The Dragon's Path

Marcus

Fire and blood. Merian shrieked her pain and fear and indignation as only a child could blend them. Her eyes were fixed on him, her arms reaching out. Marcus fought his paralysis, forced his arms to reach for her, and in moving them, woke himself.

The screams of the dead lingered in the cool air as he lifted himself up, still expecting in his half-dream to see the wheat fields and high, stately windmills of Ellis. Instead, the wide star-crowded sky of Birancour arched above him, the looming darkness of the mountains behind him to the east without even the suggestion of dawn. The burning smell of memory gave way to the sweet, astringent scent of ice lily and the distant presentiment of salt that was the sea.

He lay back in his bedroll and waited for the dream to fade. By long habit, he attended to his body. The constricting tightness in his throat eased first, then in his chest. The gut-punch ache in his belly faded slowly and vanished. Soon there was only the permanent hollow beneath his ribs, and he knew it was safe to stand.

They were battle scars. Some men lost a leg or a hand. Some men lost their eyes. Marcus had lost a family. And just as old soldiers knew when rain was coming from the ache of healed bones, he suffered now. It didn’t mean anything. It was just his own private bad weather, and like bad weather, it would pass. It was only for the moment that the dreams were getting worse.

The caravan slept, carters and mules both, in the deep night. The watch fire glittered on the hillside above him, no brighter than a star, but orange instead of blue. Marcus made his way toward it. The dry grass hushed against his boots and field mice skittered away. Yardem Hane sat silhouetted by the small fire, back turned to keep the light from blunting his eyes. Beside him sat a less familiar form. Marcus moved close enough to make out their words.

“The shape of a soul?” Master Kit asked. “I think I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Just that. A soul has a shape,” Yardem said. His wide hands patted the air in front of him. “And fate is formed by it. Whatever the world delivers to you, the shape of your soul determines what you do with it, and the actions you take make your destiny.”

Marcus turned his foot, scraping the ground loud enough to announce himself.

“Morning, Captain,” Yardem said without turning to look.

“You filling our cunning man’s head with your superstitious hairwash?”

“I am, sir.”

“Be careful, Kit,” Marcus said, walking into the dim circle of light. “Yardem used to be a priest, you know.”

Master Kit’s eyebrows rose and he looked his question from Marcus to Yardem. The Tralgu shrugged eloquently.

“Ended poorly,” Yardem said.

“It’s not a faith I’d heard of before,” Master Kit said. “I have to say I find the ideas fascinating. What shape is your own soul?”

“I’ve never seen my soul,” Yardem said.

Marcus sat. The warmth of the fire touched his back. High above them, a falling star streaked from east to west, fading almost before Marcus saw it. The silence felt suddenly awkward.

“Go ahead,” Marcus said. “Tell him if you want to.”

“Tell me what?” Master Kit asked.

“I have seen the captain’s. I was at Wodford the day of the battle. The captain rode by, taking count of the troop, and… I saw it.”

“And what shape was it?” Master Kit asked

“A circle standing on its edge,” Yardem said.

“What did you take that to mean?”

“That he rises when brought low and falls when placed high,” Yardem said.

“He needed magical visions to see that,” Marcus said. “Most people just take it as given.”

“But always?” Master Kit said. “Surely if God wanted to change the shape of a man’s soul—”

“I’ve never seen God,” Yardem said.

“But you believe in him,” Master Kit said.

“I’m reserving judgment,” Yardem said. Master Kit considered that.

“And what about you, Captain?” he asked. “Stories are you were a pious man once.”

“I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said.

“Charity toward whom?”

“Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,” Marcus said. “Do we have any food left?”

The dawn crept in softly, the outline of the mountains to the east growing clearer against the stars, then the few finger-thin clouds began to glow pink and gold and light seemed to come from nowhere, to rise up from the earth like a mist. The carts changed from near-invisible hulks to wood and iron. Pot metal clanked from across the camp as the caravan master’s wife began cooking the morning’s mash of stewed grain and honeyed pork. The landscape changed from endless featureless darkness to hills and trees, scrub and stream. Yardem ran the guards through their morning drills while Marcus walked through the camp and pretended there was no cart in the caravan he cared about more than another.

The girl, Cithrin, followed the same routine as the others. She cared for her mules, she ate her food, she scraped the mud out of her axle holes. If she needed help, she asked Opal or Master Kit. Never the caravan master, never Marcus himself. But never Sandr either, and the boy had been avoiding her like his life depended on it, so that was for the best. Marcus watched her without being obvious. She’d gotten better since they’d left Vanai. Since they’d left Bellin, for that. But there were dark pouches under her eyes and the awkwardness of exhaustion in her movements.

Marcus found the caravan master squatting beside the lead cart, a wide scroll of inked parchment on the dirt before him: a map of south Birancour probably centuries out of date, but it would still show where the dragon’s roads were. His wife, breakfast duties finished, was putting their team in harness.

“Day,” the caravan master said. “Day and a half at most, and we’ll get onto a real road again.”

“That’s good.”

“Another three, and we’ll be in Porte Oliva. You’ve been there before?”

“A time or two,” Marcus said. “It’s a good winter port. Doesn’t get too cold. The queen’s governor isn’t too heavy a tax hand.”

“We’ll stop there, then.”

“Roads should be clear to Carse by early spring,” Marcus said.

“Not for me,” the caravan master said, folding the map. “We reach Porte Oliva, and we’re done. The ’van stops there.”

Marcus frowned and crossed his arms.

“There are some problems with that,” he said. “The job is to see all this to Carse.”

“Your job is to protect the caravan,” the Timzinae said. “Mine is to say where it goes and when it stops. Porte Oliva has a market. Road trade to Cabral and Herez, not to mention the rest of the cities in Birancour. Ships to Lyoniea, and the blue-water trade to Far Syramys. The cargo I was contracted to haul will sell well enough there.”

“The cargo you were contracted for,” Marcus repeated, turning the words over like they tasted wrong.

“Is there something else I should care about?” The caravan master’s chin jutted forward. “You’re worried I might inconvenience the smuggler?”

“Last I heard, the Medean bank doesn’t trade in Birancour,” Marcus said. “You’ll be sitting that girl on a pile of money high as a tree with nothing to protect her. Might as well hang a sign on her neck.”

The ’van master tossed his folded map on the seat of his cart and began hauling himself up beside it. His wife blinked a silent apology to Marcus and looked away.

“That girl and her drinking and smuggling and sinning with your guardsmen can watch out for herself,” the ’van master said. “We were blind lucky with that Antean bastard. There’s no reason to expect we’ll be as fortunate next time.”

And there will be a next time, he didn’t say. He didn’t need to.

“If you take my advice,” the ’van master went on, “you’ll take your fee, turn your horse, and ride away from that girl until she’s less than a memory. People like that are only trouble.”

Marcus bristled.

“What kind of people do you mean?”

“Bankers,” the ’van master said, and spat.

Porte Oliva nestled on a land spur that pressed out into a wide, shallow bay. Even at low tide, the sea protected her on three sides. Reefs and sandbars made the approach from the ocean dangerous enough that local boatmen could earn their living guiding ships from the deep ocean safely into port and then out again. In the thousand years since its foundation, the city had never been taken by force, though twice it had been seduced. The dragon’s road led to it, the green pathway curving up over hills long since washed away, so that the carts traveled across the tops of wide-sloping arches as the ground dropped away beneath them.

As they drew nearer the city, the road became more crowded. Where Vanai had been rich with the black-chitined Timzinae, the crowd here showed the pale, ethereal faces of Cinnae and the oily, short, bead-adorned fur of Kurtadam in greater numbers even than Firstblood. The press of carts and bodies thickened, and Marcus started to see swordsmen in with copper torcs and the green and gold of Birancour. Queensmen. The guardians of the city, though the queen herself kept to the greater cities of Sara-su-mar and Porte Silena in the north. Marcus watched the caravan master approach one of the older queensmen, lean forward as if to speak above the chirr and murmur of the crowd. A few coins traded hands, and without any obvious change, the carts soon found themselves moving faster than before, passing the foot traffic and hand barrows. Marcus knew they had reached the Porte Oliva proper when the beggars and mendicants appeared.

Please, my lord, I have a child.

My husband is a sailor. His ship is three months late, and there’s no money for food.

God tells us to be generous.

Marcus paced alongside the carts, ignoring the words and gestures, watching for the thieves and cutpurses who always lived in crowds like these. The other guards followed his example, and likely knew more about sleight of hand than he did. It was odd how well suited the players were to every part of guarding a ’van besides the actual guard duty. He reached the last cart and turned to start for the front again. Three carts ahead, Master Kit leaned down and pressed a coin into an old man’s hand.

“Don’t encourage them,” Marcus called. “They’re all liars.”

“Not all, Captain,” Kit called back with a grin. “Only most.”

He passed the wool cart where the smuggler girl, still in her rough carter’s clothes, drove her team. Put beside the full-blood Cinnae on the road, it was easier to see her as something besides a frail Firstblood girl. Her hair wasn’t as fine as theirs, her features were thicker, her skin had more color, but the resemblance was there. She noticed him watching her, and tried out a smile. He ignored her with the same studied intention as the beggars, and for similar reasons. Riding on, the sense of anticipation and dread sat in his gut. The conversation would come, and it would be today, and the wise thing—the right thing, the thing that would let his nightmares fade again—was to refuse the girl. At the lead cart, Yardem met his gaze impassively.

Once, centuries before, the city had ended at the great stone embattlements. Now the towering white stone walls were in the middle of a busy market quarter. Fishmongers shouted out their catch on the north side of the arched tunnel that led to the inner city, and after they passed through, indistinguishable men and women called out the same fish. The architecture of war slept in the middle of a living community like a great hunting cat torpid from the kill. Beyond it, the dragon’s road widened and stopped at a huge open square.

The crowd pressed here as thick as they had on the road. A great marble temple high as five men standing one atop the other loomed on the eastern end, the governor’s palace of red brick and colored glass on the west. God’s voice and the law’s arm, twin powers of the throne. And between them, scattered through the square, wooden platforms rose with prisoners suffering their punishments. A Kurtadam man with rheumy eyes and severed hands held a sign between his stumps announcing himself a thief. A Firstblood woman smeared in shit and offal sat under the carved wooden symbol of a procuress. Three Cinnae men hung dead from a gallows, flies darkening the soft flesh around their eyes; a murderer, a rapist, and a child-user respectively. Together, the platforms served as a short, effective introduction to the local laws.

The caravan master left them standing for the better part of an hour as he vanished into the governor’s palace, returning with small stone figures on leather thongs to place on the carts as proof the road taxes had been paid. With a shout, he led them down a side road of hard, pale brick to the yard.

Journey’s end. Marcus made his way to the front cart. The caravan master had a cloth sack waiting for him. It jingled when he held it out.

“You can count it,” the Timzinae said.

“That’s fine,” Marcus said.

The ’van master’s brows lifted, then he shrugged.

“Suit yourself. But don’t come later saying it was short.”

“Won’t.”

“All right, then.”

Marcus nodded and turned away. He took out his share and Yardem’s, then despite what he’d said, he counted the rest. It was all there.

The players were at their own cart, still wearing their armor and swords. The road had changed them and it hadn’t. They were harder now, and each of them could handle a sword like a soldier. On the other hand, they laughed and joked now as much as they had in the tavern in Vanai. Sandr and Smit were competing now to see who could hold a handstand longest. Cary, Opal, and Mikel traded quips and barbs as they saw to their mules. Master Kit sat on the cart’s high bench, watching over it all like a benevolent saint from the old stories. Marcus went to him.

“It appears we’ve managed the trick, then,” Master Kit said. “I hadn’t expected it to be quite so eventful.”

“Make a fine comedy,” Marcus said,

“I think the world is often like that.”

“Like what?”

“Comic, but only at the right distance.”

“Likely true,” Marcus said as he handed the money to Master Kit. “What are you going to do now?”

“I suspect Porte Oliva’s as good a venue as any, and suppose we’ll try our luck at our original trade. After a bit of a rest, maybe. There’s a long tradition of puppeteers here, and I’m hoping we might be able to recruit a new actor or two with those skills.”

“It was good working with you,” Marcus said. “Went better than I expected, considering. I expect I’ll see you about the city. We’ll stay until thaw.”

“Thank you for not emasculating Sandr. I still hope to make a decent leading man of him one day.”

“Luck with that,” Marcus said.

“Take care of yourself, Captain Wester,” Master Kit said. “I find you a fascinating man.”

And that was over as well. To his left, the caravan master was passing to each cart in turn, taking signatures and inventories. Yardem appeared at Marcus’s side.

“We’ll need men,” the Tralgu said.

“And a cunning man. But there’s not a war on here. We’ll find some.”

The Tralgu flicked a jingling ear.

“Are you going to let the girl hire us, sir?”

Marcus took a deep breath. The city smelled of horse shit, fish, and brine. Haze left the sky more white than blue. He exhaled slowly.

“No,” he said.

They stood together. The ’van master reached her cart. Cithrin stood before him like a prisoner before a magistrate, spine straight, eyes ahead of her. Alone in a city she didn’t know, without protector or path.

“We could leave now,” Yardem said.

Marcus shook his head.

“She deserves to hear it.”

The ’van master moved on. Marcus looked to the Tralgu, the girl, spat, and went to her. Do it, he told himself, and get the worst behind and on to the next thing. The girl looked up as he came, her eyes unfocused and glassy with exhaustion, her skin even paler than usual. And yet she lifted her chin a degree.

“Captain,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yardem and I. We can’t work for you.”

“All right,” she said. For all her reaction, he might have told her the sun rose in the morning.

“My advice, take as much as you can carry, leave the rest, and take ship out to Lyoniea or Far Syramis. Start over.”

The ’van master whistled. The first cart pulled away. The caravan officially ended. The carts around them began to shift and squeak, each bound for its own market, its own quarter. Even the players were moving off now, Sandr and Smit walking with the mules to clear the way. Cithrin bel Sarcour, orphan and ward of the Medean bank, novice smuggler, almost woman, looked at him with tired eyes.

“Good luck,” he said, and walked away.

The salt quarter of Porte Oliva was, as Master Kit had said, inhabited by puppets. Street performers seemed to be at every other corner, crouched behind or within boxes, hectoring the passersby in the voices of their dolls. Some were the standard race humor of PennyPenny the violent Jurasu and the clever Timzinae Roaches. Some were political like the idiot King Ardelhumblemub with his oversized crown. Some, Stannin Aftellin the perpetually lustful Firstblood in his traditional love triangle with a phlegmatic Dartinae and a manipulative Cinnae, were bawdy and racial and political all together.

Many more were more local. Marcus was pausing for a moment by a performance about a filthy butcher who smoked his meat with burning shit and ground maggots into his sausage when a Cinnae woman in the crowd started yelling at the puppeteer for taking gold from a rival butcher. At another, four queensmen with swords and copper torcs watched a story about plums and a fairy princess with scowls that suggested the allegory, whatever it was, might put the performer on the wrong side of the law.

The public house they stopped at had a courtyard that overlooked the seawall. The sun was sliding down the western sky, setting the white stucco walls glowing gold. The water of the bay was pale blue, the sea beyond an indigo so deep it was almost black. The smell of brine and roasting chicken wrestled with the incense smoke from a wandering priest. Sailors of several races, thick-shouldered and loud-throated all of them, sat at the wide tables under the bright embroidered canopies. Braziers burned between every table, bringing the memory of summer to the winter-chill air. Marcus sat and caught the serving girl’s eye. She nodded a promise, and he leaned back in his chair.

“We’ll need work.”

“Yes, sir,” Yardem said.

“And a new crew. A real one this time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But there will be warehouses. Come the spring, caravans going inland.”

“There will, sir.”

“Any thoughts, then?”

The serving girl—a Kurtadam with the soft, pale pelt of an adolescent and gold and silver beads all down her sides—brought mugs of hot cider to them and hurried off before Marcus could pay her. Yardem lifted one. In his hands, it looked small. He drank slowly, his brow furrowed and his ears tucked back. Behind him, the sun glowed bright enough to hurt.

“What it is?” Marcus said.

“The smuggler girl, sir. Cithrin.”

Marcus laughed, but he felt the anger behind it. From the shift in Yardem’s shoulders, the Tralgu heard it too.

“You think it would be wise to put us between that cart and whoever wants to take it from her?”

“It wouldn’t be,” Yardem said.

“Then what’s there to talk about? Job’s done. Time to move forward.”

“Yes, sir,” Yardem said and took another sip. Marcus waited for him to speak. He didn’t. One of the sailors—a Firstblood with close-cropped black hair and the slushy accent of Lyoneia—started singing a dirty song about the mating habits of Southlings. The large black eyes of that race often got them called eyeholes, which lent itself to certain rhymes. Marcus felt his jaw clench. He leaned forward, putting himself in Yardem’s sight.

“You have something to say?”

Yardem sighed.

“If she were less like Meriam, you’d have stayed,” Yardem said.

The dirty song went to a new verse, speculating on the sex life of Dartinae and Cinnae. Or glow-worms and maggots, as the lyrics put it. Marcus shot an annoyed glance at the singer. The tightness in his jaw was spreading down his neck and between his shoulder blades. Yardem put down his cider.

“If it had been a man driving that cart,” Yardem said. “Or an older woman. Someone who looked less like Alys or wasn’t the age Meriam would have been, you would have taken contract from them.”

Marcus coughed out a laugh. The singer took a breath, preparing to launch into another verse. Marcus stood.

“You! Enough of that. There’s grown men here trying to think.”

The sailor’s face clouded.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“The man telling you that’s enough,” Marcus said.

The sailor sneered, then blinked at something in Marcus’s expression, flushed red, and sat down, his back toward Marcus and Yardem. Marcus turned back to his second.

“That cart is going to pull blades and blood to it, and we both know it,” Marcus said softly. “That much wealth in one place is a call to murder. Now you’re telling me that standing in front of it’s the right thing?”

“No, sir. Damned foolish, sir,” Yardem said. “Only you’d have done it.”

Marcus shook his head. In his memory, Meriam reached out from the flames. He took her dying body in his arms. He could smell the burning hair, the skin. He felt her relax against him and remembered thinking that she was saved, that she was safe, and then realizing what the softness in her joints really meant. He didn’t know anymore if it was the true memory of the events or his dreams.

Cithrin bel Sarcour. He pictured her cart. Pictured the middle-aged Firstblood tin hauler in her place. Or the ’van master and his wife. Or Master Kit and Opal. Anyone besides the girl herself.

He rubbed his eyes until false colors bloomed in front of him. The sea murmured. The sharp apple smell of his cider cut through the cold air. The anger in his chest collapsed, nothing more than paper armor after all, and he said something obscene.

“Should I go find her, sir?”

“We better had,” Marcus said, dropping the coins for their drinks on the table. “Before she does something dangerous.”