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

by C. H. Williams

  But someone, it seemed, rather fancied a re-write.

  Chim frowned, watching the Cranky Man as he lurked in the shadows.

  He ruined all the fun.

  Here she’d been, ready to bring down the glittering chandelier, and he’d gone and taken her turn.

  Games were only fun if everyone took turns, and he was a meanie, spoiling the night.

  She had planned on making a splendid mess. Not that there was anything stopping her from bringing down a second, just for fun, but he’d gone out of turn and it was all over but the crying, now.

  Stupid Cranky Man.

  She stuck her tongue out, blowing a raspberry behind his back.

  He didn’t notice.

  The threads had crossed, though, and in their crossing, Chim had been made quite cross herself.

  At least she had her wordplay to keep her company in these dreary moments.

  A ripple in the pond, and this was how they met once more to finish their game of hide-and-seek.

  The girl had won, obviously.

  Hiding in plain sight, and he didn’t see her, even still.

  She’d keep on hiding, too, even after he’d found her.

  The Litigator liked to hide behind her mask of ice.

  The Cranky Man turned to leave, thumbing a small glass disc in his fingertips, shiny and alluring and—

  Cheating.

  That man was a cheater.

  The Cranky Man in his shadows.

  Or perhaps his game was different.

  Perhaps, she mused, tugging the paper bag of candies from her apron pocket, he was after something else.

  He didn’t care that the threads had crossed.

  With his careful tinkering, he’d carried his little Litigator back beneath the tunnels, and with his meddling, he’d ruined the game of hide-and-seek.

  ELSIE

  “And in burst the knight, ready to save the damsel. There was one problem, though.

  The damsel didn’t want to be saved.”

  ~Greysha Boewliç

  “You’re ready.” Clark raised an eyebrow, crossing his legs. “And you truly expect me to believe this? That after you both tried to have me arrested, you come back, ready to reconcile, as if nothing whatsoever has happened?”

  Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, just keep him here, keep him busy—

  “I had nothing to do with—”

  Elsie’s words were cut off as a young boy in a secretary’s suit slammed the door open, breathless as he moved to whisper something inaudible in Clark’s ear, the Commissioner’s expression growing darker with each passing second.

  “What business could possibly be so urgent,” Sam pressed, frowning, “to warrant this kind of—”

  “Silence!” Clark was on his feet, snapping his fingers at the secretary, some unspoken command between them. “I am through! I am through with this—this childish insubordination! You bring a chandelier down? And what purpose, do you think, this serves?”

  Elsie was glaring, making to rise. “A—what?”

  But already, a hulking monstrosity of a man was waddling through the door, a pair of skinny things at his heels.

  Mercenaries.

  A breath, and one of them had snatched her up, the others taking Sam.

  “Stop it,” she struggled, trying to break free. “No—”

  It was useless, though.

  She was eleven again, and he might as well be kicking her roll into the street. Only this time, Sam wasn’t going to be there to save her.

  “Bind their hands,” Clark snapped. “I don’t have time for deviants.”

  Panic was rising, her skin burning beneath the manacles. “Augustus—Fletcher!” She was screaming, throat ripping raw in the sound, but if he could hear her heart beating from three blocks away, then he was damn well going to hear her yelling his name from wherever he had to be—

  “Can it,” her mercenary growled.

  “Augustus—”

  His hand met her face, stinging, something salty and warm meeting her tongue as her lip began to bleed.

  “No!” Sam’s voice cracked through the room. It’d taken both of the skinny ones to hold him back, and his eyes were swimming as they found hers. “Don’t you dare touch her—”

  Augustus’s growl cut through the chaos. “Enough.”

  Elsie pressed her eyes closed, thanking the gods above and below.

  He’d heard.

  Augustus had heard.

  The grubby hands on her bare arms fell away, and there were tears of relief on her cheeks, watching him own the carriage house.

  “More fucking Drada!” Clark was walled in again, seething, his mercenaries trapped behind shields of the same shimmering mirage-y membrane she’d watched Fletcher summon before the Commissioner not a week earlier.

  “Sam, are you—oof.” She collided with an unseen wall, making for him.

  “El!” He was shaking his head, eyes flooding. “El, run!” His fists met the wall, furious, a look of unmistakable pain carved deep into his face as the mercenaries yanked him back once more. “Elsie—”

  She turned, coming face-to-face with Augustus.

  It was his eyes, cold and unfeeling, that betrayed him first.

  “What’re you doing,” she warned, backing into the invisible wall, panic starting to rise once more. “Augustus—”

  A heartbeat, and he was dragging her towards the door, unperturbed by the kick to the shins, the elbow to the gut she tried—and failed—to deliver, and she was screaming, screaming, praying someone would hear her.

  Lingering in the threshold, he pressed a finger to her lips, drawing it away as she gnashed her teeth, aiming for the flesh.

  “Hush,” he crooned, atop her protestations. “Hush, darling.”

  “What are you doing—let me go!”

  “I cannot. You are essential to the Master—”

  “I knew it!” she shrieked, glaring tearfully at Clark, “I knew it was you, I knew this—this was too good—”

  There were words on Clark’s lips, though, his brows furrowed as he shouted something over the din.

  Fight. Back.

  “Fight back!”

  What the—

  “Don’t let him take you!” Any trace of anger in the Commissioner’s voice had faded, nothing but command in its wake. “Elsie, fight back!”

  It was useless, though, in that stupid dress.

  Clinging tight to her body, she wasn’t going anywhere. A silk prison. Nothing more.

  “Don’t you dare give up,” Clark yelled, hands pressed against the wall. “Not now, not when it matters—”

  His words dissolved as the world faded to black, lost in the dimming swirl of lights.

  She was gone.

  FLETCHER

  “Power comes in all sort of packages. Little girls with bleeding heads, tiny babies with golden trinkets, affected letters of an angsty adolescent…and yes, love, it even comes in tins of salve.”

  ~Commissioner Clark Carson

  “Oh, Stell’s ice,” Rodion swore, eyes darting inside the darkened warehouse.

  Row after row of iron shelving filled the enormous depot, craning high into the rafters. The mercenaries lay toppled in the dirt—still breathing, but unconscious, at least for the moment.

  “Siddeus, round up the mercenaries,” Fletcher muttered, waving a hand to the nearest, a rather stout man reeking of alcohol. “Put them…anywhere out of the way.” Then, taking a step forward, he crossed the threshold.

  The shelves were lined with bandages. Salves. Tonics. Ointments. Contraceptives. Poultices. Teas, medicinal herbs, braces—

  “He’s been hording medical supplies?” Isa mused, picking up a nearby tin. “And ours, too, from the looks of it.”

  Fletcher gestured to them to toss the tin, and he caught it, glancing at the label.

  The swirled script across the front was unquestionably Dradan.

  He’d heaped salve identical to this on more than a few cuts and scrapes over th
e years.

  “Mirestva, Kastarae, secure the warehouse. Make sure it’s what it appears to be,” he muttered, turning on his heel. “I need to find the General.”

  SAM

  “He told a truth so outrageous, it had to be a lie. If only it had been so simple.”

  ~Sam Alderton

  A swirl of emerald, a hazy mist, and she was gone.

  And with her, the barriers that had kept the Commissioner at bay.

  “You fool!” Clark was fuming, teeth grinding as he turned on Sam. “You have brought her death! Do you understand what you have done? I warned you that they wanted her dead. I told you they would find her, but did you think to listen? No!”

  “If you had stopped playing your games—”

  “Games? I could not have been more clear, you stupid boy! And yet, you were content, watching her fall in with the likes of—of them, because you knew best!”

  She wouldn’t die.

  She couldn’t.

  It was a simple impossibility.

  He had promised to fight for her. And yet, she’d been taken, and what had he done, but pound his fists against an unmoving wall, terror overtaking him as he’d watched Augustus rip her away.

  There was so much time still left between them, him and El.

  So much gods-damned life.

  “What are you doing?” Clark squawked, and Sam started, heart churning out ashen beats with embered determination. It took him a moment to realize Clark was snapping at the mercenaries, waving them off. “Go after them, you imbeciles! Go!”

  Relief, painful and resentful, swept across him as their grip fell away, and Sam turned to follow. He had to find Fletcher. Warn him.

  A hand, though, caught his chest, beady eyes finding his own. “Not. You.”

  “I could’ve had an empire, with her,” Clark snarled, pushing Sam back. “She could’ve been everything. And you have signed her death warrant, Sam Alderton. You, and you alone.”

  He caught himself against the sofa, knees starting to shake.

  Cora Lucia Stell Hadri

  “Just like your whore of a mother. Uncompromising.” Clark took a step forward, cracking his neck.

  “She wasn’t a whore,” Sam breathed, and he wasn’t the boy in the garden paths, running wild and carefree, not anymore, because Clark had killed that little boy long ago. “She did what she had to do.”

  “As did I, until you interfered!”

  Taking a step back, Sam’s chest was tight, panic nipping at his heels. “You paraded her about—”

  “I dared to give her what those cowards couldn’t! Look me in the eyes, love, and tell me she didn’t have a right to know who she was. Tell me, from that lonely view atop your hill of morality, Sam, that she was better off not knowing she would inherit a kingdom!”

  Sam’s back hit the wall, a jolt ringing through his body at the shock.

  Trapped.

  He was trapped.

  His head was pounding, ears ringing with the sound of his own ashen heart as Clark took one last step forward.

  Clark’s breath was hot, heavy with allspice to cover the taste of tobacco and brandy. His finger came to rest square in the middle of Sam’s chest, lain with sickening gentleness atop the silk waistcoat. “You,” he whispered, voice drenched in depravity.

  A single word. A threat, a curse, a promise, all at once.

  And with a scoff of derision, Clark let his hand fall, retreating in anger to the armchair behind his desk.

  Sam pressed his eyes closed, tears clinging to his lashes before falling reluctantly down his hot face.

  Cora Lucia Stell Hadri Asa Natali Ignata Kiran

  That first summer he’d known Elsie and Teddy, that summer nine years ago, the summer that felt a lifetime ago—that summer had been hot. Stiflingly hot, unbearably, unlivably hot, and even with his sleeves rolled up, his cravat and waistcoat stuffed into his satchel, he was sure he’d die of heatstroke, when all was said and done.

  Elsie, at ten, had looked like a wilted leaf, collapsed beneath the shady maple, beads of sweat making her hair curl viciously. Teddy, at eighteen, on the other hand, simply looked like he melted. Just a pool of blue and copper, stretched out in the grass beside his sister.

  The books lay abandoned. They were fodder for cooler imaginations and fuel for chillier days.

  River, Elsie had sighed, her young voice almost resigned to the inevitability of the seemingly nonsense word.

  River, Teddy had agreed, pushing himself to sitting.

  They’d both looked at Sam in question, as if he’d have known why it was they’d settled on the on-word conversation.

  What, he’d frowned, too hot to pretend to be polite.

  Do you want to go down to the river with us?

  And do what, he remembered asking. He more or less pretended that his senses had been dulled by the oven-of-a-heat-front moving through, scorching farmland and wits alike, because it seemed better than admitting that he hadn’t fathomed the river useful for anything other than shipping goods and generally currying the errands of merchants wise enough to own the riverfront.

  Snickering, Teddy had rolled his eyes, pulling him up. Come on.

  There’d been something thrilling, shedding his heavy clothes on the riverbank and stripping down to undershorts. His skin had soaked in the hot rays of sun beating down upon them, and he’d been sure he was going to burn to a crisp, exposed to the elements like nothing more than the base-born bastard he was.

  The river rocks had been slick against his rebelliously bare feet, the cold water delicious against the heat of the day, and…

  And the rush of what he’d felt was almost enough to carry him away.

  That afternoon, he’d felt like he was sixteen, rebellious and wild and carefree.

  He’d watched Elsie blossom into the child it seemed like she never quite got to be, hurling her stones into the river with a dangerous grin.

  And when he’d made a misstep, he had watched as Teddy seemed to make a lifetime’s worth of hurts vanish with the soft touch of his hand.

  Sam could recall sitting in the sweet clover grasses, letting the roar of the river overtake him as he idly ran a hand up and down his leg, searching for some evidence of the fall. But all he’d found was the straggly dark hairs of an adolescent boy, coarse on his sandy golden skin.

  So, there’d been nothing left to do but lay back, drying in the sun as he watched the puffed white clouds against the cerulean sky, safe in the comfort that no hurt could find him there, that pain could not reach them by the muddy river eddy, that for the first time since he’d left his mother’s cold, stiff arms in the alley so many memories ago, he had found a little slice of peace.

  RISA

  “It seemed so malicious. So cruel. It was only at the end of it all, though, that they were the actions of someone who, above all else, wanted to be stopped.”

  ~Risa Barrett

  “Easy,” Risa muttered, glancing over to Teddy. The girl’s limp form on the marble was warm beneath her hands, some life lingering reluctantly in her yet. “You go too far, they’ll start asking questions you can’t answer. Go from the inside out. Leave the superficial stuff.”

  His eyes flicked up. “I did.”

  Mask tossed gods knew where, hands bloodied from packing the wounds, he looked young.

  Young and tired.

  Bloodied hands, quiet voice…

  That brought back some unpleasant memories.

  She let the tendrils of magic reach out, searching for the pain, the cuts, the hemorrhage…

  He’d done it, alright. It’d been chaotic, the magic flooding in spurts, but he’d managed to mend the massive hole deep in her gut, at least enough, for the moment. Mended, and no sign of burn-out—he had a knack for this, no question.

  Risa had been left to tend to what was left of the girl’s arm.

  Which, after binding and healing and no small amount of prayer, would be nothing.

  There were simply some wounds too deep
to heal.

  But the girl would live, and that was a victory, anyway.

  Blankets had been piled beneath her on the marble, a make-shift hospital on the ball room floor. Someone had brought hot water and bandages and a bottle of alcohol, and the floor was littered, now, with discarded rags and slops of pinkish water, sprinkled with tiny pieces of crystal and finery, a most macabre little cupcake.

  It hadn’t taken long for mercenaries to start shooing the gawkers away, thank the gods, and the room was quieting as the crowd began to thin. A few of them had helped lift the chandelier, at least enough to pull the girl out, and someone had held her shrieking mother back as her daughter spilled blood, violent and red, across the white ballroom floor. They’d worked quickly, though, magic tearing through the girl. A cruor tonic, some rest, and she would recover.

  “You,” Risa beckoned, waving one of the waitstaff forward as she rose. “She’s stable enough to be moved, but not very far. Find her a quiet place to rest, and see if you can’t dredge up a physician or six from the carrion still in the foyer.” They’d do nothing more than sterilize and bandage—but mercifully, that would be enough, for the moment, until she could send for a medic’s pack from the City.

  A commotion from one of the garden side-doors drew her attention as the serving girl skittered away.

  “Back—you can’t come in here—”

  But a man in a peculiar gray suit was pushing past the mercenary, anyway, glaring as he made a beeline for the chandelier.

  Risa scoffed, wiping her hands on a damp rag as she strode to meet him.

  A Drada.

  His ears might’ve been filed down to rounded tips, his build stockier, his teeth suspiciously dull, his fingers so un-claw-like, and yet, the uniform was unmistakable.

  Commander.

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here,” she snarled, “but Caelaymnis needs to back the fuck off—”

  It was like he didn’t even see her.

  He would’ve walked through her, if she hadn’t side-stepped him in their little game of chicken.