The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  “But we can only write letters for the amount we are owed,” Lauro said, almost plaintively.

  “Lauro!” Komme snapped. “Be quiet!”

  “Antea can be beaten,” Cithrin said. “The war can be brought to a halt. But it requires a great deal of money. More money than we had. Now we can decide now how much money we have. How much money there is to be had. We can hire mercenaries of our own. Pay the ones working for Geder to break their contracts. We can offer the farmers in Birancour and the southern reaches of Northcoast better prices for crops like cotton and tobacco, and when Geder’s armies come, they’ll starve. We can pay bounties. We can hire ships to carry weapons to Borja and the Keshet and arm Antea’s enemies there. All it takes is money.”

  “All it takes is gold,” Komme said, but there was a tremor in his voice when he said it. Cithrin sat back in her chair. She’d made her arguments. Going over them again would gain her nothing. Komme Medean was a smart man, and one who understood contracts, wealth, value, and power. Given time, he would see the world through her eyes. Chana pressed a knuckle against her lips, staring at Cithrin as if she were a puzzle the woman could solve by an act of will.

  “If this fails,” Chana said, and then left the sentence unfinished.

  Cithrin nodded. “If this fails, we will fall beneath the blades of Antea or be taken back to Camnipol and slaughtered by Geder’s own hand. That hasn’t changed. It isn’t as though we’re at greater risk than we were before.”

  “And if we defeat Palliako and destroy Northcoast doing it?” Chana asked.

  Cithrin shrugged. “The world is burning. Anything that doesn’t end in ashes is worth doing. And there’s also the possibility that it doesn’t fail. Perhaps instead, we shift what people think of when they think of money. Buying and selling with letters of transfer seems new and frightening to them now, but in three, four, five years, it will be commonplace. All of our partners and debtors will have been using them. The throne will have backed them for years. And when that happens, if that happens, we’ve become the keepers of the king’s debt.”

  “If we’re the king’s debt,” Komme said, “then we’re the king.”

  Cithrin smiled.

  “Then we’re the king.”

  They gave Cithrin liberty of the holding company’s compound but not of the city. She had expected less. If Komme had had the guards keep her to a room, she would have understood his position. Her record for following the edicts of the holding company could not have been worse. That he gave her leave to sit in the courtyard in the compound’s center and drink cool wine in the shade of the trees was a signal of sorts. She was not free to leave, and neither was she precisely a prisoner. She thought of it as being in a sort of personal escrow, kept in place for when she was wanted and until it was clear what she was wanted for.

  As such, all she saw of Carse now was glimpsed through the narrow windows along the upper halls. Wide, grey streets and square buildings. High clouds puffed like cotton fresh from the boll. The air of Northcoast was warm enough, but with an undertone that made her think of the first warm days of autumn more than the last cool days of summer. In the courtyard, the vines and ivies rustled in breezes almost too gentle to feel and the fountain muttered and burbled to itself. At night, she didn’t sleep, nor did she expect to. At meals, she managed to swallow enough to keep her mind awake and alive, but little more than that. She knew to expect the anxiety, and so it was only an indisposition. The knot in her belly, the shapeless fear and dread, the craving for wine or beer or something stronger. She watched all of it happening to her, almost able to predict when the next wave would wash over her and when it would recede. In the meantime, grapes and cheese, water and wine. Not enough wine to untie her knots, though. She needed her wits more than the peace, and somewhere in her travels she’d learned how to suffer rather than indulge her need for strong drink.

  There were a thousand things that might still go wrong. Even if Komme Medean convinced himself to follow her scheme, the ships might be captured or sunk. King Tracian might have a change of heart. Geder’s armies might come too quickly, overrunning Carse and Northcoast before her plans had time to take root.

  She had loosed her arrow, and she could no more call it back now than pluck the moon from the sky.

  The servants and members of the holding company treated her with respect and caution, as if speaking to her were itself a reckless act. She accepted their politeness and reserve as part of the price she was paying for her actions, but they chafed. She could not calm herself with alcohol or with the business of her bank. The only thing left was the thin comfort of news. What little she had of that came through Yardem and Kit and Marcus Wester, and it was not what she had expected.

  Yardem’s and Marcus’s friends among the mercenaries of the north reported that Antea had been taking contracts with whatever companies Geder could find. All through the season, as the main body of the army had chased her in the southern coast of Birancour, the garrisons and keeps along Antea’s bloated borders had filled with hired swords, the Antean troops sent elsewhere. Where precisely was less clear. There were stories of fighting in Sarakal against the allies and remnants of the traditional families there, and also of the ongoing siege at Kiaria. There had been a rash of assassinations in Kaltfel as well, which commanded the attention of Northcoast more for its proximity than the scale of the violence. Thus far, at least. In the agonizing, slow hours between midday and twilight, she began sketching out a scheme for outbidding Antea’s contracts. So long as they were paying coin for services she could buy with paper, even a loss on her part was a victory of sorts. If she could frighten the Severed Throne into emptying its coffers, the war effort might stumble.

  Of the army chasing her, information was considerably more complete, thanks to the reports of Paerin Clark’s anonymous ally. Who had been sending the letters remained unclear, but he had managed to make a place for himself first following the army and then, after Porte Oliva, sitting in council with its commanders. The false scent of Callon Cane in Sara-sur-Mar seemed to have distracted the Lord Marshal for the time being, and the season was coming to its close. Jorey Kalliam was as aware as she that winter favored the defenders, and that the men marching in his columns could be made loyal by the priests, but no story of a hidden goddess could feed them. Even a man persuaded that the great powers of the heavens loved him above all else could starve. However powerful a story might be, it had its limits, and the brute material world didn’t listen or care what priests and bankers told it.

  She was not playing her games against the world, but the priests. The mundane stories of trade against the grandiose epics of slaughter and war. It struck her how deeply deceitful both narratives were. The banks pretended that business was stable, reliable, and a bit dull. The priests pretended that war was glorious. And the kings and regents pretended they were in control of it all.

  Looking at it as dispassionately as she could, she gave herself about even odds of evading Geder’s reach. Unless some new information came to light, which to judge from history, it would.

  For now, all she could do was wait for the ships to arrive. The gold, the pirates, Isadau, and the dragon.

  Marcus found her one evening on the northwest corner of the compound’s high walls. The nature of the building as a keep within the city was clearer here than anywhere. The setting sun shone through the brick merlons, setting the high walk in stripes of fire and shadow. He wore old leathers, and for once didn’t carry the green sword on his back. The years had not been kind to him. She couldn’t recall now whether there had been grey in his hair during that last, strange caravan out of Vanai. There was now. It spread from his temples out like frost on a window. Long travel and the poisoned sword had made his face thinner, the lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes stark and deep. She remembered his shoulders being broader than they were now and his expression less tired.

  She remembered when he’d been her protector. It seemed like a thing from a
very long time ago. There was an impulse she couldn’t quite fathom to pretend to be helpless around him. To give him that place in her life again, even though she was quite aware it wouldn’t fit.

  “Captain,” she said as he leaned forward, looking down at the street four stories below them. She made her voice sound light, the formal title made an intimacy by also being a joke.

  “Magistra,” he said, matching his tone to hers. “It’s a good building. I was never inside it before this. Didn’t really think they’d built it quite so much to withstand a siege. A couple dozen men, and you could hold this place for quite a while.”

  “The holding company has always been aware that people might grow to dislike it.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Marcus said dryly. “Anyway, I was down at the docks, and the harbormaster’s thinking the ships may come tomorrow. Depending on how much our great scaly friend is slowing things down, of course.”

  “Did he say what the chances were that the pirates have killed everyone and vanished to Lyoneia with the gold?”

  “Wasn’t something he ventured a guess on,” Marcus said. “If they did, though, it’s because Inys let them. I don’t doubt he’d have been comfortable burning all the ships to the waterline and having the Drowned carry the gold across the ocean floor in carts.”

  “Might take longer to get here that way,” she said.

  “Might. Saw your Master Komme coming up here. He still looks like he’s swallowed a squirrel.”

  “He would.”

  “Really? I thought you and he spoke the same language. Understood each other.”

  “We do,” she said, and nodded at the edge of the wall and the long drop beyond it. “You know how it feels looking down from too great a height? Like the precipice is calling for you? He feels that way all the time right now.”

  “Does he, now?”

  “I assume so. God knows I do.”

  Marcus leaned his shoulders against the bricks, turning his back to the sun. Cithrin stared out past him to where the great red disk was sinking lower behind the buildings of Carse.

  “Kit keeps trying to explain the trick to me,” Marcus said. “Part of it, I follow. The other part of it just seems… well, I get lost. I see where getting people to take these bits of scribble instead of actual money lets you afford things you couldn’t otherwise. I’m not clear on how that makes the world a place full of justice and equality and all.”

  Cithrin looked at him. The light of the setting sun had burned into her eyes, and its afterimage obscured him. “Justice and equality?”

  “Stopping war’s the point, isn’t it? Not just this one, but all of them?”

  “I don’t know about all of them, but this one. And making fewer others. But you’ve worked for me. Did you think we were making Porte Oliva just and equal?”

  “No offense, but that really wasn’t the impression I took, no,” Marcus said. “That’s where the confusion comes in.”

  “Do you recall Annis Louten?”

  Marcus scratched his chin, the stubble making a sandpaper noise against his nails. “He was the spice man, wasn’t he? Came to you for a loan.”

  “He was. And he repaid late, with penalties. The ship he invested in didn’t come through, and he hadn’t put insurance against it. He had to scrape and save and go without in order to keep us from taking his rooms and his stock. That’s trade. Going to his rooms with the full guard and taking the same money from him at knifepoint? That’s war. Both leave him just as low, just as poor. He did little to deserve either besides be unlucky. But in one, we take what we want under threat of death. In the other, he gives it because he agreed to.

  “If I manage what I hope, people will still starve. Families will still be broken. People who have done nothing wrong will still lose their livelihoods, their health, their homes. You’ve seen my trade. You don’t have any illusions about what I do when a contract is broken.”

  “Yes, but if someone’s given their word, that justifies what comes after.”

  “How?”

  “Justice,” Marcus said.

  “There are as many definitions of justice as there are people making them. Justice is doing what you said you would do, or being forced to. Or justice is getting back what was taken from your family. Or justice is hurting the man who hurt you. Anyone who wants to make the world just has only to say what justice is first, and then impose it on everyone with a different thought. I don’t care about that. I just want to keep people from burning each other’s cities quite so often.”

  From the street, far below them, a man cried out, and a woman shrieked. Cithrin and Marcus looked over the edge together to see the two tiny figures in each other’s arms smiling and greeting each other like old friends. The sun slipped behind the buildings and turned the world to rose and grey.

  Marcus let a long breath out from between his teeth.

  “The way you say it, money does the same thing a blade would,” he said.

  “It’s a tool, the way a blade is,” Cithrin said. “But blades aren’t my tools, and this is. The violence we do with a contract is the sort I understand.”

  Marcus

  For years, Northcoast had been in the back of Marcus’s mind. It had taken on a depth and significance that had nothing to do with the actual stones and skies. Northcoast was the place where the past had happened. Where he had been loved and powerful and betrayed. When he’d left Carse the last time, it had been in a fast boat going south with a king dead behind him and an old enemy on the throne by his hand. It was the kind of romantic gesture young men made because they didn’t have any better way to purge their grief. And now he was back, and walking through the city was like the blankness in the eyes of an old lover who didn’t recognize him. The taproom across from the great launderer’s yard where he and Alys had eaten their meals was still there, but the old man who’d served them sausages and apples and beer wasn’t. The empty house where he’d met with his men that last, fatal night before King Springmere earned his place in history as the Mayfly King had been taken over and cleaned. Half a dozen children were playing pebble-tossing games on the same stones where he’d cut Butun Skinkiller’s throat. There was a memory. He hadn’t thought of old Skinkiller in years.

  After Springmere’s death, Marcus had run from this city and from everything he’d been when he was here. He’d been a legend. The great general who’d pulled victory from a lost war and then cast it all away in the name of vengeance. Or justice. Or whatever name people wanted to put to it. He’d become a minor mercenary captain and head of a merchant bank’s guard. Northcoast hadn’t forgotten him, but the Marcus Wester it remembered had been younger, more certain of himself, and hadn’t had the rash across his back where the damned sword made his skin itch and peel.

  He passed through the city like a ghost. The holding company made room for him and Yardem and Kit, putting them all in a brick-walled storeroom that smelled of wheat flour and old oil. The three men spent their days in the taprooms and at the docks, finding what word they could. They spent their nights at the holding company, sharing information and telling tales and jokes. Cithrin’s great scheme still seemed like something a street-corner swindler would do to rook the unwary out of a few bits of silver, but for the moment she was safe from Palliako and his armies. Yardem and Kit made good company when they didn’t wander off on religious debates about the nature of truth and doubt and the spiritual roots of wealth. And even when they were talking hairwash like that, having familiar voices while he sharpened his knife or ate rice and meat from the holding company’s kitchen or started building plans for what to do when Carse fell under Antea’s hammer made the evening pass faster. In the nights, he would lie on his cot, looking out the narrow window at the stars, and try to put off sleep for a few minutes more.

  Because the nightmares, of course, were back, fresh and raw and more terrible than they had ever been before.

  Kit snored, but not enough to make an annoyance of himself. His blanket was a serie
s of dark brown lumps where he tangled himself. The top of his head poked out at one end, and a single bare foot at the other. Yardem, by contrast, slept on top of his blanket, his eyes slitted but not quite closed, and his sword on the stones beneath him where his hand could find the hilt without requiring him to stand or even roll to reach it. Only his ears drooping to the sides showed the Tralgu was actually asleep.

  Marcus scratched his chest. His arms and legs felt like they were sinking down into the earth, limp as overcooked chicken. In his memory, Cithrin looked out over the city and said, The violence we do with a contract is the sort I understand. The thought left him caught between pride and melancholy. She spent so much time and effort seeming older, it was easy to forget that she was only just past her girlhood.

  She’ll be fine, Alys said, walking through the thin spread of trees outside their little house. He couldn’t see the details of her face, but he knew it was her with the false certainty that came in dreams. Some part of him was already screaming in anticipation of what was coming. The violence, the smell of burning skin, the feeling of his daughter in his arms, her blackened skin against his own. She’ll be fine.

  He tried to speak, to warn Alys that it wasn’t true. Merian was in danger. They were both in danger. All of them. All he could manage was a whisper, and she couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t tell that he was trying to scream. Behind him, Merian laughed. He tried to turn around, but his body wouldn’t move. Something was wrong with him. He felt like he was stuck in thick, invisible mud. Merian’s laughter turned to a scream and he tried to run. It wasn’t too late. If he could only get there in time. Her scream was constant now, like a storm wind that didn’t have to pause for breath. The air stank of smoke and his skin was beginning to peel back from his hands, exposing the meat of his fingers. The bone. The thickened air was ripping him apart rather than letting him through. He gritted his teeth and tried to scream his daughter’s name, his heart thudding against his ribs even as the wise, watching part of him turned away, knowing what would come next.