The Widow's House

Captain Marcus Wester

The great city of Rukkyupal squatted at the edge of the ice-slush sea. Massive grey walls of granite as thick as they were high marked the city’s perimeter, defending the men and women of Hallskar as much from storms as war. The port itself lay outside the walls with jetties of slime-green stone and docks of pale, fresh pine. There were no old piers in Rukkyupal; the violence of the weather was such that only dragon’s jade could have withstood it. Instead, there was a tradition of rebuilding what was lost, remaking what everyone knew would be destroyed and then remade again. If the motto above the city gates had been Endure and Create, it would have captured the soul of the city. Instead, the gates held worked letters in green brass that read HMANICH SON HMINA UNT, and no one Marcus had met knew what they meant.

The streets were broad and paved with brightly colored brick—yellow and green and red. Leather banners announced the businesses along the high streets and the temples and churches of a hundred different gods in the low.

The men and women of the city were almost exclusively Haaverkin. Great rolls of fat thickened their bodies and ink marked their faces. They walked through the breaking cold in light wools, brushing frost from their shoulders like it was dust. Of all the thirteen races of humanity, the only other that might have been at home in the city were the Kurtadam, and even they appeared to prefer the warmth of the south. A band of Firstblood actors coming to the city not from the south road or the port, but straggling in from the rural northern wastes, exhausted from the effort of simply not freezing to death, was as curious as finding a dozen bright-colored finches making nests at midwinter. Marcus and Kit and the players had arrived to stares of amazement and concern from the locals, and the near-universal assumption that they were all idiots.

Cary, her hair tied back, stood by the fire and looked out at the crowd, her breath coming in plumes. It wasn’t the largest of the public houses near the port, but it was the warmest. The hearth was built from clay with bits of colored glass in it that let through some of the fire’s light. Like the city itself, Marcus thought, it should have been ugly and wasn’t. The Haaverkin sat at their tables, watching her. Hornet knelt at her side, tuning a small dulcimer. He looked up at her, nodded, and lifted the little hammers. With the first notes he struck, Cary’s voice lifted, her expression cleared. Marcus, huddled beside Master Kit at the back of the room, thought she looked miserable, chilled, and unhappy. He also knew that anyone who hadn’t traveled the length and breadth of the world with her wouldn’t see it. The joy in her performance only seemed artificial to him because he had seen her joy unfeigned.

“Something to drink?” Kit asked. Marcus shook his head. Kit looked over at the Haaverkin boy who served the tables and lifted one finger. The boy nodded and trundled back toward the serving room, returning in a moment with a mug of steaming wine. Kit gave the boy the price of the drink and a couple of coins besides, then cradled the cup in his hands and sat forward.

“Are you actually going to drink that?” Marcus asked under his breath.

“I may not,” Kit said. “I suspect thawing my fingers with it may be the best I can hope for.”

The winter had been mild, and the spring early. Meaning, apparently, that the sea had only been a sheet of ice as solid as stone for three weeks and was breaking into pieces already, and the older seamen were talking about the mildness as a thing of supernatural import, leaving Marcus to reflect not for the first time that their little troupe had survived Hallskar more by luck than skill. Even so, the waves bore rough balls of ice the size of a man’s torso, and the sound of the surf was like a permanent battle. This was Rukkyupal, and the ships at the port were ready to set sail through the grinding, violent waters.

The day before, Kit and Marcus had braved the docks and found a little roundship whose captain, a swarthy Haaverkin with leaf-shaped tattoos on his forehead and cheeks, was preparing his ship. Kit, with the influence of the spiders in his blood, had been the one to make the enquiries, and Marcus stayed at his side in case something unforeseen and violent happened.

“Where are your lot looking to ship to, then?” the captain shouted over the cacophony of the ice.

“We were hoping for Antea,” Kit said. Years on the boards gave his voice power enough that he sounded as though he were merely speaking. It was a good trick.

The captain laughed. “It’s all Antea now. Used to be I might go to Sarakal or Asterilhold. These days, it’s nothing but Antea from here to Northcoast. Or Narinisle. Won’t be long before it’s them too, as I make it out. Here too, for that.”

“Do you think so?” Kit asked. If there was dread in his voice, Marcus only heard it because they’d been traveling together so long. “Will the war come here?”

At the ship, a young Haaverkin woman in a light leather jacket took a pole from the dock, shook it, and began scraping hunks of ice from the ship’s side at the waterline. Marcus admired the strength required for the task. Give the woman a pike and an afternoon’s training, and she could take down a charging horse. Taking Hallskar would be no easy thing, even with the advantage of the spiders. But the captain only laughed.

“Won’t need to, will it? No, I’ve got a cousin works for Sannisla of Order Coopish. He says the High Council’s already drafted up agreements. They’re like a third-catch fisher boy with his nets on his shoulders just waiting for the girl to ask.”

“What sorts of agreements?” Kit said.

The captain looked annoyed at the question, as if the answer were obvious. “Fealty. Only a question of time before the bastards at Camnipol decide they want us too, and the High Council figure we’d just as well take their taxes and temples friendly like. It’s where it’d end up anyway, and fealty leaves us be otherwise. Don’t care to share a slave pen with a bunch of Timzinae.”

In the end, they’d paid for passage to a low port near Sevenpol, and by midday the acting troupe had brought the cart to the dock and were breaking it down. The sides slid off their hinges and folded together. The racks of costumes and musical instruments and fake swords and crowns and chalices packed into chests. Everything the company owned was compressed small enough to carry up the gangplank and stow in the roundship’s hold. Hornet and Smit, Sandr and Charlit Soon, Cary and Kit and Marcus himself. As with many of the little contrivances of the theater, Marcus was impressed by the simplicity and elegance of the design. The little rack of blunt swords and trick daggers lifted from the frame and slid into the bottom of a crate without enough room for a fingernail between it and the wood. The cart’s wheels came off their axles with a twist and a kick. Everything about the theater cart was made to make movement easy, to keep from being in a single place for too long. All that they kept out were a few simple props and instruments they could use to earn a few coins before the ship set out, and the poisoned sword Marcus took from among the false blades and strapped across his back. It had been weeks since he’d had to wear the thing, and the skin of his back itched a little at the venomous thing’s return. Still, if something went wrong with the ship, he didn’t want to take another season tracking it down or diving for the wreckage, and it wasn’t as though the dragons were forging new ones to pick up in the market square.

Cary finished her song with a flourish of hands that evoked a dove’s wings in flight, and the Haaverkin stamped and whistled and tossed a few grimy silver coins to her. Hornet gathered them up, radiating pleasure as if the paltry take actually deserved gratitude. Kit sighed, gave in, and drank.

“Do you think she’s still in Suddapal?” Kit asked.

“Cithrin, you mean? I hope not. Even with her wits and the bank’s money, going against an occupying army’s bad work. And when they’ve got people like you on their side, and you can’t even lie about it?” Marcus shook his head. “I’m hoping she’s gone back to Porte Oliva or Carse. Which means about as far as you can get from here without crossing the sea, but it’s an imperfect world. One way or the other, we’ll find her and we’ll find Yardem, and we’ll tell them… Well.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “That we found a sleeping dragon that might or might not be what the spider priests were looking for, that we woke it up, gave it a rough outline of human history since the fall of the empire. And then it got upset and flew away.”

“Didn’t say we’d covered ourselves in glory,” Marcus said.

At the hearth, Hornet was tuning the dulcimer while Cary and Charlit Soon talked with each other about what the next song should be. A thick-bodied Haaverkin man opened the door, ushering in a blast of numbingly cold air, raised his tattooed eyebrows, and retreated. Marcus shifted on his bench.

“I wish that I knew what to make of it,” Kit said. “Was the dragon the thing they were searching for? If it was, then why? Or was it coincidence? I don’t know where it went, or what it wants, or… anything really. I did believe once that I knew the secrets of the world, and now I don’t know anything.”

When Marcus chuckled, Kit looked over at him with an injured expression.

“Sorry,” Marcus said. “I was just thinking how much easier it was for you to speak to the virtues of doubt when you thought you understood everything.”

Kit scowled, but after a moment a glimmer of amusement came into his eyes. “I suppose that is a bit funny, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean to rub ashes in the cut.”

“No, no, I think you’re right. I believed that I had special knowledge that no one else had, and apparently I took some comfort in it. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time.” Kit took another sip from his drink. “I suppose it was a bit arrogant of me, looking back at it.”

“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “We love you anyway.”

Kit’s expression went still and a thin shine of tears came to his eyes.

“What?” Marcus said.

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just that when you said that just now, you meant it, and I—”

Marcus raised a palm. “Let’s not talk about our feelings just now, eh? We’ll have to leave after the next song or we’ll miss the tide, and I’d hate to be bawling on each other’s shoulders all the way out to the dock.”

Charlit Soon stood up at the front of the room, her hands clasped before her. Hornet struck an interval on the dulcimer, and a huge roar came from the street. A massive, angry voice screaming the promise of violence even before the first words came. Hornet’s little hammers paused in the air.

“Come out!” the voice shouted. “Come out, you honorless scum!”

“Someone’s having a bad day,” Marcus said.

“In the name of Order Murro, I call out the coward Marcus Wester. Come out, you son of a whore! Come to this street, or we will come in and haul you out by your balls!”

Marcus sighed and put down his cup. “And apparently it’s me. Get the others together. If there’s no one at the back, go out the alley and head to the ship.”

“What about you?”

“If I’m there when the tide turns, we’ll go to Sevenpol. If I’m not, I’ll try to catch up to you farther down the road.”

“And if they kill you?”

“Then I may not try very hard,” Marcus said, rising to his feet.

“For the last time, come out!”

The street was wide and mottled with horse shit and filthy ice. The traffic of carts and shaggy ponies had stopped. Five huge Haaverkin men stood in a rough circle around the door of the bar. They were naked to the waist, the order tattoos on their chest and faces bright in the afternoon light. They had whips with bits of metal woven into the leather in their massive fists. Marcus shrugged, loosening the poisoned sword in its sheath but not yet reaching up to draw it. The biggest of them took a step forward and hammered himself on the breast.

“I am Magra of Order Murro. You took the hospitality of my order and used it to violate our sacred mysteries. We gave you and yours shelter from the storms, and you defiled our secrets!”

Traffic was at a stop now. The eyes of a dozen strangers were on him, and more pausing every moment to see the show. People were coming out the door behind him now too, watching and blocking his retreat. Whipped to death in the street of Rukkyupal wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Marcus smiled.

“Technically, that’s all true,” he said. “And I offer you and your people my profound apologies. It was rude of me, and graceless. And I’ll swear to you before God and everyone that it’s not going to happen again.”

“You are a coward and a false net!” Magra of Order Murro screamed, his breath equal parts fog and spittle.

“Don’t know what a false net is,” Marcus said. “But I understand you’re upset, and you’re right to be. I’m in the wrong on this one. Let’s not compound that by making me kill you too.”

The five men growled and shook their hands. The whips skittered against the stone and ice. Marcus drew the blade. The steel was a nacreous green, and as soon as it cleared the scabbard, the fumes from it stung his eyes. He took a simple guard pose.

“I’d rather not do this,” he said again. Not that he expected the violence to stop, but he was willing to be surprised.

Magra’s whip cut through the air fast as a snake. Marcus thought it had missed, but as the whip pulled back, his right ear began to sting and a trickle of blood cooled his neck. The next man moved slower and Marcus met the whip, slicing it clean. Then two more whips arced through the air. They didn’t have Magra’s wrist, and Marcus avoided the first of them entirely. The second raked his leg, ripping the wool and leather, but not quite biting skin. The crowd was roaring now, great fists raised and voices clamoring for violence. Marcus gritted his teeth, lunged forward, reaching out with the blade. Magra jumped back a fraction too late, and the green tip caressed the swell of the man’s belly. With any other sword, it would have been little more than an insult wound. With this, it was slow death.

Maybe too slow to matter.

A whip raked Marcus’s shoulder, and he spun away from it, trying to move with the motion of the lash and keep as much of his skin in place as he could. They were on all sides of him now, though the one whose whip he’d cut was staying back to avoid the attacks of his companions. No matter which way Marcus turned, at least one was behind him.

“Stop!” Kit’s voice rang out. “You cannot win this battle. Listen to my voice! You have already lost!”

The man behind him pulled his whip through the air, and Marcus danced aside. Magra turned toward Kit, weapon hissing against the ground. Marcus didn’t call out a warning. Kit knew what he was looking at.

“You have already lost! Everything you love is gone already. Listen to my voice! You can win nothing here,” the actor roared, and the power of the spiders in his voice made what was clearly untrue plausible. If only for a moment.

A moment was enough.

Marcus bared his teeth, roaring, and charged. The Haaverkin man he’d targeted took a step back, and drew a knife with his off hand. Marcus drove the point of his sword through the man’s shin, then tucked his head down and kept on running. The crowd tried to push him back toward the rough battle circle, but Marcus lifted the sword before him, feinting toward anyone who came near. His back was frigid cold now and his breath sounded too loud in his own ears. He glanced back. Kit was close behind him, head down and legs pumping wildly. Behind them, the man with the cut shin was lying flat on the street, and Magra was on his knees beside him, a confused expression on his face. The wound on the big man’s belly was foaming white where it wasn’t the red of blood. So perhaps the venom wasn’t so slow after all. Marcus wrenched his way free of the last of the crowd and ran.

The docks were nearby and a thousand miles away. His first sprint gave way to a steady run, his breath taking up the rhythm of his feet. The streets passed by him, expressions of surprise and outrage and fear flickering before him and being left behind. He had the energy to hope the other players had gotten to the ship. If they’d escaped the attack only so that he had to go back out and retrieve them… Well, that would be disappointing.

At the gangplank leading up to the ship, the captain was arguing with Sandr and Smit. The two actors had spars in their hands, held like clubs, and as Marcus let his stride break, Cary emerged from the deck with a black hunting bow in her hands.

The captain gestured to him with a mixture of relief and alarm. “Look! They’re here now! There’s no call.”

“Marcus!” Smit said, rushing toward him.

“Stop!” Marcus said, then carefully sheathed the sword. He wondered whether, if he’d missed the scabbard and tapped his opened back with the flat, it would have killed him. He guessed so. “All right. Safe now.”

Smit and Cary helped him aboard while Sandr, Kit, and two of the Haaverkin sailors hauled up the plank. They found Hornet belowdecks, struggling into a set of boiled leather dug out of the costumes chest. Marcus sat down heavily on the deck. The ship shifted, the lines cast off. Ice pounded against its sides like monsters beating their way in.

“You’re hurt,” Kit said.

“I’m standing.”

“You’re sitting down”

“Could stand if I wanted to.”

“Fair enough,” Kit said. Cary clambered down with a bottle of seaman’s salve and a handful of rags, and Marcus stripped off his jacket and shirt. They were ripped to rags, as was the skin beneath them. The salve stung like wasps.

“Shouldn’t have stayed with me,” he said.

“I couldn’t see the advantage in leaving you behind,” Kit said gently. “Besides which, I think it all worked out well. This once, at least.”

“Kit?” Marcus said between clenched teeth.

“Yes?”

“That conversation we were having about doubt and understanding?”

“I remember it.”

“Occurs to me that the secret of the world may be don’t do the same stupid thing twice.”

Cary chuckled and the old actor sighed.

“We’ll work at that,” Kit said.