The Widow's House

Clara

Clara rode through the early evening rain, her pipe turned mouth-down to keep the droplets from drowning the tobacco. The lands of the Free Cities struck her as much like the cities themselves, varying from one valley to the next. The plains of southern Antea were only a day behind them now, and already she felt as if she’d ridden through three different worlds. This present landscape was made of low, rolling hills covered with a grey-green grass that seemed to collect the gloom from the clouds. The dragon’s road, permanent as it was, had outlasted the hills that had once supported it. Now it undulated toward the horizon, rising here into the air like a bridge and there disappearing for a space beneath the ground. It reminded her of nothing so much as the image of a sea serpent arching through waves.

Orsen lay a day and a half a day ahead, perched on its lone mountain. She planned to turn aside before she reached it, leaving the dragon’s road for the more changeable paths of mere humanity. The army, her sons at its head, would be marching for Bellin and the pass through the mountains. It was her hope and intention to meet it there or else between the city at the mouth of the pass and the fields of Birancour.

Her mount was a three-year-old gelding the color of wheat, and the hunting tent—a tiny affair that rose no more than two feet from the ground when employed—was folded across its back. She did not regret that she would not be spending yet another night in it, breathing air heated by her own breath and fighting to make the unkind ground do for a mattress. Vincen Coe rode beside her. In Camnipol, where she had been Lady Kalliam and he a huntsman of no particular rank, he would have ridden behind her. She preferred him where he was.

The question that remained as they trekked across the damp, grey hills toward the flickering torches of the wayhouse was who precisely he should be.

“Not husband,” she said. “Son. It’s simply more plausible.”

“To who?”

“To everyone,” Clara said. “A woman of my age simply isn’t married to a man like you. Even if they accepted the tale, it would stand out. I prefer not to be memorable.”

“I think you underestimate the world, my lady.”

“Do you, now?”

“If you believe we’re the strangest thing in it? Yes.”

“You are my son, I am your mother. We are making our way to Maccia to take up residence with my sister now that your father is dead.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“You’re laughing at me. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And don’t call me my lady. You’ll give the game away.”

“Yes, Mother,” Vincen said. As if in answer, Clara’s gelding sighed.

The sun, shrouded by clouds, did not set. The world only grew darker by degrees. The constant patter of rain was broken by the rumble of distant thunder. Her hands and hips ached, and when they drew into the wayhouse’s yard and the grooms splashed out through the mud to take their horses, she mostly felt pleased that the day was done, and that there would be a warm room and a bowl of something to eat.

The house itself was low and dark, the thatch roof black with the damp. The smell of beer and roasted peppers washed over her as she ducked through the doorway.

“Let me do the talking,” Vincen murmured. “You can’t help sounding like you belong in a ballroom.”

Clara nodded and clamped her lips tight around the stem of her pipe. The common room was low-ceilinged and smoky. The keeper was a broad-shouldered Jasuru woman with a scar across her cheek that complicated her bronze-green scales.

“Evening, friends,” the keep said, baring her pointed teeth in a smile that managed to be warm and welcoming. “Hard weather for riding.”

“Seen worse,” Vincen said. “The wife and I need a room for the night, if you have any.”

“Silver if you don’t mind sharing. Two if you’re looking for privacy.”

“Two it is,” Vincen said, putting an arm around Clara’s shoulder. “And perhaps a bowl of something to eat? Whatever you’ve got back there smells wonderful.”

“You’re kind to say it,” the keep replied, waving at the blackwood table. “Take a seat, and I’ll bring your bowls and beers. At two silver, you’re already paying for it.”

Clara lowered herself to the bench, her back and knees creaking. Vincen sat at her side, scooped up her hand, and laced his finger with hers.

“You are a terrible man,” Clara said softly.

“You are a beautiful woman,” he replied. “And your accent is fine.”

Jorey and Vicarian had left before the court season had the chance to begin. They’d shared a carriage drawn by a team twice as large as the carriage required. Jorey was in haste, rushing to do what needed to be done and have it over. She’d watched it clatter away down the street, turning to the south when it could and vanishing from sight. Sabiha, standing beside her, had wept quietly as much from exhaustion as sorrow. The baby was taking more and more of the girl’s reserves, and Clara had taken Sabiha’s hand in her own, thinking to offer her strength. As if a few fingers laced together could do that.

Over the following days, her suspicion that there was indeed a way to leave the court behind began to take root. And more than a way, a need. All her schemes among the lower classes of the city had rested on finding men and women loyal to her, who would lie for her. Now she saw that her armor was made of paste and paper, and the urge to flee the city before she could be found out grew with every day. And still, despite all her growing plans and unspoken analysis, the arrival of the high families was a shock.

The year before, Clara had watched from the gutters as the carriages arrived. Even those who had caught sight of her had pretended not to. The year before that, she had been Baroness of Osterling Fells and her husband one of the great names of the empire. This time, the powerful families of the court arrived in Camnipol already buzzing with scandal and confusion. Lord Ternigan had been exposed as a traitor. Ernst Mecelli had also been implicated, but the Lord Regent had either determined his innocence or reached some accommodation for amnesty. In any case, both men were gone: one dead, the other touring the captured cities of the previous year’s campaign. And in their place, taking command of the army as his father once had, Jorey Kalliam, husband of the somewhat tainted Sabiha Skestinin, son of the traitor Dawson Kalliam, and best friend of the Lord Regent. Clara, being a woman and so apparently having no identity of her own, was neither the baroness she had been nor the fallen woman she’d become. She was both Dawson’s widow and Jorey’s mother, and with every renewed acquaintance, she saw the wariness echoed again.

To her surprise, the women who had most supported her in her year of social exile seemed the most unnerved by her rehabilitation. Lady Enga Tilliaken, who had invited Clara to garden tea but not into her home, who had given Clara a cast-off dress, who had by most measures been Clara’s greatest supporter, went white about the lips when they met at Lady Essian’s formal luncheon the day after the opening of the season. Ogene Faskellan, a distant cousin of Clara’s and one of the first to share little meals with her at a discreet bakery where they were unlikely to be seen, was brittle and polite. Even young Merian Caot, fully a woman now but with enough of the adolescent in her to treasure scandal and upheaval, was cool to her. At first it had all taken Clara aback, but soon she felt that she understood.

Fallen, she been what each of these women needed. She had filled a role in the stories they told themselves about who and what they were. Enga Tilliaken wanted to believe she was a generous soul, and Clara had been the opportunity for her pride to feed itself by condescending to accept a disgraced woman’s company. For Ogene Faskellan, Clara had been a safe sort of shame. A secret and a whiff of brimstone that could safely enliven an uninspiring marriage and constrained life. Merian Caot had wanted a way to argue that she was not tied by the same social bonds as the rest of them. Taking tea with Clara had been an act of rebellion for her at an age when rebellion—or in truth only the appearance of rebellion—was part of the subtle mourning that came with womanhood in the court of the Severed Throne. And so, for all of them, Clara had failed. Tilliaken could no longer take her clandestine joy in looking down on Clara, Faskellan found no drama in her company. And for the young Caot girl, the older woman who had shown some ray of hope that court life might not be entirely constrained had instead stepped back into line. None of it had been about who Clara truly was, and so neither was it now. And still, it left her sour.

And she would have taken the little slights and tight smiles a thousand times over rather than endure the women like Erryn Meer who had distanced herself from Clara and now greeted her like the previous year had never happened. Hypocrisy was the marrow of court life and always had been. In truth, very little had changed, except her. And she, more even than her peers, was aware at every turn that she no longer fit.

The image that came to her time and again in the early days of the season was a pot-bound plant removed from its bindings and placed in a wider soil where roots could spread as they had not before. Only now she was being pushed back into that old, too-small container, and she would not fit. She was not any longer the woman she had been. She missed her husband with an ache that she thought would never entirely fade, but she would also have been hard-pressed to welcome him back, should God and angels lift him restored from the depths of the Division. Like the old stories of men taken to magical lands who could never entirely return, Clara had stepped into a wider, more violent, less certain world. She had the taste of it now, and she would never again be so tamed as she had been.

And so it became an easy thing to plot her escape.

To Enga Tilliaken, she said that she had an ailing friend in Osterling Fells and was thinking of retiring from the court for the season to oversee the cunning men as they tried to heal her. To Lady Daskellin she hinted broadly that her residence in the Skestinin manor was not entirely to Lady Skestinin’s liking. At the garden tea, she praised Geder for his kindness to her family. At the spring bowling competition, she confessed to missing Dawson and Barriath and her cousin Phelia who had been wife to Feldin Maas back when the conspiracy against the throne had been thought to spring from Asterilhold. She laid the ground for any number of stories to explain her retreat and a dozen false trails to suggest where she had gone and why. All except the truth. That, she told only to Sabiha, and even then, not all.

Dawson had spoken of the art of war many times, and she had listened with half an ear. She had heard him speak of the people that follow the army to war: robbers of the dead, prostitutes, workmen too old, slow, or infirm to wield a sword but able to do small service for the soldiery at a small price. He had told her more than once that the well-being of an army could be judged by the character of its hangers-on like judging the health of a dog by the quality of its coat. Often, he’d said, the followers and small people knew things about the army that the generals did not.

The army was once again on the march. She intended to follow it quietly, at distance, and in disguise. She would blend in with the followers and learn what there was to be learned. And if she could, frustrate the campaign without destroying the man who led it. When she had been trapped in the court like a fly in sap, the idea had seemed plausible. On the road with Vincen at her side, the rashness of the errand stood out, though not enough to make her turn back.

The room was small, and the thatch above them ticked with the rain and a variety of black beetles she had previously been unfamiliar with. The smell of the mud and beer and weather almost forgave the reek of the night pot. Vincen lay in the bed beside her, snoring slightly. Both of them still wore all the day’s clothes as proof against the cold, but she could still feel the warmth of his body. She was weary beyond expectation. Her back ached and her legs as well. Sleep, however, eluded her. A thousand different worries assailed her: How would she find the army, and how would she avoid being recognized, and what would happen if she were? How could the wars of Geder Palliako and his spider priests be separated from those of Antea when the same men fought the same battles for each? How much longer could she keep the grief of seeing her middle boy consumed by the goddess at bay, and what was she going to do when that dam burst?

But along with all of it was a sense of lightness that confused her at first. It wasn’t simply that court was oppressive and she was no longer there. The boarding house in Camnipol had been a hundred times more pleasant than traveling, and she hadn’t even joined the army yet. She had been outside court for the better part of a year, and had been miserable and frightened through most of it.

The difference was that she had been cast out before, where now she had stepped away. After Dawson’s death, she had been hollowed out. Now if anything she felt too large for the world she’d lived in. The campaign would be dangerous, brutal, and exhausting, but it was what she had chosen. If she died on the road—and God knew there was enough chance of that in a war—she would die on her own terms, serving her kingdom better than Enga Tilliaken or a thousand more like her would ever conceive. She would not have expected the difference to matter greatly, and yet it did.

Vincen grunted and curled his arm under his head like a pillow. She knew it more by feel than sight. The only illumination in the room was what leaked in around the poorly hung door and the occasional flash of lightning. Clara closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep, but to no avail. And so instead, she rolled to the edge of the little bed and stood. Vincen would want her to stay in the room. They were far from Camnipol, but there would be couriers running between the throne and the army. And even that aside, the fact that the keep had taken their money did not guarantee that everyone in the place was benign.

Clara slipped the door open carefully. The hinge was a length of hard leather, and it creaked when it moved. Vincen did not wake. She pulled the door to behind her and went down the short hall to the common room. A Southling boy not more than ten years old was sweeping the floor with a rude little broom. A table of men, some Firstblood and others Kurtadam, played a card game in the corner. Clara went to sit by the fire grate.

“Help you, dear?”

The Jasuru woman loomed up out of the shadows. Clara had always heard it said that the Jasuru were bred by the dragons as soldiers. Black-mouthed, pointed teeth, scales across their bodies as a permanent light armor. But no race was ever only the thing it was intended for, not any more than a woman was only what she was told to be. Clara drew herself up and smiled.

“Trouble sleeping,” she said.

“Ah. Could bring you a cup of rum if you’d care for it.”

“Trade down to wine, if you’ve got it,” Clara said, trying to speak the way she imagined Abitha Coe speaking. Vincen’s comment about sounding as though she belonged in a ballroom might only have been teasing, but there was some truth in it. If her aristocratic past showed in her words, the keep gave no sign.

“Something to ease you down, but not so much you can’t wake come morning,” the Jasuru said with a broad wink. “You’re a wise woman, you.”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Clara said, but the keep was already stepping to the back room. The Southling boy glanced over to her, smiled shyly, and went back to his chore. The men at the table reached some critical point in their game, groaning and chortling together, and then one of them began reshuffling the cards. When the keep returned, with an earthenware cup of wine, Clara took it with a nod that she hoped was companionable. She didn’t want to treat this woman as a servant, and for more reasons than one. The wine had a bite at the front, but it finished well. Dawson would have called it cheap and common, and he would have been right. He would have meant that there was no solace or pleasure to be found in it, and that would have been wrong.

The coals in the grate warmed her knuckles and the ticking of the rain seemed calming now that she was in a dry, comfortable room and not riding through it. They would find the army within the week, she hoped, and from there, she would have to improvise with her family, her country, her lover, and her life all at stake. She would find a way to save Jorey and the throne both. Or if not both, at least one of them. There was a fair chance that this would be one of the last pleasant evenings she had for a very long time.

Clara drank her wine alone, and listened to the rain.