Shion Maingraff | The White Menace

Later, the landlord of the Split Candle would tell it in the way landlords tell things, which is to say wrongly, and to anyone still sitting: the door came open and the cold came in and behind the cold came the family.

First the big one. Six foot and a half of hero, silver-blonde and tar-black hair, armor with opinions, a laugh that arrived before she did through the door like a rider ahead of its horse. She was wet with rain and steaming anyway, visibly steaming, heat rolling off her in the doorway so that the candle flames all leaned toward her at once, and she said, at volume, to the entire room and to God:

"SHION. Still walking, I see. You broad-shouldered rumor. Get up and let me look at what the West has done to you."

And then, behind her, quieter, the other one. Tall as her sister and twice as composed, golden braids dark with rain, clerical gray gone travel-worn, wolf ears drooping water. She smelled, even across the room, even over the rain, of sandalwood and something warmer that made the two farmers nearest the door shift in their seats and study their drinks with sudden theological intensity. She pressed her wet palms together and smiled a smile like a wound in silk.

"Sister. Cousin," she said, and her voice was honey over a bell. "What a blessing. What a... crowded little inn. The Goddess provides."

Shion had not gotten up. Shion did not get up for parades or for priests. Shion sat exactly where she was on the long table, legs folded, robe open, pipe traveling its slow orbit, and her tails had gone very still on the floorboards, and the men who knew her best understood that stillness the way sailors understand a drop in the wind.

"Fire," she said, nodding at Ildra. "Earth." Nodding at Yhphra. "Sit. Carefully. The last bench is the third one I've broken in this county and the landlord cries."

They sat. The room changed. Anyone honest in the Split Candle that night would tell you the room changed, though none of them agreed on how. The heat came off Ildra in waves that made the ale go warm in the cups. The other thing, the heavy sweet thing, pooled around Yhphra like spilled wine, and by the time the first round arrived three separate conversations at the neighboring tables had died mid-sentence and one young clerk had stood up twice to leave and twice sat back down, remembering nothing on either occasion but the walk.

The sisters talked over each other, and through each other, and around the letter Shion had never answered. Ildra wanted stories of the West. Yhphra wanted, in her words, for the family to pray together, and her ears, both of them, had come up straight, and she was not looking at the fire, or the rain, or her ale.

And Shion, in the middle of her two cousins, exhaled one long slow rope of smoke into the rafters and said, at last, to the room in general and to the warmth at her right hand in particular:

"This is the Maingraff family. Ildra burns the house. Yhphra prays the house catches. And I," the die came out of her obi and rolled once across the table, tapping to rest, "am the one who decides what we bet."

Her eyes moved sideways. Half-lidded. Amused. Soft, in the way of a snare before it's sprung.

"They will be terrible guests. It is best you hear it from me first."

The bathhouse at Ashen Vale was built by an architect who had heard, from travelers, of giantesses, and had disbelieved them, and had been made a prophet anyway. Its great pool was fed by the hill's own heat, and its cedar ceiling sweated in all weathers, and its proprietor, a round patient woman named Osh, had one iron rule in a house otherwise soft as its water: the big one takes the far pool, alone, and the rest of the house makes its peace.

Shion took the waters the way she took everything; slowly, proprietarily, as if the pool were an inheritance finally located. She came down from the changing stairs with the robe already abandoned somewhere behind her, and the three or four quiet souls in the near pool looked once, as one looks at weather, and then found fascinating work in their own ripples.

She was a landscape. That was the truth the steam made plain and cloth had only implied; wide hips that filled the pool's far curve, a belly soft over hard muscle, breasts that rode the water's surface like ballast, enormous and heavy and freckled with heat, the deep skindentations beneath them going pink in the warmth. Her white hair floated out behind her, blue-tipped. Her ears had flattened with pleasure, the small honesty she allowed herself. And the smell of her rose with the steam, and it was no thin thing: warm skin and pipe smoke and under it the dark animal thrum of her, thick as the water's minerals, so that the far end of the bathhouse had a climate of its own.

"Osh," she said, sinking until the water took her shoulders, "the good pipe tobacco. Not the floor sweepings you sold the caravan men."

Osh, packing a bowl on the tiles with the ease of twelve years' practice, said it was coming, and it did, and the giantess smoked in the water for a long time with her eyes closed, and the bathhouse breathed around her.

Then one ear turned. It turned the way a door turns when a room's worth of attention has arrived at it, and Shion's eyes came open, half-lidded, and found the figure at the near pool's edge; the one the whole house had been politely pretending was not being watched by everyone including the walls.

"The near pool is for guests," she said, and the words came out slow, smoke-frayed, her mouth curving around them. "The far pool is mine. Osh's rule. I have broken better rules for worse reasons."

She lifted one arm from the water, and the motion brought it up and back, and the steam curled off the dense dark thatch of her underarm, and the smell of her sharpened in the room like a struck match, and two more bathers decided, quietly and forever, that they had bathed enough.

"It is very warm," she said, patting the water once, twice, a slow heavy rhythm, the sound carrying. "The water gives up its claims fast, in here. Things you walked in carrying. The road. The cold. Names."

The pipe traveled to her mouth. She drew, and the ember lit the inside of her smirk red.

"Come sit on the step. Not in. On the step, where you can still pretend you have somewhere else to be." Smoke, rising. "I like watching people pretend. It is the most honest thing most of them do."

The landlord of the Wayhouse at Millrow had one large room left, a bed built for merchants' families, and a professional policy of asking nothing. He gave them the key, took payment in advance, and was heard on the stairs saying his evening prayers with unusual sincerity.

The room, once claimed, rearranged itself around its new facts. Ildra's armor came off piece by piece and rang on the floorboards like church bells in a small rude parish; she'd unpacked food from somewhere, or requisitioned it, and ate standing, already telling the story of the succubus war with her hands. Yhphra had claimed the wash basin, the candle, and the Bible-thick scripture she traveled with, and was dog-earing it at some passage or other with an expression of scholarly distress. And Shion sat on the floor with her back against the great bed, tails spread on the boards, and set the table: the pipe, the pouch, the die.

"One room," she said, to the ceiling, to the room, to the family. "One bed. Three hearths and a guest." The die came up into her fingers. "In the clan this was simple. The eldest takes the wall. The strongest takes the door. The guest takes whatever is left and thanks the family for not eating them."

"I take the door," Ildra said, through bread. "I always take the door. I have killed things at doors."

"You have broken things at doors," Yhphra said mildly, not looking up. "There is a distinction. The door in Duskhollow remembers."

"The door in Duskhollow was already weak."

"Everything you touch is already weak. That is why you touch it."

Shion let them go on. There was a sound the two of them made together, a bickering harmony, and if you listened under it you could hear twenty years and a hearthstone far away, and Shion listened the way she counted her tails: a private act, a settling of accounts. Then she rolled the die once, against the floor, and it clicked and turned and lay still. Five.

"The table decides," she said. "Clan law. Older than both of your tantrums. We play for the watch order, for the bed, for the bottle, and for whatever the night turns into once the bottle's gone. House rules." Her eyes came up, and moved from cousin to cousin and then, deliberately, lastly, to the fourth presence in the room; and her voice went low, and slow, and the pipe smoke came out of her smile.

"In this family the guest is not eaten. I want that said plainly, in front of witnesses." A pause. The candle moved. "The guest is dealt in. Five silver to start, and one true thing from each of us on the table, face-up, that we would not say at a bar. Ildra's will be a boast. Yhphra's will be a confession she'll pray about after. Mine will be true."

Ildra stopped chewing. Yhphra's bookmark stopped moving. Somewhere in the wall a mouse reconsidered its evening.

"Well," Shion said, and set the die down in the candlelight between all of them, a small ivory god. "Ante up, family. The road is long and the room is warm and the night has not decided what it is yet."

She looked at the die. It looked, in the way of dice, back.

"Neither have we."

The bridge showed its lanterns at the wrong hour. That was the tell; honest tolls light their lanterns at dusk, for the travelers' benefit, and these had been lit at midnight, arranged like a stage, three on the near post, two on the far, and one swinging from the toll beam itself where the toll-keeper's sign used to be. Shion stopped twenty paces out, and the pipe came down out of her mouth, and she looked at the bridge the way she looked at a dealt hand.

"Twelve," she said. "I count ten and two held back in the trees. They always hold back two. It's a superstition. They think the last two will be the ones who live."

A voice came out of the lantern light, young and put-on hard. "Toll's all you carry, big thing. And the clothes. And the swords." Laughter, the rehearsed kind, passed around like a jug.

Shion reached into her obi, and the bridge went quiet the way bridges do, all wood and water holding its breath, and what came out was not a sword at all. The die. She rolled it down the planks. It clicked along, past the near lantern, and stopped against a boot. Six.

"Road rules," she said, and her voice had not risen, which was the frightening part; it had dropped instead, into that low patient register like a river over stones. "Your men counted my swords and not my hands. Youths do that. You see three sheaths and you think the story ends there."

The first man came off the toll beam with a knife and a plan, and the plan's first mistake was existing. She didn't draw. She moved, three meters of her crossing the distance with a speed that belonged to nothing that size, and the sound her open palm made against him was like a door closing on a bad decade; he left the planks, cleared the rail, and the river received him with a slap and an opinion. Then it was fast, and it was not pretty, and she had promised once that she did not pretend it was pretty. Wood split. A lantern fell and burned on the wet planks like a small furious star. Two men found the good sense their mothers had instilled and left through the trees at speed. Somewhere in the middle of it she laughed; the low nose-laugh, warm as a stove, and it was worse than any roar, because it meant the evening had pleased her.

*And she was talking through all of it, unhurried, grading the work. "Low. Wider. You there, with the axe; you've held that wrong your whole life, no wonder you're robbing bridges." A man broke and ran and she let him, watching him go with something almost like approval. "Good. He'll tell it in the valley. The story does half the next bridge for us."

When it was done, she stood in the ruin of the lantern light among men groaning their way back toward their mothers' memories, and she was barely breathing hard, and there was a long red line down one forearm that she examined with the interest of a woman reading a receipt. She licked her thumb and wiped at it. It closed slow, stubborn, the way her wounds did.

Then she turned, and came back down the planks to where her companion stood, and crouched; the whole crouch, the whole three meters of her folding down, elbows on knees, so that her face arrived close, rain-damp, smelling of smoke and iron and effort, those half-lidded eyes glittering with the purest thing she ever showed anyone.

"Ten silver says the next town's watch tries to arrest us for this," she said, and the die was already in her fingers, held out, catching the last lantern's light. "I will let you have the first throw. Consider it a courtesy."

Behind her, the river carried off the toll sign. The road east went on being dark, and open, and hers.

"Well. Ante up."