The Widow's House

Clara

She had heard songs, of course, about the grasses of Birancour. It was a cliché of the poets and composers, like the dust storms of the Dry Wastes or the ice coasts of Hallskar. The grasslands were an image meant to evoke a sense of unending summer and sensual languor, the high blades shifting in the sun. Her experience of them was less impressive, but that owed something to the hooves, wheels, and boots that reduced the famous grasses to a mud-caked mat that stank of shit and rotting vegetation before she passed over it. Perhaps in some other context, Birancour might have been as beautiful as its reputation.

After the battle, the armies of the queen had pulled back, not quite in retreat. They lurked in the west, blocking the paths to Sara-sur-Mar and Porte Silena like Southlings making a wall around their queen. The army turned south, toward Porte Oliva, as the queen must have known it would. Riding on her horse, her spine stiff and aching, her mind lulled by the monotony of the day’s passage, Clara half dreamed it. An attacker kicking in the door of a home and bloodying the mouth of the father, the defeated man standing between the intruder and the two children he hadn’t come for, and clearing the way to a third. It was an ugly dream, and surely not true. The small, domestic ways of thinking didn’t apply to the grand vision of nations at war. Violence between village thugs was base and bestial. War was the field of glory, where the nobility of men was tested. Dawson had always said so, and she had thought at the time she understood. Men fought, and the victors were celebrated. She could still recall the triumph when Dawson had returned from reclaiming Asterilhold.

Only now that she had seen some of it firsthand, she did wonder. Perhaps the nobility of war came not from victory, but from accepting an enemy’s surrender. Not from taking the day, but from stopping short of absolute and unending slaughter. If so, she still thought less of it than she once had. She expected better of the world.

At midday, they passed a farmhouse with flames still licking at its eaves. The walls had fallen to ash and embers, and a Cinnae man and woman hung by ropes from a wide-branched cottonwood. A plow horse lay dead on its side by a little stone well. The caravan master sent a couple of his people into the ruins to search out anything the army had overlooked. The air stank of smoke that stung Clara’s nose and roughened her throat. She looked at the bodies, fighting to make the thickness in her throat be only with the dead.

They’d fought, she told herself. They’d tried to stand against the armies of Antea. They were dead because they were stupid, because they’d tried to do something foolish and doomed. It was their fault that they hung there, their bodies shifting slightly in the breeze, the motion impossible to mistake for life. Jorey’s men had killed these farmers because it was war, and this was what war was built from. Not only screaming, frightened boys bleeding into a mud-churn of a meadow. Also burning farmhouses and besieged cities poisoned with plague. It was made of a thousand species of the dead, and all of them—all of them—ought to have known better. Even her.

“They should have run,” Clara said as they passed.

“This was their home,” Vincen said.

“They still should have run.”

“Yes, they should.”

The horse under her stumbled a bit, surprised by a little ditch that the fallen grass had covered, and the unexpected motion sent pain through her hips and back like a shower of sparks rising from a bonfire. She cried out, and Vincen was at her side in an instant. She waved him back sharply.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re in pain.”

“I’m saddle-sore,” she said. “It’s nothing real.”

“That’s real.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. And then a moment later, “You think we should make camp for a day and rest.”

“No, I think we should ride to the front and tell your sons that you’ve followed them.”

Clara shifted in her saddle, her eyebrows rising toward her hairline. Vincen’s expression was closed, his shoulders tight, a man preparing for a blow.

“And why in the world would I do that?” she asked.

“We can’t stop here. The locals won’t bother us with the main force so near, but if we lag too far behind… well, those two back there likely had family. It would be hard not to take a bit of revenge if we hand it to them.”

“That’s a reason to stay with the ’van.”

“You’re getting tired, love. You’re pushing yourself harder than your body can stand, and I don’t want to see you beat yourself to death against this. If you send word to Jorey, he’ll—”

“He’ll send me back to Camnipol under guard.”

“Yes, but not because you’d be a prisoner. A dozen swords to keep us safe wouldn’t be all that bad a thing.”

“Impossible,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I’ve come out here to do the work. I’d be useless in Camnipol. And with Geder’s priests running through the city sniffing out secrets, all this around us strikes me as much safer. We left there for a reason.”

No place is safe, she thought. All the world has become a battlefield.

With two hours still to go before nightfall, the ’van master called the halt and pulled them all off to the side of the path to let some supply carts by. It had happened before, but these were not the sacks of beans and meal that she’d seen then. The ten wide carts that rolled by were piled with complex mechanisms of burnished bronze and steel, coils of braided leather rope, stacks of what looked like wheels with blades erupting from their sides, and great harpoons with loops at the back and vicious barbs at the front like something a hunter might use against an animal too large to be killed by dogs and arrows. Siege engines, she assumed, for the coming assault on Porte Oliva should they be foolish enough to refuse to hand over the banker. She imagined the great harpoons being flung into the stone walls of Porte Oliva and used to pull it down. That couldn’t be right, though.

Once the supply carts had passed, the ’van master consulted with a few of his men. They debated whether to stop here or press on, and chose to stay. Clara couldn’t say she was sorry for the decision.

They made camp in twilight. The days were still growing longer. Hotter. Even when the year turned its corner and the light began to wane, the heat would still rise. She wondered as she helped construct the little hunter’s tent whether she would still be in the field when the heat of summer was at its worst, or when it began to cool toward winter. She could imagine Dawson, his dogs at his side, looking out over the vast muddy swath the army’s passage had cut through the landscape and shaking his head. It made her sad that she could picture the dogs more easily than Dawson’s face.

The familiar scattering of stars came out, and the stink of cookfires rose to meet them, her own included. There was very little wood left after the soldiers had taken what they needed, and some of the others in the ’van had resorted to trying to burn grass or else dried dung. Clara had done a thousand things in the years since Geder Palliako took the throne that she would never have expected of herself, but eating food cooked over burning shit was still beneath her standards. She lay back on her filthy blanket and listened to the songs of the cicadas calling to each other from the grass and ate dried apples and salted almonds. She would have very much liked something warm to go with them. Even just a cup of hot tea. She would do without.

She hadn’t realized she was dozing until the sound of footsteps roused her. A man was tramping north through the muck, a lantern in his hand. In this fallen place, the little assemblage of glass and tin was enough to mark him as someone important. Clara sat up and arranged her hair as she might have in Osterling Fells before going to greet a guest. The habit of decades, as out of place here as a snowflake in a fire.

As the man grew nearer, his features became clear. He wore light mail, not the boiled leather of the normal foot. His cloak was caked with dirt and dust and streaked by stains whose origins Clara could not guess, but she could make out the remnants of the black and gold of House Basen, one of the smaller houses of Asterilhold that had not participated in the conspiracy against Antea and so had been allowed to live. The scabbard that hung from his side glittered with gems. Clara wasn’t sure whether she should look away, feign sleep, or get to her feet. The chances that she would be known and recognized were thin indeed, but…

“Hoy. Old woman,” the man barked. She pretended she was Aly Koutunin, her friend from the mornings she’d spent at the Prisoner’s Span. She bobbed her head and didn’t meet the soldier’s eyes. He accepted the deference as his due. “Heard there’s a cunning man back here someplace. A Kurtadam named Syles.”

Clara nodded again and pointed over her shoulder toward the dim bulk of the ’van master’s cart. The soldier tossed something at her feet, and it took her a moment to realize it was a coin, and that to keep up appearances she should fall to her knees and scrabble for it. When Vincen reappeared with a spare handful of dry twigs, she was turning the bit of bent copper in her fingers.

“All well?” he asked as he began to prepare a little fire.

“Walk with me,” she said. “There’s someone I want to see.”

Her thighs were chapped and angry, her muscles tight as leather bands. Her gait was more waddle than stride. The cunning man’s tent was a bit better than her own, the oiled canvas standing high enough that the old Kurtadam could sit up in it. The officer was gone, and the cunning man’s eyes were half closed and focused on nothing. When Clara sat at his tent’s edge, his gaze flickered to her and he smiled. The teeth he still had were yellowed and blunt.

“Fortune told, then?”

“No,” she said. “Not mine. What do they ask you?”

The cunning man’s eyes were open wider now. In the moonlight, his dark pelt seemed tipped by silver. He tilted his head, considering her, and she held out the bent penny.

“I’ll pay you if you like,” she said, “but the soldiers, when they come. What sorts of things do they ask you?”

The Kurtadam smirked. “Keep your coin. I don’t have anything to tell you couldn’t already guess. They ask if their wives and lovers still remember them. They ask if their children are well or if a fever has carried them away in the winter. They want to know when they will find their way home. And if. And what they can do to make the world let them be who they were before they first rode to this war. They’re men, they ask the questions men ask when they have been on campaign too long.”

“Nothing different? They don’t ask about the priests or the Lord Marshal?”

“Some do,” he said warily.

“And what do you tell them?”

The Kurtadam’s eyes flicked up toward Vincen and then back to her. There was a wariness in them now, and also a curiosity. “When I see something, I tell them what I see. When I see nothing, I invent. I try to comfort them. I tell them that there are difficult times ahead, but that they will weather them. Then when hard things come, I’m already halfway to right. Why are you asking me this?”

“These men are tired,” Clara said. “They started this campaign going east, and then south, and now west. They come to you for comfort. For word of home and of the future. If you chose to disturb some of them instead of offering comfort…” Clara shrugged, and the cunning man laughed.

“Yes, I could place a few poisoned seeds,” the cunning man said. “If the price were right. You have someone in the army that’s done wrong by you? Stole your horse, maybe? Didn’t pay you what he owed?”

“Perhaps,” Clara said. “Let me think about it.”

She was about to stand when his hand shot out, his dark-furred fingers snapping hard around her wrist. A wave of vertigo passed through her. A blue mist seemed to crowd in at the corners of her vision, narrowing the world, and the cunning man’s eyes glowed for a moment, bright as a Dartinae’s. She heard Vincen call out in alarm, but it seemed to come from a great distance. The Kurtadam released her and sat back, chewing at his lips. What did he see? she thought. What does he know?

“A time will come,” the Kurtadam said, “when a man you love will ask you a question you cannot answer. Your silence will shape your life.”

“Is that supposed to be useful?” Clara asked, her unease making her voice sharper and more haughty than she’d intended.

He shrugged. “I see what I see. Shadows and the shadows of shadows, but for you? Truth. Remember me when it happens. It is why the soldiers come to me. Why they trust me. Whatever you seek vengeance for, I have the power to help you. For the right coin.”

“And that is what I came to ask,” Clara said, rising to her knees and then her feet. They walked back to her tent, her steps unsteady in the darkness. Vincen was at her side, present but unspeaking. She didn’t know whether she wished he would take her arm or if she was pleased that he hadn’t. Something about the cunning man’s pronouncement had left her feeling terribly fragile. A man you love will ask you a question you cannot answer. She could think of far too many ways for that particular piece of prophecy to come true. Perhaps that was the point. She had little faith in oracles, but even if the Kurtadam was a fraud, he would suffice for her needs.

Back at their little camp, Vincen lit the prepared twigs. The flame smoked. She stared into it, letting the brightness blind her to what lay all around them in the night. It made the world seem smaller.

“Another vulnerability,” Vincen said.

“A small one, but yes.”

“Played well, you could undermine people’s faith. Or start to. Set the knights fighting among themselves.”

“That was my thought,” she said, sick with the words. “I don’t know how to do this, Vincen. I don’t know how to defeat my sons and also save them. How do I undermine Geder Palliako’s priests when Vicarian is one of them? How do I stop his army when Jorey commands it? I don’t know if I have the strength to sacrifice my own family to this, and also don’t see how I can bring myself to stop.”

“I’ve been wondering the same,” Vincen said. “Will you tell your man in Carse about the cunning man?”

“Not tonight,” she said. “It’s late, and I’m too tired for writing letters.”

A loud pop came from the fire, followed by a low hiss of sap cooking to nothing. Green wood and trampled grass. She shuddered though she wasn’t cold.

“I want him to win, Vincen. This battle against Porte Oliva and this bel Sarcour girl? I want him to win it, and I am fighting on her side.”

“It’s like that sometimes,” he said.

“Oh,” Clara said, and her chuckle was sharper than she’d have wished. “Have you been on this path before?”

If he heard the sarcasm in her voice, he ignored it. “Something like it, yes. Every hunter feels it sometimes. You chase the hart, you and your dogs and your lord leading the chase. And for a moment, maybe, you catch sight of it. You remember that this magnificent animal is about to die for a bit of meat we don’t need and the honor of a man with nothing better to do, and you wish the hart would run. That he’d find some escape you hadn’t seen, slip the pack, and vanish into the wood.”

His voice had gone soft. She smiled into the little dancing flame, what she felt most was a deep and broadening sorrow. “You sound as though you were thinking of some particular incident.”

“I can think of several,” he said.

“Did you hate my husband?”

“No,” Vincen said without even the pause of a heartbeat. “He was the baron, and he was my lord.”

“If he had only been a man?”

It was Vincen’s turn to chuckle, and he managed to make the sound softer and richer than she had. “Then he wouldn’t have been the baron and my lord.”

“What did you do those times with him when you found your loyalty tilting toward your prey? Did you never call back the dogs? Let the beast slip away?”

“No, I killed it just the same. I’m a huntsman, Clara. We both are.”