The Widow's House

Marcus

The birds announced the dawn before the light came, trilling and calling to one another as if unaware that one of the fallen masters of the world had returned from legend to sleep in the ruined inn’s yard. Or if not unaware, unimpressed. Marcus had stayed up the full night, waiting. Prompted by Kit and his unpleasant power to convince, the innkeep and his people had fled toward the nearby hamlets and towns. Likely it had been the wiser choice.

“When should we wake it up?” Sandr asked.

The dragon lay on its side, wings folded in against its vast bulk. Its eyes—each as wide as a man’s body—were closed. Its breath was the deep, regular tide of sleep. Every now and then throughout his watch, its scaled brows had furrowed and its mouth curved in distress at whatever nightmares plagued it.

“Be my guest,” Marcus said.

“Maybe another hour,” Sandr said.

Marcus was amazed at how easily he could read emotion in the vast, inhuman face, the angle of its wings, and the shape of its balled claws. It reminded him of stories he’d heard about shepherds whose dogs understood them so well that an untrained man would have thought they shared a mind. Really, it was only that over generations the dogs that followed a man’s expressions had been let breed while the others were killed or gelded. Only in this translation, Marcus was playing the part of the dog.

And perhaps that was apt, because he knew—they all knew—that the beast was about to wake just before the great eyes opened. The dragon’s gaze swam for a moment, fixed on Marcus, lost him, and came back.

“Morning,” Marcus said.

The dragon said something like ummbru, shifted its feet under it, and half crawled down the sward to the little river. Marcus ran along beside it. At a pool, the dragon sank its head into the water, its throat working as it drank. Marcus waited. What seemed an impossibly long time later, it pulled its head back to land. Back at the inn, Kit and the other players stood in a line, watching. They were the audience for once.

“So,” Marcus said. “Feeling any better?”

“I want to die.”

“Well, give it time.”

“For what?”

“Either you’ll stop wanting it, or you’ll die. One or the other.”

The dragon managed a wan smile.

“The world is emptied,” it said. With its head resting on the green earth, every word vibrated. “I have killed the world.”

“Well, about that. I was hoping you knew what the spiders are. We’d been under the impression they were sent by a goddess as a sign of her favor, but that didn’t work out. And since they seemed to be searching for you… I’m sorry, this is a very strange morning for me.”

“They are my fault. They are my brother’s vengeance.”

“Your brother.”

“Morade.”

“Ah.”

“He destroyed everything because of me.”

“No goddess, then.”

The dragon shifted its head to watch him with both of its eyes. “I angered him. It was cruel and it was small, and… Erex. My love is dead. She is dead. All are dead.”

“Spiders aren’t dead.”

“They are nothing.”

“We aren’t dead.”

“You are nothing.”

“You aren’t dead.”

The dragon took a great breath and let it out slowly. Marcus more than half expected it to be scalding hot, but it was no warmer than any large animal’s though it smelled of something like oil and distilled wine. The dragon rose to its haunches, spread its wings, and yawned massively. It raised its nose as if searching for some scent, then sneezed. Marcus waited.

“I should have died with them,” it said. “Instead I am trapped in this graveyard world. Feral slaves like maggots in the corpse of the earth. Why did you wake me?”

“Mostly, it seemed the thing to do at the time. The spider priests were looking for you, and we thought anything they wanted, it’d be best to keep from them.”

“You keep company with the tainted.”

“Just the one,” Marcus said. “And he’s very well behaved. Killing the spider goddess was his idea.”

“There is none such.”

“Picked up on that. So I don’t mean to pry or intrude on your mourning, but… ah…”

“What?”

“A fair part of the world I live in is in the process of grinding itself into blood and bone, and these priests look to be at the heart of it. No offense meant, but if this really is your fault, the least you can do is explain yourself.”

“I do not answer to slaves.”

“Make an exception. Just this once.”

The vast claw moved more quickly than Marcus could react. He tried to reach back for the poisoned sword, but his arm was already pinned to his side by the tree-limb-thick claws. The dragon lifted him in the air until he was higher than the inn had been, back when it had had a roof. His ribs creaked, and he fought to draw breath. One of the players screamed. The dragon tilted its head. Anger flared in its eyes, and then died. It sagged and dropped Marcus on the riverbank. He lay back, his eyes on the blue dome of the sky, hissing between his teeth. The pain in his back subsided slowly. Probably nothing broken, but damn.

“We were great,” the dragon said, as if it had made no violent move. “We were masters of time and space. The mysteries of all creation were bare before us. Before him. Morade, my brother. We were set to make marvels. To prove ourselves, and I was… jealous? Angry? I don’t know what I was. It is too long ago. I destroyed his work as a joke. I, in my folly, expected him to be… annoyed. Displeased. He was enraged. He swore vengeance.

“We were complacent. I see that now. We relied on the slave races we had made,” the dragon said, waving its claw at Marcus. “Your kind. We created you, we set you to your tasks, and we forgot. And why remember? Does a body keep track of every drop of blood? Does a gardener count his worms? We had our eyes on greater things. To see the despised, the small, the insignificant, and to find a weakness there… ah, that was his genius. He forged a secret tool, and in doing so, he poisoned his own mind. They were his madness made flesh.”

“The spiders?”

“A corruption to drive our slaves to slaughter one another. To disrupt all the patterns that we had come to rely upon. It made their minds brittle and caught them in a dream that fractured them. We didn’t see. I didn’t see. The corruption spread unnoticed, and then it shattered. They killed each other over nothing. Over the colors of their shirts or their eyes, whether they drank before they ate or ate before they drank. Whether they ate beef or fowl. Anything became a pretext for murder.”

“Wait,” Marcus said. “We haven’t seen that. The ones we’ve been fighting can smell out lies and convince people of things, but this other thing you’re talking about—”

“There is no other thing. Your kind has small, fragile thoughts and you live in dreams by your nature. You make beliefs the way a dog sheds in spring.”

“All right,” Marcus said. “Not following.”

The dragon’s smile was pitying. “I will show you. If the words in the question fall in threes, I will answer no. Otherwise, yes. Do you understand?”

“Not particularly.”

“You will. Bring one of the others. Not the corrupted one.”

“You want me to…”

“Any of them will do.”

“Wait here, then.”

“There is nowhere I can go.”

Marcus turned and walked back up the gentle slope. The players came forward to meet him. What’s it saying? Mikel asked at the same time Cary asked, Are you all right? The gabble of voices erupted. Only Kit stayed silent.

“Sandr,” Marcus said. “Walk with me.”

“Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry.”

“No, just… come.”

As they returned to the side of the creek, the dragon was staring at the sun, turning its claws in the light and watching the scales shine. It angled its head toward them, and Sandr froze.

“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “If our friend here wanted us dead, we’d be dead.”

“It’s true,” the dragon said.

“Good to know,” Sandr said in a small voice.

“I know something of you,” the dragon said, its voice rich and deep. “I will answer you yes or else no, and nothing else.”

“What’s this about?” Sandr squeaked, his gaze cutting to Marcus.

“Just do it,” Marcus said.

“Ah. All right. Um…” Sandr squared his shoulders. “Is this about me?”

The dragon turned to Marcus and counted its claws. One, then two, then three. The fourth it wiggled in the air at Marcus. If the words in the question fall in threes, then no. Otherwise… “Yes.”

“Me in particular?”

One, then two, then three. “No.”

“Something about the sort of person I am?”

Three and then three. And one left. “Yes.”

“Actors?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a prophecy?”

“Yes.”

“Does it end with us dying?”

Three and then three. Nothing left over.

“No.”

Marcus watched the dragon and the actor trade questions as the morning sun warmed them. Slowly, Sandr followed the arbitrary answers one after the other to a story about a band of actors that were going to defeat the forces of darkness by seducing an enemy queen on the evening before a great battle and then fathering a new dynastic line. Sandr’s eyes grew wider over time, and Marcus could almost see him trying to imagine which queen it was and judge his own chances of cuckolding some great king.

The dragon held up its claws and turned his attention back to Marcus, ignoring Sandr as if he were not there. “Imagine now that it cannot be disbelieved.”

“What can’t be disbelieved?” Sandr said.

“None of that was true,” Marcus said.

“The prophecy?”

“No prophecy,” Marcus said.

“Oh,” Sandr said with a shrug. “Well, that’s a bit disappointing.”

The dragon reared up, its nostrils flaring, its wings spreading wide. It pointed a claw at Sandr’s chest. Sandr fell back with a shriek and Marcus moved to stand between them.

“And that is what they cannot do,” the dragon said, its voice rising to a roar like a forest fire. “They cannot accept when they are wrong. Once told they cannot doubt. And that is what my brother did, and that is why we were weakened when he struck. That is why we died.”

“Marcus?”

“He’s not mad at you, Sandr.”

“He seems mad at me.”

“He’s not mad at you,” Marcus said. And then to the dragon: “So these wars we’re seeing. These priests spreading through the world again. They really think there’s a spider goddess.”

“Truth and belief are indistinguishable to them,” the dragon said. “They believe what they believe because they believe. There is no escape from it. And who listens to their voices becomes like them. They drifted into madness before I slept, and they are mad still.”

“Except Kit. He’s not like that.”

“All the corrupt are part of Morade’s plan. Give your friend his own followers, and they would kill the ones who disagreed with them like ants in a bottle. I made soldiers to fight them that the corruption would not infect. I forged the culling blades. I made the one you carry now. We fought to clean the stock of slaves, but the corruption outran us. And my brother killed everyone that opposed him. I planned my last, desperate trick. I would let him believe he had won, and then strike. It meant destroying the perches we held sacred. The one thing he did not think I would sacrifice…”

The dragon’s attention turned inward. It looked stunned.

“Better I had died,” it said.

“Don’t let’s get too far ahead with that,” Marcus said. “Wait here. I’m just going to take him back.”

The dragon’s head sank down until it was staring at itself in the rippled surface of the pool. It shifted its wings with a sound like a ship’s sails creaking. Marcus took its silence as permission and led Sandr back up the hill. The others had come a bit closer now. Sandr sat on the ground and folded his arms around his knees, trembling. Marcus noticed that he was shaking too, then pushed the fact aside. He’d ignored battle panic before too, and this wasn’t likely to be so different. Kit put his hand on Sandr’s shoulder and said something Marcus couldn’t hear. Sandr nodded, and Kit ruffled the young man’s hair before he came closer to Marcus. The old actor’s face was grim.

“What have you found?” he asked.

“Everything we thought was wrong.”

“I’m afraid I may be growing used to that.”

“Is a habit for us, isn’t it? If I’m following our new friend’s thread, the priests aren’t here to take the world over so much as reduce it to chaos and unending violence.”

“To what end?”

“To win a war that’s thousands of years dead.”

“Ah,” Kit said sourly. “Does he know how they can be defeated?”

“From what I can tell, he was asleep before your however-many-greats-grandfather took to the ass end of the world. He knows more than we do, though. I think he’s our best hope of ending this, and I expect that your old friends would have put a tree through his neck if they’d found him. That hairwash he was spouting last night about remaking the dragons and promoting me to the next Stormcrow hasn’t come up. He may not remember he said it.”

“Do you think it meant anything? Or was he so deeply in his cups it’s meaningless?”

“Can’t say. Not yet, anyway. The more immediate problem is I think our chances of passing unobtrusively through Antea have gotten markedly worse.”

Kit turned and Marcus followed his gaze. The low, rolling hills of eastern Antea seemed peaceful, but the illusion would only last so long.

“How long,” Kit said, “would you expect them to stay away?”

Marcus shrugged. “If it was my inn, I’d be on the way back already. See if it was safe, and if there was anything to salvage.”

Kit passed his hand across his forehead. Marcus could see the confusion and fear in the gesture. Or else in himself. If that thing had decided to kill me just now, I’d be dead, he thought. And instead of addressing that, I’m going to talk as if this were all perfectly normal. Just another problem that needs fixing.

“Surely they can’t harm it. Him. I can’t imagine a dragon could be threatened by a few farmers and townsfolk?”

“Used to be a lot of dragons,” Marcus said. “Only one left. The one thing we can be sure of is they can die. Truth, though, I’m less worried about the locals rallying than the news reaching Camnipol. I’m not greatly tempted by the prospect of answering the sorts of questions that Palliako’s private guard would be prone to ask. Especially as one of your old companions would likely be in the room.”

“Yes, I suppose that wouldn’t be likely to go well.”

“We have to get word back to Cithrin and the bank. Most wars, the enemy is looking for victory. If these spiders just want war and more war and more after that… well, that’s a very different thing, isn’t it?”

“How shall we proceed?” Kit asked.

“I think we’ll have to scatter. Pairs, I think.”

“Cary won’t like that.”

Marcus pressed his lips thin. It was too easy to forget that it wasn’t Kit’s company now. Or his own. “I’ll talk to her about it as soon as—”

The dragon rose up on its hind legs, wings spread, and stretched its immense neck toward the forest with a hiss. Marcus held up his hand to Kit, and the old actor nodded. Marcus trotted back toward the water, uncomfortably aware of acting as a servant would when his master called but unable to respond otherwise.

“Enough of your whispers and muttering,” the dragon said. “I will not be treated with disrespect. Even now. Even if I have earned it.”

“Didn’t mean to keep you outside the circle,” Marcus said. “It’s just… well, we’re in the middle of the enemy’s land. Getting all you’ve told me back to the people who are standing against the spiders is going to be a bit of a trick.”

The dragon’s head drooped, the vast iris contracting as it focused upon him. The power of its regard was like the cold coming off ice.

“Why is that?” the dragon asked.

Making the harnesses took the better part of the morning, but the dragon was astonishingly deft and there was enough leather and cloth and steel to salvage from the ruined inn and stables, and from the players’ cart. Rope and leather and cloth made slings on each of the dragon’s legs, and then at the dragon’s instruction, they crawled into them. The scales Marcus pressed his body against were as wide as his palm and iridescent in the light. The warmth of the huge body was almost uncomfortable. He and Cary and Sandr had taken the left foreleg; Kit, Charlit Soon, and Mikel the right. Smit and Hornet had each strapped onto one of the rear legs.

“I wish we could take the cart,” Sandr said. “All the props. All the costumes. I’ve grown up in that cart. It’s like a part of the company.”

“We’ll make another,” Cary said. “And there are plenty of pieces we can play from the ground.”

“It won’t be the same,” Sandr said.

Inys shifted, swiveling his head down to consider them. Sandr went quiet, but everything he’d said had been heard. “Better men have lost more,” the dragon said, and then to Marcus. “You are ready?”

“No, but waiting won’t help.”

He thought he saw a bleak amusement in the vast eye, and then the leg he was strapped to tensed and shifted. The wings unfurled with a sound like sailcloth in a high wind. The last dragon took to the sky, and Marcus held on to the straps, his mind reeling as the wrecked inn and the ruined cart, the brook and the trees, the world as he’d known it, receded.

They flew.