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

by C. H. Williams

  He knew it wasn’t true.

  THE BEST LAID PLANS

  It is disheartening, watching everything crumbling.

  I don’t even know why I’m still writing these letters. Habit, maybe. Writing these letters to no one.

  I suppose it’s my own way of trying to convince myself that everything will be alright. That these letters can be something more than treachery.

  My heart tells me that I did this for her. But some deep instinct in my gut says I did this for me, too. That I was not prepared to face the fall of refusal.

  Such, I suppose, are the plans of mortals.

  ~Sam Alderton,

  excerpt from a letter dated November 12th

  ELSIE

  “Forgiveness would buy her back; resentment would have killed her all over again.”

  ~Theodore Alderton

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit—” Elsie paced the living room floor, arms wrapped tight around her body, trying to stave off the deep panic still overflowing in her chest. It was difficult to focus, her eyes unable to pause, to take in less than everything, falling in at her, all at once.

  “El?”

  “Shit!” She started violently, heart slamming itself into her ribcage.

  Fletcher was lingering at the threshold of the hallway, and she couldn’t recall him ever being quite so still. It only unnerved her that much more.

  “You—you have to do something. What even was that? What the hell just happened? I—you—”

  “There is a Captain in my unit who is a field medic,” Fletcher interjected, his gentle voice even and calm, “and did a rotation in the settlements—”

  “Then go! Go get them!” she snapped.

  He gave her a curt nod. Then, in a swirl of shimmering mist, he was gone.

  She found her brother sitting on the edge of the bed, looking like he might be sick.

  Teddy blew out a breath, dry shirt limply in hand, already crushed as he braced his fists against the bed, like he was going to make to rise.

  “Fletcher…went to get a medic,” she offered tentatively, folding her arms across her chest as she leaned against the wardrobe.

  His eyes snapped up. “I do not need—”

  “Hon, you—”

  “I know what happened,” he hissed, turning on Sam. “I was there, Sam, I gods-damned know…” His voice trailed off, brow furrowing. Then, pressing his eyes closed, he let another deep exhale out. “Sorry. I just…I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m fine.”

  “Well, it’s three-to-one,” she muttered.

  “Oh, lovely, so now you’re chummy with those two—”

  “Shut up.” But her eyes flicked to Sam, all the same.

  A field medic.

  Elsie’s tired mind had conjured up fairy tale pictures, and still, Captain Isa Mirestva was not what she’d expected.

  Watching the warrior sink kindly down on the edge of the bed, a bright, friendly smile dancing across an unmistakably Dradan face, she had the distinct impression that the small apartment would simply not contain the swaggering confidence. Isa’d obviously been pulled from the middle of something—the gray uniformed jacket had been tossed lazily on, half the diagonal buttons, cold and silver, left hanging loosely open. The accompanying gray trousers had been tucked into scuffed black boots almost up to the Captain’s knee.

  “I am afraid,” Isa was grinning, voice accented with an unfamiliar cadence, “that human abilities are not my, ah, area of expertise. Now, get one of your friends to slice you open in the mess hall…”

  Elsie snickered, drawing a pillow into her chest as she sat catty-corner at the foot of the bed. It was difficult to nurse the feeling of resentment amid the banter.

  Isa’s dark eyes flicked to hers, sparkling. “Are you volunteering? I’ve heard you’re rather quick with a blade—but then again, the Commander desperately loves to brag.” The Drada turned back to Teddy, fingers now deftly taking a pulse, gaze searching. “Light-headed? Blurred vision? Nauseous?”

  “No,” her brother said quietly, faint amusement at the corners of his mouth.

  He brags about me?

  “Do you practice?”

  Teddy gave the Captain a quizzical look.

  “Can you control it,” Fletcher interjected from where he was leaning on the door frame, arms folded in thoughtful study. “Conjure a lucent, or—or heal in any capacity?”

  “Well, I…”

  It’s not nothing now, is it, Teddy, she thought sardonically, watching him squirm. The denial ran far and deep—in them both, if she was being honest, at least until she’d seen Fletcher for what he was.

  “He can,” Sam offered into the stumbling pause, glancing inquisitively at Teddy. “At least, a little bit. Right?”

  “A little,” Teddy confessed, voice hoarse.

  Isa nodded, turning Teddy’s hand over, palm up, the Captain’s own hand musing above his. Teddy gave a sharp inhale, and Elsie gripped the downy pillow tighter, searching him—

  The shimmering motes between their hands caught her eye. Where before, there’d been a chaotic spray of lights and haze, this was a quiet spiral, full of order, ease.

  “It is a travesty, I think,” Isa smiled softly, eyes following the motes, “that these skills are not beloved within your realm. You seem fine. If I were to wager, I’d say it’s the equivalent of…” The Captain glanced to Fletcher. “Amdormvitae?”

  “Er, sleep-walking, I think,” Fletcher muttered.

  “Sleep-walking, then.” Isa’s eyes met Teddy’s, preempting the question so clearly carved in the azure. “I cannot speak of your people, but in my experience, magic can sometimes be a bit…badly behaved, I suppose. A bit aggressive. Some find that burning off a bit of magic now and then can curb the proclivity for trouble. For a human, it’s a bit unorthodox, traditionally speaking, but this should help.”

  Teddy’s brows were furrowed in concentration, a look Elsie hadn’t seen him wear since his days at the schoolhouse. “Traditionally speaking?”

  “You’re not like us. Your magic is not an endless fount. Should you deplete the well, it’d need time to fill again, so to speak.”

  “That’s what you’re doing, though. Burning it off?”

  Isa gave a small nod. “Nice and slow.”

  Teddy loosed a small breath, tilting his head back against the headboard, eyes never leaving the stream of shimmers drifting peacefully up from his palm.

  Quiet filled the bedroom—and in its wake, a question, nipping at Elsie’s tongue.

  “He’s not supposed to be here.” She’d blurted it out, unable to take her eyes off the Captain, coaxing the swirls from her brother’s palm. “Sorry—Fletcher, though. He said he was defying orders to be here. Aren’t you going to get in trouble, too? For being here, for—for coming to help?”

  Isa glanced up, eyes dark, shoulders tense, despite the jovial tone. “I have friends in high places.”

  TEDDY

  “Healer, mend thyself.”

  ~Unknown

  It was like draining a bathtub with a teaspoon.

  Except the bathtub was sort of endless, and the water was angry, and there was an audience of onlookers, watching the tub drain.

  Teddy let out a sigh, watching stitches of magic being pumped out through the palm of his hand, even spirals of thread dissolving up, vaporizing before they reached Isa’s. It would’ve felt nice, probably, to let it all go, if there hadn’t been a void in the wake of the release, a void slowly filling with a mass of conflicting feelings, each one stronger than the next.

  “Not to impose,” Isa asked, glancing to Sam, and then to Elsie, “but a cup of tea tends to be my fallback prescription. A cup of chamomile for our Healer would do a world of good.”

  Elsie frowned, giving Sam an expectant look.

  Rising, he gave a quiet scoff. “Come on.”

  “It doesn’t take two,” she mumbled, crossing her arms.

  Oh, for fucks sake, El. “I think the Captain meant for you both to go.”
Teddy could feel her seething as he let his eyes close. The bed gave slightly as she rose, though, and he heard her storming down the hall, the bathing room door closing angrily behind her. Sam’s lips brushed his forehead a moment later, muttered complaints thinly veiled as apologies still audible under his breath as he left them.

  “Do I want to know what happened with those two?” Isa asked, voice dripping with amusement.

  Teddy opened his eyes, guilt swallowing up the relief of the empty room. “No. Probably not.”

  “But I think perhaps you should tell me, anyway.” The Captain’s eyes were glittering in the lamp light, smile faltering. “I appreciate that you have been through a harrowing ordeal this evening,” Isa went on softly. “Far beyond what the others can imagine, I suspect, and far beyond what you might confide in them. Love, in all its glory, sometimes remains a burden.”

  “It isn’t…I’m not really in the mood to talk. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Isa shrugged. “I take it you’re itching for another seizure, then. That’s fine. Your choice.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re untrained. You have no concept of your abilities, so your emotions dictate their use. Someone gets hurt, you have a core reaction, deep in your gut, and your powers kick in. And this time, you’re the one that’s hurt. But there’s no cuts or bruises to heal, because this is where you’re hurting,” Isa nodded, tapping their chest. “Your heart. Except the problem is, Healers don’t mend hearts. They fix broken bodies. So, you seize.”

  He looked away, eyes starting to sting. “So, that’s what it was, then. A—a…” He couldn’t say it.

  It was a fit. He’d been sick, that was all.

  Just like he had a knack for helping,

  Words to help put some distance between the fear.

  Seizure.

  Even now, he felt the Thread coiling, ready to strike, his skin growing hot where Isa worked the magic from him. It’d been a friend, once. And now it was tearing him apart.

  “Elsie’s pissed because the district Commissioner said he knew who her mother was,” he said softly, staring out the darkened window. “Sam was the Commissioner’s ward. They had a falling out, and—and he’s been after Sam for a while, now, on and off, so Sam went to go talk to him, and he overheard the Commissioner talking to El. He was concerned the Commissioner was just using her, and she got up in arms about it. I…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I think there’s something else going on. But they’ve been pretty closeted about whatever went down.”

  “That must be difficult,” Isa said softly, “watching two people you love dearly go after one another.”

  “Honestly, it’d be fine, if she’d just fucking get over Fletcher.”

  “Tell me how you really feel, then.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered, glancing back. “They’re driving me insane, though. You’re Drada. You tell me he could’ve walked up to that woman and given her any semblance of truth. And it doesn’t matter, because if it hadn’t been that, she’d’ve found another reason to push him away. I watched her do the same thing over and over again. Any semblance of a real connection, and she’s gone.”

  It was like the dam was starting to crack.

  He hadn’t realized how stifled the flow from his palm had been, until that moment. Through the din of the thrashing Thread, he was starting to feel the tug, drawing the well up, up, up, until it was left swirling in the air, shimmering out to nothing.

  An open faucet instead of a teaspoon.

  “And I can’t imagine trying to navigate that after last night,” Isa went on, dark eyes intense as they met his own. “Finding so much death, and still, it’s you that has to be the buffer between them all.”

  Sinking down into the pillow, Teddy let out a sigh. “It’s not even that I mind being a—a buffer, or whatever. I just…how am I supposed to feel? They’re gone, and it was too much, watching Tom…” He swallowed, fighting back the bile at the back of his throat. “One moment, I’m torn up. I—I’m never going to see them. Never going to go home for dinner, or… The next, though, I’m relieved, because I’m never going to see them again.” His eyes were tearing as he looked away again, his words hardly a whisper. “He’s never going to crack my ribs again, or—or leave my sister black and blue. She’s never going to shatter what little pieces of joy we found, never going to scream our hearts away. And it’s really hard to be sad about that. Especially when I think that—that they found more peace on the side of that road than they ever had when they were alive.”

  “And that was the second pyre, I think, you found last night,” Isa prodded.

  “Gods, I—that was just Tessa. Tessa, all over again.” His cheeks were wet, now, streaks of cold running down his hot skin. “It has been twenty gods-damned years, and I am still killing myself over that girl. And it’s so simple, to Sam and El. It wasn’t my fault. So, I should let it go.”

  “But it’s always different, looking from the outside.”

  “They don’t understand that it was my fault. They are so ready to write her death off as something that doesn’t belong to me, when it does. It was mine, as—as much as it w-was hers, and it should’ve been me, too, burning in that—that house, tonight,” he whispered, shaking his head. The room was soaked in tears, and he was grateful, so guiltily grateful, for the solitude. For space to simply feel.

  “No matter the conflict between your sister and your lover, though, you can rest assured that neither of them would wish the same,” Isa said quietly, fingers coaxing up the bright web of motes with casual ease. “It is apparent they care deeply for you. They would, I have no doubt, go to great lengths to ensure you are getting what you need, if you were brave enough to tell them. So what is it, Theodore? What is it that you need, today?”

  What do I need

  He didn’t seem to be able to stop the tears, an unrelenting, silent flow down his cheeks. Isa pursed their lips in sympathy, digging a handkerchief out of a trouser pocket with a spare hand.

  It was soft against his skin, pale gray, like everything else about the Dradan aesthetic, as far as he could tell.

  What do I need

  In the wake of the question, as his magic burned away, Teddy let himself sink deep into memory.

  The night he’d first kissed Sam, he’d found Chloe

  waiting for him afterwards, like they’d promised.

  Sam called it the night he’d kissed the wrong boy, who’d been the right boy in the end.

  And that was all well and good, but to Teddy, it’d begun an intense, internal conflict.

  Chloe had waiting, leaning against her father’s barn in that sweet lavender gown that hugged her form tight, dancing lightly around her ankles, the first hint the heavy dresses of winter were to be stuffed back into storage. A handful of months, that’d been all, and he knew she was the one.

  He was going to marry Chloe Thompson.

  It’d been rash and instinctive, his kiss with Sam in the meadow, and it was easy to dismiss.

  A few days before his introduction, and Sam had been a nervous wreck, dreaming of his fairy tale. It has to be perfect, he’d fussed, nervously plucking blades of grass to shred them in his manicured fingertips. And I’ve never kissed a boy, so it’s going to be a disaster.

  I could kiss you, Teddy had teased, stretched out on the grass. Then you’d be an old pro by the time you got to the ball.

  You would do that? Sam’s voice had been serious, his eyes molten.

  More than would. He did.

  They’d laughed it off, albeit sort of awkwardly, because it’d kindled something between them, something that was impossible to ignore.

  He’d thought a lot about what it was he needed after that. The question would invariably creep into his mind, too, when he’d fight with Chloe, when the vicious words between them brought out an animalistic anger in them both, feral and destructive, because in those moments, it felt like Sam would’ve been a better ally.

  Sam never yelled at
him for scraping up enough coppers to buy the wrong birthday present.

  Sam never minded when Elsie tagged along.

  Sam never cared that he cried, sometimes, because life had promised a hell of a lot more than it gave him.

  What do you need?

  That’d been a question asked time and again in the school house as his hand met the air for the millionth time.

  He’d been thirteen when Elsie started walking with him into town to go to school. Walking wasn’t precisely the right word for it—she’d been four, nearly five, so he and Tom took turns carrying her most of the time. She was too young to be there, by all rights, but Marlene had gotten tired of her by then, and Mrs. Henderson didn’t mind, anyway. El’d been supposed to sit up front, with the youngest ones, but Mrs. Henderson, too, had looked the other way when she’d refused to budge from between her brothers.

  He remembered working through an arithmetic book—Tom’s—at sixteen. Elsie was sick, and nobody said anything as she dozed, fevered, on the bench beside him, head resting in her arms atop the desk. She’d been up all night, and so he had, too, and there wasn’t any breakfast for them that morning, and there wouldn’t be any dinner for him, either, because when he had to choose—and he’d had to choose quite often—it was always her who’d eat.

  What do you need, Mrs. Henderson had asked, head inclined to the side as she swept back to look over his shoulder.

  He’d wanted to tell her that they needed something to eat. That they needed some sleep. That he needed medicine for his little sister.

  And now, here he was.

  Elsie might have been royally pissed. But she was well-fed. Warm. Safe, now. Loved, dearly and deeply, even if she didn’t want to accept it. And Sam was hurting, but it was difficult, too, to be upset about Clark pushing him further away.