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

by C. H. Williams

  “You do spoil all the fun—”

  “—yes, yes, I know, I’m an ungrateful thing, you’ve said so to anyone who’ll listen, Clark, now what do you want?”

  Clark frowned, any amusement derived from his playfully horrendous banter dissolving. “Fine. I’ll be brief. The absence of your correspondence has been noted.”

  “I’ve been busy, with the season about to begin.”

  As if they both didn’t know the oversight was deliberate.

  “We had an arrangement, Sam. Is her life really worth clerical neglect?”

  He never said her name.

  He didn’t have to.

  That was how deftly he pulled the strings, to evoke her with just a breath.

  “I’ll be watching for your notes, love.”

  Sam put a hand reflexively to his heart, fingers brushing the bulge of the letters tucked inside his coat.

  The very notes that Clark demanded.

  It was cowardly, to carry them around. Like Sam couldn’t make up his mind about whether to hand them over or guard them close.

  So casual, Clark was, now turning away, hands in his pockets, as if he hadn’t delivered a death threat to his ward estranged.

  As if Sam wasn’t carrying her beating heart in the breast pocket of his coat.

  As if it wasn’t an armament to his own heart, now frantically trying to escape, some sick kind of assuagement to his own culpability.

  As if he loved a single soul in all the world that he hadn’t eventually betrayed.

  As if this was all for something more than themselves.

  As if they were fighting the good fight.

  As if they were good men.

  As if.

  THE BEAST

  “Truth is in the eye of the beholder, and lies on the tongues of the well-meaning.”

  ~Greysha Boewliç

  The Beast and The Master stood waiting above the Valley.

  “Clever,” the Master mused, delighted. “So clever. She will do, she will do…He has done well, has he not?”

  Magic curled in the Beast’s nostrils, whetting its taste for fear. It cared naught for the Master’s words. It only longed for the hunt.

  “Ask, and you shall receive, and so the gods shall not leave their children wanting,” the Master purred. “You shall not be wanting for much longer, love, you understand.”

  But the Beast didn’t understand.

  The Beast only knew hunger. The hunt. And pain—lots and lots of pain.

  ELSIE

  “Certainly, sleep is not a requisite of nightmares. You understand, now, our fascination with fairy tales—all we wanted was to imagine a better world. We all pretend, in our own way.”

  ~Elizabeth Clement Faulise

  “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”

  “If you did something so ridiculously stupid,” Elsie mused, not looking up from the stack of papers littering the floor of Fletcher’s room at the lodge, “I would tell you no, because the whole notion is absurd.”

  They’d spent the morning buried in records, chasing the so-far unanswered question of who the girl at the harbor had been, armed with a pot of acidic, dark tea and quiet conversation. Settled on the hearth-rug, she let the heat from the crackling fire soak deep into her aching back, reveling in the now-hot knit sweater against her skin.

  “And would you say it’s absurd, because the essence of a thing isn’t so much in the name as in the details, and adding a wedding band doesn’t change the details of us?”

  She felt her lips tugging upwards as she glanced up. “I do love you, you know that?”

  He nodded, a sweet smile on his lips. Legs crossed, leaning against the sofa, he looked at ease, a notebook balanced precariously on one knee, a stack of parchment on the other. There was something mischievous in his eyes as he watched her.

  “And what would you do,” Elsie relented, taking the bait, “if I said no?”

  “That’s predicated on the assumption I’d be so stupid as to ask,” he countered. “I’d be more inclined say we should get a cat.”

  “Mm, smart companion,” she snickered, returning to the ink-laden sheet before her. He knew her well. She admired the fierce tenacity of their barn cats, and had long nursed a soft spot for them, going so far as to leave a bit of milk in a dish on particularly cold winter mornings. Scrappy, feral, dangerous—not a bad thing to be.

  “I was thinking,” Fletcher went on, sounding a little cautious, “that maybe after the investigation is done…maybe we could do that. Get a cat.”

  His words settled over the quiet apartment, and her breath caught in her throat again and again and again, refusing to leave.

  “Elsie?”

  She didn’t move her eyes from the now-illegible scrawls flooding across the paper, and she could feel the thin parchment starting to give as she gripped the edges with white knuckles.

  Raw.

  That’s how she’d been left. Stripped raw, left oozing when she’d barely had a moment to scab, and anymore all she wanted were the scars, the welted, pulled-too-tight scars to cocoon the wreckage that was left, but here he was, and maybe she didn’t have to fight for scars anymore.

  Once upon a time, there was a girl.

  Teddy had first told her the story when she was very little. The beginning was always the same. It was the endings that her brother liked to change. He couldn’t very well change their beginnings, he’d told her—only the gods above and below had the power to spin the beginnings of a story.

  But in spite of their father’s efforts, Teddy had instilled within his little sister the very dangerous notion that she might change the ending to her own story, if she wished.

  Gregory Mirabeau, Elsie had come to realize, was the kind of man that commandeered another’s story. He opened the cover, ripped out the pages he didn’t like, scratched out the lines he wanted to change, and when it was done, he’d discard the book like the piece of trash he knew it to be from the start.

  She knew that Fletcher’s hand had brushed against hers, that he’d slid beside her, his knee against hers, but everything was numb.

  Deadened, for her own sanity.

  Nobody is coming to save you.

  If her story had a title, that would’ve been it.

  Your power will be stripped away, piece by piece, by a coward who can’t love.

  And when he has left you so afraid and so empty that you can’t save yourself, you’ll ask for help.

  Your brother will try. He’s just as afraid and empty as you are, though. So you wait. But nobody is coming to save you.

  That would have been the little bit inside the cover.

  Maybe somebody would pick it up, thinking it would be a happy story. And they’d be a little uncomfortable at first, because it wasn’t.

  Not all of it, anyway.

  But maybe, at the end, they’d be a little kinder. Love a little more, hate a little less. Perhaps they’d learn how to slay some demons, offer a helping hand to those in distress, find a sunset of their own to ride off into with whomever they loved.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  What is this what is happening why do you feel hope you know that’s foolish

  “No.” She dared a glance his way, but he was just a watery mess of worry and love. “Where, um…where would we keep this cat?”

  Debrided and raw and why the fuck are you crying stop stop stop

  “Anywhere you like,” he said softly.

  Tears in the box, box under the bed why are you still crying you worthless piece of—

  “Like somewhere with you and me and nobody else.”

  Weak weak weak strong girls don’t do this chase boys like this run after them and you do it because you’re desperate, desperate and pathetic—

  There was a faint smile on his lips as he gave her a small nod. “Somewhere like that.”

  It’s not real none of this is real he doesn’t love you—

  Her eyes found his, burning and flashing in t
he firelight—flashing so impossibly with joy, a soft pine forest streaked with amber, and the world went quiet.

  Quiet for just a moment.

  “Sorry,” she breathed, breaking his gaze at last as she brushed the tears from her cheeks.

  “Why?”

  “Because….this.” She gestured vaguely to herself, shaking her head.

  “Because you’re crying?”

  The question sent her eyes stinging raw again.

  But when he spoke again, his words were unfamiliar, his timbre dropping almost imperceptibly, the sounds curling through the warm air.

  They stirred something deep within her chest, a spark hidden in the raw and oozing recesses of her heart. “I don’t know what that means,” she said quietly as her fingers worried the unraveling hem of her leggings, eyes intent on the tight weave of the soft, dark cotton.

  “It’s a saying. From the mountains.” There was a soft smile on his lips, his shoulders swaying in easy time to a song she could not hear. “It means that a few drops of rain muddy the path, but a torrent washes it clean. Elsie, I’ve never seen you do anything half-heartedly. You’re—you’re not a muddy path kind of person. You’re a downpour. A barrage. A cloud-burst with thunder so loud it makes the window panes shatter. And you don’t need to except your tears from that way of life. It’s okay to be torrential.”

  She chuckled wetly, shaking her head. “I thought you didn’t do metaphors.”

  “I don’t do your metaphors,” he corrected, grinning.

  Being torrential. She rather liked the sound of that.

  “My metaphors,” she snickered, drying her tears. “Who are you, Fletcher Praequintelya?”

  And he paused.

  He paused, and there was something on the tip of his tongue.

  But he merely shook his head, his voice a half-whisper.

  “I wish I knew.”

  FLETCHER

  “We love, and we trust—and we hope that it’s enough.”

  ~Theodore Alderton

  Leaves clanked together like pots and pans, their skittered reverberations filling the air as Fletcher trailed the traces of magic burning like lines of fire through the countryside.

  A cat. The thought made him smile. Soft little paws on a hard-wood floor, pitter-pattering to the low-hum purr, and her laugh would fill the air, crisp and sweet, because she would be happy.

  He would be happy.

  He could do this, keep this up. She didn’t need to know. They could simply exist. His powers would grow weak in disuse, would ossify into a bittersweet memory, and perhaps he’d no longer be a river on the constant verge of overflowance, always fighting to stay afloat while his lungs still filled with water. And they’d have their quiet future.

  A future that regretfully felt worlds away tonight.

  The grass beneath his leather boots cracked and snapped, soft earth sighing gently under his weight. The kobalde’s trail was growing stronger.

  His pace was quick, magic flaring instinctively in his palms with a sparked sizzle so high it seemed to float above the heavens. The kobalde were mischievous creatures, cunning, dangerous masters of deception, and their whining—gods below, their whining was incessant, already, the trails rang nasal as he closed in.

  That one had appeared in the Valley was not, in and of itself, concerning. Attracted to the chaos of a trading district, they thrived on the mayhem wrought in the shops and homes of workers and merchants alike. Their love of crowds and confinement and chaos and cacophony was—how did Elsie put it—butterflies to candles?

  That couldn’t be right.

  No matter. Whatever force drew the kobalde to the trading hub had slackened, it seemed, because the little threads of magic scampering through the fields were headed straight to the district’s outer edge. The drone of cattle lowing was on the air, piped as shadows began to linger long over the plained horizon.

  And in the pastoral haze, something snapped.

  Something intangible and distant, close and screaming, and his magic sent a little sting through his heart, burning and writhing.

  Fletcher froze.

  A tripwire.

  He’d set them snaking across the Valley, little strands of magic listening for the call of the like craft, waiting to be disturbed by creatures and conjurers that ought not to be crossing the district bounds—though the waiting, it seemed, was over.

  No magic was permitted to contaminate the bounds within Aerdela.

  This remained the highest law, the most unbreakable.

  That he’d willfully disobeyed, in the name of this investigation—it was no matter.

  The secret stayed safe.

  Nobody knew about the bloodied magic seeping into the sequestered lands. Nobody knew a dishonored—soon to be discharged—warrior prowled those same sequestered lands, seeking to oust the illicit practitioners.

  But something had disturbed the wire.

  The wire laid carefully, no less, winding beyond the house he’d expressly been forbidden to see.

  Behind the house of the one he loved.

  Swearing angrily, a renewed wave of adrenaline flooding his body, he disappeared into a shimmering whirl of mist, bracing himself.

  ELSIE

  “It is only when the torches die and the darkness encroaches that we can truly see the fabric of reality.”

  ~Greysha Boewliç

  “Bells!” Elsie called out, exasperated as she strode through the darkening pasture. That fucking cow. And what a stupid name.

  Great fat thunderheads were burgeoning, bruises of black and purple beneath whipped cream heads, and another clap of thunder was sent echoing through the fields. She pulled her coat closer, grimacing as big, fat drops began to plunk down, splattering wildly against the cracked earth. The wool scraped the back of her neck, the collar steadily untying the loose braid as she turned her head from side to side, searching.

  “Bells! Bells, you stupid cow, where…” Her voice trailed off as a movement near the road caught her eye.

  The air was electric and dark, and the little girl strode through the grass in her little blue pinafore apron and gathered black dress and sweet red hood, not seeming to care that the sky was rebelling.

  Careless. And it made her heart ache.

  Do they know you’re not at home?

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Elsie called out, pace quickening through the tall grass. “Storm’s coming in, it isn’t safe.”

  “I’m in the middle of my game—”

  “Go on. Get out of here. You can finish your game another time.” Her voice was brisk, colder than she wanted it to be.

  “No.” The little girl’s face had wrinkled into a pout.

  “It’s dangerous.”

  And the girl paused.

  Her frown flickered out, a malicious smile curling on her lips.

  “Yes,” she grinned. “Yes, it is dangerous, isn’t it?”

  Even before her tiny shoe smacked the ground, even before she’d raised her foot to stamp the earth, Elsie had known. Had felt a hum through her bones.

  She was falling, a loud crack filling the air, and a dark burst raced forward, pinning her to the ground with suffocating force as she gasped for air, her bones stinging—

  Something through the grass, something making it whisper and hiss, a snake of cold, biting air—

  “No, no, no, no, no!” The little girl was screaming, furious. “Not fair! That’s cheating, it’s not part of the game, that’s—”

  What it was, precisely, Elsie would never know.

  Because someone’s hand was on her shoulder, and the world had dissolved into bright whirls of color, spinning, spinning, spinning…

  Whether the world had pieced itself back together or not, Elsie wasn’t sure. Hers was still moving far too fast, her blurred vision dotted with black spots. She was shaking as she pushed herself up, dead leaves and pebbles sticking to the palms of her sweaty hands. The bile biting at the back of her throat, the nausea rising in her gut, th
e pounding in her head—it all proved too much to fight back.

  She retched, losing what had barely passed for dinner anyway on the forest floor. Someone was pulling her hair from her face, a familiar hand braced gently on her lower back as she coughed, spitting out the vile taste of vomit that lingered on her tongue.

  “Are you okay?” Fletcher’s warm voice met her ears.

  Sitting back, eyes watering, she glanced over—and started, ripping herself away from his touch.

  Her fingers dug into the pungent dirt, packing the grainy bits painfully beneath her nails, and she could not look away, because her mysterious mountain boy—he wasn’t a boy at all.

  Not a human one, anyway.

  Delicately pointed ears cut through his dark blonde hair, acuminous nails at the tips of now-slender fingers. She found his eyes, but he shifted, catching the light all wrong, and they flashed, a wolf in the dark.

  “What are you.”

  “A Drada,” he said quietly. “Elsie, I am so sorry. I…”

  But his words faded into nothing but a roaring in her ears, the beating of her own heart like some sadistic drummer hoping to rupture the head.

  She should be scared. Little girls couldn’t bring down a person with the stomp of a foot, worlds didn’t just disappear in the blink of an eye, Drada—whatever that was—didn’t exist, and she sure as hell knew that if they did, her companion wasn’t…

  Drada.

  Maybe she’d said the word, because the taste of crisp ozone air was on her tongue, an echo of a sound on her lips, and he was giving her a quiet nod.

  She pulled the switchblade from her pocket. It flicked open with a satisfying click, and she could feel her heart starting to slow. “A Drada is…what, exactly,” she challenged, voice low.

  His voice was measured, brows knitting as he eyed the knife in her hand. It didn’t make a difference, though, what his voice sounded like, because she couldn’t hear him above the din in her own mind.

  Her knuckles were white, the crevasse of the handle digging sweetly into her skin, and she could not take her eyes from him. Searching, she was searching violently for the man she knew, she loved, beneath the leather bracers, beneath the knife-belt, beneath the dark clothes woven from midnight itself.