by Matthew Ward
[[Except freedom.]]
“In time, I swear. Even if we must sail far from this city to find it.”
She snorted. [[We? You’re presuming a great deal, Viktor.]] The words cut cold, but her tone held wryness.
“Have you ever known me to be anything other than bold?” he asked. “In any case, I must take my leave. There’s much needing my attention and I’ve already indulged myself longer than I should.”
She beheld him, arms folded and thoughts unreadable. Then, step by hesitant step, she offered brief embrace. [[I’ll withhold the thumping for another day. Take it as a sign that our dreams may not be so far apart. But if I might make one request?]]
“Name it.”
[[Candles are more romantic than practical – especially for reading. Perhaps you could arrange for some firestone lanterns? I’m sure that’s not beyond the mighty Lord Protector.]]
A simple request, and impossible to deny without explaining how painful he found their light of late. “For you, Lady Trelan, he will see what can be done. Though they, like so many things, are in short supply in this embattled Republic.”
Calenne lost track of time after the key turned, her thoughts abuzz with revelations, recounted tales… and evasions.
Evasions, above all. For all his talents, Viktor lacked a dissembler’s tongue. Not that his artlessness did her any good, for she’d nowhere to start unravelling the suspected half-truths. The world she’d returned to was too different to the one she’d left. And Calenne allowed that there were many honourable reasons to keep things unspoken. Her own sanity for one.
Such as it was.
The room – her prison – grew smaller, the lengthening shadows closing about her like a fist.
A memory jarred loose. Words uttered in mist. Poor Viktor. Always so certain you know what’s best. Her words. As true now as before. Much as she wanted to trust Viktor, she needed answers. She needed the open sky, and her feet free to walk as she wished. Decide for herself if new life was blessing or curse. Those things could not be hers if she obeyed Viktor’s wishes.
Returning to the window, Calenne ran a hand across the lowermost board. Gravelly laughter echoing about her, she closed her fingers about its edge.
Twenty-Nine
Waning moon stared down on empty streets. Hawkin Darrow had lived through three city-wide curfews, and others targeted at specific districts. But for all that, this felt different. Resentment hung heavy on the smoke-bittered air. For all that the citizenry had cheered proclamation of war on a distant border, they’d little stomach for consequences nearer home. Food, already hard enough come by in certain neighbourhoods, would grow considerably scarcer.
Foremost of all, Hawkin had never seen well-to-do streets so quiet. Even during curfew, highbloods thought restrictions were for others, not them. Not tonight. The wealthy streets around Strazyn Abbey were deserted. The Drazina reputation at work. A curfew-breaker cornered by the constabulary might attempt a bribe. Getting snatched up by swan-tabards meant a beating. Worse, if you didn’t have papers. The rules were changing.
Thus Hawkin clung to the shadows, flitting between lamp posts with ears pricked and eyes wary. The streets themselves she knew well enough – especially those bordering the Abbeyfields estate’s overgrown ruins. Not where she wanted to be. Too many memories.
But choosing the course wasn’t in the shadower’s gift.
Three dozen paces along the narrow, lantern-lit street, the wisp of Kasvin’s white-blonde hair halted. Her bare-shouldered and high-hemmed gown was a poor choice for the bitter night. Hawkin hunkered close to Abbeyfields’ overgrown railings and clung to shadow.
Kasvin’s blue-green eyes lingered on the patch of darkness. Hawkin breathed deep, cold air stinging her lungs, and beseeched the Raven to conceal her. If Kasvin called out, Hawkin knew she’d show herself and confess. Better to brave the gnawing, sorrowful hurt of the young woman’s disappointment and come more swiftly to sweet forgiveness. Even now, part of her longed to do so. The small, mangled part of her that craved a word, a gesture, a kiss.
Hawkin would have cut it out long ago, were such a thing possible. But it ruled her whenever Kasvin was near, suffocated her in adoration. So much that she forgot her disdain for the younger woman’s firebrand principles.
It had taken weeks to realise it was happening at all. She’d actually thought herself in love. Imagine that. Giddy at the knees for a slip of girl. She hated Kasvin for making her believe those scars had healed. But only when Kasvin was elsewhere.
The longing worsened, tugging at Hawkin’s stomach. Clamping her eyes shut helped. If she revealed herself, she’d learned nothing.
When she opened her eyes, Kasvin was gone.
Heartsick ache faded to relief. Worry over an escaped quarry followed close behind.
Hawkin wasn’t even certain why she’d ever come back to the city. But she couldn’t leave now. Privation and war would make fertile recruitment ground for the Merrow, as it had the Crowmarket before. And what benefited the Merrow – assuming he existed, for she’d never met him – benefited those in his shadow, if they’d wit to seize the opportunity.
And there had to be opportunity. Didn’t there? Not that she was against feeding the hungry or getting medicine to the sick, but she’d yet to see even a hint of profit in the enterprise. And there was always profit for someone. Might as well be her, if she could wrangle it.
Cursing under her breath, Hawkin left the shadow and advanced as swiftly as slush underfoot allowed.
“Let’s see your papers!”
Hawkin froze, even though she knew the challenge wasn’t meant for her. It had come from the streets ahead, past the memorial to the Weeper Plague – a dozen statues of men, women and children in funeral garb, hands clasped to their eyes.
A scream. The thump of a falling body. A whisper of song, half-heard on the night-time breeze. Achingly familiar, somehow.
Heart pacing with worry for Kasvin and her head wary of discovery, Hawkin concealed herself among the statues. Halfway between the corner and the tumbledown abbey gate, Kasvin stood atop a Drazina’s crumpled body, bloody dagger in her hand and spreading stain at her feet. She had one arm wended about a second Drazina, hand cupped about the base of his neck and her lips against his.
The song faded. Hawkin’s throat tightened with jealousy. Swallowing, she reminded herself it wasn’t real. Or was it? Jealousy was of the heart. If it was felt, it was real.
More convincing was the passionless embrace. The Drazina’s fading, ineffectual twitches. When he went entirely still, Kasvin let the body fall. He hit the cobbles, dark fluid rushing from his mouth and nose. Kasvin strode on towards the abbey as if nothing had happened.
Hawkin lingered, jealousy falling away into the empty, gaping pit beneath her stomach. Raven’s Eyes, but what was Kasvin?
The easy thing to do – maybe the smart thing – was walk away. From Kasvin. From Tressia. From the Republic itself. Even now the thought offered a pang of dismay. Hawkin steeled herself. She’d been vranakin, hadn’t she? On the cusp of earning a kernclaw’s feathers. She’d beheld the rotting horror of the elder cousins and the malice of the Crowmarket’s pontiffs. This was no worse.
Resolution bled away as she reached the corpses. Not so much because of the one Kasvin had stabbed. Hawkin had left too many with a ripper’s grin to feel ought but mild approval for the cleanness of the blow. But the other? Bloated, mottled blue skin gave the appearance of a corpse dragged from the river. Fibrous black weed clung to lips and nostrils, twitching in the water puddled beneath his head. The smell, too, was of the deeps. Decay dredged from a silted canal.
Lips pursed, Hawkin stared again at the empty abbey gate. Kasvin’s footprints marred crisp snows. Follow or flee?
Follow.
She advanced with uttermost care, walking only in her quarry’s footsteps. They wended across the silent grounds, beneath the broken-rib arches of the long-vanished roof and through a gap in rusted railings raised to k
eep the curious at bay.
Not that the curious ever trespassed Strazyn Abbey.
Hawkin tried to forget the tales of how its lone, abandoned bell tolled without touch of human hand. That the deepest foundations had once belonged to one of Malatriant’s Abdon Temples, where sacrifice and bloodletting had conjured demons from beyond the mists. By the time the snows gave way to the crypt’s uneven stairs, she was trembling. Every sound – every wisp of shadow – promised some terrible fate. And none more so than the pitch black of the crypt.
Fearful she was on the cusp of some terrible mistake, Hawkin drew a hooded lantern from beneath her cloak, coaxed the crystal to life, and pressed on.
Bereft of guiding footprints, she trusted to instinct, to the tell-tales of scuffed stone that marked recent passage. The straight stair gave way to a long, bowing columbarium, burial alcoves crowded with cracked urns and tangled with tree roots. Insects scurried away as Hawkin twisted the lantern to and fro, picking a path across debris from a collapsing ceiling. Blank-eyed serathi statues watched her progress.
A door loomed to the left. Ajar, it was barely distinct from the columbarium alcoves. Indeed, its maker had clearly wanted it so, for it was less a door and more a pair of alcoves set on a deep hinge. Closed, she’d never have seen it. The cold, dry odour of the crypt gave way to something musty and older still.
A worn spiral stair lay beyond, walls unadorned save for patches of pale, lichenous glow. A dozen steps down the treacherous stones, the air shimmered. For a brief moment, Hawkin felt distant, unmoored – as if she and her body were no longer one and the same. Then the first ripples of song echoed up from below, and the sensation passed.
Product of a single voice, it wasn’t the whispering, breathy song of the streets above, but a sweet, echoing refrain that resonated about her heart. The rush and ripple of running water deepening the melody. With fumbling hand, Hawkin doused the lantern, trusting to lichen-light to be her guide.
No door waited at the stairway’s foot, merely an opening onto a vast, natural cavern whose crowded, girthsome stalactites and stalagmites evoked a shark’s maw. A flagstoned path wended through the maze, flanked here and there by cold, white statues. Beautiful young women with hungry smiles. A far cry from the disinterested, serene serathi watching over the columbarium. Opals glistened in place of eyes, but no dream of avarice could have persuaded Hawkin to pry one free. At least one statue’s pallid skin was smeared with what looked to be dried blood.
Song and rush of water blossomed in greeting as she edged along the path. Stalagmites yielded to glimmerless black water. Kasvin knelt on the rocky bank, hands outstretched. Even in the gloom, she shone. As if the lichen woke light for her alone.
Coventaj. The old name, half-suspected, emerged out of memory. You couldn’t live in the city and not hear whispers. The Black River of myth that flowed from a land of giants and into worlds beyond without ever once touching the sea. A forgotten shrine to a vanished goddess. Endala, whose lover Tzal had drowned her in those same inky waters… or she’d drowned him. There were stories of both and neither, and a hundred justifications for the betrayal. Hawkin, who’d poisoned a wife dearly loved years before, understood that. Some things were true even when they were not, love foremost among them.
She’d wept as she pressed the seldora-laced rag to Vona’s mouth, and begged her not to awaken. But at the last, soul-wrenching moment eyes had brimmed wide in accusation and pain. That moment had survived the years, experienced anew in midnight dreams. But it had been Vona or both of them, and so it could only ever have been Vona alone. The Parliament of Crows had ordered the murder as much as a lesson for Hawkin as retribution for Vona’s killing of Crowfather Athariss. They’d sought to remind her of her true family.
Now both families were gone, and as Hawkin concealed herself among stalagmites, she recalled that the drowned goddess Endala was patron of betrayed lovers.
The cavern’s cool air turned colder still.
Still Kasvin sang. A mournful lullaby offered to oneself.
A tendril of black weed broke the river’s reflectionless surface and slithered about her outstretched arm. Others joined it, their caress tender. Owner and pet, or perhaps vice versa. Kasvin sang on, sweet and sad, as black water soaked the sleeves of her dress.
“Must you do that? It’s revolting.”
Hawkin flinched. The voice had hailed from behind, further up the path. Had he seen her?
The singing faded. The tendrils slipped back beneath the river’s surface. Kasvin stood, water spattering from her sodden arms. “Am I now beholden to you? Is that how it works?”
The gloom shifted as he joined her at the water’s edge, the lichen-light never strong enough to reveal much. Tall. Thin. Fragile in posture and confidence for all that he made measured stride. Was this the mysterious Merrow?
“Did we have to meet here?” The voice was cultured, highblood in tone and accent, but Hawkin would have wagered both had been learned in later life, much as her own speech had shifted while in service to the Reveques. Mimicry of one’s betters was a hard habit to resist. “Is there something wrong with my home? You’re ready enough to make free with it when it suits you.”
“Does this place unsettle you?” Kasvin’s thin smile belied innocence.
“You know it does. I wish I’d never found it.”
“You’d do better to wish you’d never had the need,” she snapped. “Or had found the courage to live with your deeds.”
“You called. I came.” A fussy, peevish note crept in. “What do you want of me?”
“You’ve heard the news, I take it?”
“About the ration being withdrawn?”
“Not just that. There’s talk of broadening conscription.” She laughed. “Not even a day, and already the city’s heaving with discontent. There’ll never be a better time.”
“For what?”
Kasvin offered no reply save a wry curl of the lip.
“No.” The Merrow shook his head. “Too many will die. I began this to save people.”
“You began this because I own you.”
Hawkin wondered at that. There was nothing in the Merrow’s manner to indicate he shared her blind, unwilling adoration for Kasvin. She heard only fear, and something darker beneath.
“People are dying already.” Kasvin’s voice burned. “Droshna is squeezing the life from this city. The people won’t take it. When their children sicken and starve, they’ll rise up. But that takes time. How many more must die before that happens? This is inevitable. Better to get it out of the way while the odds are in our favour.”
“You’ve already decided to do this, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you even need me at all?”
“Because my influence fades with distance. Folk will die for me, but only when I’m close enough to see them fight. But the Merrow’s name? That reaches clear across the city. Plenty will remember how you fed them. If you call, they’ll come.”
The Merrow stared into the rushing waters. “And if I refuse?”
“You gave me to the river. The Nameless Lady sent me back. If you’d prefer my vengeance cast a smaller net, you need only say. You and I can dance together in the Black River.”
A cold smile accompanied the words, what Hawkin saw of Kasvin’s face suddenly older and crueller. For once, she’d no fear of the compulsion offered by those blue-green eyes. Their gleam spoke of merciless undertows and jagged rocks. The beguiling young woman was an aspect now washed completely away.
The Merrow shuddered. “What do you suggest?”
“Droshna cut the government ration to feed his Thrakkian allies, but it hasn’t yet left the city. We blockade the storehouses and the docks.”
“We tried two years ago. He was ready then. He’ll be ready now. It’ll be a slaughter!”
“No, it won’t. Because we’re going to keep Droshna off-balance. Angry men make mistakes, and we’re going to make him very angry. Maybe even angry en
ough to rip Trelan and the rest from their stupor and make them see what he is!”
“And how, pray, are we to do that?”
“We give our cause a figurehead he can’t ignore.”
“Me?” The Merrow shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Nor I,” Kasvin replied acidly. “Yours is not a face to inspire confidence.”
“Then who? You won’t find support among Droshna’s circle. Izack thinks only of the war. Trelan and the others are suffocating in his presence.” He broke off. “You’re not suggesting the church?”
“I doubt the Archimandrite will accept my petition. In any case, with the foundry in the clutches of the Reveque girl and the provosts dispersed, Jezek has little authority.”
“Then who?”
“The river provides.”
Kasvin picked her way back through the stalagmites, her lilting song echoing around the cavern once more. The Merrow didn’t move, the set of his shoulders betraying unhappiness. Hawkin beheld both in sordid fascination. Profit she’d sought, and certainly there was profit here. The secrets of Coventaj laid bare to the right scholar, or even to the archimandrite. A word in the Lord Protector’s ear about the coming blockade? Both would command a grand fee.
Not that she could leave without being seen.
This time, Kasvin didn’t stop at the water’s edge, but stepped into the river’s flow. Skirts petalled about her waist then sank, dragged down. She strode deeper until only her head and the tops of her shoulders could be seen.
When she walked back to shore, a man’s body emerged from the waters with her, draped across extended forearms at shoulder and knee. A naked, grey-haired man, his withered limbs tangled in black weed. A weightier burden than should have been possible, but Kasvin gave no hint of strain, nor missed a beat of her fluid, mournful song.
Stepping onto the bank, she tipped the body from her arms. It landed with a thud, and gave a retching, hacking cough. A stream of black water slithered across stone, and the coughing began anew, each convulsion accompanied by a flood as heaving lungs emptied themselves.