Plague: After the Water
by M. Frost
part 1
The Wolflord calls her Sorrow, but she’s not some common grief. She’s the kind of sorrow you think about when you see a lone tree, misshapen by years of wind, worn but still standing.
Vera calls her the ghost. The Wolflord finally tells her not to. Superstition perhaps, or maybe he likes the name he gave her best, but I hear the mage lady slip. I correct her once, and Vera — you have to understand — has demons of her own. She just looks at me with these chilling eyes and I hold up my hands.
“Whoa, I didn’t mean anything by it.” I like her, but that lady could kill you with a look.
I suppose they have Sorrow right: haunted and sad. Then she throws me off, laughs out loud when I make one of my jokes, then looks around as if she’s not sure where that came from, as if she had forgotten what laughter was until that moment. But, dear gods, when Sorrow laughs, I fall in love.
I tell Jolic. He just shakes his head the way he does when I say something dumb. “You don’t even know what that word means. Who could love any woman as ugly as she is?” He says it in a whisper on account of her scars.
The Wolflord told everyone not to stare too close at the scars. Of course it’s hard; there’s not a length of her not covered with them. They look painful, which catches your eye for true. Not in some throbbing, skin-peeling way like my friend Erris did after he went back into his burning barn after Rosebud that summer. If anything, her scars look cold, white and hard, ridged almost. Sometimes I think they’re beautiful in the way they weave over her skin.
Jolic said he thinks someone etched her to match her bow. Gods, that’s a tortured beauty, too.
Sometimes I hate the scars. They get under my skin if I see them unprepared, like when she lifted that lamp up suddenly the other night and her ruined face came out at me through the dark. I wanted to scratch at my own cheeks.
Jolic laughs at me when the Wolflord pulls me aside, tells me I’m to go with Sorrow, Piern and Galwine — couriers, you know — for a package down near Jendarth. Jolic bats his eyes. “Going to propose to your lady-love?”
I punch him good. My love isn’t like that and, besides, Sorrow’s not that kind of lady.
He shakes his head at me like I’m simple. “Going to find us a wineskin,” he says. “I’ve got courier duty tomorrow, too.”
“With us?” I ask.
He shrugs. “No, some place upcoast.”
I’m leaving Jolic when I hear voices from the Wolflord’s tent. It’s late and we’re leaving for the Facing Cities tomorrow. There’s been a lot of talk that we have a traitor among us. Besides, I don’t know much about our mission — that’s for Galwine and Sorrow. I assume Piern and I are just along for our eyes, scouts the both of us. So anyway I stop to listen, thinking this is the other two getting inside information.
No luck there. I hear Vera’s voice, low and muffled, like she’s got something wrapped around her mouth. I creep closer where I can hear better.
“I need you here, Vera,” the Wolflord says.
She answers, “I don’t think you should send Sorrow. She’s unstable.”
Unstable? I think. I dunno about that. She’s pretty even-headed, especially in a fight. I’ve never seen her lose her temper, not once, and I keep a count.
So the Wolflord sighs long, and I can almost see him shake his head. “I trust her, Vera, more than I trust you right now. Is that what this is about? That I’m not sending you?”
Vera stops. It’s like I can hear her thinking. “No,” she says real quiet.
I would have heard more, but then a hand lands over my mouth. Good thing too or I would have yelled for sure. It’s Jolic, and he thumps me hard and holds up the wineskin.
I wasn’t all that interested in what they were talking about anyway.
* * *
I found out more the next morning. The Wolflord walks out with us well away from the camp before telling us. I wonder if the talk about a traitor might be true. We usually get orders in his tent, not out away from everyone where we can’t be overheard.
We’re to meet the envoy in ten days. Our usual courier has been delayed. His eyes shift and I guess delayed probably means dead. I wonder how he figured it so fast, but that’s the Wolflord for you.
There are two possible meeting points, so he has us split up. Piern and Galwine will take the first site on the Jendarthi side, Sorrow and I, the second on our side of the city. He unfolds a map and points to two spots. I study ours closely until I have it for true. Then, because I can, I learn the other one. I’ve been to the Facing Cities before. Sorrow hasn’t, and not many of the other scouts have either, so now I know why he picked me.
Ten days is pretty short timing, so we take horses. Sorrow rides like she was born to it, but me, I can feel my spine rattling somewhere in my head after two steps. After a bit, she takes pity on me and ponies my horse along. But she can’t do something nice for free and she gives me this look as if my horse pulling away to chew grass every two steps was my fault.
We split with Galwine and Piern seven days out. There’s a ferry on the river they can take into Jendarth and come to the city from the south so as they don’t have to go through the Ithirian side and over the bridge with all the tradestops. Sorrow’s never chatty, but she gets all quiet after they leave. I try a couple of jokes, but she doesn’t even break a smile.
She’s looking around, pretty intense, and finally turns us off the road. I know her well enough not to ask, but my curiosity is tested when she stops by this slow, muddy creek. She bends over the clay of the bank and starts rubbing it onto herself like she’s found the cure for warts. Finally it hits me what she’s doing. I’m used to the scars, but the guards at the city walls wouldn’t be too keen on them.
She’s smart, Sorrow is.
Sure enough, she was right to worry about the guards. I count them: five, three more than the last time I was here. They’re stopping everyone, and my ears ring with the buzz around us. I can tell Sorrow is listening too. She’s got her cloak up over her face, but there’s this tension to her head that gives her away. I pick through the babble and what I hear makes me shiver to my boots.
Stinking plague. Didn’t catch where, upcoast in Ithiria, some small village. No wonder there are more guards. I wonder for a moment about Jolic. He says upcoast somewhere, and it hits me a little in the chest. I glance at Sorrow, but she shakes her head. The Wolflord wouldn’t have told her about Jolic. I guess she’s thinking they’ll check her for sure.
I’m thinking about plague in a city like this. I’ve seen it in villages, half the children dead by the third day, cast out to rot beside the doors. In a city, it’d be worse than fire, spreading fast. I get the urge to turn around and walk away, mission or no mission, but then I wonder what Sorrow would think of me. I know that would be worse somehow.
It’s our turn. “No, sir, I haven’t been north, no villages; no, sir.” Sorrow nods agreement. The guard points to her, grunts. Remove her cloak.
The voice I hear from Sorrow I’ve never heard before. It’s thin, girlish almost. Until that moment, I never thought of her as that kind of a lady.
“I’m burned,” she says, all tremulous, looking down at the ground. “Horribly burned.” She lifts her sleeve. The mud has dried and looks cracked and old, skin that’s been through more than years. “Pray do not make me show my face, here with so many people around. I’ve no plague, I assure you.”
The guard, he looks at her like he’s got a daughter just like her, all soft eyes and sympathy. He nods and in we go. Clever indeed.
I’ve got a vague idea where the meeting point is, some pub called the Dirty Pearl down in the common trade district. I hit a street I know and I’m off, Sorrow tapping behind me. We’re a day early and Sorrow doesn’t want us haunting the Pearl in case there’s anyone casing it out. She’s as paranoid as the Wolflord, but I’ve grown to like that. After all that business with the League on our tails last summer, I do indeed like caution. Don’t want to bump into any of those mages after dark.
We find another tavern — this one is named the Drowned Sailor — closer to the river. I slip out at night and watch it flow past, muddy and deep, walled on each side and bounded with big stones. I laugh to myself. “You can no sooner cage a river than a dragon,” I say. The city men, they’re fooling themselves, feeling safe with their walls and stone.
Sorrow hits the square with me the next morning. Still early, we’ve nothing better to do. There’s a crowd lined up at the well. The Facing Cities are odd this way. Don’t know how they do it, but each district has its own well. Sweet and cold, even though the river’s right there and you’d expect the wells to run dirty with river water. I say it’s magic, but someone told me once, “No, it’s good engineering.”
At the time, I pretended to understand the word and just nodded at the man who tried to explain it to me. I know magic when I see it.
I get in line for the well because neither Sorrow nor I liked the look of the klaus they set us this morning, green and thick as porridge. Me, I was ready for something cool and long.
Sorrow gets this funny look, then pulls me out of line. She’s staring at the well like it did something to offend her.
“Let’s find some wine,” she says. “I don’t want to wait.”
I’ve never known Sorrow to hit the cups any earlier than sundown, and even then, not that hard. But she’s got this look on her face that tells me I’d better not argue. We find a quiet, high-class inn and Sorrow passes over silver for the best stuff in the house, straight from the bottle. No watered wine for her, I think. I wonder where she got enough silver to waste it on wine, but I don’t ask.
Sorrow looks at me as if she can read my mind. “I’ve heard you shouldn’t drink the water with plague around.” I can see the smile on her face, like she’s trying to make a joke, but her eyes are dead serious.
Later, I blame her for cursing us, as if by saying the word she conjures it from the air. The news comes around noon. The district closed by quarantine, some edict they read from barriers they assemble out of scrapwood and soldiers.
“We’re stuck.” Sorrow shrugs. “Guess the courier won’t make it in. I hope Galwine and Piern catch up with him.”
I tell you, I stare at her for a long second. She sounds so flippant, as if the quarantine were just some delay, that I think she must be mad. I think about what Vera said. Unstable.
Then I catch her eye and I see my fear reflected in them. Which comforts me.
* * *
The body in front of us does not comfort me.
I usually avoid dead bodies, bodies dead of plague in particular. But Sorrow seems fascinated. I think it must be the first plague victim she’s seen, the way she studies it without touching, leaning close enough in the dusk to see the dark marks on the arms, the way the eyes are focused on some point beyond us, the pupils small and round.
I make a warding gesture, then hiss, “Let’s go, please, Sorrow?”
She stands, looks a last time at the old woman hunched into the doorframe, then walks away without turning back.
I turn around a couple of times. I tell myself I’m checking my backtrail, but what I’m really checking is to make sure the body is still there, just where we found it. Call it superstition, but I’ve heard enough tales of the dead walking to feel uncomfortable around any body not firmly nailed inside a coffin.
Then I see him.
I know it’s him, I know him as well as anyone — the way he walks with a little hitch every other step on account of an old injury, the funny hunch to his left shoulder, brown hair cut short as moss — Jolic. I don’t have time to call to Sorrow. She’s well ahead of me. No good to shout. The Wolflord told us never to draw attention to ourselves that way.
I hesitate for a second, then slip away from Sorrow toward the point where my friend turned the corner.
He’s in a hurry and he’s trying to keep quiet about it, flitting from shadow to shadow like we’re trained to do. It’s dusk, so he hides easy, but tailing is what I do best. I’m behind a cart the one time he casts over his shoulder. He doesn’t see me and he turns back so quick I don’t have the chance to catch his eye.
How he does it, I’m not sure, but next thing I know, I’ve followed him through a series of walled courtyards, through a gate miraculously unlocked, and down through a narrow alley angling steeply to the river. We emerge underneath one of the bridges, and I realize with a start that we’ve left the district. Slipped the quarantine entirely. He jogs along the moon-pierced river toward the sea.
Copyright © 2025 by M. Frost
