Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  Twenty-Four

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Finnuc didn’t look up from the table. The lamp she’d brought into his cell flickered as a draught blew down the corridor, sending shadows across his face. For a heartbeat she couldn’t see what she had done to him, could only see the shape of him. Then the flame strengthened and revealed the nasty purple mark around his neck. And there was a nasty irony in that too, given what Finnuc had done to Nicholas Ento. Widow welcome it.

  ‘Why, Finnuc?’ she asked again. She pulled her new coat tight. It was cold in the cell. And it smelled of piss – a kind of steam wafted from the pot next to his pallet. ‘Was it because of the Wayward story?’

  ‘Why else kill a storyteller?’ he muttered.

  ‘It wasn’t just any old election story, though, was it?’

  He shrugged.

  She reached out and grabbed his hair, yanked it. He flinched, and she saw surprise in him as much as the pain. She would hurt him if she had to.

  ‘Everyone said Ento’s story was about change,’ she said, and slowly pulled his hair so his head was forced back at an unhealthy angle. The purple mark around his neck stretched. ‘The Wayward Chambers. Your own storyteller, Nullan. Even a Torn I met once. Great change, they said, and some don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Guess not.’

  She released him. ‘I don’t need guesses, Finnuc. There’s no time for that. I need the Wayward story. And yours.’

  He shrank back from her. ‘Aren’t you tired of the stories yet?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you worn out by the endless drivel we tell each other, that we tell the Audience?’

  Cora glanced into the corridor beyond the cell. Jenkins was at the far end. There if Cora needed her but sharp enough to realise her superior needed some privacy. That Cora had more than a professional interest in this man had surely been clear when Jenkins arrived in the carriageway, drawn by the shouting. Cora hadn’t been able to say much that was useful then. The shock of seeing Ruth – was it Ruth? – left her all but jabbering. But now, the following day, Cora had found her tongue. And she had questions.

  There was no sign of Hearst, not yet. He’d given her this last half an hour to get Finnuc to talk, and even that was hard-won. The sergeant was no doubt having to answer to Sillian for it. But this was the final chance. Finnuc had refused to co-operate since his arrest but Cora had to try. For the case. But for herself too. And maybe for him.

  ‘You’re lucky not to be hanged for what you did,’ she said. ‘Killing a storyteller. The pennysheets were calling for capital punishment to be reinstated.’

  ‘That would have been something for the Audience – first public execution since the War of the Feathers.’ He laughed, but he was relieved, she was certain of it. Relief was something she could work with.

  ‘It’s the Chambers you’ve got to thank for the reprieve,’ she said. ‘Word is, some of them wanted hanging to stay in the past. String one Casker up, who knows what that might lead to.’

  ‘Nothing good,’ he said. ‘So I’ll be sent to the Steppes then. Well, I’ve built a few walls and dug a few holes in my time.’

  ‘Even if that doesn’t kill you, when the Wayward who live there learn of your crime—’

  ‘I’m not a fool, Cora. I know what’s coming.’

  ‘Then what have you got to lose by telling me?’ She opened a bindleleaf tin and started rolling. The tin wasn’t hers, may the Insolent Bore forgive her; she’d borrowed it from a constable on her way to the cells. ‘Start with who Tennworth is.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No one does, apparently. Not even the people who work in the winery.’ That particular mystery, and Finnuc’s silence on it despite the punishment that awaited him on the Steppes, had really bothered Sergeant Hearst. It had also helped win Cora this last chance of getting an answer. The idea someone could both exist and yet be utterly unknown was… unsettling.

  ‘I’ve already told you who Tennworth is,’ Finnuc said. ‘Many times. Or weren’t you listening to my stories?’

  ‘Tell me again.’ She passed him a lit smoke.

  He stared at the lamp’s flame for so long she wondered if he was done, lost to her completely. But then he took a deep drag on the smoke and began.

  ‘I was young when she changed everything, as I told you before. Just a child. My mother was a Casker, my father a Fenestiran. We lived here, in the city, and he ran a baker’s shop. Nothing special, but his loaves were—’

  ‘Where, Finnuc? Where was this bakery?’

  He wasn’t expecting interruptions. Everything was different now. How could it not be?

  ‘South end of the city,’ he said, ‘not far from Tithe Hall actually. We weren’t rich, but we managed. Until one day, when a bunch of your flatfoot constable friends turned up with an eviction notice, signed and wheel-stamped by the Commission. Said my father owed money to pretty much everyone who had it to lend. I remember his face, right at that moment, as he lifted his gaze from the notice and then looked at her. At my mother. See, he’d never borrowed a penny in his whole life. It was something he prided himself on, running a business debt-free.

  ‘“Another man’s money is like his wife – you can pretend they’re yours, but they’re always his,” my father told me. Most days he told me. I would nod and say, “Yes, Father.” As serious as any little boy could be. And all the while the Audience was laughing at him. He deserved it, really. He didn’t run the business, she did. He was the one who could bake passable bread, but my mother could make passable sense of a column of numbers.

  ‘Soon enough, shouting started. I heard some of it. Grain shipments had been mislaid. Order forms forged. Errors in the accounts ignored or disguised.’

  Cora opened and closed the bindleleaf tin, as if checking for something. She wouldn’t let him see her face. For all she knew, this detail of the story might be just for her. For her parents, and for Ruth. He carried on.

  ‘Even imaginary employees on the payroll, Patron take her! All right under my father’s nose. When they really got into the arguing, I was turfed out. But not before the worst of it.

  ‘My mother, she’d been carrying on with another man. He—’

  ‘Finnuc, I’m not the Audience. This doesn’t have to be a good story, just a true one.’

  ‘Do you want to know, or not?’

  ‘Fine,’ Cora said, glancing into the corridor again. ‘But get to the point.’

  ‘My father, well, you can imagine.’ Finnuc whistled. ‘He barred the doors and locked the shutters, both of them still inside. Me on my own in the street. I tried to get back in, but I was just a boy. I pried at the wood, banged the boards until paint chips fell about me like snow. My mother didn’t realise what was happening. Neither did I, not really. Not until it was too late.

  ‘There were words, at first, among the screams.

  ‘Smoke started to escape around the edges of the shutters and the big double doors. Then there was just her noise. My father didn’t make a sound the whole time, not that I heard.’

  Finnuc stubbed out his bindleleaf on the wall.

  ‘The smell,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to describe. Burned bread comes closest, maybe, but there was something else under that, somewhere under all that smoke. Sickly and sweet.’

  She knew that smell. Burlington. Burning the victims of a plague that was forewarned by the Caskers, and a Casker here in front of her, telling her about another fire, years before.

  ‘The heat too. It pushed me back to the other side of the street. But there was no escaping it.

  ‘I looked away. This I remember as clear as anything else: the sun was setting behind the Poet’s Spire, applause in oranges and reds. They approved, all the Audience.’

  ‘That’s when she found you?’ Cora said. ‘Tennworth.’

  ‘There, sitting on the street, rocking back and forth and ignoring the blaze. Despite feeling it on every part of me. She was an important person, I could tell that right away. Her hair was clean and
she didn’t have dirt under her nails.’

  ‘Important how?’

  ‘You know, Cora,’ he said. ‘You’ve always known. Blind as she is, the Devotee knows. Drunk as he is, the Heckler knows. Senseless. Restless. Curious. They all know. The Wayward Chambers, he knows too, and that’s the kind of bitter twist the Audience really savours. Like a fine wine.’

  ‘Tennworth is a Chambers.’

  ‘And no one can do anything about it. Or the whole wheel stops turning.’

  ‘So Tennworth’s not…’ Cora mumbled. Ruth, she shouted in her head. Ruth Ruth Ruth. Even though she knew nothing about her sister since she’d left, Cora knew Ruth wasn’t a Chambers, because Cora herself had stood beneath the balcony during the Opening Ceremony and seen them, one by one. But nothing seemed certain anymore. Had she truly seen her sister the day before, after all these years, driving that old coach? It was a glimpse in a moment of chaos. Perhaps Cora had smacked her head on the cobbles without realising.

  ‘Not her real name, no,’ Finnuc said, misunderstanding her.

  ‘So what is Tennworth’s name?’

  ‘You’re a detective. You’ll figure it out.’

  ‘Tell me who made you do this, Finnuc. Tell me and maybe I can keep you here, in Fenest.’

  He laughed, but it was all sorrow. ‘And would you visit me?’

  She didn’t know the answer to that, and didn’t want to think on it. ‘Before, in the carriageway, you said you owed her. She helped you. All your stories end the same way: Tennworth kept a young orphan from the wrong kind of trouble. Gave you a job. More than one, in fact.’

  ‘That’s how it was.’

  ‘Are you telling me that killing Ento was just following orders?’ Cora said.

  ‘Will you sleep easier knowing that Ento wasn’t the first time? Or that the man my mother had an affair with was a Wayward?’

  ‘Sounds as if it helps you sleep easier.’ She lit another bindleleaf. ‘You used the name Tennworth in all your stories. You wanted me to know that name. You were trying to tell me who was responsible.’

  Finnuc shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘But if you won’t tell me about Tennworth, let’s talk about the part you played in this tale. You picked Ento up at his lodging house in Derringate, then what happened?’

  ‘You know this story, Cora.’

  ‘You strangled him in the back of that old coach.’

  ‘Then dumped him in an alleyway, stitched lips and all.’

  ‘Those lips,’ she said. ‘What was his story, Finnuc?’

  He closed his eyes and sat back against the damp cell wall. He was as calm as she’d ever seen him. ‘Ah, now you want something the Audience do like.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A good Hook.’

  ‘Is that what Ento’s body was? A Hook?’

  ‘Not how the Wayward had planned, but as good as. You’re right: there are people who don’t want the Wayward story told.’

  ‘Because it’s dangerous. But why?’

  ‘Because it’s the truth, and the Whisperer knows it. What could be more dangerous than that?’

  Cora slapped the table. ‘Silence take you! Tell me the story.’

  ‘It’s not mine to tell. But we’ll all know it. We’ll be living it, soon enough.’

  ‘Living what?’

  ‘The south is falling apart, Cora,’ he said, looking her right in the eye. ‘Black Jefferey is just the beginning, the opening story. They’re trying to warn you, warn everyone, the only way they know how. The only way they can. The only way you’ll listen. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘The south? How bad?’

  ‘I hear it will make life in the Tear look like a summer picnic.’

  ‘But why try to stop a story that would warn people, that would help them? Who would—’

  The cell door behind her opened.

  ‘Gorderheim?’ Hearst said.

  ‘Nearly done, sir,’ she said without turning around.

  A pause. ‘The coach is here. I can’t keep—’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I won’t be long.’

  When they were alone again, Finnuc grinned. ‘You’ll need to watch him,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s helping you. Those are the people who’ll hurt you most.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Another story you already know.’

  She stared at him, trying to take in all that he’d said. She’d come into the cell wanting to help him, give him a chance to stay in the city and stay alive. Now, she wasn’t so sure. But she did know she had nothing else to say.

  She opened the cell door. In the corridor she could hear the hum and clatter of the station. Jenkins was still standing guard at the end. Beyond her, the normal way of things carried on, as they always did. But that wouldn’t be Finnuc’s fate. He wouldn’t last long on the Steppes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, so quiet she almost missed it. ‘Sorry for what we had.’

  She paused, about to tell him she was sorry too. But instead she banged the cell door behind her and walked quickly away.

  *

  She didn’t remember the walk back to her office but that was where Sillian found her. The chief inspector picked her way through the mess on the floor until she was close to Cora’s desk.

  ‘He’s confessed?’ Sillian said.

  Cora nodded.

  ‘Good. It took longer than I would have liked but you got the right result in the end.’

  ‘The right result?’

  ‘Really, Detective? I believe this is quite clear.’ Sillian’s gaze was cold. As cold as the Steppes would be for Finnuc. ‘I asked you to find the person who killed the Wayward storyteller, did I not?’

  ‘You did, Ma’am.’

  ‘And in the cells we have a Casker who has confessed. He will be duly punished.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘So what is it about this situation that presents difficulty?’

  Cora gripped the edge of her desk, forced herself to breathe. ‘Nothing, Ma’am,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Good, then I trust—’ Sillian glanced at the door as a pair of constables passed. In a low voice she said, ‘I trust that I can count on your discretion in this matter?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘I have informed the pennysheets. The story should make the evening edition and that will be the end of the matter.’

  ‘The end of the story?’ Cora said.

  ‘The end of the story,’ Sillian said.

  *

  Alone again, Cora closed the door and leant against it. Her thoughts were churning and nothing made sense. Finnuc’s words, Sillian’s. It was all a mess. Finnuc said he’d been working for a Chambers when he killed Ento, which was done so the Union wouldn’t find out the truth: that the south was ‘falling apart’. This Chambers had rescued him from the streets around Tithe Hall. The south end of the city.

  That felt like a lot of south, even just thinking it over.

  Critic hear it, doubt was starting to take root.

  Hadn’t he looked right at the lamp’s flame before telling his story? The fire at the bakery. The fiery sunset behind the Poet’s Spire. Had he just used what was there to shape his lies while the time ran out?

  What about the rest of Finnuc’s story? Was the south really in trouble? Was a story worth killing over?

  But then something came clear through it all.

  There’s power in stories and a story of power.

  Ruth had told her that when they were children. The words were as true then as they were now. And Ruth herself – there was a chance she was back, and connected, somehow, to the murder of the Wayward storyteller. There was only one thing Cora was certain of, more certain than she’d ever been since she started this case: a Chambers was involved.

  Cora had solved a murder, but that wasn’t the end of the story – no matter what Sillian said. This election, this city, all the people caught in between…

  She had more work ahead of her, and there w
ould be much to tell the Audience.

  Acknowledgements

  We would like to thank the following people, all of whom supported this book and made it possible:

  Our agent, Sam Copeland, for unfailing faith.

  The team at Head of Zeus, in particular our editors Sophie Robinson Madeleine O’Shea and Laura Palmer, who believed in this story and helped us make it better.

  Our families – without you we wouldn’t have started writing, and we certainly wouldn’t have made it this far.

  Ollie Bevington, who told us our next book should go big or go home.

  Jonathan and Ele Carr, and your wonderful cat Kiro, for friendship and hospitality in Italy where we began this story and likely moaned about it a lot over good coffee and even better ice cream.

  Our early readers, Katy Birch, Tom Francis, Iain Cameron, Tricia Jones, Kate Wright – without your help we wouldn’t have found where we needed to go.

  Katherine would like to thank the Royal Literary Fund for awarding her a Fellowship during the writing of this book, which gave her much needed time.

  David would like to thank the University of South Wales and his colleagues in the English and Creative Writing Department for all their help and support.

  About the Author

  D.K. Fields is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of novelists David Towsey and Katherine Stansfield. David’s zombie-western The Walkin’ Trilogy is published by Quercus. Katherine’s historical crime fiction series, Cornish Mysteries, is published by Allison & Busby. The couple are originally from the south west of England, and now live in Cardiff.

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