Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

‘Queue?’ Cora said. ‘Queue for what?’

  ‘There was a sanga, but they torched his house with him inside.’

  ‘But it isn’t real!’ Cora said. ‘It was a story, for Audience-sake.’

  ‘The other local stitcher was overrun within hours, so the Commission closed off part of the city to manage the problem.’

  ‘And all this has happened since yesterday?’ she said.

  ‘Would you sleep if you thought you had the plague?’

  ‘Wait.’ Cora closed her eyes, as if that might help her make sense of what she was hearing. It was too early for this. ‘What about you? You’re saying someone threw a bottle at you because of the story’s plague? Because you’re a Casker?’

  ‘The Commission is telling all Caskers to stay off the streets. The talk is that Bordair’s gone and Caskers brought Black Jefferey to the city. Likely be in the ’sheets by this evening.’

  ‘That’s crazy!’ Cora said. ‘Black Jefferey isn’t real.’

  ‘Must feel real to those sick people.’

  ‘So where’s the Commission putting them?’

  ‘Burlington Palace, I heard. Close enough to Murbick, but not too close.’

  Burlington Palace. She had seen that name recently. She picked up a pennysheet from her desk. ‘But that’s the Perlish venue,’ she said, finding a list of venues in a chequer’s odds.

  ‘It was.’

  Cora put the ’sheet back on the desk. At the Opening Ceremony, Jenkins had said it was the Perlish who had the hardest task to win the election, and now the Commission had turned their story venue into a plague hospital. If the Perlish were responsible for Nicholas Ento’s death, life wasn’t getting any easier for them after the act. Was the commandeering of Burlington somehow connected to the death of Ento? She couldn’t make it out, not yet.

  ‘What’s that?’ Finnuc said, pointing at Cora’s desk.

  ‘What’s wh—’ She noticed the small glass jar, the one with the dirt scraped from the alleyway where they’d found Ento. ‘That? Good question. I don’t know, really.’

  ‘You don’t know. No wonder your office is so neat and tidy.’

  ‘Funny,’ Cora said. She picked the jar up, turning it this way and that to get a better look at the reddish dirt inside. ‘When I took it from Pruett’s cold room, he said… he said… I need to see this plague for myself,’ she said.

  ‘He said what?’

  ‘Never mind. I need to see Burlington Palace.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’ Finnuc went to stand but Cora stopped him, a hand on his arm.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re hurt.’

  He tried to laugh away her concern but stopped when he saw her face.

  Giving a low cough, Pruett’s assistant Bowen edged into the cramped office. The youngster looked harried and lacking in sleep. Cora knew how that felt.

  ‘Pruett making you do the grunt work is he?’ she asked the assistant.

  ‘Something like that,’ Bowen said, and set down a cloth wrap from which the tips of sharp things gleamed.

  ‘Just wait, can’t you?’ Finnuc said to Cora. ‘Let the stitcher do his work and then I’ll come with you.’

  Cora stepped aside for Bowen. ‘You said yourself the streets aren’t safe.’

  ‘That’s why I want to help—’

  ‘They aren’t safe for you, Finnuc. You’re a Casker in a city dealing with a Casker plague from a Casker story. The Commission is right: you shouldn’t have even come here.’

  Bowen wetted a cloth and wiped the blood from Finnuc’s head.

  ‘That’ll be a nasty scar,’ Cora said. ‘Won’t make you any prettier.’

  ‘I haven’t told you one of my stories this time, have I?’ he said.

  ‘Thrown bottles and imagined plagues, I think that’s story enough for one day.’

  ‘There’s one where I kissed a pretty woman when she was at work.’

  The stitcher’s hand stilled for a moment, but he clearly thought better of making any comment and carried on his work.

  She looked down at Finnuc, searching for any sign he was mocking her. He stared back, as earnest as she’d ever seen the Casker. Any Casker.

  ‘I’ll save that story for another day,’ she said.

  Thirteen

  It took her the better part of the morning to make her way through the busy streets. Cora watched those streets warily, as if an angry mob might be around the next corner; she doubted the outbreak of Black Jefferey, a story’s plague, not Finnuc’s bleeding head. That had looked all too real.

  By the time she reached Burlington Palace, the sun was high and relentless. It was turning out to be a hot spring day – just the thing for frayed tempers and sick folk. She shook her head. How did she get mixed up in all of this?

  At the arched entrance to the ruined palace she was stopped by a constable. He was from Uppercroft, judging by his badge.

  ‘Keep five paces back,’ he said. ‘Now, what signs do you have?’ His voice was partly muffled; he had a cloth tied across his mouth and nose, above which his eyes were ringed with darkness that spoke of exhaustion.

  ‘Signs?’ she said.

  ‘Coughing, expelling, fever.’

  Cora stepped forwards, and the constable stepped back. His hand reached for his baton.

  ‘I told you to stay back!’

  She took out her badge. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Gorderheim, from Bernswick.’

  ‘I don’t care who you—’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll deal with this, Constable.’ A woman came through the archway. She wore a stitcher’s apron that might once have been white, but now was a mottled, faded mix of browns and reds.

  ‘Are you in charge?’ Cora said.

  ‘Here? As much as anyone can be. Miriam Damer.’ She went to offer her hand out of habit, then seemed to realise the absurdity of the gesture.

  ‘This was supposed to be a venue,’ Cora said.

  A wail sounded from somewhere beyond. Cora noticed a thin plume of distant smoke: maybe the sanga’s house that Finnuc said had been burned by the mob.

  ‘Only tale being told here is one of death,’ Damer said. ‘Can’t see that getting many votes.’

  ‘I came to see it for myself,’ Cora said.

  ‘You want a tour?’

  ‘Please, it could be… it could be important.’

  The stitcher stared at her for a moment, then grabbed a bucket from next to a brazier and shoved it at Cora. ‘Take a cloth,’ she said coldly. The bucket held squares of flannel floating in a milky liquid. ‘Helps keep the smell at bay.’

  ‘Will it stop anything else?’ Cora said.

  Damer shrugged. ‘You’re better off keeping your distance. Don’t touch anything or anyone.’

  Cora covered her mouth as she followed Damer through the arch and past Burlington’s old gatehouse – though barely any gate or house remained. Jagged walls stopped abruptly, leaving dark gaps and the sense that Cora was only seeing a fragment of what once was. The remnants were stained by moss and streaked by bird droppings; perhaps that was all that kept the walls upright.

  ‘I haven’t been here since my Seminary days,’ Cora said.

  ‘We teach our children history,’ Damer said, ‘so we can forgive ourselves for forgetting it.’

  Cora glanced at the blood-spattered woman. Perhaps her line of work lent itself to that kind of talk. She strained to remember her lessons, surprised to find she wanted to prove the woman wrong.

  ‘It’s harder to recall our history when it’s changed, or re-named,’ Cora said. ‘Burlington wasn’t a palace. It was military – a castle.’

  ‘Not much of a castle now.’

  ‘No. It’s old, though, older than all of Fenest, my Seminary master said.’ Cora touched the stone wall. A wonder it felt no different to any other wall. ‘Before the city, this was the border between those ridiculous Perlish duchies. They ruined it, as they ruin everything, with their fighting. Big battle, this one, ended the War of—’


  ‘The War of Feathers,’ a little boy said, peering round the wall at them. His eyes were wide beacons blazing out of a grubby face.

  ‘That’s right,’ Cora said. She made to ruffle his blond hair but stopped when she saw how thickly matted it was. In her remembering, she’d forgotten why she was there – what now resided in Burlington alongside all that history. ‘You don’t look so Perlish. What do they teach you in school about the war?’

  He looked from Cora to Damer, and back again. ‘We fought them too. My uncle Jorian, he says no one thanks us for “starting this whole mess of a wheel”.’

  ‘Whole mess of a wheel?’ Damer said.

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘Go on, then, go play.’ Damer shooed the boy out from under the archway.

  ‘Jorian, that’s a See— a Lowlander name, isn’t it?’ Cora said.

  ‘Likely.’

  They came out onto a grass track lined by shin-high walls that suggested the shape of rooms. Men and women were sitting against those walls while children chased each other, playing their unknowable games, but in an unsettling silence.

  ‘Lowlanders, Caskers, fair few Rustans too,’ Damer said. ‘No Torn yet, far as I know, but the rest of the south is here.’

  Cora saw the truth of that easily enough. Among the muted crowd were plenty of inked Caskers. The sun caught the dull metal of Rustan lockports and Widow-knew what else. The children looked to be mostly bare-footed Lowlanders.

  ‘They don’t look like they have the plague,’ Cora said.

  ‘They don’t. Not yet anyway. Those are the relatives,’ Damer said, gesturing up and down the area beyond the archway, where the old Palace had become a makeshift camp.

  People huddled in groups around their belongings – Cora could see that now. Canvas and leather bags full to brimming, hand carts similarly laden, and anything that could be carried. Those who met her eye had a hollow look. Constables from all divisions moved among them, there to keep the peace. Was it really the election that had brought these people to Fenest? They didn’t strike Cora as the type hoping for a seat in the public galleries, ready to queue and jostle for the chance to hear an election story. But what else would have brought them?

  ‘It can’t be easy sleeping in the open like this,’ Cora said. ‘Don’t they have anywhere to go while they wait for the sick to recover?’

  ‘Do you think they’d be here if they did? They’ve come to the city and the city offers them no shelter. Besides, most want to be near their sick families. Wouldn’t you?’

  Cora pictured Ruth among the sick, no one beside her, no one who knew her name. She deserved her fate.

  ‘Detective?’ Damer was frowning at her.

  ‘And what about the sick themselves?’ Cora said. ‘Are you really seeing black hands and feet?’

  ‘That, and everything else you’d expect,’ the stitcher said. ‘Vomiting, fever.’

  ‘All this because of a story,’ Cora said.

  ‘No. Not because of a story. Because of a plague. Could have started in Bordair, or in the Lowlands, or right here in Fenest – on any road or river between. But it’s plague.’

  ‘So why are people blaming the Caskers and their story?’

  ‘Same reason we blame a messenger that brings bad news. But I’ll tell you just what I told her: one person, one story, can’t be responsible for a plague.’

  ‘Her? You mean Storyteller Nullan?’

  ‘She wouldn’t leave so I put her to work washing bedsheets.’ Damer gestured to a far wall of the ruins.

  ‘I’d like to talk to her,’ Cora said.

  The stitcher looked like she might object, and then evidently decided it wasn’t worth the effort. They came to the first of many rows of tents that stretched across the grounds of the ruined Palace. ‘Tent’ was perhaps too grand a term: the shelters weren’t much more than canvas lean-tos that looked to have been put up in a hurry. Several other stitchers rushed back and forth with buckets and blankets.

  Damer parted the canvas of one of the tents. ‘You can tell me afterwards if you still think this plague is just from a story,’ she said.

  ‘I…’

  ‘Remember: don’t touch anything.’

  Inside the tent, the smell hit Cora first, even through the herbal-scented cloth at her mouth. A cloying, fetid smell. She felt bile rising at the back of her throat. She gagged, wanting to rip the cloth from her face and breathe fresh air. Then she took in the horror before her: in the gloom, bodies writhed on pallets, emitting low moans. Their contorted faces suggested they would be screaming, had they the strength.

  Something touched her. She turned to see a hand clutching her coat, a young boy hunched on the nearest pallet. His mouth opened and closed on silent words. A white paste coated his tongue and had crusted at the corners of his mouth. His shirt was soaked; with sweat, or something else, she didn’t know.

  The boy’s hand slipped from her. His eyes rolled in his head and his body convulsed.

  ‘Move!’ a stitcher said, knocking her out of the way as he rushed to put a bucket under the boy.

  He was just in time. A stream of hot, brown liquid poured from the boy’s mouth. The stench worsened. A low gasp escaped his lips, and then… nothing. His eyes were wide and his mouth open. After a moment of quiet, the stitcher covered the body.

  Outside, the wind had picked up. A cart was sent for and the boy’s body was loaded on – just one more roll of canvas among many. His feet were marked black, as were the others that stuck out from the bottom of the rolls. Cora couldn’t help thinking of Sanga Jeffereys. She damned to Silence Nullan, her story, and the plague it had foretold.

  She pulled off her coat and threw it on top of the cart.

  The dead boy had touched her coat, but it was more than that. She had to be more than that if she was going to finish this case. She’d used that coat in so many ways, sometimes to hide behind, at other times to announce who or what she was. But that didn’t fit anymore. Not with the kinds of stories she was dealing with.

  Damer followed the cart between the rows of tents and more black-marked bodies were added. And then the wind changed direction. There was something strange in the air; thick, it darkened the day. Cora looked for clouds but instead found ash. A heaviness high above, blowing from the fire at the far end of the Palace. That was where the cart was taking the boy and the others. Flames she had thought were a sanga’s house, still burning after the mob, were much closer. These flames were for the bodies.

  *

  Cora hurried along the makeshift path to the other side of Burlington Palace, breathing as lightly as she could, the cloth in place across her mouth. Damer had pointed her in the direction of where the linens were washed and seemed to understand that Cora wanted a private conversation with the storyteller. Obviously, the stitcher had enough demands on her time. Cora envied her none of it.

  Soon enough she heard water slushing about in buckets, the whine of old mangles at work. There were a few men and women going about their chores, but Cora recognised the hood of the Casker. Cora could hardly blame the woman for wanting to remain anonymous, even as she helped – not everyone would be as understanding as Damer.

  ‘You’re a hard woman to find,’ Cora said, ‘except when I’m not looking for you.’

  The storyteller visibly stiffened but didn’t stop stirring a huge vat full of bedsheets. The water was the colour of cheap red wine.

  ‘Detective, you know so little of storytellers,’ Nullan said quietly. ‘I am wherever my story can be found.’

  ‘Perhaps you should both sail off into Break Deep, then?’

  ‘You might be right.’

  ‘Why even bring such a bleak story to the election? Did you really think it would get enough votes?’

  ‘Tragedies win as often as funnies. You ask me why. Given your job, Detective, I’d have thought you knew all about our morbid fascinations. We each have such darkness inside us.’

  Cora stopped the woman’s hands on the woo
den paddle. ‘I need you to tell me what happened the night Ento was killed.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘He was coming to your lodgings that night, wasn’t he?’ Cora said, still holding the small Casker. She smiled at a man as he passed, his arms full of filthy linens.

  ‘No,’ Nullan said.

  ‘Then where?’

  Nullan mumbled something.

  Cora jerked back the woman’s hood. ‘Where?’

  ‘Corner House. It’s a—’

  ‘I know what Corner House is.’ She also knew where Corner House was, and it was a long way from Hatch Street, where Ento’s body was dumped. ‘What did you do when he didn’t arrive?’

  ‘I already told you! I waited all night for him.’

  ‘In the room?’ Cora said.

  ‘Where else? I wasn’t there to drink, or to… We were supposed to be keeping it secret.’

  ‘But someone saw you, someone gave you the room.’

  ‘The madam. She was discreet,’ Nullan said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. And she’ll tell me you didn’t leave at all that night?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ Cora said. ‘Did Ento ever tell you about the Wayward story?’

  ‘What? No, of course not.’

  ‘Nothing at all? He never mentioned it, not once?’

  ‘Maybe, in passing.’ Nullan stared into the distance. ‘But it was more like a feeling.’

  ‘A feeling.’ Cora grasped the Casker’s hood once more.

  ‘Change. That’s what took hold of him; a great change is coming, he said. He was just the harbinger. Do you know that word, Detective?’

  ‘I know it’s rarely good,’ Cora said.

  ‘You might be right. Ento’s story would have shown what is to come, what can’t be stopped, out there, in the world beyond this small city. That scares some people.’

  The Torn woman, the one Cora had met at the Opening Ceremony, said something similar about the Wayward story. Both Nullan and the Torn were clear on two things: change, and fear.

  ‘But what was the story about?’ Cora said.

  ‘It wasn’t like that, we couldn’t talk… we weren’t ’tellers when we were together.’