The Widow's House

Clara

From the road to the stand of trees fifty feet from it, the land was scarred and churned to mud. Even the jade of the dragon’s road was dimmed, covered over by thick, sticky earth. Clods with grass still clinging to them peppered the landscape. The air stank of smoke and shit. The trilling birdsong and the high, rain-washed blue of the sky seemed incongruous, given the destruction. Clara pulled her horse to a stop gently. She had the feeling of walking into a tomb. Here something terrible had happened, and the world was marred by it. Made worse.

Vincen went a bit farther before he realized that she’d stopped. He turned in his saddle to look back at her. His eyes spoke his concern. She took her reins tight and shook her head. The braided leather between her fingers seemed more real to her because of the carnage all around. A dog was pawing at the ground just south of them, digging at something. It looked up at them with a wary curiosity as Vincen turned back and cantered to her side.

“My lady?”

“What happened here?” she asked. “Was there a battle?”

Vincen looked around, as if seeing the destruction for the first time. His laugh was short, mirthless, as much an expression of sorrow or anger as anything gentler. “No, Clara. There’d be bodies. This is where they camped. Perhaps a night ago. Not more than two.”

“They only camped? All this?”

“All this,” he said, and nodded toward the road ahead. Clara started forward, and he fell into place beside her.

Dawson had told her any number of stories about his adventures in the field, but they had all been stories of battles or camp humor. The time he had faced down Uric Saon, the leader of the little slave rebellion in the south, and scared him so badly he’d offered to sell Dawson his own men. The siege at Anninfort, and how it had ended. The night he’d been on campaign with Simeon back when he’d only been the prince and they’d started a poetry contest with the men that went so long they didn’t sleep before the battle. He had, she was certain, softened much of the worst of it. When he talked of the violence his voice had taken a calmness, a care, that spoke as loud as shouting that he was reluctant to tell her everything. But even with that, she’d built the image of war being like a kind of long, terrible King’s Hunt, with men as the prey.

The violence of an army’s mere passage, the damage to the land that soldiers, servants, horses, and carts left behind them merely by being had never entered her mind. An army, she knew, was a huge thing, but that it should leave ruin in its wake even without the violence of battle drove home the scale and depth of the errand her sons had been sent on. Follow this back, and the mud and filth would go to Kiaria, and Suddapal before that. Inentai. Nus. Along with his conquests, Geder Palliako had made a road of scars that tracked back, in the end, to Antea. To the fields in the south where the army had assembled, and to which it had never come home.

To the west, high mountains rose, blued by distance and height. Clara knew that on the far side, there would be Birancour. She’d never been that far to the west or south. All she really knew about it was that it was a nation of grassy plains and busy ports, that it divided Princip C’Annaldé, Herez, and Cabral from the rest of the continent, that those smaller nations sometimes resented the tariffs the throne of Birancour exacted for the privilege of passing through its roads, and that Cithrin bel Sarcour was there. Those mountains and the long, treacherous pass through them were the last barriers between her son’s army and the war they shouldn’t be fighting in the first place.

The day passed all too quickly. The local traffic on the road was slight. A few carts, a handful of travelers, and most of them heading the other way. The springtime sun was just above the highest snowcapped peaks when they found the bodies.

Four men, all Firstbloods, swung by their necks from a rough scaffold built of sapling trees. Flies danced and swarmed around their eyes and mouths. Their strangled faces were swollen in death beyond any recognizable human emotion. They wore the colors of Antea in their cloaks. The banner of the spider goddess, red as blood with a pale spot in the center and the eightfold sigil of the goddess within it, hung from the top bar between the hanging ropes. Clara stopped her horse, sorrow rising in her breast, and with it an anger that was almost pride.

Vincen stopped beside her. His expression was apologetic, as if she shouldn’t have had to see such a thing. As if atrocity were not part of the world she’d chosen.

“They weren’t killed by the enemy,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “They were deserters.”

Dawson had told her of this too. Of the custom of taking captured deserters, sending them ahead of the army to be executed on the path, so that the whole force would march past them on the following day. Sometimes officers were set to stand by the bodies and watch the faces of the sword-and-bows as they went by. Dawson had stood that duty himself once.

She looked at the dead men and wondered who they had been. Likely she knew all the officers in the army now, by reputation and family if not on sight. These were not of that class. They’d been low men. Conscripted farmers, perhaps. Or the sort of man that lived on the sides of the Division and eked out a living doing whatever work came to hand. They had been like her, skeptical of the glory of Geder Palliako, and driven to act.

“Cut them down,” she said.

“Ma’am,” Vincen began, and she interrupted him.

“Don’t ma’am me. Cut them down or wait here and I’ll do it myself.”

“Do we have time to bury them? If we want to join the army’s tail before Bellin, we need to keep moving.”

“We’ll make up the time. I won’t leave them on display.”

Vincen sighed, then passed her his reins and dropped to the ground. It took the better part of an hour to slash the ropes and pull the dead men to the side. Vincen was right. They didn’t have time to dig graves or raise cairns, but at least the corpses weren’t raised like a sign outside a taphouse any longer. She left them lying side by side in the green under the trees, as if they were only resting. The banner of the goddess, they dropped in the mud. Let that be a statement and a symbol. There were still some who stood against the goddess. No one might ever see it, and of those who did, few if any would care. It didn’t matter.

Resisting Geder’s power and the corruption he had brought to the Severed Throne was like shouting into a storm wind. She didn’t know—couldn’t know—if half the things she did had any effect at all. Undermining Ternigan, of course, she had accomplished. But the letters and reports she sent? The little acts of rebellion like putting deserters on the roadside to rest? They might be wastes time and of effort with no lasting effect on the world.

But that did not make them meaningless.

“Clara,” Vincen said again. She realized he’d been trying to catch her attention for some few moments. “We should continue on.”

Should we, she thought, or should we turn our back to all of this and find some pretty farmhouse by the sea to live in together until we die? Even in the privacy of her mind, she didn’t mean it.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s do.”

They reached Bellin just before nightfall four days later. It was a strange little city. If she didn’t know to look, it might only have been a few scattered buildings by the roadside, hardly more than a farming hamlet. At night, though, the mountainside glowed like a Dartinae’s eyes. Dots of brightness the color of fire all up and down the face of the cliffs. The real city was carved from the stone, and the people lived in the flesh of the mountain like moles. Vincen also pointed out the great runes cut into the mountainside. They were hard to see in the morning with the sun behind them or the afternoon when the sun had passed above the mountains and cast the city and its approach into shadow. For an hour near midday, though, the shapes of the letters were written in light and darkness across the stone. She did not recognize the script, and could not guess what they meant.

The army of Antea—Jorey’s army—was camped at the mountain’s base where the dragon’s road passed in among the peaks. Even from a distance, she could see the movement at the edge. The forces of Imperial Antea lining up like schoolchildren, waiting their turn to go on. The others, the hangers-on like herself, would go last, of course. And so she and Vincen caught up with a ragged, unsanctioned caravan squatting in a field of wildflowers and watching men in armor and swords as they marched into the gap in the mountains and disappeared. The caravan master was a Cinnae man, thin as a stick and pale as ice, with a beard like lichen.

“Can I help you, then?” he asked as Clara walked up to him. Days in the saddle had left her thighs aching and chapped, and her gait was wide and rolling, her cloak filthy, her hair pulled back in a tight, greasy bun. She couldn’t imagine looking less like a baroness of the imperial court.

“You’re following them?” she asked, pointing at the army with her thumb the way she imagined her lower-class acquaintances from the Prisoner’s Span might have done.

“Am, so long as the officer class don’t run me off. Most of my trade’s with the lower ranks, and I’m not always so appreciated as I’d hope. What’s it to you?”

“Going to see my sister in Carse,” Clara said. “That’s the way through, only it’s chock full of men with blades and opinions.”

“So passage, then?”

“My man’s decent with a bow,” Clara said, nodding back toward Vincen. “Put him in your guard. We’ll buy any food we eat.”

The ’van master leaned against his blackwood cart and scratched his neck. “You mind traveling with whores?”

“No.”

“You a religious?”

“Not so much that it matters.”

“Well. I’m Imbert. This is my ’van, and these are my rules. You travel with us, you do your share. Meals are two coppers each, no credit. You need money, maybe I’ll hire you to do something. If you didn’t bring enough coin, it’s your own damn fault. You steal from me, I’ll kill you. No offense, it’s just the way. Bring me trouble, I’ll leave you in a ditch and keep your horses.”

“Fair enough.”

“Fair enough,” he echoed. “And you are?”

“Annalise,” Clara said. “That’s Coe.”

“Married?”

“Not to him,” she said, and the old Cinnae grinned. “How long before we get moving?”

The ’van master shrugged. “They’ve been moving through all morning and down by maybe a third. I’d guess our turn could come in a day, maybe two.”

“Why so slow?”

“Tired out, them. The way I heard it, their Lord Regent’s allied with the dead. Doesn’t mind a good forced march, because the men that die along the way can still fight when they get there.”

“That truth?” Clara asked.

Imbert’s eyes grew troubled. “I don’t know. Maybe. Tell you this, there’s something damned eerie about that army, and that’s not joking.”

“But you follow them,” Clara said.

“I do,” he said, and paused. “For now, anyway.”

The ’van master’s guess had been a good one. The carts passed through the gates of Bellin at noon the next day. The road was filthy. Between the droppings of the horses and cart oxen and the boots of the soldiers, the green of the road was covered in a churn of milky brown stink. The mountains rose up around them craggy and ragged. Little forests of pine and aspen clung to the sides, rising up so steeply Clara felt sometimes she must be losing her balance just looking at them. The road tracked upward, the jade keeping close to the curves of the land. Twice she saw great woolly sheep high above, walking along cliffsides she would have thought too steep for anything but birds and moss. Any game had been scared into hiding by the passage of the army before her, so the only food was briny sausage and beans that Imbert’s cook made in the back of one of the carts. At nightfall, they made camp on the road itself. There was no land flat enough to sleep on otherwise. The jade of the road and the stone at the roadside both defied tent stakes, so Clara and Vincen set their bedrolls beside one of the carts, and lay in the night looking up at the moon and stars and the vast, black bulk of the mountains on either side. They were filthy. They stank. Clara was developing a persistent itch on the back of her leg. She felt oddly at peace.

“Have you ever been on campaign?” she asked Vincen, her voice soft enough not to carry to the next group over.

“No,” he said. “My uncle went. He was part of the siege at Anninfort.”

“Which side?”

“The wrong one,” Vincen said. “Wasn’t his choice. My father begged him to desert, but what’s a man to do? His lord tells him to go, he goes. Or he winds up like those poor bastards we found. It was hard for my mother afterward. We were part of Osterling Fells. Working for your lord husband. Keeping his kennels and cooking his food, and him part of the force that killed Uncle Hom. They came over it, though. War’s war. Things happen there, you ought not carry them home with you.”

“Is that what your mother said?”

“Father,” Vincen said.

“I think Dawson said something very much like that to Jorey once. It’s hard to think of him and Vicarian. You realize that if I wrote them a note right now, we could likely pass it hand to hand all the way to their tents without anyone walking more than a dozen steps? If they knew I was here…”

“They’d send you back.”

“And they’d be scandalized. That they are going to slaughter a nation because Geder Palliako was disappointed in love doesn’t strike them as obscene. But my being here would.”

“You’re sure of that? The part where they think the war isn’t obscene, I mean. Because Jorey at least seems more like Uncle Hom.”

“You mean Geder called him and he had to go?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Clara said. “You’re right. It is like that.”

“The other now. Vicarian.”

“He isn’t like that. He’s here because he wants to be. Because it’s an honor. Because he believes.”

“The priests. They did that to him. It’s not his fault.”

“Perhaps. I also have a daughter whose opinions I can’t admire. Children are who they are. I may love them all, but I know them too. Their feet are as much clay as my own. It hardly matters what path we’ve walked to become what we are. Whatever it was, we’ve walked it. Vicarian has too. He’s become what he is. And I’ve lost him.” She put her hand out, took his in her own. His fingers laced themselves with hers. His body was so strong compared with hers, she could could almost understand his mistake. “Those men we cut down today. You didn’t want me to see them. You didn’t want me to feel that they had died in the same cause more or less that I’ve taken up.”

“I didn’t see the need.”

“You cannot protect me from the world or choices I’ve made.”

She was weeping now, but gently. For Vicarian as he had been. For the boy she’d known and loved. For her child, and what he had become. What he chose, and what was chosen for him. Her chest ached with it, and yet she knew it would pass and come again and pass again. Over and over, and likely would for the rest of her days. It changed nothing.

Farther down the road, someone began playing a flute. A pair of voices rose to join it, and another voice to protest and call for silence. It was cold, but not bitter, and the air of the mountains was thin. Vincen Coe sighed deeply, looking up into the moon and the stars and the darkness. She considered the shape of his face, the place where his collarbones met. The dim had robbed all color from him and left him like a sketch by an artist who had only blue and black to paint with.

“I’ve told very few people that I loved them,” Clara said. “And with each of them, I think I meant something a little different. Sometimes very different.”

He turned to look at her. “Are you telling me that you love me?”

“I think I am,” she said. “I am. I love you.”

“I love you,” he said, and squeezed her hand. How strange that in the depth of all this horror and war, displacement and fear, it would take so little to fill her with warmth and pleasure. She lay back, letting the hard ground bear her up. Letting her eyes follow the distant ridges of the mountains far above. The moon glowed cold white. A bird appeared, a deeper darkness against the sky, its wings spread to ride some great updraft. Only… no.

“What is that?” she said. “Is that… a hawk?”

“Hmm? Where?”

She lifted her finger, and he pulled himself over to sight along it like a stick. When she spoke again, she could hear the fear in her own voice. “What is that?”

He said something obscene and sat up, staring. His jaw was slack, his eyes wide. He shook his head.

“Vincen? Is that a dragon?”