The Widow's House (The Dagger and the Coin)

by Daniel Abraham

  “Your empire is in her sight,” Basrahip said. “Listen to my voice, Prince Geder. You are the agent of her peace. She knows what glories you are capable of, and you shall not fail.”

  In truth, the season was calmer and quieter than in previous years, if only because there were fewer people present. But there were still feasts and balls and luncheons. Men still dueled over questions of honor, and their mothers and wives and sisters still patched things over afterward. It looked the same as it had before, and if it felt different, it was likely only that there was so much new that needed to be thought of. The year before, the management of Nus and Inentai and Suddapal hadn’t been at issue. The year before that, Kaltfel and Asinport had been the great cities of another country. So while Camnipol alone was a quieter, calmer place, the Kingspire was not. He spent most of his days in his private study with reports and letters from the protectors of the empire’s newest cities and towns. There was still the grand audience to prepare for, and he’d already postponed it once.

  And so there were whole days sometimes when he didn’t think of Cithrin. And then, like the sudden pain of on old wound, he would. For a moment, he would remember himself as he’d been, tripping idiotically into the streets of Suddapal expecting to find a lover’s embrace waiting for him. Being stupid enough to think Cithrin loved him. That anyone would. He saw himself with the wide, delighted grin of an idiot, his fat buffoon’s arms spread to nothing and no one. And the emptiness of the bank’s compound and the pity in Fallon Broot’s eyes. Fallon Broot, whom Geder had ordered specifically to give privilege to Cithrin and her people. No amount of vengeance, no triumph or victory would ever wash away the bright pain of that day. It would stain his life forever, because he had believed.

  That was the worst of it. Even more than the betrayal, there was the sheer, superhuman stupidity of thinking that someone like Cithrin could have feelings for someone who looked like him. His power and position, certainly. They’d been of use to her. But he had convinced himself—genuinely convinced himself—that she’d taken him in love. That the touch of their bodies had been something as real to her as it had been to him. Cithrin was beautiful and intelligent, and he was the heir to a third-tier holding like Rivenhalm who’d blundered into power and then thought he belonged there. And he was fat. Worse than fat, pudgy. That one night when she’d opened herself to him—

  And then the memory shifted and became a thing of longing so deep and vast it would have filled oceans. And all of it poisoned by humiliation.

  “Are you all right?” Aster asked.

  Geder coughed, looking around the study as if he were seeing it for the first time. Essian’s latest report from Lyoneia was still in hand. He didn’t know how long he’d been staring at it without seeing the words. The Southling locals have reported two men something over a year ago and a document known as the Silas map. He put the papers down.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You were grunting.”

  “Was I? I didn’t notice. Probably just too long in this damned uncomfortable chair.”

  “You should move, then,” Aster said. “Father used to take things to his rooms at the bottom of the spire all the time. He liked it down there.”

  “Maybe that is a good idea,” Geder said, stretching. “Very, very good idea. You’re a smart boy.”

  “Your standards are low,” Aster said with a half-smile. “Doesn’t take much to say you should change things if you’re uncomfortable.”

  “It’s the simple things that carry, though.” He stood up. The study was a mess. Piles of papers, reports, letters. The tax ledgers and farm reports of the south reaches. The unglamorous work of running the world. He didn’t enjoy it, but it had to be done. Aster, at his own desk, was working through a poetry exercise his tutor had set him. It struck Geder again how much older the boy looked. How much older he’d become. How much work there was still to be done before Aster took the Severed Throne and ruled over Antea. More than Antea. The world. He didn’t realize that he intended to speak until the words were already coming out.

  “You’ll be better, you know. When all this is yours? You’ll be better than I am. I didn’t train for any of this. I barely spent time in court when I was young. You’ve seen all of this. Not just what I’ve done, but your father, when he was alive. It won’t be bad.”

  Aster nodded without looking up. His lips pressed thin. Geder waited, unsure whether he should just leave or be patient and let the boy answer in his own time.

  “You spend all day in here,” Aster said.

  “There’s a lot of work to be done,” Geder said. “A lot of changes have come, and there’re decisions to be made. I’m the only one who can make them, for now.”

  “Why?” Aster asked, still not looking up. “You have men who serve you. You have more men serving you than anyone else in the world, probably.”

  “But I’m the one the goddess chose. I don’t know why she did, but she did. So this is what I have to carry. And if I do enough of it now, there won’t be as much for you to shoulder. When the time comes.”

  Aster turned his head at last, smiling but diffident. He nodded. His jaw was stronger than Geder remembered it being.

  “Do you want to come out and spar a bit?” Geder asked. “We haven’t done that in a while. And it would work the kinks out of my back.”

  “I should finish this,” Aster said.

  “Yes. Of course. You should. All right, I’ll just head down to that fountain for a while. Take these with me.”

  In the corridor, his personal guard fell in behind him as he took the great sweeping staircases down toward the ground level, the gardens, the fountain. All around him, the Kingspire buzzed with activity. Not only his own servants, but the brown-robed priests who made the tower their own home now. Men passed through the halls on errands that supported the empire and the crown and the temple. Geder felt like he was the first among servants. In truth, he was looking forward to the day when he could retire to his own estate somewhere and let it all carry on without him.

  He caught sight of the only Jasuru priest. A man who had been an assassin bent on Geder’s death, and was now a wide-eyed servant of the goddess. He made a point of bowing to Geder every time they met, as if his body could bend itself into a living apology. Geder couldn’t help but wish Basrahip were still there. He hoped things were going well in Kaltfel. The afternoon breeze was cool when he stepped outside. The gardens spread out to his left. To his right, the dueling grounds and the vast canyon of the Division. His land, for now. Everything, as far as he could see and beyond all horizons, his responsibility.

  He sat by the shadowed fountain for a time, but he couldn’t focus on the papers and reports here any better than he had in his study. The dead king’s chambers were all around him, and he felt Simeon’s presence. Water sheeted down a bronze dragon almost lost to verdigris, and Geder listened to the splashing as if there might be voices in it. Spirits in the water that could tell him something wise. Something he needed to know. There was nothing, and after a time—long or short, he couldn’t say—he made his way back out into the gardens and the sunlight. Far above, the banner of the goddess was a line of black and red against the side of the spire. He lay back in the manicured grass and looked at it, and then at the distant clouds beyond. If he’d been sitting up, Canl Daskellin and Cyr Emming—two of his three closest counselors—might have noticed him sooner and been less free with their words.

  “—off for weeks at a time to apprentice as a midwife,” Emming said, his voice a growl. “For God’s sake. Can you imagine Simeon doing that?”

  “I’m not disagreeing with your particulars,” Daskellin said. “But I think you’re exaggerating the problem. No one in four countries is willing to cross him. Not after Dawson Kalliam. Certainly not after Ternigan. He has his dead enemy’s own children toeing his line. And the ladies of the court have nothing but kind words after his unfortunate romance.”

  “That. Well, it’s a thin line betwe
en kindness and pity, and I for one—”

  “Lord Regent!” Daskellin said, his tone bluff and hearty. “We were looking for you. Prince Aster said you were in his father’s old quarters, enjoying the fountain.”

  “I was,” Geder said, sitting up. “Then I came here.” Canl Daskellin stood at the edge of the path, his smile polite and rueful. It was an acknowledgment that Geder had heard them. Emming, on the other hand, was scowling severely, nodding, and fighting not to meet Geder’s gaze. The old man’s face was pale. To Geder’s surprise, it wasn’t anger that swept through him, but a strange kind of sympathy. Emming was one of the great men of Antea, and here he was, caught misbehaving. He looked like a guilty dog. If he’d had a tail, it would have been tucked between his knees. It wasn’t so long since Geder himself had felt the sting of embarrassment that he couldn’t recognize its distilled form in his counselor’s face.

  Embarassment and also fear. That he feared Geder forgave him much.

  “We’ve had hard news, my lord,” Daskellin said. “I thought it best that we speak to you at once.”

  Geder levered himself up to his feet, dusting bits of grass and leaf from his knees. His mind raced to a hundred different things that might have gone badly. Had Sabiha gotten sick again? Was there bad news from Jorey? Had the enemy in Porte Oliva killed Lord Skestinin, or the apostate in Kaltfel ambushed Basrahip? Or the siege at Kiaria? Could something have gone badly there? A plague among the men? An assault from behind now that the body of the army had gone west? Geder hadn’t realized he carried so many catastrophes so near the top of his mind until the chance came to for one to come true, and they all spilled out, ready to be made real.

  “Mecelli’s written,” Emming said, his gaze fixed on Geder’s collarbone. “He’s still in Inentai.”

  “The city is suffering raids,” Daskellin said. “Robbers were attacking outlying towns and farms at first, but they’ve grown bolder. He says they’ve begun coming into the city proper.”

  “Well, we can’t let that go on,” Geder said. “They have to be hunted down. Stopped.”

  “The force left at Inentai is not a large one,” Daskellin said, nodding. “When the army was at Kiaria, there was a sense that it might return east as reinforcements. With the bulk of the men in Birancour now…”

  “We’re stretched thin. Very damned thin,” Emming said.

  “It is also possible that some members of the traditional families or their relatives in Borja are sponsoring the raids,” Daskellin said.

  “Can we raise more troops?” Geder asked.

  Daskellin’s eyes answered before his words. “Raising a second army would be difficult.”

  “Hired swords, my lord,” Emming said. “That’s the path to go. The Keshet’s lousy with them, and garrison duty’s what they’re trained at. Get a few hundred of them for a season. Just until the problem in the west’s cleared up. We’ve got the coin for it.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Geder said.

  “Mercenary companies are certainly an option,” Daskellin said. “Mecelli thought we might reach for that, and he was… skeptical. There is a precedent in the east for companies to switch sides if a better offer is made. If we count on professional soldiers to die for us rather than take bribes from the enemy, it may not go as gracefully as we’d like.”

  “We can find out if they’re loyal,” Geder said. “There’s a temple in Inentai. They just ask.”

  “Yes,” Daskellin said, “and knowing that there’s a force of armed men who won’t answer to the throne guarding Inentai is better than not knowing, but it’s still a problem.”

  “What then?”

  “With respect,” Daskellin said, “mercenaries are best used where they aren’t needed. I suggest we hire companies to stand guard where there isn’t trouble. Asinport. Nus. Even Suddapal. Then the Antean blades can go to Inentai and ride against the raiders.”

  “Good,” Geder said. “Yes. We’ll do that.”

  “We can do this once, my lord,” Daskellin said. “If something else happens? A revolt in Nus or a slave uprising on the farms. If Herez or Cabral or Narinisle throw in with Birancour? We’ll have to make choices, or we’re in very real danger of all of it falling into chaos.”

  “No,” Geder said. “It’s fine. This isn’t like other wars. This is the goddess reclaiming the world. The old ways don’t apply. Everything is going to be just fine.”

  “Damned right,” Emming said, nodding hard. “Damned right.”

  Daskellin’s smile was thinner, the angle of his head not as deep. “I hope you are correct, Lord Geder.”

  Clara

  The assault itself began in flame.

  Over the long years of peace, the city of Porte Oliva had outgrown its own defenses. Buildings spilled past the defensive wall and out into the open land. By the time the army arrived, they were empty as a plague town. The soldiers walked through the outlying buildings and then sent forward a priest under the flag of parley. Clara saw none of it, but the reports filtered back quickly. How the parley had been refused, arrows raining from the top of the wall and driving the priest back. How the voices of Porte Oliva had jeered and sung and drowned out the priest’s words. How the chance of surrender had been squandered.

  After that, the army had pulled back, out into the open fields. Clara had found her own camp surrounded by soldiers’ tents, and the Lord Marshal’s banner not a hundred yards away. Jorey was so close she could have walked to him. The banners of the other houses took their places around the perimeter of the city—Caot and Essian and Flor and Broot. The first sign of fire came with the fall of twilight, thin pillars of white smoke rising into the air from one place and another around the exposed belly of the city. And then, with night, the flames.

  “He’s a careful one, this new Lord Marshal,” the caravan master said, eating his bowl of beans and salt by the fire. He sounded approving, and Clara felt a stab of pride.

  “I don’t understand,” a young Dartinae woman said. She was a seamstress who sometimes also shared a bed with the soldiers. Her name was Mita or Meta. Something like that. “He could have used those buildings as cover. Gotten in right by the wall. Now he can’t attack until the fire’s burned out, and even then, he’ll be marching over embers to get there.”

  “That was never cover,” the caravan master said. “That was the first line of defense. Straight trap, and meant to seduce him. March his men in under it to keep the arrows off, just like you were thinking. Only then it’d be the queensmen who started the fire and our boys burning in it. Kalliam’s boy’s too smart to take the easy path. Don’t know how he’s getting past that wall, though.”

  When the time came to bed down for the night, the ’van master took her and Vincen aside. “Look, I can’t help but notice you two like setting up a ways off from the rest of us. That’s fine. I got no opinion on it. But tonight? Might be best if you kept close. Soldiers before a battle can be… well, rowdy, eh? Mistakes get made. Better all around if we keep close and cheer them on.”

  The smoke thickened the air, and the flames of the city danced and leaped and muttered. When she woke on the grey, ashen morning, her eyes stung and her throat felt raw. Where the day before there had been houses and businesses, stables and dyers’ yards, there was now smoking ash, blackened timber, a few low stone walls. And beyond it, the great wall of Porte Oliva, blackened with soot. It looked like a city already fallen. Jorey’s scouts made forays into the grey and black and red, reporting back, Clara assumed, how much the coals still burned, how hard or simple it would be to cross the new-made ruins and spill the same destruction on the far side of the wall.

  “Are you all right?” Vincen asked.

  Clara nodded at the defensive wall. “It’s a high wall, and it seems they know what the priests are capable of. Do you think it might hold?”

  “What I’ve heard, Porte Oliva’s never fallen to attack,” Vincen said.

  “I can believe that,” Clara said.

  Near midd
ay, the worst of the fire seemed to have passed. All around them, the soldiers began to prepare. Siege engines were assembled—trebuchet and catapult, ballista and the strange new spear throwers that had passed them on the road. A vast array of mechanisms all built toward violence.

  And then, as they began to rise, the voices.

  “The goddess is with you. You cannot fail.” It wasn’t Vicarian’s voice, but neither did it carry the accents of the Keshet. When the priest passed by, one hand lifted to the sky and the other holding a speaking trumpet, his face strong and bright and severe, she didn’t recognize him, but he did not have the wiry hair and long face of Basrahip or the others like him. This man had been born in the same Antea that she had known, and had been remade. “Her strength is yours. Her purity is yours. The servants of lies tremble before you now, and you cannot fail.”

  “Why is he saying that?” Vincen asked.

  “To give them courage,” Clara said. “To assure them that they will win.”

  “That they… Oh. I understand.”

  In the background, a group of nearby soldiers took up the chant cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. Clara turned to Vincen. He looked older in the smoke-stained light. “What did you think it meant?”

  “I was taking it more that they dared not fail. Must not. You cannot fail, for if you do the consequences will be unimaginably dire. Something like that.”

  “Yes,” Clara said. “Words can so often mean what you take from them rather than what was intended.”

  They sat huddled by the ’van master’s cart. The chant seemed to spread around them, the men of the army—men who had been farmers and tradesmen two years before and were practiced killers now—lifting bared steel and shouting as if their words alone could bring down the city’s defenses. Cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. She could hear both meanings in the words now. It occurred to her that if things went poorly, Jorey and Vicarian might both die today. Two of her sons might not see the sunset. She might not. It was a battle, and anything might happen.