The Widow's House

Clara

The wide, grassy plains outside Sara-su-Mar, the lush blue of its skies, and the passion of its lovers had made the backdrop of any number of small romances and ballads of youthful love. Clara had never made the journey herself, but the image of it that she held in her mind was perfect and complete. She could not say now whether her imaginings had been romantic fluff, or if violence had greyed it.

The defensive perimeter Jorey had made was clear, the army huddled behind its swords and spears as it took stock and planned. Where his patrols and scouts had gone, she did not know, nor could she ask.

Low clouds pressed down until the sky seemed no higher than the treetops, and the spitting rain soaked the road, her cloak, and the coat of her horse. It thickened the air. All along the roadside, tucked back in the cover of the trees, tents and rough cobbled-together shelters huddled. Men and women watched her pass, their faces bleak and empty. The children who sat at the roadside were too hungry to play. Their faces had taken on the grey of the land around them. They were the small people of the world. Trappers and fishers and hands on the farms so desperate that they could not postpone their business, even though there were armies on the road.

The battle that followed the ambush had lasted hours, pressing into the countryside before Jorey called their forces to regroup. The stink of churned earth and drowned fires clung to the landscape as if it had always been there, as if the devastation of war had bled back through history and poisoned all that had come before. That was not true, of course. Weeks before, this same low road had likely been cheerful and bright as any of the old songs. That it had always been so corrupted was an illusion. But it was a persuasive one.

Clara kept her cloak tight around her and her head down. She regretted now that she’d taken so fine a horse. The nut-brown gelding stood out among the half-starved nags and exhausted plow mules that shared the road with her. The question hadn’t even occurred to her. After all this time, some part of her was still the Baroness of Osterling Fells, whether she wished it or not.

A bend in the road, a grass-covered hillock to her left, and her own preoccupation hid the crossroads from her until it was too late. Five men in cloaks of undyed wool stood in the center of traffic. Their hems and boots were dark with mud, and hoods covered their heads. Their blades were in scabbards, and two held unstrung bows wrapped against the rain. One of them was speaking to a thin young man, bending toward him, interrogating. The young man’s head bobbed as he spoke, desperate for approval and rich with fear. An answering fear rose in Clara’s throat. The hooded man nodded, waved the young man on, then stepped in front of two girls traveling the same direction Clara was.

Soldiers, then, though in this blighted space she had no way to tell which side’s men they were. If they were queensmen, what would they make of an older woman with the accents of Antea in her voice and a fresh, powerful horse beneath her? And if they were Jorey’s men, how could they keep from asking what errand took her into enemy territory?

Stopping now, even hesitating, would only draw further attention to herself. She wondered, if she bolted, whether the men would be able to raise an effective alarm. They let the two girls pass, and Clara was certain one of them at least was looking at her with a vague curiosity in his eyes. Remain calm, she thought. Don’t give them more reason to notice you.

She might as well have stood in the stirrups and sung for all the difference it made.

“Hold there,” the man in the front said, holding up his hand to her as her horse stepped into the crossroad. “Rein in, grandmother. Rein in.”

Clara raised her eyebrows as she might to an impertinent servant, but she brought her little horse to a halt. One of the other men stepped in and put his hand on the reins. He managed to seem polite doing it, which she counted in his favor.

“What’s your name and your business on the road?” the lead man asked. His voice had the softer cadences of Birancour, and now that she was near him, Clara could make out the green and gold of his tunic. The wet had darkened both almost to black, but there was no doubt. A queensman.

Well, at least it isn’t one of the contemptible little spider priests, she thought, and then smiled. The words might have been in her own mind, but they had been in Dawson’s voice.

“Clara Osterling,” she said. “I’m looking for my daughter. She was staying near here before the battle, and I haven’t found her since. Her name’s Elisia. She’s a bit younger than you, I’d think. Brown hair? A mark on her left cheek?”

It was ridiculous. Antea was in her blood and her vowels, and there was no way of removing it from either. She could no more pass for Birancouri than she could be mistaken for a chipmunk. The man smiled.

“Can’t say I have, grandmother,” the queensman said.

“Then you’ll excuse me. I have to keep looking.”

“Not sure of that. I’m going to have to ask that you come over here with us.”

“What for?” Clara asked, feigning confusion.

“Agents of the enemy all around, ma’am. Just have to be sure you’re what you say.”

Clara made a soft, amused sound in the back of her throat. “Ah,” she said. “It’s my accent, isn’t it? I quite understand.”

“Then if you’d just—”

She drew her knife and slashed at the man holding her reins in a single motion. Thankfully, the blade didn’t connect, but the boy started back and his grip went loose. She kicked her poor horse’s flanks like he’d done something wrong, and together they leapt forward, scattering the queensmen like pins on a bowling green. She kicked again and the poor animal surged forward. Shouts rose behind her, and a woman’s startled shriek. Her speed drove raindrops into her bared teeth, into her eyes. Clara bent low over the surging back and held as tightly as she could, waiting for an arrow to pierce her back or a stone to stun her.

For God’s sake, she thought, don’t kill me. I’m trying to help you.

Leaving Vincen behind had been among the most difficult things she had ever done. Even after the wound had been cleaned and the bleeding slowed to a sickening crimson seep, the worst had not come. The cunning men moved on, tending to those among the army’s wounded whom their skills could aid to health or else with their passage into darkness, leaving Clara to sit at his cot. His skin had taken on a waxen look that made her think of meat at a butcher’s shop. In his fever, he kicked away the thin blankets and then, minutes later, gathered them back to himself.

She sat with him because she could think of nothing else to do. Somewhere in the camp, Jorey and his knights were measuring the cost of the ambush and its effect on their plans. She should have been there, gleaning what she could if not farther afield, acting on what she already knew, and yet it all seemed impossible. Vincen slept in a fever and woke in it, and the two states seemed nearly the same. Near sundown, he raved for the better part of an hour about the need to find a lost dog before the hunt began, and then fell into a sleep so profound that Clara had to watch the rise and fall of his chest to assure herself that it was only sleep.

What would the men think of her attentions to a man who was, after all, merely a servant in her house? What would her boys make of it? She didn’t care. She only dampened the cloth again, soothed Vincen’s wounded body as best she could, and waited.

Near dawn, the fever seemed to lose its grip. The blankness left his eyes and reason returned. The terrible pressure in Clara’s breast and throat eased and she felt the black exhaustion she’d spent the night ignoring.

“My lady,” Vincen said, with a weary smile. “I’m afraid I may not manage that errand for you after all.”

“I think you may be forgiven this time,” Clara said. “You have an excellent excuse.”

“Thank you for your indulgence,” he said, then sighed and made as if to rise. Clara put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and the weight of it alone pressed him back to the creaking canvas.

“You’re not to move,” she said. “Not until the fever passes.”

“The warning—”

“The warning be damned,” Clara said gently. “Callon Cane and his agents have to know they’re in danger. There’s an army outside their city. It isn’t as though we were being subtle.”

Vincen Coe frowned. “He doesn’t know we have a way in. They’ll kill him,” he said.

“People die. I can’t save all of them,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes. She felt no sorrow to match them, they simply came and she suffered their presence as if they were unexpected and unwelcome guests. “This one time, I think we can leave the enemy to their own devices.”

Vincen’s expression clouded, pale lips pressing together. She felt his disapproval, and her answer was rage.

“No,” she said before he could speak. “No, I won’t have it. We aren’t responsible for the world and everything in it. Not every tragedy is our fault. Not every loss.”

“We’ve come this far so that we—”

“Could do what we can,” Clara snapped. “We came so that we could try, but there are constraints. There are limits.”

“And have we reached them?” Vincen asked.

If she hadn’t been so terribly tired, she would not have sobbed. Truly, staying up all night waiting for a young lover to die before one’s eyes was better done at twenty. It took too much energy.

“You cannot go,” she said. “And there is no one else that I trust.”

“And if they kill him because we didn’t warn him?” Vincen said. “If the word spreads that Palliako slaughtered him after all, can you live knowing that there was something else you could have done and didn’t? Can your son bear it? Because say you both can, and I’ll go back to sleep.”

Outside the little tent, a horse snorted. The cool morning breeze stirred the wet oilskin walls, shifting the shadows on Vincen’s face as if he were an image on a banner. Could she live knowing there was something she could have done, and that she hadn’t?

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“Take the warning,” Vincen said.

“Me?” Clara said, and laughed.

“Who else?” Vincen asked.

“What makes you think I could manage that?”

“You’re a predator, my lady,” Vincen said, and closed his eyes with a sigh. “You can manage anything.”

“You’re young and romantic,” she said, making the words harsh and their harshness an endearment. Vincen smiled.

She could take any horse in the camp. The army wouldn’t be moving before tomorrow, she was certain of that, and the city wasn’t that far away. Getting access to Jorey’s tent would be simple enough, she was his mother, and the tale of gutting the Birancouri soldier had made her more of the army’s pet. It could be done. She could do it. And so, of course, she had to.

She said something soft and obscene. Vincen smiled.

“Sometimes doing the least necessary is still a heroic work,” he said.

“When I said I didn’t want to outlive another lover, this isn’t what I meant.”

“You won’t die,” he said, the words growing slushy with sleep. “You’ll never die.”

Everyone dies, she thought. All of us. And usually, damn you, for things less important than this.

For a long, anxious hour, Clara combed the stretch of wood, sometimes certain that she’d come to the wrong place, sometimes that the story had been a fabrication from the start, and always consumed by the fear that she would overlook the secret way. That Geder would overcome another of his enemies because she had not prevented it.

When at last she found the entrance, it was with a sense of profound relief. There, in the depths of a grey-green bush, a slightly deeper darkness. Now that she saw to look for it, a uniformity of the forest litter that spoke of being swept to look as if it were undisturbed. The thin rain tapped against the leaves and trickled down the back of her neck as she looked for a place to tie her mount. It seemed cruel to leave the poor animal out in the cold, but it wasn’t as if they’d put a stable next to a smuggler’s cave. She made do with a dark hollow where the canopy of trees almost stopped the wetness, and looped the reins in a branch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, petting the gelding’s gentle face. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

She pushed through the brush, twigs cracking against her. The darkness resolved into a sloping passage so narrow that her shoulders brushed both sides. Worn stone steps led down into the earth, and she followed them, her boots slipping a little against the dampness and grime. When the last of the raindrops had stopped, she paused to light a stub of candle. The smuggler’s passage made tombs look welcoming. Streaks of slime clung to the stonework, and the walls tilted in against each other, as if on the verge of collapse. Her passage through it seemed to take hours. There was no marker to show when she passed beneath the walls of Sara-sur-Mar, when she moved from the wilderness into the city. Her little underworld was circumscribed by a single candle’s light, and there might as well have been nothing outside it.

The smell of sewage was the first sure sign that she’d reached the habitation of humans. The stink of it was profound and powerful, and it grew with every passing yard she walked. The passage widened, and the stones became brick—old and weathered and alive with cockroaches. The secret passage opened into the vaulted arch of a great sewer. The rank water shone black in the candlelight, and dead things floated in it.

She followed a stone quay along the side of the wall until it turned away, up toward the light and the streets of the besieged city. She lit her pipe from the last of the candle’s wick and threw the last thumb’s width of wax to the gutter. If wouldn’t have been enough to get her back anyway. She’d need to find a lantern. Assuming the man she was seeking out didn’t kill her for her troubles.

She turned the bowl of her pipe down to keep the water from putting out the tobacco and stepped into the street. The house was a thousand times easier to find than the passage had been. The green-painted walls and yellow eaves reminded her of toys that a child might play with. She stood outside for a long moment, then sighed, marched to the bound-oak door, and rapped the iron knocker against its strike plate.

It was almost a full minute before the little viewing window squeaked open and a Timzinae woman’s dark eyes appeared.

“Who the fuck are you?” the woman demanded.

“I’m here to see Callon Cane,” Clara said.

“You’re off your head, then,” the woman said. But she didn’t laugh. There was no hesitation in her voice. Nor surprise. Any uncertainty that remained in Clara’s mind evaporated in that moment and she smiled.

“I’ve come through danger to see him,” she said. “And if you don’t let me through, I can swear he’ll be dead or taken before the week’s out. And likely you will too. Now open the door.”

The woman blinked and slammed the window shut. Voices came from the other side. The Timzinae woman’s. A man’s voice, so deep he was likely one of the eastern races. Clara wished she could hear well enough to make out the words. A cart rattled by behind her, iron wheels against cobblestones. The sound almost covered the scrape of a bar being lifted.

The door opened. The rooms within were gloomy and dim. A huge Tralgu with a bare blade in his hand and half his ear missing stood aside and motioned her in. Clara had the sudden visceral memory of the Tralgu who’d been her own door servant, back in some other lifetime.

“I’ve come to see Callon Cane,” she said again.

“Your thumb.”

“They don’t take women.”

“All the same. Your thumb.”

Clara held out her hand, suffered the prick of the blade against it. The Tralgu leaned close to examine her blood, then made a satisfied grunt.

“You’ll have to leave the blades,” the Tralgu said. “Both of them.”

Clara didn’t ask how he’d known she wore two, only drew them from their sheaths and handed them over, hilt first. The Tralgu seemed satisfied with that. The woman was gone, and Clara felt sure that she was being watched from places she didn’t know.

The bare drawing room looked out over a narrow courtyard, rain running down the window glass like the world weeping. The makings of a fire were laid out in the grate, unlit. The man standing at the window was little more than a silhouette. His greatcoat might have been black or brown. His battered hat sported a wide brim. He was perhaps six inches taller than Clara, perhaps six shorter than the Tralgu guard, who took his place silently behind her. He could have been anyone.

Likely that was the point.

“You don’t know me,” Clara said. “And for reasons of my own, I won’t tell you who I am. I have come to warn you. The forces of Antea know you are here, and they have a way to move soldiers into the city. You must leave at once or else…”

The man turned. His face was bloodless, pale, and aghast. Clara felt the world shift beneath her.

“Mother?” Barriath said, sweeping the wide hat from his head. “What are you doing here?”

She stood stunned for a long moment. When the laughter came, it was like a fountain and it would not stop.