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

by C. H. Williams

  “To the best laid plans,” Elsie murmured, eyes lingering on the amber contents of her crystalline glass.

  “To the love of family when they fail,” Teddy added softly, putting his arm around her, drawing her close.

  “To friends that stand the line,” Sam nodded to Fletcher.

  Their eyes were on him, and Elsie was watching him expectantly, eyebrow raised.

  “To…” But there were only the words of his people drifting through his mind. “Apoticaeum defuespes,” he mumbled, face flushing.

  A half-smile was lurking on Elsie’s lips as she found his gaze again. “That’s lovely,” she whispered, cocking her head to the side. “What does it mean?”

  “To failed poetic expectations.”

  The living room was filled with laughter as they raised their glasses, and he watched her take a sip of whiskey.

  July had clung to Elsie, sticky and hot, and the sh-flick of her turning pages rolled like thunder through the clouds blossoming over a distant mountain home. It had been a hopeless refuge, the wrought-iron bench by the gurgling fountain. Hot wind had kissed the sweat-curled hair pulled back into a messy bun, ringing like wind-chimes, and her peach cotton dress, he remembered, had matched the baked earth beneath them.

  He hadn’t known her name, then.

  Hadn’t known anything, except that something was happening between them, something he did not quite understand, something terrifying and dangerous and exhilarating and electrifying, something that made him almost shake with undiluted happiness.

  She told him later he’d been staring.

  That was why she’d looked up.

  Staring as he’d walked down the shaded path, winding his way back through the park, the vision of a bloodied corpse stained across his eyes, and she had been so fucking alive, with the perpetual da-dum, da-dum, da-dum that had called him through the streets, the resounding cry of I am here, I am alive, and you have to listen getting him drunk on summer love.

  He walked by her twenty-three times.

  Twenty-three days watching her eyes flick up from her book as she slayed those hot afternoons away, hiding from a world that didn’t want her.

  Twenty-three days, and it was about to be twenty-four, except that day, she didn’t have a book, because she was waiting for him, one arm resting lazily on the back of the iron bench, her legs crossed beneath that white summer dress, embroidered with the smell of grass and sweat, and maybe he’d have kept walking, but his feet knew better than to leave her, and somehow, he’d been sitting next to her, asking if she’d finished her book, if that was why she had arrived empty-handed, and she’d laughed quietly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, saying no, no that wasn’t why she wasn’t reading right now, she was just curious, curious about the boy that took the time to smile, and I’m Elsie, by the way, Elsie Mirabeau, and that was when he loved her.

  In July.

  On the bench by the fountain.

  He steeled himself, finding a little more to give, and it was the Acadamae again as he traced the rug patterns, taking their endless vivacity for himself. You have to find it, Fletcher, Augustus had once told him quietly, pulling him aside, Find the way that you work best, and Fletcher had been about to argue, but his brother had cut him off, because you’re trying to do what everyone else is doing, he’d hissed when Fletcher had met his eyes and lost the words for the millionth time, you’re trying to do what everyone else is doing and it isn’t working.

  It isn’t fucking working.

  There was something about the advice of older brothers, Fletcher thought, the amber liquor burning sweetly.

  And something impossible about Elsie.

  ELSIE

  “May your soul know peace, may your heart be at rest, and may you finally know tranquility in the sweet arms of Death.”

  ~Dradan Funeral Prayer

  The cold water bit her cheeks, her breath catching in her throat as the bathing room tap gushed proto-ice into her still-cupped hands.

  Another splash across her tired face, and the faucet squealed to a halt as Elsie yanked the fluffed hand-towel from the rod, burying her face into the soft fibers.

  The overindulgent scent of lavender and lemon tickled her nose. It made her vaguely drowsy, a recall of nights stolen away, of nights safe, safe, safe.

  Fucking Clark.

  Eyes flitting across the accoutrements scattered on the countertop, she sighed.

  Of course, Clark had stuck his greedy little fingers into dark magics. He’d wrung the Valley empty, sucked every last copper from the drying teat, and of course it wouldn’t have been enough.

  Of course, he’d have walked free.

  A soft tap on the half-open door interrupted her thoughts.

  “What,” she muttered, tossing the now-crumpled hand towel towards the hamper, not bothering to see who’d come calling.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Fine.” She folded her arms tightly across her body, waiting.

  Fletcher exhaled deeply, the door closing with a soft click as he leaned back against it. The pale teal tunic pushed his eyes to the border of blue, a storming sea, the ship-wrecked flecks of brown all that was left of what they’d been before.

  Human.

  And he was all but, standing there before her.

  Even with her hands balled to angry fists, crammed against her ribs, she was acutely aware of the empty space between her fingers. The space she wanted his to be.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his voice little more than a whisper humming off the tiles.

  “For what,” she growled.

  His eyes flicked to hers. “Do you really think I came in here to deliver half-apologies? For lying, Elsie. I’m sorry I lied.”

  “You admit it, then.”

  “Yes. I—it was pointed out to me,” he went on hesitantly, “that while I thought I wasn’t…culpable, because I hadn’t said the words—hadn’t expressly claimed to be one of your people—but given the circumstances, it was advantageous for me to appear human, and…and such a deception is lying by omission.”

  Elsie could hear her brother in his words, Teddy’s phrases twirling and turning as Fletcher strung them together.

  “Look. I wish I could say I would do it better, if I could do it again. But honestly, Elsie, I have no idea what the right answer is. How do you walk up to someone you want to love and bare your soul?” His voice was drenched in desperation, an actor without lines trembling before the crowd, terrified of forgetting the obsolete little play-act drama of their life to the maddening night.

  Her fingernails relented their excavation of her palms, daggers drawn for a fight.

  She’d brought knives to a negotiation.

  “You…” The word hung between them, and he was waiting for an answer that would never come.

  She let her arms fall.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly, and the ten-by-ten was a mausoleum of surrender-white tile.

  But there were no mourners.

  Only the dead-on-their-feet, looking for some rest.

  Her reluctant fingers found his, warm and sweet, a reflection of a smile on his lips, and he pulled her into him as he leaned against the door. She let herself melt, his hands on her hips, and she buried her face in the crook of his soft neck, letting her arms rest cradled between their thudding heartbeats, pulsing into her skin.

  “I love you,” he murmured, and his breath was warm, his lips brushing across the rounded tip of her ear, sending a cascade of pleasant shivers down her spine.

  Her guard was down, the sentries were gone, the gates were open and this, this was what it was like, to be buried alive.

  They’d taken the underworld for themselves, for their damnable sinner souls, fuck the godful, left up above, with their piety and suffering, because death was life, life was death, magic was ordinary, the ordinary was magic, and the whole gods-damned world was upside down in Sam’s bathing room.

  His skin was a whisper of salt on her sweet kisses,
the finest confection. “Love you, too,” she whispered, so soft she couldn’t even hear the words, but he did, he heard them, because he gave a small inhalation, drawing her closer, like he’d hold her, and her words, until the bitter end.

  She wanted to gorge on those salt-caramel kisses.

  Her fingers had found the collar of his tunic, had gripped the stiff cotton tight until it gave beneath her hold, a starchy, crinkled mess. “Do you know,” she asked breathlessly in between the barrage, “what it is I want most, right now, in this very moment?”

  “No.” His voice was low, hushed with reverential longing. He’d found her waistline beneath the sweater, fingers drifting against the bare skin, and she gave way, leaning in, the softest sound of more, more, more on his lips.

  To draw him beneath the sheets.

  To yield the mausoleum, to forsake the ice, and simply be, as they had been, before.

  In the sweet, human months of summer. In the wide-eyed seven days of autumn.

  One brilliant winter night.

  To unravel.

  To remake.

  Now, though, fatigue was pressing heavy on her shoulders, her eyes burning with wakefulness known for too long.

  A coy smile was tugging at the corners of her mouth as she moved to meet his eye-line. “What I want, Fletcher, more than anything in the world, is some gods-damned sleep.”

  Bright laughter dissolved them, and she caught a glance of them in the mirror, red-faced and giggling.

  The sound had shattered the mausoleum.

  SAM

  “Cling to your morality, love. And tell me of its steadfastness in your waking hours, when it is all that remains of the life you wanted.”

  ~Commissioner Clark Carson, Valley District

  I am a good man.

  I am a good man.

  I am a good man.

  But, Sam thought, good men didn’t betray the people they loved.

  It wasn’t a betrayal. It couldn’t be. Because Sam Alderton wouldn’t do that. He was a good man.

  Sam Carson might, though.

  Sam Carson had been persuaded into doing a lot of things that Sam Alderton wouldn’t do. Had kept a lot of secrets Sam Alderton would have refused to.

  The timepiece on the mantle boasted a quarter past two in the morning.

  He turned the envelope over once, and then, lips pursed, handed it to Elsie. “It belongs to you,” he said softly, watching her split the seal. “I had no right to it.”

  Over six months of letters to Clark, gathered and held in the breast pocket of his coats day in and day out as he’d dared himself to turn them over, failing each time.

  The letters he would’ve delivered, if he hadn’t overheard them both in the carriage house.

  If he hadn’t realized he, too, had been betrayed.

  Her brow knit as she skimmed the pages, expression unreadable.

  “I did take the liberty of adding something at the end. Something I found notable.”

  She turned to the last page, a soft oh on her lips as her shoulder sank down. “She is fierce,” Elsie read, hardly audible over the crackling fire, “fierce, and unapologetic. These are enviable traits, for they mean she does not compromise. She does not allow her moral integrity to be twisted, the way mine has, nor does she accept anything less than the respect she deserves. It is…” Her voice broke, and she shook her head, swallowing. “It is my duty,” she went on, eyes watering, “to fight for her. For all of them. For their right to trust, and for their right to be loved, without fear, and without pain.”

  They were victims.

  All of them.

  Tendrils of fire licked the logs with succulent tongues, and Sam sent a silent prayer to the heavens.

  To Cora and Lucia and Stell and Hadri and Asa and Natali and Ignata and Kiran.

  Let us both survive this love.

  And gods, did Sam love her.

  Not romantically. Never romantically, in spite of Clark’s intentions.

  He’d indulged the thought, when he’d been young and stupid, and even then, it’d been absurd.

  It could protect her, he could recall thinking, having my wedding band. And yet, it was the pastries that had fallen first. How naive, he’d been. Ready to condemn them both in the name of righteousness.

  But nevertheless, he loved her fiercely. And it had been love at first sight, no matter what the critics said.

  Such a tired trope, misused by the arrogant poet, misunderstood by the dimwitted reader.

  And still, Sam had loved Elsie from the moment they’d met. Quick, wise beyond her years, she’d been unabashedly kind, the sort of kindness that took courage beyond reckoning.

  “Oh, Sam.” She pulled him into a hug, the pages still clutched in her hand.

  “I meant it,” he whispered, holding her tight. “I will fight for you, El.”

  For her.

  For her family.

  For her justice.

  And, when she was ready, for her city beyond imagining.

  AUGUSTUS

  “Peace. Only a moment, and even then, it was fleeting. But it was peace, all the same.”

  ~Elizabeth Clement Faulise

  The hot water of the barracks showers pummeled the aching muscles screaming in his neck, his back, his hips, and Augustus closed his eyes, letting the steaming barrage douse his sweat-soaked hair as he worked the soap with his tired fingers.

  It was empty, this time of night, as a rule.

  Empty, save for the soft drag of leather-soled boots against the damp floor.

  A smile was curling on his lips as he pushed his doused hair back, blinking the water from his eyes. He knew that soft-footed swagger.

  “I’m back,” Isa grinned, fingers making deft work of the slanted buttons across their coat. “Your future sister is absolutely charming, by the way.”

  “She won’t be my sister,” he mused idly, “Not if I can help it.” Rubbing his shoulder, he drank in Isa, lingering by the bench a few paces from the open stall.

  Exquisite.

  “Don’t think there’s much to be done, lover.” Isa pulled the boots off, tossing them aside before letting the gray trousers fall easily down. “The heart wants what it wants.”

  And what his brother’s wanted, it seemed, was a human amidst their ranks. Not completely useless, Augustus supposed. But hers was not the head to wear a crown. The realm did not need a pseudo-politician with her words of false hope and lies of broken treaties.

  The realm did not need more death.

  Fletcher was a shit investigator, of that, there was no question. Promoted to his highest level of incompetence for the blood in his veins.

  So Augustus would go. He’d meet them all, put on a diplomatic face, indulge his brother’s whims, answer the request for additional force for the seizure of the grounds.

  The accusation of blood-magic was not one to be brushed off over a brotherly spat. Already, Augustus had gone to the furthest reaches to wipe that scourge from the settlements beyond Caelaymnis, risking his own immortal soul. That risk had brought the first victories his people had seen in a long time. Only this once, he promised himself, dosing his own warriors. Only this. No more. No less. There’d been no other choice.

  When the Woodshade humans drained the Drada, they seized their magic. They weren’t content with what they themselves could do. They weren’t content to Heal. To rend ice and fire and stone in isolation.

  They wanted more.

  They wanted the uncontained, undefinable magic of the Drada. They wanted to fold the fabric of the universe to traverse the world, to bring light itself, to shape not only their ice and fire and stone but to bring nature itself to heel.

  And the Woodshades were one thing—their methods were crude. Unsophisticated, and so, unpredictable.

  A professional ring could conjure magics the likes of which even the Drada couldn’t conceive.

  If production rings were spreading through humanity, from the backwoods settlements towards the heart of human
civilization itself, if this proclivity for illegal magics was spreading…he had to act.

  Augustus reached for the bar of soap balanced precariously on the ledge. “What was wrong with the brother?” A morbid curiosity.

  “Nothing. It’s the same old story,” Isa shrugged. “These humans don’t know what they are. Don’t know what they can do. And some of them can’t contain it.” Standing there, bathed in the lucent-light, the pale yellow binding gently hugged the strong chest, a soft outline of breasts beneath the traditional cloth where they’d been bound not to flatness, lest the ribs crack at the strain, but simply to what Isa, with a sparkle in their eyes, always called out-of-the-way-ness. Tight undershorts clung mercilessly to perfect hips, taunting, the body sculpted not of hard lines and intense musculature, but rather the tone of one who knew how to move. The top half of the Captain’s sleek, dark hair had been tied in a tight knot, the rest shaved low, in the traditional style, fierce and elegant and lethal, all at once.

  A beautiful ro.

  From the ancient myth, Rho.

  A rare star, escaped from the heavens, destined to walk amongst the mortals to flee the gods. Devastatingly beautiful, the mortals vied for Rho. A prized wife, kings proclaimed. A coveted husband, queens demanded. But Rho laughed, for the mortals did not understand.

  Ro. To be neither. To be both.

  To be radiantly uncontained.

  And this was an honor, above all else, to see the ro as such. Coming undone.

  Isa’s gaze was idle, practiced fingers winding the swath of yellow into a neat roll.

  The pinnacle of trust and sacred vow, a promise not to err, as the gods first had. A promise not to contain the ro within their gods-granted flesh.

  “Well, you’re back, now,” Augustus murmured softly as Isa joined him beneath the water. Lacing his fingers through the ro’s, Augustus sighed. Isa’s hands were strong, callused, like his own, from years of training. Perfect.