The Widow's House

Marcus

We should be harassing their column,” Marcus said.

“I don’t see much point,” Cithrin said lightly. “The scouts say they’ll be here in a few days.”

“We should have been harassing their column. From the first foot they put in Birancour, the queen’s army should have been snapping at their heels. Wearing them down.”

Cithrin shrugged in a way that made him want to shake her. Around them, the taproom was busy with its midday custom. Sausages and hot mustard, beer and wine, the twice-baked flatbread that snapped against his lips when he bit it. The preparations for the coming siege had left the outer ring of the city almost empty, and not everyone had fled to the countryside. If anything, more of them had come behind the great white wall. For the first time in generations, siege engines were being hauled back into their niches and new gates fixed in place. Porte Oliva had been a smaller city the last time an army stood outside its defenses, and the press of extra bodies in the street was the measure of it.

“The queen’s throwing you to the dogs,” Marcus said. “Just standing back and letting them march to us like Porte Oliva wasn’t one of her own cities.”

“I know,” Cithrin said, taking a handful of nuts and raisins.

“That’s why we should be doing it.”

“I’ve talked to the governor about it,” she said. “We don’t have the soldiers. There are enough to man the wall and defend the port, but if we start putting together companies to put in the field, we’ll be stretched too thin.”

“Really?” Marcus said. “And how many battles has the governor been through?”

“None.”

“Well I’ve seen a couple, one time and another. We’re not ready for this.”

Cithrin frowned. She’d grown older since the day she’d left for Carse it seemed like years before. Her face was wider now, though her Cinnae blood meant it would always be sharp at the chin and cheeks. Her shoulders were broader now, and when she moved it was less like a girl pretending at womanhood than a woman’s authentic gait. When she wasn’t in the room with him, he thought of her as the girl he remembered, and was a little startled every time he saw her again.

“Inys wants to wait, and I don’t see that we’re in a position to issue orders to a dragon,” she said. Then, changing the subject, “Herez had to close down the bounty system. I think they’re afraid Antea will come after Callon Cane once they’re done with me.”

“You should move him to Sara-sur-Mar and let Geder chase him down the queen’s throat,” Marcus said bitterly, and Cithrin laughed. Marcus scowled, relented, smiled. In the street, a man started shouting and another took it up. A few people in the taproom craned their necks to look out the windows or the half-open door, but Marcus could tell the sound of a traffic brawl from something serious. It was to be expected, this near to the storm.

Since the defeat of the queen’s army in the north and the arrival of Inys, Marcus had seen the city fall into the old patterns. The coming violence touched everything from the mood in the taprooms to the street-corner puppet shows to the songs the workers sang while they carried their masters’ crates inside the protecting ring of the wall. He hadn’t seen Porte Oliva in the months before, but Yardem had told him enough of how the blockade had shaken the city to recognize the mixture of anxiety and relief that had them all drunk. They had been in danger and now they were saved. They had a champion to lead them, and a new danger to overcome. The stones themselves had found faith in the dragon and its power to protect them. Marcus knew it was an illusion because he’d been that savior himself once in an old war in Northcoast.

He’d even had faith in himself, back then.

Cithrin sighed and shook her head. “Porte Oliva’s never fallen in war. Never. The only times it’s been taken, someone inside the city betrayed it and opened the gates. No one’s going to do that now. We know to keep out of earshot of the priests or drown them out. They’re exhausted and in the middle of enemy land. We have freedom of the sea to resupply, we have well-rested soldiers protecting their own homes, and we have a dragon. We’re going to be fine.”

“That exhausted army’s got spider priests, and they’ve already conquered half the world,” Marcus said. “We shouldn’t underestimate them. You don’t know how bad this could get.”

Cithrin’s face went cold and she hoisted an eyebrow. “I think I do. I’ve lost two cities already and lived through the fighting in Camnipol. I’ve seen what war can do.”

“No disrespect, Cithrin. You’ve seen a handful of squabbling noblemen and a surrender. You haven’t lived through a battle. They’re worse, and once they start going bad, it’s usually too late to make fresh plans. However many high cards we’re holding, we should have been harassing their column, and we should have been hiring mercenaries to break the siege when it comes, and we should have burned every building north of the wall rather than leave it for the enemy to shelter in.”

“The governor would never agree to that,” she said.

“Shouldn’t ask permission, then.”

“We’re going to be fine,” Cithrin said, and the hardness in her voice ran on the edge of challenge. She wanted to believe it. He wished that he could too. “We’re going to be fine, Marcus. They can’t take the city.”

“All right,” he said, but when he stepped outside, he turned north. The air was thick with the smell of bodies and of the sea. The spring rains were late this year, but coming. He could feel the press of weather in the air, a stillness that made even the breeze feel sluggish. The dragon’s perch in the courtyard stood empty. Inys’s resting claws had stripped away the bark and carved deep gouges into the pale wood beneath. They’d have to replace that soon. Unless the siege went poorly. Then it’d be someone else’s problem. He looked at the sun. He’d agreed to relieve Yardem from the guardhouse. With the increase in coin and goods in the counting house strongbox and new people coming to the relatively defended city from the countryside, they’d both decided that tripling the guard was a good thought. But if he was an hour or two late, chances were Yardem would forgive him. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Passing through the defense walls was like stepping into a dream. He remembered the first time he’d passed this way, besieged by beggars. The great stone wall with its arrow slits had seemed like the artifact of another time then. It marked the edge of a city that had long since outgrown it. There were no beggars there now. He assumed they’d all moved to the port. There wouldn’t be many travelers arriving with charity by land.

Beyond the fresh gates, the buildings of Porte Oliva stood almost empty. The breeze set a shutter clacking open and closed and open again. A sullen dog followed him for a few streets and then wandered away. There was no new wall, no second defense. Birancour had been at peace for generations, and even before that, their wars had been in the north, at the seat of power. It showed in the architecture and the shape of the streets and the buildings that slowly grew sparser and lower, wider yards between them and more trees and grass. And then without ever passing an archway or marker, he was outside the city. He found the dragon in a meadow that had become a favorite place for its torpid sleep. The grass all around its body was smashed and dead, the dark earth showing through. Its eyes were narrowed but not closed, and it shifted to consider him without rising.

“Marcus Stormcrow,” Inys said in a voice like distant thunder.

“Back with the Stormcrow thing? Thought we’d moved past that.”

“I call you that, or not. As I see fit. I think of you that way or not.”

“That’s very flexible of you,” Marcus said. “I wanted to talk about the war.”

“It was terrible. It was the triumph of rage over cowardice, and I was the coward. I should have let him kill me. I should have bared my neck to him and let him take the light from my eyes. It would have been better for both of us than this.”

“Yeah. Not the war I was thinking of,” Marcus said, sitting on the grass beside the great head. “There’s an army coming this way. We haven’t done anything to slow it down or break its supply lines. The forces that could have backed us got spanked and are off pouting outside Porte Silena and Sara-sur-Mar. Everyone and their uncle seems convinced that you’re going to save us all.”

The dragon didn’t speak, but shifted its weight, claws digging deep into the turf like a housecat kneading a pillow. Marcus waited.

“Do you know what it is to mourn, Marcus Stormcrow?”

“I do.”

“There are days I can almost forget, and then I see something and think how Erex will smile to hear of it, only she will not. Not now, and not ever. Because of me.”

“That’s why we call it mourning,” Marcus said. “And it goes on for a hell of a long time before it gets better. But between now and then, I need to know if you’re planning to follow through and protect this city. Because if you aren’t, I’m going to have to.”

The dragon went still. Marcus leaned forward and brushed a blade of grass from his boots.

“Even Drakkis I never permitted to speak to me in such tones.”

Marcus felt a sweeping urge to apologize and bit his lips against it. “We are acting like we’ve already won,” he said. “It makes me very uncomfortable.”

“I am acting as though I have lost, and I have,” the dragon said.

“When you were drunk, you had hope. Something about filling the skies with dragons again.”

“When I am drunk, I have hope. When I am sober, I am too much a coward to let myself die. Even if I remake them, they will be new. Different. No one will remember the things I remember. There is no one to continue those conversations. I could bring a thousand dragonets into the world and still be alone.”

A thousand dragonets, Marcus thought. That doesn’t sound like a good thing either. He pushed the thought aside for the moment. It was a problem for another time.

“All right,” he said. “So I’m hearing you say that today’s one of the bad days, and you’re feeling hopeless and down. Have I got that about right?”

“You do not understand.”

“Like hell I don’t. You went to sleep and you woke up with everyone gone. I watched my wife and daughter die in front of me because I’d gotten too cocksure and full of myself. I stood witness, and I couldn’t do anything about it.” Marcus stopped, growling at the thickness in his throat like it was an enemy. He was courting nightmares here, but he didn’t let it stop him. “I smelled their hair burn. When you set fire to someone, they keep moving a bit even after they’re dead. Something about the way the sinews shorten up when they cook. They were in the flame, moving. They were dead and moving. And I spent years like that. Dead and moving. Some days I still do. But your family trouble is about to kill some people I know. Dead or not, you need to stop it. That’s the job.”

Inys rolled away, curling its back toward Marcus. The folded wings looked like furled sails on a ship.

“Perhaps you do understand,” the dragon said.

Marcus sat for a time. Inys didn’t speak again. Didn’t move. A dove fluttered by and landed on the branch of a tree at the meadow’s edge, cooing loudly. Marcus coughed.

“We should be harassing their column,” he said.

Inys didn’t answer.

“Was I that bad?”

Yardem flicked his ears thoughtfully, the earrings jingling against each other. “You weighed less.”

“I’m amazed you put up with me.”

The sky above the harbor was hazy white, the bodies of hundreds of seagulls dark against it. The tall-rigged ships that had been the heart of the blockade stood out in the deep water off the harbor, transformed from enemy to protector, and the sea shone bright and rich as mother-of-pearl. Marcus and Yardem stood on the seawall looking down into the waves.

“Do you think Inys made the Drowned too?” Marcus asked. “He said he had them undermine that island. He made the Timzinae. Maybe he made the Drowned too.”

“Might have,” Yardem said. “Might only have found a use for them.”

“I still don’t like thinking of a whole race of people as tools made for a purpose. Use them and clean them and put them in the box when you’re done.”

“Would they be better meaningless?”

“They should be able to make their own meaning.”

Yardem grunted, his ears turning back they way they did when he was being polite.

“What?” Marcus said.

“Don’t see what stops them from doing that, sir. Can stab a man to death with a cobbler’s awl. Can dig up weeds with a dagger. Seems to me what something’s made for matters less than what’s done with it.”

“But they made us what we are. Even the Firstbloods, to judge by the way we dance to whatever tune he calls. We’re all formed by a dragon’s will for a dragon’s plan. All of history is a gap in a war they fought using us for weapons.”

“Something had to make the dragons,” Yardem said. “I believe there’s a larger order, and Inys is part of it just as we are.”

“Any evidence for that?”

“None, sir.”

“So why think it?”

“Just seems plausible.”

A new voice called out from the walkway behind them. Marcus turned back. Porte Oliva stretched out. Tile roofs and white walls and narrow, cobbled streets. Kit, Cary, and Barriath Kalliam walked toward them. The two players wore new clothes of a carefully nondescript grey. Until they could amass a new supply of costumes and props, they’d fallen back on the style of Princip C’Annaldé where the performers created the illusions of their stories through only the use of their voices and bodies. Beside them, the pirate captain looked almost gaudy, though in truth his cloak and breeches were no more than anyone might wear. Barriath nodded to Marcus and then Yardem.

“Your friends here said you wanted to speak with me?”

“Do,” Marcus said. “No offense to the governor and the queensmen—or the dragon, for that matter—but I’m the sort of man who likes having five or six plans deep, and you’re the man at the city’s back door.”

“You think the fleet’s likely to attack when the army comes.”

“It’s what I’d do,” Marcus said.

“It could happen,” Barriath said. “There are a few ships in the Inner Sea, mostly at Suddapal, but they’re spoils of war, and the sailors for them were up in Nus until they started sailing for here. I don’t see how they get those ships crewed unless they hire on mercenaries, and frankly, I’ve already bought the best of those.”

“You’ll have to tell me more about how you managed that at some point,” Marcus said. “What about the blockades on Porte Silena and Sara-sur-Mar?”

“They will come south, block any supplies coming in or escape going out. But the water’s where we’re strongest now. We might not be able to stop them getting here, but I’m fairly sure we’ll see them coming, and the dragon wouldn’t have trouble burning them all to the waterline.”

If we can talk him into caring at all, Marcus thought but didn’t say.

“It seems to me,” Kit said, “that you are also in a rare position to advise the city defenders on the drier end. I understand that the army is commanded by your brothers. Is there any insight you can give into how you expect that conflict to play out?”

Barriath crossed his arms. His expression was equal parts pain, anger, and the cold consideration of a man accustomed to war. Marcus waited. However carefully it was put, the question was still how best go about killing Barriath’s brothers. The sailor’s eyes turned toward the sea, but what he was seeing, Marcus couldn’t guess. Cary put a hand on his arm, and Barriath started. Her smile was encouraging, and he nodded.

“Jorey. My youngest brother. He’s smart, but not experienced. I don’t know how he’ll do as a commander, but Father told us stories of great battles and strategies of the hunt. And this isn’t his first time in the field.”

Brothers and wars. If Barriath and Jorey and this third one whose name Marcus kept forgetting had all been dragons, they’d be at the mouth of the war instead of the ass end of it. “All right. With any luck it won’t come to this, but I think we need to discuss what happens if—”

“Breaking the siege isn’t the problem. Or it’s not the one I see,” Barriath went on, ignoring him. “Maybe I’m being dim, but this isn’t a normal war. If the army comes and shatters itself against the walls, then what happens? Does Palliako sue for peace? If he does, and the queen accepts it, then what? Send the army and the priests back to Antea and call it victory? Or do you few march on Camnipol with as many queensmen as Birancour’s willing to grudge you?”

“That’s a little farther on than I’m worried about just yet,” Marcus said.

“It shouldn’t be. This is precisely what you should be worrying about right now. Because everything I’ve heard so far are ways not to lose the war. I don’t see anyone thinking about what it would take to win it.”