The Widow's House

Clara

The assault itself began in flame.

Over the long years of peace, the city of Porte Oliva had outgrown its own defenses. Buildings spilled past the defensive wall and out into the open land. By the time the army arrived, they were empty as a plague town. The soldiers walked through the outlying buildings and then sent forward a priest under the flag of parley. Clara saw none of it, but the reports filtered back quickly. How the parley had been refused, arrows raining from the top of the wall and driving the priest back. How the voices of Porte Oliva had jeered and sung and drowned out the priest’s words. How the chance of surrender had been squandered.

After that, the army had pulled back, out into the open fields. Clara had found her own camp surrounded by soldiers’ tents, and the Lord Marshal’s banner not a hundred yards away. Jorey was so close she could have walked to him. The banners of the other houses took their places around the perimeter of the city—Caot and Essian and Flor and Broot. The first sign of fire came with the fall of twilight, thin pillars of white smoke rising into the air from one place and another around the exposed belly of the city. And then, with night, the flames.

“He’s a careful one, this new Lord Marshal,” the caravan master said, eating his bowl of beans and salt by the fire. He sounded approving, and Clara felt a stab of pride.

“I don’t understand,” a young Dartinae woman said. She was a seamstress who sometimes also shared a bed with the soldiers. Her name was Mita or Meta. Something like that. “He could have used those buildings as cover. Gotten in right by the wall. Now he can’t attack until the fire’s burned out, and even then, he’ll be marching over embers to get there.”

“That was never cover,” the caravan master said. “That was the first line of defense. Straight trap, and meant to seduce him. March his men in under it to keep the arrows off, just like you were thinking. Only then it’d be the queensmen who started the fire and our boys burning in it. Kalliam’s boy’s too smart to take the easy path. Don’t know how he’s getting past that wall, though.”

When the time came to bed down for the night, the ’van master took her and Vincen aside. “Look, I can’t help but notice you two like setting up a ways off from the rest of us. That’s fine. I got no opinion on it. But tonight? Might be best if you kept close. Soldiers before a battle can be… well, rowdy, eh? Mistakes get made. Better all around if we keep close and cheer them on.”

The smoke thickened the air, and the flames of the city danced and leaped and muttered. When she woke on the grey, ashen morning, her eyes stung and her throat felt raw. Where the day before there had been houses and businesses, stables and dyers’ yards, there was now smoking ash, blackened timber, a few low stone walls. And beyond it, the great wall of Porte Oliva, blackened with soot. It looked like a city already fallen. Jorey’s scouts made forays into the grey and black and red, reporting back, Clara assumed, how much the coals still burned, how hard or simple it would be to cross the new-made ruins and spill the same destruction on the far side of the wall.

“Are you all right?” Vincen asked.

Clara nodded at the defensive wall. “It’s a high wall, and it seems they know what the priests are capable of. Do you think it might hold?”

“What I’ve heard, Porte Oliva’s never fallen to attack,” Vincen said.

“I can believe that,” Clara said.

Near midday, the worst of the fire seemed to have passed. All around them, the soldiers began to prepare. Siege engines were assembled—trebuchet and catapult, ballista and the strange new spear throwers that had passed them on the road. A vast array of mechanisms all built toward violence.

And then, as they began to rise, the voices.

“The goddess is with you. You cannot fail.” It wasn’t Vicarian’s voice, but neither did it carry the accents of the Keshet. When the priest passed by, one hand lifted to the sky and the other holding a speaking trumpet, his face strong and bright and severe, she didn’t recognize him, but he did not have the wiry hair and long face of Basrahip or the others like him. This man had been born in the same Antea that she had known, and had been remade. “Her strength is yours. Her purity is yours. The servants of lies tremble before you now, and you cannot fail.”

“Why is he saying that?” Vincen asked.

“To give them courage,” Clara said. “To assure them that they will win.”

“That they… Oh. I understand.”

In the background, a group of nearby soldiers took up the chant cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. Clara turned to Vincen. He looked older in the smoke-stained light. “What did you think it meant?”

“I was taking it more that they dared not fail. Must not. You cannot fail, for if you do the consequences will be unimaginably dire. Something like that.”

“Yes,” Clara said. “Words can so often mean what you take from them rather than what was intended.”

They sat huddled by the ’van master’s cart. The chant seemed to spread around them, the men of the army—men who had been farmers and tradesmen two years before and were practiced killers now—lifting bared steel and shouting as if their words alone could bring down the city’s defenses. Cannot fail, cannot fail, cannot fail. She could hear both meanings in the words now. It occurred to her that if things went poorly, Jorey and Vicarian might both die today. Two of her sons might not see the sunset. She might not. It was a battle, and anything might happen.

Worse, when the priest walked by again, the speaking horn to his lips, his face a mask of religious ecstasy, Clara found herself wanting to take comfort in his words and slogans. You are the chosen of the goddess. She will protect you. She wanted to give herself over to the hope that it might be true, that Jorey was blessed and special and that he, at least, would live to see his wife and baby.

She didn’t know she was weeping until Vincen took her hand. He didn’t speak, but his gaze met her, and she found herself taking some strength from his simple presence.

A roar went up. A thousand voices lifted together. The first of the siege engines had loosed its stone. Clara watched it arc up over the newly made wasteland and strike the wall. The sound of the impact came with the stone already falling to the ground, and four more catapults swung. Four more stones battered at the vast and uncaring walls of Porte Oliva. For hours, Jorey’s forces flung stones, trying to crack the battlements and the great gate. Many of the shots fell against the wall’s face, but some few scraped across the top or fell past it into the city to effects Clara could not guess.

She heard the horns sound, the orders called out, but she couldn’t make out the words. Men streamed forward around her and the rest of the caravan. Thin, hard-faced men in motley armor and beards. Her countrymen. The servants of the Severed Throne, as much as was she, rushing to spend their deaths to avenge Geder Palliako’s sexual humiliation. And Jorey at their head. The ranks formed in the ashes. The catapults threw their last rounds before the advance. Six siege towers began the slow approach through the ruins, each following a trail the scouts had marked out for them. They were like slow giants, lumbering forward, the forces of the army advancing behind them, using them as cover. For now, the defense from the wall began in earnest. Great bolts from ballistas arcing over the ashy land. And in the siege towers, answering bolts, and also, more terribly, the voices of the priests, shouting their dreadful certainties. From where she sat, they were only muddled echoes that bounced from the wounded side of the wall. She wondered what the defenders of the city heard and if they believed. And if they did, how would they react? She closed her eyes, back again in another battle, Dawson at her side, as Basrahip shouted to a square that they had already lost, that everything they loved was gone, that there was no hope. There was no hope here. No victory was possible. Geder’s priests would win or else Jorey would lose, and there was no ending that would not pour acid on her heart.

“Ah, Vincen,” she said.

His gentle grip on her hand tightened and did not let go.

On the field, a covered battering ram rolled toward the gates, arrows and stones raining down onto it. Two of the siege towers had become fouled in the debris of the burned city, and men were scampering out in front, pulling away blackened beams and stones. Smoke rose where the passage of the army had exposed coals still hot from the night’s long fire. The air all around her stank of ashes. The first of the siege towers came to the wall, throwing ladders up to reach the last distance to the wall’s top. The queensmen of Porte Oliva swarmed toward it, their little swords no bigger than needles at this distance. The battle along the crest of the wall began. Far away to the south, a column of black smoke was rising until it found some barrier of air and grew flat along the top. She couldn’t imagine what it came from, but it added to the sense of doom that covered the battlefield. The image of humanity locked in violence forever, without hope of peace.

The deep, drumlike report of the battering ram filled the air. The covered ram had reached the gate and was worrying at it like a terrier killing a rat. A shout rose, though whether from the defenders or the Antean army, she could not say. A great stone fell from the top of the wall over the gate. It struck the battering ram’s protective roof a glancing blow, but perhaps something within the structure was affected. The steady boom of its attack stopped and the mechanism began, slowly, to roll back out of the way. A second tower reached the wall. More ladders rose. As she watched, a man scrambled up toward the enemy and was cast down. He fell slowly, his arms spread, his axe turning in the air beside him. Clara watched him all the way down. When he landed, he lay still. Dead, no doubt. Like that, between one breath and another, a man died before her. It wasn’t the first slaughter she’d seen, and oddly, she found comfort in it. These were only men. This was merely violence. Terrible, yes. Useless and wasteful, yes. But also human. She could not say what part of the carnage that forgave.

A loud splintering came from the left, and the second siege engine to reach the wall was listing to the right. She couldn’t see what had broken it, but it tipped over, not quite falling, but scattering the men who had been on its height. The ladders wheeled toward the ground, but already another tower was approaching a few dozen feet down, and a third far away to the right. The defenders would have to split their attention four ways. Maybe five. She wondered if they could.

A second battering ram made its way toward the gate, but its movement was slow, and the rain of arrows and stones seemed more concentrated now, as if with a little practice the men at the top of the wall were improving their technique. The voices of the priests still rang out, louder than the clashing of swords or the screams of the soldiers. She could not make out the syllables, but she knew the sense of them.

A horn sounded, and a company of soldiers raced across the battlefield, the banner of House Flor streaming above them. She caught sight of Jorey’s banner. Banner of the Lord Marshal. It stood back from the wall, nearly as far from the violence as she was, hanging limp in the still air. She pulled her hand from Vincen’s and tapped his knee. It was a moment before he took her meaning and handed her the little spyglass. It took her a moment to find him, but then there he was, sitting high in his saddle with a spyglass of his own, surveying the battle. He looked thinner than when he’d left Camnipol. His cloak was thrown back, his jaw set, and his shoulders bent in an attitude of supreme concentration. She had seen his body take that shape since he’d been a boy too small to walk. His mind was bent entirely upon the scene before him. She would have given a great deal to know what was in his mind just then.

Vicarian sat a horse just beyond him, and his expression chilled her. His smile was wide and bright, his eyes flashing in the grimy sunlight. She had also seen this—pleasure, laughter, joy—but never in this setting. To look upon this and rejoice seemed monstrous. There, in those priestly robes, was a thing that had been her son. A thing that had eaten him and now wore his skin. She had known that, but being reminded felt like being struck. She wanted to shout to Jorey to run, to get away before the corruption spread to him.

Jorey’s attention shifted just as Vincen murmured, “Oh God.”

A second column of smoke was rising in the south, and for a moment she thought that was what Vincen had seen. Then the flames took the crippled siege tower, lighting it like a pitch-dipped torch. The fire’s soft murmur was as loud as the shrieks of the men dying within the tower. The oil that had poured down to drench it and then be set alight left a trail of flames up the soot-black side of the wall. Another of the towers stood alone, trapped, it seemed by some misfortune of the path far from the wall. The other towers had reached their places. Soldiers swarmed up the ladders, either rising to the wall through sheer will and the force of numbers or being thrown back. She couldn’t guess how many men had died before her so far that day, but there were more, and with priests there to urge them on, she had no doubt that they would either win the city or die to a man. She wondered what she could write to Paerin Clark and the bank in Northcoast. The war is a madness unto itself, and there is no ending it short of complete slaughter. The first blow has been struck, and there is no path to victory nor reconciliation nor peace.

And yet there had to be. There must, and she—God help her—had to find it. If she did not…

“You cannot fail,” she said with a sigh, “for if you do, the consequences will be unimaginably dire.”

“What, m’lady?”

On the wall, a roar went up. A thousand voices lifting together in chorus that overcame mere human sound. It was like floodwaters rushing in a gully. On the top of the wall, the battle had changed, though she couldn’t quite make sense of how. The motions of the men seemed more frantic, if that was possible. At the westernmost of the siege towers, a man panicked and ran off the wall, arms and legs flailing in the air as he fell to his death. Clara stepped forward, a thick dread growing in her throat. The crowd shouted again, a vast sound that seemed to echo more deeply than the space could explain. A cunning man’s trick, surely. Some magic to frighten them and put the army to flight.

The dragon rose up from within the city. Its wings were spread like a monarch raising hands to claim a kingdom. The great jaw swung open, showing sword-cruel teeth and the black flesh of its tongue and mouth. It screamed again, and Clara understood. The echoing roar had not been the summed voices of the clashing armies, but this one throat opened in rage. It wheeled in the air, flame pouring from its mouth. Another of the towers close against the wall caught fire, and the screams came from all around. She felt Vincen step back, but was unable herself to move. The beast was beautiful and terrible. Its movement in the air was like a dancer’s. It cried out again, and she thought there were words in the call.

Jorey’s banner fell slowly, arcing down to the earth. She turned her spyglass back, fear possessing her. When she found her son, it was only his bearer who’d fled. Jorey sat where he had been, fighting to control his mount. Other men of noble blood were beside him now. Ceruc Essian, Assin Pasillian, Myrol Caot. They wore a form of armor she had never seen before, something between scale and leather that caught the light of the burning fires. Vicarian had twisted in his saddle and was shouting at them. Jorey had eyes only for the enemy. His smile spoke less of joy than a grim and violent satisfaction.

“They knew,” Clara said. “Jorey knew. He’s ready for this.”

“I don’t think I am, Clara,” Vincen said. “We should pull back. I don’t think we’re safe here.”

Clara put up her hand, waving him to silence. By his fallen banner, Jorey lifted his fist.

The horns blew a new and unfamiliar command. The one siege tower that stood back from the rest—the one that Clara had assumed trapped by some unfortunate ground—opened, and men spilled out of it. And with them, new machines such as Clara had not seen before. Or had, but only in the carts that had made their way past her during her travels.

“What are those?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Vincen said. And then, “A trap.”