Death and the Merchant (River's End Book 1)

by C. H. Williams

  These were the outliers.

  The ones forgotten by their brethren, the ones that still recalled the taste of magic.

  And their blades, the ones he knew so well, the ones he could still feel, those blades would lay discarded on blood-soaked earth before the morning was done.

  ELSIE

  “And instead of dirt, gold coins were heaped on the graves of the few. But Death cared not, for she’d taken them all the same.”

  ~ ‘Merchant of Death’ and Other Wary Parables

  The tang of stagnant water filled the air as waves lapped against the stone walls of the harbor.

  A spray of white frothed into the air, the hewn obsidian surface gutted by the keel of a barge, and Elsie wiped the cold from her cheeks with the back of her hand, grimacing.

  The chain of the locket was grinding into the back of her neck, yanking on the wisps of hair ill-contained and trapped beneath her scarf.

  Stupid.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, and what had she done but slide it tentatively over her head, only to bury it with shaking fingers a moment later beneath her tunic, face heating in deep, childish shame.

  She is gone, she is dead, she isn’t worth the air you breathe, because who would just brazenly abandon their baby with back-district trash and still, the locket sat, the metal warm against her skin.

  “This place smells like death,” Elsie muttered, nose wrinkling in disgust.

  Death.

  The word itself was a wash of darkness across her.

  Death.

  Best not to dwell on it, she decided.

  Fletcher gave her a side-long glance before returning to his study of the docks.

  Where words usually ran freely between them, he was quiet, hazel eyes cradled in hammocks of purple.

  She’d found dawn on the streets, and Fletcher, too, and this death—this murder…it had been different.

  Stray strands of hair were sent whipping across her face, phantom spiderwebs yanked forth by the cold burst of wind off the water. Hands stuffed in rough coat pockets, her fingers toying with the familiar holes in the slick lining, she traced the stains bleeding into the cobblestones, the toe of her boot dragging across the crevasses and cracks.

  The only evidence the girl had ever lived.

  Had ever bled.

  Had ever died.

  The marks were sequestered beneath the empty branches of an oak peering over the dock wall. This girl been dumped, cold and alone, on the shores of a stinking harbor to die amid the sounds of clanking bells and swearing harbormen.

  A few of their delectable daughters in their pastried gowns, driven to the edge of madness, dying in delirium in the streets of their little town, and the merchants screamed bloody murder.

  Never mind that the Valley was starving.

  The merchants continued to gorge on their feasts, bemoaning the injustice of it all.

  This one hadn’t been a pastry, though. The one who died last night.

  The one who died while Elsie had let herself forget the world beneath the glittering festival lights, and she could hear her mother—no, no, no, not her mother, it was Marlene, she wouldn’t relent, it was just Marlene.

  Her mother was the one who’d left her—and this gods-damned locket, apparently—in the Valley.

  Marlene was the one delivering biting admonitions in her wake.

  Pay attention! Don’t be a ditz, with your head in the clouds, not like those other girls. Those stories rot your senses and make you forget—

  “Did she burn?” Elsie asked quietly, shaking the thoughts from her head.

  Fletcher nodded, not taking his eyes from the marred cobblestones. They all burned, in the end.

  She’d never bothered to ask why the boy from the mountains set them alight atop the pyres, because it seemed better, anyway, than rotting in the ground, forgotten in decay.

  So they burned.

  Eights souls, all burning, for the price of a love that didn’t hurt, that’d been the ferryman’s toll. Eight souls, and she kept him a while longer, because if they stopped dying, stopped burning, there’d be nothing to keep him here.

  Eight souls, anointed with poison, sanctified with blood—and consecrated with a cunning scheme to send the plutocrats crashing to the ground, it seemed, for why else would the merchant’s daughters be falling with alarming speed.

  Eight souls, and time was running out.

  “It isn’t just the pastries anymore, though,” Elsie muttered, breaking the silence to answer her own thoughts.

  “I don’t understand the escalation. They go from targeting the merchant’s daughters to a prostitute?”

  “It feels panicked. Desperate, even.”

  “Maybe,” he breathed, eyes distant.

  “You don’t think so?”

  He said nothing, lost in thought as he crouched down, hands hovering above the stain as if before a fire. His tic when there was a puzzle he couldn’t solve. As if he might reach out and snatch the answer from thin air.

  Elsie kicked her boots together, bringing some life back into her toes. They’d been standing here for over an hour, and the cobblestones were blocks of ice beneath the thin leather.

  It’d been polished.

  The locket.

  Lovingly cared for, painstakingly preserved.

  Almost like new.

  Almost, save for the worn filigree heart etched, fading, on the front.

  Sam.

  That was probably it, it had to have something to do with Sam.

  So from the mother, so to the daughter, or maybe, so to the son, because Sam was a bastard, too, and it was the ill-breeding of their mothers that’d marked them so from birth, so that was probably what it had to do with, the Commissioner, trying to get under Sam’s skin. He’d been difficult, of late, Sam had said.

  Even still.

  She didn’t know if she was ready to share this, just yet.

  A little tiny piece of who she could be. And if it was just to get under Sam’s skin…

  Well, no use making waves.

  Rising, Fletcher’s gaze darted around the harbor, eyes unseeing all the while, brows furrowed in contemplation.

  He hadn’t even bothered to change after the festival. Hadn’t even bothered, if she knew him, to go back to the damn lodge to even get a bite to eat.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m just…not ready to go,” he said quietly, eyes flicking to hers.

  She shrugged, lips pursed in sympathy. “Then don’t.”

  The sounds of the town awakening overtook them as they at last left the harbor behind, the clatter of commerce once more filling the streets of Taylor Town.

  Shouts filled the air as street vendors cried for coppers, and the vague smell of hot-inked papers and burning bread curled in her nose as she side-stepped a dark-suited merchant, rattling off a list of complaints to an already over-burdened secretary as he snapped up one of the papers. “Steel securities are up, good, good—schedule an appointment with the Commissioner, we’re buying on the margin, going to need a meet-and-greet…”

  Elsie gave a snort of derision, rolling her eyes. Now that was a tart, with his perfect little necktie and crisp lapels, bouncing along like he owned the damn place.

  Pride before the fall, and greed precedes the grave, that was how the saying went.

  Only one man owned these streets. And he did not share.

  Her hand was half-way to the locket before she caught herself, tucking a strand of hair unconvincingly behind her ear instead.

  Commissioner Clark Carson dominated the Valley. It was a small district, to be sure, barely eking out survival, and yet, he’d managed to wring a pile of gold from it bigger than that gods-forsaken mansion he laughably called a home. And when he’d started climbing that pile, he hadn’t stopped until he was running the Merchant’s Guild.

  So what is he doing, handing out trinkets to a broken little bastard.

  Her gaze drifted down the street.

  She spotted Sam firs
t, of course. His spun-gold hair was hard to miss, and anyway, his voice carried through a crowd. But a few more steps, and she saw her brother’s dark navy coat—she’d gotten particularly good as a child at spotting it amid the chaos that was Taylor Town, a talent that had not diminished as she’d gotten older.

  “Come on,” she sighed, nodding to the boys down the busy sidewalk. “I see breakfast.”

  ELSIE

  “In the cold of winter, it was the breaking of bread that kept them from breaking themselves.”

  ~Greysha Boewliç

  Leaning on the counter of the general store, Elsie pulled off a chunk of her sweetroll bleeding with sugar and cinnamon, watching as Teddy pulled his apron on, fingers deftly tying the strings behind his back. His blue eyes flicked up to hers, and he gave her a small smile.

  The paper crinkled pleasantly as she idly blotted up a pool of glaze with a hunk of bread.

  These were their moments.

  The four of them. Elsie and Fletcher and Teddy and Sam. Moments when the rest of the world lay frozen, quiet, and they were permitted temporary reprieve from what lay beyond.

  Not that there was much solace to be sought on a morning like this.

  On a morning so heavy with death.

  “It’s excessively worrying, I think, this devolution,” Sam frowned, shrugging off his suitcoat and tossing it down the counter out of the way of the sticky glaze oozing across the brown paper bag. Joining her at the counter, he eyed the sweetrolls, relenting after a moment to the precariously delicate one nearest him.

  Elsie swallowed the massive bite of sugary dough, nodding. “That—that’s exactly what I said.”

  Whoever had been taking down the pastries hadn’t been satisfied, that much seemed apparent. Perhaps it was a deeper craving for violence. Perhaps only death could satiate that thirst, and it no longer mattered whose death it was.

  And there was no question, the murder of the girl by the harbor still belonged to this string of gruesome deaths. The symptoms of the poison were unmistakable.

  Wan skin, bloodshot eyes, and everything bled, when they died. Like they were dissolving from the inside out, and even still, nobody had bothered to connect the pieces together.

  Except Fletcher.

  Where the merchants themselves saw a plague of hemorrhagic fever, he saw the conspiracy for murder.

  “The rest bore strong ties to the merchants. Is it possible the latest victim is somehow connected to the Commissioner?” Fletcher prompted, watching them both from the other side of the counter. Leaning against the wall, arms crossed, his gentle rocking back and forth somehow reminded her of the ocean she’d never seen, a soothing tide smoothing the rumpled sands. “His daughters are under lock and key, the manor a veritable prison. Perhaps it’s some kind of—of substitution? They can’t reach him, so they’re targeting his paramour?”

  Sam paused, a piece of bread drenched in cinnamon poised elegantly between his forefinger and thumb. “No. No, I don’t fancy procurers and pleasure-houses are particularly his style.”

  “One of his associates, then. To send a message.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Teddy offered.

  Sam cast him a dubious look, raising an eyebrow. “I very much doubt that. His associates are disposable. He couldn’t care less about their extracurricular endeavors. Anyone sending a message by targeting the conquests of his actuaries is woefully misinformed.”

  “Lovely, Sam, yes, by all means,” Elsie nodded with an air of sardonic pretension, “the targeting of prostitutes instead of pastries is what makes our poison-happy friend woefully misinformed—”

  “That’s not what I’m saying in the least! It’s simply that if you’re going to go after the Guild, it doesn’t make sense to go after the gulls—”

  “—unless you consider them all together,” Fletcher cut in quietly. “It’s not haphazard. And it’s not like they ran short of the merchant’s daughters, either. If it was simply a—a gull, trying to target a merchant, then I agree, they wouldn’t start killing their own.”

  An interesting point. Of course, it was predicated on the assumption that, despite the escalation from pastry to prostitute, the attacker still bore a calculated motive.

  It assumed a specific victim, and despite a murderous rage, the ability to circumnavigate around whatever roadblock had driven the killer to the girl by the harbor. And Fletcher was right—if this was a string of violence sparked from one of the farmers or factory workers or any of the other gulls with a chip on their shoulder, they wouldn’t have gone after one of their own.

  Teddy paused his whispered count, stacks of coins balanced precariously on the strip of wood before the till. “So, it’s a merchant, then.”

  “Baynard, Diegel, Foster, Johansenn, Reginald, Forescue, Tibbets, Gough,” Sam muttered, ticking off the names with quiet counter-taps, “and Carson, if we assume the courtesan was meant for him, which I’m still not sure it was. I mean, they’ve made waves with anyone and everyone—but so has every merchant holding their position.”

  Quiet washed over the store, a tiny respite from the storm beyond. It wouldn’t open for another fifteen minutes. And for those fifteen minutes, it was their refuge.

  A merchant, on a quest for vengeance against his fellow plutocrats.

  Given this, it made sense that Fletcher had come to the Valley.

  The territories outside Aerdela were growing restless, the whispers said, their petitions for districthood falling on increasingly deaf ears. A few scant towns, lining the edge of Aerdela, that was all they were.

  All they were supposed to be, anyway.

  The territories were further flung than Elsie had realized, it seemed, if they stretched so far west as to hit the mountains.

  That a territory boy had come, crawling from the mountains, sniffing out scandal—and if it was a merchant behind this, if there was tangible, blood-soaked corruption, if this was the weakening of the Guild…

  Elsie watched the sunlight crawling across the floor, leaving a layer of dust dancing in its wake.

  Perhaps there was something growing beyond the borders of Aerdela.

  Something bigger than they realized.

  A merchant gone rogue, and the district left the victim.

  It was funny, how people talked about the sun like a faithful friend.

  The sun was a liar. A liar and a coward.

  Too deluded by the half-truths of shifting light.

  Too scared to stay and face the dark.

  Morning had fully dawned when she met the street once more, and still, the sun was all wrong, with its false hope.

  Cold rays lingered between her shoulders, and she had been betrayed by the blue sky above, cold and unfeeling in its broken promises. A day like today should’ve been warm, but without the blanket of clouds, coupled with the biting wind rolling off the foothills, the empty sky brought nothing but bitter autumn cold.

  His hand brushed her shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze, and there he was.

  Her Fletcher.

  Undoing the broken promises of the lying sun.

  TEDDY

  “Doubt percolates in the troubled mind.”

  ~Dradan Proverb

  “You saw it, right?” Teddy asked, frowning. The tang of copper lingered in the air as he closed the till, and he glanced over to Sam, dubious. The gold seemed to melt against his sister’s olive skin, chain flashing against the back of her neck as she’d tilted her head low over the sweetroll.

  Sam’s cinnamon eyes gazed back at him, now molten in the morning sun. Even with hardly any sleep, he was beautiful, golden hair catching the light, his sun-kissed skin warm with sandalwood and cloves. “What, that pretty little thing she thought she was hiding beneath her shirt?”

  “She didn’t—”

  “Ugh! Shame on you, Theodore Mirabeau,” Sam scoffed, straightening up. “She steals one roll—once—when she was eleven—”

  “It goes well beyond that, and you damn well know it—”

&n
bsp; “It is the morning after a night of dancing and romancing beneath the stars, and given that they were hopelessly tangled up when we left—which was late, mind—I find it disturbing that your first conclusion is blatant thievery. It’s probably a gift. You saw Fletcher—he was a nervous wreck. He knows El, he was probably apprehensive she’d—I don’t know, berate him for the sheer non-utilitarian-ness of it—”

  “Gods, fine!” Teddy snickered, relenting to the smile tugging at his lips. “Fine, point taken. I just worry.”

  “As is your brotherly duty, I should think.”

  “Don’t let El hear you say that.”

  Sam grinned, giving a reflexive double-tap on the counter. “Fine. Point taken. I’ll see you later?”

  “See you later.”

  The bell over the door sent out a tinny call, and Teddy braced his arms on the counter, clinging to the scent of spiced tea that lingered Sam’s wake. A moment later, though, it’d vanished, overwhelmed by the streaks of vinegar on his dark apron, evidence of inattentive fingers and a shattered jar.

  It was probably just as well.

  Those crates weren’t going to unpack themselves.

  The storeroom was stale, the air heavy and thick, no matter how many times Teddy had run a broom and rag over the camphor-soaked wood—an atmosphere, he thought bitterly, which wasn’t like to help his exhaustion.

  It would’ve been nice for Sam to stay a little longer. A couturier of prodigious skill, though, he had his own work waiting for him back at Mulligan’s. That man was unquestionably an artist with the needle and thread—this, even Teddy could recognize, despite having what Sam lovingly called a blind eye for fashion.

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t see it.

  A farmer’s son didn’t have the luxury of silk neckties and olive bath soaps, that was all. A merchant’s ward, though…

  The crack of fresh pine and the faint hint of mildewed straw met Teddy as he took the cat’s paw to the crate. Salary was due today. A silver stack to Dad—it was more than Teddy pulled from the general store, but his father accepted no excuses, and besides, he’d seen Sam slip something in his satchel, anyway, gods bless that beautiful man—and he’d split the rest between himself and El—