The Spider's War

Marcus watched more than the battleground. Jorey moved among his men with an ease that wasn’t quite easy yet. Like an actor new to the troupe, he made the gestures without entirely making them his own. He had potential, though. Marcus had seen more than one great general rise to power with less compassion for the men who followed him. Jorey Kalliam understood the importance of commanding loyalty. It would serve him well if any of them managed not to be killed on this blighted stretch of jade. Jorey called an end to the day’s building, as they’d agreed he would, and the men put up a ragged cheer. During the long, terrible days of the march, Marcus had kept as much as he could to himself, but he still knew some of them.

Durin Caust was the one with two missing fingers who’d been the first to learn how to make a shelter out of cut snow. Alan Lennit and Sajor Sammit were the lieutenants under one of Jorey’s bannermen who held each other’s hand during the march. The one with the flaming red beard and eyes dark as a Southling’s was called Mer, and he had a good singing voice.

Trivial, meaningless bits of information that took them from being a single organism—the army of Antea—and made them into a company of men that Marcus didn’t particularly look forward to watching die. It occurred to him as they walked back to the main camp that holding himself apart hadn’t only been so that his already thin disguise as a servant wouldn’t be seen through. He also hadn’t wanted to see them as anything more than meat on legs, extensions of Geder Palliako and the priests and Imperial Antea. So he’d cocked that up too.

“Double fires tonight,” Marcus reminded Jorey. “If we have wood or twigs or dried dung. Anything that’ll burn, burn it. Let their scouts think we’re more than we are.”

“Last fires we’ll see for a good while too,” Jorey said. “Might as well enjoy them.”

“That’s truth.”

The attack would come in the morning with the rising sun low on the horizon, blinding the Antean forces. Depending on how the enemy was stocked, Marcus guessed that it would be a hammer blow of horsemen coming down the road in hopes of scattering them quickly or a foot assault swooping south and taking them in the right flank. Or both. Dannien likely had enough men for both. Jorey had laid out the camp to make that plan seem the sound one. More fires in the north, closer together. Fewer and more widely spaced in the south. Likely, Dannien would be using banners or flares to signal his men. Their ears would be stopped against Kit’s voice. As advantages went, it was thin, weak, and insufficient.

It wasn’t only that Marcus didn’t want the battle in the first place. It was also that there was no chance that he could win it. Weak as they were and without the morale-breaking voices of the priests, they had effectively lost already. The Timzinae forces would break the exhausted, underfed, road-weary Anteans like a dry twig, wheel north, and burn a pathway from there to Camnipol.

And so, when Karol Dannien led his men out of Orsen, Jorey and his army would need to be elsewhere.

As the last grey of twilight settled to black, the Antean scouts went out. The moon hung over the horizon at just less than a quarter. It would be below the horizon before midnight. Jorey and his captains went to the men at their fires and checked each group personally. Their packs had to be filled with dried meat and hardtack and the sticky, dense waybread they’d taken from Bellin. That and their swords and bows. No armor. It was too heavy for what they were doing. Boiled leather and worked scale were all burned or ripped down at the seams so that the enemy couldn’t make use of them. Marcus sat with Clara Kalliam beside the Lord Marshal’s tent, waiting for word to come that something had gone awry. That the enemy scouts had seen them or that Dannien had somehow stolen a march and blocked their way. If they’d done it right, there wouldn’t be many scouts to the north of the camp. They’d be marking out ways to lead the attacking forces to the south of the road, but few plans were so graceful as to match the world.

“Are you well, Captain?” Clara Kalliam asked.

“Am I fidgeting?”

“A bit, yes.”

“Sorry. I’m told I do that when I’m annoyed. Isn’t something I’m aware of at the time.”

She shifted, drawing deeply on her pipe and letting the smoke out through her nose. The firelight played across her face. She was handsome, in a solid, well-bruised way. More than looking like a beautiful woman, she looked like an interesting one.

“You’re thinking this may not work,” she said, her voice low.

“I’m not thinking one way or the other,” he said. “I’m waiting to see what happens. If it’s interesting, I don’t want to spend the time then getting ready to make a call, so I’m just anxious and cranky now. Gets me out ahead of it.”

“Your burden seems to be bothering you less,” she said.

“My burden?”

“Your blade,” she said.

Marcus glanced back at the hilt rising above his shoulder. When he thought about it, the skin across his shoulder still itched and burned a little. The muscles where the scabbard rode against him ached. The weird taste in his mouth that came of carrying the poisoned thing too long had become so familiar, he’d have noticed more if it left. And still, he knew what she meant.

“It hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “It’s only that I’m more distracted. There are a thousand things I’m bad at. This one, I’m good at.”

She smiled. “You’re good at being annoyed and anxious?”

“The way I’ve heard it put is that my soul’s a circle. I’m best at the bottom, heading up. The top of things is just the first part of down. At least for me. Being caught in a storm keeps me from thinking about other things, and when it’s too quiet, I do. And then I’m not as good.”

Clara Kalliam lifted an eyebrow in query.

Marcus shook his head, refusing the question, but then answered it anyway. “I saw my wife and daughter dead before me.”

“I see,” Clara said. “I watched my husband executed.”

“By Palliako. I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” she said. “Dawson was an old-fashioned man, but he was a good one. I miss him, but I also think the world as it has become would have been a hell for him. There are times I’m glad he didn’t live to see this.”

Ah, Marcus thought. The night-before-battle conversation. He hadn’t expected to have one of those, but here he was, sitting in darkness with the things that simmered and stewed in people’s hearts starting to bubble out. Well, she’d opened the bottle because she wanted to. He’d accommodate her and see what she would drink.

“You sound as though you’ve recovered from the loss,” Marcus said.

“No,” Clara said. And then, “Or yes. Yes, I have. I haven’t unmade what happened. It was too ugly an end to something precious. I shall always have the scars of it, I think. But I realized his wife died with him, and I have mourned her, and I am someone new. And I like who I am. If God gave me the option, I couldn’t go back.”

“It’s not like that for me,” Marcus said, his voice lighter and more conversational than the truths he spoke. “I’m the same man I was the night they burned.”

“You haven’t changed at all?”

“Not in any way that matters,” he said. His inflection was like a joke, but she heard past it.

“No scars, then. Only wounds. That must be terrible.”

“It is,” Marcus said. “But it makes me good at the things that keep my mind off it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve intruded.”

“I let you, m’lady,” he said.

“Then thank you for that. I will not undervalue it.”

He looked at her, unsure what weight her words carried. It struck him for the first time what very lucky men her husband and the so-called servant everyone pretended wasn’t her lover might be. She was a singular woman.

Footsteps approached the fire, and Marcus looked up. He’d forgotten to put his back to the fire, and his eyes were poorly adapted to the darkness around them. When Vincen Coe loomed up from the night, it was like he’d stepped into being.

“Word’s come from the scouts. Jorey’s chosen a path.”

“Well then,” Marcus said. “Let’s see if we can pull this off after all.”

The night march began. Everyone’s orders were strict. No voices rose in chatter or song. No scabbard remained unwrapped for the starlight to glint off the metal. The soldiers had rubbed their faces in dirt and ash to keep the sweat from shining. Likely it was more than they need do, but the way to find that out was to try without and fail. The curious thing about war—about so many things—was the number of critically important things that no one could know.

Marcus and Vincen and Clara Kalliam, like the rest of the great army of Antea, abandoned their fire and their tent, their carts and the great majority of the supplies they’d carried, and became ghosts. Silent as the spirits of the dead, they whispered their way to the north, running along deer trails and through thin woods. The air was chill to the point of real cold, but after the pass, it felt like nothing. The thread of dragon’s jade that led from Orsen up into the body of the empire lay somewhere far to their right, unseen. When the last sliver of moon failed them, they went on in darkness without so much as a candle to give them away.

Hours later, the east brightened to charcoal and the figures walking in their silent lines began to have silhouettes. Jorey called the halt, and the army divided. Five groups to the west, to cross the dragon’s road and take shelter separately in the shallow hills and forests of Antea’s southern reaches. Three to stay here and skirt the edges of the Dry Wastes as best they could. One small group with most of the horses to ride north to Camnipol, raising the alarm along the way.

It was in many ways the end of the Lord Marshal’s command. Though Jorey Kalliam would lead the largest of the groups, all would act independently to harass Dannien’s scouts and threaten his supply lines, draw him off the swift path of the dragon’s road into the weeds and dirt of the plains. They would slow the attackers, distract them, and if one group was cornered and slaughtered to a man, there would still be seven more to carry on the job. It was the kind of fighting they did in the Keshet and the wilder edges of Borja, dirty and harsh and thin on honor. It was the kind of battle an army didn’t win so much as indefinitely postpone losing.

None of Jorey’s captains, no matter how noble their blood, objected. That alone, Marcus thought, showed how far Antea had gone down the dragon’s path. No one dreamed of glorious conquest on the field of battle. No one called their sneaking away in the night an act of cowardice. Years in the field and more than half the men who’d marched out to capture Nus dead or scattered back along the path had left the veterans of Antea with fewer illusions about the glories of war than when they’d started.

Which, though Marcus didn’t say it, suggested there was another problem.

They stopped three hours after midday in a shallow valley. Sandstone blocks made a rough wall, the only vestige of some long-vanished structure. There was no snow there, no ice, nothing that could have been made into water. The air had an uncanny salt taste that Marcus had only ever found near the Dry Wastes. But though they were close, these weren’t the wastes.

Jorey’s personal force was a hundred and fifty men, five horses, and his mother. Of the three that had stayed on the east side of the jade road, it had gone farthest north. Even if Dannien wheeled his forces and quick-marched after them—which would have been a first-campaign level of error—they wouldn’t reach here in twice the time Jorey had. The army might be hard to stop, but at the price of speed.

Marcus found Kit on the sun-soaked side of the wall. The actor had grown thinner since they’d left Carse. They all had. His cheekbones seemed ready to cut through his olive skin, and his wiry hair haloed him in brown and grey. He lifted an exhausted hand to Marcus.

“Well,” Marcus said, sitting beside the man. “That was unpleasant.”

“I found it less enjoyable than I expected,” Kit agreed. “And I don’t think my expectations were particularly high. I must admit, I was surprised that our little sidestep was effective.”

“There are advantages to having a name that kings whisper to scare their princes at night. Great warriors don’t traditionally turn tail and sneak out in the dark before a battle. Add to that I challenged him, and he thought we had more men than we did. He believed he’d win, but I didn’t let him think I agreed quite so much.” Marcus laughed and rested his head against the gritty stone. “I won’t be able to pull the trick again.”

Kit made a noise of appreciation deep in his throat and went silent. Marcus shifted the scabbard, unslung it awkwardly, and put it on the ground at his side.

“Noticed something odd. When the forces split, no one was talking about the greater glory of the goddess or how we were all bringing truth to the unwashed or any of that.”

“I suppose I hadn’t paid attention to that,” Kit said.

“No, they dropped their honor-and-glory talk in favor of something practical pretty damned fast. Leaves me wondering.” He looked over at his old friend and companion. They had come through terrible places together, he and Kit. He didn’t want to go on, but it was the job. “Get the feeling you may have been improvising some lines.”

“I think you’re asking if I played the priest of the goddess the whole journey. Have I understood you?”

“Have.”

“I could not,” Kit whispered. “I like to think I tried as best I could. I didn’t reveal who we truly are or our relationship to Cithrin or the bank. Or Palliako, for that. I didn’t lay bare the truth of what the spiders are or how these men’s lives were spent on a deceit. But there are things I cannot agree to do.”

“If you couldn’t stand lying to them, the time to say that would have been before we left Carse. We were counting on you. And you don’t get to change that horse midstream.”

“Them? It wasn’t them. It was me.”

“Don’t know what that means, Kit.”

“Each of them, I spoke to each of them every… I don’t know. Two days? Three? I started in the mornings and I played my part until it was time to sleep again. Even in the pass. Even then. They heard me a bit. On occasion. I was never free of my voice.”

“You’re not getting clearer.”

“I began to believe again,” Kit said. “I said that the goddess would save us. That we would win through. That all would be well, and I found myself taking real comfort in it. Once I saw that, I felt I had to change. Give them encouragement, but not… not the kind I had been giving.”

Marcus felt a little twist in his belly. A drop of horror in his sea of weariness. “Knowing what you know and seeing what you’ve seen, you fell back into believing in the spider goddess?”

Kit was silent for a long moment. A breath of wind stirred the grit and dirt. Salt and copper haunted the back of Marcus’s tongue.

“I don’t believe we are fighting cynics, Marcus. When I see my old brothers, I don’t see men manipulating innocents. I see men who have listened to their own stories until who they might have been was eaten away to nothing. I think they wear the goddess like a blindfold and swing their knives on faith. I believe I am as vulnerable to the power of my voice as anyone else, and I felt myself falling prey to the words I spoke. I’m sure that what I knew protected me, but it would wear away given time. Here and now, I want you to see how badly I wish the world free of these things. I hope you understand that I have been fighting against this power longer than anyone else I know. Longer than most of you even knew this danger existed.”

“I understand.”

“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I hope I have managed to bring those two together as nearly as I could, and if I have, it was hard work with terrible prices paid along the way. I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but taking apart what I actually am and what I only believe myself to be?”

“Yeah. All right,” Marcus said.

“I would rather die than that,” Kit said.

“If you turned back into one of them, I’d kill you.”

Kit’s eyes went a little wider, his face paled under the leather and burn of his cheeks. The truth of what Marcus said carried a deeper weight than the glib way he’d said it. No one but Kit and his twice-damned spiders would have heard it.

“Thank you,” Kit said. “I appreciate that.”

Marcus didn’t have the advantage of the spiders, but he was fairly certain Kit wasn’t lying.

Cithrin

Years before, in another lifetime, Cithrin had been part of a caravan attacked by robbers. They’d been stopped by a tree across the dragon’s jade of the road. Before they could clear it, bandits had come from the sides and behind. The plan Cithrin hatched now wasn’t precisely the same but neither was it so very different. There were only a few scraps of information she needed.

The inn sat at the intersection of a dirt track and the dragon’s road. Yardem had done the negotiations with the keep, pretending to have less coin than they actually had and haggling for a place in the stables where they would be seen by fewer people. The grooms and stable hands, he was more open with, passing them enough silver that most of them found their way to the common rooms here or else other places nearby.

For the players, it was like coming home. With the exception of Lak, who had never been touring with Cary and Master Kit and the others, the stables of inns and taprooms were nearly like a mother’s hearth. Hornet and Mikel immediately made friends with the horses, cooing and passing them bits of dried apple. Charlit Soon and Cary scouted the place, finding where they could all sit in relative warmth and privacy, and also where the women could sleep apart from the men and so lower the chance of a local boy’s taking the wrong idea. Yardem took it all with the same stoic amusement that seemed to follow him like a cloud. Only Barriath seemed out of place.

Well, Barriath and her.

Cithrin had to keep out of sight. She’d spent the whole journey down from the icy coast to Rivenhalm wrapped in a colorless woolen cloak and hood, trying not to be noticeable and feeling as unobtrusive as blood on a wedding dress. A half-Cinnae woman in Antea would suggest only one name to the townsfolk. Cithrin bel Sarcour was, after all, the slut and daughter of lies who’d humiliated the Lord Regent and aided the filthy Timzinae in their plots against the empire. It gave her more attention than any banker would want. Her best defense was that a woman of that stature and power would never be so stupid as to travel the back roads with only a handful of actors, a single guard, and an exile and traitor whom Geder had ordered killed if found inside his borders. If she had been able to trust the work to anyone else, she wouldn’t have come.

Except that wasn’t true. This was better than sitting quietly in Carse, waiting for word to come. And if it was a problem, at least it was hers. It was better to be damned for what she was.

Charlit Soon’s giggle came from the yard, and a boy’s rough voice trying to be deeper than it was. The other players went quiet, holding their conversation until they knew the results of her mission. She squealed and laughed and then her shadow came through the stable door alone. The boy’s footsteps were almost too quiet to hear, even before he retreated.

Charlit’s round face glowed.

“He’s at his holding,” she said. “Apparently Lord Lehrer Palliako isn’t what you’d call a fixture at court, even if his son does run it.”

“Could have told you that,” Barriath said, with a scowl. “Wait. I did tell you that. More than once.”

“You didn’t say he was at home just now,” Sandr pointed out with feigned mildness. The two men had been needling each other since landfall in the north. Cithrin had a sense that she didn’t want to examine why the pair got on so poorly.

“And,” Charlit Soon said, lifting her chin, “he’s due to visit a particular set of farms tomorrow. I even have directions to the road he goes down to reach them.”

“Well done,” Cary said, then turned to Cithrin. “You know what you want to do, then?”

In the stall behind them, a thin, shaggy horse sighed and shifted, scratching himself against the wooden posts. The straw around her feet skittered in the little breeze. The others were looking at her, waiting.

“I know what I want to try,” she said.

The next day, they went out. Horses were too expensive to take without drawing attention, but the march wasn’t long, and the landscape welcomed them. The trees outside Rivenhalm were still bare from the winter, but warm winds had almost finished melting the snow. Only the deep shadows still held pale and dirty lumps, half snow and half ice, and all surrendering to the coming springtime. Pale-green sprouts were pushing their way up from the dark earth. Gravel and mud made a raised roadway, and a slope to the north came to a ditch already running with brown, murky water. Everything smelled of rich soil and the coming spring. Rivenhalm’s farmland to the west of the holding lay on a plain, but Cithrin and the others didn’t go so far as to see them. They made their little camp in among the trees on a long straight stretch, waiting. The low, white sky softened the sunlight, leaving everything cool and nearly shadowless. Everything else she’d done, now she was trying her hand at banditry.

When she was a child, Magister Imaniel had talked to her about the placing of negotiations. The architecture that surrounded a conversation had the power to shape it, he’d said. That was why the bank’s offices were kept so modest. When someone came to place a deposit, everything around them lowered their expectation of a return. When the bank was preparing to put out coin as an investment, it was better done at a cathedral or a palace or a wide open square in the city’s center. Simply by making the space in which the trade took place wide and large, the bank set the scale for the money involved.

As the sun sailed unseen through the sky, lighting the clouds with pale fire, she wondered what he would make of this empty stretch of road, the bone-bare trees spreading out all around, and the road that reached out toward the horizon. It was a humble place, without even the dignity of the dragon’s jade. And it was lonely. She had to take control of Geder’s father, one way or another. And then she had to take control of Geder. She strained her attention toward the vanishing edge of the road, willing her prey to appear and dreading it.

Cary struck up a song, her voice low and murmuring so that the melody wouldn’t give them away. Yardem throbbed a bass accompaniment. The wood itself seemed to take up the song. For a time, it was beautiful.

The distant echo of hoofbeats stopped them, and in the distance three figures appeared, all on horseback. Cithrin, back among the trees at the roadside, scowled. She’d assumed Lehrer Palliako would travel in a carriage. It was possible that the man she wanted wasn’t in the party now approaching. Or perhaps he was and would have a much easier path to escape should it come to violence. Either scenario carried its own difficulties.

Her breath came faster and shallow as the riders approached. Two men, one in a wide, shaggy coat, the other in light leather armor such as a guard or huntsman might wear. The third a woman in plain canvas and patched wool.

Cithrin narrowed her eyes, trying to better see the man in the shaggy coat. He was older, that was sure. The hair that showed at the edges of his leather hat was white. The horse he rode held itself tall and proud. It was hard to think that the father of the Lord Regent would go about his holding in such practical, workmanlike fashion. It was also hard to think that this would be anyone else.

Her heart in her throat, Cithrin lifted her hand to Yardem. He nodded and lifted his voice in a call that sounded like a crow calling twice, and then again three times. A moment later, another false crow came back twice and then once. The others set back along the road were ready. She should have brought more soldiers. Except that soldiers could hardly help looking like soldiers, and actors could better pass unnoticed. Trade-offs. Everything was trade-offs. Always and forever.

Cithrin stepped out from the trees, walking with her weight low in her hips the way Cary had taught her. Cary, Yardem, Sandr, and Lak followed. The hoofbeats shifted, slowed. Yardem and the three players stood behind her, their bodies blocking the way forward at a hundred feet behind, and Barriath and the others did the same. Cithrin’s belly was tighter than knots, and she wished she’d thought to bring a skin of wine. Or something stronger.

She walked alone toward the riders, and the riders stopped before she reached them. Close up, there was no question that this was Geder’s father. They had similar eyes, and the way the old man’s shoulders angled into his thick neck was a prediction of how Geder Palliako would age.

“Lord Palliako,” she said, making her curtsy. “I assume I have the honor of addressing the Viscount of Rivenhalm?”

She braced herself for his reply, ready to leap aside if he charged, or fall back if he drew his sword. The seconds lasted hours.

“You have me at a disadvantage, miss,” the elder Palliako said. “I don’t recall having met, and I would think even at my age, I’d recall a lovely young woman like yourself.”

There was no fear in his voice. His male companion and, Cithrin had to believe, guard placed a hand on the pommel of his sword. The woman in the patched cloak had already drawn a long, vicious-looking knife. Cithrin smiled. When she’d pictured this conversation, it had happened in a carriage where it felt much less like shouting. But here she was, and nothing to be done about it.

“I am an acquaintance of your son’s,” she said. And then a moment later, “I think you’ll have heard of me. I mean you no harm. I’ve come to talk with you. I have an offer I’d like to present.”

The old man blinked. It took only a few seconds for him to understand what this half-Cinnae woman in his road was saying. Who she was, and what her presence implied.

“You’re certain this isn’t an abduction?” the older man said, turning his horse a few degrees. “Because, just between us, it looks a bit like an abduction.”

Well, and it might have been if he’d ridden in a damned carriage. If he left the road, leapt the filthy ditch, and lit out among the trees, she’d never find him again. She stepped to the side of the road and motioned to the others. Yardem, understanding the tactics of the situation, moved first, and the others followed him. None of them drew a weapon. Lehrer Palliako’s way forward was clear, but the man didn’t spur his horse.

“Your son is in danger,” Cithrin said. “He needs your help. And you need mine.”

“My son has a large number of people protecting him. I doubt any new attempt on his life will come to much.”

“It isn’t his life that’s in danger. Geder’s fallen under the influence of corrupt and corrupting men. They’ve turned him into a monster.”

“That seems alarmist,” the older man said, but he didn’t spur his mount. His gaze cut to the side like a man trying not to admit he couldn’t pay his debt. Hope surged in Cithrin’s breast. Hope and fear. She was so close…

“I know what you’ve heard of me, my lord. But I’ve come here at the risk of my life because I know your son is a good man,” she lied. “He’s in trouble.”

Lehrer Palliako didn’t move for a long time. The leather-clad guard shot a worried glance at him. Cithrin clenched her fists. At last, he took a long, shuddering breath and lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was low.

“I know,” he said.

The holding at Rivenhalm was smaller than Cithrin had imagined. The house itself was wood with only a little stone. It stood tucked on the side of a deep and wooded ravine. The river from which it took its name was in truth hardly more than a wide and vigorous stream that muttered and clapped its way along below. Even without the leaves of summer, the place was dark with shadows. When the crowding trees were in their fullness, Cithrin imagined the house would never rise much above a green and dappled twilight.

Sitting on a small porch with a window that looked out on the steep hillside, Cithrin imagined young Geder Palliako spending long, quiet hours there on the same floorboards she now walked. Here were the rooms and archways and halls where he had been a boy. Where the seeds of the man he’d become had been planted. She tried to find something sinister in it. There was nothing like that. Rivenhalm felt close and cozy and warm inside. But maybe lonesome.

Lehrer Palliako had led them back, his visit to his farmlands forgotten. His servants had taken the cloaks and jackets from the players and guards and the exile Barriath Kalliam as if it were perfectly normal for the great enemies of the empire to arrive unannounced and be welcomed. But perhaps it was more that there was no one much more likely to appear. No one seemed to come to Rivenhalm.

“My wife died when he was very young, you know,” Lehrer said, half to her and half to the cup of wine in his fist. “I raised him myself. Taught him to love books. Taught him to be a good boy. Did what I could. I never wanted him to go to court. They’re a bunch of self-righteous bastards, all of them. But it isn’t a favor to keep a young man from making friends. Connections in the court. I dreaded it from the day he left. The day. And when Dawson fucking Kalliam threw a triumph for him, I thought… you know, I thought perhaps I’d been wrong. Just because I’d failed at court, it didn’t mean my boy would. I was sure it would be all right. Only it wasn’t.”

Lehrer shook his head, and Cithrin could see Geder in it. Not the monstrous Geder, hacking a man to death with a dull sword because he’d chosen defiance even at the last. The lost and gentle Geder, the one who’d hidden with her in the darkness. But there were glimmers of that other too. Lehrer Palliako was, she thought, a man of deep resentments as well as deep affections. She wondered what his wife had been like when she was alive.

“And then these priests,” Lehrer said. “I went to him I don’t know how many times. I told him not to forget himself, not to let them change who he was. Who he is. When Simeon named him Lord Regent… I was proud. I won’t say I wasn’t. But I was also afraid.”

“You were right to be,” Cithrin said. “The spiders in their blood were made to sow chaos. To make war constant. Inevitable. They’ve lied to him, and it’s not his fault that he believed.”

“Exactly,” Lehrer said. “Exactly. It’s not his fault at all. It’s these priests and courtiers and politicians, isn’t it? They’re what led him astray. My poor little boy. Do you know, he used to try to save the water beetles? When he was young, he’d find water beetles down in the mud, and some were on their backs. He’d bring them back and try to nurse them back to being well. Gave them bits of leaf and fresh water and kept them warm. He’d cry when they died. He’s a good boy.”

Tears streaked the old man’s cheeks. Cithrin had the sense that he’d been waiting to say all this. All he hadn’t had was someone to listen. Someone who understood.

“Will you help me, then? Will you help me to help him?”

“I will,” Lehrer said. “You’ll stay with me. All of you. Geder has an estate in the city. No one will look for you there, and we can get him away from these bastards before they make it worse.”

“Your son is very angry with me,” Cithrin said.

“And Kalliam’s boy. Barriath. The one you brought. I know he is, but it will be fine. We’ll see to it. He’ll forgive you once he understands.” Lehrer reached out his hand tentatively, and Cithrin paused for only a moment before she took it. Lehrer smiled, tears welling again in his eyes. “You would have made a fine daughter. I’m sorry that this has all done what it’s done.”

“I am too,” she said, and let him go. The relief in her belly was like a drink of strong wine. It unknotted her, if only for the moment.

She’d done the first part. She’d gained the confidence of someone Geder loved. Now there was only finding the way to turn the younger Palliako against the priests whose power he relied on. And as difficult as that sounded, she had her path picked out. With every tale Lehrer spun, with every reminiscence about the innocent, kind young man Geder had been before the court corrupted him, she felt more certain she could manage it.

The priests had taken control of the empire, that was true. They were sowing chaos without even knowing that they had been designed for the task. They were the enemy that had to be defeated if there was ever to be hope of peace.

But fire could be fought with fire, violence with violence, and there had been no priests when Geder burned Vanai.

Entr’acte: Nus

The enemies of the goddess have already lost! None can stand against her power. You, her chosen, stand as proof of her grace and her power in the world.”

The priest lifted his hands in blessing, and Duris—along with everyone else in the cathedral—cheered. Their gathered voices echoed off the vaulted ceiling, until the whole building rang with them. A roar louder than a dragon, and more dangerous.

The central cathedral of Nus had been dedicated once to some local god who seemed from the carvings in the stone columns to have had a great deal to do with rose-covered shepherd’s crooks and a shallow bowl with a crack in it. Now, it belonged to the goddess. The red of the banners that hung behind the altar represented the blood of true humanity, untainted by the filthy powers of the dragons and their Timzinae agents. The pale circle in the center with its eightfold sigil, the purifying power of the goddess as it reached out across the world.

Not that Duris would have known that if he hadn’t been told. As the cathedral had once been the shrine of a crook-and-bowl god, Duris had once been a butcher’s apprentice of a little crossroads town that the locals called Little Count, about a morning’s walk south of Sevenpol, and was now a soldier of the empire and of the goddess.

When the roar faded, the priest lowered his hands. “There are many who will deny her. Many who will close their eyes to her light. Stripping away the lies of a lifetime—of hundreds of lifetimes, father and grandfather and on back to the fall of humanity at the claws of the dragons—is like tearing away the scab of an infected wound. Some will cling to their infection rather than accept the healing pain. These are the servants of the lie.”

“Kill them!” Duris and a hundred others shouted. “Kill anyone who stands against her!”

“They come to us now,” the priest said. “They come to kill us and steal back what the goddess has claimed.”

Everyone knew that, of course. The scouting parties had been keeping track of the movements of the enemy army since the fall of Inentai. But hearing it in the resonant voice of the priest gave it a weight and a dignity that taproom gossip didn’t carry. Duris felt the mixture of dread and exultation in his chest. When he closed his eyes and let the feelings rise up in him, it was like he’d climbed the highest tree in Little Count and was looking down on the roofs and yards far below.

“But,” the priest said, “they have already lost. The goddess is in the world, and her power cannot be denied. She is the living voice of the truth. Faith in her is stronger than arrows. Stronger than swords. Nothing in the world can remain unchanged before her!”

Duris rose, fists in the air. All around him, his compatriots and the converts from among the citizens of Nus stood too. Some—especially the locals—wept. Duris, who wasn’t a butcher’s boy any longer, grinned beatifically and felt the joy and power flow through him.

Nus, the Iron City, had been the first Timzinae stronghold to fall to her, and Duris had been there from the start. When the army had moved on, Duris and his cohorts Noll and Kipp and Sandin had all been picked to garrison the city. In all, there were three hundred Antean soldiers to hold a city of fifty thousand. Three hundred soldiers and half a dozen priests.

For the first few months, he’d struggled not to feel overwhelmed by the city. The grand square alone was larger than all Little Count put together. The salt quarter at Nus took up almost half the city. The port on the northern edge spread out past the great stone-and-metal walls and onto the water, becoming a complex tissue of docks and ships and boats that changed their configuration by the day, like alleyways in dreams. Then there were the archways tucked in among the streets. Long, lazy swoops of hollow dragon’s jade that rose up above the buildings and streets before arcing back down. In Little Count—even in Sevenpol—they would have been wonders to look up at in awe. In Nus, people hung laundry from them.

With the service done, Duris and his friends poured out onto the minor square. Minor, and still big enough to fit most of a village into. The giddiness that always followed a morning listening to the priests left them in playful moods as they strutted past the street vendors with their beaded jewelry and promises of futures told and tin plates of spiced chicken and lamb.

“Did I tell? Had a letter from home,” Kipp said.

“Did not,” Sandin said. “And it wouldn’t help if you did. You can’t read.”

Kipp shoved the larger man while the others laughed, but Kipp was laughing too, so it was all right. “I can hire a scribe, same as anyone else. My sister sent it. Saved up a tenth of her sewing money for a month to do it too. She said Old Matrin’s died.”

Duris missed a step. The pleasure he’d taken in the day faltered. “Did not,” he said, unaware that he was echoing Sandin. Old Matrin with his knives and the white crop of thin hair rising off his brow like smoke had been the butcher in Little Count and the master of Duris’s apprenticeship.

“Did. Caught a fever over the winter and slept himself to death,” Kipp said. He kept his voice light because they were men now, and men didn’t act sad about things. The look he gave Duris was sympathy enough. “Guess you’re the only one knows how to cut those chops of his now, eh?”

“Suppose I am,” Duris said. A wave of homesickness washed over him—Old Matrin’s slaughterhouse, the treelined lane between his old father’s house and the huts where his mother and sisters lived with his new father. The pond where he’d played whistles with the miller’s daughter back when they’d both been too young to think of anything less pure to play at. He shook himself, put a smile back on his face, and kept on. There was no use thinking too much on that now. His mother had said Sorrow calls sorrow so much that he assumed it was true.

The blare of the alarm trumpets cut through the air. It was so unexpected, Duris looked at the others to see whether they’d heard it too. Noll and Kipp had gone pale in the face. Sandin’s jaw was set forward in a vicious grin.

“Guess the fuckers came early, eh?” he said. The alarm came again, and they broke into a run for their siege stations.

At the stone side of the great walls, ladders wide enough for four men to climb side by side stretched up. The walls rose as tall as ten men one standing on the other, and divided so that low walls of iron marked off each length twenty yards long of the street-wide walk along the top. From his post, Duris could see the gates closing, the city of Nus folding in on itself like a turtle expecting a storm. And as he looked out from the top of the wall, the storm front was clear. Clouds of dust rose in the east. The largest plume came from the along the dragon’s road, but three smaller arced in from the south. Sandin, beside him, laughed.

“Well, look,” he said. “All the roaches are in a hurry to sit at the bottom of our wall. Idiots.”

“I don’t know,” Duris said. “Looks like there’s a lot of them.”

“If they make the top of this wall, it’ll be by climbing over the bodies of their own dead,” Sandin said, and spat. It was a phrase Duris had heard before, spoken by the priests. The thought reassured. The captain came last, and the fifteen men of the segment stopped talking among themselves. Callien Nicillian was the second son of some minor house—Baron of Southreach or some such. He had a sharp, dark face and an eager manner that brought Duris and the others with it.

“Take your posts, boys,” Nicillian said. “The roaches will be here by midday, and they may take a little knocking back.”

“Hope so,” Sandin said.

Along the wall, outsize speaking trumpets were being mounted, and the priests were beginning to call into them. The enemies of the goddess cannot win against us! Everything you love is already gone! If you stand against us, you have already lost! The syllables rang out clear and sharp. Duris almost felt sorry for the bastards riding so quickly toward their defeat. He sharpened his sword and wondered whether he’d get to use it. Three of the other men on his segment put together the ballistas and set them into the seating hole in the iron. The inner face of the wall looked down over the city. There were few buildings in Nus as tall as the wall. The people in the streets below him were only the oval tops of heads. He wondered what it would be like looking down at Camnipol from the Kingspire. He’d never seen it himself, but he’d heard it was taller than ten of Nus’s walls stacked one on the next, though that was likely an exaggeration.

When the call to make ready came, Duris was already looking down over the edge. The enemy had come in a force as large or larger than the Antean army that Lord Ternigan had led. The difference being that Ternigan had marched his men—Duris among them—through the opened gates and fought in the streets. The full garrison of Nus. The guards and soldiers of the traditional families that had ruled it. The shopkeepers and merchants and indentured slaves defending their homes. For a moment, Duris wondered whether the three hundred soldiers topping the walls were quite enough to defend a whole city from a full army, but then the priests began to call again, and his unease evaporated.

“Those catapults,” Sandin said, pointing down below them. “You see how the leather at the top looks like a sling? Those are Borjan make.”

“And you’d know that how?” Duris said. “All the time you spent as a boy with your lovers in Tauendak?”

Sandin hit his ear lightly and turned back to the army below. “I’ve heard about them. And see, those aren’t all roaches.”

It was true. There were Timzinae soldiers below them in profusion, but also Tralgu and Jasuru and wide, tusk-jawed Yemmu. Even a few that might have been Firstblood or Dartinae. The banners they carried were in the vertical style of Borja and the Keshet.

“This isn’t an uprising,” Sandin said. “That’s an army that’s fought as an army. Could be this is a good day after all.”

“Think that?”

“Break the back of the Borjan army and show them what it means to take the side of the Timzinae? I’ll put you a full night’s drinks the real people down there are offering up dead roaches by the end of the week as part of their surrender.”

“Not taking that bet,” Duris said. “I’ve seen how you drink.”

“Ready weapons!” Captain Nicillian cried over the calling of the priests, and Duris moved to his ballista. It almost seemed cruel, killing them from his safe perch. But they’d made the choice when they came, and damn but there were a lot of them. “Loose!”

The bolts of the defending ballistas fell on the attackers below. Duris couldn’t tell if they’d done much good. With only four to a segment, it seemed like each bolt would have to spit half a dozen enemy like pork on a skewer to make any difference at all. On the other hand, apart from cobbling together their Borjan catapults, they didn’t seem to be doing anything but standing about waiting to be killed. He waited while the others winched back the swing arm, then he shoved a second bolt in place and barked that he was clear of it. The string made a sound like snapping fingers, and somewhere in the throng below, another man died or was wounded or the bolt pierced only earth. The winch creaked again, and Duris waited with the next bolt.

He didn’t see where the fire came from. A cunning man at the rear of the army, maybe. Or one of the catapults, set aside for the purpose. The first sign Duris had was the intake of breath from the man beside him. When he turned to see what had caused it, he already knew. The ball of bright-blue flame like a sun made from sky floated above the wall, a trail of black smoke showing the arc it had already traveled.

“The hell is that?” he said. And behind him, the Borjan catapults answered: it was the signal to attack. All around the city, the Borjan catapults fired, first one and then a few, and then dozens. The stones arced up, and for a moment Duris thought the enemy’s aim had failed badly. None of them were going to strike the iron wall. None of them were even arcing low enough to pick off the soldiers at the ballistas. One of the stones passed over his own segment, and he saw the line that it drew behind it. The stone dropped down into the city, swinging hard on its leash and cracking into the stone inner face of the wall. The line, as thick as two of his fingers together, snapped taut under its weight.

“Cut the cords, boys!” Nicillian shouted. “They’re coming up.”

Duris’s disbelief overcame his discipline, and he looked over the edge. It was true. Down below, a Jasuru man hauled himself hand over hand up the line. You cannot win. All who defy the goddess are already doomed. Your only hope is surrender. Duris drew his sword and started hacking at the line as another stone flew overhead, another line wrapped itself over the wall. It wasn’t rope, but a braid of leather and wire that defied the blade. It wasn’t magic, though. Before the Jasuru made the wall’s top, they severed the cord. Only by then, there were two more cords drawing black lines across their segment.

Duris hacked as if his life depended on it. For the first time, real fear quickened his blood. The voices of the priests and the calling of his fellow soldiers were the only sounds. No enemy drums or trumpets sounded. When they cut through a cord, there was a scream or a shout or else silence. The stillness of it left him unnerved.

The speaking horn from the next segment over fell silent. When Duris looked over, a Timzinae man stood over the fallen priest, an axe in his black-chitined hand. Duris didn’t think, only ran. The barrier between segments was tall, but not so great he couldn’t clamber up the sun-hot iron and fall on the other side. The segment was overrun; Borjan soldiers were everywhere. Duris barreled into them. Those who stood with the goddess could never lose.

He swung his sword down, using the blade’s weight, and only hitting with the farthest tip, the way Old Matrin had taught him to use the big butcher’s knife. The Timzinae man’s back opened from shoulder to waist, and he fell screaming to the ground. Duris kicked him away, and stood straddling the fallen, bloody form of the spider priest, his sword at the ready. Something tickled his leg, then something else. Before he could look down to see what was happening or jump back, a Tralgu man stepped forward, a mace in his fist. He batted Duris’s sword out of his hand with an air of near boredom, shifted to follow and redirect the momentum of the swing, bringing it up and over and down.

The blow didn’t hurt, but it made a deep, solid sound, like stones being dropped onto dry ground. Everything grew quiet and distant and the world tilted oddly. The dead priest stood, or no. No, Duris fell at his side, but he had the clear sense that he was standing. Something danced across his hands, and then more. Spiders. Hundreds of them.

The Tralgu who’d hit him had stepped back now. He was waving a yellow banner over his head, and his teeth were bared in disgust. And fear. Duris tried to stand, but the pain finally found him. The wall tumbled in empty space, though his eyes told him nothing was moving. He rose to his knees. Something sharp happened in his ear, like a sting. Spiders swarmed his eyes, scratching at the lids like a dog trying to dig out a rabbit hole.

I can’t die, he thought. The goddess can’t be beaten. Nus won’t fall.

Two Timzinae men appeared carrying wooden buckets, and another came behind with a burning torch. Another signal, he thought, but of what he couldn’t guess.

“You bastards won’t stop me,” he shouted, or tried to. The words came out poorly. He tried to say I am dedicated to the goddess and the Severed Throne, but what he heard himself say was, “No one else knows those cuts!”

The liquid that splashed out from the barrels was thick and greasy and smelled weird and familiar. It was something he knew, though his mind was so addled he didn’t place it. Was it piss? Or butter? He spat out a mouthful of it, and a lump of oily spider came with it. His hand found the grip of his sword.

Lamp oil. They’d drenched him in lamp oil.

“No,” he shouted as the third Timzinae came closer with his torch in hand. “No, please wait!”

The torch flew toward him in a long, lazy arc, trailing smoke behind it.

Clara

War was made from individual lives, but that didn’t make it special. Any number of endeavors were just the same. The loaves of day-old bread she’d handed out at the Prisoner’s Span had been as much the product of disparate lives as any battle. The boy who gathered the eggs might have done so while in despair of ever winning his father’s love. Or in silent contemplation of the murder of his rivals. Or still flush from the revelation of a great secret. Or bored beyond measure by another day’s empty work with only chickens for companionship. And so for the farmer who’d brought in the wheat and separated the chaff. A carter had brought grain to the mill and taken flour from it, and done it as part of a full span of years punctuated by its own tragedies and moments of exultation. In Camnipol, a baker had worked the common magic of yeast and heat and time, transforming what individually would have been inedible into a moment of warmth and beauty that passed unappreciated, cooled, faded, staled. And then a noblewoman still deep in her grief had taken it, used the little bun as a way to create some connection with the lower classes of the city with whom she imagined she had nothing in common. And from her to a thief or robber or thug hanging in a cage over the gaping fall of the Division, who had had a childhood and a mother and friends and a moment of defiance before the magistrate or one of fear and sorrow. All that was in a bit of bread, and a city was immeasurably more.

Whenever Dawson had spoken of the nobility of war, or the honor and glory of the battlefield—or even, on rare occasions, obliquely of the atrocities it carried in its saddlebags—he had given the project a life of its own. A name, like a god’s name or a city’s. War became a person of a sort, and because it was a person, it became worthy of a kind of politeness. One didn’t speak ill of one’s family or one’s friends, however rude they might be. Even sowing derision toward one’s enemies was a process rich with rules and obstacles of form. As she became more familiar with the process of battle herself, Clara became less and less respectful of it.

Every soldier in an army had a life that had brought them there, that had tested them and remade them and put them through times of glory and of despair. And if they’d remained farmers and blacksmiths and huntsmen and bakers, then they would have done there as well. More would have died of illness and accident, and fewer on a stranger’s blade.

No, Clara had looked war in its face now, and she found herself unimpressed.

For the better part of a week, they skirted the edge of the Dry Wastes. She woke in the mornings to the stink of salt and rode through the day, Vincen at her side, as they ghosted along the road. Twice, Jorey’s scouts had sighted the scouts of the enemy. Both times, Jorey had drawn the enemy on as far as he could manage, charged to drive them back, and retreated again to lead them on. The other groups, she presumed, as did Jorey, were doing the same. Forcing the Timzinae to move slowly, to take few chances, to waste time and fodder in making moves and countermoves that by Antea’s aim came to nothing.

And now and then, people died for it. Some on Jorey’s side, some on Dannien’s. None for any reason Clara could respect. They played for time and waited for something unexpected to happen, unsure whether it would.

When it did, it came from the north and it wore Canl Daskellin’s face.

“Lady Kalliam,” the Baron of Watermarch said. “I… I didn’t expect to see you here.”

The meeting was a small one: Clara and Jorey and Canl. They’d long since given up both the convenience and burden of the Lord Marshal’s tent. The leather sides and metal frames lay in a gully somewhere to the south where they could rot and corrode in peace. Instead of sitting on the field stools behind the little writing table, they stood on a barren hilltop with their men standing at a little distance to give an approximation of privacy. To her right, the land sloped down to the east, growing slowly greener. To the left, yellow dirt and sand. Finding Daskellin here, on the border between springtime and the wastes, was the sort of thing that would have seemed a portent if she’d been dreaming. Awake, it was only what it was.

“Nor I you,” she said. “How is your family?”

“Quite well, m’lady,” he said, taking refuge in the forms and customs of etiquette. Clara smiled, not entirely kindly. Faced with a woman standing with one foot in absurdity and the other in scandal, small talk was indeed a blessing from the good angels. “Yours?”

“They’re well,” she said, gesturing at the sere landscape, “given this present unpleasantness.”

“Yes,” Daskellin said, and then again more soberly. “Yes.”

“How many men do you have?” Jorey asked.

“Four hundred,” Daskellin replied. “Though none of them are the first cut. You?”

“Less than that, but I’m only one of seven. If your men are rested, armed, and well supplied, I think we can put them to good use.”

“I’m only pleased to find I’m not holding the road alone,” Daskellin said. “Last I’d heard you were still in Birancour. How did you come so quickly?”

“We weren’t quick. We started weeks ago,” Jorey said, “and came through the pass at Bellin before the thaw.”

Surprise and then respect flickered in Daskellin’s eyes. This, Clara thought, is how reputations are made. When they returned to Camnipol, the tale would be of the prescience and daring that had brought the Lord Marshal to the defense of the empire at the moment he was most needed. Assuming, of course, that they made it back at all and not in the chains of avenging Elassae.

“Good that you’re here,” Daskellin said.

“How is the situation at court?” Jorey asked.

Daskellin opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head. Even here, far south of the Kingspire, he would not speak the truth aloud. Clara understood. Fear was a habit, and Geder’s fondness for pulling even the highest of nobles into his private court to be questioned by the priesthood had trained them all like dogs. Daskellin knew when not to bark, and that was ever. Not even now. His silence was enough to give an answer. Jorey understood as well.

Clara felt as if she were waking from a dream when she hadn’t known she was asleep. The court and Camnipol and her granddaughter were all quite near now. She’d left as a spy and returned as… as whatever it was she’d become. It felt like the end of something, though she wasn’t certain she could put a name to it.

“Good that you’re here, then,” Jorey said. “I have maps made of what we know about the enemy position and what we guess. Let me show you.”

“You’ll excuse me,” Clara said. “It is a pleasure to see you again, Canl. It’s been far too long.”

“Hopefully we can meet again soon in better accommodations,” he said. There was a melancholy in his voice that meant he did not expect that day to come.

“Hopefully,” she echoed, and turned away.

There had been a time not so long ago when the walk back over the rough, trackless ground to the tents would have seemed a long one. It was, after all, farther than the garden. At home, dignity alone would have meant calling for one of Lady Daskellin’s carriages. Now, it was nothing to her beyond a bit of an ache in her left hip, and that more the joint than the muscle.

Vincen sat at his tent with Captain Wester and the priest beside him. Kit and Vincen both rose when she approached. Marcus only nodded to her, as he would, she thought, to anyone, regardless of their station.

“What news, then?” Wester asked.

“Reinforcements have arrived. They’re building with straw in a windstorm, but they’re here.”

“Something’s better than nothing,” Wester said.

“I suppose it is,” Clara said, then turned to Vincen. “I believe it is time to gather our things.”

“Are you going somewhere, lady?” the priest asked. She knew that he was an ally, and that he had never done anything to undermine her efforts or Cithrin bel Sarcour’s. Still, the similarity of his face and skin and hair to those of the others who haunted Camnipol made it hard for her to keep from pulling away from him.

“Yes,” she said. “Back to court. I followed the army in hopes of bringing it to Antea’s true defense, and I’ve done it. There is no more I need do here.”

“And there is in Camnipol?” Marcus asked.

“One may at least wait for catastrophe on more comfortable beds,” she said smartly.

The captain laughed. “That may be the wisest thing I’ve heard said all week.”

“I find I shall miss your company, Lady Kalliam,” Master Kit said. “But I also hope we are not driven to meet again too terribly soon. When we come again to Camnipol, I pray that it is in peacetime.”

“That would be lovely, wouldn’t it?” Clara said, surprised to find a sudden grief rising in her. It seemed her hopes were as low as Daskellin’s. And like him, she would not say it.

One of the unexpected lessons she’d learned on the road concerned the speed of small groups and the slowness of great ones. The army of Elassae, even un-harassed, would have taken weeks to reach Camnipol. For her and Vincen on fast horses, the journey took four days. She arrived at Lord Skestinin’s manor having sent a runner ahead to give Lady Skestinin and Sabiha time to put anything in order that needed to be put. There might by an enemy army at her back, but that didn’t make an avoidable rudeness polite. When she arrived, the servants fought not to look shocked and Lady Skestinin’s usual reserve seemed deeper than Clara had become accustomed to. It wasn’t until she reached her rooms and for the first time since leaving Carse encountered a mirror that she understood.

“Vincen, I’ve gone brown as an egg.”

“You’ve been walking from dawn to dark for weeks, m’lady. Months.”

Clara sat at her private table and flapped her hands at the powders and kohl. “Everything I have is the wrong color. If I use any of this, I’ll look like someone dipped a cake in sugar! It all has to be replaced. You’ll have to find Sanna Daskellin or Kieran Shoat and ask what they have that I can borrow until—” She put her hand to her mouth, a sudden horror passing through her. “My dresses.”

“Your dresses?”

She rose from the table, marching to the dressing room. A simply cut yellow silk gown with pearl beads and complexly embroidered sleeves came first to hand. She stripped off her traveling cloak and leggings, at first by herself and then—distractingly—with Vincen’s wide hands to help her. For a moment, she considered dropping the yellow gown as well, but anxiety won out. She pulled the silk over her head and twisted. The cloth swirled around her. She didn’t sit down so much as fold.

“Clara?”

“They don’t fit,” she said. “None of them will fit. They’ll all have to be taken in. I have literally nothing I can wear to court. Nothing. Stop that, it isn’t funny.” She put a hand to her head. “The sun’s bleached my hair, hasn’t it?”

“Well, it’s a bit travel-worn at the moment,” Vincen said. “We can wash it, and then we’ll know better, but likely so.”

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and slapped the floor. She felt tears of frustration and embarrassment stinging her eyes.

“Fuck,” she said.

Vincen slid down to sit, his back against the wall. His eyes were alight. “You are the most amazing creature in the world.”

“I know I’m being silly, but knowing doesn’t help.”

“That’s what makes you amazing,” Vincen said. His voice was warm and soft, and there was laughter in it, but not at her. She balled the silk in her fists and tugged at it. And then she laughed too.

“This is trivial, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “How you look to them is important… and not even that. You could come before the court dressed as a swordsman or a beggar and not be ill at ease if you’d chosen it. It’s not being able to control what they see of you that leaves you feeling at sea. I understand it. I do.”

She felt her own smile growing to match his. “Then why are you laughing?”

“Because you will be more beautiful now than any of them, and more so by standing out proud. I’ll go fetch you new powders, and Sabiha will have gowns from before she had the baby that we can use until the tailors come.”

“I can’t wear those,” Clara said. “They’re cut for a girl half my age.”

“Then you can go naked and be even prettier,” Vincen said.

“Oh,” Clara said. “Now you’re only trying to distract me.”

“I am alone with you for the first time since we left Porte Oliva,” Vincen said. “I’m surprised I can still use words.”

She shifted, pulling her legs out straight before her, sitting across from him like they were two children exhausted from too much play. Vincen’s skin was sun-darkened as well, his hair longer than he usually wore it and shaggy and light. With all the time they had traveled in company, it had become easy to gloss over him. To think Yes, Vincen is here and take comfort in his presence and move on. She had managed somehow to forget that he was beautiful. And if he was, then perhaps she might be as well, in her own way. She reached out, touching the sole of his left foot with the toes of her own.

For a long moment, she didn’t speak. And then she did. “I love you, Vincen. You make everything in this mutilated world a bit better.”

“Only when I’m with you,” he said. “When you’re gone, I sulk.”

“Come over here,” she said, and he did.

Later, she sent a Dartinae girl out to the perfumers for new powders and appealed to Sabiha for aid with gowns. Between the constraints of color and size, the options were few. Clara chose a pale-green ensemble with a fairly conservative cut, though it was more daring than she would have affected on her own. When the time came to go out for the evening and make her return to court known, Vincen was among the guards and footmen, standing a little apart. His hair was combed and freshly trimmed. His borrowed uniform had bright glass buttons down the sides for decoration. She didn’t stare, but she appreciated. When he saw that he’d caught her attention, he made the faintest bow and a smirk that matched it. The boy was taking entirely too much joy in teasing her. Someone would notice. She couldn’t find it in her to chide him.

The affair was only in the middle of the scale of court events. Lady Emming had opened her garden, which meant that Clara hadn’t needed a specific invitation. There was neither music nor a dance, which signaled what sort of guest was expected, and no one was so forward as to barge in where they were unwelcome. In her absence, the style of court had shifted to the positively macabre. Cerrina Mikillien was actually wearing a cloak decorated with rabbit skulls, but she was only the most extreme of a larger trend. Clara in her new-leaf-green gown and glowing skin became a fashion of one and as difficult to overlook as a rose on snow. When asked, Clara admitted she had spent some time in the company of the army. When the questioning grew too specific, she mentioned Dawson and got teary and her interrogators were forced to leave the issue aside.

There was, after all, gossip enough to go around. Geder Palliako, it seemed, had all but retired from courtly life. He’d gone off on some little campaign to Asterilhold at the beginning of the winter. Another apostate, another splinter cult, another small slaughter of the sort the spiders engendered. Some ascribed his withdrawal after returning from it to the rise of the Timzinae in Elassae. Others to the slaughter of the hostage children. The general wisdom was that he was in council with Basrahip, planning the brilliant endgame for the nations-wide war he’d begun.

Clara left not quite as early as form permitted, but nearly so. The other women of the court—and with as many armies as still were in the field, it was a court overwhelmingly of women—would spread word of her arrival and outlandish appearance before morning, she was sure. Well, it was awkward, but it would give her a new opportunity to find which members of the court were her allies now. And she was mother of the brilliant Lord Marshal who’d swooped in from the west to parry Elassae’s blow. That was some protection. At worst, she expected to be called eccentric. If Jorey hadn’t enjoyed his current grace, the word would have been cracked. A bit of drama, a few uncomfortable probings by women of equal dignity, a few people laughing down their sleeves at her. A minor scandal at worst. A small loss, and easily born.

She was mistaken.

Hornet, the actor friend of Cithrin bel Sarcour and Master Kit, arrived in the morning dressed as a courier. She met him in the withdrawing room that overlooked the garden. Sabiha was resting in the shade, nursing her daughter, while Lady Skestinin chided the gardeners. Vincen stood discreet guard in the hall to keep them from being overheard. Hornet stood at attention, playing his role to the hilt. He seemed to be enjoying himself in it.

“Cithrin bel Sarcour is in Camnipol?” Clara said. “With Lehrer Palliako?

“Yes, Lady Kalliam.”

“Has she lost her mind?”

“No, m’lady. I’ve traveled with her a fair bit, and she’s always like this,” Hornet said. “Yardem Hane’s come as well, though he rode off south to fetch Master Kit and the captain when he heard you’d made it close.”

Clara sat on the divan, waiting for panic or outrage to overwhelm her, but they didn’t. She felt the same anxiety and bright, breathless excitement that she remembered from when she was a child steeling herself to jump into a cousin’s swimming hole from too great a height. “Has she a plan, then?”

“Yes, ma’am, and she was hoping for your help. It’s a little gathering of friends and family that needs arranging. Only it’s going to decide the fate of the world, so we’d like to get it right.”

Marcus

Karol Dannien’s army was on the road, stretched out north to south, braced for their attack. Marcus made something like fifty sword-and-bows protecting the supply wagons. Jorey sounded the approach, and their little force moved forward, approaching the vastly larger enemy’s vulnerable flank.

“Watch for it,” Marcus said under his breath. “Careful. Don’t over-commit.”

But the young Kalliam had been through the exercise enough now. The ripple in the Timzinae ranks as the order went out, the soldiers shifting to the counterattack. Jorey lifted his hand, and Marcus and the others slowed, inching toward a battle they couldn’t win.

The reinforcements from the north had been telling. Old men, sickly boys. Half a dozen women with shoulders as broad as a man’s and expressions that dared you to question their presence. These were the defenders Camnipol had to offer. The story of the vast dark empire with unstoppable armies defeating city after city, sweeping across the world like a dark tide, had been a sheet over a more prosaic story: an inexperienced war leader had overreached and left himself as vulnerable as a naked man in a dogfight. If the armies of Elassae reached Camnipol, Marcus didn’t give the city good chances. The best scenario was a sack as vicious as any he’d ever seen. The worst was Antea’s capital set on fire as an example to the next petty tyrant who thought to invade Timzinae cities.

Except that wasn’t the worst case. The worst case was more like this, all the time, forever.

The Timzinae counterattack came. The column parted, and riders poured out, streaming toward Jorey’s force. The boy barely had to sound the retreat that they’d all known was coming. Marcus and the Anteans spun their horses and rode away, loosing arrows back over their horses’ rumps as they fled. The Timzinae followed them almost half a mile this time before turning back to their own column, careful not to be drawn so far out that they left a vulnerable flank.

Jorey and his force regrouped. It would take the Timzinae something like an hour to put themselves in order and be ready for the march north. So in something just more than half that, another group of riders would appear on the top of another hillside, renew their threat on the supply wagons, and they’d do the same dance again, over and over and over until one side or the other went so mad with impatience that it made a mistake—waited too long to retreat or pursued too far and exposed a weakness. If it was Dannien’s mistake, Jorey would pick off a few supply wagons. If it was Jorey’s, Dannien would slaughter as many of the Antean men as he could and leave fewer to slow his progress toward the butchery to come.

The previous day the army hadn’t made it farther than a mile and a half from breaking camp in the morning to building its cookfires at night. That had been a very good day for Jorey. The chances were thin that they’d manage to slow the army that badly for long.

“We can’t win,” Jorey said.

Marcus swung down from the saddle and gave the poor, exhausted nag he’d been burdening a cup of water. “We’re not trying to.”

“I don’t know if I can stand this.” He almost made it a joke.

“Well, I think of it this way. Every hour they spend moving their defenses around or chasing us through the grass or playing stare-down on us is one more that the people north of here get to watch their kids grow older. Every day is another morning they have the privilege of waking up next to their husbands and wives. Feeding their dogs. Living in the houses they were born in. The ones their parents died in. Because when Dannien’s men get to them, all that ends.”

“But there’s no victory for us. There’s no ending to it. It just goes on.”

“There will be an end,” Marcus said. “Chances are it won’t be one we like, but this doesn’t last forever.”

Jorey let that sink in. When he looked out toward the horizon, it was like he was seeing all the way back to Kiaria, Suddapal, Inentai. All the way back to the beginning of the war, whenever that had been. “This is what we did to them, isn’t it?”

“And what you’ll do to them again, if you get the upper hand,” Marcus said.

“Never again. Not if I can help it.”

“No? Well, good luck with that, but we’ll have to visit the question when we’re not down a well and drowning. Everyone loves peace when they’re losing the battle.”

Canl Daskellin’s scout arrived an hour later, just as Jorey was preparing to lead his men back out to harass the Timzinae column again. The scout didn’t come alone. Marcus would have recognized the Tralgu riding high in the saddle beside him if there’d been a blanket thrown over him. He spat, turned his mount out of the formation, and trotted over.

“Captain,” Yardem said when they drew alongside.

“Can’t help noticing you’re here, Yardem.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This isn’t Carse.”

“Isn’t.”

“I left you in Carse with Cithrin.”

“Did.”

“This won’t make me happy, will it?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Report?”

“Magistra’s put together a scheme against the priests. She’s in Camnipol, and she needs Master Kit to make her argument.”

“You let her do that?”

“Stopping her wouldn’t have worked,” Yardem said. “And the situation’s desperate.”

Marcus twisted to look over his shoulder. Cithrin was in Camnipol working another of her mad plots. Of course she was. And when the city fell, she’d be in it. “How is it we’ve managed to be on both losing sides of this war?”

“It’s a talent, sir.”

“You might as well take Kit. Karol Dannien knows the trick of him, and Kit’s all but confessed to the men that it’s all hairwash anyway.”

“Be good if you came as well, sir.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Marcus said. “The Kalliam boy’s good enough, but he’s still green as grass. I’ll hold these bastards off as long as I can, but when it fails, get Cithrin away safe. If she’ll let you.”

Yardem flicked his ear, the rings jingling. “If you say so, sir.”

“It’s how it has to be,” Marcus said.

The poisoned sword across his back felt heavier. Or as heavy as always, only he was more aware of it. The sun slanted down from the afternoon sky, baking his skin and narrowing his eyes. The world all around him had a sense of being only half-real that came from having been too long on campaign. Depending on how he counted it, it was either since the march from Birancour or the caravan contract out of Vanai. Or since Merian and Alys died. It was hard to say when exactly one fight stopped and the next one began. That wasn’t just him, either. It stretched from the nursery to the history books.

“Should I ask who she’s trying to convince that they’re better off standing against the Lord Regent?” Marcus asked. “Or will it only make me anxious?”

“She’s approaching the Lord Regent.”

A hot breeze snaked off the wastes, carrying a breath of dust and salt. Far above, a hawk circled, hardly more than a dot against the pale-blue sky.

“Geder Palliako?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s talking Geder Palliako into fighting on our side? Against the priests?”

Yardem didn’t answer.

Marcus cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “You get Kit, then. I’ll need a minute to tell Kalliam he’s on his own.”

The promontory on the south of Camnipol made it seem like the bones of the earth itself had lifted up the city wall. The land sloping out to the east and west almost glowed with springtime green, and an orchard they passed at sunset caught the orange light on millions of pale petals—the promise of a good harvest in autumn if the people tending them still lived. If the orchard hadn’t burned. Oxen worked the fields, digging furrows in rich valleys. They passed a slave master driving a line of Timzinae men linked neck to neck to neck with a dull iron chain. The slaver was Firstblood with a wide, friendly smile, bright, shallow eyes, and red cheeks. He looked confused when Yardem drew his blade and held the man down as Marcus and Kit undid the chain. Likely, they’d all run off to Dannien and join the march, so Marcus made certain they all remembered the names of the men who’d freed them. At least he could give Dannien a moment’s confusion.

Apart from that distraction, they rode hard enough that there wasn’t much opportunity to talk during the day, and at the simple camp they put up at night, Marcus fell into a torpid sleep, like a man recovering from a fever or else still in its grip. He slept to the sound of Kit and Yardem talking at their little fire about love and war and the spiritual consequences of violence, so probably it was better. Kit’s worn, gaunt look softened a little on the journey. The role of army priest hadn’t suited him anyway. Hearing his genuine laugh again was like seeing a friend who had been traveling a long time and only just returned.

They reached the base of the promontory in the late afternoon of the second day’s travel and began moving up the weird, looping path of dragon’s jade as it made its way up the cliff face. If there was any hope of keeping Camnipol whole, it was likely this. A company of slingers and archers could hold the dragon’s road and force Dannien’s army to go around to the east or west and find some other path up. Camnipol might be taken, but not from the south.

The southern gate was preparing to close when they reached it, but Kit talked their way through. Likely his appearance was enough. As they passed through the slit of a gate and along the passage through the stone, Marcus had the sense that the guards shied away from the priest.

The twilit streets of Camnipol bustled with men and women of half a dozen races hurrying home before the final darkness of night. Yardem took the lead, moving through the alleys and squares with an air of passive boredom that Marcus recognized as deceptive. He matched it, and Kit—better practiced than either of them—practically blended into the stonework. At every corner, Marcus was ready to see the robes of the priesthood waiting for them. For him to come this far and die in a street brawl would be just the sort of humor the world seemed to enjoy.

The compound they reached was small. A grey stone wall surrounded it. A lantern hung from a black iron sconce by the gate. Yardem paused there.

“Should I know where this is?” Marcus asked.

Yardem pounded on the gate, three times, then two, then two again. “No, sir. It’s the compound of the Baron of Ebbingbaugh.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Geder’s estate,” Yardem said as the gate opened. “Took it from a man named Feldin Maas back before he was Lord Regent. Supposed to retire here when the prince takes the throne. Meantime he lets his father use it.”

An ancient-looking Jasuru woman ushered them in with an air of anxious confusion that suggested she hadn’t welcomed guests to the house often enough to be quite sure how it was done. The gardens were large, but from what Marcus could make out in the dying light, poorly tended. A small paved area flickered with light, and night air carried the scent of flowers and the sound of voices. Marcus recognized them.

Cary caught sight of them first, and she walked from the light into the shadows, falling into Kit’s arms as he fell into hers. Then Mikel, then Hornet and Sandr and Charlit Soon, and Lak, still uncertain of his place in the company. They stood together, heads pressed to each other’s shoulders, their eyes wet with tears, and Kit in the center, beatific joy on his face. Marcus had seen it before. After so many partings and reunions, some part of him expected it to become rote or common or insincere, but it never was.

However often they came together, the troupe always felt it deeply. Even when the players themselves had changed. It was, Marcus thought, part of walking a stage and calling forth the emotions of the crowd. To do what they did, they had to feel deeply and authentically and without reserve, just the way that doing what he did—overseeing the death of men both under his command and on the enemy line—meant falling back into step with Yardem despite months or years apart as if they’d only walked into adjacent rooms for a moment.

A thick-bodied man with white hair and a smile that looked as if it didn’t get used much came out of the house and spread his hands to them.

“Welcome to my son’s house. Come in, please. Come in. I broke out the good wine. It’s a celebration,” the older man said, but his voice had the high drone of anxiety and fear beneath it.

Marcus followed him down a hall to a well-lit drawing room with panels of thin mesh fit into frames instead of one wall. It let the breeze through, but discouraged the insects. And there, sitting side by side on a silk divan, were Clara Kalliam and Cithrin bel Sarcour. Cithrin’s smile was part rueful and part defiant. She rose to her feet and walked to him.

A traitor lump knotted Marcus’s throat. Something that felt like sorrow and pride and fear.

“Magistra,” he said.

“Captain Wester,” she said fondly, but casually. As if they had only walked for a moment into adjacent rooms. Yardem coughed once, in a way that meant I see it too. Cithrin wasn’t his daughter. Had never been his daughter. And still, a hell of a woman they’d raised, he and Yardem and the players. A long way she’d come. “I assume you’d like a private word?”

“Several,” he said.

She turned and nodded to Clara, who returned the gesture. Cithrin led the way into the garden. Nightfall had called up a fountain of moon lilies. The gentle scent soothed like the murmur of a river. Moonlight refashioned the leaves in silver and black. Cithrin sat on a low stone bench, and glowed in the moonlight herself. He lowered himself beside her, fighting the urge to take her hand. For a moment, he envied Kit.

“Didn’t expect to find you here,” Marcus said. “Last I’d heard you were safe in Carse.”

Cithrin chuckled. “Last you heard I was in Carse, anyway. There’s no place safe. Not now.”

“Got Barriath Kalliam to carry you here?”

“He’s back north with the ship now, in case we need a way out. I think he may have soured on my company.”

“Yardem told me some hairwash about you confronting Geder Palliako and… I don’t know. Turning him sane and good with the power of your kiss? What is the plan here? Because all I can see looks like a particularly gaudy kind of mad.”

“Don’t raise your voice,” Cithrin said.

“Apologies. I’m bone-tired and scared as hell. Every hour you spend in this place puts you and all those back there at risk.”

“I agree we should move quickly,” she said. “But this is our best hope.”

“Then our best hope is shit,” he said. “Listen to me, Cithrin. You cannot change Geder Palliako.”

She turned sharply. “I don’t want to. I need Geder, and more than that I need Geder to be Geder.”

“The man is evil, Cithrin. We can put bows and bells on it and dance ribbons into maypoles—”

“Stop that,” she said, annoyance in her voice.

“Stop what?”

“Making him into the story about him. He’s not Orcus the Demon King. He’s not war incarnate. He’s just a person, and my job is to judge people and risk and what losses are wise to hazard in return for what rewards.”

“He’s a person with a history of hacking people to death if he feels betrayed by them,” Marcus said. “And not to make the knife too sharp, but he feels betrayed by you.”

“Yes, I am putting my life at risk. And yours and Clara’s and Barriath’s. All of us will be killed if I’m wrong. But the return if I’m right will be everything, and…”

She turned away, her lips pursed like she’d tasted something sour.

“And?”

“And I’m right,” she said.

Marcus wove his fingers together over his knee. From the house, Charlit Soon laughed and Sandr’s grieved voice floated behind it, the words less clear than the tone of them. Everything in Marcus’s body was screaming to throw Cithrin over his shoulder and run. Find a way to get her away from the city and the little kings who threw children to their deaths as a kind of political punctuation mark. The urge was larger than oceans, vast and powerful, and he recognized it from a lifetime of nightmares. It was the same thing he felt when he wanted to draw Merian and Alys from the fire. The want to save her was as complete as for his own wife and daughter, and it was as impossible. It left him trembling.

But then, he hadn’t understood her when she wanted to turn gold into paper either, and everyone had seemed to think that terribly clever. So maybe he just didn’t see what she did. Faith in her was as good a bet as anything.

“What’s the job, then?” he asked.

Her face took on a calm seriousness that was better than a smile. “In the short term, see to it that we aren’t interrupted. Especially not by any of the priests. I’ve arranged a bit of a theater piece. I believe that having his father with us gets us past the first barrier, but there will be some dangerous spots.”

“Glad we agree on that, anyway,” Marcus said. “Care to tell me what you expect they are?”

A bell sounded, dry and clanking, but with a long rolling finish that seemed to cut the night in two: all the moments that had come before it, and all the ones after.

“We may have to learn those lines when we say them,” Cithrin said.

“You mean?”

Cithrin gestured toward the garden gate. “He’s here.”

Geder

Geder’s illness, whatever it was, seemed to be getting worse, or at least no better. He couldn’t sleep at night or wake fully in the day. The business of the empire was as vast as it had ever been, but he couldn’t even bring himself to address it. Letters and reports and requests came in each day, high nobles requested audiences on any number of concerns. Rates of taxation and disputes over land rights and slights of honor. Reports from the searchers he’d sent to Lyoneia and Hallskar, tracking the ancient wonders and threats of the world that he could no longer muster any enthusiasm for. Geder had a basket the size of a bed filled with invitations to one thing and another. The blessing of Maken Estellin’s newborn granddaughter, a garden fantasia by Lady Nestin Caot, a tasting of brandy captured from Nus the year before at a private room of the Great Bear. Everyone seemed to want something of him, and the weight of it bore him down until even the simplest thing felt too much because it was attached to all the rest of it.

The death throes of the enemies of the goddess were growing stronger, which Basrahip told him was a good sign. Inentai and Nus and Suddapal were all in open revolt now, and a Timzinae army was pushing its way north with Jorey and Canl Daskellin doing all they could to hold it back. Written reports said the temple in Nus had been burned to the ground and the priests with it, but that was fine. It was good. Basrahip said it was good. And despite that one terrible haunting moment of confusion that Geder had seen in the huge priest’s eyes, Geder believed him. He heard the man’s voice, and he believed, but he was so tired. And the fog grew in his mind.

His study was warm with the light of sunset. A bird sang outside the window, three rising notes and a pause and the same three again, like a musician practicing a flourish. Geder plucked at the cuff of an embroidered jacket sent from Asterilhold in celebration of his glorious victory over the apostate. It was hard to remember sometimes that he’d done that.

A carafe of cool water sat on the edge of his desk, sweating. When the drops of water it called out of the air dried, a girl from the kitchens would come and replace it with another that Geder also wouldn’t drink from. This was the third of its kind that had come since he’d sat down. It was strange that he felt he’d been working so hard but nothing, so far, had been finished or done.

The knock at the door startled him. A thin-faced Dartinae woman in a servant’s robe bent almost double with her bow. He caught a glimpse of the tops of her breasts as she stood, but they excited neither lust nor shame. Just a kind of weariness.

“Lord Regent,” she said, holding out a silver plate. A slip of butter-pale paper stood folded on it. He almost turned away, but the script was familiar. His father’s. Geder felt a mix of pleasure and anxiety as he plucked it up and unfolded it, but at least he felt something.

I’m at your mansion here in the city, and I need you to come over right away. There’s something we need to discuss. I love you very much.

Geder blinked at the words, his heart beating a little less sluggishly than it had a moment before. It was the profession of love at the end that scared him. Something had happened. Something must have happened.

“Call a carriage,” he told the Dartinae girl. “And tell the guard I need to go. Right away.”

And still right away took the better part of an hour. The sun was gone below the roofs and city wall in the west by the time Geder’s carriage surrounded by his personal guard clattered across the cobblestones of the darkening city. A fog was rising from the depths of the Division and creeping out into the streets that surrounded it, the bridges across the great urban canyon shifting and undulating like the surface of a slow, grey lake. Geder drummed his fingers against his thigh, willing the driver to push the horses faster. Lehrer Palliako wasn’t a man given to appearing in court or sending mysterious messages. What if he’d fallen ill? What if something was wrong that Geder didn’t have the power to fix? He wondered as they arrived at the gate whether he should have brought a cunning man with him, just in case.

As soon as his carriage stopped and before he’d even stepped out of it, the gate slave struck a bell. The clanking sound had a long, clear finish, and before it had faded to silence, Lehrer Palliako was walking out into the street to meet him. He was well enough to walk, then. Maybe it wasn’t his health.

“My good boy,” his father said. “My good, good boy.” There were little tears in his eyes catching the torchlight. “I knew you’d come.”

“Of course I would,” Geder said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

They hugged awkwardly before Lehrer tugged him forward to the dark gate and the garden beyond. “Come along. And leave the guard here. There’s something we need to talk about in private.”

“They can be trusted,” Geder said. “They’re my personal guard. Basrahip talks to them every morning. They’re the most loyal soldiers in the empire.”

“Leave ’em here,” Lehrer said. His voice had taken on a rougher note. This was all very strange, but Geder motioned to the captain of his guard, and the swordsmen took up positions in the street and along the wall. If they weren’t to guard him, they’d guard the house he was in. And it wasn’t as if there were going to be anything dangerous. It was his house. His father.

Once the gate had closed behind them, his father’s pace slowed. Geder walked at his side past a wide spray of moon lilies bobbing in the soft breeze.

“I want you to know,” Lehrer said, “that I’m proud of you. Whatever happens, I’m very, very proud of you.”

“Of course,” Geder said with a tight, nervous laugh. “I mean I’m Lord Regent. Master of the Empire. We’ve almost doubled the size of Antea since I stepped in. Who’d ever have thought that we’d be this important?”

“That’s not why I’m proud of you,” Lehrer said.

“But it’s still quite a thing. You must admit, it’s quite a thing.”

Lehrer didn’t respond. They passed into a little courtyard and through a screen to a drawing room with pale screens that kept the worst of the bugs away. Clara Kalliam sat there on a divan. Her face was so dark and thin, he almost didn’t recognize her at first, but when she rose to her feet, the movement was unmistakable. Are they here to tell me they’re getting married? Geder thought. And then, Would I be Jorey’s brother then?

“Lord Regent,” Clara said, her voice warm and gentle.

“Lady Kalliam?”

Lehrer sat on a silk chair, bent forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “I love you, my good, good boy. I love you, and I need to you listen. Don’t… don’t be afraid.”

“Of course I’m not afraid,” Geder said, though it wasn’t true. “And I’ll always listen to you.”

“Not to me,” Lehrer said.

“Then—” Geder began.

“To us,” a voice said from behind him.

Cithrin bel Sarcour. Cithrin, in a pale dress. Geder heard a low grunting sound like someone had been punched, and realized afterward that it had come from him. In the light of the lanterns, she glowed like the wick of a candle that had just been blown out. Her expression was soft, her hands clasped before her. He had a vague impression of people at her side, but he couldn’t care about them. His heart clattered in his chest like a kettle suddenly at the boil.

He’d imagined some version of this moment so many times. Cithrin throwing herself at his feet, weeping and begging his forgiveness. Or else haughty and dismissive, reveling in his humiliation. Neither version of her made sense now that she was here.

She was here. Why was she here? And she was so beautiful. And why couldn’t he catch his breath?

“I didn’t know you were here,” he heard himself say, wincing even as he spoke the words. Of course he hadn’t known. God, he sounded like an idiot. But she didn’t laugh at him, only lifted her hand a degree. And yet here I am.

“Geder!” another voice said. Cary, the actor. She stepped out from Cithrin’s side, her arms wide, and scooped him up in a vast hug. And then Hornet, grinning, and Mikel and Sandr. And a couple of new people Geder didn’t even know. They all hugged him and clapped him on the back, grinning and laughing and greeting him like he was an old friend they hadn’t seen in too long. And at the end of them, Clara Kalliam took him in her arms too, pressing her cheek to his.

And then Cithrin was there, and she put her arms around him, embracing him gently. Don’t wake up from this, Geder thought. If this is a dream, die in it. Only don’t wake up.

“I don’t understand,” Geder said. And then, without being sure quite what he meant, “I’m sorry.”

“There’s someone else you need to talk to,” Lehrer said, his hand on Geder’s shoulder. “Before any of the rest of this.”

The priest looked much like the others, only maybe thinner and more worn. Olive-toned skin and wiry hair, and an expression of gentleness and an indulgent fondness. “We haven’t met,” the man said, “but it seems we have a great number of friends in common. I am called Kitap rol Keshmet, or sometimes Master Kit.”

He took Geder’s hand in both of his. Amid the shock and confusion and joy, Geder felt a thread of fear. “Are you with Basrahip?”

“I knew him once, when he was a boy. But that was many years ago.”

Geder felt a cool breath of fear. “Are you an apostate, then?”

The priest sighed. “I’m afraid you’ll have to decide that for yourself.”

Geder shook his head. His body felt weirdly separate, like he was watching himself from a distance. “For myself?”

Lehrer took Geder’s elbow and guided him to a chair. Kit walked along with them and sat at Geder’s side. A beetle that had escaped the frames and mesh floated in the air, its wings beating so quickly he couldn’t tell they were there except for a soft buzzing.

“I think you are aware of the curious gifts that the spiders allow men like myself, yes? I hope you will understand, then, the position I find myself in.”

“I don’t think I do,” Geder said. His father sat beside him, leaning in toward the priest. Cithrin put her weight on the divan’s side, leaning casually against it. Her gown clung to her arm, draped from her shoulders and breasts. Geder couldn’t focus clearly on anything but her. At least not until Kit spoke again.

“I believe you have been played for a fool, Lord Regent. I believe that, but you must make up your own mind on the matter. And because of my… condition, I find I must choose my words with you very carefully.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything you’ve heard about the goddess and her role in the world might be wrong,” Kit said. “You will have to consider it, and come to your own conclusion. Knowing what you do of me, and Basrahip, and all the men who are like the two of us, you can weigh what you know of us and of the world, and decide for yourself what is true. It’s possible that we will disagree.”

Something in Geder’s mind shifted. “Disagree?” he echoed.

“You can disagree,” Kit said, his voice low and powerful as a drum. “To look at the world and doubt the stories you’ve heard of it is your right. Your responsibility, even. If something can be harmed by a question, I think it should be. Must be, even. And especially when it’s said by someone like me.”

“But Basrahip—”

“The things the Basrahip says may be wrong,” Kit said. “You should look at the evidence yourself and see what sense you make of it. I understand you’re something of a scholar.”

“I was,” Geder said. His hand was shaking. That was very strange. Why should his hands be shaking? “I am. I’ve translated text out of a dozen languages. Not always very well, but… I have… I have a collection of speculative essays.”

“Then perhaps you understand already the importance of looking outside of a story for other bits of evidence that a thing is true.”

“But written words are dead,” Geder said. “They’re just things. They can’t be true or false. The living voice can carry intention in a way that written words can’t.”

“Possibly,” Kit said. “But only possibly. Are you certain of that?”

“You’re doing it to me now, though,” Geder said. “You’re using the power of the goddess to… to…”

“To open your mind to doubt,” Kit said, “and to ask that you reevaluate the conclusions you’ve drawn. Not mine. Your own. If they are true, then considering them can do no harm. For example, you have heard—I did too when I was at the temple—that nothing written can be judged and those things which are spoken can be. Is that your experience?”

“Yes,” Geder said, and looked at his father. Lehrer’s expression mixed fear and pain and a fierceness Geder had rarely seen. “I mean, I think so…”

“Listen to my voice, Lord Geder,” Kit said. “Some of the things the Basrahip has told you may be true. Others may not. You must judge them for yourself and decide whether the world he describes is the same as the one you know. You are permitted to disagree.”

“But—”

“Listen to my voice, friend. You can disagree.”

Cary came to him, a cup of water in her hand. Geder sipped from it out of a kind of habit. He looked out past the pale screens to the moonlight on the roofs of Camnipol to the vast tower of the Kingspire. The banner of the goddess, red in the daylight, had faded almost to black. Lights glowed in the high windows where Basrahip and the other priests held their ceremonies. The great doors had been swung open to allow in the night’s cool air. Geder felt like the tower himself. It felt as though the fog that had taken him for the past months was being stirred by a cold wind. The illness that no cunning man could identify, much less treat, began to resolve. The sensation of it was physical, and the words that it carried were I can disagree. He hadn’t been ill. He’d been confused. Caught between two things that he couldn’t reconcile until a kind of moral vertigo had consumed him. But he could disagree.

“They came to help, Son,” Lehrer said.

Everything that Basrahip said, everything about the war and the goddess and the nature of the apostate… He could disagree. As soon as it was said, he knew that he did, and the force of it pushed at his throat like too many people rushing through too small a door.

“I don’t know,” Geder said, and the words were like a confession. “I don’t know. I’m not… sure.”

“Is there some question that’s bothered you, my lord?” Kit asked.

“The fire years,” Geder said, then stopped. His jaw felt almost stiff with the effort of saying it. He paused, tried to catch his breath. The words hurt in a way he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t physical, but if it had been, it would have been the bright, itching pain of tearing off a scab. “Basrahip said there were years after the dragons fell when the whole world was burned, but there’s nothing about that in any of the histories.”

“I see,” Kit said, but Geder couldn’t stop now. The words had begun and they wouldn’t stop until he’d finished.

“And there are buildings in Hallskar with wooden perches. Either the perches would have to be a wood that doesn’t burn or someone would have had to make them after there weren’t any dragons left to use them. And there’s not a layer of ashes under any of the ruins in the Division, and it just doesn’t make sense!”

“Then perhaps there were no fire years,” Kit said.

Geder’s blood felt bright in his veins. Somewhere in his gesturing, he’d spilled a bit of the water from his cup. It dripped down his knuckles. Clara Kalliam put a hand on his shoulder and smiled down at him. His father nodded. His breath felt clean and clear for the first time he could remember. Across the room, Cithrin stood like a statue of some ancient hero, her chin high but her eyes kind.

What if it wasn’t the death throes of the enemy, but just losing a war? What if killing the apostate in Asterilhold wasn’t the final victory of the goddess? What if having a temple in a city didn’t mean it would never fall?

Wouldn’t it all make more sense?

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you know. And I’ll say what I think of it.”

“Yes,” Cithrin said, as Kit cleared his throat.

“I think I might not be best suited to that,” he said. “Do you think we should invite in Captain Wester?”

It took hours. The story of Master Kit’s apostasy, the power he’d found in the word probably, and the price he’d paid for it was all told by Marcus Wester and a Tralgu called Yardem, presumably so that Geder wouldn’t feel he was being influenced by the spiders in the apostate’s blood. The trek through the wilds of Lyoneia and the ancient ruins guarded by the Southling tribes there. The sword and the temple, the attempt on the life of the goddess, and the discovery that she was no more than a statue and a story. And then the search that Geder himself had begun with Dar Cinlama, and the discovery of the last dragon.

Then Cithrin came and sat by him, her voice low and serious, her pale eyes on his in a way he’d thought would never happen again. She didn’t take his hand, and he didn’t reach for hers. She told what she’d learned from Inys. The prank against Morade that had begun the last war between the dragons, the invention of the tool that would strip the dragons of their slaves, the release of the spiders, and the fall of the ancient world. Geder listened, enraptured. It was like all the best histories and poems and speculative essays he’d ever read, wrapped together with confirmation by sources who’d been there.

All my time in power, he thought, I could have been doing this. I could have been having conversations like this one and hearing stories and putting them together. It made something familiar and terrible shift in his gut that he didn’t think about. Not yet.

They came to the creation of the Timzinae—a race made for fighting the dragon Morade—and he stopped them.

“But why did the Timzinae want to kill Aster?” Geder said. “Why did they suborn Lord Kalliam?”

“They didn’t,” Clara Kalliam said. “Dawson would never have taken direction from a foreign power or another race. My husband did what he did because he felt the throne had been usurped by a cult of foreign priests who were using you and Prince Aster as puppets.”

And, she didn’t need to say, he was right.

For the first time, the implications of it all struck him and left a vast and oceanic hollowness behind his breastbone. If this was all true, if Basrahip’s goddess was an artifact of the dragons, if the Timzinae were only another race of humans fashioned from the Firstbood as they’d all been, if the war was not about bringing the light of truth to the world, then Jorey’s father had been right.

The cities they’d taken in the war were no more or less likely to fall than any other captured land in any other of a thousand wars. Geder had been tricked into throwing those children into the Division. Like a hand puppet stuck on the big priest’s fist, he’d been telling Aster all the things Basrahip had poured into his own ear and none of it true.

He’d been played for the greatest idiot in history, and he’d brought Antea to the edge of collapse by it. The thing that had been moving in his belly came to life, lifting up into his heart, his throat, his brain.

It was relief.

Cithrin

It was working. The change showed in the way he held himself and the timbre of his voice. Geder Palliako sat on his divan like it was made from nails and he was determined to endure it. All around, the others sat and stood, spoke and were silent. Played their parts. Cithrin cared about Geder.

He looked… bad. His skin had taken on a strange sheen, like dust and oil. His eyes seemed smaller than she remembered them, and darker. When he first came in, his father had led him to Clara to create a setting of the familiar. The known. Geder’s voice then had been tight and tense, his body braced as if against a coming blow. She’d feared what would happen when she spoke, and it made her speak sooner than she’d intended.

His dark eyes had widened when he saw her, but he hadn’t called for his guards. When Cary embraced him, and then the other actors, each greeting him as an old friend, as if none of the atrocities that had come between the day he’d come out of hiding and now had ever been, he’d seemed dazed. The deeper change came with Kit, sitting at his side, opening the doors of Geder’s mind the way she’d hoped he would. When the history of the spiders came clear to him, it was like watching a child see his first rainbow. The joy and wonder in it would have been beautiful if they’d been in some other setting. As it was, they were more unsettling. What she had hoped for, what she’d come here to achieve—but unsettling.

Marcus spoke to him in professional tones, like a soldier giving a report of a battle, as he explained all that had come before. Disapproval showed in the corner of his mouth, but Geder didn’t see it. He only listened. As Marcus tore away every story that Geder had lived by, every poisoned dream, Geder’s breath deepened. The tightness in his voice smoothed gently away. As he grew calmer, she did as well. When her turn came, and she sat beside him, he seemed almost the man she’d known in the darkness, and she could at least remember the girl she had been.

They brought tea and coffee which Geder drank without seeming to notice he was doing so. She unfolded the story of Inys and Morade with all the skill and grace Cary and the players had been able to teach her, and Geder listened to it all. His eyes were on her, but seeing the deep past and the grand sweep of history. He could kill me, she thought, but he isn’t going to.

The idea felt like victory.

“But why did the Timzinae want to kill Aster?” Geder said. “Why did they suborn Lord Kalliam?”

Cithrin looked for the words, for the gentle way to say it. Clara Kalliam answered before she could, and her voice was hard as stone.

“They didn’t. Dawson would never have taken direction from a foreign power or another race. My husband did what he did because he felt the throne had been usurped by a cult of foreign priests who were using you and Prince Aster as puppets.”

Geder’s eyes went flat, his expression terribly still. His eyes flickered from side to side as though he were reading some invisible text written on the air. Cithrin felt her belly tighten with excitement and fear. It had all gone so well, and now they were at the crisis point. Everything depended on the next few seconds. If he heard the woman’s words as an insult, they would all be dead by morning. Cithrin felt a deep calm come over her. She didn’t think he would.

At the edge of the room, Yardem started and blinked, his ears flat against his head.

“I see,” Geder said, the syllables gentle as a fawn. His eyes filled with tears that he wiped away with the back of one hand. And then, a moment later, “I understand. Thank you.”

He rose to his feet, and his father came forward. The elder Palliako’s face drew a picture of regret and resolve. “Are you well?”

“I think,” Geder said, his voice artificially calm, “it might be better if I could stay here tonight? I don’t think I want to go back to the Kingspire right now. And if it’s not too much, will you stay? Will you all stay too?”

“Of course,” Lehrer said. “You never have to ask.”

“Thank you, Da.”

They embraced. A tear tracked down Lehrer’s cheek. For a moment, Cithrin wondered what it was like to have a mother or a father who would take you in no matter what you had done. It was here before her, and she still couldn’t imagine it. When they parted, Geder could not look in his father’s eyes. His hands were at his sides in fists, his face dark. His lips moved as he talked to himself, too quietly for her or any of them to hear, and he shook his head.

“You are the only one who can stop them.”

His eyes found her like he was peering through a fog. “What?”

“You can stop them. You’re the only one who can put an end to this. Call them together, all of them. A conclave like the Council of Eventide, only for the priests. You can tell them it’s because of the rise of the apostates. It won’t be telling them the whole truth, but it won’t be lying.”

“And then what?” Geder said.

Kit cleared his throat. “There is a play called The Archer King. The king, betrayed by his ministers and lords, calls them all together for a triumph, then locks the doors of the common house and floods it.” The actor shook his head. “The nearest convenient river would be in the depths of the Division, of course. So I can’t recommend that.”

Geder didn’t speak for a moment. When he did, his words were cool. “We’ll find something.”

Clara Kalliam left shortly after Geder and Lehrer Palliako retired. Staying away until daybreak would, she said, excite comment, and she’d already done more than enough of that for the time being. The players and Master Kit went to the servants’ quarters where there were cots enough for them all. Lehrer Palliako’s hospitality meant that Cithrin had her own bed in a small chamber of its own that opened into a narrow courtyard of ivy and lilac, an honored guest in the house of her enemy. A thin mesh over her window let in a breeze thick with the scent of the flowers and, beneath that, of the city. Perfume and shit. She didn’t take off her dress, only lay on the mattress and pretended that sleep would come.

Her gut was a single knot, hard as stone. Her body was wretchedly tired. She trembled with it. But each time she closed her eyes, her mind sped away from her—where was Geder now, what was he thinking, would destruction of the priests mean her own transgression against his pride would be forgotten, what would she do if he came to her chamber now in the night—and without noticing when it had happened, she realized her eyes were open again.

Outside, birds that had been silent began their raucous choir. She saw no sign of the coming dawn, but they did. She forced her eyes closed again, again found them open, and surrendered to the inevitable. Even if she’d had enough wine to bring her down to sleep, it was too late to begin it now. And in her present situation, she wouldn’t have. Miserable or not, she needed her wits. She rose, washed her face in the basin, combed out her hair, and prepared herself as best she could to face the new day and the dangers she’d created for it. When she opened the door to the hall, ready to call for a servant to bring her food or else lead her to it, Marcus Wester was waiting. He sat with his back against the wall opposite her door, the poisoned blade on the floor beside him. His hand rested on its hilt.

“Captain?”

“Magistra,” he said, and the tone of his voice made it half a joke.

“Are you… all right? What are you doing?”

“The job, as I understand it,” he said, levering himself up with a grunt. As he rose, she caught a glimpse of his shoulder where the sword usually rested. The skin there was red and peeling as from a sunburn. “With the present factors at play, I thought having one of our guard outside your room was literally the least we should do. I also considered killing our hosts and slipping out the back, but it seemed rude.”

“Have you been here all night?”

“No,” he said, brushing his sleeves with open palms. “Yardem took first watch. I caught a little sleep.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“We’re good.”

Outside, the birds all went silent at once, then burst forth again even louder. Marcus glanced down the hall, one way and then the other. When he spoke, his voice was low and disapproving. “I saw what you did back there.”

“Back where?”

“With the Lord Regent.”

Cithrin’s mouth pressed thin and she nodded back toward her room. Marcus followed her through it and out to the little courtyard. The sky had gone from black to charcoal. A single high cloud held a delicate pink color. The lilacs nodded in the little breeze like holy men sprinkling blessings out over a crowd, filling the air with a sweetness that was almost cloying. Marcus found a low stone bench and sat. Cithrin crossed her arms.

“How does this go?” Marcus said. “In your head, how does it play out? Everyone comes and gives Palliako a hug and rubs his little belly and suddenly he’s our dog? Is he going to come running when we whistle now?”

“I’ve given him the chance to look at his world from a different perspective,” Cithrin said. “What happens next depends on what he sees.” Weariness sharpened the words more than she’d intended. It felt as though she’d spent her life with all her decisions being questioned by Marcus Wester. He could afford to have a little more faith in her. More than that, she wished she’d rested as well in her bed as he had in her hallway.

“You played him as much the fool as the spiders have. Damned near drowned him with how much everybody liked him,” Marcus said. “Everyone there touching his shoulder and taking him in their arms and smiling at him like he’s always been their favorite.”

“Love is what he wanted. What he still wants. I only pointed out that we are a way it could be supplied.”

“But we aren’t. The truth is everyone in that room hates that man. We’d each of us have thrown him off a bridge if there was a way to.”

“Not everyone,” Cithrin said. “His father was sincere.”

“And what happens when someone lets slip? Geder Palliako’s head is a bag of snakes. If he decides we’re the one plucking his strings—”

“Then we’re very nearly no worse off than we were before we came,” Cithrin said. “We’ll die a bit sooner, and the world we leave behind won’t be worth living in anyway.”

His half-coughed laughter surprised her. “Well, that’s true enough, I suppose.”

“Here’s how it plays out. Geder does as he has always done. He sees that he’s been made a fool of by the priests. He gets angry about it, has them all brought together, and we kill them.” She spread her hands.

“It won’t work.”

“It will,” she said. “Geder’s predictable. Yes, we’ll need to be careful with him, but we have the thing he needs, and he will trade it for it. Love for dead priests. This will—”

“That’s not the hole in it.” The little rosy cloud had faded to white. The grey sky had brightened into blue. She could see Marcus’s face better now, the lines and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. The yellowed ivory of his eyes. “You say you can have him call the dinner bell and have the priests come running, and so I believe you can. Makes me nervous as hell, but anyone else’s battle plan besides my own has that effect. The problem’s the trap.”

She wanted to yell at him, to tell him that he was trying to find ways that she’d failed. That he didn’t want anyone to win if it wasn’t through him. It was the voice of her fatigue. “Go on,” she said.

“We have to build the thing. There have to be people at the palace ready to throw boards over some banquet hall’s windows or rain burning oil through a false roof or… something. And this while as near as we can manage it all the lie-sniffing priests there are swarm around the court like flies on a shit heap. This conspiracy of yours is too big already. Throw in builders and servants? The people who supply the oil and the boards? Even if it were Geder’s own guard, it’s too many people to keep the secret.”

“So we find a better way to build the trap. Simpler.”

Marcus made a thin grunt and scratched his head. “All right.”

“You have an idea?”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But if you need one, I’ll find one. Someplace. Yardem, maybe. He’s always impressed by his own wisdom and clarity. But we will have to be clever about it. And there’s the problem of getting all the priests here when we’ve got two armies making their way toward us. If we wait too long, Camnipol will have already fallen when the bastards get here.”

“Can it be saved?”

“The city? No. If Camnipol’s not a ruin by winter, it’ll be because Karol Dannien decided to let it live. We can postpone the thing, but we can’t stop it.” He coughed out something like a laugh, and looked out to the east. The tower of the Kingspire was barely visible above the courtyard wall. “That temple of theirs. That’s a long way up, isn’t it? Well… ha. All right, I may have a way.”

But Cithrin barely heard him. The exhaustion in her body, already crippling, doubled. The army of Elassae was coming, and she should have been delighted. Not so long ago, she would have been. They were the wronged, the people crying out for justice that they deserved. That she and Magistra Isadau and Marcus—and Clara Kalliam in her way—had all risked their lives to achieve. She had seen the body of the Timzinae priest hung from his own church. She had seen the children ripped from their families, their parents shipped away as slaves. Many of those children were dead now. How could she want those to go unavenged? And yet what would killing the bakers and groomsmen, street cleaners and taproom servers of Camnipol achieve? No depth of violence ever retrieved a single person from the death they’d already suffered. More dead were only more dead.

“I don’t know what justice is,” she said.

“That’s because it isn’t the sort of thing you discover. It’s a thing you make.” She looked at him, and he shrugged. “There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It’s not that houses and songs aren’t real, but you don’t just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”

“Like war gold,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have been my first example, but why not? That’s about as made up a thing as I can think of.”

“Antea’s crimes can’t be paid for,” she said, testing the thought for the first time even as she spoke it. “They could fill the Division with the dead twice over, and it wouldn’t rebuild Suddapal or bring their children back to life.”

“That’s true enough.”

“It’s another debt that can never be repaid. That’s…” Marcus’s head snapped up to look at her, but she only shook her head. It was there, at the edge of her understanding, but she was spread too thin to grasp it now. It would come if she gave it time. If she had enough time to give it.

She walked through the house only half seeing it. Tapestries hung along the walls, telling the tale of House Palliako or else merely showing the skill of the weavers. A few servants scuttled along before her, staying out of her way as they’d been told to do. War was a debt paid with a debt that left both sides poorer. It was always that, and never anything else no matter what the songs and stories claimed. That was what Morade had seen and embraced. The mad dragon emperor had tried to drown the world in an acid that would eat away everything. But he’d failed once.

The dining hall was smaller than Maestro Asanpur’s café had been. Two long wooden tables stood at an angle to each other, platters of eggs and beans, bread and jam standing ready to be eaten. At the smell, Cithrin’s stomach lurched awake, and a vast appetite filled her. At the end of one table, the farthest from her, Lehrer Palliako and Geder sat across from each other, talking and gesturing and laughing. A father and a son, taking pleasure in each other’s company. Seeing them was like looking down a cliff; it left her a little dizzy. Or maybe that was only hunger and lack of sleep.

“Magistra!” Lehrer said, rising to his feet. “Please, come sit with us. There’s enough room, God knows. Isn’t there enough room, my boy?”

Geder nodded, but his eyes were on his feet and a wild blush was pushing up his neck and out to his cheeks. When his gaze did flicker up to meet hers, he tried a smile. She returned it, and the artifice was easier than she’d expected. And then she remembered how many lives had been spent by his misplaced affection and she looked away. Marcus shifted behind her.

“Thank you, my lord,” Cithrin said, “but the captain and I have business we should see to. I’ve only come for a moment.”

“Well, eat. Eat before you go,” Lehrer said, gesturing toward the expanse of food. “This is all for you and your people, after all.”

Cithrin took a plate of sausages in her hand. The first one popped between her teeth, flooding her mouth with grease and salt and the sweetness of roasted garlic. “You’re too generous,” she said.

“Not generous enough,” Lehrer said.

Clara

I am reconciling myself to the idea that I will never see my husband again,” Lady Skestinin said.

“Oh you mustn’t say that,” Delliah Kemmin said around a mouthful of sweet bun.

The garden party was at Lord Emming’s estate. A pavilion of colored canvas decorated with banners of colored silk had been raised over a wide paved square at the garden’s center. A trio of Dartinae slaves wearing glittering robes that matched their glowing eyes stood on a dais not far away from Clara’s table, their voices mixed in a careful harmony. They kept the song quiet enough not to interfere with conversation. The air was thick with the scents of turned earth and flowers and freshly brewed tea. The overall effect was to leave Clara shifting with a barely contained impatience.

“It has been too long without word,” Lady Skestinin said. “He was lost in Porte Oliva before the city fell. And I’ve been seeing a cunning man on it.”

“No,” Rielle Castannan said. “Which one?”

“The Jasuru woman that Lady Caot recommended,” Lady Skestinin said. “She’s been lighting fires for me and reading the flames. She’s seen his body in them, she said. Killed and buried under the plains of Birancour.” Her voice broke at the last. Clara put down her teacup too abruptly. It rattled.

“Before you give up all hope,” she said, “I would recommend being sure your cunning man is what she claims to be.”

Lady Skestinin’s lips tightened and her shoulders slid back a degree. “I’m not certain what you mean, Lady Kalliam.”

“Ask her something you have the answer to,” Clara said. “See whether she can learn what you do know before you put too much trust in her ability to know what you don’t.”

Because, while the plains of Birancour was a pretty phrase and rich with connotations of lost love and exotic locations, she’d been there. There were any number of Antean dead in that ground, but Lord Skestinin was in a decent if uncomfortable cell in Carse. Not that she could say that. It was only that watching another woman’s grief be exploited upset her, even if it was Lady Skestinin’s.

“Or take one of the priests,” Lady Kemmin said.

“Or that,” Clara agreed, sourly.

A dozen women or more had arranged themselves around the garden, each according to their own dignity and position. Depending upon who spoke to whom and where the apparently casual traffic of social exchange went, their status would be ratified by the women around them or else denied. Clara watched it with a practiced eye for the occult significance of it all: Lady Emming had taken the chair with its back to the house, and so commanded the best view of the gardens; Canl Daskellin’s youngest daughter had arrived slightly before her older sister; the ladies whose houses extended to Asterilhold weren’t deferring to the purely Antean houses the way they had been when Clara had left to follow Jorey. All of it had meaning.

Including—especially—Nickayla Essian’s dress.

It was simply cut, and flattered her figure. The cloth was a gentle green set off by more vibrant ribbons at the spine and woven into the skirt. During King Simeon’s reign, it would have been an acceptable if unremarkable choice. Among the black leather jackets and unsettling ossuary cloaks of the present fashion, she stood out like a single live blossom on a burned field. The context made it bold, even brash. And more, it announced an allegiance to Clara. The borrowed green dress she’d worn to Lady Emming’s previous, smaller garden party had begun a new fashion. Nickayla Essian’s statement was the boldest, but once Clara knew to look, there were others. Dannie Sennian had a pale-green ribbon woven in her braids. Lauria Caot, while still sporting a fringe of bones along the cuffs of her sleeves, had a choker with a single new leaf as its pendant.

None of them knew or could know the depth of the conspiracy in which she’d involved herself. She felt tired because she’d spent a fair portion of the previous night with the Lord Regent and the banker who was his mortal enemy and unhealthy obsession. Most of them would have been horrified to find out that she had camped at the edges of Jorey’s army with the whores and merchant carters, much less that she’d helped to engineer a fundamental realignment in the forces of the war. For them, the struggle was still very much the Severed Throne and the spider goddess standing against the draconic and inhuman Timzinae. But Nickayla had seen something in the accident of Clara’s appearance, and she’d grabbed on to it.

It wasn’t hope, but it might be the desire that there be hope. A shoot of new growth in the decadence of black jackets and bone robes. That the potential existed at all meant something, and Clara suspected it would be something good. Unless the two armies in the field against Jorey did their work and everyone here faced the blades and arrows of Elassae.

It seemed impossible that Camnipol could fall. Even with the men of court scattered for the most part to the army, everything was too familiar, too regular. Catastrophe would surely announce itself more clearly. Simply by having garden parties and dances, feasts and performances of poetry, they affirmed the normalcy of the world. Surely if the end were really coming, they wouldn’t have sweet buns and tea, and so sweet buns and tea were a kind of armor against what they all feared. The laughter that covered the shriek.

She imagined Suddapal had felt much the same before their own army had come to it.

Her mind turned to Hoban, the cunning man who’d saved Vincen Coe’s life once. She wondered whether he still worked out of the little house in the low quarter of the city. Alston, who had been her servant when she’d been Baroness of Osterling Fells and kept a compound of her own, and was now… she didn’t know. She’d been so careful to keep track of all her old servants. Now that she’d come back from her tour with the army, she needed to find them all again. Tomorrow. She would do that tomorrow, unless the enemy came. Unless Geder decided to execute them all as traitors. Unless Lady Skestinin discovered that Clara had… how had Lord Skestinin put it? Betrayed the kingdom? Well, if the world didn’t find some way to collapse before the next morning, she would put in the effort to find her old servants and go to the Prisoners’ Span and renew her old acquaintances there.

Oddly, the idea cheered her. It would be good to see them all. And, now that she thought of it, there might be other connections within the court that it would be wise to renew. The problem of the Timzinae children in the prison and their parents working as slaves on the farms, for instance, might be something that—

“Don’t you think, Clara?” Rielle Castannan said, and Clara realized she’d utterly lost the thread of the conversation.

“I am making a concerted effort not to think at all,” she said, and the others chuckled politely.

The commotion in the house was small at first: a raised voice, and movement in the doorway. Clara hardly noticed it. It was only when the others began to rise from their seats that she turned back to look. Geder Palliako stood on the stone-paved walk with a too-cheerful smile and cast his gaze across the gardens. Lord Emming trotted out from the house, his shirt and hair in disarray. He looked like a man half wakened from a nap, which he likely was. Clara stood, either in respect for the Lord Regent or through the animal impulse to run. Discerning between the two was not straightforward. If Cithrin bel Sarcour had failed, this would be Clara’s last moment as a free woman. She tried to savor it.

Her mouth set in a tight smile, Lady Emming came to where the two men were speaking. Neither priests nor guards accompanied the Lord Regent, so that was something. Clara chanced a look around the garden. Not all the guests were standing, but most were. Not all looked frightened, but more than didn’t. So at least she wouldn’t stand out.

Lady Emming nodded to the Lord Regent and gestured toward Clara’s table. Geder’s gaze shifted to her and grew brighter. He trotted toward her, waving to the other women as he came, like the parody of a carefree man. “Please don’t let me interrupt,” he said as he reached her. “I only need to borrow Lady Kalliam for a moment. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Lady Skestinin said, but too late. Geder had taken Clara’s arm in his and was already leading her off to a corner of the garden where rosebushes formed a little grotto of thorns and buds not yet in bloom. Geder looked back at the party, playing his grin over the ladies of the court like a searchlight in the darkness. When he spoke to her, his voice was low and conspiratorial.

“We’re meeting tomorrow night,” he said. “The Ebbingbaugh compound, just before sundown. Can you be there?”

“Of course I can,” she said.

“Good, good, good. I’m putting a plan together, and I want you all to be part of it. You’re the only people I can trust anymore.”

I have betrayed you as deeply as I could manage, Clara thought. I stood by and watched you slaughter a man I love with your own hand. And yes, I see that you trust me. Her heart was complicated by pity and hatred and a hope of her own.

“I will make my way there,” she said. “Discreetly.”

“Yes. Important that we be discreet,” he said, with the eyes of the garden party on him. He appeared unaware of the irony. “There are going to be a lot of things we need to manage if we’re going to fix all this. A lot of things to be done.”

“That’s true.”

“And I wanted… I wanted to thank you. For what you’ve done. For bringing her back to me.” He nodded, his gaze on the roses, as if by nodding he could convince her to agree that Cithrin bel Sarcour had been brought back as a gift for him.

“If I helped the throne, I’m pleased,” Clara said.

When he looked up at her, his eyes were as bright as a fever. “I’m going to show her it wasn’t me. She’ll understand. Better than anyone. Don’t you think?”

“I think we’ll all need to be careful,” she said, not answering the question, though he acted as if she had.

When she returned to her tea, Geder made a show of shaking Lord Emming’s hand and escorting him back into the house as though it had been him the Lord Regent had come for and meeting Clara had been only a happy accident. It was overacting of such scale that it would, she expected, be inscrutable to the court. They would see the change, though. The Lord Regent had returned to public life. His energy and optimism of form would mean something to those seeing it. What exactly they would think, she couldn’t guess.

“Preparations for Jorey’s triumph?” Lady Skestinin asked. An undertone of jealousy sharpened the words.

“Something like that,” Clara said mildly.

Not all men of the court had left Camnipol, but those who remained fell into distinct categories: the old and infirm, like Jaram Terrinnian, Earl of Attenmarch, who had outlived three kings in his time and hardly ever left his gardens; the very young, like Daunan Broot, toddling now after his mother and unlikely to see his father in this world; the highest leaders of the empire, like Geder and Aster and the bull-huge Basrahip; and the disgraced. It was to this last category that Clara turned her attention.

Curtin Issandrian’s home shared the street with the one Geder had claimed from Feldin Maas. From its gate Clara could see the vast and unruly hedge where she’d hidden once from her cousin’s husband’s guards. Where a wounded huntsman had stolen a kiss, long before her own husband had died. She supposed that with so many lives packed so close together, all the city must be like this. The architecture and streets recurring in people’s lives, meaning something a bit new every time, but echoing all that had come before. Or perhaps that wasn’t the city. Perhaps that was the whole world.

The courtyard outside Curtin Issandrian’s house had fallen into disrepair. The cobbles themselves showed holes where the cold had shattered stones that had not been replaced. The hedges had the yellowed look of distressed plants, and the flowers within showed more stem than blossom. The door slave was a Kurtadam man with a greying pelt and a limp, who seemed astonished that anyone would come to the house. Company at Issandrian’s compound was clearly an exceptional thing.

The years had been kinder to the man himself than she would have expected. His once long hair remained short-cropped as she had seen it last, but he also sported a thick mustache and beard that suited him better than she would have guessed. His whiskers, like his gardens, were in need of some trimming, but the potential was there.

“Lady Kalliam,” he said, walking with her into his withdrawing room. “It’s been too long. I hadn’t expected to see you again.”

When she’d been there last, it had been to filch letters from his study. She recalled it now with a combination of shame that she’d taken advantage of the man’s good nature and pride that she’d gotten away with it. She sat on the divan now and he sat across from her, his legs crossed.

“I’m afraid events have conspired to keep me away from court more than I might have liked,” she said.

“I can’t say you’ve missed much of consequence,” Issandrian said. “Or at least, if you have, I’ve missed it as well. I made an unfortunate friend in Alan Klin once, and I’m paying for it still. The Lord Regent isn’t a man who easily forgets a grudge.”

The Lord Regent, she thought, is a man who will easily forget whatever it pleases him to forget and recall what he wishes to recall. It’s what makes him most like the rest of us.

“Well, the wheel of the world hasn’t stopped turning yet,” Clara said. “There may be changes of fortune ahead still.”

“I don’t see much hope of it,” Issandrian said.

“I do, but I stand upon a slightly different stair.”

A Cinnae man in a servant’s livery knocked at the door, bowed his way in with a carafe of steaming coffee, served it, and bowed his way out. Clara took her pipe from her sleeve and packed it with fresh leaf.

“I wondered,” she said, “whether you might still have friends among the farmers?”

“Some, yes,” Issandrian said, and sipped at his cup.

“Have you a sense of whether there is a common opinion on the Timzinae slaves?”

“They’re a godsend,” Issandrian said, without hesitating. “There’s not a farm in the southern empire that hasn’t lost at least one son to the army. Near Sevenpol there are farms running that have lost four or five to it. Without the slaves, we’d be eating clouds and drinking raindrops.”

“I see,” Clara said, drawing on her pipe. The smoke tasted rich, and the coffee better. Issandrian’s gaze was a question. She let the smoke seep out through her teeth while she considered what she wanted to ask, and how she wanted to ask it. “Between the two of us, and purely as speculation—yes?—purely as speculation, what do you imagine your friends among that stratum would think of setting the Timzinae free?”

Issandrian laughed, but it was from shock, not condescension. That was good. “I can’t think why they would.”

“Say as speculation it was required to make peace.”

“Peace? Peace with who?”

“Elassae. Sarakal. Everyone.”

Issandrian put down his cup. His skin, already pale, had gone a shade paler. She gave him the moment, drinking her own coffee. It wasn’t quite pure, she thought, but she couldn’t identify what the extender was that he’d used. Something about the kind of bitterness it carried made her suspect it was a root of some sort. Issandrian folded his hands on his knees.

“I thought we were winning,” Issandrian said. “Everyone says that we’re winning.”

“We’re not.”

Issandrian pressed a hand to his chin. His distress would have been comic if it hadn’t been so sincere. “I can talk with them about raising more troops. I don’t know that there’s many to be had, but if it’s that or lose the war—”

“The war cannot be won. Only prolonged,” Clara said. “It may come to a place where prolonging it is worth the effort and blood, but that isn’t what I need to know of you now. I believe there is a change coming upon us rather quickly. If I’m right, it may give us a chance to save something of the empire, but we would need to be ready to act.”

“Lady,” Issandrian said. The poor man. He’d started his day as an outcast, ill-dignified and shunned by polite company. Now here he was listening to half riddles from a woman with the most complex and uncertain status in the history of the court. In his position she wouldn’t have known if she was being asked to defend the throne or conspire against it. Which, in fairness, hadn’t been clear to her either, these last few years. It was a problem, she supposed, of trying to use the tools of another time as if nothing had changed. This war was not like the last one, this kingdom was not the kingdom it believed itself to be, she was not the woman she had once been, nor Issandrian any of the versions of himself that had come before. Hardly a surprise that he felt a bit dizzy with it all.

He gathered himself. “I will do what I can,” he said. “What are you asking of me now?”

“Should we require that the Timzinae be freed, it will need to happen quickly and uniformly and without any of the farms demanding that they be excepted.”

“That won’t be easy,” he said.

“Not if it’s demanded without any return,” Clara said, then laughed. “I sound like a banker, don’t I? Well, regardless, if you could use what contacts you have to sound them out, we might be able to recompense them for their loss.”

Issandrian shook his head. Somewhere in the world of the dead, Dawson turned his head away. Poor ghost.

“It may be time,” Clara said, “to revisit the idea of a farmer’s council.”

Geder

Geder slept through the night and woke rested in the morning. He lay in the wide bed, looking up at his ceiling, the blankets a nest around him and over him. Outside his room, servants went about their morning routines. The sounds of voices were like music just at the edge of his hearing. Outside, a bird sang and another answered it. His belly growled, pleasantly empty, and he stretched his arms above his head until his muscles felt tight enough to sing if someone took a viol’s bow and struck them.

He smiled without having a particular thing he was smiling about. Only everything at once. A servant rapped gently at the door, brought in a washstand and fresh cloth, then retreated, careful not to speak or look at the Lord Regent in repose. Geder stretched again, sighed, and hauled himself up from bed. He washed himself in privacy, chose his own clothing for the day, and prepared himself.

The euphoria wouldn’t last forever. He knew himself well enough to know that at least. Just now, not feeling ill was enough to make him feel well. The buzzing, cottony sensation of a mind at war with itself had gone, and he felt clearer than water in a fountain. All the joy in his body just now came from that. The rage—and oh, there was rage—lay below it. Rage and humiliation and the overwhelming conviction that the men who’d misled him were going to suffer. There were only two ways this story could go. The world would either remember him as the greatest dupe in history, or it would tell the story of what a terrible mistake it had been to cross Geder Palliako. He’d been Lord Regent long enough to know how it felt to put his enemies on their knees, and it felt very, very good. He was looking forward to it.

And then there was Cithrin. She was there, in his city. In his house, even if it wasn’t the one he’d lived in most. Her face was as beautiful as he’d remembered. When she’d touched his hand, it had been like his skin was in a cunning man’s fire—bright and alive and unburning. All the fantasies he’d had about her—her mocking laugh, her mewling and naked shame—paled when they were faced with the actual woman. She’d come to him, to help him. And together they’d do what needed to be done and save the world. He was already imagining sitting with her after it was over, taking her hand again, pressing it to his chest. He’d tell her that he understood now why she’d fled Suddapal, that he forgave her.

What had happened between them during the insurrection had been between a man and a woman of equal dignity. It had felt almost like that again when they’d seen each other now, and likely would be even more so at the meeting of the conspiracy tonight. And once Basrahip and his lackeys were done with and Aster took the throne—

“Lord Geder?”

“Not yet,” Geder snapped, and returned to pulling on his clothes. “I’m not ready yet. Give me time.”

The workings of the Kingspire—the functions, in fact, of the whole empire—seemed clearer to him now. The effort it had required to look at the maps of the war and see victory in them only became clear now that he was able to stop. That he could trace his fingers along the paths the armies had taken and would take, count up the numbers of the men he’d sent out and the reports of the dead, and not be forced into finding one particular message in them was like being released from prison. The empire was crumbling, and that was a terrible danger that had to be addressed. But he saw it now, and the truth alone gave him peace.

It did not, however, make him want to spend more time at the Kingspire.

The late-morning light slanted down out of a bright sky. Blue arced above the city, unbroken by clouds. Camnipol shifted along its streets and bridges, the commerce of human activity rushing through it like blood through veins. The birds of winter were still there, but with them, brighter ones. Finches among the sparrows. Robins with the crows. Geder watched out the carriage window as he ate dried apples and boiled oats.

There was a beauty in Camnipol he felt he hadn’t seen for some time. The city bore its ages well, the ruins of what had come before making the foundation of all that had come after and above it. The curving streets with their dark cobbles felt familiar and dignified. The Tralgu beggar at the corner singing in his low and broken voice was ignored by the passersby, but his song was part of the grandeur of the empire. The occasional unfortunate wind that brought up a curl of the rot and shit in the chaos at the base of the Division was a part of the city, part of what made it unlike anyplace else in the world. And the Kingspire, with the red banner he’d been tricked into placing there.

But more than that, there were the city’s fresh wounds. The compounds of the families who’d risen in revolt against him had been torn down or burned or given to loyalists from Asterilhold or lesser families promoted by Geder’s favor. The lane he passed now had once been travelled by Mirkus Shoat and Estin Cersillian, whose houses were broken now for rising against Geder and the throne. There was still a plaque at the Great Bear in honor of a poetry contest won by Lord Bannien, Duke of Estinfort, in deference either to his wit with a rhyme or the power and wealth he’d commanded. All of which were only memory now. Camnipol, like the world, was drawn in scars and violence, and for the most part beautiful despite that.

Geder pressed at the thought of those fallen houses like he was scratching at a wound. Technically, he was responsible for those dead. However much he had been made the puppet of Basrahip and the so-called goddess, he had been the one to give the final commands that ended the men whose grandeur he’d once admired. He tried to feel guilt for their deaths, but had to make do with a kind of peace. Almost forgiveness. He saw now that they had been as much tools of the conspiracy as he had been himself, and in a sense, it put them all on the same side now. He wished there were some way that they could know it. He’d been their enemy once—even their executioner—but he would avenge them now. He couldn’t imagine they’d be anything but grateful for that.

The Great Bear was empty. With so many gone to war and so early in the season, it would have been nearly so anyway, but Geder had made his wishes clear. The rooms were vacant, what servants there were kept away in their corridors and kitchens until he called for them. With Canl Daskellin in the field and Mecelli retired to his holding, only Cyr Emming, the last of his inner councilors, waited at the wide oaken table. His war room. Not the miniature maps built of glass and dirt in the Kingspire. Nothing so near to the temple as that. He’d chosen his own space now, and this—this, where the great minds of the kingdom had come together for generations—was his. The old man’s face broke into a smile when Geder walked in, but it was a smile that meant nothing. There had been a time when Geder might have cared.

“What news?” Geder demanded.

“Reports are… ah… still coming in, Lord Geder. It seems certain that Nus has in fact been taken up in the death throes of the enemy. The unrest hasn’t spread further.”

Because it isn’t unrest, Geder thought. It’s a military campaign reorganizing after a conquest. He leaned on the table and squinted down at the maps, making what sense he could of the marks and scratchings.

“How likely is it that they’ll come to Kavinpol before the end of the season?”

Emming laughed, then, when Geder didn’t follow suit, sobered. “Cross into Antea proper? It can’t happen, my lord. This is the poison of the dragons being purged from the world. There was never any poison here to begin with inside Antea. No, I expect Nus and Inentai will return to order before the summer is done.”

Of course lifted toward Geder’s lips, but he didn’t say it. He even believed it somewhat. The habit of seeing all the marks of the war through the story of the goddess and the purification of the world wasn’t gone from him. Its back was only broken. Nus and Inentai might return to the empire by the end of summer, but he didn’t have to agree that they would. He could dissent. And because that option existed, the freedom to consider his own opinion did as well.

And his opinion was they were fucked.

The thinner thread at the south of the map was the greater issue. The army of Elassae pushing its way north from Orsen would reach Camnipol long before the forces in Nus could fight their way through Kavinpol to reach him. If it hadn’t been for Jorey coming back with the Antean men over the winter, the Timzinae might already be at the gate. He needed time. They had to find a way to give the priests scattered across the map time to reach Camnipol. Anything else that mattered would come after.

“How much gold do we have?” Geder asked.

“Lord Regent?”

“Coin? How much coin do we have? Can we hire mercenaries in the south to slow the Timzinae? Or pay the mercenaries who’re with them to abandon the campaign? There’s got to be some nomad prince in the Keshet who’s looking to grab a bit of glory. We could make the Timzinae pull back to protect Suddapal.”

“Is there any need?” Emming said.

Was there any need? Geder looked into the man’s swimming eyes and saw the confusion there. It was like seeing someone walking in their sleep. Emming literally couldn’t see the world because he was trapped in someone’s dream of it. Geder felt a surge of impatience and then, to his surprise and confusion, a vast and terrible grief. Hot tears filled his eyes and spilled down his cheeks, smearing the ink that was Camnipol. It lifted him like a storm wave hoisting a ship and brought him down to shatter on rocks hidden under the surface of his heart.

Cyr Emming flapped his hands and looked about at the empty halls as they rang with Geder’s sudden sobs. Was there any need? There was all of it, and it was his fault. From the start, it had been him. He had brought Basrahip back from the Sinir Kushku. He had let the priests poison his mind and through him the minds of all Antea. Anyone who might have had the strength of will to stand against him, he’d exiled or killed. The stupidity of it washed him away until he could only sit, his knees drawn to his chest, bawling like an infant. Emming patted his shoulder like a dog pawing at his wounded master.

There was nothing—nothing—Emming could do. No insight left in the man’s pithed mind. He was dead already, as Geder had been before Cithrin had come and brought him back to life. Geder bared his teeth and screamed, the sound echoing through the chamber. It was like a beast larger than himself stalked the hall. The Great Bear forcing its way into the world through Geder’s throat.

And then laughter that had nothing to do with mirth, everything with rage. He had been fucked. Basrahip had fucked him and broken everything he held sacred and dear. He’d poisoned Aster’s mind and his friendship with the boy along with it. He’d taken away Geder’s books. Geder stood now, taken in a glorious madness, and tried to tip over the oaken table and its maps, only the thing was too heavy. He had to make do with scattering the papers to the ground.

Cithrin had cracked the egg; the small, still part of himself that watched him suffer saw that. She’d opened him enough to blow away the fog that had taken him. Now, he couldn’t stop ripping open from the same hole. And he would not be silent until there was blood in the streets for what had been done to him. He grabbed Emming’s cloak, pulled him close, and screamed in the sleeping bastard’s face. Spit flicked the man’s cheeks, bright as froth. Geder screamed again, and again, and again, louder each time.

And then it was gone. The wave had passed. Geder felt worn. Wrung out. Emming was weeping a little now too, in fear and confusion. There was nothing Geder could do to wake him. Not yet, anyway. Later perhaps. Geder took a long, shuddering sigh and sat back in his chair. The rage was still there. The humiliation and the anger and the grief. Like an infected wound, it would fill again and be drained again and fill. But for now, he was empty. He used his fingers as combs. Gathered himself.

“I think,” he said, in a calm, level voice, “we should do whatever we can to reinforce Kalliam and Daskellin in the south. If there are standing garrisons in Sevenpol and Anninfort, we should call them south. Even if they’re small.”

“L-lord Regent,” Emming said.

“Every little bit will help. And it’s important, I think.”

“Yes,” Emming said. When Geder clapped him on the shoulder, the man flinched.

“Sorry about that,” Geder said. “I’m sorry.”

Prince Geder,” Basrahip said through his vast, placid smile. “You honor me by your presence.”

I can disagree with that, Geder thought. I might honor him with my presence. I might not. I might have no effect on his dignity at all. I’ll have to decide that myself.

“Thank you,” he said, and sat.

The high priest’s cell was as simple now as it had been in the Sinir Kushku. A lantern. A brazier, unused now in the warmth of spring. A censer with a few smoking twigs of incense. Outside the cell, a half dozen priests stood at the open doors, hauling up the blood-red banner so it could be washed and mended and set out again in the morning with rites and chants imported from the caves east of the Keshet. The vast stretch of the city spread out beyond them, and the horizon past that. The wide bowl of the sky seemed wider up here, higher than the birds and trees below.

Geder considered all he’d planned to say and how he’d planned to say it. Perhaps he should have waited to see Cithrin again, to consult with Master Kit and Captain Wester, but he couldn’t. Waiting was too hard, and there wasn’t time. And this wasn’t their fight. Not really.

“You always say I am the chosen of the goddess, yes?”

“You are such,” Basrahip said with a dumb certainty. “The goddess has chosen you to lead us out to the world, and through you her truth has spread through the world.”

I don’t have to agree. Geder clung to the thought like a castaway hugging a bit of wood. I can disagree.

“Can you say it?”

“Prince Geder?”

“Say it. Hear your own voice. Hear the truth in it. Geder Palliako is the chosen of the goddess.”

Basrahip’s shrug was vast, his shoulders rolling like cartwheels. “Prince Geder, you are the chosen of the goddess, precious to her and blessed.”

“Good. Do it again.”

Basrahip shook his head this time, but complied. “You are chosen of the goddess.”

“You know that’s true, then.”

“Of course.”

“Good, now listen to me. Listen. We have a problem. The apostate we killed wasn’t the only one.”

“He was—”

“No. To me. Chosen of the goddess?” Geder said, pointing to himself. “Listen to me. We still have a problem. You’ve felt it troubling you, but you haven’t been able to think about it. Am I right? But I know it’s going on. And I know how to fix it.”

Basrahip shuddered. It wasn’t a motion that came from anger or confusion. It was like a man twitching in his sleep or in a fever. He swallowed.

“Listen to my voice,” Geder said. “We have a problem, and I know how to fix it. Am I lying?”

Basrahip’s voice came slowly now, creaking like a bad hinge. “You. You speak the truth, Prince Geder.”

“I do. And you know I am chosen of the goddess. You know it because you said it.”

“I know this”—still slowly—“to be true.”

“I have been visited,” Geder said. “Truths have been revealed to me, and I will reveal them to you. Listen to my voice. Am I lying?”

Basrahip only shook his head this time. No, Geder wasn’t lying.

“I will reconcile every schism. I will bring every apostate to a place where there is no dissent and no confusion and no lies. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Basrahip said, and there was wonder in his voice. “I hear the truth in you.”

“Damned right you do,” Geder said. “Call all of them. I’ll give you the best couriers in the empire. The fastest birds. All the cunning men we can use. Send the word to every priest there is, everyone who carries her in his blood. Bring them all here. To me.”

“Prince Geder.…”

“Am I the chosen of the goddess?”

“You are.”

“I know how to fix this. Bring them here, and I will. Do you believe me?”

Basrahip moved forward, wrapping his vast arms around Geder’s body in a massive embrace. Geder thought of the swarm of spiders pressing against him, kept away by a thin veil of human skin. It made his flesh crawl.

“We are blessed to have you, Prince Geder.” The priest’s breath was warm against his ear. Something damp touched Geder’s temple and for a second he was certain it was blood, but Basrahip was only weeping. There were no tiny black bodies in his tears.

“You bring them here,” Geder said, “and bring them quickly, and I’ll see all of you reconciled forever.”

And that’s true, he thought. He wasn’t lying. Because there’s no room for dissent in the grave.

Marcus

Rain came in the north starting on their second day. Mornings were pleasant enough apart from the damp of the day before, but shortly after midday the few white puffs of cloud coalesced and joined together into great angry pillars with grey veils at the bases. They crept across the Antean landscape like giants, unaware of humanity and its little wars. Marcus envied the storms a little. There was a great deal about humanity he’d prefer not to be aware of himself.

When the hard grey clouds passed over them, Marcus and Yardem plucked up their hoods and rode on. The little mules that carried them were as unimpressed by the wet as they were by everything else. If the downpour became too great, they took what shelter they could or, if there was none, stopped where they were and suffered until it abated. By sundown, the cloud giants began to decay into great swaths of red and gold and peach that faded to ash as the light failed, and the midnight sky was clear for the stars.

The going was slow. They kept off roads and tracks, making their own trail as they went. Solitude itself was the goal, and anywhere they could find it would do. Only it had to be complete. If it worked—and there was every chance it might not—being observed at it risked everything. The stakes justified the effort.

Marcus called the halt at the ruins of a small fort by a clearing in the heart of the wood. The tumbled stones showed no sign of human use. Thick moss hung on the tie-posts. A black mat of rotten leaves choked the half-tumbled fire stand. The clearing was a little narrower than the courtyard of a small inn, and showed the marks of a lightning-struck fire a year or two old. New trees thinner than fingers were already competing to choke the grasses with shade again. Like all places of light and openness, this one was temporary.

The only tracks were of deer and rabbit, wolf and bear. No horses and no humans and no dogs. Even poachers and huntsmen had left this place behind. Whoever had built the fort and whatever danger they’d built it against were forgotten. The only exceptional thing they found in the search before making camp was a bronze statue of a Jasuru woman that had been half engulfed by the trunk of an ash. Marcus stopped there for a moment, trying to make out the features on the statue’s face. Whether it had been martial or serene, it was a tree now. Marcus moved on.

The second meeting at Palliako’s compound had, for Marcus, been the test of Cithrin’s scheme. Not whether it would work. Only God knew that, and that was the same as saying no one. No, the second meeting was the proof of whether Cithrin and Kit and Geder’s father had managed to sway the Lord Regent into forsaking his own reign out of spite. As it happened, the little man had arrived on time and without a regiment of guards to haul them all to the gaol or throw them down Camnipol’s throat. More than that, Geder Palliako had seemed pleased. Almost excited. Marcus couldn’t begin to guess what sludge was flowing behind that man’s eyes, but Cithrin’s take on him seemed solid. His anger had turned toward the priests, and if it fixed there long enough for the rest of the plan to play out… Well, that was more than Marcus would have hoped for.

Geder had listened to the schemes that might slow down the invasion and open corridors to let the wide-scattered priests come home with a seriousness and intelligence that were more than a little surprising. When Marcus laid out his own plan for the trap, there’d been a spark in Geder’s eyes. He’d even called for paper and pen and written out letters of passage for Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane. The pages, signed with Palliako’s private chop, were still folded in an envelope of oiled parchment sealed with wax in Marcus’s little mule’s saddle pack. If they were stopped by soldiers and questioned, they had the Lord Regent’s protection. It wasn’t a shield he’d try against an arrow, but it was more than nothing.

He’d expected nothing. Or worse than that.

They’d sent out a bird for Northcoast the next morning. Clara Kalliam was a past master of sneaking messages to Paerin Clark in Carse. Her couriers were fast and well practiced. Lehrer Palliako even thought he might know a cunning man who could be put upon to drive the message through his peculiar talents. It didn’t matter what channel the word went by, only that it arrived.

There was more than enough dead wood under the canopy of trees, and Marcus had a small fire crackling by the time Yardem emerged from the wood with the corpse of a rabbit he’d hunted down for their dinner. Marcus cleaned and dressed the animal and set it on a thin, improvised spit. The smell of roasting meat was pleasant and a little melancholy too. Until today, the animal whose body was crisping on a stake might never have seen anything more human than these ruins, and tonight, it had learned—however briefly—what humanity was.

That wasn’t fair. Not really. The world was filled with people who did things more noble than killing in order to eat. Artisans who fashioned tools of great utility and beauty. Poets who made songs that honored the living and the dead, or only made people laugh for a while. Brewers and bakers and all the puppeteers from the streets of Porte Oliva. Some of them probably didn’t even eat meat. It was just Marcus and Yardem weren’t among that number, and the rabbit whose haunch he carved had had the ill fortune to run into them.

“Ever think about what we look like to the dragons?” Marcus asked. “Well, the one, I mean. Isn’t like there’s a wide choice of dragons to compare among.”

“Sometimes, sir.”

Marcus bit into the rabbit. The flesh was a little gamy, but after a long day of nothing but dried fruit, nuts, and some twice-baked bread, it was decent enough. That or else carrying the poisoned sword had numbed his tongue past the point of knowing good from bad. Yardem was eating it too, though. It couldn’t have been that wretched.

“Draw any conclusions?”

Yardem flicked his ears thoughtfully, the rings jingling. “Hard to say. Inys isn’t human. I am. It’s a wide gulf to cross.”

“You think that? I don’t know. He’s seemed fairly explicable to me, one way and another. Lonesome, self-indulgent, convinced that he’s a monstrosity and also the only hope for the world. Well, his version of the world, anyway.”

“Hard to say how much is there and how much we’re putting there.”

“Meaning you still think I’m using the great bastard as a mirror.”

“Wouldn’t say so, sir.”

Marcus popped open a waterskin and took a long, tepid drink. They’d want to find a spring tomorrow if the dragon hadn’t arrived. “So what would you say?”

Yardem was quiet for longer than Marcus had expected. He’d almost thought the Tralgu wasn’t going to reply at all when he finally spoke. “We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What we would have to feel to do what they have done. If we can’t put ourselves into that place, then we can only guess.”

“That’s not only dragons. That’s anyone.”

“It is.”

“Palliako and Inys would get along if they didn’t hate each other.”

“If you say so,” Yardem said so mildly that Marcus looked at him again to see if it was mockery. Yardem’s expression was so polite, Marcus laughed. He handed his friend the waterskin. They waited.

Inys appeared in the late morning, four days later. He began as a thin line of black high in the western sky, easy to overlook. Then he was a hawk riding the high air, only with something odd about the shape of his wings. Marcus could imagine people on the roads looking up at the wide blue-and-white expanse and never seeing the predator in it, and wondered whether the rabbits he’d been eating had noticed Yardem.

When the dragon descended, he came down fast, folding his wings and dropping toward them like a stone. Marcus felt a pang of unease shift in his chest—would Inys be able to stop in time? Had he chosen this particular moment to die suddenly of whatever the hell killed dragons?—before the great wings opened. They caught the air with a sound like a tree snapping in half or a vast canvas sail bellying suddenly out in a high wind. The wings themselves were ragged. Bits of blue shone through here and there where the scars of Porte Oliva would never entirely heal. The fall slowed, and as he came nearer the earth, Inys flapped the wide, ruined wings to slow himself further. It was like storm wind aimed straight down. The boughs of the trees nodded with it until it seemed like the forest itself was bowing to the fallen king of the world.

When Inys’s claws sank to touch the grass of the meadow, it was with the lightness and grace of a dancer. The dragon lifted his wings out again, stretching them, then folded them in against the shining scales of his body and stood still as stone for a moment. A smell like burning pitch and fortified wine filled the air and left the birds silent. The wilderness might ignore the presence of two men, but a dragon set the world on its best behavior. Every sane animal in the wood was still and quiet and hoping against hope not to be noticed. And so, it being the job, Marcus strode forth.

Inys turned his head, considering him with a wide, dark eye, then hunkered down, crushing the young trees of the meadow with his belly or ripping them with the casual motion of his tail.

“Marcus Stormcrow,” Inys said, his voice a deep rumble that seemed to come up from the ground as much as the beast’s vast throat. “You sent for me, and I, like your servant, have come. Do not insult me again.”

Well, God smiled, Marcus thought. Baby’s in a sulk.

“Thank you for this,” he said aloud. “I’d have come the full way myself, but there may not be time. And the roads you travel have fewer enemies on them than the ones I have to hold to.”

Inys grunted. His massive eye blinked. Marcus took it as permission to go on.

“We’re gathering all the priests together in a place they feel safe, and then we’re killing them all. But for it to work we need to keep the number of people who know what we’re up to low, the trap we kill them with simple and effective. That’s why we need you.”

“Go on,” Inys said and laid his head on the turf like a child bored by their father’s lecturing.

“They moved the temple to the top of the Kingspire after some rioting and insurrection a few years back. That’s where we’re bringing them.”

“Kingspire?”

“Tower in the north of the city. Only one like it, and it has the banner of the goddess hanging out of the temple proper like a dog’s tongue. It’ll be hard to overlook. You’ll have to be near enough by we can get you the signal but not so close you’ll be seen. We’ll bar the door so they can’t get out and run like hell for the bottom. You come in, burn them all to the bones and the spiders with them, and they’re through.”

“The war ended,” Inys said. “After so long. And at such cost.”

“It’s got some holes in it,” Marcus said. “There’s at least one army, possibly two, headed in the general direction of Camnipol, which might make bringing them all in one place difficult. The priests are moving in pairs and small groups. They’ll go quicker than a fighting force, and we’re doing what we can to speed them up and slow the other down, but—”

“My brothers gone. My people turned to ash. Our perches drowned and lost forever. This is the fruit that war brings forth.”

Yardem flicked his ear, scratched his arm, and looked back at Marcus. No help there. “Yes,” Marcus said, guessing at what the dragon wanted to hear. “It’s rough. But it’s almost over. And look at all you did.”

“I killed them all,” Inys said. “I drowned the city and sent my allies and friends… my love… to death while I hid in darkness. Like a coward. Ah, Erex, what have I done?”

“And you’re striking the last blow,” Marcus said. “You’re the one who made it to the end, where you can crush Morade’s invention for the last time.” Inys sighed. Marcus bit back a shout and tried again. “And think of the other things you’ve managed. You carried the secrets of the spiders and what they are and how to defeat them when the world had lost all knowledge of them. That isn’t nothing. And the Timzinae. You made a race of warriors who right now are—”

The dragon roared in anguish, thrashing his massive tail into the trees and stripping away the bark with his violence. His claws ripped into the ground, clenched in what looked like pain. Something’s wrong with him. Marcus thought. He’s wounded.

“I did not,” Inys sobbed. “I did not.”

Marcus waited a long moment as the dragon shook his head and bared his teeth, but no more words came out. “Didn’t what?”

“Asteril, my brother, made the Timzinae. They are his children. When I claimed them, it was a lie. This is what I am. What I am reduced to. Dishonoring myself to court the approval of slaves.”

“No one cares,” Marcus said, his voice sharp. “None of us ever thinks about which dragon made which race. It’s not a thing that matters, unlike the chance to kill the priests that’re tearing the world apart. That matters. So why don’t we come back to it?”

Inys reared back like the words had stung him. Violence filled the dragon’s dark eyes, bare as a taproom drunk about to take a swing. Marcus fought the impulse to take a step back. Instinct told him that any show of weakness now was the same as death. Fumes leaked from between Inys’s scaled lips, poisoning the air with the threat of fire. In his peripheral vision, Yardem had gone very still. If there was a way to get between the dragon’s shoulders—someplace where his head couldn’t reach—and find a break in his scales before he flew up into the clouds or rolled on his back and crushed any attackers…

Inys’s roar filled the world. There wasn’t room for the noise and thought both. The trees shuddered, their leaves flickering pale undersides like a wind was passing through them. Marcus scratched his nose, pretending that his heart wasn’t ticking over in his chest fast as a stone rolling down a mountain. The dragon bared teeth as long and cruel as knives. Then visibly deflated.

For a moment, they were all silent, and the forest too. Somewhere to Marcus’s right, a particularly stupid bird sang out, as if its small, bright trill could answer the dragon. Stupid or brave. Or both.

“I will do as you ask, Stormcrow,” Inys said. “Bring me my brother’s work, and I will end it, scatter its ashes, and bury the grievance between us forever. When the time is right, light a torch of sage and pitch like the funeral pyres of emperors, and I will come. There will be a kind of honor in that.”

“All right,” Marcus said. “It is going to be important that no one notices there’s a dragon in the vicinity, though. You can’t be near the city. Will a torch be enough to—”

“Do not question my ability again. I am not a child fresh from his first kill.”

“Pitch and sage then,” Marcus said.

“And once we have finished, then the work will begin. I have smelled remnants of a workroom far in the south. Little more than a hint of old herb and vivarium, but it will be a start. Yes.”

Inys turned, his head snaking up and to the north. There wasn’t anyplace on his back a swordsman could be that head couldn’t reach. But maybe if there was a way to grab on to the back of the neck itself… Inys launched himself into the sky with no word of farewell. The scarred wings commanded the air, graceful and strong and the image of power. The last dragon rose toward the sun until he was smaller than a sparrow. Marcus lost him in the light.

“Could have gone worse,” Marcus said.

“Could.”

“That workroom bit at the end was a little disturbing, though.”

“Was.”

Marcus walked to their little camp and started to pack it away. “I believe our great scaly friend up there is still thinking about repopulating the world in his image and keeping us as pack animals and pets.”

“Problem for another day, sir.”

“Maybe,” Marcus said. He tied the leather thongs of his pack and swung it over the shoulder that didn’t have the sword on it. The meadow looked like a badly tilled field: ripped grass and churned earth. Long, dark wounds marked where Inys’s claws had torn the forest, and the smell of sap from the ruined trees competed with the lingering stink of dragon’s breath. He’d come and had a short conversation, and the place would bear the scars of it for a century. Maybe more.

“Those big toys we had to leave in Birancour?” Marcus said. “The ones Jorey used to knock our scaly friend there down in Porte Oliva?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We should see if Palliako’s got any more of them.”

Entr’acte: The World

The summer sun punished the Keshet, but the messenger ran on. The green of Antea and Sarakal were behind him, the trailing mountains on the north of Elassae as well. He’d moved fast, traveling by night as well as day, avoiding the well-trodden paths and dragon’s roads. Where he could buy or steal horses, he did, riding them until their exhaustion left them of no use, then setting them free. It was not a journey but a sprint that stretched out behind and before. The Lord Regent and the high priest had chosen him for the task because he was the best tracker in the kingdom, and of all the journeys in this nightmare summer, this would be hardest.

In the sand-colored hills of the Sinir Kushku, he had to slow. Consult maps and diagrams that he carried in his pack. Here were the fallen pillars, here the hidden spring that only the men who’d lived here knew. He found the mountain where men who looked to be the Basrahip’s cousins led sheep across barren-looking ridges. He found the chieftain and said the words he’d been told to say.

The gate to the temple towered as high as the western gate in Camnipol. A machinery of gigantic gears rumbled and clanked as it opened. Banners like the one hanging from the Kingspire adorned the walls, though in all the wrong colors. Ruined statues stood in audience or else as guard, worn to nothing by wind and time. Words stood in iron, each letter as tall as the messenger. KHINIR KICGNAM BAT. He didn’t know what they meant. The priests who came out wore darker robes than the ones in Camnipol, belted with chains. The messenger rubbed his chin and nodded to them as they came close. The lead one was a tall, thin man with dark eyes and a scar on one cheek like someone had laid him open with a rock at some point and it hadn’t healed quite right.

It was to him the messenger addressed himself. “I have a message from the Basrahip. He said I should invoke the third oath.”

The scarred priest’s thick black eyebrows rose and his eyes narrowed.

“What do you know of the third oath, traveler?”

“Nothing except that I was supposed to invoke it. And he said you’d hear it in my voice if I told you true. Figure as I have, so you know I’m not farting out my mouth here.”

“What is his command?”

“You’re all to come to Camnipol now. Like pack-some-water-and-let’s-be-off now. The goddess is making her voice known direct in the temple there, and you’re all meant to be present when it happens. I’m to guide you back.”

The scarred priest flushed, his eyes brightening like a babe seeing a sweet gum. “I will gather our elders to join you—”

“Everyone. Lord Regent was very particular on that. All those touched with the power of the goddess’ve got to be there. It’s what he said.” The scarred priest nodded, though some struggle was clear in his eyes. The messenger leaned forward and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Everyone.”

“I will bring all of the faithful together. In the morning, we will take leave with you.”

What’s wrong with right now? the messenger thought, but didn’t say. “Good enough, if it’s all you’ve got.”

“Will you take rest with us?” the priest asked, gesturing to the vast iron gate that stood open behind him.

“I’ll camp here,” the messenger said. “Not much one for being cooped up.”

“As you prefer.”

That night, the messenger slept in the lee of one of the statues, looking up at the vast carved dragon that covered them all. The best part of the journey was over. Now it was all going to be sheepdogging the priests back the way he’d already come. He’d do it, but he wouldn’t like it. You didn’t become the fastest tracker in the empire by enjoying the company of people.

Porte Oliva in the summer fell on Kurrik’s shoulders like a smothering blanket. It wasn’t the heat. He’d grown up in the Sinir Kushku. It was the steam-thick air and the stink of the sea and the unbearable smugness of his alleged brother Vicarian Kalliam. Of the three, the last was worst.

“The tide goes out before nightfall,” Vicarian said. “If we aren’t at the docks, we’ll miss the launch.”

“Thank you, brother,” Kurrik said. “I intend to return in time, and I will be vigilant.”

He ducked out the door and down the hall of the cathedral toward the square and the sun before Vicarian could find another way to say If you’re not right, you’ll be wrong.

The streets of the city were thick with people. Claiming the city had cut the number of streets and houses almost in half, but it hadn’t killed nearly half the people. Now they lived stacked one atop the other, two and three families in rooms that had before housed only one. Buildings were rising up over the ashes of the battle, but small ones. Shanties that might one day grow to dignity but had none now.

Vicarian, who claimed to have great knowledge of the world because he’d lived so many years in decadence and lie, didn’t see how the locals scattered before them. They were frightened even now of the power of the goddess, and Kurrik knew it. And he sensed the same fear—the same taint—in Vicarian’s yammers of Cleymant and Addadus. He was careful to couch all his words such that there was no essential lie, but Kurrik sensed it lurking at the back of all their conversations. It had been an error to believe that men new to the priesthood would comprehend what they had been given. Without the lessons learned from boyhood, the habit of deception and lie ran too deep. Vicarian and all the new priests like him were flawed at the base.

And now it seemed Kurrik might not have to be the one to resolve the matter after all.

Shandor Paan lived in a shed near the waterfront. He was a thin man, hunched at the shoulder and slow of speech. His loyalty to the goddess was based in fear more than faith, but it would do. If it had to. Their meeting place was a dark corner in what was called the salt quarter where they could speak without being seen, and Kurrik found the man waiting for him there.

“You took my message?” Kurrik said.

“I did. I did,” Shandor said. “How long are you gone for?”

“I do not know. The Basrahip called us, and so we go. I believe he has seen the same flaw that I have. If so, we may not need to go forward.”

“That’s good,” Shandor lied. Of course he did. His wish now was not the elevation of the goddess but of Shandor Paan. It pained Kurrik to see men so lost to lies that they forgot they were telling them, but there was no denying that Shandor was one such.

“If it is not that,” Kurrik said, “I will approach the Basrahip myself, so that when we move forward with the correction of our error, it will be with his blessing.”

And if it turns out that the Basrahip has also fallen into error, we will find another, purer way to remake the temple in her image, free of the corruption of the fallen world. He could already imagine taking the children of Porte Oliva into a temple of his own, conducted as they had the first temple, the true temple, before they’d been led out to the world and astray.

“So we’ll still kill the other one?” Shandor said, hope lighting his eyes. It took Kurrik a moment to understand what he was saying.

“If the need is still there, the need is still there. I will know more when I return.”

“Yeah. It’s only…” Shandor ducked his head like a bird.

“Only what?”

“What if the city rises up with you gone, eh? What if those letters that keep coming down from Carse make people think they can go back?”

“They will never go back,” Kurrik said. “The goddess is here whether you feel her presence or not, and once you have been touched by her grace, you will never fall to error.”

“But… the other one… he’s in error, yeah? So sometimes…”

Kurrik’s blood surged with impatience and anger. Having the city all around him was like living in a pile of rotting meat. The ignorance and the lies were worked into the skin of the place, and it would never, never be wholly clean. That was why men like Vicarian and Shandor should never be granted her gifts.

“It won’t fall,” Kurrik said. “Listen to my voice. Porte Oliva will be loyal to the goddess forever. The fighting here is over unless I am the one who brings it.”

The priesthood of the goddess left Asinport under a flowered archway with the local children singing the praises of the goddess in chorus. Girls in summer gowns with ivy braided into their hair strewed light-pink petals along the jade road before them. They were seven men in robes riding the best horses the city could offer. A train of servants followed, and a cart draped by the blood-red banner whose cousin hung above the temple.

Where the dragon’s road leading south widened, Sir Raillien Morn had set up a little stage. He stood on it now. He’d oiled his scales, and they glowed like metal in the morning sun. The men and women of court were all of lower families. Most were Firstblood, though there were a few of his own family present as well. The merchants present were more varied. Kurtadam with formal beads tied on their pelts. A pair of Cinnae men standing with the goddess and the empire in defiance of the banker girl who, they said, soiled the name of their race. There had been a Timzinae quarter in the city once, though of course none of it remained now. The lowborn who crowded the road were of any number of races, all equally unbathed and uneducated. They had come for the spectacle and the distraction, as if honor were a theater piece.

The priests paused before him. Sir Raillien lifted his hand to them in formal greeting.

“Since the coming of the goddess to Asinport,” he declared, “we have known nothing but peace and prosperity. While the world itself has shaken and struggled, our city has known only blessings and joy. This we credit, as is right, to our newest and best-beloved citizens. We wish you speed in your journey and safety on the road that you will return to us soon and with the further blessings of her truth. In her honor and in yours, I pledge a week of feast and celebration beginning upon whichever day you return to us.”

The eldest priest rode forward. When he answered, his voice carried as loud as if he’d held a speaker’s trumpet, and Sir Raillien felt himself washed by the words.

“You do yourself honor by this,” the priest said. “And you will not be forgotten by us or by her. We leave only briefly and look forward to our return to this, our right and proper home. Asinport is blessed by the Righteous Servant, and taken into her protection now and forever.”

The crowd cheered and waved small paper banners, red and pale and black. Sir Raillien took to horse, riding south with the priests. Both sides of the road were thronged. Every man, woman, and child in the city or the lands nearby had come out to watch.

A mile past the city’s southern gate, they came to the place where the prisoners had been executed. The bodies were nailed to poles set in the earth. Apart from a few scraps of white, the leaflets the dead men and women had been found with couldn’t be seen sticking out from between their rotting lips. But Sir Raillien knew they were there, as did the priests. And everyone else as well.

Morn stopped there among the righteously punished and the dead. The priests and their train rode on.

Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said, leaning on his spear like it was a walking stick.

“That’s truth,” Jerrim said, then chuckled. “Strange not hearing the truth is truth. Funny, that.”

Kavinpol stood in the fragrant sun of the summer evening, the guard looking down both sides of the wall. On one, the city streets slow in the heat. On the other, the traffic along the road and the river docks. Carts filled with early harvest crop, and lambs and pigs carried in carts or led on ropes, heading for the slaughterhouses and the butchers and the fires and the tables. Flatboats waited at the water gate where a team of men like Coppin and Jerrim took the tax, let in who could pay, negotiated with who couldn’t. Sometimes the rules bent, sometimes they didn’t. A farmer who’d brought Timzinae slaves, for instance, might be looked at more carefully than one who’d brought real Firstblood help. Having the roaches inside the gates at all made some people jumpy, and for a reason.

Twice in the last week, the forces in the south had come looking for resupply and cunning men. Daskellin’s once, Kalliam’s the other time. Seeing what the roach army was doing had sobered more men than Coppin and Jerrim. Lost legs and fingers and eyes. Men half-gone from fever. Lady Flor had set aside her personal ballroom and filled it with cots for the injured and the dying. They said you could smell the pus two streets away. Others had come down from Sevenpol and Anninfort. Boys and women now bearing whatever weapons they could scrounge, coming to defend the empire.

Coppin, leaning on his spear, clumped along the wall, and Jerrim followed after. Coppin had lost three toes off his left foot to an axe when he was ten. His arm was good enough to pitch spears down the wall if it came to it, or else he’d have been on the road with the others. Jerrim had fits, sometimes three a week, and the captain of the guard said he’d be more trouble than he was worth in the fighting. It didn’t matter. They had their part, and that was enough. They manned the walls, they kept the peace, they showed the roaches and traitors that Kavinpol had teeth enough to bite if it had to. And they waited for the war to get done with. The priests came along every day or two and gave a talk about it, and they always left feeling better after. It didn’t matter how things looked. It mattered how things were. Truth would carry them through.

And the truth was that the goddess was alive in the world. No city that had her temple had ever fallen. Even if one was occupied for a time, that wasn’t the same as fallen. The roaches hated her because they were made by the dragons to seem like they were human, but they were really the servants of the lie. It didn’t count when you killed them.

Coppin stumbled and Jerrim steadied him. A voice called from behind: Coppin’s name, then Jerrim’s. Drea was climbing up the rope ladder to the wall’s top, a basket bouncing against her hip. She was a small woman, brown as a nut with bright eyes and a gap in her teeth when she smiled, and everyone know that she and Jerrim were in love except for her and Jerrim. Coppin, for instance, didn’t have doubts.

“Brought some bread,” she said when she reached them, holding out the basket. “Had extra.”

“Thank you,” Jerrim said, taking it from her carefully so that their hands brushed each other’s.

“You can bring me back the basket later,” she said.

“I will.”

She smiled, nodded once to Coppin like she was agreeing that yes, he was there too, and went back down the ladder. Jerrim watched her go with a longing that was almost palpable. Coppin took the basket and opened it. The bread was fresh anyway. So that was good.

“She’s what we do this for,” he said around a mouthful of the stuff.

“What?” Jerrim said.

“This,” Coppin said, and held up the spear. “Being guard. Risking our lives to protect people like her. The whole city of them. Truth is, I’ve got nothing against the roaches as roaches go. Until they crossed the Severed Throne, I didn’t care about them one way or the other.”

“Me too.”

“If they all just went back where they came from and didn’t come back, I wouldn’t chase after them. Would you?”

“Not me,” Jerrim said. “Heard the other army’s left Nus heading this way.”

“They’ve been saying that for weeks. It hasn’t been true yet.”

“But what if it is?”

“We’ll kick ’em in the nuts and send ’em to work the farms, same as we always do,” Coppin said. It was what he always said, and Jerrim gave his usual chuckle in reply. Both the bravado and the appreciation of it felt different this evening, though. Thinner somehow. It reminded Coppin of the feeling at the back of his throat before he got sick. Not the actual illness so much as the announcement that something unpleasant was coming. It wasn’t in his throat, though. The whole city felt like that. Maybe the world.

“Think they’ll come this far?” Jerrim asked.

“Elassae they or Sarakal they?”