CW 23: The Green Chair

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Enjoy.

The Green Chair

For Ginny Gilder. Thank you for your friendship and support.

Our town lies on the River Wrack. We are not large or important, except that we stand at the start of the Ever Road into the Gorge of the Dead. Travellers sailing upriver to the King’s Keep sometimes stop at the riverside inn for a meal or a night with someone who doesn’t smell so much of fish, and they smile at the names. Ever. Dead. But we’re not fanciful here: we call things what they are.

There was a ship at the dock and the inn was busy tonight, most bedrooms spoken for and the tables full in the bar and the snug. A warm night; I had Anders open all the shutters and prop the doors.

“We’ll have moths in the stew,” he said. He says it every time, and every time I consider it with a raised eyebrow and respond, “Well, we’ll risk it tonight, shall we?” Once I would have found it maddening; but I am fifty-three and I find sameness restful now; even busy, moth-ish sameness.

“Right, then,” he said, as he always does. I went to fetch another keg of beer from the storeroom.

When I came back with the keg, I saw a man stopped just inside the door of the bar. In the lamplight his face was lean and sharp, his eyes shadowed as he studied the crowd. He wore black leathers and carried a traveling bag on his shoulder. I caught Anders’ attention, and jerked my head towards the door. “Go see if he wants the last room,” I said, and hefted the beer down to the end of the bar.

I tapped the keg and reached for clean cups. Close behind me, Anders said, “Caddis,” in a voice so careful that I knew something was very wrong.

I turned. Anders stood with the man in leathers, who was studying me now. His irises were brown. The part around them that should have been white was flat gray, like smoke from a marsh fire. Like the fog in the Gorge. When the Dead take you and send you back alive, you come back with those eyes.

“Caddis Stone,” he said, “they want you at the Green Chair.”

“What?” I said. The Dead can call anyone anytime they want, and they do: infants, old men, once a set of twins of whom only one returned. I just never expected them to call me.

“No,” Anders said. “there’s a mistake.”

The man ignored him. “I’m Walter Surano,” he said to me. “I’ll be taking you there. I can give you the night to make arrangements.” Then, to Anders, “I’ll take that room now, if it’s convenient.”

Anders said again, “There’s a mistake,” and his jaw was set in that particular way that meant he was ready to say it a thousand times if that was what it took to make it true.

The man’s gray eyes turned to me, and I could read the message as surely as if he’d said it: Call off your dog. It was a flat and final look, a look that ended in blood on the floor and me riding to the Gorge regardless.

“Anders,” I said. He turned to me. “Anders, give him the room,” I said gently. “If the Dead want me dead, it’s already done.”

He took a sharp breath. We call things what they are, here, but that does not always make them easier to hear.

I looked around my crowded inn. My life. The smell of hops and stew, the moths in the lamplight. The tang of the river through the open windows. The folk I lived with in good times and lean, in flood and famine. The strangers from places I loved to dream of but never dreamed to see, because my life was settled in sameness and my dreams did not include doing.

We call it the Ever Road because it leads to Ever Dead or Ever Changed. But when the Dead call you to sit in the Green Chair and be judged, you have to go. So I went back to my rooms and began to set my affairs in order.