  “Yes,” Lady Skestinin said. “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

  Geder nodded. It hurt him to see her pain and to be unable to do anything to ease it. It hurt him to think of Aster’s aching loneliless and anxiety and of the fact that Jorey had already missed the first months of his daughter’s life. Lady Skestinin nodded again, much as she had before, and retreated to the hall without taking the risk of further speech. Geder sat again, his hands between his knees, and looked out at the garden. Bees filled the air around the pear trees, drawn, he thought, by the sweetness of the fruit where it had gone overripe and split. A striped grey cat streaked across the ground, fleeing from something or chasing it. Geder closed his eyes, and Cithrin was there, waiting for him. She was neither the cruel one, laughing at him for being too stupid as to believe in her love, nor the repentant one who begged his forgiveness. He couldn’t even conjure up her face, not clearly. It was Cithrin because he knew it was Cithrin. It was the Cithrin he’d created in his heart, and who was still there.

  I loved you, he thought. And you laughed at me. Why did you have to laugh at me?

  “Geder?”

  His eyes opened, and Sabiha was there. He hadn’t heard her come in. Motherhood was agreeing with her. She’d put on weight that widened her face and her hips, brought a warmth to her cheeks. The baby clung to her side, riding Sabiha’s hip like a tiny bear shimmying up a tree. The small, bright eyes found Geder, boggled at him, lost him, and found him again.

  “Sabiha,” he said. “And how is the perfect girl?”

  Annalise made a low guh and swung her arms to grab Sabiha’s hair. Sabiha winced and gently disentangled her locks from the baby’s fingers. “The perfect girl,” she said, “is growing like weeds in springtime and doesn’t know her own strength.”

  “She looks wonderful,” Geder said.

  “She is wonderful,” Sabiha replied, sitting down on the chair opposite him. “I hear you’re going.”

  “Yes. After this.”

  Sabiha shifted the baby to her lap and jounced her gently on her knee. Annalise looked fascinated, and then startled, and then cooed delightedly and waved her tiny hands. Her hair was thin as high clouds on a windy day and the same color as Jorey’s. The soft place at the center of her head where the bones hadn’t grown closed was visible only because he knew to look for it. Geder imagined he could see something of his friend’s face in the pudgy curves of her cheeks. She met Geder’s eyes and shrieked with pleasure. Geder smiled.

  “I wanted to see my niece again before I left,” Geder said, looking directly into the child’s eyes. “She’s going to be a different girl when I get back, isn’t she? Uncle Geder won’t even know her.”

  “Would you like to hold her?” Sabiha asked.

  “If I could,” Geder said, and Sabiha rose up, scooping the baby to him, to his lap. Annalise was lighter than he’d expected, as if her body were made from fluff and warmth. He held her carefully around the chest, supporting her neck the way Sabiha had shown him the first time, though the baby seemed quite able to hold up her own head now.

  “You know my nurse back at Rivenhalm used to tell me that you should whisper all your secrets into the soft place there before it grows closed,” he said.

  “My mother says that too,” Sabiha said. “It’s supposed to make the baby grow up wise.”

  “Is it? I thought it was to give them something while they were still innocent enough to make it clean again. I may have gotten that part wrong. My skull had grown closed when she told me, but I was still fairly young. It’s hard to know what really happened back then.”

  “It is,” Sabiha said. “Have you heard from Jorey?”

  “Just the usual. Reports from the field. Dry stuff. Nothing personal. You?”

  “I had one letter after Porte Oliva fell. He seemed… happy’s a strong word. He seemed well. He was glad his mother came.”

  “They’re going to make fun of him for that when he gets back,” Geder said.

  “If he wins, the jokes will be gentle,” Sabiha said, an edge in her voice. “And if he loses, they’ll mock him for more than that. It’s the joy of court that everything you do is available for the casual judgment of others.”

  “I suppose I don’t see that from where I am,” Geder said. “No one but Aster confides in me. Or makes jokes. I’m not complaining, you understand. It’s just I wasn’t really part of court before Basrahip and the priests came, and after that it was so little time before I was named Lord Regent. I don’t know what court life is really like. All my time I’ve been either below it or above it.”

  “I’ve been in the thick,” Sabiha said. “It’s only people. Cruel and kind, and often both in the same evening.”

  Annalise blurped in agreement. Geder made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth that fascinated her, and she tried to grab for his lips. Sabiha gasped and pushed her hand between them. For a moment, he thought he saw something like fear in her. As if she was afraid that he might get angry with the babe if it tugged at him too hard and dash her to the floor. But
perhaps that was only his imagination. Sabiha knew him better than that. Or he hoped she did.

  “After this, it should all be over,” he said, embarrassed by the words as he said them. I’m going to save the world. I’d never hurt your baby. Obvious, thin, and whining.

  “That’s good,” she said. “I’m ready for whatever comes after.”

  “A world truly at peace,” he said. “Not that I think it will all come right at once. There’ll still be some work to be done. Ruling. All that.”

  “I’ll take a world that’s half on fire if it brings Jorey home,” she said. “That’s uncharitable, I know, but it’s the truth. I just want him back before she starts walking and doesn’t want to be held anymore.”

  “Would it be all right,” Geder asked, “if I gave her one of my secrets? Just to keep before I go.”

  “Of course,” Sabiha said.

  The baby looked up into Geder’s eyes, suddenly and comically solemn. Her thick fingers opened and closed. Geder leaned carefully over her until the thin scruff of hair tickled his lips. He could feel the soft place as a tiny warmth. He closed his eyes.

  He whispered, softly enough that not even Sabiha could hear him, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Cithrin

  King Tracian’s face was red and beginning to peel. Marcus Wester, sitting at Cithrin’s right side, looked much the same. It was as if they’d both sat out too long in the summer sun without shade. Komme Medean was at her left, his weathered face solemn as if they were at a funeral. And beyond him, Kit. The four of them together on one side of the table, and the king across from them and sitting in a slightly higher chair. On the pale white tablecloth, a single vivid drop of blood. And from it, dancing crazily, a tiny black body with eight frantic legs.

  The point made, Marcus crushed the spider with a stone.

  “You’re… one of them,” King Tracian said.

  “I am, yes,” Kit said. “I believe, though, that my actions and history will speak for my benign intentions.”

  “It’s truth,” Marcus said. “Kit’s been the driving force behind stopping these bastards since before the rest of us knew they were more than the latest fashion in Antean political cults.”

  King Tracian put his head in his hands, peeking out between the fingers. The gesture didn’t seem intended to be comic, however it looked, and Cithrin didn’t laugh.

  “The power of having someone like that,” he said. “To just say things and have them be true.”

  “Have them be believed, rather,” Kit said. “Please forgive me, Majesty, but I find these differences are quite important to me. More so, perhaps, than the average person. What we do does not create truth. In my experience, only the world can do that.”

  “And the dragon…”

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “It seems that it started that long ago. Inys says he is part of the cause of it. And, we’re hoping, part of the solution for it too. But the point here that you should be taking back to your private chambers is that if we hadn’t come here, you’d be marching your army off to Kaltfel right now, ready to fly your banner and die to a man. You’d be at war.”

  Cithrin glanced over at Komme. The old banker’s face didn’t seem to have moved at all. He might almost have been carved from wood. She kept her own expression smooth and calm, giving away as little as she could.

  “So this isn’t Antea’s Lord Regent,” Tracian said. “Geder Palliako isn’t the danger we’re facing. It’s these… these priests that command him.”

  “No,” Cithrin said. “It’s Geder. But it isn’t only him. The shape that all this has taken, the shape it still takes, began in him. You’re right that it won’t end with him, though. It will spread the way it almost did here. It may have already.”

  “You see,” Kit said, leaning forward and gesturing with both hands, “as distance grows, the chance for… not even misunderstanding. For differences of opinion, then. They grow. And when all sides are certain—unshakably certain—there can be no reconciliation. Only death for one side or the other, inevitably. And I fear that will be true for every division, however small. I believe that, unchecked, men like myself will set the world into an eternal battle of all against all, with no hope of peace. It is, as Inys tells us, what we were made to do.”

  “So, much like the normal course of history,” Marcus said sourly, “but without the restful times between.”

  Cithrin folded her hands together and kicked him under the table. They could be cynical and despairing afterwards when they were safely back at the holding company and drunk. This was not the time.

  Under the red of the burn, King Tracian looked green. “Komme?”

  “Majesty,” the old banker said.

  “What in the name of all that’s holy have you brought into my court?” the king demanded, his voice harsh with anger. No, not anger. Fear. Cithrin made a private note of that, even as she dreaded the answer. Komme bowed his head and heaved a sigh.

  “I’ve brought you the only hope you’ve got,” Komme said at last. “We have to stand up to this, old friend. You know I don’t like working out in the world where everyone can see it. But being quiet and hoping the storm passes south of us won’t work this time. The girl brought you the gold to defend the nation because chances are you’re going to need it. Nothing she said to you was false. Cithrin bel Sarcour is more than the voice of my branch in Porte Oliva. I don’t say this lightly. She’s a genius. There hasn’t been a mind like hers for seeing the systems of the world in all my life.”

  “You trust her, then?” the king asked.

  “Absolutely,” Komme said with a firm nod, and Kit pressed his lips a degree tighter to cover a smile. It was all right. Cithrin knew it was a lie. All that mattered was that the king didn’t.

  “All right, then,” Tracian said. “You think this war can be won?”

  It was the question she’d been waiting for. The one she’d known from the moment the summons came she would answer. She thought of all the words she’d practiced, let her breath out, and pulled up her neck the way the players had taught her to. In truth, there might have been no one in the world better prepared to seem one thing and be another than her.

  “No, it can’t be won. Not as a war, with soldiers on the field. The more we try that, the more they manage what they were made for. Violence. Dislocation. Chaos. What we can do is drive them out of business.”

  King Tracian frowned, but there was something in his eyes. A glimmer not of hope—it was much too early for that—but of hope’s seed. King Tracian was curious.

  “How,” he said, “would we do that?”

  CUT THUMBS! the sheet read in letters half as high as her finger was long. Each one was drawn in red ink with a lining of black to make it easier to see. The writing went on underneath in a less ostentatious script. The forces of madness are all around us. Protect your mind and your family. Do no business with anyone who will not prove themselves free of the spider’s taint! When they say there’s no need, that is when the need is greatest! The servants of the spider are everywhere. Never let down your guard!

  In truth, it was not her favorite of the letters. There were five of them now. The first laid out what the spiders were and where they had come from, and the rules by which they functioned. Another listed twenty strategies for defeating the priests in the field of battle, including a rudimentary set of visual signals that could be used with torches or banners to guide troops whose ears had been stopped with wax. But the one that was hardest for her to read was the letter that Magistra Isadau had written to her race, telling the Timzinae what the spiders were and of Inys’s creation of their whole people as a measure against them. We have suffered, that letter said, but not without reason. We have suffered because they fear us. And they fear us for good cause.

  Cithrin imagined the copies of the letter coming into the hands of the slaves of Antea. She could barely imagine what it might mean to them. Isadau’s words already had the power to move her to tears, and she was s
itting safely in the scrivener’s house at the south of Carse with the sample copies in her hand and a cup of watered wine sitting on the bench at her side.

  “How many can we produce?” she asked.

  The master scribe was a dark-skinned woman of middle years. Her forefinger and thumb looked almost deformed by the calluses there. “Done to standard, a full member of the guild could make five copies in a day.”

  “And how many full guild members are available?” Isadau asked. Through everything, she managed to seem gentle and firm.

  “Twenty,” the woman said.

  “Not enough,” Cithrin said. “How many senior apprentices?”

  The master scribe scratched her arm. “If we used them, we might have as many as… fifty desks? So that way we could have two hundred and fifty pages a day, but that would be—”

  “We will supply paper, pens, and ink,” Cithrin said. “And you’ll accept payment in letters of transfer.”

  A shadow passed over the master scribe’s face, but at least it passed. “King Tracian has commanded that we will, and so we will.”

  “I’m glad we understand each other,” Cithrin said. She drank off the last of the wine in a gulp and put the cup back on the bench with a sharp click. “It’s a pleasure working with you.”

  “Likewise,” the master scribe said.

  Cithrin and Isadau rose. The main room of the house was row upon row of desks, and fewer than half of them occupied. That would change. Cithrin could already picture every desk full, the air thick with the scratching of pen on paper. One point in a plan of a hundred, and thankfully not one that had to be paid in coin. Buying paper with paper. There was an elegance in that, she thought. Or it might only have been that she was a little bit giddy.

  The plans she’d drawn up in Porte Oliva had been for besting Antea in the field, and not all of them applied to her new framework. But some did, and others she could create with Komme and Chana and Magistra Isadau and Magister Nison.

  “Magistra?” the chief scribe said as they reached the wide blue doors that led to the sun-drenched street. Cithrin and Isadau turned back together, each of them answering to the title. The master scribe held up the sample letters. “All of this we’re copying. Is it… true?”