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

by C. H. Williams

  Didn’t matter.

  Worth it.

  “What’re you thinking for the wedding?” Fletcher asked, head tilted to the side, studying them both. “As I’m given to understand it, human celebrations vary drastically from our own. I remember when my eldest sister wed—of course, there was all the pomp and frill of your typical temple ceremony, but it was a bit longer, too, as she’s the Heir Apparent.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes, a look of wry amusement on his lips. “How long is longer to you, Fletcher?”

  “Another thirty minutes, maybe? So, three hours, beginning to end.”

  “Three—are you kidding me?” Teddy snickered, shaking his head. “That’s absurd.”

  Fletcher merely pursed his lips, nodding his agreement.

  Valley ways were simpler. An easy binding, and that was it. Say the vows, burn the candle, and really, it could be done in ten minutes, if there was a rush.

  Elsie had never seen herself swearing the vows.

  But if she did, she’d drag it out. If they were going to watch her stand up and tie herself off anyway, they’d get a hell of a show.

  Sam gave a side-long glance to Teddy, still considering the question. “We talked about spring,” he said slowly, and Teddy nodded, grinning. “Though as to the specifics of where and who—I mean, it only just happened this morning.”

  “I always imagined trees, just in bloom,” Teddy mused. “Dunno why. Maybe ‘cause we don’t even have any flowering trees here. At least, not the right sort. I think I read it in a book, once, though. Flowers, perfuming the air, and whatnot, it always sounded very romantic to me.”

  Elsie snorted into her wine, coughing. “I—I know that one. Seemed to feature a girl in a white dress, didn’t it?”

  “Girl in a white dress, boy in a white vest,” he shrugged, giving Sam a boyish smile. “I always thought that tale could’ve done with a rewrite.”

  “You could get married in Thallassas,” Fletcher interjected, leaning forward.

  “And that is,” Sam prompted, eyes lingering on Teddy for a long moment before flitting back to the Drada.

  “A Dradan island in the southeast sea.”

  Elsie nearly toppled her glass as her head snapped to Fletcher. “I thought Caelaymnis was the only realm.”

  He shook his head. “There’s three, on the continent—though they’re distant from the dealings of Aerdela, far more than Caelaymnis. Relative to the other two, we’re just down the street from the Valley. Thallassas in the spring is beautiful, though,” he carried on, brushing off her aside.

  Like he hadn’t simply broken down another wall of what the world should’ve been.

  “There’s nectar trees, blossoming along the coastline, and the ocean—it’s pure turquoise, and as clear as glass. Rodion’s like a brother to me, I imagine his father, the Magister, would be happy to preside. ‘Course, that’d mean a rather extensive guest-list…”

  “That sounds beautiful,” Teddy agreed, leaning back in his chair.

  “Agreed,” Sam added, “though I should mention that the Magister’s services won’t be needed. Our weddings don’t include a presider.”

  “You…marry yourselves?”

  “It’s an old tradition. Goes back to when most of Aerdela was still being settled. It was impractical to go all the way back east to find a Commissioner to marry you, not when you had fields to tend and work to be done. You know old saying—if you want something done right, do it yourself? Legend has it, it started with Aerdelean weddings.”

  Teddy rolled his eyes, snickering. “Anyway…” He shook his head, sparing Sam one final look of disdainful amusement before glancing back to Elsie. He said nothing, though, as he held her gaze, his smile fading somewhat.

  There were words poised on his lips, that much, she could see.

  But whatever they were, though, they were lost when Sam rose, pushing back his chair. “I suppose that is enough wedding nonsense for the moment,” he said, scooping up the picked-to-death cake, turning for the kitchen.

  He didn’t need to say the rest.

  He didn’t need to tell them there was work to be done.

  “Four invitations.” Sam tossed four pearlescent envelopes onto the coffee table before falling down beside Teddy on the sofa. “You and I, of course,” he nodded, threading an arm around Teddy’s waist, settling in. “One for El…and one for Augustus.”

  “Good, good…” Fletcher was pacing the hearth rug, eyes distant, like they’d been in the General’s office.

  Curled in what was usually Sam’s armchair, Elsie drew her knees to her chest, watching the boys with quiet disinterest.

  Caelaymnis had been surreal.

  It’d at least been nice, seeing Isa again. One familiar face—one she knew she got along with.

  She’d been so ready to hate Augustus on behalf of his brother.

  And it was true, that he was brusk. Abrupt. Sort of rude, if she read a little too much into his sharp tone. Two minutes, though, was all it’d taken, and she wouldn’t have minded, staying a little longer. It was admittedly easy to see why he didn’t get on with Fletcher, why the two might come to clash every so often—Fletcher could be frustratingly dense about some things, wickedly clever about others, and Augustus seemed to refuse excuse for either.

  Even so, he wasn’t half bad.

  Not really.

  “I don’t doubt the masquerade’s a distraction,” Sam mused, his caramel voice bringing her back to the living room. “Is it enough, though?”

  A plan, forged in the scant few days of Teddy’s recovery, in the wake of Clark’s failed arrest. Sam had been skirting around the idea, hesitant, promising nothing, beyond that he’d find a way to get into the manor.

  Now, with the invitations sitting on the coffee table, he’d come through.

  I will fight for you.

  Fletcher nodded thoughtfully, rolling his question over. “I believe it’s enough. It’s, in truth, more of a distraction for the Commissioner than his mercenaries. Augustus was quick to point out they’ll be busy patrolling the manor house, but there’s nothing to stop them from letting slip that the production facility’s under attack.”

  “And you’re sure it’s on the estate?” Elsie asked, unconvinced.

  “Mia and Rodion have been reporting heavy traffic in and out of a far corner of the estate to a heavily guarded warehouse. There’s more than a few unsavory creatures amongst his ranks, too, from what they’re telling me.” Eyes flicking to Elsie, he resumed the steady pace of the creaking wooden floor. “The plan,” he went on, worrying his hands, “is this. El and Sam, your job is to distract Clark. Head off the mercenaries, and keep him too busy to care what may or may not be happening beyond the boundaries of the manor house.”

  “Should be easy,” Sam offered, craning one-handed across Teddy to tug the throw over both of them. “There’s intrigue galore to be had, arriving with a fiancé on my arm, and that doesn’t even broach what El and I can bring, with his nonsense about her mother, and whatnot.”

  If it was really nonsense.

  Elsie spared a look to Sam, who didn’t return the glance.

  It could be more than a distraction.

  Something could be two things at once.

  Maybe they’d pull his attention from the raid happening beyond the house—and maybe they’d pull some information from him, too.

  The two of them together, maybe they could bully something more substantial from him—like what the information in the letters was guarding her against. What threat was so immense, that a woman of sound resources and judgment had willingly left her infant child in a back-district farmhouse. What details Sam might’ve seen, woven into Elsie’s life, details Clark was so keen to capture.

  “Augustus will be close, acting as guard and officer, to make the arrest, when the moment comes. He can’t apprehend Clark initially, but he’ll be playing the role of El’s…escort, so as not to draw attention,” Fletcher remarked bitterly, grimacing. “Meanwhile, myself,
Rodion, Mia, and Isa will take the facility. If all goes according to plan, it should be swift and silent.”

  “And me,” Teddy prompted, looking underwhelmed. No matter how much he’d gushed about the engagement, there was no way he’d appreciate being toted about as a token oddity, the requisite rags-to-riches of every fairy tale. He’d do it, though, Elsie thought, watching him. He’d do it for Sam. For Fletcher. For her.

  He lived too much of his life for other people.

  “Help with Clark, and when he’s been detained, help with the facility,” Fletcher said quietly. “There’s no telling how many are still in holding, or what kind of shape they’re in. You’ll play aide to Isa, triaging and treating anyone who needs it.”

  The mantle clock chimed nine.

  With a sigh, Fletcher at last abandoned his patrol of the floor, turning to brush a kiss across Elsie’s cheek. “I have to go.”

  She could see the discomfort in his eyes, that this plan weighed so heavily on his adaptiveness. His abilities, from her perspective, were quick, practiced—but nobody would’ve ever said Fletcher rolled well with the punches.

  If he couldn’t sequester the facility—doubtless a heavily warded facility—in suffocating isolation, there’d be bloodshed, and lots of it. So, Fletcher had to master the sequestering of the facility. And that meant logging hours with his brother in the training hall at the Caelaymnic compound.

  “I’ll see you at the lodge,” she murmured, giving his fingers a squeeze before rising herself. “More wine?”

  “Sounds lovely,” Sam grinned, nestling in closer to Teddy.

  What it must be like, finding such relief in the arms of another.

  What it must be like, not to burn.

  AUGUSTUS

  “Great are the men that challenge the gods, and dust are those who defy them.”

  ~Anscip Xavishia, Mende of the Coalition

  “Something on your mind?”

  Cam’s soprano voice cut through the soft clip-clop of hooves, and a pair of flashing eyes met Augustus as he glanced to the rider beside him.

  Even on a casual patrol through the pines to the northwest of the city, she looked regal. Her almost platinum hair was slicked back into a severe knot, an easy circlet atop it, dropping a single teardrop sapphire onto her delicate forehead. That was where any real elegance ended, though.

  Beneath the dark cloak, her glistening silver tunic was belted with a swath of cord, as was the traditional style. On most, it was a friendly look, giving an almost quaint appearance to the Drada dwelling in these mountains.

  On Cam, it was terrifying. Augustus himself had always been left with the vague impression that if he really pissed her off, she’d have happily garroted him with the belt without displacing a single hair beneath her circlet.

  She remained, though, his sister and his confidant.

  Blood ran thicker than the impending fear of a good garroting.

  “I’m just running over the new patrols Father requested,” he lied, gripping the leather reigns a little tighter. The gentle padding of Valoxus had done little to soothe his troubled thoughts tonight.

  A few hours prior had found him in the Master’s company. In the streets of an unfamiliar little settlement buried in oceans of prairie and scraggled trees sucking down what little water ran through the arid desert of grass before it crashed into the massive river, the river he knew cut through Aerdela like a scythe.

  Nobody had given the Master a second glance, strolling down the avenues.

  He belonged there.

  I don’t have time for games, Augustus had growled, leaning against the brick shop, trying not to breathe in the stink of tobacco and piss. Humans were filthy creatures.

  She will come, the Master mused.

  The one marked with gold.

  The one marked by Death herself.

  At last, the Master’s pale finger had drifted up, pointing across the street. There. That is the one.

  A girl with hair as black as the night, and eyes like emeralds.

  A girl, who even then, had been turning something gold over in her fingertips once, twice, before tucking it back beneath her navy coat.

  And now, there was a choice.

  Cut down the humans besieging Caelaymnis once and for all. End the assaults, end the bloodshed, end the pyres that seemed to light the sky every gods-damned night.

  Or let the violence continue.

  I solved your little mystery, Fletcher, Augustus thought bitterly, nudging Valoxus forward. It was me.

  The first of the Ruby Tears had to come from somewhere, while they had waited for the batch brewing in Cam’s cellars to ripen. Before that Woodshade scum had cried those first drops, while Augustus had still been marked with the bruises of lightning, while Epherias’s pyre still smoked, the Master had bequeathed to him a taste of the forthcoming feast.

  He hadn’t known the it’d come from the Valley.

  So, that was where the Master had set up shop. Clever. Beyond the authority of the realms, protected de-facto from Dradan involvement by the Hidden City…a neat little shelter for the scheme, all in all.

  It would’ve been hopeful, seeing the girl in the street.

  The girl that had to die.

  Hopeful, if he hadn’t known her. Talked to her. Become rather fond of her, in the few hours they’d shared.

  One life for thousands.

  Tactically, it was a sound decision.

  She was the heiress to powers only gods could dream of, and in her veins, old magic begging to be awakened. Her blood would bring a victory devoid of death. Her sacrifice would bring a stop to the violence spilling from the Woodshades for the first time in six-hundred years.

  The Master said she was the only daughter of Cora.

  The only daughter of Death.

  Such drivel, he’d thought, had been the stuff of legends. The gods were not to be mocked, painted as impulsive interlopers sharing the beds of humans—and yet, the Master had not been wrong, in his direction to administer the Ruby Tears on the tongue of each warrior, to wrench their magic back from the grip of the Woodshade humans who’d so wrongfully stolen it, and so, perhaps in this, he was not wrong, either.

  Each Drada possessed an endless font of magic, and so, the Woodshades took and took and took until the Drada was drained and dead, for that was the only way to wholly rip the magic away. It had taken time to find his strength again. But simply because his own font of power remained intact didn’t mean the Woodshades didn’t still possess what magic, through their twisted rituals, they’d extracted from his veins.

  What had been Augustus’s right by birth had been turned into something unnatural.

  Unpredictable.

  Deadly.

  And so, tomorrow, he would abandon his brother.

  He would abandon his lover, his friends, the soldiers under his command.

  But he would not abandon his city.

  Loyalty before amity.

  “Father is a fool, parading about these victories as though they were his own,” Cam remarked with a look of disgust.

  “He is a fool for holding fast to his sentiments,” Augustus muttered, glancing back to the towering spire, hardly visible through the trees. Even in the dark, it shown brightly, marking the temple at the center of the city. He would cleanse himself doubly, for her sacrifice.

  “Does he think shattering the treaty will do anything but bring violence? And not to mention the hungry, the sick—anyone demanding the mysticism of the Drada be harnessed for their own good.”

  “Not when the City refuses to do the same,” he agreed, turning her from his thoughts. It did not do to dwell. “They increase their protections, and we are supposed to open our gates to the flood of humans they have abandoned? I think not.”

  “Things will be different, when I have his seat. Cormalum assures me I will have Senate support, when we move.” A glint of silver flashed in the moonlight, her circlet shining as she spared him a glance. “Father can spout his open-walled
nonsense from the inside of a cell for all I care. What he plays at is treason.”

  So is plotting to overthrow the king.

  Not that he’d dare counter with the remark, even as a joke, for she would not take it as such.

  At least her husband, the illustrious Senator Cormalum, had guaranteed backing. Now that had been a powerful match, the Heir Apparent and a Senator. A guaranteed control of the politicians scurrying about the rostrum steps, and an honorary title for one of inconsequential bloodlines—few of peasant birth could boast of being Senator and Titled Prince.

  Augustus would win his victory for the city.

  He would see his sister crowned Queen.

  And it would all begin with the arrest of Elsie Mirabeau.

  RISA

  “Who are you, when things get hard? Will you fight for them, as much as you’re fighting for yourself? Or will you turn and run? They’re fond of saying ‘right’ and ‘easy’ are not the same, but I wonder how easy it must feel, knowing you’ve abandoned them in their hour of need.”

  ~Adrian Lynch

  Prove them wrong.

  This place was a refuge. A solace for your winters, that was the carving above the Chancery. Fuel for your fires. An ocean for your tributary. And bandages, for your wounds.

  From the founding doctrine, and quoted in the treaty that had raised the City and sealed the walls.

  In the cavernous sewer, frozen and putrid, Asher’s face was all shadow. But even so, she didn’t have to see the carved disdain across his brow to feel his disapproval.

  Tunnel runs were dangerous.

  And a novice runner like her was a liability.

  But each team needed a medic, and the latest casualties had left an unfortunately opportunistic vacancy, one Risa had been happy to fill.

  The straps of her knapsack bit into her shoulders through the thick wool coat. She shifted the weight, the scrape of her rubber-soled boot through the sludge beneath ringing gritty through the empty shaft.