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

by C. H. Williams

  “They let me go! A whole thing about how Mrs. Mulligan didn’t want to part with me, but she couldn’t justify the fines from the Commissioner, and the law is the law and it is such a load of bullshit!” The word rang through the store as Sam tossed his satchel down on the counter, furious.

  The air was laced with rage, a tangible tang lingering in the back of his throat as Sam paced the length of the counter, burning off the fresh fury curling in his veins.

  And inside, it stirred.

  The Thread.

  “I earned my place there! And she turns around and acts like she did Clark a favor, letting me stay on? Like this whole thing is some big play-act?”

  “They can’t do that,” Teddy put in darkly as he came around the counter. The countless hours Sam had poured into the needle and thread, the tears, the pin-pricked fingers, the tangled bobbins, the complete brilliance with which he’d shone, seeing that first gown on the mannequin—

  “But they did! They did, and there isn’t a damn thing…” Sam’s voice cracked, brown eyes glistening as he slammed a hand on the counter, grimacing.

  With a gentle brush of his hand against Sam’s shoulder, the soft reassuring squeeze melted into a deep hug, arms tight around each other because those damn ribs had failed again, failed to guard that quivering mound of muscle so laughably called a beating heart.

  “It will be alright, in the end,” he whispered, and it was the meadow all over again.

  Quiet peace when Sam was falling apart at the seams.

  “You can do this,” Teddy breathed, and Sam’s hands gripped the back of his tunic, because he was, he was fighting, tooth and nail, to keep standing, right here, right now, and You will fight, and you will keep fighting, because I am here with you, Sam. You will fight because you don’t have to fight alone, words conjured with a breath, words to safeguard what the ribs had betrayed.

  Sam’s jagged breaths were forced, hot against Teddy’s neck, willing composure.

  “Hey.” A gruff voice shattered the meadow, and Teddy’s eyes flicked threateningly to the harborman loitering with disdain, a one-man queue.

  Pulling away, Sam’s jaw was clenched, face red as he yanked his satchel off the counter, turning for the back room.

  With a huff of derisive amusement, the man tossed a box of nails and a package of what would prove to be stale, hard cookies wrapped in butcher’s paper before the till.

  “Something funny to you?” Teddy asked, voice low, returning behind the counter with the taste of rust and sugar bitter on his tongue.

  “Just wondering,” he snickered, rustling in his pockets. “And maybe you can answer this, seeing as ya’ll’re so close—why is it, these tarts walk around, actin’ like a bunch of fuckin’ flowers—”

  “That’s enough.” There was an edge of ice to his voice, his knuckles white against the counter.

  A sneer rolled across the man’s face as he flicked a worn slip of paper out.

  “And no cheaters,” Teddy added.

  “Why the fuck not? That’s good money.”

  “Not here, it isn’t. Hard cash, or no deal.”

  Only a scant few shops in town would take the risk of accepting a promissory note from the Guild. And it’d never been a problem, not here, anyway. Frequenters of Williams’ General Store, as a rule, mistrusted the promises of merchants, and had a taste for copper between their teeth.

  And kinder words on their lips, Teddy thought angrily, not breaking the harborman’s gaze. They were shrewd people, the Valley people. Quick, too, to have survived here for so long. They could not afford to gnash their teeth at one of their own, not when a weak link in the chain could be the ruin of them all, not when solidarity was in their blood. And Sam was one of theirs, they’d decided. Nine years loitering around the store, and they’d taken him in—bitterly, warily, resentfully, it was true. But they’d taken him in, all the same.

  Swearing under his breath, the harborman slammed a fistful of coppers on the counter, snatched up his goods, and left without another word.

  In his wake, a little girl.

  Hidden behind his massive form, she took one silent step towards the counter. Then another.

  “Rude,” she remarked, matter-of-factly, standing on her toes to put an overstuffed bag of candies on the counter. She couldn’t be more than five or six, with eyes as dark as coal, her blood-red hood pulled neatly back, a painfully white pinafore smock riddled in ruffles over a navy dress.

  His eyes flicked around the store. Empty. Or so he’d thought.

  “It is ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and be wary of strangers, and he mustn’t know the rules.” She paused, glancing at the door. “What an ass.”

  Heart still pounding, adrenaline flooding his jellied muscles, he felt an echo of a smile on his lips. “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” he offered, leaning on the counter. Even if it’s true.

  “He wasn’t a very nice man.”

  There was the quiet shuffling of shoes on wood, and Teddy glanced over towards the back room. Sam was leaning on the door frame, arms crossed, lips pursed into a reluctant smile, eyes still damp.

  “No,” Teddy sighed, “no, he wasn’t.” He turned back to the little girl. “I like your hood. Red, just like from the stories.”

  “Yes. From the stories.” A rather mischievous grin split across her face, a row of small, pearly teeth flashing.

  “Just the candy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, it’s on me today.”

  She beamed, taking the bag. “Thank you, sir.” The girl took a moment to neatly tuck the little bag into the pocket of her smock before looking back up to him. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Teddy,” he offered.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Teddy,” she smiled, “I’m Chim.”

  ELSIE

  “Fear is the mask, and Doubt becomes her.”

  ~Dryadic Proverb, from the Book of Adagic Texts

  “Gods below,” Elsie panted, wet, trembling fingers still clinging to the cavern wall. They’d been bathed in an eerie light, and even in the cold, steam was still curling off both of them in time to the pit pit pit of water droplets against stone. Slowly, she let herself sink down, her shaking legs unable to keep her upright anymore. “Gods…”

  Fletcher’s chest was heaving, his eyes wide and unseeing as he surveyed the tunnel. “Shit—El, I…I’m sorry—”

  “It…” She shook her head, swallowing down the moist air, the smell of sulfur swimming. A smile was tugging on her lips, watching him pace.

  His eyes flashed in the aquamarine light bleeding through the icy windows swirled into the stone. It’d be flooded, where she sat, come spring, the waterfall crashing down.

  Laughter was pressing at her, making her ribs ache all that much more as the sheer absurdity of it all starved her lungs, and he was laughing too, pushing the soaking hair back off his forehead, shaking his head. One glance at her, and he sank down next to her, leaving wet footprints on the cavern floor and a great dark splotch in his wake as he slid down the wall to sitting. The stench of minerals from the steam of the hot springs below clung to them, both of them soaked from the dive into the turquoise pond.

  Wordlessly, she took his hand, grinning as she tried to catch her breath.

  “I, um…” Fletcher’s voice was breathless, and he closed his eyes, a smile on his lips. “I can hear your—your heart. Racing.”

  She glanced over. “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “I—I can hear it, from, like, three blocks away, too. Which is pretty good, for us. With the—the background noise, and everything.” He was watching her intently, something playful sparking in his hazel eyes.

  He never talked about what he could do. Not really. Not like this. It was all lucents and evanescing.

  This, though…this was them. Together. Elsie and Fletcher.

  “So,” she snickered, brushing a kiss on his cheek before rising. “Wrong kobalde.”

  Laughing, he dropped his head
in disdain. “Wrong kobalde.”

  The evening was crisp as the dirt beneath Elsie’s feet gave way to cobblestones just inside the town limits. Their clothes had dried quickly, by the roaring fire sparked in the secluded corner of the foothills, and she’d been savoring the moments, being free. Watching him being free, too. Being free together.

  The problem, though, was when he’d gone back.

  When he’d shifted. When his eyes dimmed, his ears rounded, when his frame seemed unsettled and graceless, when there was a look of deep discomfort on his brow, unerasable.

  Because when he went back, anything between them seemed to fizzle out. The conversation would die, the soft touches would cease, and nothing would remain but stilted words and unsure movements, neither really knowing what to do.

  “So,” she mused, trying to break the quiet. “What do the Drada dream of?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fletcher’s brow knit as he gave her a side-long glance.

  The locket was sitting, warm against her chest, and she fought the urge to reach for it. “Human children dream of magic and elves and all the things we think are impossible. But if you live the fantastical, what do you dream of, when you want to escape?”

  “Depends. Cam fancied herself an explorer, I think—she used to talk about traveling the world. Augustus only ever wanted war. He was born a soldier, my father used to say. But I think Alva and I always just wanted some quiet,” Fletcher shrugged, giving a stray pebble an idle kick. “Listening, I think, takes a toll on her. And my world is just…it’s too loud.”

  Words had trickled intermittently between them as they walked, no destination set.

  They didn’t know about the locket. She’d meant to tell Sam, but somewhere along the way, she’d gotten drunk on this idea that maybe there was a tiny piece of her life that belonged to her, and her alone.

  And it wasn’t like she owed Fletcher any sort of secrets, to be sure.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?” She’d toyed with the question, on and off, not really knowing if she wanted the answer, other times telling herself she knew he would’ve, only the timing had been wrong, and it was difficult, and she wouldn’t have believed him, anyway, and—

  He heaved a sigh, shoulders shifting uncomfortably as he pushed his hands deeper into his coat pockets.

  He was so utterly human.

  So human, it was sickening. In the blink of an eye, he’d dissolved, and it was like nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t come bearing secrets that would have undone all of Aerdela. Undone their world.

  “I knew, very quickly after meeting you, that you were not someone I could walk away from,” he said at last, hesitant. His voice tiptoed across the thin ice, each word liable to plunge them into the freezing depths below. “And clearly, there would be…considerations, in a relationship, that would—but you and I—”

  “Yes or no, Fletcher,” she snapped, stopping in the road. “It’s a simple question.”

  “I—”

  “Yes or no.”

  “No.”

  The word cut her to the quick.

  “No,” she echoed, and it was almost funny, in a sick and twisted sort of sense, because of course, this was a secret he’d have died with. He was so damned charmed with her simple life, so, of course, he’d have been chasing his quiet dream, of course she’d be the fodder to the romantically quaint life of humans, a means to a fucking end. “So, what? You were going to spend our lives lying?”

  “I never lied—”

  “Bullshit!”

  And she could feel it, deep in her bones.

  The change. The overcoming of love with anger. A script she’d played out again and again, a part she never wanted to play, but always did, when it came down to it.

  “You understand, Fletcher, I had no idea who you really were?” she snapped, and she was coming undone.

  “Semantics! Aside from the fact that I doubt you’ve shared every detail of your personal life with me—”

  Liars, both of them, liars, because she could not be different, she could only be trouble, always so much trouble—

  “My personal—this isn’t about me,” Elsie snarled, taking a step forward. “Don’t you dare try and rationalize this, because you know if I’d been in your shoes, I’d have said something!”

  “I could’ve easily invented some story, that’s what you’re not understanding—”

  “Easily? You,” she scoffed, “you could have easily invented a story?”

  “—but the pieces I did tell you, they were the truth!”

  “The truth?”

  “I said there were repercussions from disclosing—”

  “You made me think that people would keep dying if you said something! That me knowing anything about why you were interested in this investigation would compromise your ability to stop what’s happening!”

  “And it would have!” His voice was loud across the howling wind as he glared at her with flashing eyes. “Elsie, you’re not supposed to know about this, any of it! I violated a treaty, the laws of our realm, direct orders from my commanding officer, my father’s explicit directions—you could be arrested, knowing what you know! And we haven’t even gotten to the actual reasons that I’m here—”

  “I trusted you, Fletcher! I trusted that you would’ve told me, after this was over, and you were—were taking advantage of that! Of the fact I trusted you!”

  Her tears were cold against her cheeks, and the ice had fractured, they’d fallen down, down, down, and she was drowning.

  This was heartache.

  Heartbreak.

  And she was Elsie Mirabeau, the scrappy girl that picked fights with anyone that pissed her off, that took no prisoners, that, with venomous vitriol, would push, and push, and push, until there was nobody left close enough to hurt her.

  She wrote the endings.

  FLETCHER

  “Together, we are stronger.”

  ~Lucenia Maladictus, Desai of the Coalition

  Storming down the snow-packed road, there was a discomposed glare etched on Fletcher’s brow, because he couldn’t quite recall ever hating a human settlement.

  But right now, he hated that place.

  The pasty, over-seasoned and yet somehow tasteless food, the mud so laughably called ale, the unfamiliar streets, gridded and numbered like it made any sort of difference in this chaotic world—he’d been a fool, thinking this was paradise incarnate.

  And even still, he’d taken two steps on the icy boulevard here in Caelaymnis, had breathed in the delicately spiced meats and the sweet pies, the cider so sharp it could slice through cold butter, had been ready to walk those swirling city streets that looped in steady wheels, spiraling to the palace spires at the center of it all, and…and it was wrong.

  It wasn’t home, because she wasn’t here.

  His hands were still shaking, adrenaline overflowing as he tapped the compulsive rhythm against his leg, pit bi-di-dit, pit bi-di-dit, percussive like the language that flowed so easily off his tongue, that now had begun to permeate even his thoughts, his dreams, and he was himself disbelonging, the act of being a sum of parts disparate from any whole.

  Snow was falling with quiet fft, fft, ffts on the metal barrack roof, windows glowing warmly, the sound of laughter and the smell of cinnamon liquor boasting the end of a long day.

  He didn’t really know why he’d come to this place.

  Even when he’d been in better standing—never good standing, mind, simply better—he’d barely tolerated the cold flat, and besides, Sentinels boasting the rank of captain and above were never tied to the compound. It’d just been instinct, coming back.

  Report, he could hear his brother saying.

  The only person I’ve ever loved told me that I made her sick. She told me that I hurt her. And she screamed and cried and yelled and I am lost. I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand how I fucked this up. But I did.

  I did.

  Some report.

 
; Gritting his teeth, he turned on his heel, leaving the barracks to his back.

  The house wasn’t far. It was a quiet street, too, with a scant few shops wedged in between the domiciles. Nothing glamorous—certainly not like the monstrosity his sister had erected across the city, a miniature shrine to the palace itself. No, this was simple, a two-storied thing, unassuming with its pale yellow walls and deep brown trim and white curtains shading the inside from the street beyond.

  It was as he’d left it.

  Darkened and cold, he sent a couple warm lucents bobbing overhead in the entry way, illuminating the carpeted stairs that opened up from the foyer to a regretfully empty second floor, save for the bedroom at the end of the hall. To the right, a barren living room, furnished with a piano in the corner and a messy desk, heaped with reports he’d sifted through, letters he simply hadn’t bothered to throw out, notes scribbled in his own illegible handwriting that only his eyes might decipher. To the left, a kitchen with nothing more than a dusty bottle of wine and a few glasses, dried little coins of red left in the bottom where they sat in the sink from when he’d last shared a drink with Rodion nearly six months ago.

  And this was the place, he thought bitterly. The place she’d been dying to see.

  This jumble of mismatched furniture in which he’d built a chaotic little nest.

  His fingers trailed the polished banister, little bits of snow still clinging resentfully to the carpet as he summited the stairs.

  The worst part was that he knew she’d have loved it. That she’d have grinned, stepping through the door, just happy to be here.

  He sank down on the edge of the bed, running his hands with a whispered shhhhhh across the comforter, breathing in the dust.

  This place did not know her.

  And it seemed a little dead for it.

  She brought life, wherever she went. Vivacious, unrepentant life, lived so fiercely there was no choice but to keep on living.

  Fletcher let himself fall back onto the bed, the down heaving out a sigh as he found himself staring up at the ceiling.

  The memories rained.