The Spider's War

Jorey scowled, looking from Wester to Kit to her. They ought not to have let the actor-priest come along. It looked too much like another faction, another schism, another apostate come to champion another side in the war. And yet, would Jorey have been able to lead his men home without the perverse gift of the goddess?

No, not the goddess. The dragons.

“This is bel Sarcour’s plan?” Jorey said. “To send us home so that we can defend Antea against the consequences of the Lord Regent’s overreach?”

“It is. Assuming that you’re willing to abandon the plan to abduct her and hand her to Palliako for whatever unfortunate revenge he has in mind,” Wester said.

Jorey Kalliam was silent for a long moment, then let out a long sigh. “Can’t say my heart was in that to start with. Yes, I’ll turn back the army if you can keep it from mutiny when I give the order. I’ll tell Geder I had to. It won’t be a lie.”

“Well, we’ve an understanding then,” Marcus said. And then, “Just between us, it feels damned strange doing it. You and your men have killed some friends of mine. Helping your kingdom? Working with you? It feels more than half like betrayal.”

Jorey’s too-thin face broke into a bitter smile. “Well, at least we’ve that in common.”

Geder

It was a fit of pique,” Geder said. “I was angry. I wasn’t thinking straight. We can’t kill all the Timzinae children with parents in Elassae.”

“As my lord wishes,” the chief gaoler said.

“We have to keep enough back so that there’s incentive for them to put down their swords,” Geder said. “So maybe half? Does that sound right?”

A light snow was falling in the prison yard, dots of white too small to be called flakes. The Timzinae children were lined against the wall. Their scales were a light brown that would darken with age. Well, would have. The witness cull had already taken place. The ones who were set to watch and carry the word out to the farms huddled in a corner of the yard, the guards knotting leads around their necks, ten to a rope. Their inner eyelids flickered open and closed.

They didn’t know yet that they were the lucky ones.

“If my lord likes half, we can do that,” the chief gaoler said. He was a thin, grey-haired Firstblood man with skin almost as dark as the Timzinae, though of course his was real skin and not the insectile plates of the enemy. He lifted his whip, handle first, and the guards by the line stood to attention. “Count ’em off by twos. All the ones go back to the cells. The twos come with.”

Geder nodded to the chief and smiled. One of the children—a girl with pale-brown scales—tentatively smiled back at him, and he looked away.

The others were waiting in the street. Aster and Daskellin, of course, but a few other of the great houses had representatives. Coul Pyrellin was there. Mallian Caot, hardly older than Aster and standing in for his father and elder brothers. Some distant cousin of the Broots. If it could have waited until summer—or even until the King’s Hunt was ended—there would have been more. It couldn’t, of course. Tradition was all well and good. Geder had even read an essay once that said the rituals of tradition were what defined a kingdom, even more than the bloodline of its kings. But if that were true, it would mean Antea now was a wholly different empire than it had been when Geder became Lord Regent, and that couldn’t be right.

Their carriages stood at the ready, the horses’ breath pluming in the cold. His private guard surrounded him as he walked to the gold and silver carriage at the fore of the group. As if there were any danger to him here. Aster and Basrahip were waiting.

“Is there a problem?” Aster said, his voice strained and anxious.

“No, no,” Geder said. “Just some last-minute details. Nothing to be worried about.”

The carriage was more open than Geder would have liked, given the weather. It was designed to let them be seen from the street, which was important for the occasion, but since most occasions for the prince and Lord Regent to be seen happened in summer, keeping in the warmth wasn’t a priority. Aster wore a richly embroidered hunter’s jacket, Basrahip a grey wool cloak. Geder himself slipped under a thick lap blanket and a servant boy draped his shoulders with a throw still warm and smoky from a brazier.

High above and to the north, the banner of the goddess—red and pale with the eightfold sigil in black lines at the center—hung from the temple at the top of the Kingspire. The iron gates of the prison swung open, and a dozen guards with whips and blades paraded the prisoners out. Geder watched the small bodies trooping across the icy cobbles in double file. They were the witnesses, he thought. These weren’t the ones who were going to die, these were the witnesses. But they kept coming, so he was mistaken.

“Does something trouble you, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked.

Geder shook his head, but said nothing. For some reason, he found himself recalling the burning of Vanai. There had been a woman in the city, on the wall. He remembered seeing her silhouette against the flames. That was a strange thing to recall now. Today was nothing like that. No fires. No smoke.

“I hear the Hunt’s sparse this year,” Aster said.

“Mm? Little game or few hunters?” Geder asked.

“Few hunters,” Aster said. “Everyone’s at war or busy with their new holdings.”

“Stands to reason,” Geder said. “It all stands to reason. All of it. We do what we have to do, and it’ll come out right in the end.”

The last of the Timzinae emerged. The iron gates closed. The carriage lurched. The procession began down the eastern side of the Division, sometimes along the cliff edge, sometimes turning down a street that only ran alongside it. Geder’s belly felt odd, and there was a thickness in his throat he couldn’t explain. The wet or the chill. Something.

“It’s a shame they’ve made us do this,” Geder said. “But they knew. They knew from the first, and they made their choices. And the death throes of the enemy are on them.”

“They are,” Basrahip said. “We are her righteous servant as she is ours, and the world is made whole through our works.”

“Even this one,” Geder said.

“Especially this,” Basrahip said. Geder tried to take comfort in it, and managed a bit. The Timzinae had, after all, brought all this on themselves. He had to remember that. They were the ones who’d tried to kill Aster. They weren’t even human, not really. Not like the other races. Even the Yemmu with their jaw tusks and the candle-eyed Dartinae were more purely human. The Jasuru might have dragon-like scales, but Timzinae were dragons at the heart. Turn over a stone, and the grubs died of exposure. Turning over the world was just the same.

The Prisoner’s Span was the bridge farthest to the south. The cages that hung from it held the guests of the magistrate’s justice. The crowd that stood on the bridge was the families of the prisoners or their detractors, tossing down food or throwing stones. But all went quiet when the Timzinae arrived. Guards cleared the bystanders from the bridge, but once removed, the citizens didn’t leave. The sides of the Division grew thick with people. Witnesses. There were voices, but no cheers. No shouts. No jeering at the fate of the enemy. Geder didn’t know whether he was pleased or disappointed at their solemnity. The cold of the air tightened his chest. Just the cold. Nothing else.

The guards lined the children against the side of the bridge in ranks. They covered it with their bodies. How many children had been in that prison? A nation’s worth. Hundreds at the least stood here in the cold. The maw of the Division itself gaped below them. For a moment, Geder saw the great urban canyon as a titanic mouth. The city swelling up to swallow the world, and all of them in the path of its hunger. The witnesses stood together, still bound by ropes. The others stood anxious and confused, looking to the north, toward the Kingspire and the crimson banner of the goddess.

The carriages, his own included, stopped on the bridge. Crows shouted from the sky. Sparrows darted across the wide air, as if agitated by their presence. Or celebrating it. Geder couldn’t tell which. He looked to the west. It wouldn’t be ten minutes’ walk to the little ruined yard where he and Cithrin and Aster had hidden during the insurrection. It seemed like it should have been farther away. In some other city, or vanished perhaps into a kind of legend. He imagined her there, dressed in white, her pale body among the dark-chitined Timzinae. Her eyes hard and rich with contempt. Or weeping from fear of him.

It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. I didn’t want to do any of this. It was all of them that forced this.

And then, worse. No, not just them. It was you. You’ve made me do this. This is your fault, not mine.

“My lord?” someone said, and he realized it wasn’t for the first time. The chief gaoler stood waiting at the carriage door. Geder felt a sudden and powerful urge to talk with the man, to ask where he’d been born, where he came from, how he’d happened to become a gaoler for the crown. What he thought justice meant. He didn’t even care what the answers would be, only that he wouldn’t be giving the order.

The Timzinae children stood in the cold. Some were shivering. If they wept, they did so quietly. And in the carriages, the great men of the empire waited, growing colder themselves. He saw the one girl who’d caught his eye at the prison. Who’d smiled at him. Geder pointed to her.

“She’s in the wrong place,” he said. “She’s to be a witness. Pull her back.”

“Yes, my lord,” the gaoler said. “And… the others?”

“You may begin.”

The gaoler saluted with his upraised whip. The first child in the line was a boy, perhaps ten years old. He wore grey rags and a soiled bandage on his right arm. The guard standing behind him put a foot on the boy’s back and shoved. Geder watched the boy’s arms fly out to catch himself on ground that wasn’t there. His screams were taken up by the other children.

It went on for a long time.

It was almost evening when he came unannounced to Lord Skestinin’s house. It was always a bit hard going there. Lady Skestinin always greeted him, a mixture of hope and dread in her eyes. She never said the words, quite, but she skated around them. Is my husband free? Is he dead? Is there news of any kind? And of course, there wasn’t. He hated seeing the relief and disappointment when he asked only whether Sabiha and her new daughter were accepting visitors.

As Lord Skestinin had been away with the navy more than in Camnipol, it was a smaller compound than other lords of equal dignity might have. The gardens were modest, the stables frankly small. There were servants and slaves, such as anyone might have, but fewer, given the needs of the house. For most of the time he’d known it, the house had actually been overfull.

Jorey Kalliam and Sabiha had lived there together after Lord Kalliam’s failed revolt. And later Jorey’s mother Clara and her retinue. And when Sabiha’s birthing had been in danger of failing, Geder had very nearly lived there with his guard, and a full complement of cunning men besides. The sense he had as he sat in the withdrawing room, that the house was empty and hollow, actually just was that it wasn’t unnaturally full. The Kingspire would likely have felt the same. Or anywhere. Anywhere in the world.

The door opened, and Geder jumped to his feet. Sabiha entered. Since the baby had come, her color had gotten better. Her hair had lost its ashen dullness. He’d never been around new mothers before. He didn’t know whether this was normal. If he imagined that she hesitated or that her smile was just a degree forced, it was surely just his unquiet mind. She was his best friend’s wife. Maybe his only friend’s wife.

It was why he’d come.

“Lord Regent,” Sabiha said, and he interrupted her.

“Geder. Please. It’s only us.”

“Geder,” Sabiha said. “Mother said you wanted to see me?”

He wiped his hands on his thighs. “Well, I wouldn’t, wouldn’t have said it that way quite. I mean, I did. Want to see you. I do. But really what I said was to ask if you were, were free.” He was stuttering like a child. No. Not like a child. Like something else. But he was stuttering. “Is the baby well? She’s not, she’s not with you.”

Sabiha’s brows knit and she turned her head a degree, like a bird uncertain whether it was seeing a vine or a snake. “She’s sleeping. She does that quite a lot.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine. It’s what she’s meant to do. Geder, is something the matter?”

He laughed, but the sound came out strained. Thin and high as a violin badly played. He walked to the window and then back as he spoke, unable to keep from moving. “You’re the, the second person to ask me that today. And the first was Basrahip, so I couldn’t, couldn’t really answer him, could I? Not when I don’t know the answer. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be a trouble. I really don’t. It’s just that Jorey isn’t here, and you are, and you love him, and he loves you, and you have a baby, and so you’re like him. I mean you aren’t like him, but you’re connected to him. And I don’t have anyone.”

He stopped. A plume of white rage rose from his gut to his throat, as sudden and unexpected as a lightning bolt in bright sun. “I don’t have anyone,” he said through clenched teeth.

Something moved inside him, a knot of emotion he could put no name to shifting in the space below his heart. He wanted to stop talking, to leave and go back to the Kingspire with Aster and have everything be what it was supposed to be. He wanted to erase the alarmed look from Sabiha’s eyes. He wanted to stop talking, but he couldn’t. He’d started, and now it was like a landslide.

“It’s all going so well, you see. It’s all just the way it was meant. The goddess, she’s coming back to the world, and she’s bringing peace and truth, and all the lies are dying. Everywhere. Since we stopped the apostate, everything in the world’s been getting better and brighter and purer.”

“Do you want to sit down? Can I have them bring you something? Tea? Wine?”

“If, if, if they had just done what they were meant to do in Suddapal, this would never have had to happen. They knew. They knew what would happen, and they did it all the same. They rose up. And then I had to. Because of the farms and because of the fucking traditional fucking families in Borja pushing at Inentai, and because if I didn’t do what I said, they would all be laughing at me. And I told them I told them.”

“Geder. You’re shouting. It will wake the baby.”

Laughter pushed its way up out of his chest, rich and hot and mirthless. He sat on the divan, his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I didn’t mean to.”

“I understand,” Sabiha said, sitting across from him. Her back was straight as a tutor delivering a lecture. Her eyes were wary. Well, why shouldn’t they be? He hadn’t explained himself so much as popped his soul open and spilled it on the floor. He chuckled ruefully and shook his head.

“It should have been Jorey,” he said. Sabiha stiffened. When she spoke, her voice was careful.

“What should have been Jorey, my lord?”

“He should have been regent. Not me. And more than that. The goddess should have chosen him. He’s smart and strong and people like him. He’s kind. No one laughs at Jorey. And he has you—”

Outside the window, the garden was dead from the cold and dark. Brown sticks and bare wood that would flower again when spring came. That was the promise. It was hard to see the promise of green in all the death.

“You see,” Geder said, “I can’t talk to Aster, because I’m supposed to be strong for him. I can’t talk to my father, because he thinks I’m doing well. And Basrahip… I don’t know what he’d say. What he’d do. I know that everything is happening as it should. The rise of the temples. The voice of the goddess driving back the Timzinae and their plots. The world’s becoming pure again. Maybe not even again. Maybe for the first time. I know that’s all true. And so when I feel…” He lifted his hands, words failing.

“You’re… upset,” Sabiha said. There was a buzz in her voice. A roughness that he could hear her struggling against. “You ordered and oversaw the deaths of hundreds of captive children. And you’ve come to me for comfort because you’re upset?”

“Yes,” Geder said, gratified that she’d understood him despite his rambling. “I was chosen, you know? I am the light that brought her back to the world after her exile. That’s me. I’m making the world better, and everyone knows. I’m the most important man, maybe in the whole world. I know that what we’re doing is right. I know that I’ve helped, that I keep helping. How can anyone do this much good, help the world into light as much as I have, and feel… like this?”

“I… I don’t know what to tell you,” Sabiha said.

“That’s all right,” Geder said softly. “It helps just to say it to a friend. I’d have bothered Jorey with it if he were here. Maybe I will when he comes back. Do you think he’d mind?”

“I can’t imagine,” Sabiha said. She shook her head slightly. He didn’t think she knew she’d done it. What he must look like to her. The greatest man in the empire, the power of life and death in his hand, weeping on her couch over nothing. Over a feeling he couldn’t even put words to. He tugged at his sleeve and dried his eyes.

“To be so sad,” he said, “when there’s no reason for it. I’m only afraid that… Ah, Sabiha. I can tell you this because I know you won’t laugh. I think there might be something wrong with me.”

Cithrin

Cithrin wasn’t there when Inys killed the guardsman. Her understanding of it grew first from the mixture of rumor and report, gossip and speculation that followed the unexpected violence the way thunder follows lightning.

It happened the day after Inys’s return from the south. Cithrin had meant to have one of her usual conversations with the dragon, but freezing rain and a set of queries from the scribes had distracted her. Inys had taken shelter in a covered amphitheater, and for reasons no one knew and likely no one ever would, one of King Tracian’s guardsmen took exception to the choice. To call it a confrontation would have been generous. The guard had approached the dragon, calling Inys by name, and told him to find another resting place. Inys had gutted the man, eaten the corpse, and fallen back asleep.

All those facts were agreed upon. It was the interpretations of them that spread out like feathers on a wing. The guardsman had been drunk or embarrassed after having been dressed down by his commander or goaded into rash action by his friends. The dragon had warned him or it hadn’t. King Tracian was enraged and preparing to act against Inys or he approved of the dragon’s actions. There was even the suggestion—taken more seriously than it deserved—that the guardsman had been the secret lover of a noble lady at court, and the dragon had slaughtered him as a sign of favor to the cuckolded husband.

Only a few seemed alarmed that the huge, intelligent predator that had taken residence in Carse had begun killing. It was a dragon, glorious and powerful. The populace at large seemed willing to assume that whatever it had done was justified by the mere fact that a dragon had done it.

Komme Medean and King Tracian were in the minority that did care what had happened and why. Even then, Cithrin had the sense that it was more a matter of tactics in the war than an issue of justice. Law for dragons, as for kings, was less about abiding by rules than the making of them. It was a distinction she hadn’t considered before she’d starting making laws of her own. That she kept such company—that they were in some ways her peers—left her feeling uneasy, but not so much that she resorted to the bottle. Or, anyway, not more than usual.

Inys arrived at his usual time. Rain and clouds had blown away, leaving a clean blue sky from which the dragon descended. Cithrin sat in the courtyard of the holding company, as she had before, a brazier glowing beside her and a dead lamb cooling on the winter-killed grass. She felt only a little more trepidation than usual. Inys folded his tattered wings and swallowed the animal. His breath was hot and acrid, the fumes stinging her eyes.

“So,” the dragon said. “I have come again. Ask me what you will.”

Cithrin pretended to consult her notebooks. All their conversations were there. The nature of the spiders, the history of the war, the strategies by which Inys suspected the enemy might be overcome. Many times their conversations veered widely from Cithrin’s questions. She had pages of description of the small politics of the dragons’ court, the composers Inys thought of note, the styles and fashions and vast projects that had been the great concern when humanity had still been tame.

She cleared her throat. “There was a man you killed. A guardsman of the king?”

“That,” Inys said, and his deep, symphonic voice seemed thoughtful. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of that since it happened.”

“You have?”

“You sound surprised. Yes, I have thought on it. It was badly done, and I should not have. And so I have been thinking on why I chose to do as I did. What it was that fouled my spirit and led me to act improperly. I think it was the loss of the Stormcrow.”

“You mean Marcus?”

“The burden of the empty world,” Inys said, canting a huge black eye toward the sun. “Every day I smell the air and taste the water, hoping for some sign of another, but there is nothing. I am alone. Profoundly. Completely.”

“Except for us,” Cithrin said, but it was like she hadn’t spoken.

“To be so set apart. So isolated. It was one of the greatest punishments that could be leveled against us, and it is the one to which I’ve consigned myself. The feelings I have can find no outlet, and so I begin to bond with them. And the Stormcrow most of all. It’s sentiment. Nothing but sentiment. But I feel his absence, and it stands in for all the other absences.”

“Them?”

“What are you asking me?”

“You begin to bond with them? Who do you mean, ‘them’?”

“You,” Inys said. “The slave races. I shouldn’t have eaten the one. It was bad form. I wasn’t even hungry. And if I do not police myself in these small things, how will I preserve my mind from the large ones? The path from trivial misstep to losing myself utterly is short and broad.”

“Trivial,” Cithrin said. She hadn’t meant to.

“I am the only hope for the resurrection of the world. Everything depends on me. On my holding my mind in place. But I am ashamed, and I am humiliated.”

And you are enjoying it entirely too much, Marcus Wester said in Cithrin’s imagination. She wondered if she said the words aloud whether Inys would laugh or destroy her as he had the guard. Better, she thought, not to answer that question.

“The spiders,” she said. “Was there any pattern to how the conflicts between them first spread? A distance between them that allowed disagreements to take hold? A number of people? The time they were separated from each other?”

“Not that I know,” Inys said. “It was unimportant to me at the time. The slaves were corrupted, and the corrupted were of no use. We culled the tainted and kept the pure. The only pattern, so called, was the frenzy they fell into when that which they believed and that with which another confronted them would collide. To hear another voice say something offensive to their sense of the world and also know that the other was not lying? To be faced by the fact of their error called forth a rage like no other.”

“That’s not the spiders,” Cithrin said. “That’s people.”

“It was the bent scale in your minds where Morade put his claw,” Inys said. “It is how he destroyed you.”

“How he destroyed all of us.”

“No, just you,” Inys said. “I destroyed the rest.”

What I hear,” King Tracian said, “is that the dragon can’t be depended upon. Yes, if it’s a bright day and he’s in a sunny mood. Or if Wester is here to goad him into it. But I think we can all see that Inys cannot be commanded. Can that be agreed?”

The meeting room, while it was in the palace, wasn’t the one Cithrin had first seen. This had a fire pit in its center worked in iron, silk upholstered chairs, and lanterns of crystal lit not with flame but by some cunning man’s trick that more nearly seemed like sunlight. The tapestries on the walls were designs of blue and red and gold as deeply saturated as if they’d just come from the dyer’s yards, though they were likely centuries old. Komme Medean, sitting near the fire in robes of simple brown, nodded. Tracian’s master-at-arms—a thin-faced man called Lord Fish though that wasn’t his name—hoisted an eyebrow and waited.

“I think that can be agreed,” Komme said, “at least provisionally. Inys can be negotiated with—”

“And if he breaks his word, what punishment are we going to place against him?” Tracian said. “Put him in the stocks? Fine him? Stop giving him food and drink?”

“Dealing with great power does limit our options,” Komme said. From Tracian’s nod, Cithrin thought she was the only one who’d heard the mordant humor in the words.

“And so we need to have something else on our side,” the king said. “I’ve been in conversation with Birancour. The ambassador of the queen.”

Komme looked up, his expression bland but his eyes suddenly sharp. “Sir Brendis Sarreau? I didn’t know he’d come to the city.”

“Come and gone,” Tracian said lightly, but Cithrin heard the pleasure in his voice. Diplomats and statesmen speak, of course, to the throne. Not the bankers. So Tracian was beginning to understand the deeper price that came with the gold he’d taken. That was a shame. She’d hoped to have a few years at least before that happened.

“A wise man,” Komme said. “Deep thinker. Have you met him, Cithrin? No? Well, I’m sure you will. What did the ambassador have to suggest?”

“An expansion of what we already have. Tamed spider priests of our own to counteract the others. Men like your Master Kit who can use Morade’s weapon against Antea and its false goddess.” Tracian smiled and made a wide, sweeping gesture as if he were displaying a fine piece of art. “We’ve already seen that we need the man in more places than one. We needed him here to safeguard the court. They need him with the Lord Marshal’s army to see that it retreats. How many other places would men like him be of use? We could send them to Borja and Hallskar. Cabral. You have your papers, but how much more convincing would demonstrations be? Our tame priests standing before every court in the world, explaining how the whole thing works, how it can be fought against. Your public letters are fine, I don’t dispute that. But if they heard the truth from one of our Master Kits—”

“They wouldn’t be able to disbelieve it,” the master-at-arms said. “They’d have to believe.”

The knot in Cithrin’s gut tightened. Komme stroked his beard and looked into her eyes. His silence was a warning. She took her lower lip between her teeth and bit to keep herself from speaking. Komme had lived his whole life in Northcoast. He knew King Tracian better than she could. She had to trust the old banker to see the world she did, and the dangers it held.

“It’s an interesting thought,” Komme said. “How far have you gone with it?”

“Porte Oliva will be retaken eventually. The queen has plans in place,” Tracian said. It wasn’t a direct answer, but Cithrin understood. If Kit didn’t return or didn’t agree, there were other priests. If Komme and Cithrin objected, there would be other opportunities to find the corrupted blood and use it. She took a salted nut from the silver plate before her but couldn’t bring herself to eat it. Anything close to hunger she might have had before was drowned by her quiet alarm.

“Well, it will be interesting to see what the queen does with her new agents,” Komme said, leaning back. “I can certainly see how it would help with the immediate issue, but I wonder how we would convince Birancour to put that sword down once they’d picked it up.”

“We might not,” Tracian said. “All tools are dangerous when they’re misused. Properly controlled, though, these may be a blessing.”

“Perhaps,” Komme said. “Perhaps.”

After the meeting ended, Cithrin and Komme rode back toward the holding company in a carriage. The sky was dark, and the streets frigid. Shuttered windows glimmered at their edges, the light of lanterns and fires slipping out into the night. Otherwise the streets were only moonlight and stars. Cithrin huddled into a wool blanket, but Komme sat in his shirt and jacket, his eyes on the passing buildings.

“It’s a terrible plan,” she said. “He can’t do it.”

“I know,” Komme said. “He won’t. But we can’t tell him not to. He’s the king. Informing men on thrones of what you will and will not permit them to do… Well, people juggle knives too. The danger’s what makes the sport interesting. If we weren’t already doing what he proposes, it would be an easier argument to make.”

“You mean Kit.”

“These spiders,” Komme said. “They’re meant to drive us against each other, yes? Factions within factions, all with their own particular priests leading the way. Maybe by standing at a pulpit, maybe by whispering in the right ears at the right time. With your actor fellow, we fit that description.”

“Kit’s different,” Cithrin said.

“You’re sure of that?”

“I am.”

“Tracian’s not. Others may not be. And even if Master Kit is unlike the others, that’s an argument that they can be tamed. Used by forces of good to bring victory to the righteous.” Cithrin’s short, choked laugh brought a wry smile to Komme’s lips. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“Even if they destroyed all the corrupted that believed in the goddess, it would be a season before Birancour and Northcoast were at each others’ throats over something else. They wouldn’t even recognize that it was happening.”

“I agree,” Komme said. “Give him a few days to think he’s won. I’ll write him a letter explaining that the holding company has no objection, but the voices of the branches would feel uncomfortable setting business under a crown that uses the spiders. I’ll send a copy to Sir Brendis. It’ll be a carrot to Birancour, since it suggests we would be open to expanding this war gold scheme to them, and a threat to Tracian that we might pull it back.”

The carriage shuddered across a length of bad paving, the wheels rapping the stones like an assault. Komme put his hand on the door until the roughness passed.

“Will he see the danger in that?” Cithrin asked.

“I don’t know. He might not. Not yet. It’s all still a novelty. Once people are used to it—once they’ve lost the memory of coins—we’ll have more leverage. It’s like going down a steep hill in a sled. It’d be easier to steer if it weren’t all going so quickly. But this is how quickly it’s going, so we’d best do what we can.”

The old man sighed and lapsed into silence. Cithrin sat back. The winter cold pressed at her. In Porte Oliva or Vanai, the cities she’d lost, the nights never grew cold the way they did in Northcoast. Carse’s winter was vicious and long and cold. But more than the chill and darkness, she dreaded the winter’s end. As long as the fighting had stopped, there was hope that she could end it. That the chance wouldn’t fall outside her reach. The sound of another cart came from the street and then faded away.

“I was naïve,” she said.

“Everyone is at the start,” Komme said mildly. “Were you thinking of something in particular?”

“The public letters. I thought that by telling people what they were, the world would rise up against them.”

“That if you told them the truth, they would thank you and see things as you do?” Komme said. “Yes, that was naïve. It’s a forgivable error, though.”

“Only if I can correct it,” she said. “Inys didn’t mean to slaughter the world when he upset his brother. He didn’t see the end his actions would take him to either. If the stakes are everything, no errors are forgivable. We have to be better than that.”

“So be wiser than dragons?” Komme said. “Don’t let it be said you aim low.”

“Dragons aren’t wise. They’re only powerful and noble and impressive to the people they fashioned to be easily impressed.”

“True,” Komme said as the carriage shifted and slowed. The gate of the holding company passed the window, and the voices of the grooms and guards and footmen rang out in the dark. Torches flared, and boots tapped against the paving stones. The carriage lurched to a halt, and the door swung open. Two servants stood ready to help them out, but Komme Medean hadn’t moved. His eyes were on Cithrin, glittering in the light as if the fire were in him. His expression was grim and considering. “So how do you win this war? More hunters? More fighters? More public letters exhorting people to take your side?”

No, she wanted to say. It was in her mouth. She could taste the word. Komme lifted his eyebrows, and for a moment, she was a child again, sitting at Magister Imaniel’s table, peppered with his questions. Trying to show that she was clever enough to be loved.

“In part,” she said. “Gathering new allies is part of what we can do, even though they may not all do quite as we’d hoped. That part wasn’t wrong. It was only incomplete.”

The servant at the door cleared his throat and leaned in. “Sir, is there something—”

Komme lifted his hand sharply, and the man went silent. “Go on,” Komme said.

“It’s a war, but it’s also a marketplace. I have to have something better than the people at the next table and at the right price.”

“Lower price?”

“Perhaps. Unless costing more makes it seem more to be valued.”

“And what is it you’re selling? Peace? Been a long line of clever people who couldn’t clear that inventory.”

“Not at first. No. I’m selling dead spiders. As long as their death is worth more to the world than the advantage they give, I won’t need to pull anyone to my side. They’ll find their own reasons.”

“And how do you do that?”

Cithrin was silent for a long time. The torches muttered. The grooms unhitched the horses. Cithrin felt her mind grow still, the knot in her belly loosen. “What do kings want more than power?” she asked.

“Find that, my dear,” Komme said, “and we’ll have something worth knowing. Because in my experience, the answer’s nothing.”

Marcus

Marcus went on campaign the first time when he was sixteen. His first sword had been a thin blade, meant for close, dirty work. Even pretending he’d never carried a knife until that day, he’d spent more of his life armed than not. He’d taken the field in the ice-caked springs of Northcoast and the kiln-hot summers of the Keshet. He’d commanded men and been under the command of generals and doges, princes and kings. He’d wintered in the most libertine of the Free Cities and the most pious garrisons of Herez.

Long experience told him that an army camp had its own logic, its own form, its own character unlike that of any township or hunter’s encampment. Even without setting foot in it, Marcus knew quite a bit about the Anteans’. He couldn’t have said where exactly the tents of the camp followers were, where the dice games were played, who was the company prig and who the joker, who was undercutting which commander when his superiors weren’t about. He knew that they all existed, though. It was only a matter of finding the specifics.

And then, of course, the priests. They had to be found and followed. Once he understood just a bit of their role in the geography of the army, he’d be able to make the plan that the Lord Marshal of Antea and Cithrin bel Sarcour both wanted of him. Along with that, there were other things he was looking at and looking for. Signs and indications, patterns and systems. And again, he knew that they would be there before he knew what they were.

And all the things he saw drew him to the same basic conclusion: Antea, after the most successful and extended campaign he’d heard of outside legend, had destroyed itself.

Part of the blame—though he wouldn’t have said it aloud—lay at Jorey Kalliam’s feet. The boy seemed smart, competent, even well enough read in the theory of leading an army. But he was also little more than a boy, and his mistakes were the mistakes of inexperience. It was possible to hold a small army in the field all through the winter if there was no other option, but this was the bulk of Antea’s fighting force. Even with supply carts coming up from Porte Oliva in the south and water and occasional fish from the little creek that ran through the camp, it was too large to sustain itself. The weariness and hunger of the soldiers made them look like he could push them over with a breath. And the Lord Marshal hadn’t kept discipline in digging the latrines. The frozen ground would make it hell’s own work, true. And shit left out in the cold of the little ravine beside the camp froze. It was easier to let it lie there in piles. After all it didn’t stink. They’d pay for it all when the thaw came, though. First in flies and then in fever.

The placement of the tents said something as well. Cliques were forming among the men. Maybe they’d been there from the start, but the camp wasn’t a unified whole. It was a network of camps centered around Kalliam’s subject lords and sharing a few common resources: the cunning men’s tents, the practice yard, the priests’ tent. Far better to keep the men from fragmenting, especially when they had so many other reasons to be primed for mutiny. If it had been a smaller army—the command of a new leader who was himself answering to some greater lord—it would have been serviceable. Respectable, even. But as the central force of a great empire, it looked like something that the Lord Regent had awarded a young friend instead of an experienced commander.

Which, in fact, it was. If not for the priests, the whole thing would have fallen into chaos long before.

“He’s a good man,” the young huntsman said. Vincen Coe, Lady Kalliam had called him. Her conspirator and servant. And, since he’d followed the army only from the Free Cities and not trekked with it all the way through Sarakal and Elassae first, he was about half again the weight of the average Antean soldier. All in all, not a bad ally to have. “Jorey’s men like him.”

“They’re told to,” Marcus said. “If he didn’t have this dragon’s trick on his side, it’d go harder for him. And I didn’t say he was a bad person. I said he was an inexperienced war leader.”

“He took down your dragon,” Coe said.

“Once,” Marcus said. “That’s the problem with a maneuver like that. It works best the first time.”

Coe shrugged. The man seemed to take any criticism of House Kalliam personally. Either doglike loyalty or the natural distrust of a servant for anyone who might take his place in the household. Either way, Marcus made the point to himself again not to bait the man without meaning to.

The three of them—Marcus and Coe and Kit—had set up tents in the gap between two of the larger factions within the camp. It was an unpleasant piece of land. The siege towers and machinery that had brought down the dragon sat to the east, white with frost. Come morning, their tent would be in shadow until the sun was five or six hands above the horizon. The curve of the low hills seemed to channel the wind to it, and the heat from their sad, underfed little fire didn’t do much against it.

Marcus wouldn’t have chosen the spot, but in four of the past five days, the spider priests had crossed this way on their rounds. Marcus’s first hope had been that the priests would sleep far enough from the others that he could take them in the night. But the enemy was in the center of the most concentrated group of soldiers, and so the second plan was this. Find a place along their customary route, distract them, and then kill them fast enough that no one noticed.

The middle of an army was a poor place for an assassination. His only comfort was that, once it was finished, the Lord Marshal would be able to help cover the thing over. If he’d been trying to escape after, it would have been harder.

Not impossible, but harder.

Voices came from the neighboring camp. The chatter of the men, but above them, trumpeting in rough tones, the priests. Vincen Coe had helped them stay out of the priests’ immediate path while Marcus made his plan. Even now, he hadn’t come close enough to see them as anything but dusty cloaks. They spoke like actors from a stage, filling the camp with their words. We cannot fail. The goddess is with us. All enemies will fall before us. We cannot fail. It didn’t work if the soldiers didn’t hear it, and they shouted it all wherever they went.

For all that he knew it was hairwash and deception, Marcus found himself wondering when he heard them. When they said We cannot fail, the soldiers all took it as a promise of Antean victory. Marcus knew more, and the words meant other things to him. The war will never stop. There are too many of us already, and scattered too far across the world. The chaos will come, and nothing will stop it. Put in those terms, their argument seemed convincing. And he thought it would have even if it hadn’t come with Morade’s cruel magic to back it.

The others heard it too. Coe’s face took on a clarity and focus like a hunter on a trail. Kit folded his arms together. The lines at the corners of his mouth drew deeper.

“You all right?” Marcus asked.

“Fine,” he said. “It’s only… I can feel them. Like little rivers of pain in my flesh. I hear them say that the goddess is with us. The truth of that is in their voices, and yet that it’s false is something I’m sure of. The two come together, and it’s…” Kit shook his head. “I find it difficult to fully describe.”

“Are they going to be able to feel your presence too?” Coe asked.

“I think not. My experience is that the spiders have an affinity for one another, but I expect each of them will assume any sense of my presence is inspired by the other. Unless they hear me speak. When that happens…”

“It’ll be close to the end,” Marcus said. “May not even need it.”

The voices of the priests grew louder, and then stopped. Their visit to the neighboring camp was ended. If the previous two days were a guide, they’d cross the empty space near Marcus’s tent on the way to the next little camp. The poisoned sword lay beside the fire, the scabbard covered by dirt, the hilt by a bit of cloth. Kit met Marcus’s gaze, nodded, and moved into the darkness within the little tent. Vincen stood, stretched, and ambled off toward the frost-rimed bulk of the siege towers. Marcus understood the man had been badly injured earlier in the season, but there was no sign of it in how he held himself. There had been a time when Marcus had healed that quickly too, but it hadn’t been in the last decade. Or since he’d started carrying this thrice-damned sword, for that.

The two men appeared, walking together. The cold breeze pushed their brown cloaks against their bodies. They had wiry hair not unlike Kit’s, and skin of a similar cast. Mostly, though, they were just a pair of Firstblood men. If he’d seen them sitting together at an inn anyplace from Daun to Stollbourne, he’d have thought them cousins and ended there.

Marcus shifted from sitting to a low squat. One hand rested on the hilt of the hidden blade. Two men, unsuspecting. He saw them notice him. From their smiles and nods, he was nothing more than another soldier to them. The plan was simple. Draw them to his fire, have Coe distract them, then cut them down. Two quick cuts, and then let the blade’s toxic magic finish the rest. And if things went poorly, hope that Kit could pull him out of it.

Now he just had to see it work in practice.

“Afternoon,” Marcus said, loud enough for it to carry. “How are you two doing?”

“Well,” the taller of the two said. “The goddess blesses us with this beautiful day.”

“If you say,” Marcus said. They hadn’t broken stride. A single tent apparently wasn’t draw enough for their time. “You’re priests then? I saw another like you not long ago. Up in Northcoast, it was. Eshau, he called himself.”

Their steps faltered. Marcus poked at the little fire, bringing up a cloud of tiny sparks. It was the truth. Marcus had seen the man die in dragon flame. Now, Eshau was an unpleasant memory and bait for the hook. And bless the man, he did his job.

The two priests came to stand by the fire, looking down at Marcus. The shorter of the two had a chipped front tooth. The taller, a scar on the back of his wrist. Marcus smiled up at them, his fingertips brushing the hilt under its cloth.

“You knew Eshau?” the taller one said.

“That’d be an exaggeration,” Marcus said. “I met him once. He was up looking to speak with King Tracian. All on about how your Basrahip fellow had become corrupt and the goddess was incorruptible, and everyone should raise up an army against you and Antea and revel in the light of her truth. Something along those lines.”

They exchanged alarmed glances. Marcus smiled vacantly up at them, making himself seem innocuous and a little dim. It was a mistake to think you couldn’t mislead the spiders. You just couldn’t lie outright to do it. There was and always had been a gap wide enough to march a cohort through between speaking truth and being understood.

Coe whistled sharply from behind them, and they glanced back. Marcus grabbed the hilt and moved forward, using the weight of his body to unsheathe the blade and swing it. The tall one was turning back to him when the blade took him in the side, just under the ribs, cutting up. The priest’s eyes went wide, and Marcus yanked the sword back to free it. The shorter priest yelped with alarm, and the taller one grabbed the blade in his bare hands, encumbering it, holding it in his own gut. The blood pouring down his belly was lumpy and black. The spiders already dead from the venom of the blade.

Marcus pulled again, slicing deep into the meat of the tall priest’s palms, but he couldn’t get the blade free. The shorter priest stumbled back, turned. Coe was near him, a long knife in his hand.

“No!” Marcus said. “Don’t cut him! Don’t get close!”

Marcus planted his boot on the tall priest’s chest and shoved. The blade slid free. White foam mixed with his blood now. The dying man collapsed into the fire pit, but Marcus was already running across the frozen field. The short priest, ahead of him, was shouting a gabble of words he couldn’t follow and pumping his legs. Marcus put his head down and ran. The poisoned sword was long, and poorly balanced for sprinting. The priest opened the distance between them and closed the one to the nearest camp and the soldiers of Antea. A glance showed Marcus half a dozen men in imperial clothes who’d already noticed them, but hadn’t started toward the fray.

That wouldn’t last. And he wasn’t catching up. For every four steps he took, the priest managed five. The cold stung Marcus’s lungs. He fought not to cough. The Antean tents came closer. A couple of men were running out toward them, coming to the rescue of the disease that was killing them. Marcus pushed his awareness of them aside, his gaze on the shifting brown cloak in front of him. Nothing else mattered.

Something flickered to his left, and the priest stumbled. Fell. The hunter’s knife, thrown from God knew how far, protruded from the priest’s thigh like a bone in a bad break. Tiny black bodies skittered across the frozen ground, the chill already slowing them. The priest looked up, his hand raised as if to parry, as Marcus brought down the blade. He sheared through the man’s wrist, sank the point of the green-black sword into his chest. The fumes from the blade wafted up into Marcus’s face, astringent and cutting. The priest cried out once, then blood gushed from his mouth. Blood and other things: the bodies of spiders and the white foam of the poison.

Marcus stepped back, pulling the blade free. The soldiers were crying out in dismay and anger, their voices close. He looked up. Five of them in the first wave. Maybe twenty more behind those. They looked like sticks rattling in too-wide jackets. Scarecrows with the stuffing picked out for nests. They held their swords smartly enough, though.

Marcus lifted the blade, breathing between clenched teeth. He could try outrunning them. Might even manage it, given how near starvation they all were.

“Stop!” Kit’s voice rolled across the frozen earth. “In the name of the goddess and empire, put up your swords!”

The first five didn’t put up their blades, but their charge lost its speed. Marcus took a couple of slow steps back and risked a glance over his shoulder. Kit was a few yards behind him, arms lifted wide, face beaming in a wide grin. He looked joyful. Marcus rolled his eyes.

Actors.

“Do not be alarmed! Put your confusion aside, and rejoice! I have come as your liberator and savior! I am Kitap rol Keshmet, sent by the goddess to free you from the bonds of these false servants. Put up your swords, my friends, and let us be merry! Those who brought false words of the goddess, who kept you from the full truth, who pretended to guide you to victory, have fallen beneath my righteous blade!”

“Fuck is this?” one of the soldiers shouted. The second wave was catching up to the first, surrounding them. There was no running to safety now, but seeing as they hadn’t butchered Marcus or Kit or Coe, there were also ways it could have been worse.

Kit came to Marcus’s side, put a hand on his shoulder. Marcus lowered the point of the blade and tried to seem like Kit’s righteous servant. If it came down to blows now, they were likely all dead anyway.

“Have you not wondered, my friends, why victory has been so slow to come? Have you not wondered why, for all your good work and sacrifice, the goddess has withheld the comforts of home? I bring good news and more than good news. The peace you deserve is upon you! You have been misled by those who would use the gifts of the goddess against her, but she has seen your faith. And she keeps her faith now with you. Put up your swords and rejoice. I am Kitap rol Keshmet, and I have come as the true voice of the goddess to lead you home!”

Marcus knew the trick, knew that Kit was spinning a tale, but he felt the pull of it all the same. Perhaps because it was half-true. These men had been tricked. Had been held in a kind of dream of noble warfare, of honorable slaughter.

Coe snuck through the crowd with the green scabbard, and Marcus put away the blade. The soldiers around them shuffled, uncertain. There was still rage in some of their faces, but confusion was growing in others. And in a few—maybe two, maybe three—something that looked like hope. Or possibly relief.

“I see your doubt, and I forgive it. From so deep a sleep, you must take a moment to wake, yes? So come, my friends!” Kit shouted, waving his arm in a well-practiced arc. “To the tent of the Lord Marshal! Where all shall be made clear!”

A rough shout came up from the soldiers, halfway between cheer and threat. More of the soldiers were streaming in now, coming from camps in all directions. Even a half dozen from the siege towers that Marcus hadn’t known were guarded. They moved as Kit moved, following him toward Jorey Kalliam and confirmation that what Kit said was true. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

“Well,” Coe said, “this is interesting.”

“Not quite how I’d pictured it,” Marcus said. “But I figure it’ll do for now.”

“Should confuse the hell out of Camnipol when the news gets there.”

“Might, might not,” Marcus said. “With any luck, we’ll be the ones to bring it.”

“Then what happens?”

“We defeat the idea of war itself and end this whole thing gracefully. That’s honestly the plan.”

Coe was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, friend. Neither do I.”

Clara

People of high status in the court were, of course, made of the same flesh and bone as anybody else, and hence died as often. The fact of bodily mortality had never been hidden from Clara. By the time she first witnessed someone entering the last days of their life, she was perfectly clear on what was happening. Still it had come as a shock.

Cerria Pintillien had been an aunt on her mother’s side, and Clara had been eight when she died. Her memories of Cerria before the illness were vague. She was a sort of thick-faced presence in the background of Clara’s childhood home. A deep, almost braying laughter, a sense of judgmental intelligence, an image of almost comically wide hips negotiating a stairway. When Cerria contracted her final illness, it presented at first as a kind of beauty. She lost a great deal of the weight that had broadened her body and face, and her skin tightened and took on a strange sheen, like she’d been carved from wax.

Clara remembered vividly the murmurs of admiration among her mother’s friends before the cause of this transformation was known. Those same tendencies—the thinning flesh, the tightening skin—were not, however, an end, but a direction. Cerria continued to shed the bulk of her flesh until her collarbones cast shadows of their own and her hands lost their strength. Her skin grew less supple and took on a yellow tone, like the fat skimmed off cold soup. There had been no praise for her beauty then. Cerria’s last days had been spent in her solarium, sitting in the warmth, the skin stretched across her face like an artifact from a tanner’s shop. A mask fitted upon a skull.

As Jorey’s army broke its miserable camp and prepared to march through the brown fields of the Birancouri winter, Clara found herself thinking of Cerria. Not reflecting on her, or considering the philosophical implications of her aunt’s passing, but suffering sudden, jolting visual memories. Had she been of a spiritual bent, she knew, she might have interpreted this as a ghost trying to reach her. In point of fact, it was only that so many of the soldiers had the same thinness and pallor, the same pain in their movements, the same sense of a body pushed until it was nearly used up.

And there was still the pass at Bellin to be negotiated. The prospect filled her with dread. So recently these same men had swarmed upon Porte Oliva, a conquering army strong enough to break the strength of dragons. They should have stayed there, in the south. They should have wintered in their captured city where ships could bring grain to the port and fishermen could harvest the seas to feed them. But Geder Palliako’s pride had been hurt, and the inhuman voices of the priests had filled them with lies of invulnerability. They had pushed on, chasing Cithrin bel Sarcour until their strength had almost failed.

In place of food, they had gruel so thin it was more accurate to call it soup. The soldiers hunched over their bowls, empty gazes fixed on nothing in particular. She found it hard to remember that this was the largest part of Antea’s armies. She kept wanting to think there was some other force—in Antea or Elassae or somewhere in the east—where the true strength of her nation lay. That the army that had laid waste to the world had been reduced to these wraiths seemed too terrible to be true. Certainly this could not be what victory looked like.

“Is something wrong, my lady?” Vincen said, and her heart gave its little leap as it did so often when he was involved. The little frisson was complicated—one part schoolgirl joy at her lover’s presence, one part fear that she might somehow reveal their clandestine affair, and perhaps another part the deep frustration that there was nowhere she might conveniently and discreetly take the comfort from him that she craved. From his smile, she guessed that he saw it all in her. She lifted an eyebrow. Until such time as they were free of the army and the field, all their most important exchanges were reduced to such gestures.

“Nothing of importance,” she said, answering his words rather then their deeper meaning. “I am a bit weary.”

Vincen nodded. He had grown thinner since she’d left, though he had less of the emaciation of the other soldiers. He’d spent the time she’d been away recovering from his wounds, and that had meant a slightly less impoverished fodder than the hale and able-bodied among the troops. She shifted to the side, making room on the little shelf of stone she’d chosen for her seat. Vincen hesitated. To sit so near the woman he served would seem uncommonly like taking liberties. He was right, damn the man. Pressing her lips more tightly together, she moved back.

“I’d offer to fetch you better food,” he said, “but I think the wait might be a long one. There’s no good hunting before Asterilhold.”

“It looks to be a long and unpleasant winter,” she said, lifting another spoonful of gruel and then putting her bowl down uneaten.

Vincen hesitated. She could guess what he would say next. He might have saved himself the effort. And yet. “It needn’t be, ma’am. A small escort could take you someplace more comfortable.”

“By which you mean safer?”

“And with decent food and a real bed.”

“To sleep in?” Clara asked.

He looked around before answering. “That too.”

Clara laughed. Hungry as she was, and tired besides, her laughter surprised her. It sounded like something that belonged to a stronger woman. “You are kind to suggest it,” she said. “But no. I began this. I will see it through.”

It was hard to tell. Long days in the field had darkened his skin, but she imagined he was blushing just a bit. He’d embarrassed himself to bring her a moment’s amusement. She wondered whether the gratitude she felt for that might define love as well as anything else did. Part of it, perhaps, though love in general was a vague enough target that she might not be able to define it in any consistent or useful way, had anyone occasion to ask.

“It’s odd, don’t you think,” she said, “how a word can seem so very clear until one gets close, and then it all goes as solid as fog?”

“Such as?” Vincen said. She could still hear the trailing mischievousness in his voice. She didn’t think before she answered.

“Love.”

He went very still, and she realized what she’d said. Where she’d said it. She looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes, and in hers as well. If they won this war, how long would she be able to draw out this utterly inappropriate alliance? How long before she was forced back into the ill-fitting chair of Lady Clara Kalliam, Dowager Duchess of whatever holding Geder, or perhaps Aster, saw fit to bestow on Jorey? Or perhaps the empire would fall into chaos, and she would live her life as Lady Nothing of Nowhere. Vincen’s heartbroken eyes made that last seem the grandest title imaginable.

“I was speaking of love,” she said.

Their progress was slow and painful. Her short time in the field following the army from the Free Cities to Porte Oliva had taught her something about the movement of a military force. She had walked in the swaths they cut through the flesh of the land. The ruin they left behind them now seemed less only because the land around them already felt dead, a landscape of dry grass and old snow and crows. There were few horses left. She suspected that most had been eaten.

They rose before dawn, often to the cajoling and hectoring of Wester’s actor-priest. He walked through the tents with assurances and broad smiles, much as his predecessors had. The soldiers took comfort in the words—All will be well, you will see your homes again soon enough, your efforts shall meet great reward—and that gave them strength enough to pack their things another time, walk for another day. Or often it did. Two men had died in their sleep since they’d broken camp, exhausted beyond their ability to wake.

When he was not spreading cheerful lies, the old actor walked alone, his eyes shadowed. Clara understood the price that Captain Wester paid for carrying his poisoned sword, and it struck her more than once that Master Kit bore a similar burden. She recalled all the times she’d lied to her own children: promising Vicarian that his favorite toy would be found, telling Elisia that her fever would break the next day. Caring for the innocent wounded involved a surprising amount of deceit, and she could not keep from thinking of the emaciated men staggering through the short winter days as innocent.

Yes, they had slaughtered Timzinae, razed towns, sacked cities. They had torn children from their homes and sent them as hostages to Camnipol. Jorey and his men had blackened the Antean Empire. She was aware of the senseless violence they had conducted in the name of the Severed Throne. But to see a thin face light with hope, to see them leaning on each other as they stumbled up one last hill before the sunset turned the red to grey, was also to give up her ability to stand judge over them.

They were soldiers, but many had been farmers before that. Crofters and merchants and huntsmen like Vincen. The highest among them were the sons of noble houses who should have been chasing stags through the wood, drinking and boasting and singing songs until morning rolled around again. It was as if fragility absolved them. Fragility and the knowledge that they had been betrayed by their kingdom.

Dawson would have loathed it all. The stupidity of the war, the pettiness of Palliako’s vendetta against the banker girl, the failure of the nobility to tend to their vassals. Not that he would have cared for the men themselves. She hadn’t romanticized him that much. He would have shaken his head at the winter-thinned army the way he would have at a dueling sword left un-cleaned after a fight. One took care of one’s tools. Oiled one’s swords. Saw to the well-being of those born too low to see to themselves. To do anything less was to not be fully adult.

Her own hips ached, and the cold and sun coarsened her skin. She slept without dreaming, the chill of the night and the black exhaustion in her body tugging her in opposite directions. By day, she rode with Jorey as often as she could, Captain Wester riding with them in the guise of her servant. They fell into conversation, the two men, awkwardly at first, but as the days passed, they found a greater ease. Wester treated Jorey as Clara imagined he would any client who had hired him, with deference constrained by a brutal kind of honesty.

Yes, making a field camp in the north had been a mistake. If the army had stayed at Porte Oliva, it wouldn’t be in such terrible conditions. No, there was no reliable path north that wouldn’t cross the border into Northcoast, and even if there were, the days would be shorter and colder there. Better to take a longer southerly path. And avoid the Dry Wastes on the other side of the mountains. As terrible as the Birancouri plains were, the Dry Wastes would have killed them all faster. Jorey took the knowledge in, even the painful truth of his own missteps, with a student’s focus. Under other circumstances, Clara imagined her son and the banker’s mercenary might have been friends, though perhaps it was the desperation of the campaign that gave them common ground.

The mountains began as a thicker kind of haze to the east, a complication of the sunrise. Clara had expected them to loom up more quickly, especially once they’d found the jade strip of the dragon’s road to smooth their passage. It was another three days before they reached the field where Antea and Birancour had faced one another in the previous year. A rude and dismal snow clung to the shadows, but the earth there was largely bare brown. She wondered at first who had come to bury all the spring’s fallen bodies. It was only when they paused to make camp that she noticed the bones: a rib here, a knob of foot or knuckle there. The dead were still with them but scattered. Returning slowly to the ground, to be forgotten as so many generations before them had done.

She found Marcus Wester at the siege towers looking over the weapons that Geder had sent to destroy the dragon, and the captain’s expression was oddly rueful.

“Evening, m’lady,” he said as she approached, then he looked around to be sure there were no others close enough to overhear. “Do I need to come play the servant some more?”

“No,” she said. “I was only wandering a bit before the sun went down and it got too cold to move about.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Probably should have left these behind earlier, but I’d hoped the pass would be clear enough to take them. Some of them, at least.”

The mountain pass that led up and to the east glowed like an ember in the falling sunlight. She wondered what it was about sunsets and dawns that made them so bloody. “How bad is it?”

“The trail? Bad enough.”

“Impassable?”

“Won’t know for certain until we’ve tried passing it, but I’ve seen it worse,” Wester said, squinting up at the siege engines. “If there was a better option, I’d speak for it. Your son’s scouts all agree that even Kit won’t be able to talk these great bastards through. We’ll have to abandon them.”

“Should we destroy them, then?”

“Why would we?”

“It’s something my late husband used to talk about. Ruining the things you leave behind so that the enemy can’t make use of them.”

“Assumes you know who the enemy is,” Marcus said. “These things are only good against one target, and I’m not particularly concerned that Birancour will track Inys down and pull him out of the sky anytime soon.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Clara said.

“Don’t suppose the Lord Regent’s made more of them?”

“I couldn’t say. I’d left Camnipol before he made these,” she said. And then, “I’m afraid that trekking back to Bellin may be the wrong thing.”

Wester made a low assenting grunt, then tapped his palm against the tower’s side and turned away. “Under other circumstances, I’d advise against it. Taking the pass in winter’s a gamble at best, and long odds. Going south means food, warmth, shelter. But it also means more of the priests, and giving up on providing Antea anything like a garrison force. So there’s your trade-off.”

“Are we certain that a defense will be needed there?”

“Yes,” Wester said. “And we’ll need to get through before the weather gets warm.”

“Before that?” Clara said. “And here I was lighting candles in hopes of a day that didn’t freeze the water in the skins.”

“Wouldn’t hope for that,” Marcus said. “If you’re going to be the kind of reckless we’re being, you want to do it in midwinter. The snow’s not so fresh that it’s all powder and it’s not warm enough to thaw. Being buried by an avalanche… Well, it’s our biggest risk after freezing or starving or getting caught in a storm. Still, it’s something worth avoiding if we can. A long march in winter isn’t a sign things have gone right.”

“This is their second. Or is it third now?” Clara said. “This war feels as though it’s been going on forever.”

To her surprise, he laughed. “Well, count it as the fight between the dragons, and it has.”

“It’s too large, isn’t it?” she said. “War. History. Each battle growing from the quarrels that came before and sowing the seeds of the ones that come after.”

“I try not to think about it,” Marcus said. “Getting these men through another day, and lining up a decent chance of the day after that’s more than enough to keep me busy. All the rest will be there when we’re past Bellin.”

Something in his voice—some combination of mordant humor and compassion and despair—chimed in her breast. He would, she thought, do whatever he could to protect these soldiers from the dangers that lay before them. Though they were the enemy, though they would have killed him where he stood and her besides if they had known a little more of the truth. There was something both noble and doomed about it.

Perhaps she made some sound without realizing it, because Wester shot her a look, lifted a querying eyebrow.

“I admire your willingness to help with this,” she said.

“It’s the job.”

For a moment, she thought he might say something more, but instead he spat, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and turned toward the tents. A colder breeze was coming from the north, not powerful enough to call a wind, but biting. It would be unpleasant if it kept up through the night. They walked together down the slope. Arrayed below them, the army camp looked less like the force that had brought the world to its knees than a collection of refugees at the mercy of the wide, uncaring sky. Wester’s expression was calm. Peaceful, even. It was as if he found comfort in the absurdity of suffering. Perhaps he did.

The last rays of the falling sun painted them both in red, and the bone-strewn battlefield of the world as well.

Cithrin

Marcus Wester was gone. Master Kit was gone. Isadau was gone. Carse was the greatest city of Northcoast, and it still felt empty. Lonely. As many bodies packed the taprooms, as many dogs loped yapping through the streets, as many meetings with suppliers, debtors, mercenaries, and officials of the crown filled the day, and still she felt alone. It didn’t help that Cary worked the troupe from the late, sluggish sunrise to the early twilight. Or that Yardem, love him though she did, seemed folded in his own thoughts. Or that Inys had fallen into a sulk that hadn’t proven murderous again as yet, but might at any time. Cithrin woke in the morning feeling anxious and unmoored, worked through the day at whatever there was to be done, inventing tasks when there were none, and settled in at night with her fears and her ambitions and her wine.

Winter was passing. Every hour brought spring closer, and with it the fighting season. She felt it in her gut. The growing certainty that this was the last year, that if next winter found the banner of the spider goddess still flying in the temples of Porte Oliva and Camnipol and Nus, it would be too late. Like a glass grabbed for the instant it passed her reach, the world would shatter into war within war within war, forever. And for all she had done, for all she was doing, she still dreamed at night of trying to stop a river by pushing the water back with her hands.

There had been no word from Marcus or from Kit, which was either a blessing or a sign that their plan had gone wrong or both. Or neither. The companion to the pirate ship that had spirited Isadau to the south had turned back with word that the magistra had made it as far as the smugglers’ coves at the edge of Herez. The treacherous passage around Birancour’s southern coast had still been before her, and the long, swift run past the Free Cities—free now only in name, since fear of Antea left their ports too dangerous for landing.

The most recent word had been good, so Cithrin clung to it, but still she went to the taproom near Inys’s field, and listened to the chatter of the people, the gossip, the lies and fabrications and half-formed hopes of a city as frightened and unsure as she was herself. And the singers—Mikel and Charlit Soon among them. And the fortune-tellers and jugglers—Cary and Sandr and Hornet as well as a different, less-practiced local bunch.

And she drank. More often than not, in the days of emptiness and absence, she found she drank with Barriath Kalliam.

“One time the freeze lasted so long we found a pod of the Drowned washed up on the beach,” he said. “If you’ve never sailed the north in winter, you’ve never been cold.”

“You seem to have a great many opinions on what I have and haven’t felt,” Cithrin said.

Their table wasn’t theirs, except that they were sitting at it. It was long enough for a dozen, and six besides them shared the benches. The cook’s boy brought low wooden devices more trough than platter filled with flatbread and pepper jam and cheeses that smelled like grass and summer. The others dropped coins on the table or in the boy’s open hand and took out food to eat straight from the table. Cithrin lifted her cup, and the boy nodded. More cider would come when he had a moment.

Across the common room, Yardem Hane and Enen sat across a square board, both scowling at the low wooden markers. The fire in the grate popped now and then, scattering embers and the smell of cut wood. The wind that blew through the streets promised snow, and clouds hid moon and stars alike, and the bitterness of it made the taproom’s warmth sweeter. When Cithrin said as much, Barriath laughed.

“I think you’re talking about more than weather,” he said.

“Oh do you?”

“Sure,” the man said, leaning his elbows on the table and hunching toward her. “It’s the same for everything, isn’t it? Everything’s more itself with a bit of contrast. All this?” He nodded at the room around them. “None of it would feel quite the same if the world weren’t tearing at the seams. It’d just be a taproom in winter, and we’d all be here for the food and the drink and a way to kill a bit of the boredom until the sun came back. Instead, it’s…”

The sentence stopped without ending. Cithrin followed his gaze, trying to see the room as he did. Men and women of half a dozen races, sharing warmth and bread and air. Outside, a dragon slept in the darkness, and beyond it, a city waited to find out whether it would be the next to face an invader’s blades, and then war and the threat of war spilling out to the edges of all maps. Seen that way, it was hard not to imagine the spill of firelight as the last breath of clean air in a world of smoke and fire. Barriath sighed and brushed the back of his hand wearily across his eyes.

He had changed since Lady Kalliam had arrived. Or, no. That wasn’t quite true. He had changed when she came, but he had also changed again when she left. He’d come to them, his navy at his back, a warrior and an unexpected ally. And he was that still, but also a man whose family faced danger without him. A man who’d seen his father killed before him. An exile from his home, wounded but unbroken. His gaze shifted to hers. A moment of confusion flickered in his eyes. A question.

“I was wondering who you would have been if none of this had happened,” Cithrin said.

“Just another sailor hoping for Lord Skestinin’s approval,” Barriath said. “What about you?”

“I’d have been… I don’t know. A girl in Vanai with a bit of money her parents left her and no clear work, I suppose. I could have managed a launderer’s yard or some such.”

“You’d have made a good yard manager,” Barriath said. “In a better world.”

Across the room, Yardem’s ears perked up and he moved one of his tokens. Enen growled, the silver-grey pelt of her arms rippling as she shrugged her annoyance. The cook’s boy brought Cithrin’s cup of fresh cider, then hurried over to tend the fire. A Firstblood woman at the end of the table laughed and coughed and laughed again. The knot in Cithrin’s belly—her constant companion—was looser now. The cider had a bite to it, and this was her fifth. Her mind was clear, though.

Barriath shifted on his bench. His fingers brushed against her arm as if by accident, but not by accident. Cithrin felt her blood go suddenly bright, her heart triple its pace, and for a moment she thought she was afraid. Then she turned to look at his wide, callused hand, again into the darkness of his eyes, and her body made it clear to her that it was not fear.

Oh, she thought. And then How did I not see this coming?

Barriath’s smile was soft, neither apologetic nor gloating, but again with a question at its back. Cithrin’s mind went suddenly blank. There was, she was certain, something she was supposed to do now, some way she was supposed to act. She tried to imagine that she was Cary or Isadau or anyone other than herself. Anyone who knew what to do at moments like these. The best she could manage was the polite regard of the negotiating table. Barriath nodded as if she’d spoken, regret in his eyes but humor as well, and shifted his hand away. Her skin felt warm where he’d touched her, and she immediately wanted his fingers back where they’d been.

Oh by all gods ever, this is undignified work.

“I find I’ve grown a bit fatigued,” she said, her voice crisp as frost. “It may be time that I retire for the evening.”

“Of course, Magistra,” he said. “Your company’s been a pleasure. As always.”

She looked to Yardem and then back to Barriath. Every movement she made seemed like the first performance of an amateur actor. Secret queen of the world, Komme called her, and she was awkward as a colt. “It seems my guard is busy. Would you be so kind as to walk me back to the holding company?”

She watched him understand, doubt his understanding, and then match her fragile formality. A particularly vivid and pleasant image intruded on her imagination and she pushed it away. “I would be happy to,” he said. “Just give me a moment to… finish my cider?”

“Of course,” she said, folding her arms.

Barriath took his cup and sipped from it twice, his gaze focused on the middle distance, his attention intense. Enen growled again, and Cithrin felt a sudden stab of fear. Don’t let their game be over. Please God, don’t let them be done. Barriath seemed to share her thought. He put down the cup and stood, offering her his arm.

“Shall we?” he said.

“Apparently,” she replied, suddenly giddy. Barriath pressed his lips together and pretended not to know what she’d said.

As they walked to the door, she looked back at Yardem. The Tralgu’s head was raised, his ears forward. His broad, canine face took her in and saw more than her. For a moment she was at the side of a frozen millpond south of Bellin, shouting down Marcus Wester for interrupting her moment with Sandr. Sandr who stood now not fifteen feet from her with the other players, and a world and a half away. But Yardem only shifted his soft brown eyes from her to Barriath and back to her before nodding and going back to his game.

Near dawn, Barriath finally slept. They’d made it as far as her rooms before their reserve entirely dissolved, and so it was her blankets and pillows that lay in ruins around him rather than his own. True to all he’d said of being proof against cold, he lay with his bare skin in the air, exposed and unashamed and at rest. Naked, he was lovely. No, not lovely. That wasn’t the word. He was fascinating. Strong and vulnerable, a masculine animal at rest. Beautiful for a hard, curiously melancholy definition of beauty. If she’d known better how to draw, she’d have made a picture of him there.

For herself, she could no more sleep than shout down the moon. She sat by the fire grate, feeding in wood for the light more than the heat. Wrapped in a wool robe with a lining of raw silk, her body felt like it had been carved from warm butter. Nothing about her felt tense or tight or weighed down with fear. Not that anything had changed. Her fear was still there, but at a distance for the moment. It was like she’d taken a rib from her body and could consider it in the air, turning it one way and then the other without any discomfort or pain.

The aftermath of sex insulated her from herself, and it felt glorious. Better than wine even, although wine alone never risked getting a girl pregnant. Trade-offs. All the world was made from trade-offs.

The wind outside was picking up. Even through the shutters, she heard it hissing against the stones. There would be snow before midday. Or hail. Or freezing rain. It might give her a reason to cancel her meetings. Once Barriath had gone, she expected she would be able to sleep. And would need to. She pressed her fingertips to her lips idly, feeling the pleasant bruise.

She’d lain with men before now. Not Sandr, thankfully. But Qahuar Em, her rival in Porte Oliva. He’d been a kind lover in his fashion, but half the thrill of it had been that she was betraying him. She’d thought she was using her sex to distract him, and any lingering pleasure that had come from their time together was tainted by the humiliation that he’d known her plan all along. She’d played with bed and intrigue and been beaten.

And then, of course, Geder Palliako while Dawson Kalliam’s insurrection had burned through the streets of Camnipol. He’d seemed so lost then, so much in need of comfort and care. During the days they’d spent in the darkness, hiding from the violence, he’d been powerless even over her. Granted, he’d still been a man of great power in the court, and there were risks in refusing gifts to kings. Had he insisted, she’d have been an idiot to refuse. Not that he was precisely a king, but a Lord Regent was near enough.

Neither adventure in the mysteries of physical love had left her longing to repeat the experience. Not shamed, though. She knew that girls did feel that way sometimes. Often, even. She felt stupid at having been outplayed by Qahuar and permanently unclean from having seen Geder for what he was afterward, but sex itself seemed… foolish? Messy? Undignified and pleasant and playful in roughly equal measures? Except she wasn’t sure she had felt that way about it. Not before tonight.

She thought Isadau would be proud of her. Or if not proud outright, at least subterranianly pleased that she’d made a connection with a man without thinking of it in terms of a marketplace exchange. Barriath was the first man she’d taken for pleasure, without hope of profit or fear of loss.

Someday, she might even take a lover out of actual love. Stranger things had happened. In the grate, the ashes settled, glowing gold and red. She placed another log in among the coals and watched as it smoked and burst into flame.

Barriath’s breath changed as he rose up from the depths of sleep, growing shallow and soft. He moved, his skin hushing across the cloth. She turned to watch him, and she enjoyed the sight. His slow smile graced her.

“What are you thinking, m’lady?” he asked.

About every man I’ve bedded that wasn’t you seemed the wrong thing. She turned to the fire, the tongues of flame blackening the wood. “I’m wondering how you un-sow a field,” she said.

Barriath shifted again, rose to sitting. The wind rattled the shutters, and he pulled a blanket across his shoulders. “I’m not a man of great fortune. But if… if there were to be a child, know that I would—”

Cithrin laughed without considering whether her laughter might be cruel. “No, not that field. Though thank you for the reassurance. No, I was thinking of the world. And the priests. Everything they’ve done with Antea has spread them across the kingdoms and cities like wheat in springtime. And if we don’t gather them all up…”

“Well, you could take out the scarecrows.”

“That was what I reached for. What I did. Sent out letters and bounties. Turned everyone I could reach into crows and sparrows in hopes they’d eat the seeds, but it turns out people aren’t birds after all. Too many of them are going to look at the power the spiders have and see an opportunity for themselves. And we can’t afford to let events teach them they’re wrong. I want some way to call all the seeds back into the sowing sack, but I haven’t got one.”

“No one’s going to try taking control of the priests,” Barriath said. “It’d be like putting a harness on a wildfire.”

“I know. You know. But when a king sees power, that’s all he sees. And there’s nothing a king wants more than power.”

Something shifted at the back of her mind. Something attached to the words. There’s nothing a king wants more than power. She went still, waiting for it like a cat on a riverbank watching for fish. It was there. It was there, just under the surface.

Barriath spoke. “I can’t believe that—”

She lifted her hand. What had she just been thinking? Something about sex? No. Wait, yes. She’d been thinking of Geder. She put the two thoughts side by side like entries in a ledger. There’s nothing a king wants more than power. Geder Palliako, hiding in the dust and dark with Prince Aster. Playing games, telling stories, making ill-considered and tentative love while the boy prince slept. Geder Palliako, the Lord Regent of Antea. Chosen of the goddess, who brought the priests from nowhere. The spiders’ great leader and tool. If anyone alive still held power or influence over the priests, it was him.

But he was not a king. He would never be a king…

“He won’t hurt Aster.”

“What?” Barriath said.

She wasn’t ready to say it, but if she didn’t he’d just keep talking, so she tried. “Geder. He won’t take power from Aster. He won’t… kill him and claim the Severed Throne for himself. Even though he could.”

“I don’t know that’s true.”

“You don’t need to. I know it. That’s enough. There are things Geder wants more than power.”

“Are there?”

Jorey says I should be honest and gentle, and I want to be. Cithrin, I love you. I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known. That’s what the letter said. He’d been telling her. All along he’d been telling her and she’d been so busy showing how unembarrassed and mature she was, how their physical liaison didn’t define her, that she hadn’t seen it until now.

“Love,” Cithrin said. “He craves love.”

“He can have it at the end of a sword,” Barriath said, hotly. Shut up, Cithrin thought. You’re so much better when you’re not interrupting me.

Aloud, though: “You knew him from court. From before he was Lord Regent. Your brother served with him at Vanai. There must be people Geder loves?”

“You mean besides you?” Barriath said, laughter in his voice.

He reached out and touched her arm. He was a strong man. A Firstblood, with years of hard labor on the sea to thicken his shoulders and roughen his hands. He could have lifted her and tossed her out the window without opening the shutters first. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but whatever it was, he flinched back.

“Tell me who Geder Palliako loves,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Barriath said, his voice diminished. “His only near family is a father.”

“And how can I take control of him?”

Entr’acte: Porte Oliva

Vicarian Kalliam, priest of the goddess, sat on the seawall and looked out to the south. The winter sea below him was a deceptive blue that promised the warmth of midsummer. Kurrik sat at his side, legs folded under him, and looked out over the water as well. The paper cone of sugared almonds, they passed between them. At their backs, the salt quarter of Porte Oliva bustled and chattered to itself. A grey cat with notched ears slunk along the wall, caught sight of them, and dashed away. Vicarian watched it vanish among the shadows.

“It is beautiful, this sea,” Kurrik said. His almost-but-not-quite-Kesheti accent clipped the words in strange places, like a familiar animal butchered into unfamiliar cuts. Vicarian understood the sense of them always, but found something new there as well.

“It’s a gentler sea here than in the north,” he said. “Clearer water too. If you go south from here along the coast of Lyoneia, there are islands in water so clear you can see down to the seabed. The Drowned call them Dead Islands. Nothing lives in the water there but seaweed. Not even oysters and clams.”

“Why is this, do you think?”

“No idea,” Vicarian said, pinching another almond between his fingers, then popping it into his mouth. “But it does seem the colder the water gets, the better it resembles soup.”

“At the temple, we heard of the sea. I imagined it as a wide lake. This is better.”

“It is,” Vicarian said.

In his years studying to become a priest—the traditional role for the second son of a landed noble—Vicarian had participated in the mysteries of half a dozen of the more popular cults. He’d drunk wine and recited stanzas of the Puric Creed under the half-moon. He’d prayed to the empty chair that was the symbolic center of the Lissien Rite. For four long months, he’d fasted or eaten only flour paste and water until he’d found visions at the bottom of the secret Shoren Temple hidden deep in the caverns and ruins under Camnipol, though in fact the visions he’d suffered seemed as plausibly the results of starvation and sleeplessness as anything holy. For the greater part, the Antean court treated its religions much the way it did hunts or feasts or ceremonial balls. The stories of gods and goddesses, of the spirits of the wood and the water, were taken seriously by a few. Membership in the rites was more important by far than actual belief.

Vicarian had quite enjoyed it. It had felt at the time like a kind of pretend that none of them—or at least none of the smarter of them—took all that seriously. There were a few here and there for whom the creeds and rites meant something deeper, but so far as Vicarian could see, none of those ever displayed a power from the divine more impressive than a street-corner cunning man’s. The philosophical disputations carried some actual pleasure, though.

He had spent countless hours sitting with his fellow novices, crawling through the knottier problems of living in a god-haunted world. Could the gods be mistaken? Were the figures in the various dogmas truly separate, or did they represent aspects of a single, unitary, wider faith? Was divine will discovered by prayer or created by it?

The long nights of disputation held an honored place in his memory, like running down the halls of his father’s house with his brothers or climbing a very large tree at the corner of their garden that he wasn’t supposed to climb. Innocent pleasures he’d indulged in joyfully, once when he was young.

The cult of the spider goddess was a very different thing. The clarity he knew now, the unveiling of the world and the souls of the people he spoke with, was subtler and more beautiful than the talents of the most talented cunning man. The coming age of purity promised a peace unlike anything the world had seen. He’d played for years at being holy without understanding what being holy was. Now he had achieved it.

Kurrik had been there from the start, tending to him and the other inductees in the temple at the top of the Kingspire. Whispering words of comfort and promise in those first difficult hours and days when the goddess’s power was still new to him, when his blood had not yet finished changing from his own to hers. That he was in Porte Oliva now, tending to Jorey’s conquest, felt like the goddess expressing her favor like an indulgent nurse letting him sneak a honeystone before bed.

“This is the Inner Sea, yes?” Kurrik asked.

“It depends on how you judge it, actually,” Vicarian said. “Some captains say that the Inner Sea stops at Maccia and this is the Ocean Sea. Others call it the Inner Sea until you’ve lost all sight of shore and headed out on the blue water for Far Syramys.”

Kurrik grunted, scooping up the last two almonds in his fingers and shaking his head. “Something is or it is not. So many names for the same water? It is a symptom of the world of lies.”

“I understand it has something to do with port taxes,” Vicarian said, chuckling. “So, yes, I suppose it is.”

Kurrik smiled, balled the remaining paper into a wad the size of his thumb, and tossed it out over the wall. A seagull swooped in, plucked the pale dot out of the air, and sloped away again. Vicarian stood and held out his hand, helping draw his fellow priest up. The midday sun held a bit of warmth, and there was no snow, even in the alleys and corners. So deep in the winter, Camnipol would be encased in ice. Jorey and the army, still in the field, would be shivering in their boots. Feeling cold in Porte Oliva was a sign of decadence. And still, Vicarian did feel a little cold.

“Walk with me? Take off the chill?” he said.

“Always, brother,” Kurrik said.

Vicarian had never been to Birancour before he came as its conqueror. He had no knowledge of Porte Oliva to use in making a comparison, but it seemed to him that for a fallen city, it was doing fairly well. Certainly the scars were there. Empty, soot-dark doorways where fires had gutted buildings during the sack. Gouges on the walls where arrows and bolts had chipped away the pale stucco. Street-corner carts where a girl might sell cups of sweet mash or strips of peppered meat that were empty now, the girls who’d stood them dead or fled. He’d heard for many years of the puppets of Porte Oliva, the public debates and competing performers. There were a few such now, but only a few.

As they strolled through the streets, their guard at a polite remove, Vicarian pulled his hands into his sleeves against the cold. The citizens—milk-pale Cinnae, otter-pelted Kurtadam, thick-featured Firstbloods—made way for them, and Vicarian couldn’t say if it was out of respect or fear or whether the two had a great deal of difference between them now. There were, of course, no Timzinae.

After the sack, the roaches and enemies of the goddess had been rounded up. Some had been consigned to the yard of stocks and gallows that divided the palace from the newly reconsecrated temple of the goddess. Others had been weighted down and thrown into the bay. Some had burned. Vicarian supposed that to the uninitiated and unaware, it would have looked like monstrosity. It worried him, but only a little. With time, his voice and Kurrik’s would bring the truth to them. Antea’s invasion was the best thing that could have happened to them. They hadn’t been beaten, but saved.

“Still no word from my brother,” Vicarian said, though likely Kurrik was aware of the fact. Had some report come from the army, Vicarian would have blurted it out as soon as he’d met his friend and fellow priest that morning, not waited until now.

“Your former brother,” Kurrik said, gently. “The Lord Marshal is not of our blood now.”

Vicarian nodded, but only halfheartedly. He heard the truth in Kurrik’s voice, the gift of the goddess, the certainty she brought. If he felt a bit sad to think of Jorey as no longer being his baby brother, it was a matter of language more than truth. “But you know what I mean,” he said, gesturing with a sleeve-swallowed hand.

“Thanks be to her,” Kurrik said. “All hidden things come to light through her.”

They stepped into the wide, empty plaza that had once been the Grand Market, past the gouged-out socket that had once been a cafe where Cithrin bel Sarcour had held her unclean court. It was strange to think that she’d been here. She’d walked the same streets, eaten the cousins of these almonds, looked out over the endlessly changing bay. It rankled to have come so near to capturing her.

Nor was that precisely the only thing that rankled. From the burned stones of the square for almost two more close streets, he kept his peace. “You know, the use of the word brother really has changed since the goddess led you to the desert. You’re right, of course, that the blessed of the goddess are my brothers since I took the vows, but Jorey is still the child of my same parents.”

“That you misuse your voices is part of the impurity of the world,” Kurrik said gently.

Vicarian grunted. Kurrik was correct, of course. If it hadn’t been for the rhetorical reflexes built by his years of disputation, Vicarian would probably have let the matter drop. Probably.

“Whole languages have risen and fallen into disuse since you’ve left,” he said. “And the goddess’s word is true in all those languages.”

“Her truth is eternal,” Kurrik said. He’d begun walking a bit faster, as if in annoyance. Vicarian stretched his stride wider to keep up.

“That’s my point, isn’t it?” he said, forcing his voice to be light and teasing. If the slightest buzz of annoyance slipped through, it wasn’t so much that it demanded acknowledgement. “Her truth is eternal, but the world isn’t. Kingdoms, cities, languages. They’re all in flux. The goddess is like a lighthouse, unchanging and unmoving, but the world is like a ship on the sea, and the angle that it sees her from changes. Every age needs to find new words to express the same truth.”

Kurrik stopped at a corner where three streets came together. A high warehouse wall rose above them both, its shadow darkening Kurrik’s face and the cobblestones around them. Across the street, one of the remaining puppeteers was yanking a gold-scaled doll through violent paroxysms that Vicarian recognized as part of a PennyPenny story. The thin crowd standing before him all seemed to be covertly watching Kurrik and himself. And the expression on Kurrik’s face sobered him. Annoyance. Vicarian told himself it was only annoyance.

“Her truth,” Kurrik said slowly, “is eternal.”

“Of course it is,” Vicarian said. “I would never dispute that. What I’m saying is that when you have something outside of change like the goddess and something that suffers constant change like the world, the relationship between them must change too. There was a court philosopher in second-age Borja—a Haaverkin named Pelemo Addadus—who wrote a book on the question. I studied it when I first joined the priesthood.”

“You did not join the priesthood until you were touched by her,” Kurrik said. There was more than annoyance in his voice. There was anger, and Vicarian, despite himself, felt its echo in his own chest. It felt like taking a breath and then taking another without exhaling in between. It enlarged him. Through his body, the spiders wriggling in his blood, whipping him on.

“Not the true priesthood, no,” he said, struggling to keep himself from shouting. “But I studied the thoughts and forms of the world. The changing world. You and your brothers from the temple did a tremendous good for us all. You kept the truth of the goddess safe for thousands of years when the dragons would have silenced it. There is nothing that can diminish how important that was.”

The rage in Kurrik’s eyes dimmed, his jaw softened. Across the corner, the puppeteer coughed and spun PennyPenny into a frenzied dance, trying to pull her audience back to herself. Vicarian rested his hand on his friend and—in the religious sense of the word—brother’s arm. The spiders grew calmer, if not quiet. “Those of us who remained in the world while the goddess was gone went through many changes,” Vicarian said. “We will bring her word to everyone. You can hear that in my voice, yes? We will spread her truth to the world and watch the world remade. And we will find the right way to do it.”

“We will,” Kurrik said. “Yes, this is true, we will.”

His agreement felt like a salve on Vicarian’s soul. But it will mean changing the words we use to reflect the changes in the world floated at the back of his throat. He was right. He knew it. And Kurrik would too if he would only listen to Vicarian’s voice long enough to hear it. The presence of their guard—Antean soldiers with swords and battle-scarred leather armor—seemed to unease the audience. The puppeteer shifted PennyPenny to face Vicarian and dropped whatever threads of story she had been weaving. The Jasuru puppet lifted a string-hoisted hand.

“You there! You! I am PennyPenny. Come and hear my story, yes? Come and hear.”

“We should keep walking,” Vicarian said. “Once that sort starts, they won’t stop until you’ve paid them.”

“Of course,” Kurrik said, turning. PennyPenny’s cries grew quieter as they strode away to the north and the palace. Overhead, seagulls screeched and whirled beneath high, thin clouds. Two dogs, one brown and the other one grey, darted out of an alley, then ran ahead of them and turned back to bark. Vicarian turned their conversation to other matters: the disturbing news from Elassae, how the presence of the goddess would solidify the traditionally fractious Free Cities, the plans for taking the word of the goddess west to Cabral and Herez and Princip C’Annaldé.

By the time they reached the wide, paved square with the governor’s palace to the left and the goddess’s newest cathedral—the blood-red banner with the pale center and the eightfold sigil of the goddess rippling in the afternoon breeze—to the right, questions of the relationship between flux and eternity had been nearly forgotten. Nearly, but not quite.

The end of their walk through the city marked the beginning of their evening duties. Kurrik took a speaker’s trumpet and the guard, and returned to the streets, his voice carrying over the street performers and the taproom conversations, penetrating into every building, pressing through every window. The enemies of the goddess have already lost. Everything they love is lost. Those who come to the goddess will be lifted up, their fortunes restored and their grief assuaged. In content it wasn’t so very different, Vicarian knew, from the religious claims of any cult. It was only that theirs had the power of truth behind it.

For himself, he remained at the cathedral, overseeing the workmen as they chiseled out the icons of the old local gods and hammered the old statues to gravel. The local dye yard, the only one old enough to have been within the city wall when everything outside it burned, delivered banners to hang over the emptied niches. And as he worked, he took little audiences. A Dartinae boy brought his girl love to the temple putatively to be blessed, though in fact he wanted Vicarian to find if she’d been sexually faithful to him. A merchant captain hauled his crew to the steps of the cathedral to ask which of them had been stealing from the company box. It was the work of a magistrate, but Vicarian did it without charging the tax and fees. All he required was that they all stay for the evening sermon. Their ears and attention to his voice was enough.

But that night, as he rested in the palatial luxury of the rooms they had taken from the governor’s priests, the issue gnawed. He’d spent the better part of a month once, debating Addadus and Cleymant with his fellow novices, and found the knowledge he’d squeezed from it fascinating. More than fascinating, important. The idea that all that wisdom would be swept away by the goddess seemed almost self-evidently mistaken. Her power was to lift up truth, and to celebrate the world as it genuinely was, and that included what had been understood during the goddess’s exile, so long as it was also truth.

Kurrik was wrong to turn away from it, and that his spiritual brother was caught in an error was like having a splinter. It bothered. He lay in his bed, the smells of incense and the sea competing in the air. The walls around him ticked and shifted as the day’s heat radiated away into the humid air. He wondered whether he should go wake Kurrik, explain the error, show him how the work done by philosophers and priests during the goddess’s exile still held value because they reflected the history that had played out. Show him that knowing more made the goddess’s word stronger. The temptation plucked at him.

But it was late, and Kurrik’s anger earlier—though it had been misplaced—wasn’t something he wanted to bring up again just now. He was tired. Better to wait. Perhaps he could write a letter outlining the issue to Basrahip. The high priest was more likely to understand than a minor prelate like Kurrik. He was a good-souled man, but perhaps not the smartest after all.

Vicarian sighed, adjusted his pillow, and tried to will himself to sleep. He remained troubled by the certainty not only that he was right, but that Kurrik was wrong. The anger in him was irrational, but knowing that didn’t comfort him.

Kurrik was wrong. And sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.

Geder

I find nothing wrong,” the cunning man said. He was an old Tralgu man with one cropped ear and a gentle voice. He was the sixth of his profession Geder had appealed to. The others had either voiced the same opinion—that the Lord Regent was in fine health—or offered random maladies on a platter. He had taken bad air, or bad water, or he had too much blood or not enough sleep or his spirit had come a bit loose from his body. Of all that he’d heard, that last sounded most likely. None had been able to help.

“If there’s not a problem,” Geder said, “why don’t I feel well?”

In the royal apartments, his palatial bedroom had high windows and thick rugs, tapestries on the walls with scenes from history and legend that had looked out on generations of kings. Now they looked down on his bare chest and exposed legs and the scowling cunning man. It was hard not to feel like a disappointment to them.

The illness—and Geder felt certain it was an illness—had begun, he thought, on the return from killing the last apostate. Oh, his optimism and good cheer at the time might have covered it over, but it had been there. Thin enough to ignore, but present, like a blemish on an apple small enough to overlook, but warning of worms inside. Since then, the illness had grown. Sleeplessness at night, and exhaustion in the daytime. The almost physical sensation that his mind was stuffed with cotton. The overwhelming sense that something was wrong without anything he could find that justified the dread.

“It started in Asterilhold. In the swamp,” Geder said. “I think it started there.” He’d said the words before, but to no effect. The cunning man flicked his one whole ear thoughtfully and rubbed his canine chin.

“I have a tea I can give you. It may fix nothing, but if it does improve your vigor, that will tell us something.”

“Fine,” Geder said. “That’s fine.”

The cunning man nodded more to himself than to the Lord Regent, and opened his small wooden chest. He hummed to himself as he plucked bits of herbs and stones from his collection, dropping each into an iron pot. Geder watched him for a time. Absent the cunning man’s permission or prohibition, Geder tried covering the softness of his body with his undershirt. The Tralgu didn’t object, so Geder pulled it on entirely. He felt better that way. He hated it when people saw him just in his skin.

The tea smelled peppery as it steeped, and weirdly astringent. Geder drank it quickly to get it over with. Waves of heat and cold pressed out from his throat through his body, leaving him queasy.

“Sleep tonight,” the cunning man said. “Tomorrow, we can talk again?”

“Yes, fine. Yes,” Geder said.

The Tralgu smiled, nodded, and packed away his herbs and daubs and the iron pot. Geder watched him, disconsolate. Something was wrong with him. There was no question about that. Everything was going so well, after all. Antea had conquered the world, or close to it. With the power of the goddess, he’d doubled the empire’s territory. Maybe more than doubled. He’d gained the respect of every kingdom he didn’t run. Respect or else fear. Same thing, really. He’d exposed the Timzinae threat, killed the apostate, ushered in an age of light and truth that was being born now with terrible birthing pangs in the Timzinae’s own homeland.

Every time he doubted, all he had to do was sit with Basrahip. The huge priest’s deep, rolling voice had the gift of putting everything in its right place. Only lately he’d wanted Basrahip’s reassurances more often, and for longer, and the sense of calm that came after had lasted less.

The Tralgu cunning man bowed and Geder waved him away. Maybe the tea would do something. Maybe tomorrow he’d feel better. Or maybe he was simply heartsick. How many songs were there about the man whose lover had broken him? At least some of those had the injured man wasting away, didn’t they?

For a moment, the memory of walking into the compound in Suddapal flooded back to him, fresh as a cut. He ground his teeth until it went away. God, he’d been such a fool. And everyone knew it. He was going to live and die with that moment pricking him forever.

He wasn’t sick. He’d been poisoned. By Cithrin, whom he’d thought he loved.

The bitch. He clenched his fists until his knuckles ached. The evil, two-faced, manipulative bitch.

“Geder?”

Aster stood in the doorway. His lifted chin made him look both stronger and younger than he was, like a child prepared to fight a mountain. Of course. Of course. The boy had watched King Simeon sicken and die, now here Geder was consulting with a dancing line of cunning men. Aster was frightened. Of course he was frightened. The thought put another stone on Geder’s chest. He wanted to leap up, to tell Aster that everything was fine. Or, more accurately, he wanted someone else to do it.

Geder Palliako, Lord Regent of Antea, protector and steward of the Severed Throne. It was his duty to care for the prince. Aster was his friend. One of his only friends. Geder wanted to want to comfort him, but all he really felt was tired.

And still…

“Aster,” he said, waving him closer. The prince came with halting, tentative footsteps. “How are you? Did I miss anything important in court, or is it all still the same?”

Aster tried to smile. Managed it, mostly. Geder lowered himself back on the pillows. The cunning man’s tea was doing something odd in his gut, and it didn’t feel particularly healing. Aster sat on the mattress beside him, hands folded together. He struggled to meet Geder’s eyes and failed.

“I was thinking we could walk,” Aster said. “Just down to the Division and back, maybe? Some fresh air?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Perhaps after I sleep a bit, I could manage.”

Aster’s nod came quickly enough that Geder knew he’d had it on the ready. He’d expected the refusal. For a moment, guilt almost made Geder reconsider, but it was too much. It was too far.

“It’s the weather,” he said. “It’s the cold. Just that. The thaw’s sure to come soon, and I’ll be back to myself.”

“All right,” Aster said.

“I’m not that bad,” Geder said with a little forced smile. “I’m just weary. That’s all.”

“Is there anything I can get for you? There was beef stew last night. It was very good.”

“No. Thank you, no. Just. Just a little rest.”

“Do that and you won’t sleep tonight,” the prince said, trying without success to make a joke of it.

“It doesn’t matter. I won’t sleep anyway,” Geder said. Aster flinched at the words, and Geder closed his eyes for a moment. He didn’t need another reason to feel worn. He loved the boy, wanted well for him, all that, but just now—just for today—he wished Aster would go away. Go chase girls or fight boys or read books. Something that didn’t require him. Geder longed to be outgrown.

“I have some good blankets,” Aster said.

“I have blankets,” Geder said. “I have lots of blankets. As many as anyone could need.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Geder said. “I didn’t mean to snap, it’s just that I’m tired. I’ll rest. I’ll be better. Just let me rest for a little, yes? I’ll be up again before sundown. We can play some cards, you and me and Basrahip. Only we’ll always lose to him.”

“It’s all right,” Aster said, his smile a little nearer to genuine now. “I don’t mind losing.”

“That’s because you’re a wise man,” Geder said, taking the prince’s hand. “A wise man who’ll be a wise king one day. You’ll make your father proud.”

They sat for a moment in silence. Geder tried not to wish it was ended and the boy gone elsewhere, but he did. And then, when Aster rose and walked to the door, he immediately wished he would come back. The door closed behind him, and Geder sank, giving his full weight to the mattress. His body felt too heavy, his muscles too slack. He was a puppet version of himself with the strings all cut. Or fouled in each other.

He closed his eyes, hoping that sleep would take him. Hoping that when he woke, he would be himself again. Or maybe someone better. The pillow felt unpleasantly hot against his cheek, and when he turned, his shirt twisted, clutching at him like a huge cloth hand. He willed his mind to let go, but when he did begin to slide into dream, the voice of the fire was waiting for him, all the way from Vanai. A woman’s body silhouetted by flames, and the sense that he should have sent someone to get her, quick before she burned.

Winter had always been the slow time in Camnipol. The lords and ladies of court were elsewhere, killing deer and boar in the King’s Hunt or at their holdings managing the lands that they ruled. The feasts and intrigues and ceremonies rarely began before first thaw. If anything, being in the capital carried a nuance of the merchant class. Geder and Aster were above petty status wrangles, but most people concerned themselves with it all deeply. Which was why it was so surprising when the court began to arrive early.

It was only a few at first. Minor families, mostly from the east. Breillan Caust had only just gained a holding for his family on the plains outside Nus, the first actual land his family had commanded in four generations. He and his wife and daughter arrived at the trailing end of a storm, ice and snow caked inches thick on the sides of their carriage. Then, two days later, Mill Veren. Then Sallien Halb. Karris Pyrellin. Sutin Kastellian. Iram Shoat. Not the grand names of court, but their younger cousins and nephews.

At first, Geder was pleased. It gave Aster new faces and people and distractions. But as the trickle grew to a stream, it became… not worrying, but strange. He wondered if it might signal some shift in the customs of the court. Younger nobles longing for the company of their own, perhaps. Or less established members of their houses vying for the attention of the Lord Regent and prince.

It was only when Geder found himself reading over a report on the strife in Elassae that he understood. The flow of young and minor nobles to court reflected not the age of the people, but the recentness of their holdings. They had all been given lands and titles in the lands that had been Sarakal and Elassae, and now, before the thaw, before the fighting season, they were coming back to the heart of Antea. It was hard for Geder to see it. His mind, considering the map, brushed over the short-term fighting. It was, after all, the death throes of the old world, and not something that would have a permanent effect. But the pattern was there. Those who’d arrived early to Camnipol had not been drawn by the prospect of the court. They had fled the threat of violence.

They were afraid.

Letters and reports had been building up, of course. Since the day he’d overseen the execution of the hostages—that was how he’d come to think of it—he’d been under the weather. The letters that had come in, he’d skimmed. Yes, the news had been delivered to the slaves on the Antean farms. No, there had been no uprisings there. He’d shown that Antea had the strength to do what it had promised, and peace had been the prize for it, so that was as it should be. No need to dwell on it.

The reports from Inentai, most from Ernst Mecelli, had been alarmist as they always were. News from Elassae was understandably sparse. That was fine because, after all, the broad strokes were clear. No city where a temple had been raised in the name of the goddess could fall. Her power wouldn’t allow it. Elassae would fight, would struggle, and would fail. The question was only how long it would take and how much blood—Firstblood and Timzinae both—would be spilled along the way, and in his present funk, that wasn’t a question Geder wanted or needed to meditate upon. There would be time enough later.

Mecelli appeared unexpectedly at the Kingspire early on a cold morning. The sky that day was whiter than bleached cotton, and bright. He wore his riding leathers and stank of the road. He was thinner than Geder thought of when he pictured his advisor. Thinner and older and grim. He bowed when Geder entered the withdrawing room, but that was the only concession he made to etiquette.

“Inentai has fallen,” he said. “I’ve ridden here with the couriers. I would have used a cunning man but… but there weren’t any.”

“No,” Geder said. “It’s not fallen. It can’t. It has a temple. So we might lose control of it for a time, but it won’t—”

The older man cut him off. “A force of seven thousand came south from Borja. We stood against them as long as we could, but most of the men had gone to support Broot’s remnant in Elassae. These letters, these… recipes for how best to unmake the priests, had been appearing since midwinter. The priests stood and shouted, but the enemy weren’t listening. We tried to stop them, and we couldn’t.”

“It’s not like that,” Geder said. “I’ll call for Basrahip. He can explain. It’s not like that.”

“You have to raise an army. You have to call the army back.”

“Just rest. I’ll have them bring you tea. Some dried fruit. Would you like some dried apples? Just wait. Just hold together, eh?”

Mecelli collapsed into his chair, his gaze fixed on the flame of the lantern hanging above it. Geder stepped out to the corridor, grabbed the first servant who came to hand, and told her to get the priest. And Canl Daskellin. And to hurry. Even so, it was almost half an hour before Basrahip’s heavy tread approached the door. He entered the room smiling his broad, placid smile, as calm as it was certain.

“Prince Geder,” the priest said, and then to Mecelli, “Lord.”

“We’re dead,” Mecelli said, and the gutter diction was like a slap. “The Lord Regent wanted you to hear it, and by God, I do too. We’re dead. Elassae’s all but taken back from us, Inentai’s fallen. Sarakal will not hold.”

Basrahip’s expression sobered, and he lowered he head. “I hear the despair in your voice, my friend,” he said. “But know this: the power of the goddess has already won. No force in the world can stand against her will. She is truth itself, and the allies of deceit will—”

“Stop it!” Mecelli shouted, standing so quickly that his chair tipped back and clattered against the floor. Geder’s heart skipped. Rage darkened Mecelli’s face to purple and the man’s clenched fists promised more than rhetorical violence. “You listen to me, priest. You hear my voice. There is not a single Antean soldier left alive in Inentai and there are thousands of sword-and-bows that answer to Borja or the traditional families of Sarakal or a paymaster bent on taking bounties from our dead. Your priests there are burned. Your temple there, they knocked to the ground and pissed on the gravel. It’s gone!”

Geder’s breath was coming too quickly, shuddering. Something was wrong. He was having an attack of something. He stumbled back, wondering whether he would have time to reach a cunning man. If Mecelli saw his distress, he ignored it.

“We have no way to retake the city. None. What little we had left is busy dying in Elassae. If the Timzinae and the traditional families have made common cause—and they have—Nus will fall with the first thaw. There will be enemy armies marching on Kavinpol by midsummer!”

A moment came, shorter than a breath.

It struck Geder in the heart like a hammer.

After the moment passed, Basrahip smiled and bellowed, he invoked the goddess and her will and her power as he always had. Geder watched as Mecelli’s despair and rage were battered by the flood of words and imprecations. He watched Mecelli shift from the certainty of their doom to a listless, halfhearted kind of hope. The optimism of a fever. By the time Canl Daskellin arrived, it was all but over. Mecelli made his report to Daskellin: there had been a setback in the East. Inentai would have to be reconquered when the spring broke. The temple there would have to be rededicated. Daskellin listened soberly. It was all as it had been before. As it would be again, if they needed their faith in the powers of the goddess renewed.

All of it the same as ever, except for when the priest had heard Mecelli say the enemy army would arrive by midsummer, and for a moment shorter than a breath and longer than a lifetime, Geder had looked into Basrahip’s face like he was looking down a well and seen confusion there.

Cithrin

No,” the dragon said. “I’m not your cart horse. I took the Stormcrow on his errand. I don’t care to take you on yours. If it’s so important that you be there, go. I will find you if I need you.”

Inys turned his great head away from her and laid it on the ground. His great claws flexed, gouging the flesh of the land apparently without his being aware of doing it. The chill wind bit at Cithrin’s cheeks and earlobes as she stood, deciding whether to press on. She knew that he was sulking, and she thought she guessed why. With Marcus gone and her going, both of the humans Inys knew best were leaving the last dragon behind. And God forbid that he not be the center of all things.

The temptation to chide him for his behavior was difficult to withstand. Phrases like You’ll have other people to tell you how important you are and This is beneath the last dragon and Are you a child? all rose in her mind, and she turned them all away. They might shame Inys into doing what she wanted of him or they might spur him to casual slaughter. And of all humanity, the only one he seemed to care about preserving was Marcus. She wasn’t certain that her value in the dragon’s eyes was high enough to protect her, so she stood for a long moment, looking out over the slate-grey sea under a slate-grey sky, then turned and walked away.

The taproom was warm and loud and busy, and she walked past it without a thought. Since her night with Barriath, she’d stopped drinking. It was always hard, every time she did it, but she needed her wits now. Around her, Carse fell away, step by step. The wide roads were as cold as they had been when the winter was new. The towers as grey.

If there was any change at all, it was only in the slowly contracting span of the nights, the inexorable effort of the light to hold the darkness at bay a few minutes more than the day before, and a scent in the air that hinted at the green and new. In a different year, they’d have been the beacons of hope. Winter’s back broken at last. But this would be a war spring. If she failed, it would be the first of a very long line of them. Or no. Not even the first.

At the holding company, the servants ignored her and the guards nodded her past their swords and axes. The first hard taps of rain sounded against the stones as she ducked into the warmth of the house. Not snow. Not even hail. Rain. Even the clouds were warmer than they’d been.

She found Komme Medean waiting for her in her room. A small fire danced and spat in the grate. The old man’s gout had taken pity on him, and his joints were of a merely human proportion for the time. He looked up at her with eyes unshadowed by the cunning man’s draughts and tinctures, and she made a little bow, only half in jest. She felt the coppery taste of fear, but pressed it down.

“Will he take you away, then?”

She considered pretending ignorance, but discarded the thought. Better to play it bare. “No hope,” she said. “Not from him.”

“Probably better,” Komme said. “You’d make up something in speed, it’s true. But a fast boat with a good crew’s nothing to look down on either.”

Cithrin lowered herself to the floor beside the grate, the heat of the flames pressing against her arm. Komme Medean looked down at her along the length of his nose. In the flickering light, she could almost forget who he was: the master of a bank that had spanned nations. And still did. And would again, if the idea of nations and countries and kingdoms survived the coming chaos. All her life had been lived in awe of Komme Medean, in the shadow of him and the institution he’d piloted to greatness. He was only a man. Clever, talented, and lucky, but as subject to illness and time, fear and foolishness, as anyone. He smiled at her.

“I met your parents once,” he said. “When they placed their money with the bank, Magister Imaniel had them meet with me. I was traveling in the Free Cities at the time, so it wasn’t as grand a gesture as it sounds. We all had dinner together at a table beside a canal. It was roast pork. And almonds. I didn’t remember that until just now, but it was.”

Cithrin was quiet. She knew little of her family apart from the fact of her parents’ death and the extended family’s disavowal of the half-breed daughter. She thought she should feel something more when she heard of her parents, but it was like hearing names from a song. I ate with Drakkis Stormcrow once, and danced with the Princess of Swords. Father and Mother were ideas, not people. Roles that someone might play, like Magister or Clerk. Or Enemy. Statement of function and relationship, not identity. Komme sighed.

“I didn’t think much of it. He was a Firstblood. She was Cinnae. I could tell it had been a matter of contention, and that they had taken each other’s side against the world. I suppose I admired that, but for me they were simply money. An account that we would take or not take, pay out on or take a loss. Business. When the letter came from Imaniel that they had died and no one was willing to take you, the only thing I asked was whether their account had enough to support you until you were of age. We called you ‘the liability.’ Not by your name. Not ‘the child.’ And now…”

“You’re getting sentimental in your old age,” she said.

“I am,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “I used to be so hard-hearted, and now it seems like a kitten sneezes, and I’m suddenly made of snow. Soft, I am. Old and soft.”

He shook his head. The fire settled in the grate. Cithrin lifted her chin. “May I ask who told you about my plan?”

“No one told me. But I can smell a change in the weather. I called Yardem Hane and put it to him. He said you’d come up with a flavor of… extortion? Is that it?”

“No,” Cithrin said. “Just a way to sell dead priests to the only man in a position to buy. In the coin that matters to him more than coins. Or power.”

“Abduct his father and offer the trade.”

“If it comes to that. There may be a more elegant solution, but it’s good to have a fallback. Have you come to forbid me?”

Komme turned to the fire. The relected fire made him look like an old Dartinae for a moment, eyes glowing and fierce. “Hane argued in favor of your idea. He said… he said he’d seen the shape of your soul, and that keeping you here would bankrupt the world. Break it. And that if I tried to stop you, the death of civilization would be my fault personally.”

“He said that?”

“The bit about the soul, yes,” Komme said. “The rest, I’m paraphrasing. Geder Palliako is a tyrant who has ended kingdoms and crippled races, and you want to do business with him.”

“He’s a small man in a large position, and he’s the only one in the world who can buy what I’m selling,” Cithrin said. And then a moment later, “We’ve just said the same thing.”

“He hates you more deeply than he hates anything. He’s cracked his empire’s back to catch you.”

“At least I’m important to him. And this is how bankers do things, isn’t it? Not armies in the field, but intrigues in back rooms?”

“The way bankers do things is to keep the profit and farm out the risk,” Komme said. “I’m taking the banker’s path. I don’t know what way you’re going. The odds of anything good coming of this are terrible.”

“I agree,” Cithrin said. “But that’s true of taking the safer route too. Mine has better odds than doing nothing, and the stakes are the same.”

“They are, aren’t they?” Komme said, and then lapsed into silence. When he rose, it was with a sigh. He reached down and put his hand on the crown of her head like a father placing a blessing on his child. “Good luck. I’ve had a rich and fascinating life. Seen a dragon. There’s been nothing as interesting as your mind.”

She watched him as he left. He didn’t look back. When the door closed behind him, she took the seat he’d left behind, pressing thoughtful fingertips to her lips and watching the fire dance. He’d said goodbye. Not in any straightforward way, but it was the story under his words. He was the man who, whether he’d meant to or no, had sheltered her all through her life, whose sense of risk and reward had built the financial empire she’d used. He had learned her plan, given his blessing, and said his farewells.

She didn’t know if it was more disturbing that he made the odds that she’d fail or that he thought she should try anyway.

The docks at Carse lay at the bottom of the great pale cliffs. The stairways that clung to the stone face were built of wood, and exposed constantly to the salt air and storm and sun and wind. She’d heard it said that they were rebuilt every ten years or so. The cliff face was dotted with old holes where previous incarnations of the stairs had been. And if an attacker ever came by sea, the steps could be burned, and the invader trapped at the bottom of a wall higher than any siege ladder could hope to reach. Walking down to the ship, Cithrin realized how much the violence of Suddapal and Porte Oliva had changed the way she made sense of the world. When she’d first walked up these steps, the idea of burning them wouldn’t have occurred to her.

Ice covered the dock in a thin sheet. A slack-jawed Jasuru boy in sailor’s canvas walked the length of it with an iron bar, shattering the frozen seawater until the dark wood was white with chips and shards that Cithrin took on faith were surer footing. The little sloop that waited for her looked too small, its draft too shallow. Barriath Kalliam stood on the ladder that reached to the deck, his weight shifting as the ship rose and fell with the motion of the sea. He was speaking to a thin Timzinae woman Cithrin recognized as Shark, one of the commanders of the piratical fleet Barriath had assembled.

On the little deck itself, three figures in oiled skins shifted, talking among themselves. Cithrin reached the ladder and Barriath met her eye. His nod was curt, but not unfriendly. His smile was perhaps a bit self-satisfied. Cithrin wondered whether every man looked at a woman he’d bedded with the same proprietary smugness. She drew her deliberate gaze down his body—neck, shoulders, chest, belly, groin—and lingered there a moment before looking back up. She didn’t feel any particular accomplishment in knowing what the skin looked like beneath his leathers, but she could see the uncertainty in his expression at being viewed as he had viewed her. Uncertainty and also a tentative shade of hope.

“Magistra Cithrin,” Shark said as Cithrin moved past her. Black water shifted beneath them both. “Best of luck to you and yours. Hope you cut their cocks off and shove ’em up their holes.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said. The Timzinae woman nodded once to her and once to Barriath, then went back to the docks and marched away toward another of the dozen ships tied there.

“Shark’s going to keep order while I’m gone,” Barriath said. “I imagine when I get back she’ll have appropriated the better half of the ships and headed out to sink some trade ships coming back from Far Syramys.”

“Good to know what to expect,” Cithrin said, stepping onto the gently shifting deck. It was small enough that her words carried to the three waiting figures, and one of them laughed. The sound was familiar. Cary pulled back her hood. Her dark hair had a threading of white to it, and her mouth had taken a hardness since Smit’s death in Porte Oliva, but she was still beautiful. More so for being unanticipated.

“What are you doing here?” Cithrin said.

“Learning to play the sailor,” Cary said.

From beneath another of the hoods, Hornet picked up the thought. “You’ll note she didn’t say learning to sail, Magistra. Luck is I’ve spent a few years on the ropes. Lak has too.”

“You couldn’t expect us to stay here,” Cary said. “We’ve no props, no costumes. Half a stage at best. And with Master Kit gone, we’ve lost our Orcus the Demon King, Lord Frost, Annanbelle Coarse, Bakkan the Elder. Anything that takes gravity or makes its humor by undercutting it.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Yardem said.

“They’re looking for you, though,” Cithrin said. “All Antea’s looking for the troupe since Inys landed on you coming back from Hallskar.”

Cary shook her head. “If they’re still looking, it’ll be for an acting company heading for the border. We’re a trade boat from Narinisle to Borja on the last leg of the blue-water trade. Yardem here’s Mikah Haup, tradesman of Lôdi. We’re his hired crew.”

“I won’t pass for a sailor,” Cithrin said.

“I won’t be mistaken for anyone but myself,” Barriath said. “Under Lord Skestinin, I patrolled this stretch of water for the better part of a decade. If it comes to someone being that near to us, we’ll be belowdecks.”

Cithrin considered the ship with a skeptical eye. “How much below does this thing have?”

“Enough,” Barriath said. “She’s a fast boat. If there’s trouble, we’ll outrun it. My plan is to find a cove on the north coast about halfway between Asinport and Estinport. There’s a stretch there with no dragon’s roads at all. Then south and west from there until we reach Rivenhalm and Lehrer Palliako. I can act as guide. I haven’t been there myself, but I know the land well enough.”

“That’s your plan,” Cary said. “Mine’s to get my damned Orcus back.”

“What about the others?” Cithrin said.

“They’re below already,” Cary said.

A soft voice rose up from a thin hatch at Cary’s feet. Sandr’s voice. “And we’re stacked like fucking cordwood, I don’t mind saying.”

“We’ll reprovision along the way,” Barriath said. “This is going to be faster than a smuggler’s run if I can manage it.”

Cithrin turned, looking up at the vast cliff face above her. She half expected to see wings silhouetted against the clouds, but there were only gulls and terns. The dragon was elsewhere.

“We should go,” she said. “Before I change my mind about the whole errand.”

Cithrin thought, after her escape from Suddapal to Porte Oliva and then north to Carse, that she’d come to understand the sensations of being aboard ship. She was mistaken. With the sails lifted to catch the winter wind, Barriath’s little boat flew until it almost seemed to rise up from the water, skipping on it like a stone. The dock and Carse and Inys fell away behind them more swiftly than she’d imagined possible, and by morning on the next day, they could see the mouth of the river Wod and the fishing boats that haunted its estuary.

She slept below decks fully clothed, with Hornet and Mikel, Charlit Soon and Sandr, Cary and Lak. Barriath took the days on deck, and Yardem the nights. It felt less like voyaging across the sea than being snowbound in a cabin too small for the people living in it. There were parts of the salt quarter in Porte Oliva where people had lived more densely than this, but they’d had the streets of the city to retreat into. She had nothing. The days were cold, the nights colder. The air belowdecks stank of tar and bodies and grew stale until it seemed like every breath was stolen out of someone else’s mouth.

She should have hated it. She didn’t.

On the third night, the coast to their south began to roughen. Rises became hills. Hills became mountains. Rude, rocky islands rose from the waves like rotting teeth. Cithrin looked for the little winged lizards she remembered from her first voyage to Antea, a lifetime ago it seemed, but there were none. The cold had dropped them into torpor or killed them. She had no way to know which.

After night fell, she stood on the moonlit deck with Yardem as he measured the stars and adjusted the sails. In other circumstances, they would have stopped for the nights and sailed in the safety of day. Instead, their wake glowed behind them, as if the mirror of the aurora shimmering in the northern sky. Cithrin shivered, her fingers and face numbed, and still she was unwilling to leave. Not yet.

“Komme said you saw the shape of my soul,” she said.

“I said so.”

“Was it true?”

“No,” Yardem said. “I lied. He was looking for a reason to hope, and…” the Tralgu shrugged. “It may not have been the right thing, but it seemed wise at the time. Or kind. But since I expected you would do the thing regardless, it seemed better than he have reasons to agree.”

“And you came because you promised Captain Wester.”

“He’d have wanted me to.”

The sea rushed against the wood of the boat. The canvas sails thudded and barked. Sea travel had a way of making everything sound like a whisper and a shout at the same time. Cithrin leaned against the rail and watched the lights shimmer in the vast air above them.

“I’m impressed with how devoted Cary is to Master Kit,” Cithrin said. “All of them, really. It’s a deeper loyalty than I’m used to seeing. But I suppose they’re like family to each other.”

Yardem coughed once.

“What?” Cithrin said.

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“Tell me.”

“They came for your sake, not Kit’s.”

“Oh.”

Cithrin laughed once in disbelief, then again in embarrassment. She turned to look at the dark water she’d led them to, and the spray hid her tears.

Clara

They trekked through the pass, mountains rising black against the snow and towering above their desperation. Somewhere under the snow a thread of dragon’s jade snaked unseen. Clara couldn’t guess how deep they would have had to dig down under blue ice and hardpack to find it. The winds that the land channeled down upon them bit in the mornings and killed in the night. They did their best, building block huts at the end of each day small enough that the heat of their bodies made a crust of clear ice on the walls and floors. They melted handfuls of snow for fresh water and ate what little hardtack and salted meat remained. Every morning, fewer rose up than had lain down.

Marcus Wester had taken to accompanying Jorey when he reviewed the troops, and though the bank’s mercenary still wore the costume of a servant, his wisdom and confidence lent him stature both in Jorey’s eyes and those of his men. Somewhere along the plodding, freezing, ice-haunted march, they had stopped being the army of Imperial Antea and become merely participants in a shared nightmare.

Clara’s horse died on the fourth day. Forging through a drift of snow deeper than its knees, the animal paused, sighed a weary sigh, hunkered down, and refused to rise. It was the last, and with it gone, there was nothing but to walk or else lie down beside the dead animal and follow its lead. The carts had long been abandoned. Men were even leaving behind their weapons as their strength waned and failed them. There was nothing to fight in these passes. What was bringing them all low couldn’t be cut and wouldn’t bleed.

Clara, for her part, lost herself in the physical misery. At the head of the column, a few men broke the trail, forcing a path through snow light enough to be pushed aside or dense enough to be walked on. It was the hardest, most punishing work of the trail, and which unfortunate was called on changed ten or fifteen times a day. Clara was never called, but Vincen was. And Marcus. And even Kit, their tame priest. The rest of the army followed in that path, two or three walking abreast through an aisle of snow. It made the passage easier, not fighting against a fresh drift with every step.

Time thinned as she walked in a way she’d come to recognize and associate with living on the road. Her numbed feet felt like balancing on stumps. The joints in her hands and hips ached. And still she hauled her trailing foot forward, shifted her weight to it, and began the process again. At first, she heard her own voice in her head saying, One more step. One more step. You can do one more. Just keep doing one more for long enough, and you’ll have made it. The voice quieted in time, but by then her body had the habit of it, and the soldiers drew her along like a living stream. She had neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything but be carried along by it.

Twice, she passed men who had stopped. Both had the vague and confused expression of someone lost despite there being only one path before them and only one direction in which to go. The first she prodded into taking a few steps that seemed to reorient him. With the second, intervening didn’t occur to her at all until she was well past him. She hoped that someone farther back in the line had helped him. That her own exhaustion hadn’t condemned the man to death.

Every night, Master Kit came by, sticking his head into the shelters of snow and ice, assuring them that their progress was good and their strength was enough. It was the trick of the spiders, but for the time that he was there and for several hours after, it seemed plausible that they might survive.

There were no women with the army apart from herself. All the camp followers and tradesmen and fortune-tellers had been scraped off by the rough knife of winter. Nor could she warm her little shelter with her own flesh alone. It gave her an excuse to bring Vincen in with her. There was neither sex nor the desire for it. She was worn too thin to even consider that, as, she hoped, was he. But bodies offered other comforts than release, and having him there was as near as she could hope to coming home.

“I think we may die here,” she said, her head resting against his chest.

“We won’t,” he said, his voice as empty as habit.

“Might rather we did,” she said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on. Life alone may not be worth the effort.” She was joking, at least in part. She did wonder how much it would take for her dark humor to slide into simple truth.

“Not life,” Vincen said. “Soup.”

“Soup?”

“It’s how I stay strong through this. Life’s too big. Too abstract. Can’t bring myself to want it in particular. Soup, though? A good rich bowl of soup is just a little further down the road somewhere.”

“God,” Clara said. “And a pipe with some fresh leaf.”

“Pie. With Abitha’s cold crust and cheese and beer.”

“You’ve convinced me,” Clara said, shifting against his body as if she might burrow into him for warmth. “Let’s live.”

“I will if you do,” he said, but she was already halfway to sleep. The ice seemed comfortable as a feather bed, and her hands and feet were all terribly far away. No dreams came, only a deep velvet darkness and a sense of terrible weight dragging her down. She woke to the tapping of the camp’s caller on the iced wall. On Wester’s advice Jorey had banned use of the speaking horn until they were someplace less prone to avalanche. She rose, chewed a bit of leather the length of her thumb that was breakfast, and the march began again.

Only today, it grew worse.

The first sign of trouble didn’t catch her attention until much later. The second came when the leaden march passed a widening in the landscape, the mountains stepping a bit apart before they closed ranks again. Jorey and Marcus Wester and half a dozen of the highest-ranking of Jorey’s men stood together at the side of the column. Clara’s footsteps slowed, faltered, and turned.

Jorey’s face was thin, his eyes sunken. He seemed on the verge of tears. The others—his men, the noble blood of Antea—were little more than corpses who hadn’t had the good sense to rot yet. Only Wester seemed to have his faculties fully about him, and they were his words that found her first.

“If we try to sleep, the best we can hope is a third dead by morning. The smart bet’s more.”

“What’s going on?” Clara demanded. She had no rank or authority, but they were all past that now. Marcus nodded to her and lifted his chin, pointing with it to the landscape all around them.

“Listen,” he said.

When she heard it, she realized she’d been hearing it for some time. A high, merry tinkling sound like a thousand mice playing chimes. It seemed to come from all around her, to rise up from the ground itself and shimmer down from the mountains.

“The thaw’s here,” Marcus said. “We can’t build a decent shelter with wet snow. We’d wind up sleeping in puddles, and that makes waking up come morning less likely. Add that it’s hours, not days, before some unfortunately warm breeze gets up to the peaks. Once the melt starts there, all this is going to spend a week as a particularly unpleasant river.”

“What can we do?” Clara said.

“Forced march,” Jorey said, his voice low and sepulchral. “We don’t stop for the night. We don’t stop at all. We only keep walking until Bellin.”

“It’s not much farther,” Marcus said. “We can do this.”

“Not all of us,” Jorey said.

“The ones that can’t are dead anyway,” Marcus said. “As their commander, the best thing you can offer them is a chance to rise to the occasion.”

Jorey’s head sank to his chest. Clara felt his weariness and distress as if the ache were her own. She wished there were a way to take him in her arms, to comfort him. She had the mad fantasy, gone as soon as it came, of calling for her servants to bring the carriage close as she’d done when her children were no more than babes. Too late for that now, and in so many ways.

“No choice means no choice,” Jorey said. He lifted his head, and his eyes were hard as stone. “Send the word. We’ll break before sundown, but just for food and water. Then we keep on.”

“As if we had food,” one of the other men said with a hollow laugh. None of the others picked it up.

That night, she walked. The darkness came on slowly, and then all at once. The trickling carried on for a time, then stopped as the free water turned to ice. The surface of the snow they passed by had changed. She saw already the texture of it shifting from smooth, unbroken white to a dirtier form, specked where the crystals had broken down and been remade. Beneath the surface would be paths of ice like the branches of inverted trees, clear and hard and cutting through the soft and white.

She could see them all around her, like spirits from the grave. Ice-souls returning for one terrible night before the thaw came in earnest and washed away living and dead alike. She heard their voices chattering like the meltwater and recognized as if from a great distance that she was dreaming. Asleep and walking at the same time. She was half surprised that knowing alone didn’t wake her, but it all went on as she pushed one foot out ahead of the other, and then again, and then again. Forever and only in the single, painful moment.

She observed her mind slowly falling apart, at first with horror and then with an almost childlike curiosity. It was like watching an animal being butchered for the first time, seeing all the bits of her self come apart. She didn’t realize she’d stopped walking until someone tugged her arm. In the darkness, Vincen was nothing more than a shadow and a scent. She would have known him anywhere.

“Can’t stop now, m’lady,” he said. His voice sounded rough. “Soup.”

“Soup,” she agreed, and she walked.

Dawn was turning the snow to indigo when the mountain began to glitter.

She thought at first it was another hallucination conjured by her failing mind, but one of the soldiers ahead of her lifted his arm and pointed. And then another. A ragged, sore-throated cheer rose until the commanders gestured for them to be quiet. It would be sad, after all, to have come all this way through all this terror, and be buried by an avalanche there before the candle-lit windows of the free city of Bellin.

In her little rooms carved from the living stone and heated by a single black iron brazier, Clara ate until she was nauseated, ached like she’d been beaten, and slept like a woman sick with the flu. It might have been half a day or half a month before her mind regained itself and her body found its strength again. She rose from a string-and-cloth cot that seemed grander just then than any bed she’d ever slept in. Thin windows carved into the stone wall filtered in a pale sunlight. She washed herself at the little tin basin for what felt like the first time in years and braided her still-wet hair. Bruises blotched her legs and arms, and she had no recollection of where they’d come from. Her leathers and wools vanished, she put on a thick wool robe the color of corn silk and a pair of boots picked by someone with a daintier imagination of her feet than her body could support.

She was just beginning her search for a bell or a cord to summon a servant when a scratch came at the door and Vincen’s muffled voice came after. “If you’re ready, m’lady?”

The hall was a tunnel of stone with lanterns hung at the corners filling the air with buttery light and the scent of oil. He looked better. He’d shaved and his long brown hair caught the glow of the light. Too thin, though. God, they were both too thin.

“Have you been eavesdropping on me?” she asked.

“I hear that all the best servants do,” he said. “Makes us seem cleverer than we are.”

She stepped into his enfolding arms, resting her head against his breast. It was difficult not to weep, though she didn’t feel at all sorrowful. It was simply a thing her body did after death had tapped her shoulder and then walked past. Vincen stroked her damp hair, kissed her temple, and pushed her gently back.

“We did it,” Clara said. “We went through the closed pass at Bellin, just before the thaw.”

“And we only lost a third of our men,” Vincen said. “The locals are telling us that we’re crazy, brave, and lucky as hell.”

“What a world that this is good luck,” she said.

“You’re here. It’s enough for me.”

She was tempted to pull him into the little room and draw him onto the cot. It wasn’t lust, or not lust alone. It was also that he was alive and she was alive and the trek through hell behind them. He saw the thought in her eyes and smiled, blushing. “Your son is waiting. They have a meeting room set up farther in the mountain.”

“Of course,” she said crisply. “Lead on.”

She had heard of Bellin before she knew it. A free city mostly within the flesh of the mountain, built who knew how many centuries before by Dartinae miners and then abandoned when the great plague struck their race. She had passed it less than a year before, following Jorey and his army in disguise. Being within the tunnels was different from knowing the story of them. Reality gave it weight, but also stole away the romance of it. She’d imagined grottoes within the stone, carved walls with the forms of dragons and men, light coaxed down through shafts high above or created in bright crystal lanterns. In the experience of it, it felt more like a complex mine mixed with the narrow streets of Camnipol’s poorer quarters. Less impressive than her imagination, but impressive for being actual.

“The men are being housed outside for the most part,” Vincen said. “But we’ve got good leather tents and the local cunning men are helping with the sick. They’ve eaten real food for two days straight as well, which appears to have helped more than anything. Jorey and his captains have rooms in the city proper, and Captain Wester and Master Kit besides. No one’s said anything, but they seem to recognize that Wester’s advice is worth considering.”

“How are we paying for all this?” Clara asked. “It isn’t as though we brought any coin to speak of.”

“We’re an army, m’lady. They show that we’re all friends by housing and feeding us, we show we appreciate it by not killing them all and taking what we want. That’s tradition.”

“As I recall it, we wouldn’t have been able to slaughter and loot a wet kitten before they took us in,” Clara said.

“Having one of the priests there to smooth the way was a blessing.”

Clara smiled and chuckled, though something about the idea sat poorly with her. She put it aside for another time. For the moment, gratitude that the world had seen fit to keep her warm and fed was enough.

The meeting room was round and roughly cut. The air smelled of dust and smoke, but didn’t feel close breathing it. A low table of polished oak with legs of iron commanded the center of the room. Maps and papers were laid out upon it. She caught a glimpse of a troop list. Many of the names had been crossed through. Men of Antea as loyal to the throne as Lord Skestinin, and on much the same terms. They would not be going home.

Also at the table was Marcus Wester. The journey appeared to have affected him least, though how that was possible she could not have said. Perhaps he was simply the sort of man that thrived on travesty.

“Good to see you up and about, Lady Kalliam,” the mercenary captain said with a little grudging bow.

“I am very pleased to have the opportunity to be seen,” she said. “I thank you for that.”

“It’s the job,” Wester said, then, as if he realized how rude he sounded, “You’re welcome, though.”

“We were looking at the path from here,” Jorey said, turning to the map. “The dragon’s road leads east to Orsen, and then north, which brings us near to Elassae.”

“Can we not cross through here?” she asked, tracing a finger more directly from Bellin to Camnipol.

“That’d mean the Dry Wastes,” Wester said. “We could try it, but it would make the pass look like a stroll through the garden. I wouldn’t give odds of six of us making the whole way.”

“Then Orsen?” Clara said. Jorey shot a glance at Wester, as if he hoped to read the right answer in the older man’s face. Wester shrugged.

“It’s got its dangers, but I don’t see safe on the table anywhere.”

Jorey nodded. “We’ll give the men one more day to rest, and then start out. With the road, the path should be quicker.”

“There’s quite a bit that’s quicker than slogging through snow up to your asshole,” Wester said, then grimaced his regrets to Clara. She pretended not to have noticed the vulgarity. “But yes. It won’t be a bad trot, compared to what we’ve done.”

“Well then,” Clara said. “Good that the worst is over.”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Wester said, but he did not elaborate.

Marcus

Marcus still wore servant’s robes. He still pretended to wait on Lady Kalliam and walked beside the new and skittish horse offered up by the aristocracy of Bellin. Even in private, he never presented the Lord Marshal with orders. Just suggestions that the boy knew better than to deviate from. He had a story prepared if the others became suspicious. He was ready to claim Jorey’s mother had hired him on as an unofficial advisor. He even had a name picked out: Darus Oak, mercenary captain from the Keshet. As they walked through freezing mud and snow turning to slush, he amused himself by inventing Oak’s history and exploits, his loves and humiliations. His tragic failures and brilliancies and dumb-luck escapes. It came of traveling with actors, he supposed. It took his mind off the march.

When he wasn’t lost in his own flights of fancy, Clara Kalliam made for pleasant company. She had a better understanding of field wars than most women of court, which was to say she had any at all. More than that, she knew in a general sense what she didn’t know, and asked smart questions. Still, he was careful not to be too harsh in laying fault at her son’s feet. Wasn’t any call to be rude about things.

“He’s smart,” Marcus said. “That’s not the issue. It’s Palliako’s failing. I’ve seen it any number of times before. It doesn’t matter if it’s a garrison command or kingdom or the bastard who’s picking the gate guard. He chooses the person because he trusts them, not because they can do the job. Give Jorey another five or ten years in the field, he’d be a fine Lord Marshal. It’s just he’s green.”

Lady Kalliam nodded. “That’s my fault, I’m afraid.”

“Raising him different wouldn’t have helped,” Marcus said. “It’s experience he needs.”

“I meant that I arranged that the last Lord Marshal should be caught conspiring against Geder. Lord Ternigan was quite accomplished in the field, but Geder killed him all the same. Because of me.”

They walked for a few moments in silence.

“That’s a stronger case for it being your fault than I’d expected,” Marcus said.

“It’s a weight I can carry,” she replied. “If I had done differently, my kingdom would have done better, and things would be worse.”

“Confusing, but true.”

She favored him with a smile. “I have become more comfortable with contradictions these last few years.”

“I’m still working on it.”

The truth was that commanding a real army again—even if it was at one remove—felt better than he’d expected. It had been a long time since he’d been a general, and his reputation after Wodford and Gradis had been more a burden than a joy. But there was something ineffable about doing a hard job well. Most wars were won or lost long before the battlefield, and getting a force of any size and strength through a winter-closed pass with only a third lost was solid work under the best of circumstances. With this collection of thin sticks and doom, it was a brilliancy. No one who didn’t know to look would see the achievement for what it was but he felt the lift of pride all the same. Except when he remembered whose army he’d just saved.

Spring rose up around them, fragile and pale and new. The trees they passed—the few that hadn’t been burned for wood by the same men going the other direction the year before—didn’t have leaves yet, nor even buds. It was only that the dead-looking bark was taking on a faint green undertone; the mud smelled less of ice and shit and more of water and soil. Little things, but they added up to hope and the mindless animal optimism that the darkness was passing.

Nor was the only change in the landscape.

The soldiers of Antea had been starving shadows in Birancour. The years on campaign hadn’t just hardened the men, they’d scraped them down to bones and madness. Without the priests to goad them on, they would never have kept together so long. Palliako’s army had pushed itself past the breaking point, and then kept pushing, firm in the dream that because it hadn’t all turned sour yet, it never would. Now, on the road home, it was like seeing them wake up.

No, not that far. Seeing them stir in their sleep, maybe. Food stayed scarce, and the day’s march went long, but the men talked more. They joked more. Their homes called them forward like water going downhill. Kit, walking among them as the priests before him had done, was greeted with less solemnity and more joy. Sometimes, Marcus saw it as a good sign. These weren’t bloodthirsty swordsmen anxious to cut a fresh throat. They were farmers and laborers and men of the land pressed into service and kept there too long. Even the noblemen who led them were hungry for home and comfort and an end to the war. Other times, he wondered which of the men he’d helped guide through the pass was the one who’d killed Smit and Pyk, or else recalled that any of them would have been pleased to haul Cithrin along in chains. Or worse. Those times, their laughter grated.

The dragon’s jade of the road snaked a bit to the north, then to the south, curving gently around hills that had worn away centuries before, rising up above the earth in long bridge-like stretches, and disappearing beneath the loam. The passage of the army on its way toward Birancour and Northcoast had churned the land to either side, but the eternal jade remained. At Orsen, it would meet another track headed north into Antea and one that continued east to Elassae. Roads that had been there before the nations they connected, and that would outlast them too. The confluence of them—along with the defensibility of Orsen’s weird single hill in the otherwise flat plains—defined where cities were built and how trade and violence flowed. Odd to think how much the world was defined by where it was easiest to get to.

When the remaining army of Antea made the approach that at last brought Orsen clearly into sight, the free city looked something different than it had. The differences weren’t obvious at first, except in Marcus’s sense that something was off. The air around the city seemed greyer than he’d expected. Huts and small buildings clumped at the base of the lone mountain that looked familiar and out of place at the same time. With the advantage of being on horse, Clara Kalliam saw it better than he could, and Marcus saw his unease echoed in her expression.

Either the burden of the poisoned sword was dulling his mind or the hard passage had left him more compromised than he knew. When he realized what he was seeing, it was obvious.

“We’ll need to get your son, ma’am,” Marcus said. “The halt needs to be called right now, and a scout sent forward under a flag of parley.”

“What is it?” Clara asked, but the tone of her voice told him she’d already guessed.

“Orsen’s not looking to be as hospitable as Bellin was. That darkness at the mountain’s base is a camp.”

“They’re fortified against us?”

“Doubt it. I’ll lay gold that’s a Timzinae army making an early march to the north. Probably the force that broke out of Kiaria.”

“Ah,” Clara Kalliam said. “So we’ve come too late.”

The field of parley sat at the side of the road in a meadow that wasn’t yet entirely churned to mud. It wasn’t quite near enough to Orsen that they could haul a table and chairs out from the city, so the enemy had set up a frame-and-leather tent. Protocol had them withdrawing to just out of crossbow range and letting Jorey’s guard come inspect the place to be sure it wasn’t an ambush. That done, Jorey and his guards would wait in the tent and the enemy commander and his guards would come join them, followed by some more or less heated conversation. After that, tradition was everyone went back to their camps and got on with the business of slaughtering each other. The parley was as much about trying to find some hint of the enemy’s weaknesses as any genuine attempt to avoid battle.

Putting Jorey’s strategy together hadn’t been quick. They’d talked over sending someone else in his place in hopes the enemy might think the Lord Marshal was commanding another—possibly larger—force nearby. They’d talked about abandoning the parley and falling back to Bellin. They’d even talked about trying to ambush the enemy commander and hold him hostage, because that was an idea every inexperienced commander reached for one time or another. Usually, they had an advisor to talk their hands out of the fire on that, and this time it had been Marcus.

The plan instead came to this: Jorey would go, with Marcus in borrowed armor acting as one of his customary three guards. That way Marcus could hear the full parley, possibly pick up on some nuance of strategy or tactic Jorey might have overlooked. Once the parley was ended, Marcus would offer up his best suggestions. After that, the action grew hazy. The idea of taking Kit as another of the guard was considered, but Vincen Coe took his place at the last minute as Marcus deemed the risk too great.

Given how quickly the plan fell to bits, it had been a wise choice.

The guards, when they ducked into the tent, were Timzinae. Knowing now that Inys had created them specifically as warriors against the spiders, Marcus could see the black chitinous scales that covered their bodies as armor. Their double-lidded eyes were empty of everything but hate. The way they stood made it clear that even breathing the same air as a Firstblood was an indignity. Or that was how it seemed until their commander came in and took his seat across from Jorey. He was a Firstblood himself, and more than that.

The years had been kind to Karol Dannien. A bit more softness around the jowls, and his knife-cut hair had gone the white-grey of clouds on the horizon. His eyes were as clear and sharp as when their companies had fought together at Lôdi and against each other in Hallskar. Marcus could only hope that he’d changed enough that the other mercenary didn’t place him.

“Lord Marshal Jorey Kalliam, yeah?” Karol said.

“I am,” Jorey replied. “I take it you’re commander of the Timzinae army?”

“No such thing,” Karol said, his voice buzzing with anger. “Timzinae’s a race of people. This here’s the collected force of the nation of Elassae. Got plenty of Timzinae folks in it. Got plenty that aren’t.”

“As you say. But you are their commander.”

“Karol Dannien. Lately in the employ of the fivefold city of Suddapal. We pried the last of you little shits out of it a month ago.” Karol’s smile could have cut meat. “So tell me how it is, Lord Marshal, you’re saying how you’re the one in charge when you’ve got Marcus twice-damned Wester standing behind you?”

Jorey glanced back at him, and Marcus sighed. “Karol. Been a while. How’s Sarrith?”

“She quit a few years back,” Karol said. “Went to Herez. Last I heard she was raising up two nephews and a niece her brother left behind when a fever took him. Cep Bailan took her place.” Marcus hoisted an eyebrow, and Dannien sighed. “I know. He’s a good man in a fight, though.”

“Your force, your decision,” Marcus said.

“Damned right. So what in all hell happened to you? Last I heard, you were on our side.”

“Still am,” Marcus said. “Just which side’s ours got complicated.”

“This ragtag bunch out on the road looking to join up, go burn some Antean farms on our way to sack Camnipol?”

“No,” Jorey said. “We won’t let that happen.”

“Well, Marcus,” Dannien said. “The puppy here’s saying we’re not on the same side after all.”

Marcus sighed. “You know these poor bastards weren’t behind any of what happened. They’re doing what they’re told because they’re loyal. Or because it seemed easier to strap on a sword than die in prison for defying their lords. We can march out onto a field and see who can kill how many of the other side if you want. Then if you win, you can go make sword-shaped holes in a bunch of farmers and tradesmen who couldn’t have stopped any of this either. That’s going make things better?”

“If the war’s not the soldiers, then who? The lords? All right, then. Hand over everyone you have there with noble blood or title. We’ll just kill them, and only put the rest in chains.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Marcus said.

“Had a hint. How about these priests? Got any of those?”

“I’ve got the same one who went to Suddapal and helped get the word out what we’re really fighting against. And no, you can’t have him either. Don’t be an ass about it.”

“And what should I be?”

“You know damned well that Cithrin and her bank stood against all of this from the start. Well, turns out they weren’t the only ones. There are good people in Antea who’ve been working against Palliako and his priests. We’re on our way up to rein this in. Only I can’t do it if I’ve got to crack your ass the other way before I go.”

“Rein it in how, exactly?”

“Not going to talk about that,” Marcus said. Mostly because I haven’t worked it out, he didn’t add.

Karol Dannien leaned back in his chair. His eyes were so cold they would have put a skin on water. “You hear about the children?”

“What children?” Jorey asked, but Marcus could hear in his voice the boy already knew.

“Suddapal rose, yeah? We popped out of Kiaria, sent Fallon Broot and his bunch swimming south for Lyoneia without a boat. Took back what was ours to start with. Palliako threw the hostages into the Division. Right now, while we’re being polite to one another, there’s hundreds of children who… how’d you call it? Weren’t behind any of what happened? Hundreds of kids that weren’t behind any of it either, rotting and feeding worms at the bottom of the biggest ditch in Antea.”

Jorey closed his eyes, pressed his knuckle to his lip. Funny how close horror and exasperation could run together. Marcus felt it too. Of course Geder had done the thing. Anything to make it all worse.

“Hadn’t heard that,” Marcus said. “Not much pleased now that I have.”

“Well that’s big of you,” Dannien said. “So let’s review, yeah? You’re marching the same Antean soldiers, some of them, that pulled these children away from their families and shoved them up north to die. You’ve got one of these mind-breaking spider priests in your pocket who you won’t hear of handing over. And what you want of me is I go back and tell these men and the ghosts of their babies that we ought to stand aside and let you pass by. Did I get that right?”

One of the Timzinae guards shifted his weight. Marcus paused a long moment to see if an attack would follow, but the man thought better of it.

“It sounded more convincing before you said it that way, I’ll give you that,” Marcus said. “But let’s say your side too. We pick a place and fight. Some of your men die. Some of Kalliam’s men die. Maybe you and I live through it, maybe we don’t. Whoever wins… what? Gets to brag about it? No dead child comes back. No wrong thing that’s happened gets undone. A bunch of angry, confused assholes hack each other to death in a field or else they don’t. Now tell me why my way’s worse?”

“We’ll make Antea an example to anyone else who pretends to empire,” Dannien said, biting each word as it passed his lips. “And there will be justice for their atrocities.”

“There’ll be more atrocities, at least. And it’ll be you doing them this time. So that’s a change,” Marcus said. “Not sure you’re made better than Palliako by going second.”

God smiled, he thought. I’m sounding like Cithrin now.

“There has to be a reckoning, Wester,” Dannien said.

“You’re right. There does,” Marcus said. “But this ain’t it.”

In the silence, the breeze made the leather tent sides thrum in their frames. A bird called out three sharp and rising notes, like a trumpet calling the charge. Marcus felt his weight centered between his feet, his hands soft but ready. He hadn’t been aware of preparing for violence, but here he was. Prepared. The odd thing was, his mind felt clearer and more his own than it had in months. Some things resisted being forgotten.

“You don’t stand a chance,” Dannien said.

“That’s what they said in Northcoast,” Marcus replied.

“No other way?”

Marcus felt his plans slipping into place already. How many men he had, and what supplies. Where Karol stood on the plain and the mountain above it. The dragon’s roads and the merely human dirt tracks and the deer trails and streams. He saw what he’d need to do later, and it shaped what he had to do now. Hopefully Jorey Kalliam wouldn’t take offense.

“No other way,” Marcus said. “If it’s a fight you need, Karol, I’ll hand it to you. And then I’ll beat you fair. Afterward, we can talk about justice and reckonings while we wait for Suddapal to pay your ransom.”

Karol Dannien stood. The rage made his face darker. His neck was almost purple with it. “You always were a prick.”

He left, the Timzinae guards trotting to keep up. Marcus leaned against the table, glanced at Jorey Kalliam, then away. The boy had the shocked look of someone who’d just taken an unexpected blow. “Sorry about that. Overstepped myself.”

“Not sure I’d have done better,” Jorey said.

“Still. It wasn’t mine to decide, and… well, I may have decided.”

Vincen spoke for the first time since they’d come. His voice was steady and deep. “What are our chances of winning through?”

Marcus shifted, looking through the seams of the frame where the daylight glinted through. He wanted to be sure none of Dannien’s soldiers were near enough to hear, and even then, he spoke low. “They’ve got more men, and better rested. They’ve got position on us, and given all we had to leave behind, we can assume they’re better armed. They know about what the spiders can do, though I don’t think Kit would be willing to use that power to help kill people. It’s a problem for him.”

“What do we have?” Jorey asked, and his voice was solid as stone. He had some promise.

“You’ve got the hero of Wodford and Gradis,” Marcus said, tapping himself on the chest. “So in a fair fight, you’re fucked.”

Geder

The thaw hadn’t reached Camnipol, but the court had returned. The first group tacitly fleeing the strife in the east was joined by the more traditional grandees who’d spent their winter in the King’s Hunt. Cyr Emming had presided over the hunt itself, relying on his position as Geder’s advisor even more than on the dignity of his titles. Now that he’d come back, he seemed pleased to continue being the social center of the court. Geder was pleased to let him. Despite that, not all balls and feasts could be avoided.

Since the wars began, Camnipol had seen a great influx of wealth from the conquered. Asterilhold and Sarakal and Elassae had all given up their treasuries and the adornments of their temples along with their land and freedom. Emming’s grand ball was lavish beyond anything Geder had ever seen. Distilled wine poured out of statues of gold and pearl, spilling as much onto the floor as into the cups. Slaves sat in contorted, uncomfortable positions to act as living chairs and divans for the high families of the court. The food was rich and greasy, meats and butters and cakes thick as jelly. After two seasons of starving, Geder didn’t have the belly for it.

The silk banners that hung from Emming’s vaulted ceiling listed the names of conquered cities. Suddapal and Inentai were among them. And the guests… court fashion was famed for changing year by year, and now was no different. Some few still wore the oversize black leather that Geder himself had made popular, but more had adopted the newer look based, it seemed, on feathers and bone. Sanna Daskellin in particular wore a gown fashioned from ravens’ feathers and a cape of tiny bird bones sewn together with dark thread. She clattered when she moved.

Braziers in the shape of Timzinae bodies bent in pain stood among the guests, the light from their fires licking out of their mouths and eyeholes. The smoke they gave off smelled of incense and burning sap. Reed instruments and viols filled the air with exotic music inspired by the new lands under Antean stewardship and the Kesheti rhythms associated in the court’s collective mind with the goddess.

His own chair stood on an elevated dais so that he could look out over it all. The whirl of bodies and darkness, smoke and gold and gaiety. Geder stayed as long as he could stand it, making small conversations with men and women, many of whom were newer at court than himself. Tiar Sanninen, newly Baron of Eccolund. Salvian Cersillian, cousin of the former Earl of Masonhalm, and her daughters. Lady Broot, whose every word and gesture was hoping for happy news of her family in Elassae. Happy words that Geder didn’t have to offer.

Everything about the court made it seem a fabric of excess and fear. The laughter, too wild. The joy, too desperate. It was as though the court in general had caught a fever and was pretending that it hadn’t. The buzz of desperation and despair this seemed designed to drown out… well, perhaps that was only Geder’s own.

He made his curt excuses to Emming, handed back his half-finished flagon of wine, and called for his carriage. Aster was there somewhere. Dancing, most likely, with the girls of his cohort. Well, he was the prince. He could do that. Should, even. Someone should wring a drop of being carefree out of the world.

The streets of Camnipol in twilight were oddly beautiful and quiet after the too-lush feasting rooms. The air smelled clean and clear and like the presentiment of rain. There were few trees outside the gardens of the great houses, but here and there splashes of green ivy spilled up grey stone walls, their leaves defying the cold. Hardy, thick-bodied finches had joined the sparrows and crows of the winter. Geder leaned out the window of his carriage as it rattled toward the Kingspire and let the breeze of his passage cool his face. The banner of the goddess fluttered high above, draped from the doors of the temple. Lights flickered up there as well. Basrahip and his priests, performing their rites or eating rice from simple bowls or simply sitting together. Geder didn’t know. If the trek up those stairs weren’t quite so awful, he might have joined them. Instead, he took comfort where he had before. His library.

The books perfumed the desk with dust and sweet paste. The light of a dozen candles warmed the leather-bound volumes and parchment scrolls, the codices and maps and fragile paper sewn together with twine. Geder’s stomach gurgled and shifted with the unaccustomed too-rich food of Emming’s feast, but he didn’t call for water or a cunning man. It would have meant talking to someone, and even ordering a servant to do his bidding was more energy than he could manage just now. He was ill, after all, whatever the cunning men said.

He sat on a large chair, the light spilling over his shoulder and onto the pages of a third-age history of Far Syramys by a likely mythical Dartinae poet who went by the name Stone.

Among the civilized lands, Far Syramys is a conjuration of the possible, the birthplace of soft dreams and harsh mysteries. What we hope and wish and spin from fantasy, we place there. In Far Syramys, we say, the women walk naked and unashamed through the parks, their sex available to any who ask. In Far Syramys, cunning men have deepened their arts until the cures for all diseases are known, though the price of cure is sometimes obscure and terrible. In Far Syramys, the forges make steel that will never lose its edge; the farms, pomegranates that will sustain a man for a week with only a handful of pips; the looms, cloth so fine and beautiful that the wearer of their silk will disappear from mortal sight.

Among the rough and uncivilized hills of the true Far Syramys, there are indeed great and hidden cities. There are indeed women and men of surpassing beauty. The Haunadam and Raushadam make their homes there, with bodies and minds as unlike the others of the thirteen races as an apple is from a walnut. But Far Syramys’s dreams of itself are nothing like our dreams of it, and the traveler who dares it should be warned of all that has happened there before.

Geder fell into the words like he was falling asleep. Or else waking up to some other life. He imagined himself in the court of the Grand Agha, sitting on the floor and drinking tea with poets and hunters. Or trekking through great caverns beneath Sai where the waters ran yellow and red, and drinking them was death. Or seeing the Uron Tortoise wandering the northern desert with a city of thousands riding unnoticed on its vast shell. He longed for it all, even as he knew that in practice, it would all be awkward, tiring, and uncomfortable if it was even real. But then it wasn’t really those places that left him empty and hungry and rich with need. It was the Geder Palliako who could take joy in them. That better version of himself who belonged there.

When the Kurtadam servant girl appeared at the door, her eyes wide and the pelt on her face twisted into a grimace by her anxiety, Geder was almost happy to be interrupted. Not quite, but almost.

“L-lord Regent? My lord?” she said, her voice high and piping.

“Yes?”

“I apologize, my lord, but there’s—” she choked on the words. Her hands balled in fists and she looked down, her mouth pressed tight. His heart went out to her. Poor thing was so sure she was going to be in trouble.

“It’s all right,” he said, his voice gentle. “I don’t bite. Least not often. What’s the issue?”

When she spoke, her voice was smoother, calmer. Still rich with fear, but not throttled by it. “The Baron of Watermarch has come, my lord. He asks your urgent presence.”

Geder closed the book and laid it aside. “Show him in, then,” he said. “And let this be a lesson to you… what was your name?”

“I’m Chanda, my lord.”

“Let this be a lesson to you, Chanda,” he said solemnly. “We all have to do shit we don’t enjoy.”

The servant coughed a laugh, and Geder smiled his encouragement until she smiled back. When he nodded, she backed away, still grinning under the oily fur of her race, and trotted off to retrieve Canl Daskellin from whatever waiting area they’d stowed him in while they got Geder’s permission for him to enter. Outside, night had fallen, and the candles in the library remade the window as a dark and deforming mirror. Geder shifted his weight back and forth, watching his reflected head swell to a massive, ungainly monstrosity on a twig-thin body, then shrink down to almost a nub perched on comically heroic shoulders, then back again.

Daskellin appeared behind him, and he turned. Sweat and dirt streaked the older man’s dark skin, and he wore riding leathers that smelled of horse even from where Geder sat.

“Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, “I have a report.”

“From Northcoast?”

“No, from the east. Sarakal, and it seems Elassae.”

Geder shifted in his chair. “I thought you were the ambassador to Northcoast. Why are you bothering with things in the east? It’s not yours to worry about. Mecelli’s supposed to be doing that.”

“He isn’t well, my lord,” Daskellin said. “The cunning men report an army outside Nus. And another massed in Orsen.”

Geder waved the news away. “Cunning men can’t be relied on,” Geder said. “Half the time they get these so-called messages, it turns out they were never actually sent in the first place. Just someone mistook a dream for some crackpot magic and got everyone’s feathers in a whirl over nothing.”

“I’ve had a bird from my man in Orsen. That one at least is true. And Lord Mecelli’s report after Inentai was right. The traditional families are taking back all we won in Sarakal. And more than that, they may not stop at the border of the empire.”

“Inentai is the border of the empire,” Geder said. “It’s just in flux for the moment. It’ll come back under our control. We put a temple in it. No city where we dedicated a temple to the goddess can fall. Just be lost for a bit. You heard what Basrahip said. You know all this.”

“I did hear, Lord Geder,” Daskellin said. “But I also had the reports. And I’ve seen the maps. If we want any hope of defending the empire, we have to raise an army. Possibly two.”

Silence fell between them, dividing the room as effectively as the Division split Camnipol.

“Are you telling me you doubt the protection of the goddess?” Geder asked, slowly.

“I believe in it,” Daskellin said, and the distress in his voice was like listening to a single high note played on a violin forever. It was about more than the news of the armies, more than the news of the war. There was a personal distress and hearing it made Geder’s own soul ring with it like a crystal glass echoing a singer’s pure note. “I don’t doubt her, but I also look at the world. And as much as my faith tells me that we are under her protection, my life’s experience says we need sword-and-bows at the ready. The storm that’s coming? We aren’t prepared to weather it.”

Geder hunched over his book, hand flat against the soft leather cover. The sense of his head being stuffed with wool returned, and with it a deep weariness and anger. He felt the rage bubbling in his chest. It was unfair, monstrously unfair, to bring this all to him. Did Daskellin think he had a cunning man’s stick he could wave and conjure able-bodied fighters out of nothing? The men he’d marched to Asterilhold were all that Camnipol had, and since he’d called the disband, they weren’t even gathered or armed. And Geder was ill, after all. Something was wrong with him, only no one seemed able to see it. Or else to care when they did.

As long as things were going well, everyone celebrated him and threw victories for him and praised him as a hero. But as soon as there was any trouble, no one cared about him at all.

“This is not my fault.”

“Lord Geder?”

“This,” Geder repeated, his voice growing to a shout, “is not my fault. The position we’re in? The unrest in Elassae and Sarakal? You were my advisors. The best men in the kingdom. You served King Simeon and you’ve been in the court. You were supposed to be the ones who knew how to run a campaign!”

Daskellin took a step back as if he’d been struck. His jaw worked as if fighting to get out some sentiment too large for his throat. Rage boiled up from Geder’s belly. He stood, throwing the book at Daskellin’s head as he did it. It missed by a wide margin, but the violence of the intention was clear. For a moment, Geder thought the man would attack him, and in that moment, he welcomed the thought. The prospect of beating Daskellin’s smug, self-serving face with his bare fists was like the hope of water to a man possessed by thirst.

They teetered on the edge of the moment, the air in the room rich with the potential for violence. Daskellin took his lip between his teeth and looked down. When he spoke, his voice shook, but it was not loud.

“If I have failed you, Lord Regent, I apologize. I have always done what I hoped would be best for the throne.”

“And there just now you’ve remembered that I can have you killed,” Geder snapped, but the fire in his gut had died already. He felt as though he was sinking back into himself. He’d thrown a book at the man. That was embarrassing, but it was Daskellin’s own fault. The man should have known better. “I’ll put out the call. We’ll bring back the men I led against the apostate. It’s not an army like Broot had in Elassae or Jorey’s force. And you’ll lead it. You personally. Then I don’t want to hear anything more about how I’m not prepared.”

“Yes, Lord Regent,” Daskellin said.

“And we won’t fall. No matter what we won’t fall, because the goddess is here. She’s remaking the world, and we are her instruments, so we won’t fall. Because of me. Because I brought her here. Everything we’ve gained, we gained because of me. What we’ve lost is your fault.”

“Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, making it sound like a yes without actually saying the word. Geder sneered and turned away. An exhaustion was coming over him, turning his bones to granite and lead. The effort of standing up was too much. Everything was too much. Daskellin was a selfish bastard for taking away what little energy Geder had left.

“You can go,” Geder said. “You’ll have your soldiers tomorrow.”

Daskellin nodded, his jaw still shifted forward like a showfighter’s at the start of a match. “Thank you, Lord Regent,” he said, then turned and, walking stiffly, left. Geder tried to look out the window and failed. His own bent reflection blocked his view of the city. Of the world. Only when he put the candles out could he catch glimpses of the lights of Camnipol and the moon and the stars. He sat for a time in a darkness too deep for reading. The feast was still going. Would be going all night. If he returned to it, he’d be made welcome. Or he could go to the Great Bear and drink distilled wine and smoke pipes and trade stories with whoever was there. He could command any woman in the court to his bed if he wanted to. Make her do whatever he wanted, and if she laughed at him afterward, he could have her thrown into the Division. That was the power of the emperor. The power of the throne.

The thing was, he didn’t want to do any of it. Everything sounded awful. Even the effort to call for more light seemed beyond him. When he’d been a boy in Rivenhalm, he’d dreamed of going to Camnipol, becoming a hero of the court. Now he was here, and he’d done it, and he dreamed of being almost anywhere else.

“It’s only for now,” he said to the darkness and the books. “Soon, she’ll have burned all the lies from the world, and we’ll be at peace. It’ll be all right.”

Or else the confusion he’d glimpsed in Basrahip’s eyes would grow. That bad news would multiply. More cities would fall. No, not fall, but be lost for a time. For longer. The death throes of the old world still had the power to crush everything, and staying out of its thrashing meant being nimble and quick. Geder didn’t feel nimble or quick. In fact, he barely felt anything at all, except muddy in his mind and angry without knowing who or what he was angry with.

A light in the garden below the library shifted. Some servant walking in the night. Or a member of the court. Or Basrahip and his priests. Or the goddess herself. Or Cithrin. Geder didn’t know, and he didn’t want to. As long as he wasn’t certain, there was hope that it might be something astounding. Something that would heal him.

Far Syramys wasn’t actually so far, really. Ships left for it every year from Narinisle and Herez and Cabral. The blue-water trade carried the highest risk in the world, but it was done. Geder closed his eyes and imagined himself on the deck of a ship cutting through the vast waves of the open sea without so much as an island in sight. It was supposed to be a vision of comfort, of possibility, but his mind kept turning to how it would feel to be lost there. Lost in a hostile emptiness without any sense of how to go back home or else forward to safety.

It would feel, he thought, very much like being Lord Regent.

Marcus

As the sky slid from blue to indigo, Jorey and Marcus walked the defenses, Jorey ahead and Marcus behind. Barricades and low, improvised walls stood on either side of the dragon’s road. Mud and stone and uprooted hedge, they were often little more than the idea of cover. But it gave the Antean archers places to hold and fall back to as Dannien’s soldiers moved in. They’d even managed a scout’s perch on an outcropping of rock where someone with younger eyes than Marcus could shout back reports of the enemy movements and Kit could use a speaker’s trumpet to call out assertions about the outcome of the fight in hopes of making them true. Night birds began their songs, trilling to each other and the Antean soldiers. The sun, already vanished behind the mountains to the west, sent streaks of red across the thin, scudding clouds. The smoke of the first campfires rose up like it aspired to being a cloud itself.