The Spider's War

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To Fred Saberhagen

He was right.

Prologue

The Second Apostate

The heart of the goddess, her new temple—her true temple—had neither the grandeur of the cities nor the simple dignity of the Sinir Kushku. In Camnipol, it was said that her banner hung from the great tower of the Kingspire, goddess and throne made one. In Kaltfel, the temple was ancient stone, and had been dedicated to some false god before the Basrahip had sent Ovur to remake it as the center of her truth in the new-conquered land. All through the world, the banner of the goddess flew above great pillars and windows of colored glass. And one day, they would be true temples, untainted by lies and error.

But that day had not come.

Here, in the lands to which Ovur and his priesthood had fled, the pulpit was not ancient granite adorned with gold, but a low platform of rough wood rimed with frost. Here, the pews were not carved oak upholstered with silk, but stones and logs stinking of rot and cold. For candles, they had smoking torches of wrapped grass and fat. For the altar, a mound of frozen earth. The air smelled of decay and winter, and the ruddy, early sunset bled across the wide sky.

Ovur looked out from the pulpit over the men who had come to his call. The pure. The few who had heard the truth of his voice and thrilled to the echoes of the goddess with him. At the front, the newest initiates swayed, their eyes glassy and their jaws slack, still rapt with the awe of her transformation, their blood still thickening with the mark of her favor. Three dozen men in a winter swamp at dusk, cold, shivering, and hungry. If it were not for the presence of the goddess within each of them and the glory of the purification they carried, it would have been a sad, squalid scene. Instead, it was like looking upon a rough seed and knowing the vine that grew from it would one day cover all the world.

“For years, my friends, we followed the Basrahip,” Ovur said, his hands lifted to them. “Some of you knew him of old as the voice of the goddess. Others of you saw him first as a conqueror at the side of the Severed Throne when your nation was lifted up from its corruption and ignorance.”

The men in the pews lifted their hands and their voices. Some spoke praise for the power and beauty of the goddess, some their hatred of the false priest who twisted her teachings from his glorified seat beside Antea’s throne. Ovur felt his heart warmed and reassured by both, and the spiders that dwelled in his blood shifted and thrilled. He spoke the truth to his people, and they spoke it back, and with every living voice his certainty grew.

“I stood in his shadow too, as did we all,” Ovur went on, his breath ghosting in the cold. “But even as her voice spread across the world, the Basrahip fell into darkness. As she rose in every temple, her light peeling back the ancient lies of the dragons, the Basrahip was made corrupt. He claimed that of all the temples, only his was true. As if a spider had only one true leg to which all others answered.”

Now none of the responses were of praise; all were of anger and condemnation. Ovur breathed them in, smiling and nodding as if his affirmation was also comfort to them. The threats against the Basrahip were justified by the power of the voices making them.

“Yes, once the Basrahip led straight. Once, his voice was hers. It is a tragedy that his strength was too little to withstand the lies of the world, but it is only a tragedy for him. Not for the goddess, for she is perfect and incorruptible. And we few are her true voice, welling up even in this place, as others shall all across the face of the world. Our brothers Eshau and Mikap have gone to spread our truths to the great powers of the world and shall return soon with an army that will cast down the false Basrahip and break his lies like ice upon stone. What has begun cannot be stopped, not ever, and—”

A horn blew, three rising notes. Two more answered. Ovur felt a tightening in his throat. Not fear. He was chosen of the goddess, and so protected by her power and her grace. If the quickness of his heart and breath imitated that base feeling, it was only that the man he had once been would have felt fear. Or if not that, surprise. Ovur grinned. In the rough pews, his priests looked to one another, unsure what the noises meant.

The men who came looming up from the swamp’s shadows were a sad, sorry lot. Thin and ragged. Some very old, some very young, and few enough between. They wore the armor of Imperial Antea and the eightfold sigil on their shields. Some carried swords before them, the blades catching the light of torches and fading sunlight. More had pikes braced in two hands, as if to stave off a cavalry charge. Ovur’s laughter rolled out through the wilderness, warm and delighted and thick with threat to the impure. In the pews, one of the new initiates seemed to notice for the first time that something odd was going on. He rose unsteadily to his feet, looking as astounded by the surrounding enemy as if they had woven themselves into being from the grass itself.

The mud-muted steps of horses followed. A dozen men in the saddles. They wore the brown robes that Ovur once had, before the Basrahip had fallen from grace. It was the uniform of the fallen now, and Ovur looked on them with pity. The swords they carried would have been green in the full light of day. In the red light of torches and sunset, they seemed black. The false priests drew the poisoned blades, and the fumes from them gave the air an astringent bite. The spiders in Ovur’s blood, restless, seemed to vibrate and squirm from beneath this thinnest skin down to the pit of his belly.

“I do not fear you,” Ovur said. “You cannot win against the power of the goddess!”

“We do not seek to,” a familiar voice boomed. And there, arriving last among the priests, was the Basrahip himself, his massive body astride a thin-framed pony. And at his side, another rider sat a nobler horse. This man wore a robe of thick grey wool and a hood pulled over his head against the cold. His lips were pressed thin, and his shoulders hunched.

“Prince Geder!” Ovur said. “I praise her light that you have come.”

“I’m not a prince,” Geder Palliako said, his voice high and peevish. “I’m Lord Regent. That’s better than a prince.”

“He has come to see the beginning of her reign,” Basrahip said, and his voice rolled through the growing darkness. “We have brought him to this final battle against lies that he might witness the place where the great age begins.”

In his blood, the spiders shuddered with something like delight. The truth of the Basrahip’s words was like honey on the tongue, and Ovur’s laughter grew almost gentle.

“Yes, old friend, so you have,” Ovur said.

The new initiate moved toward the soldiers, his steps unsteady. The pikemen looked at one another anxiously. The new priest tittered, stumbling toward them. One soldier reached out with his weapon gently enough to push the man back without making it an attack.

“Ovur,” the Basrahip said. “We need not come to a violent end here. Once we were brothers in her light. We can be again.”

“This is so,” Ovur said, and for an instant, his heart filled with joy at the power of the goddess. “Even now your living voice carries truth in it.”

“Does that mean we can go back to camp?” the Lord Regent said, his voice tentative but light, like that of a boy trying to joke among men. “It’s getting cold.”

“Do you renounce your apostasy?” Basrahip asked. His mount shifted, uneasy. The red-lit clouds in the heavens cooled to a sudden grey. Ovur felt a qualm, uncertain not of his faith, but of how the Basrahip who only a moment before seemed to have come to the edge of absolution from his error could now say this.

“I cannot,” Ovur said. “I am no apostate.”

The Basrahip grunted as if he’d been struck. Around in the growing darkness, the brown-robed priests held their blades at the ready. The rickety soldiers of the empire grew more solid in their ranks.

“The goddess speaks through one voice,” the Basrahip said, his tones rougher now. “And that voice is my own.”

In Ovur’s blood a strange thing happened. The spiders, gifts of the goddess, told him that the Basrahip’s words were true, even as he knew that they were not. For a moment, the world seemed to shift under him, the landscape itself heaving a great sigh beneath his feet. And then, rising up from his belly like the heat of a fire, came the rage.

“The goddess speaks through us all!” Ovur called back, his voice hard as gravel. The power of the goddess shook the words, and his throat ached with it. “No one temple holds her truth. All temples are hers, all priests are hers, and all voices are hers!”

In the pews, Ovur’s priests rose as one, their balled fists at their sides. The brown-robed priests in the shadows shifted, moving forward, outrage in their eyes. Only the third group—the Lord Regent and his awkward soldiers—appeared hesitant.

In the back of Ovur’s mind, a small, still voice told him that there was a way, that there had to be a way to reconcile. But the anger in him was like a storm breaking against cliffs. He heard the blood rushing in his ears, felt the indignation in his belly like a dragon breaking from its shell full-grown and terrible.

“You are in error!” Basrahip shouted, and Ovur’s blood filled with the spasm of a thousand spiders. Truth and not-truth ripped at him. Any thought of brotherhood, of being reconciled, was forgotten.

“No! You are apostate!” Ovur shrieked. “You are a thing of lies!”

There was no plan to the attack, not on either side. Goaded beyond his tolerance, Ovur ran forward, through his priests and toward the thick shadow of the Basrahip. His fists were clenched to the point of pain, and he felt his battle yell more than heard it. The skittering of his blood and the heat of his anger were like boiling, but without the pain; as if he himself were not the flesh and the blood but the act of boiling. Where once there had been a man, there was now only the vessel of her vengeance. With him, the others came, throwing their bodies at the apostates with abandon and faith. The Basrahip and his servants of lies would fall before them, grass before the scythe.

Frozen mud slipped under his foot, and he stumbled. The ragged pikemen fell back, their torchlit faces masks of confusion and astonishment. But the others, the brown-robed priests, leapt to battle, mouths twisted in an answering rage. Ovur lost sight of the others, enemy and friend alike, as he sprinted toward the Basrahip. He swung his knuckles at the huge man’s mount as if he might knock the horse back by brawling with it. The animal shied, fixing him with one affronted brown eye. Ovur grabbed the enemy’s great branch-thick thigh, yanking at the Basrahip. Pulling him down.

Something happened, and the noise of battle seemed to grow both more pitched and distant. He was on his knees without any recollection of falling, and a bloom of pain was coming to the back of his head. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Lord Regent of Antea staring down at him in fear and horror, a mace in his hand. The man had struck him. Ovur struggled to his feet, but the battle was past him. The gloom was a chaos of bodies. Men and horses were screaming.

She will protect us, Ovur thought. We are her chosen.

Something bit at his side, harder than teeth. Ovur fell forward, away from the blow, and twisted. The pikeman who’d stabbed him was dancing back as if the semi-prone enemy were more dangerous than snakes. Ovur slipped.

He could not see the Basrahip, but he heard the great ox-strong bellow of his voice. You cannot win! Everything you love is already lost! You have lost! You cannot win! Each word struck him, filling him with anger his body could not support. He scrabbled at the frozen mud with clawed fingers. Blood poured from his side, soaking his rude clothes. A voice he knew cried out and was cut off. A torch fell near him, smoldering in the grass and illuminating nothing beyond its own death. Ovur gasped and panted. Tiny legs flickered over the backs of his hands, the spiders spilled with his blood skittering in miniature panic. He wanted to say something to reassure them, to comfort them in the confusion and agitation that mirrored his own.

The sounds of the battle began to calm. Someone was screaming in panic nearby, but only one. Other voices moved through the night, some in the tones of conversation, others in a kind of hushed awe. The Basrahip had ceased his shouting. Ovur rested his head against his outstretched hands. In a moment, he would rise. Pull himself to his feet and carry the battle on to the end, however bitter, until his strength and his anger failed him. It would be only a moment before he gathered his strength…

Footsteps in the dead winter grass. The vicious stink of the poisoned blades. A gasp. Ovur rolled to his side, aware of the pain of his injury but unmoved by it. It was only pain.

The Lord Regent had lost his horse. In his hand, he held one of the venomous blades unsheathed. The tool of the dragons. How had Ovur lived so long knowing that the Basrahip wielded the weapons of the great enemy and not seen him for what he was? He had been blind. His strength was failing him. He felt his body growing heavier. Growing numb. Something like sleep tugged at his mind. Like sleep, but not.

“He’s here! I found him!” Palliako shouted.

Tiny black bodies skittered in the dark, moving quickly at first, but then slowing. Even before the fumes of the sword could shrivel them, the cold of the ground and of his drying blood was deadly. Palliako looked over his shoulder, the tip of the dragon’s sword wavering as his attention to it slipped. It was the opportunity. Ovur imagined himself leaping forward, wrestling the blade away and carving through the man’s throat. Using the tools of the enemy against it. He barely had the strength to smile at the thought.

“I said I found him! He’s over here!”

“Listen!” Ovur hissed, and the Lord Regent turned back to him, alarmed. “Hear me!”

“You be quiet.”

“You think that we can be stopped by swords? You think we can be stopped by slaughter?”

“Yes,” Geder Palliako said. He stepped forward, and the spiders nearest him withered. “I think there’s some pretty good evidence for that.”

Even dying, Ovur felt the great leader’s doubt. “You kill men. Only men. The truth that lifted us up will lift others too. In all the cities, in all the temples, the faithful will find the truth. All will turn against you. All.”

“No they won’t,” Geder said, and the doubt within him had grown. “You’re the liar. You’re the one who turned against her power.”

“I am not,” Ovur said, and the Basrahip loomed up from the darkness. The wide face looked almost serene. Sorrow welled up in Ovur’s heart, vast as oceans. “We are not to be reconciled after all, then.”

“No.”

Ovur nodded, then rested his head against the ground. The cold didn’t seem so terrible now. The pain in his side was vicious, but distant. Something deep in his belly felt heavy and wrong. Others were coming close now too. Soldiers and priests. Men holding lanterns and blades. Some few were familiar, but none were his own.

“Her voice,” Ovur said, then lost the thread of his thought, coughed, and began again. “Her voice is heard in all her temples. Her light shines from every torch. You, Basrahip, are only another torch. You’re not the sun. And I am no apostate.”

The large man’s eyes widened and his mouth became a scowl of rage. He snatched the green blade from Palliako, stepped forward, and, roaring like a storm, sank the blade deep into Ovur’s chest. The pain of the strike was surprising and fierce, but worse was the burning. All through his body, even those parts he’d thought numb, the spiders seemed to take fire. Acid and venom filled him. His flesh pulsed with death throes not his own. And then with his own. He was only vaguely aware of Basrahip’s voice, continuing to denounce him. Of the terrible nausea that seemed to center in the envenomed wound. For a moment, he had a sense of profound clarity, but it brought him neither insight nor comfort.

Ovur, born of Sana and Egran of the Sinir Kushku, offered to the temple in his sixth year, and pilgrim under the Basrahip to the great world beyond the mountains, closed his eyes for the last time. The thing that was not sleep pulled at him, and he let himself be drawn down into it, certain that the goddess he had served with his full heart and whole life would be in that darkness to receive him.

As it happened, she was not.

Captain Marcus Wester

Like wine poured into water, the war stained the world even where the actual fighting had not yet reached.

Carse, the greatest city of Northcoast, looked out over a winter sea. The sky was the grey of snow, the water the grey of slate. No army had crossed the kingdom’s borders, but one camped in Birancour to the south, and another—smaller—was said to be marching in the swamps near Kaltfel to the east. There were rumors that Lord Regent Geder Palliako rode with that second one, that the spirits of the dead had swollen his host to the largest the world had ever known but only at night, that the forces of Antea were poised to sweep over the kingdom like a plague wind. For all Marcus knew, it might be true. Everything else had been strange enough these last few years that drawing a line between groundless fear and plausible scenario had become difficult where it wasn’t impossible.

It didn’t change the job.

He hunched into his cloak, walking through the same frost-touched streets he had as a younger man. His feet ached, and his right knee had started to click sometimes, but it didn’t hurt yet. The poisoned sword hung across his back, eroding his health and making his blood watery and thin. He felt the weight of years slowing him, making each day a bit harder than the one before it. Death was constant, inevitable, and coming. His own, and everybody else’s. Age and maturity meant he was aware of the fact, that was all.

Beside him, Yardem stood tall, his canine face alert, his ears canted forward. There was grey at their tips. They were both getting old, but the years didn’t seem to weigh down the Tralgu as much. So maybe his bleakness was just the sword.

A boy wheeled a cart ahead of them, the steam from it billowing and filling the air with the scent of burning wood and roasting chestnuts. Marcus lifted a hand, and the guards shifted to walk around the cart. Marcus had seen more ambushes than he cared to remember, and this wasn’t one. The carter nodded to them as they passed. No hidden blades appeared in the shadows, no sudden battle cries split the air. Marcus was vaguely disappointed.

“I don’t know who we are anymore,” he said.

Yardem flicked his ear, considering. The earrings jingled. “You’re Marcus Wester, sir. I’m Yardem Hane. Those back there are Enen and Halvill. The one at the back’s called Little Fish, but I couldn’t say why.”

“Not what I meant. Used to be I was captain of the guard for the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, but seeing there isn’t a branch in Porte Oliva anymore, makes it a bit strange. Do we work for Cithrin? Is she still part of the bank? There’s no chain of command anymore.”

“We sleep in the bank’s rooms and eat from the bank’s kitchen,” Yardem pointed out. “At a guess, we work for them.”

“Do they pay us?”

“They do.”

“Do they pay us money?”

The Tralgu flicked a thoughtful ear. “Granted, that’s more a question, sir.”

The chest that Enen and Halvill carried between them was hard oak bound in iron. The lock was thick and well made. It would have taken a man with a crowbar half an hour to crack it open. Everything about it—including the five guards walking through the chill grey streets—indicated that whatever it contained was important. Valuable. Everyone Marcus passed—the carter boy, the old woman in leather and rags trundling through the intersection behind them, even the city watch—would see their burden being treated as if it were precious as gold. And it would add, the idea went, to the story that the yellow sheets of paper with their arcane script and the shining flecks in among the fibers were actually worth something.

Cithrin had called them letters of transfer, but Komme Medean had instructed everyone else to use the name war gold. It was a name meant to weave the idea of real coinage with the fear of the imperial armies at the borders, as if by the magic of pretending the drawing of a gold coin was the same as the thing itself, Northcoast and Carse would be somehow safer from the killing blades and tainted priests.

And the hell of it was, for all Marcus could see it might work. Certainly the sheets that he and his guards were given at the end of each week traded for food and drink, a launderer’s services or a cobbler’s. And Cithrin, sitting deep in the great brick keep that was the holding company, seemed busier than she’d ever been as a simple banker. And still, he felt more like an actor pretending a length of painted wood was a battle-axe than a soldier guarding treasure.

The scriptorium had a wide blue door and wooden walls with carvings of a dozen different scripts worked into them. Snow covered the tiled roof, and icicles clung to the eaves, thin tendrils hanging from the thicker stumps where they’d been broken to keep them from slaughtering random passersby. Marcus rapped on the doorway and waited, his breath ghosting before him. A woman’s voice called from within, then a scrape came, and the door swung open. The master scribe ushered them into a workroom. Twenty desks, each with someone sitting at it. All of the full guild members at work. Thick-bodied, ruddy Firstblood; pale, sprout-thin Cinnae; scaled Jasuru, all with reed-thin pens scratching gently at papers. Four iron braziers warmed the air almost to the point of comfort but not quite. In the back, he knew, were thirty more apprentices with less heat and smaller workplaces. A harpist played in the back of the room in an attempt to keep boredom at bay. A Jasuru woman glanced up at them, her bronze scales glowing in the light, and then went back to her work.

“This way, Captain Wester,” the master scribe said, and Marcus followed her back to a smaller office. The papers waiting there didn’t have the yellow dye of war gold, but they were tools of conflict just the same. They stood on the desk, square pages tied in twine. Marcus slid one around to read the top sheet.

METHODS FOR DEFEATING THE ENEMY

The abominations that have corrupted Antea and brought war to the world are powerful, but they are not invincible. Their power is in their voices and in their blood, but they have been defeated before and they can be defeated again.

It went on. Simple, unadorned letters that outlined the dangers that the priests posed and how to drown out their voices, fight battles deaf to their commands, and avoid the contagion of tiny black spiders that spilled out like rotten blood when you cut one open. The words were simple to the point of simplistic, but they were a place to start. He ran his thumbnail hissing up one corner of the stack.

“Three thousand copies,” the master scribe said, and there was more than a little pride in her voice. “We will need more paper soon.”

“There’s a dozen people on Sisters’ Street taking old books apart and washing off the ink as fast as you all are putting it back on,” Marcus said.

He thought she flinched a little at the words. It would be hard, he supposed, for someone in her position to accept the idea that her work was less permanent than she liked to imagine it. But welcome to the world. It wasn’t as if any of the wars he’d fought in stayed won either.

“Where are these going?” she asked, changing the subject.

“This batch? Asterilhold, same as the last. We’ve got a fast boat ready to carry it along the coast and a few names in the city that might be open to a little life-threatening sedition.”

Yardem coughed gently. Marcus took the meaning behind it and forced himself to smile. It wasn’t this poor woman’s fault he was in a mood as foul as last month’s milk. He lifted the brick of papers from the desk and nodded to Enen and Halvill. They placed the chest gently onto the cleared desk, and Marcus unlocked it. The war gold was a bit longer than it was wide, embossed by a press that existed only in the bank, signed by Komme Medean and King Tracian’s master of coin. A few carefully worded lines promised that king and crown would honor the transferred debt, and a line of cipher made it possible to check the note against forgeries. Yardem handed the papers to the master scribe, and she accepted them with a small, formal bow. Her hesitation was almost imperceptible, but it was there. Yardem’s ears shifted toward her inquiringly.

“Are they helping?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Marcus said. “It’s throwing seeds to the wind. A stack like this in every city they hold? Give the people they’ve conquered a better idea what they’re facing and how to stand against it? Not to mention that it aims at the snake’s head.”

“Snake’s head?”

“He means the priests, ma’am,” Yardem said. “One of the things we hope the letters will do is keep the focus on the priests so that people won’t be distracted into other conflicts.”

The scribe smiled, and her eyes seemed older than her years. “I don’t care if they all burn each other to nothing, I just hope you can keep them from doing it here.”

Yardem’s gaze flicked to Marcus, expecting or dreading a cutting remark from him. But Marcus didn’t have one to hand. It was a bloodthirsty and selfish sentiment, but it wasn’t an uncommon one. Charity and compassion were easier when there was no sense of threat to poison them, and the world was woven from threats these nights. In other circumstances, the scribe would likely have thought a bit more before she hoped death and fire for the whole world, only not her city. It was war, though. It stained everything.

When, as a younger man, Marcus had lived in Carse, the taproom had just been a taproom and the field beyond it only an odd strip of commons. Since the dragon had come, wounded and morose, the place had become the most prestigious meeting house in the city. Someone had built a massive wooden perch on the commons so that Inys could rest there and look into the taproom’s yard. The tables within the building were packed close, adding the heat and stink of bodies to the smoke and fire in the grate. The meat was probably pork, but spiced to a tear-inducing heat that could have hidden anything. Marcus leaned his elbows against the table and tried to ignore the way the bar boy kept jostling him as he squeezed by.

“What’s the point of having a cart if you’ve nothing to put in it?” Mikel said. The thin actor’s hands spread across the table in something approaching supplication. The raw emotion over small issues was something Marcus had grown used to in his travels with the troupe. Soldiers tended to be more stoic than actors.

“Where are you going to put your props and costumes if you haven’t got a cart?” Cary snapped. Since they’d lost Smit in the fall of Porte Oliva, her temper had been shorter. Marcus liked her better for it. Mikel’s hands retreated from the surface of the table.

“I hope we can agree that both will be needed before the company is made whole,” Kit said. “I think we might be better listing out which plays we can perform in our present circumstances, and then determining which replacements will add most to the repertoire.”

“Like another actor?” Cary asked. “Is that what you mean?”

“I suppose it is one thing I mean,” Kit said, only the way he formed the words was like warm flannel on a cold night. Cary looked away. Kit turned a concerned expression to Marcus. “Are you well, my friend?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Yardem cleared his throat. “You made a noise, sir.”

“I did?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A noise?”

“Something between a laugh and a cough, sir. Could have sounded like sneering to someone who didn’t know better.”

“Didn’t notice doing it,” Marcus said. “Sorry. Must have been in my own head too much. Nasty place, that.”

The actors were all looking at him now, and all with different shades of concern. Soldiers didn’t tend to do that either.

“I’m fine,” Marcus said, more defensively than he’d intended.

“He’ll be better in a few days,” Yardem said.

“I will?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why’s that?”

“Today’s Merian’s name day.”

“Ah,” Marcus said. The beer was warm and a little bitter. He shrugged. “I’ll be better in a few days.”

A flicker of understanding passed through the troupe crowded around the little table. Nothing spoken, but a moment’s understanding and companionship. A grief acknowledged and shared almost without the need of communication at all. That, at least, was a thing soldiers did as well. Marcus listened for a while more. Cary and Mikel, Sandr and Charlit Soon and Hornet, all of them talking through the next steps for the company they had been and the one they would soon become. Marcus took another few bites of the spiced whatever-it-was, finished his beer, and took a folded slip of war gold from his belt to pay for it all.

In the yard, a thin, resentful snow fell from a low, grey sky. On the perch in the middle of the field, Inys, the last dragon, hunched and played disconsolately with the carcass of a bull. It was like watching a five-year-old fuss with boiled vegetables. The dragon lifted his eyes to Marcus, let forth a small, stinking gout of flame by way of greeting, and then went back to batting the corpse across the frozen ground. Marcus leaned against the black wood fence, the chill of it seeping into his sleeves. The moon, if there was one, was eaten by clouds and mist. The greatest city of Northcoast endured the darkness and the cold, waiting for a day that would come as pale as it was brief. Inside the taproom, someone struck up a song, and a beery chorus rose. The sound grew louder when the door behind him opened and quieted a degree when it shut. He felt the looming presence of Yardem at his side without having to turn and look.

“You know,” Marcus said, “I keep hearing how other people have suffered terrible losses and then years pass and things change and they heal over it. Girl who falls in love with a bad-hearted man doesn’t always end up at the bottom of a cliff, no matter what the songs say. Often as not, she’s married to someone else five years on, and the bad-hearted man’s just something that gets brought up when she’s spatting with the new one.”

“Can happen,” Yardem said.

“And then there’s me, where it just never seems to get better.”

“It doesn’t, sir.”

“Ever wonder why that is?”

Yardem’s earrings jingled as his ears flicked. “I have some theories, sir.”

“Do you? Well. Keep ’em to yourself.”

“Was my plan.”

The winter wind shifted, pushing snowflakes at him like little handfuls of sand. Marcus squinted into the cold and ignored it. The ice might make him a little blind, but the chances were thin that he and Yardem were going to be ambushed in sight of the dragon they’d escorted to Northcoast. Even if they were, the worst that would happen was they’d all be killed.

He tried to imagine Merian here with him. And Alys. He could hardly recall the shapes of their faces some nights. All that was left was a sense of overwhelming love and overwhelming loss that had names and memories built into it. His daughter’s determined smile when she’d taken her first step. His wife’s arm around his sleeping waist. Years ago. Decades. They were dead. They didn’t miss him. But he’d have cheerfully slaughtered anyone who tried to relieve him of the wounds they’d left behind.

“Made that noise again, sir.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “It ever strike you that we’re doing the same thing as they are?”

“No, sir. It hasn’t.”

“I just mean the mythical spider goddess and all her priests’ hairwash about what history was and what the future’ll be and how it all fits together. They’re just making up stories and getting everyone to act like they’re true. No real stone to build on anywhere.”

“That’s fact, sir.”

“How are Cithrin and her paper gold any different? We’re telling a story and talking people into forgetting that it’s all something we made up. Then we’re using what we’ve snowed them into thinking in order to make the world the shape we want it to be.”

For a long moment, they stood in silence with only the winter wind to reply. Inys, tiring of the game, scooped the dead animal into his gullet and swallowed massively before tucking his head under his great battle-tattered wing. Muffled by the snow, distant footsteps came nearer.

“I still see some distinctions,” Yardem said, but then Halvill burst into the yard. White snow dotted his broad black chitin scales and his inner eyelids flicked open and closed in agitation.

“Captain Wester. Yardem. You’re wanted, both of you, back at the holding company.”

Marcus looked up into Yardem’s wide, considering eyes. “What’s at issue?”

“It’s Barriath Kalliam, sir. He’s come back from Sara-sur-Mar.”

“Ah,” Marcus said. “So the pirate admiral’s finished presiding over the bounty board already, has he? Well, I suppose we should be glad he didn’t get himself killed doing it.”

“No sir,” Halvill said. Then, “I mean, yes sir. I mean, he hasn’t come alone.”

Marcus stood, seeing the excitement in Halvill’s stance clearly for the first time through the veil of his own unease. He felt his spine grow a little straighter, the weight of the sword on his shoulder not so heavy.

“Didn’t come alone?” Marcus said.

“No, sir,” Halvill said. “He’s brought his mother.”

Cithrin Bel Sarcour of the Medean Bank

All the money in the world. Even now, with winter’s progress turning the war sluggish, it was the thought that kept her awake in the night. All the money in the world.

Creating debt was nothing new to her. Conjuring an absence of money was as simple as laying any wager at odds. Should storm or piracy intervene, a weight of silver paid for insurance on a ship might call forth twenty of its kind. To create an obligation for money greater than the actual coins in the coffers was nothing more exotic than a default. It happened, if not constantly, at least often.

But to reverse that, to create letters of transfer that summoned the idea of gold—the function of it—without need of the coin itself, still left her giddy. From the remnants of the fortune from her branch of the Medean bank, she had purchased a debt that would never be repaid, and from that debt she had made all the money in the world. As much as she could print, so long as she kept the confidence of the merchants and tradesmen, nobles and artisans whose custom she had changed.

All the other forms were being kept as they had been. The letters were kept in the same strongboxes that the coin had been. They bore the image of the coins they represented. They traded as coins would trade. King Tracian’s master of coin was even coming around to the idea of accepting them for taxes, which would, she believed, seal them forever as the legitimate equivalent of gold. She had even heard of money changers weighing the papers as if the heft of the pages themselves signified anything. It was a kind of grand theater piece where the whole kingdom—and Narinisle and Herez now as well—ate imaginary food and was miraculously nourished by the exercise.

And because of it, things that had once been impossible were now within reach.

When first she and Isadau had plotted their war in Porte Oliva, desperation had driven them. The breadth and varieties of strategy had been immense. Did the enemy need to cross land to reach you? Offer a guaranteed high price to the farmers along the dragon’s roads for cotton and tobacco, and when the army came to loot the farms, there would be no food to eat. Did the enemy outnumber you? Hire mercenaries wise in the ways of the battlefield and warned against the poisoned voices of the spider priests. Buy ore and drown what couldn’t be used so that Antea and Geder Palliako could forge fewer weapons. Post bounties against the enemy on every front—Elassae, Sarakal, the Free Cities. Even cities of Birancour that hadn’t yet shared Porte Oliva’s fate. Let the enemy face a silent army of the desperate and greedy that you only had to pay.

They had been constrained by the gold in their coffers then. Now that the gates of possibility had opened, Cithrin’s time was spent less generating plans than with putting them in action. Bounty boards were fast and easy. A single local agent in an occupied city could inspire any number of actions against the enemy simply by setting a price on them. Or, if the enemy forces within cities like Nus and Inentai and Suddapal proved too dangerous, some nearby hamlet in Borja or the Keshet could be converted to a base.

Hiring mercenaries was slower than that, but in the long term more effective. The paid blades were for the most part between contracts for the winter. Those who were not subjects of Northcoast or Herez or Narinisle might demand coin rather than the letters of transfer, but Cithrin was confident that she could buy hard coin with credit if she found the right discount rate. It wasn’t as though the gold of Northcoast was needed in the kingdom any longer. Not if she had her way about it. Fixing prices on ore and inedible crops, while ultimately more powerful, took a greater time to see results. She found herself wishing that victory against the enemy might be a matter of years, just so she could see all her schemes enacted.

She sat in her workroom in the holding company’s compound, the dim, fitful light of winter that came through the window adding blue to the buttery yellow light of her candles. Her ledgers piled the desk, and maps lay unrolled and tacked to the walls. A bottle of wine still half-full stood forgotten beside a plate of cheese and hard sausage. In her small space, the world opened like a blossom in springtime, visible only to her. And to people who had the trick of seeing the world as she saw it.

From Inentai, reports said the empire’s strength was faltering. At Kiaria, the mountain stronghold of the Timzinae race, the armies of Antea had met defeat even with the power of the spider priests. Like a child who had never learned restraint, Geder Palliako had spread his might so wide that it had grown thin and brittle. The war was the widest and swiftest anyone had ever seen, and the price it had demanded was terrible. The cities it had taken from her—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—still ached like a lost limb. The Timzinae taken into slavery, their children imprisoned as surety of their good behavior, suffered and died on the farms of the Antean Empire even as she sat, warm and safe in Carse.

To sow chaos among the enemy now, with enemy forces spread so wide and schisms beginning to form among the priesthood of the spider goddess, was less than blowing aside a feather. The map of the war was a portrait of overreach.

In any other conflict, it would have given her hope.

There had been a time, not even very long ago, when winning a war had meant crushing an enemy, killing them, lighting their cities afire. She, like the others around her, had imagined redeeming the world with the point of a dagger. It was, after all, the story everyone told of how a war ended: a righteous victor, a conquered evil, order restored. It was a lie in every particular. Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And the spiders that tainted the priests’ blood were a tool designed by a brilliant, twisted mind to sow this violence. They were the living embodiment of war without end, a promise of permanent victory, infinitely postponed. To imagine tools—even her own tools—turned to some different solution was like trying to wake from a nightmare. She failed more often than she liked.

“I find myself looking through a scheme,” she said, gesturing to Isadau with a cup of steaming tea, “and chortling over how it will break Geder’s army or ruin his supply lines or give weapons to the traditional families in Nus. And I realize I’m doing it again. I’m looking for ways to win the fight, not to end it.”

The Timzinae woman smiled her gentle smile. From their first shared flight from Elassae and then Birancour to now had hardly been more than a year, but it sat on Isadau’s black-scaled face like decades. The greyness at the edges of her chitinous plates made her seem fragile. “There may need to be a certain amount of winning,” she said.

“I know that,” Cithrin said. “But I don’t think past it. I get as far as That’ll show the bastards and then I just… stop. It’s frustrating.”

Isadau sipped her own tea. The steam curled up around her face, softer than clouds. “The first enemy is the priesthood,” she said, as if she were agreeing. “If we can find a way to defeat them…”

The frustration in Cithrin’s gut knotted itself tighter. “Then what? Say we did find a way to drive them all back to whatever hole they’ve been living in since the dragons fell. Would that end our problems?”

“The critical ones, yes,” Isadau said.

“Or would it only make it a war we thought we could win? Tell me that when Antea falls all the Timzinae will drop their chains, shake the hands that whipped them, and say Don’t worry about all the people you killed and the families you shattered. The priests are gone, and we’re fine now. Because I believe that they wouldn’t.”

Isadau’s inner eyelid clicked shut, leaving her both watching Cithrin and not. The rage under her surface calm was palpable. A stab of regret took Cithrin under the ribs.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was too far.”

“No, I take your point,” Isadau said. “They wouldn’t. Nor would I, for that.”

“I don’t know how you fight against war. Even the words don’t fit.”

They lapsed into silence for a long moment, two women who had once been voices of the Medean bank, neither of them welcome or safe in the cities she’d called home. The damp of the city air made droplets on the palm-wide panes of window glass. Isadau’s expression was angry, then closed, then amused.

“At least you’ve ended the age of usurpers,” she said. “Not, perhaps, the task we’d set ourselves, but not an inconsiderable windfall.”

“How did we do that?”

“We took the power of gold and married it to the crown,” Isadau said. “Who’ll ever rise against King Tracian when as soon as he falls, all the coins in their chests turn into leaves and ink?”

Cithrin waved the comment away as if she were fanning smoke. “All it means is that whoever cuts off his head and takes the throne will have to offer the same guarantees he did. Kings are just as disposable as they ever were.”

“But bankers aren’t.”

Cithrin heard Komme Medean’s half-joking voice in her head. Cithrin bel Sarcour. Secret queen of the world. This was what he’d meant, then. Whatever house rose or fell in Northcoast, whoever sat the throne would need to keep on good terms with the bank, because as soon as the kingdom lost confidence in the worth of the letters of transfer, everyone from the boys selling pisspots to the launderers for bleach to the highest lord in court would be bankrupt. The worth of gold had always been a shared fiction about a soft and shining metal, but now it was also braided with a crown and a bank. The loss of any would shake the confidence in all three, and so long as the powerful understood that, perhaps it was less likely that a usurper could rise up. Or at least not without her permission. There was a giddying thought.

“So,” Cithrin said. “We only need to design something like that that we can apply to the world as a whole, and the problem… well, it won’t vanish, but we’ll put a blanket over it anyway.”

“An end to all war,” Isadau said. “Next we’ll be tying ropes to clouds and having them carry us across the sea to Far Syramys.”

“Well, if not an end to war, at least an alternative to it. That’s a bit less grandiose.”

“Do you think so?”

“A bit,” Cithrin said with a shrug.

A soft knock came as the workroom door opened, and Paerin Clark leaned in, his pale face an icon of amusement and a cynical sort of wonder. “Forgive my interruption,” he said. “I have someone in my sitting room I think you two might like to meet.”

Cithrin put her tea down with a clatter. Isadau rose to her feet. Cithrin’s expression was a question, but Paerin either didn’t see it for what it was or else chose not to. He led the way down the brickwork hallway with its tapestry hangings and crystal-and-silver candle holders. The melting beeswax still held a ghost of autumn honey. Thick woven rugs gentled their footsteps, so Cithrin heard the voices coming from the sitting room well before they reached it.

Paerin Clark didn’t bear the name Medean, though his wife Chana did. She sat now at her father’s side, her smile demure and warm in a way that made the hair on Cithrin’s neck stand up. Komme Medean, his joints only somewhat swollen by gout, warmed his hands at the fire. Yardem Hane stood by the door, his expression unreadable apart from the interest in his forward-pointing ears. Captain Wester leaned against a low teak table, his arms crossed. And opposite him, Barriath Kalliam and an older woman.

The last news Cithrin had had of Barriath placed him in Sara-sur-Mar, taking the role of the mythical Callon Cane and funding bounties against the Antean army that his brother Jorey Kalliam led. Seeing him here now was a shock, and Cithrin’s mind took hold of it at once. The bounties were no longer being offered in Birancour. They had been compromised, perhaps. Or the queen had decided that antagonizing the soldiers who had already sacked one of the great cities posed too great a risk. For a moment, she was lost in a cascade of implications that his presence set in motion. The woman at his side seemed almost an afterthought at first.

She was older, and a Firstblood. Her hair was done up in a prim bun, and her skin had the ruddiness of the naturally pale who had been roughened by the sun. She could have been a caravan carter or a farmer, but her bearing was elegant and easy. Here among people of violence and wealth, she was at ease. More than that. Relaxed. Her hands, folded on the table, had a scattering of age spots, but they were strong. The woman’s gaze met Paerin as he brought the two magistras-in-exile into the room. The new woman nodded to Isadau with grace, but her eyes sharpened when they met Cithrin’s gaze.

She felt a wave of unease. For a long moment, she couldn’t place the woman. There was only a sense of the familiar and a half memory of terrible violence. Of blood and fear. It was as if a figure from Cithrin’s nightmares had stepped in among the flesh-and-blood of her daily life, and the dread that tightened her throat was inexplicable. Then the woman moved her shoulders, and something about the motion brought her full memory back.

“I suppose,” Paerin Clark said, “that introductions may be in order.”

“Of course not,” Cithrin said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Lady Kalliam.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” Clara Kalliam said, rising to her feet. She wasn’t a large woman, but she seemed to radiate a strength that Cithrin didn’t remember of her. Of course the last time they’d spoken had been moments after Geder Palliako had slaughtered Lord Dawson Kalliam in front of the Antean court. “For that matter, I wasn’t at all certain I would know you, other than by reputation. As it happens, I do. I think you were very kind, the last time we spoke. Though I admit my recollection of the day isn’t what it might have been.”

“It was a terrible time,” Cithrin said.

“One of several, I’m afraid.”

Isadau cleared her throat. “Cithrin has an advantage over me.”

“Magistra Isadau,” Paerin Clark said, “Clara Annalise Kalliam, formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells, mother to the Antean Lord Marshall Jorey Kalliam and also our own ally Barriath. And also, it seems, to a spider priest named Vicarian who’s still in Porte Oliva.”

Isadau extended her hand, and Clara took it warmly.

“I also have a daughter,” Clara said, “but she often finds it more comfortable to distance herself from me, poor dear.”

“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Barriath said. His voice was oddly childlike, as though the thought of his mother and sister being at odds distressed him. It wasn’t at all the reaction Cithrin expected of the exile of empire and pirate commander. She found it oddly endearing.

“Forgive me, Lady Kalliam,” Cithrin said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but are you here as an ally or a prisoner?”

The older woman laughed and took her chair again. “That is a fine question, isn’t it? I am here as a messenger and a spy.”

“A messenger from the Lord Marshal,” Komme said. “And a spy, it turns out, for us.”

Marcus made a small grunting sound that was probably some version of a laugh. “You recall how Kit and the players and I all spent weeks in Camnipol looking for the mysterious man who’d been feeding Paerin information on the Palliako’s court? It’s her. The handwriting matches. She’s been behind the struggle against the spider priests almost before we were.”

A rush of joy filled Cithrin. New intelligence of the Antean army, and more than that. A channel to feed her own information to the heart of the enemy. With someone at the Lord Marshal’s side, they could draw Geder’s army to its destruction. Only… no. She was doing it again.

“Is something the matter?” Chana Medean asked, but Cithrin waved the question away.

Komme was the one to pick up the thread. “We were just talking about our rather peculiar situation. Fighting alongside one of her sons against the other two. It seems that it’s even more complex than we’d thought.”

“Jorey’s been protecting his family. Myself and his wife and now his daughter as well,” Clara said.

“That,” Barriath said, “would be Lord Skestinin’s daughter and granddaughter respectively.”

“The same Lord Skestinin that’s in our gaol?” Isadau asked.

“Mentioned it was complicated, didn’t he?” Marcus said dryly. Lady Kalliam continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted.

“Jorey may be the man in Camnipol closest to Geder’s trust—apart from Basrahip and the priests and possibly Prince Aster—but he is not blind,” Clara said. “He knows as well as any of us the danger that Geder poses to the world. And to Antea. And to the soldiers under his care whom he has led against you. I am very sorry, by the way, about what happened in Porte Oliva. I was there during the battle and its aftermath. I grieve for your losses.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said, then nodded, paused, shook her head. She felt as if she’d drunk too much wine. “Forgive me again. Have you just said that the Lord Marshall of Antea is ready to turn against the throne?”

“No,” Clara said. “I am saying that we need your help to save it.”

Clara Annalise Kalliam, Formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells

It was a fact well understood that a person was never a perfect match for the tales told of them. It might be something as small as Lady Caot’s reputation as having an iron will, which was true so far as it went but neglected her weaknesses for her grandson and butter tarts. It might be as great as the person of Geder Palliako, hero of Antea and champion of the empire, who was instead… what he was.

The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed. Clara knew that. Since Dawson’s death, it was the space in which she lived.

And still: Cithrin bel Sarcour.

It was a name to conjure with. The woman who had broken Geder Palliako’s heart. Who had tricked him into letting God alone knew how many Timzinae escape his grasp in the fivefold city of Suddapal. A half-breed whose Cinnae blood thinned and paled her. Or whose Firstblood taint left her thick and dark, depending from which direction one came to the question. A merchant-class woman who had outwitted the Lord Regent of the greatest nation in the world. The most hated woman in Antea, and so also secretly beloved.

It was legend enough to carry a full lifetime, and she looked hardly more than a girl. So terribly young to have so much on her shoulders. And yet the impression she gave, sitting there among professional killers and hard-headed men of business and power, was one of naïve brilliance. A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible. Apart from Geder himself, Clara couldn’t think of anyone she had met who had impressed her so profoundly as being dangerous.

“It’s nearly too late,” the girl said to the room and to herself. “If what you say’s true, he’s run the armies to their breaking point. Past it. And the priests have already begun to schism.”

“Have they?” Clara asked.

“Seen one already,” the mercenary captain—Wester—said. “Came in ready to lead King Tracian in glorious war against your Basrahip and Antea. Light of the truth, voice of the goddess. All the same hairwash, but pointed the other way.”

“Is he still at issue?” Clara asked.

“He’s a char mark on the pavement,” the captain said. “But there’ll be more like him. And faster, once your son’s army falls.”

“Does the one lead to the other?” Clara asked.

It was the Tralgu that answered. Yardem Hane, he’d been introduced as. He had a low, rolling voice that was beautiful in its way. “Retreats always invite a certain amount of chaos, ma’am. Gives the impression that no one’s in control. Takes time for things to calm back down.”

“But,” Komme Medean said through a vicious scowl, “with these fucking priests spreading lies no one can see through—themselves included—every little whorl becomes a whirlpool.”

“Has that potential, sir,” Yardem said. “Yes.”

Barriath cleared his throat and leaned forward. “If we could maintain the army as a whole and draw them back to Camnipol before they broke? And especially if we could coordinate an occupation by Birancouri soldiers who knew to watch for the priests?”

The Timzinae woman—Isadau—had been silent. Now she lifted her chin. When she spoke, her voice was thin and resonant as a bowed string. “Have we decided this, then? Is there no conversation about the people who’ve been killed or the families shattered?”

Cithrin bel Sarcour nodded, not in agreement, but a kind of recognition, as if the phrase was part of some other conversation.

“Isadau,” Komme Medean began, but the woman went on, her voice more terrible for being as matter-of-fact.

“I don’t ask for myself… No, that isn’t true. I saw my city humiliated,” she said. “I saw Firstblood men whipping Timzinae women through the street for sport. Children stolen from their mothers and fathers. Sometimes the priests were there, and sometimes they were not. I respect that the Lord Marshal and his mother aren’t pleased with Geder Palliako, but how does that wash clean all that’s been done in Antea’s name? Do we believe we can end this without also demanding justice? Because I am not convinced.”

And in a breath, what had been a meeting of minds with a common purpose became split. The Timzinae woman stood in one world, and Clara—to her dismay—in another. Like flakes of iron pulled by a lodestone, the others would become allies of one or the other. Already she could see it. Barriath shifting in his seat, moving toward her as if to protect her from attack. Cithrin easing down her gaze, pricked by a moment of shame perhaps. Guilt at her disloyalty. Chana Medean and Paerin Clark glancing at the old man of the banking house to see how Komme reacted to the question, but the old man’s face was blank as stone.

And it had all been going so well up to now.

Clara took a deep breath, searching for words that would bring them back together. She couldn’t imagine what they were. To her surprise it was Captain Wester who spoke.

“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog. If the question’s how much do we have to punish the other side before we can stomach peace, my experience is you can do the enemy a damned lot of hurt before it starts feeling like justice enough. Most times it comes down to how many of them you can kill before you get tired and bored. And whether you can break them so they don’t take their turn after. Looking for everyone to feel happy is waiting for yesterday.”

The Timzinae woman’s inner eyelids closed with a faint click and she rocked back an inch as if she’d been slapped. The Tralgu’s tall, mobile ears went flat against his head in what looked like chagrin. “He’ll be better in a few days, ma’am.”

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” Isadau said and walked stiffly from the room.

Wester sighed. “Am I going to have to apologize for that?”

“Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said.

“Put it on the board for tomorrow.”

“Was already planning to, sir.”

“Still, she brings up a fair point,” Komme said. “Even if you pull Antea back inside its borders, there are going to be a lot of people howling for blood. It might not be too early to start thinking about what reconciliation would look like.”

Barriath snorted, “The spiders have been in play since before the dragons fell. Don’t you think we should find how to win against the priests first?”

“Or figure out who we’re talking about when we say we,” Wester said.

Cithrin bel Sarcour raised her thin, pale hand. Her gaze was fixed on nothing, as if she were reading a text invisible to everyone else. “It has to all happen at once. The spider priests, the war—all the wars. And building what comes after to keep it from all starting up again. It all has to happen at the same time.”

“That’s quite a bit to ask,” Komme said.

“Well,” Clara said, “necessary isn’t the same as simple, is it?”

Komme’s laughter was sharp and barking, but she saw how it eased the tension in all the others’ faces. Except Wester’s. “Fair point, Lady Kalliam. If we’d wanted easy, we should have stayed home. Or all of you should have, at any rate. It isn’t as though I’ve left my house. Why don’t we drink a little wine and talk through this like it was a question of business. What do we have to work with?”

“All the money in the world,” Cithrin said, the phrase coming with a depth of meaning that Clara couldn’t entirely parse. Then she smiled at Clara with a brightness and sharpness that might have been genuine or an actor’s artifice. “And the mother of the Lord Marshal as an ally.”

“Well, one of those is better tested than the other,” Komme said. “But I follow you on both points. What else have we got?”

For the better part of an hour, they spoke. Much of it Clara followed—the letters written against the powers of the priests, the knowledge that the dragon Inys could provide, the dispositions of the Antean army and the forces rising in Elassae. Other points, like the peculiar relationship among Narinisle, Northcoast, and Herez mediated by the new “war gold” letters, she couldn’t quite parse, but she did her best to listen intelligently. A brown-pelted Kurtadam girl brought platters of glazed meat and soft cheese. A Firstblood boy with skin as dark as a Timzinae’s scales poured wine into thick crystal cups. The day flowed quickly into night until the fire couldn’t outpace the chill. When, at evening’s end, they parted, Barriath walked with her to the rooms the bank had set aside for her.

For a moment, she suffered a sense of displacement. Memories of winter nights in Osterling Fells while Dawson was off on the King’s Hunt mixed with something more recent—walking in unfamiliar halls with a young man. So much had changed in her life in so few years. And in herself.

“Well,” Barriath said as they came to her rooms, “and what did you make of your first council of war, Mother?”

“A very apt rehearsal for the real one,” she said, and Barriath chuckled. A Dartinae servant, his eyes glowing a gentle yellow, slid her door open with a bow.

“That was the real one,” Barriath said.

Clara paused in her doorway. He didn’t sound as though he were joking, and his face didn’t have the expression he employed when he was teasing. But she couldn’t take what he’d said seriously. When she spoke, she sounded scandalized, even to herself. “Without a representative of the crown?”

“Things are different since the bankers took over.”

The journey from Jorey’s camp to the great city of Carse had been unpleasant, but not overly long. Jorey had given them good horses and a sturdy cart. Nothing grand enough to attract the wrong kind of attention on the road. Coming so far and through so much only to be killed by bandits would have been absurd, but the world didn’t seem to shy away from absurdity now. If it ever had. Barriath had traded his disguise as Callon Cane for a servant’s robes and a cheap hat that drooped down on the sides to obscure his jawline. The winter roads were thinly traveled, and while the forces of King Tracian kept a close eye on the southern border, an old woman and her son weren’t a threat they feared. They had slept in merchant inns and public houses, keeping to themselves as much as they could. Barriath could pass for a man of no country, but the accents of the Antean court were too much a habit for her. She could no more deny her origins than explain them.

The hardships of following the army had served her well. She rose before dawn, her eyes opening while the still-dark sky betrayed nothing of the coming day, and traveled until twilight faded to dusk. Between the falling winter and their northern route, the light came late and left early. But the fighting had not reached Northcoast, and a mild autumn had left the granaries full, the harvest just passed still rich in memory. Clara had been greeted with as much generosity as suspicion, seen as much courage as fear. In time of war, it was more than she had hoped.

Her rooms at the holding company, home and hearth for Paerin Clark and the Medean bank, were less than the room she would have offered guests of her own in Osterling Fells, greater than she’d had in Abitha Coe’s boardinghouse in the poorer quarters of Camnipol. The bed was large enough for two, with a thin down mattress and wool blankets that she could lose herself in. The fire grate held a small blaze and the bricks held the heat for hours after the flames went out. The inner walls of the little keep bent in there, giving her something like a balcony that looked down on the inner courtyard, walled off by thick cedar shutters with oiled cloth in the joints to keep out the wind.

When she slept there, she dreamed of Dawson. Something about the cold or the voice of the wind, perhaps. In her dreams, he was neither alive nor dead, neither with her nor apart. Often she did not see his face or hear his voice. There was only a sense of his presence that faded when she woke. For the hour or so she sat alone with her tea and honeyed bread, wrapped in a robe as thick as tapestry, she would remember him. The names of his favorite dogs. His overwhelming contempt for Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. The way he’d taught Barriath and Vicarian and Jorey to fight and to hunt. The melancholy she felt then wasn’t for her own loss. She’d spilled her grief in strange places, and what remained was a complicated tissue of fondness and gratitude and guilty pleasure at who she had become.

Dawson had wagered his life that the world could be kept as it had been: static and unchanged. He had lost. These people of ledgers and sums would have been as vile to him as the foreign spider priests. For him, the world had had an order. To plan a war against a noble—and Geder wasn’t king, but he was certainly of noble blood—without its being between peers would have been unthinkable. He would never have done what she had chosen to do. She loved him for that. Worse, she was relieved that he hadn’t lived to see this.

And she missed Vincen Coe. Not simply as a man, not any man, but the one particular face and body and voice. The lover of her new life as Dawson had been the lover of her past one. Necessity had made leaving him behind with Jorey easy. Not pleasant, never that, but easy. Once one saw what had to be done, it simply had to be done. She’d needed to find Cithrin bel Sarcour, the enemy of her enemy, and hope to turn the fall of Geder Palliako into something other than the devastation of her country.

Perhaps it was even working. But as the first scattering of fat grey snowflakes swirled down from the white morning sky, she found herself picturing Vincen huddled in a cunning man’s tent. Cold. Still recovering from the wounds he had suffered. She wished him here, in relative safety. In her bed, where she could warm him and be warmed by him. And more than that. He was her one critical vice.

She knew, or thought she knew, what Antea would be if they failed against the spiders. And if they won? Who would she be then? Would she stand in the court by her remaining sons and turn her scandalous lover aside? Would she vanish into the low world at Vincen’s side and leave behind her children? Her grandchildren? All that she had built and loved and made?

No matter what, the nation she saved—if she saved it—wouldn’t be the one she’d known.

She filled her pipe thoughtfully, her thumb tamping the leaf into the bowl with the ease of long practice. She lit it from the fire, drawing smoke deep into her chest. When she breathed out, the smoke was as grey as the snow. She had to make a plan, but she couldn’t. Not by herself. Not any longer.

The shriek came suddenly, and from everywhere. She started, her fingers snapping the stem of her pipe. It came again, louder, and followed by a rushing sound like the voice of a great fire. Her breath shuddered as she stood. She shook, fears deeper and more primal than speech could form filling her mouth with copper, but she rose all the same. The shutters were frigid against her hand as she pulled them aside and stepped out onto the little balcony.

A vast shadow passed over her, blackness dotted white by snow-strewn air. The dragon dropped to the courtyard in the center of the keep, its war-tattered wings too wide to fully unfurl. It was magnificent and awing. Its dark scales defied the cold. Its massive head turned on a serpent neck. Clara had the sudden, powerful memory of going to court for the first time. A child of eight years faced by the splendor of a king.

A black wooden door opened far below her. A thin figure stepped out into the fallen snow. Cithrin bel Sarcour walked out to the dragon, notebook and pencil in her hand. The dragon folded his wings and settled before her. Clara couldn’t hear the girl’s voice at all, and Inys’s replies were bass rumbles, like a landslide with words in it. She watched them consult, the most ancient ruler of the world and the newest.

These are the allies I’ve picked, she thought as her toes and earlobes began to ache. Please God let me have chosen well.

Geder Palliako, Lord Regent of Antea

As he had been preparing for this last campaign, Geder’s father had come to see him. They’d sat in one of the gardens just within the grounds of the Kingspire, the huge tower rising up on one hand, the depth of the Division on the other. Lehrer Palliako, Viscount of Rivenhalm, had been the central man in Geder’s life, even when he was not present. Ever since Geder had become first the hero of Vanai, then Baron of Ebbingbaugh and then Lord Regent of Antea, he’d felt a little odd around him, as if his rise in court were somehow a reproach upon his father. It had struck him that day as they sat eating dried apples and fresh cheese how much older Lehrer had become.

A day would come, he realized, when he would be the Viscount of Rivenhalm himself. The idea had been both melancholy and wearying. He’d distracted himself and his father by outlining the hunt for the apostate. He’d done all he could to make it sound the grand adventure that it was, but Lehrer seemed only to hear the risk in it.

“Be careful out there, Son,” he’d said.

“I’ll be fine. I have Basrahip, and the men may not be the first pressing, but we have the goddess with us. We can’t lose.”

“Still,” Lehrer had said, “do be careful out there. And when you come back too.” Then he’d smiled and patted Geder’s knee as he’d done since Geder had been a child. “My good boy. My good, good boy. There’s more danger in court than on a battlefield, eh? Always remember that.”

Now that the fight was done, Geder found himself wondering what exactly the old man had meant.

Killing the apostate priests in the swamps of southern Asterilhold—or what had been Asterilhold before he’d conquered it—had been the final defeat of the darkness, the birth of the light. Geder, sitting alone in his private rooms in the palace at Kaltfel, thought it might have been a little more momentous.

From the way Basrahip had described things, Geder had imagined the apostate priest as a dragon in human skin. A being of darkness and violence and rage, bent on holding all humanity in a death-grip of lies. He’d imagined the man would be tall and graceful and threatening, honey-tongued like a villain in an old song. And his defeat would crack the world like the Division in the center of Camnipol. Split the earth itself down to its bones. And afterward, everything should have been light and hope and renewal. The world made right. The allies of evil slaughtered or else, if they’d been innocent, set free. That was the way those things were supposed to happen.

Instead they’d followed a rough path into the swamp, killed a couple dozen wet, cold, angry men, and come back to the city.

Basrahip had explained that the light of the goddess wasn’t like real light. The world wouldn’t suddenly start glowing gold or some such. And of course, Geder had known that. The light of the goddess was a metaphor for purity and righteousness, only sitting by the fire with a rug over his knees, the insides of his thighs still chapped from the ride, he couldn’t help feeling that purity and righteousness might be metaphors for something too, and he wasn’t quite sure what.

Kaltfel had been the first city to fall in the war that stretched out behind him, year after year. Dawson Kalliam had taken it and brought King Lechan to Camnipol in chains. King Lechan who’d plotted to kill Prince Aster and claim the Antean throne for some cousin of the royal line whose loyalty was to Asterilhold. Unify the kingdoms.

Well, Lechan had managed that anyway, though not the way he’d meant to. All the remaining court had sworn allegiance to Geder and Aster and the Severed Throne. And since the priests had been there when they’d done it, the ones who hadn’t meant it were all dead. The court in Kaltfel was loyal to Antea. Still, it was strange.

Lechan, the old man Geder had put to death, had probably sat in this room. In this chair. Warmed his shins before a fire like this one. Slept in the bed where Geder had slept last night, would sleep again tonight and then hopefully never again. With Basrahip arranging priestly things at the temple, Geder had thought of searching through the old man’s library, browsing the shelves and boxes for something rare and old and special. An essay that had never been translated. A poem he hadn’t seen. Speculative essays that laid out visions of the world and wild insights and imaginings he would never have had on his own. It was the way he’d amused himself on any number of evenings before he’d become Lord Regent. But the idea of pleasure wasn’t the same as the thing itself, and all during the long, grey afternoon, he’d found he didn’t quite have the will to rouse himself and go looking. Or order someone else to do it for him. Or really manage anything much besides sit and watch the fire dance in the grate and the sky go dark with the sunset.

He was tired. That was all. It was only that he needed a solid night’s sleep. Tomorrow would be better.

A soft knock came at the door, and he let himself imagine that it would be something dramatic. Assassins come to assault him or Jorey finally arrived with Cithrin in chains. Something. Anything. But it was only a grey-haired old man in the gold-and-silver filigree of the highest servants. Geder had been told his name at some point, but he didn’t remember it now, and didn’t care enough to pretend otherwise.

“Lord Regent,” the servant said. “Sir Raillien Morn requests a moment.”

“Who?” Geder asked.

“Sir Morn is the sworn protector of Asinport. He has ridden a day and a night to reach you, my lord. He says it is a matter of deadly import.”

He didn’t remember anyone named Raillien Morn, but he also didn’t recall whom he’d named protector of Asinport. He might not even have done it. There were so many declarations and proclamations and appointments and things that Daskellin and Mecelli had shoved in front of him for his signature. Or Ternigan might have appointed the man before he’d turned loyalties.

Or after. Maybe it was assassins after all. Geder felt a thrill of fear. “Is Basrahip back from the temple yet?”

“I do not know, my lord.”

“If he is, bring him. And my full guard—”

“They are outside your door, my lord.”

“I didn’t ask where they fucking were. I said bring them in here. With Basrahip. When they’re all here, you can get this Morn person.”

The servant backed out bowing. Geder turned his gaze back to the fire, but the flames had lost their charm. With a growl, he threw the rug aside and stood up. He paced the room, his hands behind his back, his legs aching with every stride, for what seemed like hours. The windows had long since gone dark. Without moonlight, the glass became only a dark mirror that reflected Geder’s movement. When the door opened again, Geder’s private guard entered the room in silent formation. And after them, Basrahip.

The massive priest’s face was broad and untroubled. He bared his teeth in a smile. “Is all well, Prince Geder?”

“Fine,” Geder snapped, and Basrahip shook his head.

“No.”

“I didn’t really mean it to be true,” Geder said. “It’s not really a lie if you don’t mean for people to think it’s true, you know.” He was whining. He hated it when he whined. Odd that it wasn’t enough to stop him.

“What troubles you?” Basrahip asked.

“There’s someone come to see me from Asinport. The protector, apparently. Only I thought maybe Ternigan… or Dawson Kalliam…”

“You fear he is not loyal?”

“It crossed my mind. People have tried to kill me, you know.”

“And failed, for you are beloved of the goddess,” Basrahip said. “Bring this man, and let his living voice proclaim whether he is corrupt.”

Sir Raillien Morn was a Jasuru, which was odd. But the court of Asterilhold had allowed for more mixing of the races than the Antean. And even in Antea, there were a few minor nobles whose line was said to be less than purely Firstblood. The Jasuru noble fell to his knees. His scales were a deep copper color, his teeth black and sharp. It was odd, really. The Timzinae were the race that weren’t really human but a kind of lesser, debased dragonet carved into human form. But Jasuru scales were more like dragon skin than the chitinous plates of the Timzinae. Or maybe that wasn’t true. After all, he’d never seen a dragon, only gotten reports. They might be more like great insects than the serpent scales in the old books. He’d have to ask Jorey when he got back.

As Lord Marshal, Jorey had defeated one in battle with the tools and weapons Geder had made for him. The story of that battle was one he wanted to hear. Certainly more than he did whatever the man still kneeling before him was going to say.

“What’s your name?” Geder asked.

“I am Sir Raillien Morn, Lord Regent. I am protector of Asinport.”

Which was all pretty well established, Geder thought, but he looked to Basrahip all the same. The priest inclined his great head in a subtle nod. That was true.

“Are you loyal to me?”

“Yes, Lord Regent,” Morn said, and looked to Basrahip. There had been a time that not everyone had known that it was the priest who told Geder whether things were true or lies. Everyone had held him in awe back then and wondered how he’d known so much. Now everyone looked to Basrahip and the other priests that way instead. It shouldn’t have irked him. It didn’t, only he’d enjoyed it back then and he wished he could enjoy it now too. It was like the libraries that way.

Basrahip nodded.

“Do you mean me any harm?” Geder asked, more sharply than he’d intended.

“No, Lord Regent.”

He thought about following it up with something more extreme. Would you sacrifice your life for mine? or What are you most ashamed of? Not that it would change anything, but Geder was curious what the limits of Sir Morn’s dedication were, and prying open someone’s private self was always interesting. But he’d only have been doing it because he was feeling peevish, so instead Geder ordered his guard back out and sat again by the fire.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I have ridden through from Asinport in the north,” Morn began, and Geder cut him off.

“I know you did. They told me. What is it?”

“There have been statements, Lord Regent,” the Jasuru said. “They began appearing in the city very recently.”

Geder shifted in his chair. “Statements?”

Morn, still kneeling, fumbled at his belt. When he held out his hand, a thick paper was in it, folded in a square. Geder plucked it out and unfolded it. It was sturdy and thicker than the page of a book, the fibers that made it up coarse enough to texture the words inked upon it.

THE SPIDER GODDESS IS A LIE AND HER PRIESTS ARE THE TOOLS OF MADNESS

The scourge of the spider goddess that has touched all the world in recent years is not what it claims to be! The peculiar and insidious powers of those dedicated in the false temples hide their true nature, but now THE TRUTH CAN BE KNOWN! YOU CAN RESIST!

It went on down the page. The spider priests, it said, were not the voice of a suppressed goddess, but a creation of the dragons, like the twelve races of humanity or the eternal jade roads. They had two powers—to sense it when people knowingly spoke an untruth and to convince whoever heard their voices that what they said was true, whether it was or not. The page called the first “the power of the ear” and the second “the power of the mouth,” which seemed like a particularly old-fashioned way to frame the idea. Archaic, even.

For a moment, an old fascination stirred in him. The pale ghost of his old love of speculative essays. What if it were true? What if the dragons had made a tool to sow chaos among their own servant races? How would that fit with all he’d read of the ancient past? Something like excitement sparked in his brain.

“They… began appearing?” Geder said. “What does that mean?”

“All through the city, my lord. They would just… be there. One was pasted to a wall near the port. Another, we found on a table in a common house. In all, we’ve gathered almost a hundred.”

“Are they all like this?” Geder asked.

“No, my lord. There are several versions, and people are copying them. We found a house in the salt quarter where a scribe had started making others with the same text. We questioned him before he was killed, of course, but he didn’t know where the papers had come from. He only made copies out of his own hatred and malice. But I fear he may not be the only one such.”

Geder handed the page to Basrahip, who shook his head. “Dead words on a dead thing, Prince Geder. They are less than nothing.”

“It isn’t true, what it says,” Geder said. “The spider goddess wasn’t made by the dragons.”

“Of course not,” Basrahip said with a warm, rolling chuckle. “She is the truth itself, and her enemies are the servants of lies. It is why they must use this emptiest form of words to defy her.” The priest sobered. “What is written is in no voice. Ink on a page means no more than a bird’s scratches on bark. You know this as well as any man.”

For a moment, Geder remembered another letter. The one Cithrin had written him from Suddapal. The one he had humiliated himself over. Bird scratches on bark indeed. Was this letter hers as well? It seemed likely.

It was the kind of thing she’d do. The kind of thing she’d done. Hiding behind phrases. Pretending things were true that weren’t. With a growl, he threw the Jasuru’s page into the fire grate. The flames dimmed for a moment, then brightened as the words turned to smoke.

“You did well by bringing this,” Geder said through clenched teeth. “And by killing the scribe.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

“Go back. Make patrols. Anyone who has one of these, take to the gaol. The priests can question them. Anyone who’s making them or passing them on is guilty of treason against the Severed Throne. As the Lord Regent, and in the name of Prince Aster, I authorize you to question them and execute them in whatever manner you think would be most likely to keep anyone else from following in their path. Torturing a few people to death in the public square’s better than being gentle and letting them get away with… with this.”

“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”

“And if you find how they got here? Who’s writing them? I’ll get you your own weight in gold.”

The Jasuru’s eyes went wide. Geder regretted the words as soon as he’d said them. It was too extravagant a promise, but taking it back now would be embarrassing. He was stuck with it. He had to be more careful about that.

“I will turn the city out like a pocket, Lord Palliako,” Morn said. “I will pull every man, woman, and child in the salt quarter into the sea if I have to. No one will escape.”

“Good,” Geder said. “Do that.”

After the man had left, Geder turned back to the fire. The last remnants of the page floated over the coals, grey and fragile. He felt his scowl as an ache at the corners of his mouth.

“I thought after we stopped the apostate, everything would get better. That it would be over.”

“Everything is getting better, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said. “The world of lies is failing before us. All this that you see is only the curling back of the corrupt world. There is no cause for mourning.”

The darkness of Geder’s mood didn’t ease, but a layer of shame overlaid it. Basrahip was right, of course. Things were going well. They’d beaten the apostate. There was no reason that he should feel so dispirited. That he did left him with the creeping suspicion that he was the problem.

“Doesn’t matter,” Geder said, forcing a grim smile. “We’ll march ahead all the same. Back to Camnipol and Prince Aster and all the rest of it.”

“We shall,” Basrahip said. “Bring yourself, Prince Geder. The feast in your honor is to begin.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“Your work has been long and noble and hard,” Basrahip said. “Your sacrifices are deeper than those around you know. All this that troubles you? It is only the passing of a cloud across the face of the sun. Come eat and drink. Let those who love you surround you. All will be well.”

Put that way, the feast actually sounded worth sitting through. Geder hauled himself up and bowed to the priest. “I’m sorry. You’re right. A little food will certainly do me some good. Let’s go to it.”

The great hall was filled with the members of the court and their families. The heat of their bodies filled the room. The scent of pork and mint, stewed plums and cinnamon, fresh bread and sweet butter caught Geder’s attention at least. Lanterns of worked crystal glowed along the walls. Men and women both wore the overlarge black leather cloaks that he himself had made popular what seemed like a lifetime before. A group of Dartinae acrobats amused the crowd; lithe thin bodies capering impossibly in the air, eyes aglow. A Southling cunning man conjured fire out of the air for a time, his massive black eyes seeming to recoil from the light. A Cinnae girl with a silver slave chain around her neck sang second-empire love songs in a voice as rich and warm as a viol, and bright and clear as a flute. Geder waited for it all to salve him, but the most it managed was to distract.

It wasn’t until Basrahip stood before them all on a raised dais, his palms out to the crowd commanding silence, and gave a speech honoring Geder as Lord Regent and chosen of the goddess that he started to feel a little better.

Geder Palliako had been drawn across the Keshet, called for the righteousness of his soul. He had brought the Righteous Servant out of the desert and into the noble houses for her glory. No man in all of history had done as he had done. It was like being reminded of something he’d almost forgotten. Yes, that was right. He had led the empire to glory. That was true. He had been entrusted by the dying King Simeon to care for and raise Aster. That was true too.

By the end of the speech, Geder actually felt a little better about himself and all he’d done. Even the slaughter in the swamp seemed to have taken on a patina of grand adventure. If he went to bed afterward more nearly at peace, the rest, he told himself, would pass with the morning. It was only that he needed to recover from his struggles.

It wasn’t—couldn’t be—that he was oppressed because the morning would begin a long, cold journey along the jade road. Or that he already dreaded the work that would be waiting in Camnipol for him. Or that he still loved Cithrin, and hated her. Missed her, and who she could have been to him. That he was disappointed by how the death of the apostate and the moment of greatest victory had seemed to change so little.

Applause and cheering rose up at the end of Basrahip’s speech, and Geder stood to acknowledge it as his due. Once, long before, he’d told Basrahip that he wanted his enemies to suffer. It had been true at the time. The adulation of the court washed over him, warming him, cleaning him, forgiving him his failures or else denying they existed.

If that wasn’t enough, it was close. It would have to suffice. He drank in not love but renown like a man dying of thirst and pretended to be slaked.

Clara

Buildings, she thought, echoed each other. Though they might have been in different cities, every palace she’d been in had had the feel of a palace. The rooms, the decors, even the scents of the places might be as different as apples and walnuts, but they served the same functions, and so perhaps it was natural that they took on an ineffable sense of being the same. Marketplaces all seemed to have the same resemblance among themselves as siblings of a large family. Even the cunning man tents in the field had some resemblance to the sickrooms of great manor houses.

And the same was true, it now appeared, of gaols. The one she’d seen most recently had been a prison of the innocent: Timzinae children parted from their parents and brought to Camnipol as assurance of the good behavior of the newly enslaved race. The one she sat in now held the guests of King Tracian of Northcoast. And still they were meant to divide space, to confine, to represent the power that one person held and another did not. They were even meant, as unalike as they were, to represent justice, though if justice had so many different faces, she wasn’t at all certain she knew what the word meant any longer, and good God, but her mind was running away with itself.

Clara adjusted her sleeve for what must have been the fiftieth time. Cold radiated from the stone of the wall, and the weak winter light that came from the high, thin window did little to push back the shadows. Her throat felt tight, as though she might be coming down with something, and wouldn’t that be unpleasant. She’d heard cunning men say that unchecked emotion could bring on illness, but she couldn’t help thinking of all the times she’d felt swept away by strong feeling and hadn’t gotten so much as a sniffle, so perhaps that was only a story they told to explain away what they had no better answer for.

But why, after all she’d been through, all she’d done, should she feel so unmoored now? She had faced down soldiers drunk with bloodlust with no more than her voice and a raised eyebrow. She’d sentenced men to death and stood to watch her sentence carried out. What was this meeting—with an unarmed man who hadn’t enough power now to walk outside when he wished—that it should make her blood cold? The complications of her allegiance to her nation were well enough known by now. Jorey knew. Barriath. Vincen Coe had known almost before she had. Hers was a secret well-practiced in the telling, only…

Only never before to someone who would feel it as a betrayal. The thought settled on her heart, calming it, though not in a comforting way. At least she knew now what fear was driving her. Knowing made it easier to bear.

“Lady?” the gaoler said. He was a thick man. Firstblood, but as wide across the shoulder and belly as a Yemmu. She wondered—a passing fancy—if the races echoed one another the same way buildings did. If a gaoler in Borja might seem the fellow of this man, though he was Tralgu or Jasuru or Dartinae. Clara took a deep breath, rose, and banished all other concerns.

“Yes, I’m ready,” she said, and the gaoler turned. She followed.

The walls were too cold to be damp. Frost rimed them, and the gaoler’s torch smoked. He looked back at her when she coughed, his expression an apology. She lifted her chin and moved on. Their footsteps sounded lonely on the bare stone, as if they were looking for some companionship besides the walls. It was a silly thought, but that she’d had it meant something. The door, when they reached it, was black oak bound in iron. There was no rust, and she found herself perversely grateful for that. It would have been worse, somehow, if the cell had been poorly kept.

“I can come in with you if you like,” the gaoler said. “Keep him in line.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“You sure about that, lady?”

Was she? It didn’t matter. The answer had to be the same. “I’ll call if there’s need.”

The gaoler shrugged, undid the lock, and slid back the bar. Even with her assurances, he pulled the door open carefully, his torch at the ready like a cudgel. Within, the cell was small and close, with a window no more than a finger’s width just by the ceiling. But a crystal lantern hung from a hook, and there was room enough for a tiny desk beside the cot. If there was a lingering scent of the chamber pot, it was no worse than she’d suffered in far nicer rooms, and a small brazier left the air warmer than the hall. Lord Skestinin himself rose when she entered, his snowy eyebrows beetled, but his eyes bright and alert. He wore a prison gown rather than the uniform of a lord of the Antean court, but he wore it well.

“Lady Kalliam?” he breathed, as if uncertain of his senses.

“Clara,” she said. “If you’ll permit my calling you Anton. We are family by blood now, after all.”

“Sabiha?”

“I understand the birth was touch-and-go, but from all I’ve heard she and the baby are quite well now. They’ve named her Annalise, after me. I hope that’s all right.”

Lord Skestinin grinned. His teeth were yellow as ivory, and crooked. She wondered now whether she’d ever seen him grin before. “Whyever would it not be?”

“That’s a longer conversation,” she said, and turned back to the still-open door. “I’ll call.”

The door closed, though the bar did not scrape back into its place. Poised for a swift return, she supposed. Well, it would be embarrassing to have a visitor assaulted on one’s watch. She couldn’t blame the man for being anxious on her behalf. She arranged herself at the foot of the cot. Lord Skestinin lowered himself to the thin desk, seeming almost to deflate. Clara cast a weary eye on the walls, the cot.

“It’s not so bad,” Skestinin said. “I’ve shipped in smaller cabins than this. Miss having a deck to walk at will, though. And the sea. I seem to have fashioned myself into the sort of man who needs the sea about him. What news of the war?”

Clara shook her head. It wasn’t a question she knew how to answer. The war was going well, or poorly, or dancing on chaos’s edge. How was she to tell the difference? Or report it? Facts, she supposed. Simplicities. “Jorey took Porte Oliva. I suppose you know that, seeing as you aren’t there any longer.”

“May he burn the place flat,” Skestinin said with a rueful laugh. “It was not the site of my greatest triumph. And my men? The navy?”

“The ones who were still imprisoned in the south are freed. I don’t know how the ships stand. Winter, you know.”

“Winter business,” Skestinin said with a bitterness she recognized.

“Winter business,” she said, letting the words roll in her mouth.

“If it isn’t too indelicate to ask,” Lord Skestinin said, “how were you captured?”

“Oh,” Clara said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t.”

For a moment, he was confused. She watched him understand. He lifted his eyebrows and looked at the ground. “Ah,” he said.

“You’ve seen what’s gone on in Antea. Palliako is the worst thing that’s happened to the empire in my lifetime or yours. We’d have been better giving the throne to Aster straightaway. A kindhearted child would be better than the Lord Regent we have now. And, Anton, these priests…”

“Yes, my lady,” Lord Skestinin said. “The foreign priests your late husband led his rebellion against. I… understand and respect your loyalty to his cause.”

She felt for a moment as if he’d spoken in some unfamiliar language. Her laughter was sharp and sudden and only partly related to mirth. There was also disbelief in it. And something sharper for which she had no name. “I can accuse myself of many things these last years, but slavish devotion to Dawson has not numbered among them.”

“We disagree on the point. No, hear me out. I am loyal to the crown. Did I agree with every choice King Simeon made? No, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t pick and choose when to be loyal. That isn’t loyalty. There is a right system to the world, my lady. God, then the king, then the lords of the court. The father rules over the mother rules over the children. The husband rules over the wife. That is the right order of the world from the stars to the lowest nomads in the Keshet.”

His voice had grown louder and rougher. Spots of red appeared on his cheeks. She considered him closely, as she might a particularly colorful insect that had landed on her arm. The brightness of his eyes. The folds of his sea-leathered skin. The jut of his jaw. He had been her son’s commander for years. He was her own family, first by marriage, and now both of their blood flowed in a little girl in Camnipol. How strange, then, that she felt she had never seen him before as he was.

“You’re quite right,” she said. “We do disagree on the point.” He clenched his jaw, his white beard jutting out like a goat’s. A sorrow she had not expected shook her. And then a guilt, and a resentment at being made to feel guilty. She laughed again, but more gently and more to herself. “Still, we needn’t be rude to each other. God help us both, we are family. Is there anything I can do to make your confinement less odious?”

“I wouldn’t ask favors,” Lord Skestinin said. “Gives the wrong impression.”

“Of course. But all this unpleasantness aside, might we not come to a private understanding?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

A gust of wind spat a snowflake in through the window. It spiraled close to the lantern, shining for a moment, then winking out as it melted. “The world is a cruel place, and the next few years are going to be difficult,” Clara said. “I don’t know how this all comes out. And… and they did name her after me.”

Lord Skestinin’s smile was flinty. “The king protects his land. The father protects his child. And his grandchild, however unfortunately conceived. There is no need for agreement between us, Lady Kalliam. Not for that.”

“Should history favor my views over your own, my lord, I will bend stone and bleed fire to see Sabiha kept safe. And not as a favor to you.”

“I am pleased that you still have some honor. Perhaps we may yet be reconciled.”

“It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened since we left Camnipol. If I see your wife and daughter, is there a message you’d like me to give them?”

“Other than that Lady Kalliam and her exiled son have betrayed the kingdom?”

“Yes, other than that.”

“No,” he said. “It won’t be called for.”

Clara put a hand on his knee. The fur was cold to the touch. “It was good to see you.”

“And you, my lady,” Lord Skestinin said. Etiquette was such a beautiful system of lies. It allowed everyone to pretend when the truth was too ugly to bear. That they all shared in the lie made it at least something that they shared. She rose and called for the guard. The door opened at once, and then closed behind her once she’d reached the hall. The bar ground back into place with a sense of finality. She wondered whether she had just seen her granddaughter’s grandfather for the last time.

“Ma’am?” the gaoler said, bringing her back to herself.

“Yes, of course. They must be waiting,” she said. “Lead on.”

No chance then of Skestinin taking our side?” King Tracian said. He was a young man, and she had a sense that it was more than just his age. He was older than Simeon had been when he took the throne, after all. There was a nervousness about him. An anxiety that seemed to infuse his words and movements. Perhaps it was natural in the son of a usurper. Or it might only be that he was harboring the sworn and public enemy of a kingdom that had recently conquered all its immediate neighbors and had an army camped at his southern border. Or that the last dragon roamed his street. Come to think of it, he had more than enough reason to be uncertain of himself.

“I think he will not,” Clara said, accepting a cup of mulled wine from Komme Medean’s thin hand. There were no servants in the withdrawing room, and none in the hall without. It was not a conversation to be overheard. “It would have been too pretty, I suppose, to have the Lord Marshal and the master of the fleet both in our confidence.”

“Shouldn’t get greedy,” the old banker said. If it was meant to be ironic, he hid it well.

The room was colored with gold. It was in the tapestries on the walls, woven into the carpet beneath her feet. There were other colors—the shining green and indigo of the cushions, the scarlet of the wall hangings, the gentle yellow of the lanterns—but all of them seemed there to offer contrast to the gold. The air was mulled wine and incense, rich without being cloying, which was much rarer in a palace than Clara thought it should be. Incense was too easily overdone. It spoke well of Tracian that he knew to restrain it. There was a plate of raisins and cheese to go with her wine, though she couldn’t bring herself to taste them. Not yet.

The king of Northcoast paced, four steps along the wall, then back the other way, hands clasped behind him. Komme Medean sat beside the wine with his fingers woven together and a calm expression in his eyes. She had the sense that the world might turn to fire and ash, and the banker would have the same calm about him. The king turned again. For a moment, she wasn’t certain what he reminded her of. Ah, yes. A captain pacing his deck.

“It would be a kindness to put him in a larger cell,” she said. “One, perhaps, where he could walk a bit.”

“Did he ask for that?” Tracian said.

“No,” Clara said. “He was quite careful to ask for nothing.”

“We have Barriath’s pirates,” Komme said. “And the ships of Northcoast, of course. I’d be surprised if we couldn’t convince Narinisle and Herez to step in as support at the least. Though they may balk at open battle.”

“Is open battle our plan?” Tracian said. “Because last I checked, we still had an army to the south with orders to bring Cithrin bel Sarcour to Camnipol in chains.”

“Jorey won’t come north,” Clara said. “We’re safe here. For now.”

“With respect, Lady Kalliam,” Komme said as he poured himself more wine, “are we sure of that? Have we had word from the army since you came?”

“I haven’t, but neither was I expecting any. Jorey has no intention of marching on Northcoast. He knows I’ve come, and he will wait until I return.”

“You’re making some assumptions,” the old banker said. “By your own report, the soldiers are overtaxed. There are two of the priests there at least.”

“Only two,” Clara said.

“Only two if no others have arrived in your absence.” Komme’s voice was gentle, but firm. “We speculate on what’s happened in the winter camp, but we can’t know. And though I hesitate to point it out, Lord Marshal of Antea hasn’t been an invitation to a long career since Palliako took the crown.”

“Why didn’t Skestinin come to us?” Tracian said. “He has to know what the priests are. We have showed him the one we have, haven’t we? The actor?”

“He’s known since Porte Oliva,” Komme said. “It isn’t at issue with him.”

“Why not?”

Several thoughts collided in Clara’s mind: He is bound by his honor and He has reason to fear Palliako and Men of a certain age can only understand the world they were boys in. She was left with an impatient grunt as the most eloquent answer she could give.

“More to the point,” Komme said, “is what we can do about it. You know the court in Camnipol better than any of us. Will they rise against the priests? When they know, will they take arms? Or will they be like our guest?”

Clara wished badly she’d thought to bring a pipe. The wine was warm, but too sweet. She wanted the feel of the stem between her teeth and the taste of smoke. “The court,” she said, “is unlikely to turn. The lords who were most prone to object to the priests rose already, my husband among them, and they’re all dead. Anyone disloyal to Palliako is dead or exiled or hung from the Prisoner’s Span. The fear he has built in these last years… No. I think they won’t rise up. Even if they know what the priests are and how they function. And after all, they think they’re winning.”

“They are winning,” Tracian said, only of course that wasn’t true. None of them were winning, except perhaps Morade, thousands of years dead and still sowing chaos among the dragons’ slaves.

Komme Medean sighed. “That’s the thing with these spiders, isn’t it? Even when the wolf’s at their door, they’ll believe they’re on top of the world and pissing down on the rest of us. You can’t change a man’s mind when he’s lost the capacity to see he’s wrong.”

Cithrin

How long did you work with Karol Dannien?” Marcus asked. If she hadn’t known him for as long as she had, it might have sounded like an innocuous question. The Yemmu sitting across the table from them reached up and scratched at one of the great carved tusks that rose from his lower jaw. Since Cithrin was fairly certain the intricate whirls and images in the enamel weren’t capable of itching, she interpreted it as a sign of annoyance.

“Three seasons, more or less,” Dantag Moss said. “Two in Borja when the council shat itself and Tauendak declared against Lôdi, and then a summer in the Keshet.”

“Small unit work?” Marcus asked.

“And some garrisoning. Elder Samabir up in Tauendak wanted his family to have the glory of the battle, so he set us up to stop anyone from looping around behind him.”

Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “And you let him?”

“Dannien let him,” Moss said. “I was tertian back then. Not going to dictate to my prime.”

Marcus glanced over at Yardem, the two men conducting some tacit conversation over her head. Cithrin wished she had a tusk to scratch, then smiled, amused by the image. Around them, the common house was quiet. It was just after midday, and the streets were at their warmest. When the door opened, there was the smell of water and the sound of dripping snowmelt from the roofs. The winter sunset would come in fewer than three hours and turn it all back to ice. There would be time later to huddle together around the rough wood tables, but anyone whose work called them out into the city was hurrying now to get it finished before the dark came.

Cithrin was comfortable where she was.

“Fair enough,” Marcus said. Whatever test he’d been making, the mercenary had passed it, or near enough.

Cithrin took it as time for her to take the negotiation. “How long before you could put your men in the field?”

“Start of fighting season’s still six weeks out, if the weather’s with you. Nine if it’s not.”

“Not what I asked.”

“Then the answer’s going to depend on what your cold bonus is. Man loses a finger, it ain’t much comfort that it was frostbite and not an axe.”

“Fair enough—”

“And, ah, no offense, miss? Captain Wester? But hard coin. This war gold? It doesn’t do with the men.”

Yardem made a low throbbing sound in his throat, something equal parts cough and growl. Moss’s scowl deepened, his lips flowing around the carved teeth. The only other Yemmu Cithrin had worked with was Pyk Usterhall, the bank’s notary lost in the flight from Porte Oliva. Seeing Pyk’s expression on the mercenary’s face left her melancholy. Cithrin took a long sip of wine to clear it away.

“There’s a bonus for accepting war gold,” she said. “If you only take coin, it’ll be eighty on the hundred. And you’re going to be provisioning from Northcoast and Narinisle. It won’t make much difference to a bag of feed whether it was bought with metal or paper. Tastes just the same after.”

“Still,” the Yemmu said.

“We could do the provisioning, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Captain Moss takes coin for his wages, we give him the horses and the food. Any arms or armor.”

It was a suggestion Cithrin had fed to the Tralgu before the meeting. He’d brought it up a little sooner than she’d hoped, but it was close enough. She made a show of thinking about it. “Ninety on the hundred for that, but yes. We could.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead on ourselves.”

“Of ourselves,” Marcus said. “Of. Not on.”

Moss shrugged, but the correction had hit home. That was fine. Marcus made an accomplished hard party. He was older, a man, and Marcus Wester. She was younger, slighter and paler than a full Firstblood, and a woman. If Moss was like the others, he’d play to her.

“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” Moss said, and Cithrin made a silent note that he’d accepted Marcus’s correction. “What’s the work we’re doing here? My men are hard as stone and sharper’n axes, but if you’re putting us against Antea in the field—”

“We aren’t. Their army’s going to fall back. We want you to… clean where they’ve been. Look for people who’ve been taken by the spiders. Whoever you find, you burn.”

“Hunters, then,” Moss said, sucked noisily at his teeth, and shrugged. “We can do that, yeah. If your price is right.”

“There’s risks,” Cithrin said. “We’re working to have Birancour’s permission, but if the queen doesn’t agree, it won’t change our contract.”

“You paying me or is she?” Moss said. Cithrin felt a knot in her belly untie.

“I’m paying you.”

“All right, then,” Moss said. “We won’t bother the queensmen if they don’t bother us. Plenty of peace to get kept, I figure. Enough to go around anyway.”

“One thing,” Marcus said. “If one of the queensmen has the little fuckers in his blood? Even if he’s captain or lord of whatever town you’re passing through…”

“He burns,” Moss said. “I understand. But what’s the money?”

The negotiation went on for the better part of an hour as they worked through the details—how much for a sword-and-bow, how much for a horse, how much for a cunning man; the length of the contract; the payment schedule; the bonus for every one of the tainted they burned; the standard of evidence they had to provide for it. The cold bonus. The penalty for killing outside their mandate. It wasn’t her first pass through this particular area of contract law, and having Marcus and Yardem talk her through the logic of it all beforehand let her seem more experienced than she was. When it was done, Cithrin shook Dantag Moss’s huge, thick hand. The contracts would be drawn up in three days. They’d cut thumbs on it and sign, and she’d hand over the initial payment—hard coin for the men, war gold for the provisions. If it had all been coin, it wouldn’t have happened.

She stepped out to the street, Marcus and Yardem behind her, and turned to the north. The sky was white from horizon to horizon. Snow melted in the sunlight and glowed bluish in the shadows. Carse wasn’t a beautiful city. It was too open, too austere. She had grown up in the close streets and canals of Vanai, come to her full power in the dense humanity of Porte Oliva. Even the fivefold city of Suddapal—where she’d been as out of place as a candle for the Drowned—had been more beautiful in its way. Carse was unnerving, she realized again, because it was built on the scale of dragons.

Inys could walk through these streets, his tattered wings folded behind him. He could perch in the square or throw himself down to weep among the claw-marks of the Graveyard of Dragons. Children might roll hoops in its squares and alleys, food carts could steam at its corners and fill the air with the scent of roasting nuts and spiced meat, but Carse was not a human city. It was a place for the absent masters of humanity. Or nearly absent.

“We going to see him?” Marcus asked as they walked.

“No,” Cithrin said. “Not the dragon. The troupe.”

Marcus grunted his approval and squinted up into the sun. The lines of his cheekbones cast shadows down his face. The venomous green culling blade was strapped across his back.

“Why do you carry that thing?” she said, speaking her real concern as if it were only banter.

“In case I need to kill someone with it,” he said, just as lightly.

“Expecting a flood of spider priests?”

“No, but I wasn’t expecting the last one either,” Marcus said. “That was nicely done with the war gold just now. Get a few more countries on the same scheme, you’ll have men like Moss willing to take full payment in paper.”

“We’ve had letters from Princip C’Annaldé and Cabral,” she said. “Apparently the idea of giving all the gold there is to the crown is fairly popular among certain strata of power.”

“Imagine that,” Marcus said.

“I only wish we weren’t calling it war gold.”

Yardem cleared his throat. “Any reason not to, ma’am?”

“War’s what we’re fighting against. What we’re trying to avoid. I’m afraid that if we keep the name, we bake it into the new system from the start.”

“New system’s not really new, though, is it?” Marcus said. “There are always people who’d rather not solve problems by killing each other. Or at least by doing it at some remove. It’s why we have people like me and Moss. Karol Dannien. Merrisan Koke.”

“We have mercenary soldiers because we don’t want war?” Cithrin said.

“You have us because you don’t want to go to the field yourself.”

“That’s not why I’m using them.”

“No?”

“No. I want soldiers who won’t hold a grudge against the enemy once it’s done. If you’re fighting out of love or loyalty, peace can be a kind of betrayal. Mercenaries are like whores. By taking money for it, they debase what it means. I want to debase what violence means.”

Marcus laughed, but Yardem didn’t. His great brown eyes met hers. “You may have missed your calling, ma’am. You’d have been a fascinating priest.”

“No!” Marcus said. “No recruiting for the priesthood on my watch, Yardem. I’ve got enough trouble following her when she’s talking about things that exist. Start pulling gods into it, and I’ll lose the thread entirely.”

“Sorry, sir,” Yardem said. “Didn’t mean to confuse you.”

“And you have to call it war gold,” Marcus went on. “If you called it peace gold, no one would take it seriously.”

The news had come three days before from Suddapal, and whether it was good or bad was beyond her capacity to say. The fivefold city, home of the Timzinae race, had risen. The siege at the mountain fortress of Kiaria had broken. The forces of Antea had been put back on their heels. In a normal war, it would have been excellent news. If there was such a thing as a normal war. Cithrin found herself beginning to doubt the idea.

Isadau and Komme had been locked in conference since the courier had arrived, stumbling, exhausted, and filthy, in the middle of the night. Already, the servants were packing Isadau’s things. Taking ship to Elassae now was a terrible risk. Antea held Porte Oliva, and likely the ports of the Free Cities as well. But Barriath’s pirate navy had fast ships, and sailors who knew well how to evade a navy. Cithrin was torn between wanting Isadau to stay and wanting to go with her, though neither was possible. It was a choice between ache and ache.

And as with all aches, she found she could soothe it in a taproom bottle. That the troupe was also there made things convenient for her.

She wanted to like the new actor, but she didn’t. His name was Lak, and he was thin and gawky with eyes the color of ice and an unruly head of hair only just darker than straw. His voice was good, though, and with his paleness against Cary’s dark hair, some striking tableaus became possible. She could see the reasons for choosing him, especially as the company had lost its stage and props and costumes. But he wasn’t Smit. And fair or not, she couldn’t forgive him for that.

Cithrin found them in the yard outside the stables. Cary, her arms crossed and her breath smoking in the cold, stood where the audience would be. Master Kit, Hornet, and Charlit Soon held their places and poses. And Lak. Mikel and Sandr were off somewhere, but a pair of young Timzinae boys stood in the door to the stable, watching with dark and shining eyes.

“Again,” Cary said as Cithrin took another long pull of wine from the glass neck. “From where the king makes his speech.”

Master Kit nodded and walked across to a different spot on the frozen dirt. “Here?”

“That’ll do,” Cary said.

Kit lifted his hand dramatically and turned to Lak. “Boy, know this,” Kit said, his voice suddenly rounder and deeper, as if he were speaking inside a temple. “To be king of all the world would not be enough to sate my hunger. I am more than a throne, more than a land, more than death or love. I am King Ash!”

Lak fell to his knees and Cary sighed impatiently. “No. Stop. It’s still not right.”

“What if I was on his left?” Lak said. Kit put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and shook his head. Cary walked back toward the common room scowling. Lak watched her go with a poorly disguised distress.

“I would be surprised if this was yours to carry,” Kit said to him. “I think it more likely that she’s used to the way we staged it before. Give her time to reimagine how it could be, and I think you’ll see a different side of her.”

“I don’t think she likes me,” Lak said.

Kit didn’t say more, but clapped the boy’s shoulder again and made his way to Cithrin.

“You’re still rehearsing,” she said.

“Did you expect something different?” Kit asked as they fell in step with each other. “We’re actors.”

“It’s only that, with things as they are…”

Kit chuckled, low and warm. “If we only worked when the world was certain, I expect we’d have starved long before this. I’m afraid this one may be beyond us, though, for the time being.”

“The props and the costumes?”

“I think more than that. The Ash and the Pomegranate is, I feel, more a story of war than of love. I’ve always found war stories difficult.”

“Worse than romances?”

“Yes. Love, I believe, is a small thing that feels large. I find the feelings might overwhelm, but the action is between a handful of people. War, by comparison, seems to me so large and happens so differently to so many people that capturing it in a tale leaves me with the sense that I’ve simplified it so much that it no longer resembles the thing it depicts. The best I’ve managed is a story about people while a war goes on around them, but I think that isn’t the same.”

Charlit Soon yelped and sped past them down the street. Sandr and Mikel were struggling around the corner of a brewer’s yard, pulling a low wooden cart loaded with sacks behind them. Old cloth and thread, Cithrin guessed. Perhaps some lumber. The raw material for costumes and a better stage, false swords and paste-and-leaf crowns. The slow rebuilding of all that they’d lost to the great war.

“I can’t remember not being afraid,” Cithrin said. “I can’t remember what it was like when Antea wasn’t killing people.”

“Palliako’s war has been greater and worse than any war I’ve seen or heard of,” Kit said. The paving stones gave way to a wide strip of dragon’s jade. A path through the city unworn by the ages.

“It started before that, though,” Cithrin said. “I started being afraid in Vanai, and there weren’t any priests then. Or only the normal sort. Prayers and herbs and promises about justice after you die. Not like them. Not like—” She pressed her lips together, but Kit knew what she hadn’t said.

“Not like me,” he said.

“We talk about Morade’s spiders as if they were the root of all the evil, all the killing, but they aren’t, are they? Because they’ve been back in their temple long enough that no one even remembered they were real, and there have been wars and murders and cities burned all that time.”

“I understand there have been, yes,” Kit said. “It seems to me that the source of war isn’t the dragons or magic or the spiders in the blood. I hear the histories and learn the songs, and I feel that humanity is the beginning of it all. Pain and lust and vengeance and oppression. But I also see that we are capable of tremendous compassion and hope. I think of all the cities that war has razed, and still, we’ve built more than we’ve torn down. I think of all the things of beauty that found their end in violence, but there keep being more beautiful things.” Kit gestured at the city around them. “As I see it, Morade’s spiders didn’t create a fault in us, but rather inflamed what was already there.”

“Certainty’s always brittle, and disagreement’s inevitable,” Cithrin said. “And so apostates.”

“And schisms,” Kit agreed. “The creation of enemies from those who were once allies. And I may be wrong, but it’s seemed to me that the sense of betrayal by someone who you thought of as one of your own is even more punished than simply being of a dissenting tribe. If you think of it, I am an example of what the spiders were meant to do. I believed as they did, worshipped as they did, and then I had a thought that took me from the group.”

“Only instead of running off and starting your own church to lead into battle against them, you turned into an actor,” Cithrin said.

“And yet, it seems I still find myself at the head of a kind of army fighting against the men I once called brothers. I lost faith in the goddess, and in the story we told of her. The world that brought her forth. The apostate who came to King Tracian broke with the Basrahip in Camnipol over issues of doctrine. I broke with the temple because I came to understand the words truth and certainty differently. I’m not sure the distance between my heresy and theirs is as great as I would like to pretend.” A small dog trotted past, a length of rope in its jaws. The sounds of cartwheels clattering against stone and a woman laughing seemed to blend into each other, and the low, white sky. Kit put a hand on her shoulder. “Is something troubling you?”

“I don’t think I can win,” Cithrin said. “I’m doing as much as I can. I’ve sent the letters about the spiders and what they are all down the coast, east to Asterilhold and Borja and All-star. I’ve doubled the bounties against Antean forces and shifted what we’re paying for so that it’s bent to take on the spiders. I’ve hired all the mercenaries I could find to keep the Lord Marshal’s army from coming north and to keep the peace if he retreats the way Clara seems to expect him to. But I keep thinking that I’m fighting Antea, and then remembering that I’m really fighting the spiders. And then remembering that I’m not fighting the spiders, but the impulse toward war.”

At the common room, someone was shouting, and then two people, and then a dozen. It didn’t sound like violence so much as a shared celebration, but it might have been a brawl. It was hard to know.

“And how many swords does it take to defeat an idea?” Kit said.

Geder

There were an endless parade of events and feasts, rituals, and customary celebrations in the course of a season at court. When Geder was a boy, his father had taken him to many. As Lord Regent, Geder suffered through them all. Of them, many—the grand audience, the Remembrance Ball, Midsummer—occurred at set times, predictable as the fall of sand in a glass. With a few, though, there was no set schedule. First Thaw with its honey floss and candy ice came when the warm winds blew it to them. Abandon Night with its masks and smokes and dangerous sexuality came when an heir to the throne was born. And a triumph came at the end of a military campaign when the soldiers returned to camp outside the walls of Camnipol, and their commander called the disband. For those sorts of occasions, part of their joy was their uncertainty.

Geder had been a child when the rebellion in Anninfort was put down. He tied his memory of his first triumph to that, but he could have been misremembering. As he recalled it, the streets had been filled with cheering men and women of all classes—from barons and lords to beggars and pisspot boys. He remembered it as being overwhelming.

He’d seen others since. Had one of his own after his return from Vanai. The overall shapes had been the same. The conquering hero—or defender of the empire, if the campaign hadn’t gained any new land for Antea—moved through the city to the accolades of Camnipol. The walls were decorated, sometimes in the house colors, sometimes in the king’s, sometimes just with whatever looked most festive and came to hand. Then there were feasts and parties in the houses of the most honored lords, with the commander whose men had just earned their release the most honored guest.

It seemed wrong that this particular triumph should seem so weak and vaguely foul. It was, after all, the one that marked the final battle in humanity’s war against the dragons. The apostate’s death was the dawn of the new, brighter age. The spider goddess’s power was sweeping invisibly out from the spot where her false servant had died. Basrahip had explained it all to him. Of course, it being winter, there were few lords at court. And there was more pleasure in parading down streets that didn’t have ice coating the cobblestones. There was music, but it was thinner. There were houses with open doors and plates of bread and meat and cakes, but they all opened just ahead of the procession and closed again behind it. Not that he blamed them. It was a cold, grey, miserable day. An icy wind pushed the fog from the southern plains north until it broke against the walls of the city and filled the Division with mist the color of milk. The Kingspire darkened to the color of iron against the low, grey sky. Cunning men on the street corners performed small miracles of light and fire, but no one crowded around to throw coins at their feet.

His soldiers, returned to their lives with the success of his campaign, trailed behind him. Very old and very young, thin and fat and coughing. They looked more like slaves of a fallen foe than heroes returned in glory. Geder held his chin high, but the cold made his nose run, and really he just wanted the parade over so he could go inside.

It was the greatest triumph in history, and all he felt was tired and dispirited and ashamed of himself for feeling tired and dispirited. Was he really so shallow that he couldn’t be pleased with just the truth? Did it all have to come with cloth-of-gold and flares and music to mean something?

Victory—true victory—is humble, he told himself. Just the knowledge that he had led the force that ended the dragons’ last and greatest threat against the goddess was enough. Even if it had been the biggest, most lavish celebration in Camnipol’s long history, it wouldn’t have been as glorious as the truth. There was even a beauty in this exhaustion. This wasn’t the paper-thin remnant of a third-pressing army celebrating that it had slaughtered a few dozen religious zealots in a swamp. It was the proof of how much the empire had pushed itself in the name of the Righteous Servant. All of Antea was like a warrior kneeling on the battlefield with the dead enemy all around. It was easier to see a nobility in the greyness when he thought of it that way.

At the entrance to the royal quarter, Prince Aster waited. He was dressed splendidly, and the handful of lords and nobles who’d stayed in the capital through winter stood with him. There were fewer of them, and many of the great faces he’d known growing up were missing. Either suborned and corrupted by the plots of the Timzinae or scattered to the corners of the vastly expanded empire. The few that remained stood like watchmen in a tower, a forest of servant-held torches warming the air around them and making a little circle of gold in the darkness of the city.

The prince came forward. In the time Geder had been gone, he’d grown a little fluffy peach-fuzz moustache. It made him look like a puppy. Geder could see the boy’s anxiety and knew him well enough to recognize its meaning. A dismissive comment from him now—or even a false compliment—would devastate the prince. Geder felt a smile burgeoning and bit his cheek to force it back as he knelt.

“Lord Regent Palliako,” the prince said. “We welcome your return.”

“My prince, you honor me,” Geder said. “The enemy of the Severed Throne is defeated.”

There was a round of applause, noble palms banging together to fill the air between leafless trees and dry fountains. And above them, the Kingspire rose, higher, it seemed, than the clouds. For a moment, it reminded Geder of the green blades Basrahip and his men had carried against the apostate, as if the heavens had leaned down with one and cut the city in half, the mist rising out of the great wound of the Division like milky blood.

With the parade complete, the men scattered. One of the low halls was ready for them, ham and beer and roasted fowl, singers and cunning men and perhaps some of their families come to welcome the unlikely warriors home. Many would go, and others would scamper back to their homes—their children, their parents, their wives. Aster drew Geder to a black carriage with gold bunting and a team of pale horses. The servants helped them inside, and the carriage lurched off, wheels and hoofs clattering. Aster let himself sink back against the cushions and grin. For the first time since he’d left, Geder felt something like relief.

“You did it,” Aster said. “You found the apostate.”

“We did,” Geder said. “Killed him where he stood. It was mostly Basrahip, though.”

“You always say that,” Aster said. “This was it. It’s over now.”

“Not totally over,” Geder said. “We still have two armies in the field, after all. But yes. With the apostate gone, the dragons’ power is broken. Basrahip said it will be like light pouring through the fabric of the world until everything’s… right.”

Geder felt a blush rising in his cheeks, called up by the admiration in Aster’s eyes. The prince swallowed and grinned. “You’ll be remembered as the greatest hero in history, Geder. You know that.”

“I probably won’t be remembered at all,” Geder said. “I didn’t really do anything that someone else wouldn’t have done in my place. I’m not special.”

“You are,” Aster said. “You know that.”

Geder let the smile he’d been holding back come through. He was back. He was home. He had Aster with him, and the carriage was warm, and he wasn’t expected to lead an army or sleep in a tent. There was pride, yes. And there was a glow that came from the young prince’s admiration. And more than anything else, there was a relief that it was all finally over.

“We’ll need to talk soon about how to prepare for your coronation,” he said. “Not right away, of course, but in the next two years. Maybe three. You’ll be old enough to take the crown. All I wanted was to keep the empire strong until it was yours. It’s got more than twice the holdings it had. The Timzinae are broken. The goddess has come back to the world and beaten her enemies. I think you’ll be the first king to rule in peace… maybe ever. You’re the one they’ll remember. Not me.”

The carriage lurched around a corner. There were tears in Aster’s eyes. “It’s not going to be right. Not without you.”

Geder pretended to wave the comment away, but in fact it left his heart feeling warmer for the first time since he’d left. And maybe in some expanse of time before that. “I won’t be gone. I only won’t be Lord Regent. No call for a regent when you have a king.”

“Still,” Aster said. Geder thought about taking the boy’s hand, then didn’t. Aster was almost a man now, and too old for taking comfort in hand-holding. So was Geder, for that.

The carriage stopped at the Fraternity of the Great Bear. The carved animal that announced the place was coated in ice, as if the weeks of winter had greyed its pelt with age and weariness. With the precedence of both prince and Lord Regent, there was no one closer to the great doors. Geder and Aster entered the great hall together. Within, the air was warm and fragrant with the smoke of pine and pipe. The silk tapestries were lit by cut-crystal lanterns. Great chains of gold and silver glittered along the walls. A servant girl in a uniform that was just revealing enough to be pleasant but not so much as to provoke offered them both mugs of wine. Aster caught Geder’s eye as if asking permission before he took it. Geder smiled. He didn’t mind. A little mulled wine never hurt anyone.

The others came in afterward, men of the great families laughing and joking. They stopped at the table Geder and Aster had claimed and paid their respects. A Dartinae woman with a viol took her place in one of the niches at the corner of the hall and began playing soft music, her glowing eyes darkening when she closed them in concentration or ecstasy. Geder found himself watching her, appreciating the beauty of her music, of her hands. Of the gentle swell of her breasts. Only that made him think of Cithrin, and he turned away. Better to be distracted than think too much of her again.

The patriarch of one of the minor houses of Asterilhold lifted to prominence by the recent tumult was reciting a lengthy poem. It appeared to be about the nobility and burdens of empire, which Geder thought was perhaps a little obvious and self-serving. He wondered what would happen if he questioned the man about his sincerity with Basrahip present. It would be interesting to know if the old man actually meant all he said, or if he was just trying to curry favor. Or both.

Geder craned his neck. Even though the winter court was thinly attended, anyone who remained in the city was here. There were enough that the tables were filled, the halls crowded. It didn’t feel as thin now, except for the early darkness at the windows and the chill that even the fires and braziers couldn’t quite dispel. It took him some time to find Basrahip among the bodies and motion, despite the priest’s size. But yes, there he was, his head canted forward, listening to someone. To Canl Daskellin, in fact.

The Baron of Watermarch and the high priest of the goddess were in an alcove. Daskellin was gesturing as he spoke, his hands making low smoothing gestures, his head shaking in a constant, barely perceptible no. The man’s skin, usually as dark as a Timzinae’s scales, had an ashen cast. Geder felt a tightening at the back of his neck. He rose, the poet forgotten, and made his way through the crowd. Aster followed in his wake. When he was perhaps half a dozen steps away, Daskellin glanced over, and his face went greyer.

“Lord Regent,” he said, making a fast, birdlike bow. “I’m sorry to interrupt your triumph, but there’s news. From the south.”

“What is it?” Geder said. Aster stepped into the alcove’s mouth, shutting the four of them off from the rest of the fraternity.

Daskellin’s lips pressed thin as a drawn line. “The siege at Kiaria, Lord Palliako. It broke.”

“Well, about time,” Geder said. “I was starting to think the Timzinae’d be holding those walls until the end of the world, eh?”

Daskellin’s confusion passed quickly, replaced by chagrin. “No, my lord. We didn’t win. They broke the siege. Fallon Broot led a counterattack, but it failed. We don’t know if he was captured or killed. The city… Suddapal is no longer under our control.”

Geder heard the words, but couldn’t understand them. Daskellin could as well have said The pigeons have all voted to become crabs. It would have made as much sense. “No,” Geder said. “We put a temple in Suddapal. Once we put a temple there, it can’t fall.” He turned to Basrahip. The wide face was the perfect image of concern and sorrow. “It can’t fall. Can it?”

“It cannot be lost,” Basrahip said, “but even what is not lost can be made to suffer terribly. The blow has been struck, and even though we do not see it, the world knows. Feels within its blood and its flesh. Death throes can be violent and dangerous, even as the final end comes.”

“Oh,” Geder said. Just hours—less than hours—before, they’d been talking about how it was all already ended. How Aster was safe and all the good that Geder had managed for him, and now he couldn’t meet the boy’s eyes for fear of seeing the disappointment in them. Everything he’d said in the carriage came back like a weight. He felt as if he’d swept open the curtains to reveal a grand ball in Aster’s honor and revealed a bunch of panicked servants still setting up the tables. He felt the humiliation like putting his hand in a fire.

“The problem is not only there, my lord,” Daskellin was saying. “Mecelli has written from Inentai. The raids have grown more intense, and there are suggestions that the traditional families have regrouped in the towns of Borja. They may have been coordinating with the enemy in Elassae. He reports that letters like the ones in Asterilhold have begun appearing. And, my lord? There is the question of the farms.”

Geder shook his head, anger flaring in his throat. Daskellin was one of the great men of Antea. Advisor to the crown since before Simeon was king. You’d think he could come out with something more useful than “the question of the farms.” What question? Was he just leaving the phrase out there to make Geder ask? Or was there something so obvious that he should have known what the man meant, and they were all laughing at him on the inside for not knowing?

Geder scowled at Daskellin so fiercely his cheeks ached, and shrugged. Are you planning to explain that?

“Half the farms in the southeast are being manned by war slaves,” Daskellin said. “Timzinae war slaves. It won’t be possible to keep word of the troubles in Suddapal from reaching them. And if they should revolt, we don’t have enough swords to send, even with your army home.”

“And?”

“And… we have the prison,” Daskellin said.

A thrill of horror cut through Geder’s foul mood. Of course they had the prison. He’d had it built when the invasion began. Housing for Timzinae children taken as guarantee of their parents’ good behavior. Only now the parents in Suddapal had misbehaved, and if the farm slaves saw that Suddapal could rise without consequences, trouble would spread like fire. The understanding of what he would have to do sank in his gut, and with it, anger and resentment for the people—not the people, the Timzinae—who’d put him in this position. But Daskellin, for all his stammering and talking past the point, was right. The thing had to be done.

“Identify all the hostages with parents working the farms,” Geder said. “Pull one out of every ten as witnesses. The others, keep them locked in their cells. The ones with parents in Elassae, throw off the Prisoner’s Span. When it’s done, send the witnesses to the farms under guard and let them tell what they saw.”

“My lord,” Daskellin said, “they’re children.”

“I know what they are!” Geder said, more loudly than he’d meant. “Do you think I like doing this? Do you think it’s something I take pleasure in? It’s not!” All around, the conversations went quiet. The eyes of the court turned toward them. Toward him. Geder lifted his chin, his rage giving him confidence. “This isn’t a choice we made. They knew what would happen. They made the decision. They made us do this. If the roaches can’t be bothered to love their children, I don’t see why we should.”

Entr’acte: Borja

The Low Palace at Tauendak looked down over the river port. The High Palace faced the sea. On the dragon’s road that wound into the city from the east, there were no palaces, no compounds of the rich or powerful, only the defense walls. The first was in stone and as tall as two men, the second twice the height and girded by plates of iron. The wars of the Keshet might sweep north into Borja, but those waves broke against the walls of Tauendak. There were even songs about it.

Ships might come to the seaport from as near as the cities and towns of Hallskar or as far as Cabral and Lyoneia. The river trade was all from Inentai, or had been before the Anteans ate the city. Since then, there hadn’t been many barges at the river port.

Within, the city was broad and flat. Seen from above, Tauendak looked like an exercise in cross-hatching done by some great and godlike artist. Roads ran north to south at the bases of the flat-roofed buildings, caught most of the day in some level of shadow and darkness. Bridges spanned east to west above them, their railings painted yellow. And every few blocks the wide circle of a ramp let oxcarts rise up or sink down. Temples rose above all, red brass and blue tile.

The people of the city were of the Eastern Triad: Jasuru, Yemmu, Tralgu. Timzinae were welcomed, especially those related by marriage to the traditional families that ruled Borja and Sarakal. Dartinae, Haaverkin, and Firstblood were permitted in the city, but barred from certain kinds of trade. Southlings were called Eyeholes, and walked the streets with guards, if at all. Mostly they stayed away. And the Drowned… Well, what could anyone do about the Drowned? They washed through the bay and out again. No one fished for them or sold their flesh at market, because it was ritually unclean, though whether that was because they were another race of humanity or because they were filthier than fish was a matter of some debate.

Damond Gias had been born at the cunning man’s house three streets south of the Red Temple twenty-six years before. As a Jasuru, he had lived in his uncle’s compound, carrying weights of grain and beans and ore from the caravanserai in the east of the city to the ports, carrying weights of fish and rope back to the caravanserai. His cousins and brothers and sisters lived with him until they married. He himself had no interest in women, and the lovers he took among the men of the city had no interest in raising children, so the question of marriage never came up for him. And so it was natural enough that, when the representative of the Regos came and called upon his uncle to give one of the family over in service to the city for ten years, Damond had been picked.

He hadn’t minded. The life of a guardsman wasn’t harder than that of a carter, and the uniform brought a certain level of respect with it. Most violence could be handled with threat, and when that failed, he had a group of well-armed men from across the city who felt that any attack on him was an attack on all of them. Even the odious duties of collecting taxes and closing businesses that hadn’t given up their share to the council weren’t too awful. It had taken years, in fact, to find a duty among the many duties of the city guard that was so soul-crushingly dull, so arbitrary and absurd, that Damond genuinely dreaded it.

Blood duty was a new thing, a ritual from the west that stank of panic and war-fear. But war-fear had its hand on Tauendak too, and so it went. He didn’t have to like it.

“Tilt your head.”

Damond looked up into Joran’s black eyes. The older man had scales three shades lighter than Damond’s own, and a scar across his cheek that spoke of old violence. By summer, Joran’s time in the guard would be ended, and the old man would go back to whatever he had been. It made him a little easier to negotiate with.

“Not today, eh?” Damond said. “It’s my second blood shift in a week, and I spent all my time since then digging that shit out of my ears.”

“You know the rules. Tilt your head.”

“I’ll give you six lengths of copper to forget it. Just for today. And next time, I won’t even ask. I’ll just put my head on the table and let you pour it in my ears. Not even a grumble.”

“The day you don’t grumble, the sky’ll fall into the sea,” Joran said, baring his sharp black teeth in a grin. “I’ll forget this time, but don’t you forget when we come to the taproom that it was six of copper. Or I’ll have it too hot next. I mean it, I won’t haggle on a finished deal.”

“I’d never ask it,” Damond said, grinning back.

“Then get your thick ass out there,” Joran said, putting the cup of wax back with its brothers beside the fire. “You can at least be on time.”

Damond jumped out of the chair, strapped on his blade, and left the close, warm guard’s station for the chill of the streets before the old man could change his mind. In the half light of the rising dawn, he went up the stairs three at a time, and then across the bridge, running east to the river port. Ammu Qort, the day’s prime, was harsh to men he found shirking their duty, but lazy about checking after the work had started. Damond wanted to be in place well before any inspections could be done.

The cut-thumbs letters had begun arriving just before Longest Night, smuggled past Antean ports on ships from the west. Sheaves of them had been handed around the taprooms and temples. Damond had seen only one himself. The forces of madness are all around, it had said. He’d joked with his cousin that anyone who’d worked for the guard had known that for years. For a time, the letters had been the first subject of everyone’s jokes and speculation—whether they were sincere or a kind of expensive joke, whether the things they said were true or pure invention, whether the people making and distributing them had Borja’s best interests at heart. He’d heard that the letters had been written by pirates, or a Northcoast merchant, or some sort of resurgent dragon cult. For himself, he took them lightly.

Someone else, though, hadn’t. A priest had put something in the letters together with a passage of scripture and petitioned the council. The council—probably influenced by Sarakal’s traditional families in exile—had declared new policies for the guard. And Damond, through no fault of his own, had been introduced to blood duty.

Now, he skittered down the stairs where the bridges stopped and run-walked to the inspector’s station. All along the river, a high wall sank down into the muddy depths and rose high above them. Algae greened the stones from the high-water mark down to the surface of the river, and guards only slightly luckier than himself patrolled the thin walk at its top. When he’d started in the guard, there’d been jokes about Timzinae merchants from Sarakal climbing the walls by night to avoid the inspector’s station. Since the war, the jokes seemed less funny.

Barges stood on the water, shadows on the shining river. In years past, a busy morning might see a hundred boats waiting for the station to come open. Since the war, Damond had never seen more than thirty, and usually fewer. The inspector’s station stood at the end of a walled quay. Whatever goods were to be loaded or unloaded stopped here to be counted, considered, and have tariffs levied. Whoever wished to come into the city or leave it was questioned and examined. Tauendak was a city of the pure, and it didn’t stay that way by opening itself to all comers. Or that was the story it told, anyway. Damond had believed it until he’d been part of the guard.

The number of people the inspector’s station waved through for expedience or changed its mind about for a bribe had scandalized him at first. He’d settled into a professional cynicism since. The cut-thumbs letters had tightened down the passage, as had the fashion of ransom kidnappings in Lôdi before that and the War of Ten Princes in the Keshet before that. Every time the rules became stricter, they also would eventually relax. Antea’s spread across the world was like that too. Whatever the rich and powerful thought, whatever the priests pretended to find in the ancient scripts, the madness of the Firstbloods wouldn’t come here.

Kana Luk, inspector for the Regos, was at her table in the station when Damond came in. It was still dark enough outside that she had her lantern lit, and the flame glittered on the scales of her cheek and forehead.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m early.”

“That was a trick. Your ears aren’t done.”

Damond shrugged. “Joran and I must have forgotten.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” the inspector said.

“I can go back, if you’d like. But it might take a while. You know how Joran heads out once his morning duties are done.”

“Any candlemaker in the medina would have wax enough to do the thing.”

“If it’s worth being late—”

“Don’t bullshit me, boy,” she said, a smile in her gruff voice. “I was making excuses to get out of work before your mother licked off your caul.” Damond grinned and took his place, blade and cloth in hand, but Kana wasn’t done. “You watch yourself. I went to the cunning man last night. He said there was great danger coming.”

“He always says that.”

“Does not. Sometimes he says there’s great fortune coming. Or a man to sweep me away in clouds of passion.”

“I don’t know why you give him your money.”

“Promises of danger, fortune, and passion? He’s the most entertaining thing in my life anymore. Now let’s open for work before Qort gets here and finds you idle enough to examine.”

Damond stood by the quayside door, thin blade in one hand, white cloth in the other. Kana opened the door at his side and shouted into the darkness. The voices of the laborers and carters answered back, as they always did. There was a music to the work, and it was the last beautiful thing in Damond’s day.

The first man to come in was a Dartinae, his body thin and lithe, his eyes glowing from within like his brain was afire. He looked from Kana to Damond and back again.

“The fuck is this?”

“New rules, Dabid,” Kana said. “State your name.”

“You just called me by it. I’m Dabid Sinnitlong, just the same as I was last month.”

“I know it,” Kana said. “What’s your business?”

“Grain from the farms down by Sabbit township. Five hundredweight.”

“Nice,” Kana said. “East or west bank?”

“All west,” the Dartinae said. It was a lie, and they all knew it. Someday, Kana would lose patience, and Dabid would pay a thick fine or a slightly thinner bribe. But apparently this wasn’t that day.

“Lucky for you that’s the cheap one,” Kana said, holding her hand out for the bill of lading. She passed her eyes over it, clicked the beads on her figuring board, and wrote a number at the bottom of the bill. She looked up at Damond and pointed three fingers at the Dartinae. It was the motion she was supposed to use so he’d know it was time.

“Thumb, please,” he said, and the Dartinae held out his hand. Damon pricked it, squeezed out a single drop of blood, and wiped it with the white cloth. The smear of red was unremarkable, as they always were. “Pass,” Damond said.

“Well thank God for that,” Dabid Sinnitlong said dryly. “How much are you dunning me for today, Kana?”

“Same as I ever do,” the inspector said. “Now pay it and get out. I’ve a line behind you.”

This was the banter, the human voices, that Damond would have been without if he’d followed the rules too close. His whole day would have been spent in silence, watching people come through the doorway, seeing their mouths move, watching the papers go back and forth from Kana’s desk. Then three fingers up, and he could hear his own voice traveling through his flesh rather than the air. Thumb, please, like he was underwater. Like he was one of the Drowned. The prick, the dot of blood, the swipe with the white cloth. Though by midday the cloth would get to looking pretty gory itself.

As it was, Qort arrived in the middle morning, wandering in and out of the station at odd intervals so that Damond had to pretend he couldn’t hear the whole time. Still, listening was more diverting than the isolation of temporary deafness, even if he couldn’t say anything himself. Most of the morning was dull. A Yemmu woman coming up from the western Keshet to take up house with her cousin. A Tralgu man hauling poppy seeds for the cunning men’s shops. A Firstblood woman sneaking Timzinae goods out of Inentai for refugee families living in Lôdi. The river trades were more interesting for Damond because they spoke of the southern lands. He didn’t have much interest in anyplace with winters colder or darker than Borja.

The Firstblood man came in just before the station shut for midday. He wore a robe the colorless brown of sparrows and stood before Kana with a patient smile, like there was a joke that only he was in on. Damond’s experience of Firstbloods was that a lot of them were smug like that, so he didn’t think much of it. Not at first.

“State your name.”

“Kirmizi rol Gomlek,” the man said.

“What’s your business?”

“I have come to take audience before your Regos.”

Kana widened her eyes and bared her teeth. “Audience with the Regos, ah? The Regos know about that yet?”

“She will,” the Firstblood said. “And from my words shall she profit greatly. There is a darkness that has fallen upon the world. Even now, it walks the streets of your city unfettered and free. I have come to cleanse it.”

“Ah,” Kana said. Even if he had been deaf, Damond thought he would have recognized the tension and unease in her shoulders. He took a tighter grip on his blade. “How many in your party, then?”

“We are seven,” the man said.

“Coming from?”

“Sarakal.”

Kana nodded. “Where in Sarakal?”

“Outside Inentai.”

“Not inside it?”

“We have been traveling among the towns for some time,” the man said.

“Carrying anything for trade?”

“Only truth, and that we give freely to all who listen.”

“Right,” Kana said. “No papers, then? It’s ten lengths of silver for entrance.”

The man took a purse from his belt, counted out ten coins, and placed them on the table before her, each one making a sharp tap as he placed it. Kana took them, looked to Damond, and lifted three fingers together.

“Thumb, please,” Damond said. His heart was beating fast. It wasn’t possible, was it? It couldn’t be truth.

The Firstblood scowled deeply. He turned his gaze to the blade, the bloodied cloth, and shook his head. “We will not need to do this. You would be foolish to insist.”

“It’s a… it’s needed. Protocol,” Damond said, but in truth he did feel a bit silly. The Firstblood shook his head.

“Listen to my voice, friend. There is no need. It would be foolish to insist. Better that we let this go. Better for you, and for me, and for your people. Nothing good can come from insisting. Better to let it go.”

Damon’s throat thickened and he nodded, lowering the thin blade. A kind of deep embarrassment was spreading through him. Here he was, a guard of the city, poking strangers at the word of God alone knew who. Qort was likely having him do it just as a show of contempt.

“Listen to my voice,” the Firstblood said again. “There is no—”

The door opened and Ammu Qort came in. The Firstblood turned to him, anger in his eyes.

“What’s the matter here, inspector?” the prime demanded.

“Nothing, sir,” Kana said, sounding dazed. “It’s just this man—”

“Is he processed?” Qort said.

“He’s paid,” Damond said, not realizing that he was proving he hadn’t taken the wax. “But the blood… it seems like we should just—”

Qort scooped the blade from Damond’s hand and grabbed the Firstblood’s wrist, and before any of them could speak, a tiny drop of crimson was on a corner of the white cloth. And in it, skittering wildly, a tiny black spider.

“Fucking hell!” Qort shouted, jumping back.

“Drop your weapons,” the Firstblood shouted. “You cannot win against me. You have already lost—”

“His voice’s poison!” Qort shouted. “Don’t listen to him! Don’t hear him!”

Some part of Damond understood and he screamed. It was wordless at first, but loud. And then, as he pushed the Firstblood back through the door to the quay, he added syllables. MA-LA-LAL-BAY-AB-ABA! ZA-MAM-BABA! Nonsense gabbling like a bored child singing in a yard, but it drowned out whatever the Firstblood was saying. His own blood seemed to rush white-hot in his veins as he pushed the Firstblood back. Kana was scrambling toward the loaders and dock guards, shouting at them, but Damond couldn’t hear her over his own screaming any more than he could hear the spider-infected thing.

The Firstblood was trying to yell at him, but Damond’s voice was louder, and he shoved the man back, and back, and back again. BA-BA-YA-BA-MA-BABA! YE-BE-YE-BEY-BE! And Qort had a rope around the Firstblood man’s neck. The Firstblood reached for the noose, clawing at it. Damond stopped shouting.

“Come on, you bastard!” Qort shouted. “Help me with this!”

The rope around the man’s neck was tied on the other end to a stone anchor weight. Together, Damond and Qort pushed it to the river’s edge, and then into it. To their right the guards under Kana’s direction were throwing lit lanterns onto a boat that was trying to throw off its moorings. The anchor weight sank, hauling the Firstblood down behind it. Damond watched until all he could see were the soles of the Firstblood’s shoes, kicking in the gloom, then going still.

Qort lay on the quay beside him, breathing hard. The prime’s expression was one of rage and triumph. Damond tried a smile.

“Forgot the wax, sir. Sorry.”

Marcus

Marcus swung hard and low, but the blow didn’t connect. Yardem danced back just outside the arc of the attack and brought his own sword down. Marcus shifted, parrying with a hard clack of wood against wood. The impact stung his fingers. He stepped back as Yardem pressed his advantage. Marcus blocked, blocked again, dodged, and tried to slip under an attack. Yardem’s sword caught him just above the temple, and the world went a little quiet for a moment. He felt his mind willing his body to shift away, to raise his own blade in reply, but nothing happened. His hands and feet had gone sluggish, and he stumbled to the icy brickwork of the pit.

“Sir?” Yardem said, his voice humming with concern. Marcus lifted his hand, waited until the world stopped spinning.

“I’m all right. That was a good counter. Nice work.” He hauled himself to his feet. The fighting pit was ten yards across, and a little longer. The walls curved, but not into a circle the way they made them in the south. It still had corners. The poisoned sword leaned in one of them beside Marcus’s overcoat and Yardem’s less exotic blade. In the summer people would stand at the lip, or sit and dangle their legs. The cold made it a less enticing spectacle. Marcus didn’t care either way. Let them look, let them stay indoors by their fires. It didn’t change what he had to do.

“Let’s go again,” Marcus said, taking a grip on the hilt of the wooden practice sword. “I’m good for it.”

Yardem huffed out a white, frozen breath and raised his own false blade, but not fully to the ready. “Might want to discuss that, sir.”

“You knocked me on the cob,” Marcus said. “Not the first time it’s happened. Come on. Take position.”

“Comes a point where more training doesn’t gain you anything, sir.”

“You think we’re there?” Marcus said through a tooth-baring grin.

“Were an hour ago. Didn’t mention it.”

Marcus let his shoulders sag. Truth was, he didn’t feel well. Hadn’t in a while. He sank to his haunches, leaning on the practice sword. He was breathing harder than he should have been. His back ached, and not with the vigorous burn of worked muscle. More like the sharp complaining of loose joints. He coughed and spat. The brick walls rose up on all sides, the looming wall of the gymnasium to the east, and the white winter sky above that. He wondered where the habit had begun of sinking practice pits into the ground. It wasn’t done for formal dueling. He pictured vast perches at the edges, and dragons looking down at them, slaves fighting each other for the masters’ pleasure. It seemed a little too plausible.

“It’s not the sword,” he said.

“Didn’t say it was, sir.”

“No, but you thought it mighty loud. So don’t crawl up my back again about how I should leave it be more.”

“Or let someone else take a turn carrying it,” Yardem said.

“You think it’s rotting me from the inside out, and you’d pass it to someone else? That seems cruel of you.”

“Fit across my back,” Yardem said. “Give you some time to find your strength.”

“I know where my strength went,” Marcus said, pulling himself up. His scalp felt cold where the sword had taken it. Oozing blood, most likely. “It’s not the sword. It’s age.”

“It’s both, sir.”

“Well don’t paint it gold for me,” Marcus chuckled. “Tell me how you really see it.”

“You’re past the age when most men in our profession have stopped,” the Tralgu said, his ears flat against his head. “Taken long-term duties running a guard company or opened a training camp or died. Instead, you’ve trekked across the world two times over, half died in the interior of Lyoneia, been hauled up mountaintops by a dragon, and strapped this blade across your back. You act as if you could go on forever, and your body’s starting to show you it isn’t truth.”

“I was joking, Yardem. You can go ahead and paint it gold a little.”

His second-in-command looked down and flicked an ear. “All right. You’ve got a mostly full head of hair, and that one girl at the inn still thinks you’re handsome.”

“Fuck you,” Marcus laughed, walking across the brickwork to their things. His legs actually seemed to creak. Yardem was right about one thing, at least. There was such a thing as overtraining. They bundled the wooden swords together with a leather strap, and Yardem tossed them across his shoulder like a day soldier carrying a pack. Marcus pulled on his overcoat, and then the dark-green scabbard and hilt of the culling blade. As they walked toward the ladder, a figure appeared at the edge of the pit. The sole observer of their showfighter’s practice.

If the last few years had worn Marcus down, they’d grown Cithrin up. She’d never have the shard-of-milk-ice paleness of her mother’s race, but she carried something of the Cinnae calm. She no longer showed the awkward girlishness that Master Kit and Cary had tried to train out of her back in ancient days. Back when they’d been smugglers running from an Antean army not yet fueled by the spite of dragons. She was a woman now. A young one, but experienced beyond her age.

She’s not your daughter, Marcus thought. And yet, standing before her as Yardem climbed the ladder behind him, he felt the same mixture of pride and melancholy he imagined a Merian grown to womanhood might have called forth.

“I need you,” she said.

“And here I am,” Marcus said. “What’s the problem?”

“I have a plan, or part of one, but it means the two of you talking.”

Yardem grunted his way over the lip of the pit and leaned against the wooden railing. Marcus glanced at him.

“We’re here,” Marcus said, settling the blade more firmly on his shoulder. “What is it we need to talk about?”

“Not you and Yardem,” Cithrin said. “You and him.”

“Well, God smiled,” Marcus said sourly.

Inys stood on his perch, staring out over a slate-grey sea. The vast head turned as the three of them came close. The intelligence in the huge eyes was unmistakable, as was the weariness. Marcus hadn’t spent much time around the dragon since they’d come to Carse. There had been no end of people to serve Inys—bring him food, clean away his dung, sing and caper for him. Marcus understood it. Even felt some of the same urges to cater to the master of the fallen world. Almost all of humanity’s races had been built to serve the dragons and to read the feelings in their faces like sheepdogs watching the shepherd. For thousands of years, no one had suffered that burden, and now, with Inys suddenly among them, no one had any practice resisting it.

Marcus had the feeling someone should, and he was fine with its being him. Part of the job. He had the sense that Inys knew it too. That, perhaps, it was why the dragon had a fondness for him.

“Stormcrow,” Inys said, the words low and deep, “you return at last.”

“So it seems,” Marcus said. “You’re looking ragged.”

When Marcus had woken him, Inys had been sluggish from ages of stonelike sleep, but he’d been unscarred. The dark, shining scales had been dulled by dust, but perfect, row on unending row. Porte Oliva had changed that. Long streaks along the dragon’s side were roughened by scar. The huge wings had holes in them where Antea’s great spears had pierced them and pulled the dragon down. Weapons designed to slaughter dragons, and invented, it seemed, after Inys began his long hibernation. That they existed at all meant someone out there had shared Marcus’s opinion of the masters of the world and the dignity of being their slaves.

Cithrin stepped between them, taking the moment for her own. It was a good skill to have, in her position.

“We’ve had more reports from the east. Birds now. Not just cunning men.”

“That’s good,” Marcus said. “Half of what the cunning men make out winds up being dreams anyway. I’d rather we had an actual courier, though.”

“I’m working on that,” Cithrin said.

“What will it matter?” Inys said, his gaze turning back to the sea. “The world is empty anyway.”

Cithrin ignored the comment. “For now all we know for certain is that Kiaria is no longer under siege, and the forces that were meant to hold Elassae are hunkered down in northern Birancour.”

“Hunting you,” Marcus said.

“Hunting me,” Cithrin agreed. “Geder was so fixated on that, he left himself open, and the Timzinae are taking advantage of the fact. There was fighting in Suddapal and along the coast. We don’t know how bad it was, but… people there have more reason to be angry than merciful.”

“Mercy has no reason,” Inys sighed. “Mercy justified is only justice.”

“Deep,” Marcus said.

“We don’t know who’s in charge of the uprising,” Cithrin said. “That’s in part what the courier is going to find out for us. And Isadau is going too. Barriath’s given her a fast ship and a crew.

“The good news is that the priesthood there has been closely identified with Anteans. Even if there is a schism, the priests hate the Timzinae and the Timzinae hate the priests. Komme’s fear—and I think it’s a fair one—is that when the chaos goes north into Inentai and Nus or west into the Free Cities, it’ll start reaching other races. Jasuru, Yemmu, Tralgu. People who might see a schismatic priest as an ally.”

Marcus nodded. “And then fall to their unpleasant power, lift up another bunch of fanatics, and start the whole damned war over in miniature.”

“Not miniature,” the dragon sighed, his breath pluming out yards from his mouth. “And not starting over. They will only carry it forward. More sides, more causes, more reasons to demonize and slaughter the slaves in the next valley. It was what Morade wrought.”

“Birancour is stable,” Cithrin said. “For now. But the Antean main army’s still there. The Lord Marshal and a force of cold, skinny Anteans are still tasked with hunting me down and taking me back to Camnipol in chains. And even if Jorey Kalliam’s turned sides the way his mother says, that’s not a promise they won’t try to take Northcoast come the thaw. Antea’s got a new and thriving tradition of killing off its Lords Marshal. At which point Northcoast is bound to act.”

“So chaos on both sides of Antea,” Marcus said. The dragon heaved a massive sigh. Great whiner, Marcus thought. He brought the whole thing on us, however many hundred generations back. Least he could do was pretend interest.

“Pulling the thorn here,” Cithrin said, “and keeping the fighting in the east from turning to the greatest rout in history call for the same thing. The Antean army’s well-ordered withdrawal back to Camnipol. Only there’s two priests with them talking everyone there into thinking they’re invulnerable and protected by the goddess.”

“So we’ll need to be rid of them,” Marcus said.

“And that seems to require Marcus. Or at least his sword.”

“If it takes the sword, it takes me. That’s the job. And, fairness, the prospect of not having a massive force of armed men bent on delivering you to the boy tyrant who feels you humiliated him would likely help my concentration too.”

Cithrin tilted her head, hearing something more in his words perhaps than he’d meant to say aloud.

He cleared his throat, feeling an unwelcome blush rising in his neck. He turned to the dragon and changed the subject. “How about it, Inys? Are you up for hauling a few people south? Or are your wings too weak?”

The dragon turned, real anger in its eyes. Marcus fought the urge to take a step back, but he did lower his eyes. “My wings are cut, but I am no cripple, Stormcrow. What is this that you ask of me? Be plain!”

“How many can you carry?” Cithrin asked. “I mean no disrespect, Inys. You know that. But I won’t tax your strength. Not while you’re still healing.”

“How far?” the dragon asked, scowling in a way that was both inhuman and perfectly recognizable.

“Around the army, far enough that its scouts don’t see you. And then south. It’ll be less likely to raise suspicions if they don’t seem to be coming from Northcoast.”

The dragon spread his wings. Marcus knew they’d suffered in the attack at Porte Oliva, but he hadn’t made a close inspection. It was uglier than he’d thought. There were gaps in the thick, leathery membrane. Holes. He remembered watching Inys laboring across the water toward the escaping ships and wondered just how close the dragon’s escape had been.

“I can carry myself and five others,” the dragon said.

“Let’s call it three,” Marcus said.

“Do you doubt me?”

“A little,” Marcus said. “It’s why you love me.”

The dragon bristled, bared its teeth, and then laughed. Gouts of stinking flame rolled through the winter air as Inys chuckled. The smoke rose above them, spreading until it became the sky. “Three then,” the dragon said.

“When will you be ready?” Cithrin asked.

“I am ready now,” Inys said, folding his wings together and settling heavily on his perch. The great eyes closed, with the feeling of the conclusion of a royal audience. Marcus walked at her side in silence until they reached the court where Yardem stood waiting.

“Went well?” Yardem asked.

“Didn’t end with us burned or in his belly,” Marcus said. “Willing to call that a victory. So me for the sword. This Lady Kalliam to get me past the guards. Maybe Enen? Kurtadam are common enough in the south she wouldn’t seem odd. Or should we keep to Firstbloods?”

“Not Yardem?” Cithrin asked.

“We’re known,” Yardem said. “A man traveling alone might be anyone. A Tralgu man with a Firstblood beside him, and people might remember stories. Especially this near to Northcoast.”

“Barriath will want to go,” Cithrin said.

“Can’t let him,” Marcus said. “Lose him for too long and his little pirate fleet’ll pull up stakes. Metaphorically speaking. And… Oh. Yeah.”

“I think that’s right, sir.”

“What’s right?” Cithrin asked. The cliff and the sea and the dragon retreated behind them as they walked. A Timzinae woman hurried past, wrapped in a wool scarf, the scales of her face catching the dim winter sun. “Marcus? What’s right?”

“You’re sending me in to assassinate the priests, yes?”

“Unless you’re willing to hand the sword to someone else,” Cithrin said.

“Once that’s done, though, the soldiers are going to lose all the false certainty they’ve had carrying them through. Start thinking for themselves, and since the truth is they’re hungry, exhausted, and working with shit supply lines, they’ll likely come to the fact that all’s not well pretty damned quickly. If we just wanted a mutiny or a mid-campaign disband, it’d be simple. But you want to march them back east. To do that… Well, we’ll need a priest, and that means Kit.”

“Cary won’t like it,” Yardem said.

“You can tell her, then,” Marcus said, and Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “And truth is, Kit’s just going to have to keep them together at least long enough to let them scent home. After that, they’ll likely go where we want like water running downhill.”

“Through the pass at Bellin?” Yardem said.

“Depends on how deep the snows are,” Marcus said. “Otherwise… I don’t know. The coast and by ship? I don’t like the idea of marching all the damned way south to the Free Cities again, and I can’t see King Tracian letting them through Northcoast, even if they’re sort of on our side.”

“Complicated,” Yardem agreed. “You’ll go back to Camnipol with them, then?”

“Can’t see leaving Kit behind. It’d be rude,” Marcus said, and smiled. If anyone had asked, he’d have said that being back in Carse, in Northcoast, walking down the streets that Merian and Alys had walked down once a lifetime ago, didn’t bother him. The pleasure he felt at the prospect of leaving—even leaving in disguise at the heart of an enemy army—suggested his assessment might have been optimistic. Any reason not to be here was a good one.

He wondered how much he could really trust Lady Kalliam, now that his life and Kit’s depended on her. He supposed there was an easy way to find out.

The great keep of the holding company came in sight as they rounded a corner. Carts and horses and servants in the colors of half a dozen houses swarmed the street around it. The Medean bank hadn’t been built for the constant traffic that came with governing a kingdom, much less three of them. Perhaps more. They’d have to redesign.

“Why do you bait him?” Cithrin asked.

“Who? Inys? Do I bait him?”

“You do, sir,” Yardem said.

“I don’t know,” Marcus said. Then, “Because he’s self-indulgent with his grief. Because he screwed up badly once, and now everything he ever does is about that, and God forbid that anyone around him ever be let to forget it for a day.”

“Oh,” Cithrin said. “All right. I understand.”

“I wasn’t going to say it,” Yardem said.

“Say what?” Marcus said, then understood. He disliked the dragon for being too much like Marcus Wester. He shook his head. “You can both go piss up a rope.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“And you two take care of each other while I’m gone. I’ll miss you. Now let’s go break the bad news to Kit.”

Clara

Clara, wrapped in layers of wool and leather against the cold and the wind, pressed her face against the dragon, closed her eyes, and waited for the worst to be over. Inys’s leg shifted as he flew, the huge muscles flowing and flexing against her in a way that felt both intimate and impersonal. The leather straps that kept her from plummeting to her death bit into her legs and back. She couldn’t say whether her feet had gone numb from the lack of blood reaching her toes or the intense cold. She had imagined one time and another what it must be like to fly through the air. Always, she’d evoked ideas of freedom and joy. Now that it came to the actual practice, it felt more like being a baby carried along the edge of the Silver Bridge by a not-entirely-trustworthy nurse.

On the occasions when she did open her eyes, there was little enough to see besides the horizon of stars and the bulk of the vast animal to which she was tied. The land below her was dark, and the few firefly glimmers she saw might have been anything: cities, camps, farmhouses, tricks of her over-tired eyes. The others—Wester and Kit—had straps of their own on other legs. She couldn’t see them, nor could she imagine hearing them over the sound of the wind. Had they fallen to their deaths, she would not have known.

They had left Carse only hours before, with the dull red disk of the sun hovering just above the horizon. She’d felt then, waddling out to the open space nearest the Graveyard of Dragons, ridiculously overdressed. Her elbows and knees seemed hardly to bend. Barriath walked beside her, and if he found her as laughable as she found herself, he showed respect enough not to say it. The dragon was on a great perch made from a felled pine. The scent of its sap was still fresh. When she saw the harnesses hanging limp from the great beast’s legs, she had to work to stifle her laughter. What would the ladies of the court think if they saw this? Hardly appropriate behavior for a baroness. But what had to be done, would be.

In the shadow of the great wings, two figures were already waiting. The older man with the long face and wiry hair of the priests and an attractive younger woman with a thick braid. They were speaking with an intensity that made her wonder whether they might be lovers or father and daughter, though that didn’t seem likely. The woman’s face was hard, and tears streaked her cheeks. The man’s posture was equal parts sorrow and strength. Clara found herself wondering how they managed to express so much with their bodies alone, but then they were actors. She supposed it was the sort of thing one did without thinking, if only one practiced enough. Like the way her daughter Elisia used to spend the whole day whistling to herself after working with her music tutors.

The woman said something she couldn’t make out, and the old man laughed, then they embraced. Not as lovers would, nor yet parent and child. Family of some sort, though.

“I should be going,” Barriath said.

“Of course you shouldn’t, dear. They need you for Callon Cane or the leader of the little fleet or some such. Besides which, there’s little you could do to look after me that Jorey won’t be able to accomplish. He is still the Lord Marshal.”

And if he took her place, she wouldn’t be reunited with Vincen Coe, she didn’t say. In truth, the implausible journey she was about to take might have uneased her more deeply without the prospect of Vincen at its end. Of course, she couldn’t explain that to her son. For him, her eagerness might even look like courage. She felt a bit dishonest about that, but didn’t see what else she could do.

The actors stepped apart gracefully, as if they had ended their scene. What fascinating people really. And the woman, at least, seemed vaguely familiar. Clara wondered whether she’d seen her perform somewhere. Barriath took Clara’s hand, turning her. The distress in his eyes reminded her of how he’d looked as a boy. A baby. Of course this was hard for him. Since the day they’d found each other again, he’d been able to play the protector. Now he was sending his mother off into the teeth of danger. What boy could ever see that done and be unmoved?

She raised her laughably puffy arm and touched his face. “No regrets now. We’ve gone past that.”

“Just tell me you won’t take any chances you don’t need to,” he said.

She wondered for a moment what her life might have been if she’d lived by that rule. Nothing like it was, she thought. She wondered what her son would make of all the things she’d so carefully never told him. The rage and despair she’d suffered losing Dawson. The joyful recklessness of standing against Geder Palliako even at the height of his power. She was friend to thieves and cutthroats now. Lover of a man her sons’ age. And none of it could be said.

“I will use my very best judgment,” she said. “And this won’t be our last meeting.”

“You don’t know that,” Barriath said, choking on the words.

“I don’t,” she said. “But I choose to believe it, or else I’d never stand going.”

“I love you, Mother.”

And then they were embracing. Not for the last time, she told herself. There would be another, at least. Somehow. She was weeping now as well. When she could bring herself to let him go, Barriath’s eyes were red and wet. He wiped them angrily with his sleeve and stepped back. She turned to the dragon.

The mercenary captain and his Tralgu second fell into step beside her. The green blade was strapped across the older man’s back. The Tralgu—Yardem, his name was—flicked an ear.

“I know,” Marcus Wester said, as if something had been said. “Watch after it all until I’m back.”

“Will.”

And then she was at the dragon’s leg, and they were helping her into the harness. She still didn’t entirely believe that it was going to happen until the dragon spread its wings, howled like a storm, and fell up into the sky.

That had been hours ago, and the sun had long since fled. Clara couldn’t entirely believe that she’d slept, but her mind had surely lost track of time. A scattering of fires glimmered far to what she presumed was the east, and the ground seemed closer. She could make out the shapes of trees, and a thin silver line that might have been a stream or a dragon’s jade road. Her cheeks were stiff as plaster, and as unfeeling, but she craned her head against the storm wind. The ground was closer. Much closer. The dragon dipped, dipped again, and didn’t rise. The great wings worked, stirring loose snow and winter-killed grass. They landed in a drift that rose to her knees. The ripping storm that had plagued them since Carse vanished instantly, and the calm seemed unreal. Clara sagged against the dragon’s flesh. Now that they weren’t in motion, the warmth of it was like sitting near a fire, and she wondered how much Inys’s heat had sustained her during their flight.

Someone tugged at her, and she opened her eyes. The actor-priest. Kit. Starlight lit his smile, and she felt a little thrill of fear and revulsion. The man might be a tame priest, but the same spiders were in his blood as in the others’.

“I think you’ll find it more comfortable once you’re unharnessed, Lady Kalliam,” Kit said.

“Thank you,” she said, meaning to go on with I can manage for myself only it seemed she couldn’t. The straps had worked themselves around her back, and so she suffered the priest’s aid in silence. When she tried to walk, her legs felt half strung and uncertain. Captain Wester was at her side, helping her to keep her balance. He had already stripped off the thick wool traveling clothes to reveal the guard’s tunic beneath. The great green sword was still across his shoulders, but wrapped in rags and leather. The priest was pulling on the grubby robe of a servant with a deep hood to conceal his face and hair. Somehow, he managed to seem smaller than he was. It was quite a talent.

“First light’s not more than an hour from now, and I’d guess we’re at least an hour’s walk from the camp,” Wester said.

“I don’t know that I can manage that,” Clara said.

“Once we start moving, you’ll warm up,” Wester said. “Besides which, if you rest, you’ll cool down. So we’re short on options.”

“You stand before me,” Inys said, his great voice low but all the more threatening for that, “and moan you can find no warmth?”

“Anything that would fuel a fire, that army burned weeks ago,” Marcus said. “And while I’m sure streams of dragon flame could heat some rocks enough to thaw our hands by, I’d prefer not to call attention this way just before we walk up to their sentry posts.”

The dragon snorted his vast derision, but didn’t press the issue. Clara nodded and began pulling off her own flying gear. She knew the robes she wore underneath were warm and thick enough for uses besides flying through the night sky like a witch out of legends. Still, she did wish they had something to make a little fire with.

“Head out away from the camp before you turn north,” Wester said.

“I shall go as I wish, and do as I please, Stormcrow.”

Now it was the captain’s turn to snort, but when the dragon leaped again into the darkness, it seemed to Clara he was doing as Wester had ordered. Or suggested. It wasn’t easy to know the difference with those two.

“Kit?” Wester said.

“Ready, I think,” the priest said. “I’m not certain which direction to go in, though.”

“That’s all right,” Wester said. “I am. Keep close, both of you.”

He forged through the snow, breaking through the soft white with his legs. Clara found it was easier to walk in his footsteps, and before long the snow thinned, and they found themselves on a track of frozen mud and churned ice. It stretched out to north and south, winding. The ruts of wagon wheels showed in the muck like scars.

“All right,” Marcus said. “Let’s go see if this works.”

“It will,” Clara said.

“Things can always go wrong, lady,” Wester said, but there was a smile in his voice. Clara took the lead. It was a shame, she thought, that they didn’t have horses. Or at least one for her. Coming in on foot was beneath her station, not that a poor beast could have survived being carried all the way from Carse. Even if it didn’t freeze to death, the fright would likely have killed it. But they could have gotten a litter. Something light that the two men could have used to carry her. Well, it was something to keep in mind for next time.

Next time. She chuckled. God, let there never be a next time.

Wester was right: the walking did help. By the time the eastern sky began to come rose and gold, she was feeling almost herself. She was Clara Kalliam, taking a brisk morning’s constitutional with a guard and servant trailing behind her. She wondered whether Jorey had any tobacco left. Almost certainly not, which was a shame.

The track curved around an outcropping of rock, and a voice came across the snow, sharp and angry. “Stop there! What’s the watchword?”

Five archers, arrows nocked, stepped out from behind the stones. They looked terribly thin, the dark leather of their armor hanging loose against their sides. Clara remembered the story—wholly imagined—that the dead rose at night to march in Geder Palliako’s army. She didn’t know if it was amusing or tragic.

“Watchword?” she said crisply, her accent perhaps a bit thicker than it might have been. “Why, I haven’t a clue, dear. Who would have been the one to tell me?”

The archers hesitated. The lead man lowered his bow. “Lady Kalliam?”

“Yes, of course. You are… no, wait. You’re Sarria Ischian’s boy, aren’t you? Connir?”

“Ah… yes, ma’am.”

“I never forget a boy child,” Clara said, something like victory singing in her veins. “The fathers are always so put out if you do. I’ve just returned from Porte Oliva. I hope it’s all right that I haven’t got the watchword? Because it would be terribly inconvenient to go back now.”

The other archers lowered their bows as well. Wester and Kit stayed carefully behind her, as they ought. The more the guards looked at her, the less they saw anything else. Guards and servants weren’t the sort of people one paid attention to anyway, not when a baroness was present.

“Of course not, ma’am. Only we didn’t know to expect you.”

“My fault,” she said, waving the comment away. “I should have sent word. Where would I find my son?”

“The Lord Marshal’s tent’s up on the western side of camp, ma’am. If he’s not inspecting the troops, he’ll be there.”

“Lovely.”

“Permit me, ma’am. I can lead you.”

“Thank you, Connir. That would be very welcome.”

The mask of habit slipped on so easily, it almost frightened her. Was she the somewhat touched woman of the court wandering about the field of war like it was a garden party? To them, she was. It wasn’t that appearances were deceiving. That was a given. What astonished her every time was that they were so fluid.

Her weeks away had done the camp no good. Dawson had always spoken of supply lines and provisioning men in the field, and she had listened with half an ear. These men had been away from their homes for years. The little city of tents and shacks they had cobbled together in the fields of Birancour were less than those of the beggars and thieves who made homes on the sides of the Division. What food there was would have to arrive by cart from Porte Oliva. There was no allied city nearer. All the woods nearby had been cut down for firewood, the game, she had no doubt, hunted to extinction. They were hungry, cold, and far from home.

And she had watched them kill the innocent of Porte Oliva. Had seen the pain and horror in the Timzinae woman’s eyes. These men she walked among, by whom she was greeted with pleasure, had killed. Had stolen. Many, she was sure, had raped. And her son, her Jorey, was their leader, as Dawson had been before him. Soldiers of the glorious empire or monsters of violence and suffering. So much depended on the story one told about them.

And then he was there, in a group of emaciated men, his hair under a knit cap he’d gotten somewhere. Her Vincen, his eyes bright and his smile as rich and full as it had ever been. Tears leapt to her eyes and she blinked them away. He touched his hand to his heart, and she melted. No one seemed to notice when she dabbed her cuff to her eyes.

The news of her arrival had run ahead of her, and Jorey was standing outside the leather walls of his tent when they arrived. The spider priests, thankfully, were not with him. She saw the exhaustion in his face and the relief.

“Mother,” he said. “I was worried you wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Oh no, dear. Nothing could have kept me away.” She waved absently over her shoulder at Wester and Kit. “These are my men. They’ve been very good to me during the journey. Now do let me come in and warm my feet, won’t you?”

“I’m afraid all we have is grass tea and hard bread,” Jorey said, ignoring the two newcomers magnificently. “But I can’t think of anyone I’d rather share them with.”

Clara walked past him and to the door of the tent. She patted his cheek gently as she passed. “You have always been such a good boy. Come along, you two. You can rest for a bit inside while I talk to my son.”

Once they were inside and the door closed behind them, Clara made her introductions. She could tell from Jorey’s reaction that Captain Wester’s name meant more to him than it had to her. She also caught a flash of distrust in Jorey’s eyes at the sight of Master Kit.

“What’s the news from Carse?” Jorey asked.

Wester was the one who answered. “Six kinds of hell have broken loose in Elassae. And possibly Sarakal by now. We’ve come to kill your priests and put in our own, such as he is, and get you and as many of your men as will survive the trip back to Antea in hopes that you can keep things from falling apart entirely.”