Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

“The food,” Abatha said bitterly. “They took the food. That was everything for the next week. How’m I going to feed everybody now?”

“Are you hurt?” Clara asked, clasping at her arm. As long as she kept her palm pressed against the blood, she didn’t have to see how deep the cut had gone. Better to tend to Abatha before that.

“Hurt?” Abatha said, as if the word were one she’d heard before but never used. “They took the food.”

“Vincen?” Clara called. “Are you all right?”

There was no answer. Clara felt her heart go tight. The pain of her arm faded to nothing as she rose to her feet, floating, it seemed into the ruined kitchen. The bench by the little table lay on its side. The pale bodies of dried beans were scattered across the dark planks of the floor. Vincen sat with his back against a cabinet, his sword in his hand. As Clara watched, he heaved a breath, and then another. His gaze struggled its way into focus, and he frowned.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

“Vincen?” Clara said, kneeling at his side. Behind her, Abatha stood in the doorway. “Are you well? Can you walk?”

He lifted his left hand as if he meant to scratch his nose. The fingers were black with blood and gore. Clara heard herself gasp.

“Don’t believe so, m’lady,” he said, and then, more softly, “Oh dear.”

Abatha’s hand tugged at her shoulder, pulled Clara back and up. Vincen couldn’t die. It was unthinkable. He was young and healthy and he had no enemies. And he was in love with her, and she, God help her, was in love with him, and he couldn’t—could not —die stupidly in a fight over ham. Clara’s breath came in sips and gasps. The world seemed to narrow. Abatha was saying something, and shaking her while she spoke. Clara tried to bring her mind back, but it was slow, difficult work.

“It’s three streets to the east, two to the north,” Abatha said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

“Three east,” Clara said. “Two north.”

“It’s a low house. Green with a red roof.”

“Three east, two north. Green with a red roof.”

“The cunning man’s named Hoban.”

Clara nodded. Of course. A cunning man. They needed a cunning man. She would go and get one.

“Three east, two north. Green with red. Ossit.”

“Not Ossit. Hoban.”

“Hoban,” Clara said. “I’ll be back. Don’t let him die while I’m gone.”

“Wait!” Abatha said, shrugging out of her house robe and holding it out. “Take this. Y’ain’t decent.”

Clara looked down at herself. The simple sleeping shift was torn and soaked down one side in blood. What a sight that would be. Lady Kalliam half naked and bloody running through the streets before dawn. She would have done it without a second thought.

The air in the streets felt cool against her skin, the rough cobbles scraped at her bare feet. The half moon dodged between rooftops, here and gone and back again, as she ran. Three streets to the east, then turning left into a thin passage hardly more than an alley that stank of shit and piss and old blood gone to rot. She’d feared that in the dim light she might not be able to make out the colors, but the green was the green of new grass and the red almost crimson. Even by moonlight, there could be no mistake. Clara hopped up the single step and hammered on the door until a huge First-blood man with a greying beard to his navel and strange tattoos up both of his arms answered her. His accent spoke of Stollbourne and perhaps cities even farther to the west. She had to assure him twice that she wasn’t the one in need of help, but once he understood, he came quickly.

Abatha had laid Vincen out on the kitchen table like a body being prepared for his funeral. His skin looked like wax, and webs of dark blood marred him. His eyes were closed and his mouth drawn back in a grimace of pain and determination. The greatest wound was in his side, just below his lowest rib, and the skin there hung loose and open. The cunning man crouched, placing his palm over the injury, closing his eyes and murmuring prayers and invocations that seemed to echo in a space larger than the kitchen.

With the violence done, other occupants of the boarding house began to creep out. The Southling girl who always ate by herself. Two Firstblood workmen who’d just come to Camnipol from the north and taken a room together. They haunted the shadows, drawn to the blood like flies. Abatha’s cold gaze kept them at bay, and Clara ignored them. The cut on her own arm had begun to hurt again, but she paid it little attention.

Without warning, Vincen howled. Light poured from his mouth and nose, from the cuts in his skin. His back arched until only his toes and the top of his head were touching the table. Clara cried out in alarm, but as quickly as it had come, it was over. The cunning man sat heavily on the bench. The terrible wound in Vincen’s side was still there, but instead of blood, a thin, milky fluid ran from it. The kitchen filled with the smell of onions.

“He will live,” the cunning man said. “He will be weak for a time, but this is not the wound that kills him.”

“Thank you,” Clara said. Her vision went wet and blurry. “Thank you so much.”

“Now. Will you let me see to that arm?”

Clara looked down. Fresh blood was still sheeting down to her wrist. When she moved, the living muscle shifted and twitched. She felt dizzy.

“If you would,” she said. “That would be very kind.”

The first light of dawn pressed at the windows as Abatha counted coins into the cunning man’s hand. The boarders who hadn’t made their way out already began to appear, and Abatha enlisted three of the strongest to carry Vincen to his room while she put together something edible from the ruins of her kitchen. Clara went with Vincen, and when the others left, she remained with him, watching him sleep. The reassuring rise and fall of his breast. The calm in his face. Her own skin itched where the cunning man’s words and herbs had knit it closed, and she scratched at it idly.

He was so young, and yet older than her youngest son. Older than she had been when she’d married Dawson and become the Baroness of Osterling Fells. There were scars on his body, testaments to the life of a huntsman. And new ones now. She remembered the half-kiss she’d given him, the roughness of his stubble against her lips. The softness of his mouth. She let herself weep quietly without any particular sense of grief. Exhaustion and the aftermath of violence were surely enough to justify a few tears.

She heard Abatha’s steps long before the woman appeared. She’d put on clothes and carried a carved wooden bowl of wheat mash that she held out to Clara. It tasted sweet and rich and comforting.

“How is he?” Abatha asked, nodding to her cousin unconscious on his bed.

“Well, I believe,” Clara said. “I don’t know.”

Abatha nodded and looked down at her feet. Her lips moved, practicing some words or thoughts. When she looked up again, her expression was hard.

“This is your fault, you know.”

Clara wouldn’t have been more surprised if the woman had spat out a snake.

“Excuse me?” she said. “If I’d stayed in my room, you would both have—”

“I told him we had to leave,” Abatha said. “I told him that food was coming short, and people were going to get desperate. Get mean. Get out of the city, I told him. Close up the house and good riddance to it. There’ll be more than enough work needs doing on the farm. And he’d have gone too, if it weren’t for you and your letters, whatever they are.”

Clara’s lips pressed thin. The sudden mixture of guilt for keeping Vincen in harm’s way, annoyance that he had spoken to Abatha about her work, and outrage that she should be asked to carry the responsibility for the actions of thugs she didn’t even know confused her into silence.