The Tyrant's Law

There were some issues that didn’t hinge on deceit, in which the facts were established and uncontested, and only the interpretation of them was in question. He didn’t like those as much, but he gave them his best guess or else put off the decision until he could look into some fine point of history and common practice in more detail. He could see the disappointment in the faces when he said that, but no one objected. He was Lord Regent Geder Palliako. He was the man who had revealed the treachery of Feldin Maas and Asterilhold, waged a war of reunification and defeated a coup in a single year, and saved the empire twice over. He was a hero. Anything he did was right by definition.

The only unexpected event came nearly at the day’s end. The Dartinae man came to the foot of the throne, kneeling in a bow so deep he pressed his knuckles to the floor. He was strong for one of his race, his skin dark from the sun, and his eyes glowed as bright as torches. His tunic was well-worn leather with the sigil of a dragon inked on the chest like a poor man’s coat of arms.

“Dar Cinlama?” Geder said, reading the name from the petition.

“Lord Regent. Thank you for hearing me out. I was afraid your other business might eat the day,” the man said. There was an amusement in his voice and a sureness of purpose. Even though his words were appropriate and acceptable, they gave the sense that they were equals, two men speaking as men instead of a dusty petitioner before the guiding hand of the Antean Empire. Geder envied him his certainty and disliked him.

“You want me to fund a mission to … where?”

Cinlama smiled.

“If I was sure of that, it would already be too late. Someone would already have found it.”

“It?”

“What there is to be found. The Temple of the Sun. The Salt Scrolls. The lost books of Erindau.”

“Those were forgeries,” Geder said, pouncing too quickly. Cinlama smiled.

“The ones presented so far have been. The true ones are still out there. That’s the thought, isn’t it? My father and his spent their lives in the lost places where the dragon’s roads don’t go. I’ve climbed caverns mankind hadn’t touched in centuries and found carved stone at the bottom. There’s mysteries out there still. Treasures going back all the way to the Dragon Empire. Gems and jewels. Books of knowledge and magic. Devices from the war we don’t even remember except in stories we tell the kids to get them to sleep.”

“And you know how to find these marvels.” Geder loaded the words with skepticism.

“I know how to look. Finding’s a gamble, but if it pays out, there’s no higher prize.”

No was already on his lips when Geder glanced over at Basrahip. The minister’s eyes were wide, his brows lifted. The pretense of prayer and contemplation were gone, and in their place something that could have been alarm or delight. Geder swallowed his refusal and waited, but Basrahip neither nodded nor shook his head.

“Um,” Geder said. “I will have to consider my answer.”

“My thanks for that, Lord Regent,” Cinlama said, smiling.

Geder leaned toward his guard captain. “See him somewhere safe. And don’t let him leave.”

The captain nodded, but there was a hesitation in it.

“You mean the gaol, my lord?”

“No. A guesthouse. Or put him in one of the gardens. Just … just don’t let him leave.”

After that, Geder heard a shepherd asking recompense for his flock, slaughtered by a drunken priest, but by then the joy had gone out of it. He called the halt and withdrew, his guard walking ahead and behind. He stopped at a dry fountain, a copper dragon almost lost to verdigris throwing itself toward the sky, the bodies of the thirteen races of humanity drawn along behind it. Or, looked at differently, pulling it down. Basrahip came shortly thereafter, his face pinched in thought.

“You heard something?” Geder said. “The adventurer. You … I mean, do you think he means what he says?”

“He does,” the priest said. “He did not mislead you, Prince Geder. He seeks what he claims to seek. I would speak with him, if I might.”

Geder pulled his hands into his sleeves, warming his fingers with the ends like mittens.

“I thought as much. I had the guard take him somewhere comfortable and hold him.”

“You are good to us,” Basrahip said, but he seemed distracted. “This man’s errand may be of importance. For time beyond time, the dragons have envied and hated the goddess. If buried shells survived the fire years, we must know. His coming may be the hand of the goddess in the world.”

“Oh,” Geder said. “Then you think I should accept his petition?”

Basrahip put a thick hand on Geder’s shoulder.

“I will speak with him and know more. The goddess’s web is wide as the world and deeper than oceans. Nothing escapes her notice. If he is indeed sent by her, we must honor him.”

“I suppose we will, then,” Geder said. “If the conversation goes the way you hope.”

“My thanks, Prince Geder.”

“I’m chosen by the goddess to bring peace to the world. Really, whatever she says needs to be done, we should do it,” he said.

For the most part, he meant it. The little tug of reluctance was only caution and a rational skepticism. They were in the early stages of a war, after all. They might need to buy food or mercenaries, and if the coin was already spent, that would mean levying taxes or borrowing. So it was best to be certain. He was Lord Regent of Antea. He was the most powerful man in the world. This Dar Cinlama was a wanderer and a beggar, and if Basrahip was enthusiastic about him, it was only because the Dartinae man might be an apt tool for Geder’s projects. That was all. Of all people in the world, Geder told himself, surely he had the least reason to be jealous.

Marcus

No one knew how long the dragons had ruled the world, only that they had. The greatest empire that could be imagined had spanned the seas and lands of mankind and for all anyone knew more besides. The skill and rigor of the dragons had bent the nature of the world to their desires. The thirteen races of humanity and the dragon’s roads were two of their great works that had survived, but many others had passed away. Great cities had floated in the distant air, competing with the clouds for space in the sky. Poems and chants had been composed by inhuman minds with such complexity and beauty that a lifetime’s study still might not do them justice. Devices had been built that set the stars themselves in order and laid plain the books of fate.

Or perhaps they hadn’t. A lot of history could be lost in a generation. One of Marcus’s grandfathers had been a minor noble of Northcoast who’d kept his grandmother as mistress. The other had been a sailor who’d made his money fishing cod and avoiding port taxes. All he knew of them was a dozen or so stories he’d heard as a boy and likely misremembered.

The ages since the fall of the Dragon Empire had swallowed that a thousand thousand times over and left only legends and stories, roads and ruins.

What little there was, though, still had the power to awe.

Larger than the palaces of Northcoast or Birancour, the vast stronghold spread out before them, sinking down into the flesh of the earth level upon terraced level. Ivy clung to the spiral towers and magnificent stone arches. A few brave trees had forced their way through seams in the great blocks of dragon’s jade, their bark bellying over the pavement and their roots spidering out in the vain search for deeper soil. Black water pooled in the low places, thick with slime. Bright-plumed parrots fluttered and complained from the trees and the towers, and tiny scarlet frogs leapt from leaf to broad leaf with a ticking sound like dry twigs breaking. Stepping out from the jungle canopy for the first time in days, Marcus stared up at an open sky the color of sapphires.

“My God,” Kit said.

“Wouldn’t think it’d be so easy to hide something that big,” Marcus said. “Any thoughts as to what we do from here?”

“I expect that reliquary itself will be in the deepest part of the ruins, guarded and barred.”

“The intent being to keep out people like us.”

“Yes.”

“Wish I’d brought a pry bar,” Marcus said. “We should find shelter for the night. This isn’t our territory, and those very hospitable Southlings who told us none of this existed won’t be pleased we proved them wrong.”

“Can you imagine it, Captain?” Master Kit asked. “This was a citadel of the dragons. These walls have stood here since before the war. Humanity might well have been feral when these stones were set.”

“Or they might have caught us all as slaves to set them. Careful. Snake.”

“What?” Kit said. Then, “Oh.” He moved to the side, and the black-and-silver serpent slid away down the steps toward the dark pools below.

By the time they found a chamber that met Marcus’s approval, the sapphire sky had darkened to indigo, the parrots had all vanished, and the evening’s swarm of midges filled the air. An early bat, its wings fluttering wildly, spun through the air above the ruins, eating its fill of the insects. The smells of decay and still water filled the air. Marcus sat with his back against a cool stone wall while Kit measured out the evening meal of nuts and the last strips of dried meat from a foxlike animal Marcus had trapped three days before. His clothes were little more than rags, and he’d had to put another hole in his belt to keep it from slipping off his hips.

The journey had thinned Kit as well. The actor’s handsome face was craggy now, and his beard looked brittle and dull. Marcus took the food with a nod of thanks and Kit lowered himself to sit across the narrow chamber. Likely it had been storage, back when it had been anything. The door had stood a bit ajar for centuries before Marcus was born, its hinges rusted away to black streaks. The ceiling was low enough that any attackers would have to come in hunched and vulnerable, and whatever animal had left its spoor in the corners hadn’t been back recently. It was as good as home.

“Start searching at first light?” Kit asked.

“That suits. And we’ll need to find something to eat. Freshwater. Ancient hoard of the dragons won’t do us much good if we starve to death.”

“I suppose not,” Kit said.

“I’ll take first watch.”

Kit nodded in the growing gloom. Even if they’d found something dry enough to burn, they couldn’t afford the luxury of a fire. Any Southling patrol would see the light of it from seven miles off, jungle or no. Kit yawned and settled down against the far wall. Marcus took his sword in its rotting sheath and laid it across his knees, preparing for the long hours of darkness. Outside their little shelter, something ticked, ticked again, and began a whirring insectile song. Another joined in, and soon the ruins were alive with the sound of inhuman life. The walls and terraces that the dragons had designed were a vast city for beetles and midges, frogs and snakes. And two men whose minds and comprehension of the world was likely nearer to the midges than the dragons. Marcus let himself wonder what the builders of his little shelter would have thought if they’d known, however many centuries ago, that in the vast span of time their work would fall this far. Despair, maybe, that all their efforts were doomed. Or pride that what they did would leave a mark on the world that, though it might change its shape and meaning, would not be erased.

And nothing could ever really boast permanence. Every castle fell in time. Every empire. Every man. Even these walls would eventually be buried by the jungle, though the slow accretion of fallen leaves and grit might take ten times longer than had already passed. There was a kind of consolation in the thought that nothing lasts forever.

“Do you think they’re all right?” Kit asked. His voice was gentle, already half asleep. “Cary and Sandr and the rest?”

“Probably,” he said, and Kit chuckled.

“I keep thinking of things I want to say to them. Two days ago, I thought of a simple, clear explanation for Charlit Soon about why the king’s role in The Song of Love and Salt has to be played as a Haaverkin or Jasuru. When I realized I couldn’t tell her, it was disappointing.”

Marcus grunted.

“And Cithrin. I assume your own thoughts are with her.”

“And Yardem,” Marcus said.

“What are you going to do, when it’s over? Will you go back to them?”

The last time he’d seen Cithrin bel Sarcour, she’d been leaving for Carse with two of his guardsmen and not him. The last word he’d had of her, she’d been lost in the chaos of a political coup in Camnipol. He knew all too well what happened to rich, unarmed women during political uprisings. He tapped a thumb on the body of his blade.

“Once we’re done, I’ll find them,” Marcus said, “and if Cithrin’s hurt or dead and I could have stopped it, I’ll kill Yardem.”

Kit shifted in the gloom.

“You would do that?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Well, I might. Yardem’s good, though, and he’s got reach on me, but one of us will be leaving on a plank.”

“And if Cithrin’s well?”

“Likely the same.”

The chirring song of insect wings was the only sound for a moment. When Kit spoke again, he sounded more awake.

“You’re not having the nightmares any longer, are you? About your wife and daughter. What happened before doesn’t seem to be troubling you.”

“They’ll come back,” he said, meaning the dreams of burning. “They always do. Right now, I’ve got more than enough nightmare just getting up in the morning.”

“I think Yardem was right about you and the shape of your soul.”

“Then he knew the consequences of locking me in that dovecote,” Marcus said. “You should sleep, Kit. We have a lot of ground to cover and no particular idea what we’re looking for. Tomorrow is going to be long.”

For five days, they searched the ruins, waking with the first light and stopping when the darkness forced them to. Even in the torrential rains that came with midday, Marcus pressed on, pulling back growth of vines and scraping through layers of moss and lichen that had grown hard and thick as armor. Twice they found nests of broad gold-and-red beetles that defended against his intrustion by rising in the air, thick as smoke, forcing their bodies into their noses and mouths as if to choke them. Once, something paced them for a long hour, though Marcus never saw more of it than a massive shadow, low against the ground.

The ruins were vast and complex, not a palace buried in green. Halls led into the body of the earth. Doorways lurked, hidden by the grown of the jungle. Towers stood, their windows empty and open as the eye sockets of sun-bleached skulls.

They knew they were coming close when they found the bodies.

The first bones had been a massive beast once, its jaw as long as Marcus’s arm. Three rows of teeth, serrated edges still as sharp as knives, littered the paving stones, a scattering of pale bone on lichen black. Marcus knelt. Thin bits of gristle still clung in the depths of the joints, but the time that had cleaned away the flesh had replaced it with moss. He brushed it off with his fingers.

“What was it, do you think?” Kit asked.

“Big. You see the notches in the bone here and right there? That’s where spears took it.”

“A guardian, perhaps,” Kit said. “A sentry set to watch over the reliquary for the ages.”

Marcus rubbed the back of his hand against his chin.

“Would have been on the old side,” he said.

“Assian Bey was said to be an engineer for the dragon Asteril,” Kit said. “There are tales of the dragons setting guards who could sleep away years until they were disturbed.”

“A trap with teeth, then,” Marcus said. “Well, the good news is that someone’s killed it for us.”

“And the bad?”

Marcus didn’t answer.

The chambers beneath the ruins were dim as night, and the improvised torches of tree branch and moss smoked badly. They walked carefully through a hall larger than the grandest ballroom in Northcoast. The walls were complex with carved designs, and high above them, almost obscured by the shadows, the ceiling seemed to have claws and teeth. It might have been carved stone or stalactites built from the soft fungus of the invading jungle, but it gave Marcus the sense of stepping into the maw of a vast animal. He walked slowly, watching for traps and dangers, and so it was almost an hour before they found the next bones.

The ten men had died quickly and lay where they had fallen. If there had been survivors, they hadn’t buried their dead or raised cairns. A vast bronze door stood before them, its seals broken. Marcus and Kit stepped carefully among the dead.

“Dartinae,” Marcus said. “One over here that might have been a Cinnae or a very young Firstblood, but most of these were Dartinae.”

“I suspect we’ve found where Akad Silas died. I think I would feel better if I knew what had killed him.”

“Poison’s my bet,” Marcus said, poking his head through the opening of the great bronze door and peering into the inky darkness beyond. “Fill the chamber here with bad air, and when someone opens it, all the swordsmanship in the world won’t help you.”

“I am beginning to think Assian Bey might perhaps have been a bit overfond of his own cleverness,” Kit said sourly.

“It is a vice. Come on. This is as far as they got. Whatever comes next is our problem.”

Despite everything they had seen, despite the warnings of bone and flesh, Marcus very nearly didn’t see the third guardian of the reliquary before it was too late.

The corridor had narrowed, the ceiling dropping down so low that Marcus could touch it with his fingertips. The statues of dragons clung to the walls, shifting evilly in the dim torchlight. Kit walked beside him, humming tunelessly under his breath. Ahead of them, something glittered in the darkness. And then it moved. Marcus froze, and half a heartbeat later, Kit did as well. Something like massive eyes blinked in the gloom ahead and a low, reedy sound like the breath of a vast animal filled the narrow space. Another beast, Marcus thought, only that seemed wrong. Repeating the same sort of trap didn’t seem the thing an overly clever engineer in the last days of the Dragon Empire would do. And anyone who’d come this far would be expecting another trap, would be watching for it. Marcus’s blood went cold.

It was a distraction.

He whirled, drawing his sword by instinct, as the massive toothed blade descended from above. He pushed Kit forward and down with the back of his arm, and swung in a desperate parry. The ancient steel met the new and snapped. The evil blades drove in toward Marcus’s belly, rusted spikes scraping his sides. The impact knocked the breath out of him but the mechanism would not let him fall. For a moment, Marcus stood in the darkness, uncertain whether he’d just been impaled, waiting for the shock to fade and the pain to come in. He looked down at his belly.

The spike that would have ended him, weakened by centuries of rust, had been broken by his parry. The stump had cut into his skin, but not badly. If he hadn’t seen it, if he hadn’t turned in the breath that he had, the rusted teeth would have punched into the small of his back deep enough to kill.

“Are you all right?” Kit asked. He sounded awed.

Marcus considered his answers, and settled on, “Yeah.” He pulled himself out from between the spikes and walked toward the false beast with a confidence born of relief and fear. The eyes were half spheres of gold, the reedy breath a vast bellows.

Beyond it, a long hallway stretched, thick with webs and the scent of rot. They moved through it slowly, alert for the next trap. At the end stood two vast bronze doors with a massive complex of locks, fitted with dozens of crystal vials that still had thick, noxious-looking fluids in them. Turn the wrong wheel, it seemed to say, and release the poison. It took several hours to see that it was a trick, and that the doors could be opened by lifting the bar.

And beyond them, like the boasting display of a king, lay the treasures of the Dragon Empire. A huge tome with letters in worked bronze on its side that Marcus couldn’t read. A silver case, the metal tarnished to black, filled with stoppered vials fashioned from dragon’s jade. A roll of copper hung like a tapestry with a fine lines etched into it showing what appeared to be a massive ship floating in the sky and doing battle with a vast dragon. An urn of orange-and-gold enamel with the image of a weeping Jasuru woman painted in its side. There was no gold, no gems or jewelry, but it hardly mattered. Anything there would have called forth wealth enough that Marcus need never work again for any king of any nation. If they didn’t just kill him and take it.

Marcus walked slowly through the reliquary’s deepest chamber, his torch held high above him. A mirror in the back caught the light, but its reflection was some other room in a sunlit tower. A wide throne of black wood and yellow silk sat in a corner, and Marcus’s skin crawled just being near it.

“Here,” Kit said. “It’s here.”

Kit stood before a simple wooden stand that held a single blade. It was longer than Marcus preferred, designed perhaps for a Tralgu or Yemmu. It would have been unworkable for a Cinnae. The scabbard was green, but deeper and more complex than enameling would explain, like the emerald carapace of a vast beetle.

“Strike a man with it, and he will die,” Kit said. “Strike a man like me with it, and all the spiders within him will die as well. We had blades like it at the temple to purify the unclean.”

“Meaning kill people like you.”

“Meaning that, yes.”

“And stick it in a goddess’s belly, and we save the world,” Marcus said, reaching for it.

Kit stopped him, the old actor’s hand on his wrist.

“What’s the matter?”

“This is an evil thing. An evil object.”

“Come a long way for second thoughts now,” Marcus said.

“I know that. I agree with you. But I brought you here, and I feel wrong letting you take this without being certain that you know what you are sacrificing. What I am asking of you … I think I am asking a great deal of you, Marcus. And I consider you my friend.”

Marcus tilted his head. Kit’s face was somber. The grit and dirt of weeks had ground itself into the man’s pores and the greasy wires of his beard and hair. Kit swallowed.

“This weapon is poison,” Kit said. “I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it—just that, carry it and nothing more—the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably, it will kill you.”

“It’s a sword, Kit,” Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from its place. “They’re all like that.”

Cithrin

The market houses of Suddapal sat at the edges of the wide, grassy commons. Pillars of black wood carved with delicate whorls and spirals marked the corners of every room, and wall hangings of rich green felt hung where Cithrin would have expected tapestries to be. Where the Grand Market of Porte Oliva assigned stalls to merchants and let the buyers move between them, everything here was in flux. Halfway through a negotiation, some third party might intrude with a better price or an accusation of poor quality, and this was true whether the issue hinged on the price of a single apple or a shipping contract worth half the value of the city. Nor was that the only aspect of the market that left Cithrin feeling at sea.

Her youth had been spent in the Free Cities where Firstblood and Timzinae had lived and worked in very nearly equal proportion. If asked, she would have said that she was perfectly comfortable with the race, with any of the thirteen races of humanity. The market houses of Suddapal showed her that that was not perfectly true. Walking through rooms and corridors filled almost exclusively with the dark-scaled bodies and twice-lidded eyes, she felt conspicuous. She was aware of her slight frame and unscaled, pale skin in a way she had never been before, and she disliked the feeling. And while no one was cruel to her, she could not help noticing that she was watched, considered, and commented upon. By stepping on a boat in Porte Oliva and stepping out in Suddapal she had become an oddity, and she didn’t know how to play the role.

Adding to that was the depth of family connection and history that seemed to inform every negotiation. In her first hour, Cithrin heard reference made to the marriages of cousins three generations dead, to favors done by one man’s uncle for another’s niece, to shelter given by one family to another during the flood of a river whose course had shifted twice in the century since the kindness was offered. The same care and analysis that concerned the noble houses of Birancour or Herez applied to everyone here, and Cithrin despaired of ever mastering it.

Though Cithrin didn’t complain, Magistra Isadau seemed to recognize her discomfort. The older woman introduced Cithrin as the voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, gave Cithrin what context she expected her to need before they entered a negotiation, and explained any obscurities that came in once the discussions were over. Isadau never spoke harshly, never condescended, never reminded Cithrin through word or act that one of them was the master here and the other an apprentice in all but name. She didn’t need to. The resentment that Cithrin felt came from being aware of her failings already.

“Oh no,” Magistra Isadau said, smiling as if she were sad and shaking her head. “We can’t accept last year’s terms again.”

The man across the table from them chuckled. Even seated, he was half a head taller than Isadau. The chitinous scales on his neck and face had begun to grey and crack with age. Cithrin sipped at her tea and smiled politely.

“You don’t do yourself any favors gouging us when we’re low, Isadau,” he said.

“You aren’t low. You’re at war.”

The man’s name was Kilik rol Keston, and Cithrin knew from her review of the books that he traded spice and olives from Elassae north to Borja, returning with worked leather and medicines. The bank had insured his caravans every year for the past decade and paid out the contract only once. It was the sort of information she would have used to make her determination in Porte Oliva or that Magister Imaniel would have considered in Vanai. It appeared to be only a part of Magistra Isadau’s calculations.

“This isn’t a war,” Kilik said, “it’s the world teaching Antea a lesson about the price of overreach. If anything, it makes my work safer. The traditional families aren’t going to be arguing over who gets to levy taxes every half mile of the eastern passage.”

“You’re hauling food and medicine past refugees,” Isadau said. “Next you’ll be storing your seed corn in a sparrow’s nest.”

A thick man passing by their table clapped a wide hand on Kilik’s shoulder.

“Why do you even talk to this woman?” the new man asked. “She’s only going to rob you.”

“Misplaced loyalty,” Kilik said sourly.

“Oh, did you want the contract, Samish?” Isadau asked, smiling brightly. Then to Kilik, “You know Samish has been offering very good terms on his insurance contracts.”

“Better than yours, that’s truth,” Samish said, sitting down at Kilik’s side. Cithrin felt her gut go tight. Anywhere she had ever been, the intrusion would have been unforgivable. Here, it meant nothing. “What’s this hag offering?”

“Half recompense for six on the hundred,” Kilik said, and Samish’s eyebrows rose like birds taking wing.

“You’re joking,” he said, and Cithrin thought he sounded genuinely surprised.

“Half recompense on expected sale,” Isadau said, “not on cost.”

Samish’s expression changed to a sly smile and he wagged a scolding finger at Kilik. “You’re being tricky with me, brother. But because our fathers fought together, I’ll give you five and a half on the hundred.”

Kilik looked at Isadau and pointed toward Samish as if to say, You see how much better I can do? Cithrin felt a rush of anger, but Isadau laughed.

“My terms don’t change,” she said, rising from the table. Cithrin sipped down the last of her tea too quickly and got a mouthful of soaked leaf for her trouble. When she stood Isadau took her elbow like they were close confidants and steered her back through the overwhelming din and chatter of the trading house. As they reached the door to the yard, she squeezed Cithrin’s arm once and tilted her head in query. Cithrin shrugged.

“I wish we could make our negotiations at the house,” Cithrin said. “I hate losing a contract because we were where we could be overheard.”

“We didn’t lose the contract. Kilik’s an old hand at this. He’ll spend the rest of the day wandering about talking, and he’ll find that Samish is overcommitted. The caravan will take insurance with us because he wants to be the gambler and have the insurance be his safety. He won’t risk his trade on someone who might be destitute when the time arrived to make a claim. Not for one-half on the hundred,” Isadau said, then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. Her easy joy was gone from it. “I do worry about this war, though.”

In the yard, Enen and Yardem Hane leaned against a low stone wall, talking with a Timzinae girl old enough to have a woman’s figure but still with the light brown scales of youth. Yardem’s ears shifted toward them as they approached and Enen lifted her soft-pelted chin. The girl turned, caught sight of Isadau, and trotted up to meet them.

“Magistra,” the girl said.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific, dear,” Isadau said. “Maha, this is Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour from the new Porte Oliva branch. Cithrin, this is my cousin Merid’s daughter Maha.”

Cithrin nodded her head and the girl matched her before turning back to Isadau.

“Papa said you should come when you can,” she said, then leaned closer and shifted to a whisper. “He’s got information about the lemon crop.”

Isadau nodded and let Cithrin’s arm go free.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to meet you back at the house,” she said.

“That’s fine,” Cithrin said. The girl took Magistra Isadau’s hand, and the pair of them walked briskly off through the gate and out to the uncurbed stone-paved road. Yardem and Enen came forward.

“Is all well, ma’am?” Yardem asked in his soft low voice.

“Apparently,” Cithrin said. “But I couldn’t start to tell you why.”

Enen scratched her collarbone, setting the beads woven into her pelt clicking. “I had that experience of them too. Timzinae are the worst. Haaverkin or Jasuru—even Tralgu, if you don’t mind my saying it, Yardem—you deal with them and you at least know you’re in for something odd. Timzinae seem just like anyone right up until they don’t, and then who the hell knows what they’re thinking?”

The city was low all around them, the wide streets with stretches of grass and low scrub between them and the houses making it seem less a city than a village grown vast. Horses and mules drew large carts, men small ones. The air smelled of the sea but also of turned earth and damp. Above them, the sky was a blue so intense it was hard to look at and the sun glowed like a great burning coin. Cithrin crossed her arms as she walked, realizing only after she’d done it that she missed Magistra Isadau’s touch and was trying to make up for its loss. She dropped her arms to her sides.

“Where’s Roach?” she asked. “Wasn’t he on duty today?”

“Took his shift for him, gave him a day’s liberty,” Yardem said. “He has a nephew getting wed.”

“Really?” Cithrin said. “I didn’t know he had family in Suddapal.”

“Some,” Yardem said.

“He never mentioned them to me.”

“Don’t know that he felt it was his place to, ma’am,” Yardem said. Enen cleared her throat in a way that sounded more for preparation than for comfort. Cithrin turned to look at her. The Kurtadam woman’s face was masked by the oily seal-like fur of her pelt, but the discomfort showed through in her eyes.

“I was just thinking, Magistra,” Enen said. “You might not want to call him that while we’re here.”

“Who? Roach?” Cithrin said. “Isn’t that his name?”

“His name’s Halvill,” Yardem said. “Halvill rol Kausol. Roach was just what people called him in Porte Oliva. Sort of the way people might call a Southling ‘Eyehole’ or a Kurtadam ‘Clicker.’”

“Oh,” Cithrin said. “I didn’t know it bothered him.”

Yardem shrugged. “He’s never said it does. He’s not the sort that makes trouble.”

“Only if other people hear you saying it, they might take it wrong is all,” Enen said.

“I understand,” Cithrin said, trying to recall how many times she’d called the little Timzinae guard by name and who had been present when she had. “Thank you.”

Cithrin had spent most of her life being alone. As a girl, she had been the odd one of her cohort, fitting as poorly with the children of nobility as the urchins who ran in the streets. When she left Vanai, she had adopted false identities, from boy carter to agent of the Medean bank, which had required a certain distance from the world to remain plausible. The work of banking itself was isolated. Simply being known as the woman who could lift a poor man to wealth so long as he was wise, prudent, and lucky—or destroy the highborn if they were prodigal and weak—made her a race of one. She was a banker, and so of course she was alone.

Still, the isolation she felt in the compound at Suddapal was unlike the cultivated distances she’d experienced before. Here, she could retreat to her room, close the door behind her, and feel like a prisoner waiting for the magistrate’s justice, or else she could go out into the compound and be greeted and welcomed to half a dozen conversations and endeavors from quilting to shoeing horses to sitting with the children of the family and improvising poetry, and never once feel she was truly at home. Being alone in her room, trapped by the walls, was unpleasant. Being alone in the midst of a group that seemed to go out of its way to make her welcome was worse. The only solace she could take was the branch’s books and kitchen’s wine cellar, and so over weeks, she had become a citizen of both.

The evening meals came late, the wide hall with Magistra Isadau and her siblings and their families and friends often making room for twenty people. Afterward, the diners would withdraw to the yard or to private rooms. The sound of lutes and drums and living voices lifted in harmony were as much a part of the after-meal as sweet wines and cups of chocolate. Cithrin, though, excused herself from the merriment, took a bottle or two of the rich red wine the house imported from Pût, and took some ledger or company book from Magistra Isadau’s office to her room to read like a girl lulling herself to sleep with a volume of poetry. The wine calmed the tightness in her body, the play of numbers and agreements occupied her mind until the music of the house didn’t bother her and the cold of the night drove her under her blankets and, at last, to sleep.

Except that some nights, sleep would not come. On those, she would rise, dress in her dark wools, and walk the halls of the compound. There were always a few men and women still awake or else woken early for the next day. The capacity of the Timzinae to go without sleep was remarkable to her. On one such night, she found Yardem sitting at the watch fire alone, staring at the stars scattered above them and listening to the first crickets of spring.

She looked up, tracing the new constellations she knew. Stars were not her passion.

“Evening, ma’am,” he said. “You’re up late.”

“I suppose,” she said, her words careful and deliberately unslurred. “You are too.”

“Am,” Yardem said and flicked one jingling ear. It might have been only her imagination, but the Tralgu’s wide, canine face seemed wistful. “Seems we’re settling in well.”

“Yes,” Cithrin said. “Magistra Isadau is a very intelligent woman. From everything I saw at the market house, I’d have thought the bank would be barely turning a profit, but she manages to do quite well.”

“I was thinking more of the household,” Yardem said.

“They’re very kind,” Cithrin said. “I’ve never been around a real family before. To see the way they treat each other … the way they treat us, for that. They’re all so open and loving and accepting. It’s like we’ve always belonged here and just never knew it.”

In the trees at the compound’s edge, an owl launched itself up against the stars, a shadow moving on darkness. Yardem traced its arc with eyes and ears, and Cithrin followed it by following him. The silence between them was calm, companionable. Cithrin put her small hand over the back of his.

“I hate it here,” she said. “I have never hated anyplace as much as here.”

“I know.”

“It is obvious? I try not to let it show.”

“I’ve known you a while,” Yardem said.

“They’re all so kind, and all I can feel is how little I belong with them. Magistra Isadau? She’s like a good witch from a children’s story. She’s sweet and she’s wise and she wants the best from me, and it makes my skin crawl. I keep thinking that I wouldn’t know it if she hated me. God knows she’d treat me just as well.”

A falling star streaked overhead, there and then gone.

“I knew a man once,” Yardem said. “Good fighter, pleasant to keep watch with. The sort of man who’d have done well in a company. Might have gotten as far as running one if he’d kept at it. Only he’d spent his whole youth as a slave. He’d do well enough when we were on campaign, but when we were done and he had time and money of his own and no one telling him what to do? He didn’t know how to act.”

“How did he deal with it?”

“At first, the captain tried keeping him back, giving him duties even while the other men went out and drank themselves poor. Treated the boy like he was still enslaved. That worked for a time, but in the end it wasn’t enough. It took the boy a season to manage it, but the magistrates stripped his freedom and sold him to a farmer.”

“That’s sad.”

“Is it?”

An insect landed on Cithrin, its legs struggling against the fine, pale hair of her forearm. She flicked it away.

“We say our souls want joy, but they don’t,” she said. “They want what they already know, joyful or not.”

Yardem grunted as if he’d taken a blow to the gut and pulled his hand away from her to scratch an itch she doubted was really there.

“What about you?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“Should.”

“But you can’t.”

“Apparently not.”

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“The war, partly. The word in the trade has it that Antea is stretched tight as a drumskin. Wore themselves thin last year, and on the edge of falling apart. Except there’s other stories too.”

“You can’t say that and not tell,” Cithrin said. “I’d fire you.”

“They’re saying that the spirits of the dead march with the Antean army. And that the birds and dogs all start running away before their army comes the way they do from a fire. Makes it sound as if there’s something uncanny about the Lord Regent, like he’s some sort of cunning man.”

“Geder’s not a cunning man,” Cithrin said. “He’s … he’s just a man of too little wisdom and too much power.”

“You sound sad for him.”

“No,” she said. “He burned my city. Killed the people who raised and looked after me. I lived with him for weeks. Took comfort in him. I don’t think there’s a word for what he and I are to each other.”

“Do you love him?”

“Are you drunk?”

“You took comfort in him,” Yardem said. “For some people—”

“He got anxious, I didn’t say no. What’s love got to do with that?”

“Nothing,” Yardem agreed. “Only there are people who don’t see it that way.”

“They’re fools,” Cithrin said, without rancor. And then, “You said partly. What’s the other part?”

“I don’t know where the captain is. What he’s doing. There’s no word of him anywhere. It … bothers me.”

“I wish he was still here too.”

“Not sure I said that, ma’am,” Yardem said ruefully. “I’d hoped to know where he went and what he did. The captain and I didn’t part on the best terms. People who betray him don’t tend to end well, and there’s a good chance he feels I betrayed him.”

“Then he’s a fool too,” Cithrin said.

Yardem didn’t answer.

Geder

Well, you know how it is,” Geder’s father said, scratching at his belly. “Rivenhalm in winter. Spent a fair part of the season listening to the ice crack. Not a great deal more going on. Though this might amuse you, hey? You remember old Jeyup the weirkeeper? The one with the crooked nose?”

“Yes, of course,” Geder said, though the truth of it was that he had only a vague impression of a tall man with dark hair and an unfortunate voice. The room in which they sat now was less than halfway up the Kingspire, and still higher than any other tower in Camnipol. He’d thought that the view might impress his father, and perhaps it had. It was hard to tell.

“Well, just before thaw, he was out cutting ice away from the weir. Making repairs. Only he’d misjudged the ice. Fell right through, half died from the cold of it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Geder said, and glanced at the great spiral stair of rosewood dressed in gold that led to the floor above. The floor where Basrahip and his pet adventurer Dar Cinlama were meeting even now. He hoped to catch sight of the great priest as he descended, but the only form on the stairway was a servant in ceremonial robes trotting off on some errand or another. Geder leaned back in his seat.

“Don’t be,” his father said, “because that’s just the thing. Good came of it after all. The cunning man was away in the east seeing to a man who’d had a tree fall on him, so until he got back old Jeyup had Arrien, the butcher’s widow, coming to nurse him along. And they married at first thaw, if you can picture that!”

Geder’s father slapped his knee in merriment that invited Geder to join in. Geder did smile, pretending pleasure he didn’t actually feel. Rivenhalm had been his home for the whole length of his childhood and the early part of his time as a man, but the fine points of it seemed as vague as someone else’s memories. He remembered the weir and its keeper, the long path behind the manor house that led to the cave where he’d hide in the summer, the smell of the library, the small niche his father kept always lit by a single candle in memory of Geder’s mother, and those tiny fragments would be rich and full of meaning. But they had no context.

“So,” Geder’s father said, “tell me. What translations are you working on these days?”

“I’m not really,” Geder said. “You know. Being Lord Regent. Running the empire. The war makes it hard to have the time, really.”

Lehrer’s face fell a bit, and Geder felt he’d said the wrong thing.

“Of course,” his father said. “It’s just that it was so important to you when you were a boy. I hoped you’d be able … Well, that’s the world, isn’t it? We do what we have to do.”

A long, low, rolling laughter echoed in the distance. Basrahip. The urge to leap up from his seat and go up the stairs, the desire to know what had happened in the meeting was like an itch, but he also didn’t want to seem anxious. It would have been beneath his dignity, and he didn’t want Basrahip to laugh at him. He hated it when people did that.

“I’ve, ah, I’ve kept you too long,” his father said. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Geder said. “I’m always happy to see you. As long as I’m Lord Regent, you should come by the Kingspire anytime you like. I could get you rooms here.”

“My own rooms are fine,” Lehrer said. “They suit me.”

He levered himself to his feet and Geder rose with him. The older man looked frailer than Geder remembered, his hair thinner, his skin more ashen. It was just the winter, Geder told himself. With the summer sun and the court season to keep him busy, his father would get his color back. They stood for a moment, both of them unsure what etiquette demanded. At last, Lerer made a little bow appropriate for the Viscount of Rivenhalm to the Lord Regent, but with an ironic smile that meant for the father and son. Geder followed his example, and then watched as his father turned and walked away. He felt a lingering sense of having failed somehow. Of having disappointed. He shouldn’t have been thinking so much about Basrahip.

Basrahip. He glanced at the stairway, licked his lips, and started walking toward it, forcing his demeanor to be casual.

Basrahip and Dar Cinlama stood together under an archway of pale stone. The priest was speaking too quietly for Geder to make out the words, but his huge hands were gesturing, massaging the air. Cinlama nodded his understanding and agreement, the light from his eyes casting shadows across his cheekbones. The vastly large Firstblood man and the thin, muscular Dartinae looked like a woodcut, an allegory for something more than what they actually were.

“Well, then,” Geder said, walking up to them. “All the plans are made, then, yes?”

“Lord Regent,” Dar Cinlama said as he bowed. The amusement in the man’s voice was probably only Geder’s imagination.

“Yes, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said, putting his hand on the Dartinae man’s shoulder. “My friend Dar and I are quite pleased. Your generosity and wisdom will bring you great rewards from the goddess.”

Geder felt his smile curdle.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

Cinlama made another little bow, but Basrahip frowned and Geder bit his lip. He shouldn’t have said anything. The falseness of the words would be clear as daylight to Basrahip. But then, Geder considered, that might have been why he’d said them.

“Forgive me, friend Dar,” Basrahip said. “I must speak with Prince Geder now.”

“No problem with that,” Dar Cinlama said, grinning happily. “I think the list of things I’ll need to prepare should keep me busy for days.”

He bowed to Geder a third time and then trotted away, self-congratulation radiating from him like heat from a fire. Basrahip’s wide face was a mask of concern. Geder crossed his arms.

“What troubles you, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked, gesturing that they should step into the meeting room that priest and explorer had just abandoned.

“All sorts of things,” Geder said. “The grain stores we’re capturing in Sarakal aren’t as rich as we’d expected. Ternigan’s saying the siege at Nus may take longer than he’d thought it would. I’ve got half a dozen decisions from the grand audience that I still need to do something about, and they’re just gnawing at me. It’s all just …”

Geder held his hand out, trying to express his frustration and the sense of loss that words could not quite encompass. It had all come so suddenly. The sense of being the most important man in the world had been wonderful, and it had been transitory. Geder couldn’t explain it precisely. It was as if everything had been fine before Dar Cinlama had made his petition, and then tasted of ashes afterward. He could no more justify it than deny it away.

He walked to the balcony and looked out over the massive city below him. It was his, for the time being at least. Camnipol was his, and Antea, and so, in a sense, was everything. It stretched out before him like a map of itself—the Division, the wide manors and compounds of the noble classes, the maze of narrow streets in the south. Even the sun high in its blue arch of sky seemed part of Geder’s domain. The air smelled of smoke from a thousand forges, bakeries, and hearths. Tiny shapes moved on the ground far below, distance reducing them all to less than ants. It should have been enough.

Basrahip’s footsteps approached from behind him. Like a boy poking his tongue at a sore tooth, he remembered again the pleasure and interest on the priest’s face when Dar Cinlama had made his proposal.

“I was thinking,” Geder said, “we should move your temple. The highest floors of the Kingspire aren’t being used for anything in particular, and there’s a beautiful theater space you could use for sermons. It looks out like you’re a bird. And then if something else like Dawson Kalliam happens, you’ll be safe. No one can take the Kingspire.”

Basrahip was silent for a long moment. His nod was hardly visible in the corner of Geder’s eye. The echo of disappointment and shame he felt could have been the echo of speaking with his father. It could have been something else.

“The meeting with the adventurer,” Geder said. “It went well, then? We’re going to do what he said.”

“I have asked that he give over all the information he has about places where the bones of the world may lie near its skin,” Basrahip said. “He has agreed. The man himself will lead one group, but there will be others to go where he feels it wise to send them. With your permission, Prince Geder.”

“Of course you have my permission. Why would you not? Here’s my permission. Take it.”

Beyond the southern wall of the city, the land fell away into a deep plain. From where he stood, it was almost as if Camnipol stood at the edge of the world. A flock of pigeons rose in the air below them, grey wings glittering white in the sunlight. Basrahip’s sigh carried the weight of years.

“What is troubling you, Prince Geder?”

“Nothing.”

“That is not true, my friend,” Basrahip said, his voice gentle. “Try again.”

Geder crossed his arms. Without meaning to, he picked out the tiny blot of color that was Yellow House. He wondered if Cary and Smit and the other players who’d hidden him and Aster were still there. He wondered if they had heard from Cithrin. He started to speak, stopped himself, and then tried again.

“This man Cinlama. He’s going to go off into the world and find things, isn’t he? He’s going to follow these tiny traces of history, these clues and rumors and half-remembered stories, and try to dig up wonders. I used to be the one who did that. I’m the one who left Antea and went looking for the Sinir Kushku and found the temple. I was the one who brought you and the goddess back out into the world. And now …”

“Do you fear that this man would take your glory? Your place in the goddess’s favor?”

Geder shook his head. “I could have Cinlama killed for any reason. For no reason other than that I said so. It’s that I see him and I think of the ways I used to be him. Or the way I used to be my father’s son, and I’m not anymore. Or the way I used to be Dawson Kalliam’s client before he turned on me. I used to be the one who led you into the world and showed you all the things that had changed since your people went into seclusion. And I’m not any of those people anymore.”

“Would you wish to be?” the priest asked. “Lord Prince, what do you want?”

The question seemed to float in the air like a feather. Geder tried to imagine himself strapping a leather sack of books to the side of a horse, taking a handful of servants, and pressing out into the forgotten corners of the world. In truth, he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the journey when he had gone, and the prospect of sleeping in a tent and worrying about where the next freshwater would be had more charm in theory than in practice. It wasn’t what Dar Cinlama was doing that Geder envied, it was what he signified. For a moment, Geder was suffering the summer just gone by, hiding in a hole under a collapsed building, spending days and nights in darkness with Aster and Cithrin bel Sarcour. He heard her laugh again and the slight bitterness that seemed to flavor everything she said.

“I want to matter,” Geder said.

“Ah,” Basrahip said, as if he understood.

There were, Geder supposed, things in the world that deserved his hatred more than ancient precedents of grazing rights. The worse sorts of stinging flies, for example. Or the way a man’s bowels turned to water if he ate bad meat. Those were worse, if only slightly.

“You see, my lord,” the scholarly man said, “the question you ask hinges on whether the men in question are grazing animals that come from the same stock. If, for example, they are sheep who descended from the same ram three generations previous, then they are by imperial standards within the same greater flock. In that case—”

“The old Miniean precedents apply, and this Sebinin fellow doesn’t owe the other one a single coin.”

“Exactly,” the scholar said, “but if there was another ram—”

“He owes a tenth of a sheep for every day he grazed on the land without permission.”

“Precisely. If you don’t mind my saying it, your lordship is very quick to understand the intricacies of these questions.”

Geder nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table like a schoolboy before his tutor. It was another of the unresolved issues of the general audience taken care of, or if not taken care of, at least moved to the next stage. He’d send a messenger to the people in question and find out the lineages of their sheep. He had never in all his life imagined that the role of governing an empire would cook down to such a thin broth as this, but he understood now why the general audience came only once a year and usually ended well before the last of the petitioners came before the throne. If he’d chosen to stop an hour or two earlier, he wouldn’t be sitting here now. Nor would Dar Cinlama and his team be preparing to depart. Around him, the small library held the least command of his attention that any collection of books had ever managed. Volume after volume, codex after codex, trailing back through centuries to the founding of Antea, and many older even than that, without a single one being particularly interesting. He wondered whether Basrahip’s disdain for the written word was beginning to seep into him, or if this was genuinely the least interesting subject known to humanity.

“All right,” Geder said and consulted the page of notes he had sketched for himself, his heart sluggish and grey. “Let’s see what’s next. How much do you know about the legal differences between spring lettuce and autumn?”

The scholar’s eyebrows rose as Geder’s heart sank.

“Well, my lord, that is a fascinating question.”

It isn’t, Geder thought. No, it really, truly isn’t …

“Lord Regent?” a familiar voice said from the doorway. Canl Daskellin stood uncertainly, hesitating to step in or to leave. Geder sprang to his feet.

“Lord Daskellin! Come in, please,” he said, and then turned to the scholar. “I’m afraid the rest will have to wait. War and all. I’ll send someone for you when there’s time.”

The scholar bowed his way out and Geder led Daskellin to a chair, only realizing when he got there that he’d been pulling at the older man’s sleeve like a puppy worrying a dog’s ear. Daskellin smiled as he sat, but his expression seemed abstracted. It was as if he were still making some internal argument and had not come to a conclusion that entirely satisfied him. The dusting of white at the man’s temples stood out against the darkness of his skin, making him seem older than he was.

“I’ve been … speaking with Minister Basrahip,” Daskellin said at last.

“Yes,” Geder said. “Did he tell you I’ve decided to move his temple into the Kingspire? There are all of those levels at the very top that no one ever seems to use, and since the old one was damaged last summer … along with everything else, I suppose. But that way, he’ll have a place that’s protected.”

“He’d mentioned it, yes,” Daskellin said, tapping his fingertips idly against the spine of a book on taxation precedent. “It wasn’t the meat of our meal, though. It’s the Lord Marshal.”

“Ternigan?”

“Not Ternigan, no. Not precisely,” Daskellin said. “More the role of the Lord Marshal in the larger sense. As an extension of the power of the throne.”

Geder tilted his head. Daskellin licked his lips, his gaze on the farther wall.

“The king, or in your case the man taking the king’s role, isn’t a leader in the field,” Daskellin said. “His place is to coordinate among his subjects, see to it that the nobility are unified and direct his will through them. Through us.”

“Of course,” Geder said.

“But,” Daskellin said, sitting forward, “the minister had a point about the present situation. About Nus, in particular. You’ve read Ternigan’s reports, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Minister Basrahip suggested that if you were to join the Lord Marshal in the field—if you were to be physically present—it might rally the troops and end the siege sooner. And the sooner Nus falls, the more likely we are to recover food and supplies that … Well, we’re going to need them to make it through next winter, aren’t we?”

“You mean,” Geder said, his heart suddenly leaping within his chest, “you think I should go to the war? To Nus?”

Daskellin shook his head ruefully.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at first, but the minister kept repeating his arguments, and by the fourth or fifth time he’d said it all, it seemed to have some heft to it. It is critical that things go well in Sarakal, and Ternigan is a fine strategist. Only he isn’t … he isn’t a man who inspires the men around him. He isn’t a hero.”

“A hero?” Geder echoed, and he felt the smile not as an expression, but only a pressure at the back of his jaw. A bud that was growing into a bloom.

Thank you, Basrahip, he thought. This is what I wanted.

Clara

Disruption was, in its way, a constant. No season passed without its share of scandal. In a court the size and complexity of the one that attended the Severed Throne, someone was certainly being sexually unfaithful on a near-daily basis. Someone’s health was failing. Someone had delivered a deathly insult to someone. Really, if nothing else, someone would wear a jacket with an unfortunate cut or rouge their cheeks too much or else too little. Falling from grace, like anything else, had its protocol and its expectations. And, provided one didn’t fall too far, so did returning to court.

Allies would announce themselves by their invitations. The staunchest might invite the unfortunate soul in need of rescue to a dinner party or hold a luncheon in their name, but that was boldness that bordered on the rash. The more cautious might include the recently fallen into a sewing circle or private tea casual enough that the guests sat wherever they pleased. Even a nod or a smile in the street could be noticed by others and commented upon.

Clara’s misfortune, she knew, would be difficult to parse. Her husband, whom all in court knew she’d loved deeply and sincerely, had led the rebellion against the Lord Regent and been slaughtered. Attempted regicide should have been too dark a stain to recover from, but there were Jorey and Vicarian. Even, in her grudging way, Elisia. Each of them had kept some distance from the tragedy, and Geder Palliako had even kept Jorey in the court. Clara’s position, then, became something of a cipher. She was without precedent, and even the most experienced etiquette master might be permitted to confess puzzlement at how best to approach her.

The common sentiment appeared to be that sending a servant to her boarding house was a bit too sordid, and so slowly, as the groaning mechanisms of social play took their positions, notes began to arrive at Lord Skestinin’s small manor. Not invitations, because that would be almost a statement of allegiance, but mentions of small gatherings. Most were ostensibly for Sabiha with the understanding that she might choose to bring a guest. But there were a few addressed to Clara herself.

Lady Tilliaken’s gardens spilled out from her family’s manor house in an artful display of carelessness. To an untrained eye, the ivies and spoke-roses that curled around the stone walkways might have looked wild, but it was a tended wildness. The bright green runners never found their way into any inconvenient place. The buds of the flowers all came, as if by chance, into positions that would show their petals to the best effect. The finches and butterflies that found their way there hadn’t been drawn by any obvious caches of seed or sweet water. The style was called Hallskari, though Clara’s understanding was that real gardens in Hallskar were much more spare and put greater importance on the bitter herbs that Haaverkin seemed to prefer. The servant girl, a young Cinnae with hair as pale as daylight and eyes the color of ice, led Clara directly to the garden tables without bringing her through the house. The other women were already there, and it took Clara less than five long breaths together to assess the situation.

Lady Enga Tilliaken, at the head of the table, rose to greet Clara with kisses on both cheeks, which taken with the invitation put her as Clara’s ally. Merian Caot, second daughter of the Baron of Dannick, looked pleased and amused in equal measure much the way Clara’s own daughter might have done when she was young and going to inappropriate garden parties in order to play at rebellion. Lady Nikayla Essian, seeing Clara, gave a little coo of concern and rose to her feet, her eyes the perfect image of sympathy. She had come to gloat.

“Don’t get up on my account,” Clara said with a smile. “I don’t intend to stand for long. I’m too old for it.”

“You will take some tea, though, won’t you?” Lady Tilliaken said. “I’ve discovered this fascinating blend from that merchant from the Free Cities. What was his name?”

“Not the Timzinae!” Essian said.

“Of course not. The Jasuru woman.”

“Nufuz, you mean?” Clara said, and Tilliaken clapped her hands together.

“Yes, her.”

“If she recommended it, I can hardly refuse,” Clara said, taking a seat at the little stone table. A wasp hissed by her ear, gold and green as a gem in the sunlight. “I haven’t seen her in an age.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t have,” Essian said, touching Clara’s wrist. It promised to be a long and unpleasant afternoon.

It was necessary, of course. And more than that, it was expected. Dawson had thrown everything about her into question. The role she had played at court her whole life had been made uncertain, and now those who were willing to accept her company would be watching, testing, to see who and what she was. Did she show remorse, and if she did was it for her husband’s death or his actions? Did she speak harshly, or was she kind? In a hundred small ways, the Clara Kalliam they had all known was dead, and this new woman with her face and voice had stepped in. If she were ever to be reintegrated at court, they would need to know who this new woman was.

And, for that matter, so would she.

The tea was lovely—smoky and rich with a brightness that came from adding rose hips—and the cakes seemed to be made entirely of butter and honey with only enough flour to give them shape. The smell of turned earth from where Tilliaken’s servants were preparing the beds floated through the air like perfume, and the soft warmth of the spring sun slowly undid the stays at the necks of their dresses. Clara listened and spoke, doing the best imitation she could of the woman she had been only a year before, except she didn’t smoke. She’d run out of money for tobacco, and she would not allow herself to ask for it.

“Oh, did I tell you about my son’s new commission?” Essian said. “It’s very exciting. His first command.”

“Command?” Clara said. “Is he joining the forces in Sarakal?”

Essian’s cheeks pinked slightly, and not, Clara thought, from pride. That was interesting.

“No, it’s a smaller force. Bound for Lyoneia. Fifty men, he said.”

Clara felt something deep within her wake, tilt its ears forward, narrow its eyes. Why is he going there? What is he doing? Had Palliako given the order, or had someone else, and if someone else, who? She wanted to interrogate Essian the way Palliako had once questioned her. Instead she sipped her tea and nodded.

“It’s a great honor,” Essian said, almost petulantly.

“Command is always an important thing,” Caot said with a thin smile. Why was it that the young were so adept at being cruel? “It’s only a pity he’s being sent so far south when Sarakal’s to the east. He must be disappointed.”

“I don’t see why he would be,” Clara said. “If the Lord Regent’s sending him so far, it does imply a certain trust, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, trust,” Essian said, leaping at the word. “The Lord Regent trusts him.”

“Sending him as far as Lyoneia,” Clara said. “And I have to assume that it’s a matter of some importance. Surely we wouldn’t be sending men away in wartime unless the matter were critical.”

Essian sipped her tea, but didn’t answer. Either it was something trivial or else she didn’t know what the errand was. Clara wished she could think of some way to draw the woman out. Better to be patient and not be seen to ask. Better to seem to be what they thought she was. Clara suppressed a small and frustrated growl.

“So,” she said, “since I have been somewhat away from the center of things, you must tell me about the dresses at the opening of the season. Did Ana Pyrellin wear that impressive fur of hers again?”

“The one with the heads still on?” the young Caot girl said, laughing. “She did, and worse. You won’t believe it.”

Clara let the conversation drift into safer waters. The afternoon was brief enough. Had she remained until twilight, it would have been taken quite differently in court. Small steps would get her where she wanted to be more swiftly than great strides. They spoke of Geder Palliako’s decision to inspect the troops in Sarakal, of the rise in status of Fallon Broot, of the great debate about whether to replace the chairs in the Fraternity of the Great Bear. Clara listened and offered perhaps a bit less comment than she would have before. She felt the two different versions of herself sitting together, one hurt and shamed and cast out from her home, the other listening carefully for scraps of information that might give her advantage. When the time arrived, Caot and Essian left together, but Lady Tilliaken kept Clara back, inviting her to a small niche for a moment. She was still not welcome in the house even so far as a withdrawing room, but that Tilliaken wished a moment alone was interesting. Clara sat on the wooden bench while the lady of the house disappeared for a moment. She reached for her pipe before remembering that she couldn’t make use of it.

“Clara,” Lady Tilliaken said, stepping into the niche. She carried a folded cloth of yellow cream. “I wanted to ask if you had any need of this. It’s perfectly serviceable, but I’m afraid it doesn’t fit me any longer.”

The dress spilled forth from her hands, flowing like water. Clara felt herself go cold. It was a pretty enough piece of sewing, strong at the seams and the lacework well crafted. That wasn’t at issue. It was the offer itself. The fact—for it was now a fact—that the Baroness of Osterling Fells had become the sort of woman one offered secondhand clothes to. She wished now that she’d asked for the tobacco. If she had descended to charity, there seemed no reason to step away. She forced a smile.

“It’s lovely, Enga,” Clara said, taking the silk between her fingers. “And I have the perfect use for it.”

No, ma’am, I can’t,” the woman said. Her name was Aly Koutunin, and Clara had met her on the Prisoner’s Span the month before when Clara had gone to pass out free bread. She was younger than Clara by almost a decade, but the years had worn harder on her, and they might almost have been sisters.

“Your daughter’s getting married, isn’t she?” Clara asked. “She’s almost the right size. Even if she doesn’t choose it for the ceremony—”

“Not that. It’s just so rich.”

“If you don’t take it, it will be on the ragman’s cart by morning.”

“No!”

“I swear it,” Clara said, and her sincerity left no more room for dissent. Aly folded the cloth carefully, reverently, and pressed it into her sack. They stood at the edge of the Prisoner’s Span, looking out across the southernmost reach of the Division. In the west, massive clouds were building, high and white at the top, grey as slate at the bottom. Late spring storms often washed the lands near Camnipol this time of year, but just as often they missed, clinging to the horizon like a shy boy at a his first ball. On the bridge itself, a Firstblood man was leaning over the railing, shouting down to a woman in one of the hanging cages. From what little Clara could see, the prisoner’s expression was empty, her arms and legs poking out between the bars and over the abyss. The man shouted something about being a bad mother to her children and spat down toward her.

“True love, eh?” Aly said, following Clara’s gaze. “They’ve been like that most of the day.”

“And how is your Mihal faring?” Clara asked.

“He’ll come back up in three days, unless the magistrate’s too drunk to come,” Aly said. Mihal, her son, had been caught stealing coins from a merchant’s stall and had hung over the open air for two weeks now. It wasn’t his first time in the cages, and the magistrate had made unpleasant jokes about sending him over without one next time. Aly pretended to treat it lightly, but Clara saw the fear at the corners of her eyes.

The previous year’s battles had wounded the city, there was no question. Blades in the street and fires in the noblest quarters. Nothing like that could happen without leaving a mark. Only in the gardens and mansions at the northern end of the city did Clara see how it could be possible to view the worst as passed, the wounds as healing. Walk south and west far enough to reach the Prisoner’s Span, and the infection showed. It wasn’t only that there were more beggars, though certainly there were. It wasn’t only the merchants’ stalls closed and abandoned.

Palliako’s war against Asterilhold had taken the able-bodied men from the farms in planting, and the insurrection against him had distracted the noblemen from the business of managing their holdings. Now the armies fought in Sarakal, and another spring planting had almost passed with fewer hands than it needed. There was still bread at the bakers, meat at the butchers, beets and carrots at the carts along the streets, but there was also the growing sense that all the reserves had been spent. It felt like desperation, and it showed the most in the city’s desperate places—the Prisoner’s Span, the vagrant encampments that clung to the sides of the Division, Palliako’s new prisons. The places that had been beneath her notice and were no longer.

To her left, Vincen was talking to a thin older man. He glanced toward her then away, reassuring himself that she was still there, still well, in a way that could only remind her of a hunting dog checking on its pack.

“What’s happened to Oldug?” she asked, taking her pipe out from her pocket.

“Hauled him up early,” Aly said, bitterness in her voice.

“Hardly seems fair, does it? My boy in for taking a few bits of copper and staying his full time. Oldug was running his ship from Hallskar and back for five years before they put hands on him. Must have cost a hundred times what my boy did.”

“Is odd, isn’t it? What’s become of him since?”

“Not around here. Likely took his good fortune back to sea with him.”

“Or got pressed into service for the war,” Clara said.

“Or that.”

Clara took her tobacco pouch out before she remembered again that it was empty. She pressed it back, but Aly plucked the clay pipe out of her hand and started filling it from her own supply. Clara began to protest, but then stopped. It was rude to ask, but it was worse to refuse. A young man of status given a small command to Lyoneia. A smuggler shown leniency. The feeling it called forth in her was little more than a slight discomfort, an itch, but Clara sat with it patiently, and it grew into something larger and more complex. Suspicion, perhaps. Aly lit the pipe from her own match, drawing on it until blue smoke billowed from her lips, then passed it back to Clara. The leaf was old and stale-tasting, but after a few days of nothing it might as well have been ambrosia and incense. Clara puffed out a careful ring of smoke and watched it spin and diffuse while she thought.

“If you hear what happened to him, I would be interested,” she said. “Anyone else who’s been let out early and then gone too.”

“I’ll ask around if you’d like,” Aly said, leaning against the great stone abutment that gave the bridge its strength. “Anything else you’d want to know?”

Of course there was. She’d already gathered so much from so many places—the knights in the field from an old porter who had taken a position at the Fraternity of the Great Bear; the grain and fodder being diverted to the army from a disgruntled baker arguing with the miller who usually supplied him flour; the movements of the army from a dozen friends, lovers, and relatives of the soldiers. It was all there, floating through the city waiting only for a careful listener. But like drinking saltwater and growing thirsty, every question answered left her curious. What kinds of supplies were going south to Lyoneia with Nikayla Essian’s son. What other commands were being scattered to the odd places of the world and who was leading them. Whose sons they were taking with them, how many horses, and how much food. Her curiosity was piqued, and it would be days or weeks finding what she wanted to know, all of which might amount to nothing. She smiled at Aly and drew another sip from her pipe. Was there anything else she’d want to know? Only everything.

“No, dear,” she said. “Just an old woman feeding her idle fancies.”

“Not so old as that,” Aly said and cast a leering glance at Vincen Coe. Clara felt a moment’s stab of embarrassment, and then laughed. Across the little square, Vincen turned to look over his shoulder at them, checking in with his pack.

“He is pretty to look at,” Clara said.

They stayed there for the better part of an hour, Clara visiting and trading gossip with men and women she had come to know over the last months and Vincen following her lead. At last, the sun began to reach down toward the western wall of the city, and Vincen came to take her arm and lead her home to the boarding house.

“We should talk,” he said as they stepped into the shadowed alleyway. “I’m starting to get worried about staying in the city. I’d like to speak to my uncle about going out there for the summer.”

“That’s sweet,” Clara said. “No.”

“I’m afraid there’s going to be more trouble. Not right away, but soon.”

“All the more reason I should stay,” Clara said.

“It would be safer if—”

“I’m sure the letters I wrote from your uncle’s farmstead would be fascinating,” Clara said. “‘There may be more piglets this year than expected.’ No, if I’m going to do this, I have to do it from here.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t do it,” Vincen said. His voice was so gentle she almost laughed.

“Of course I’m going to continue with it. It’s what I have left.”

“You have me.”

This time she did laugh, and the flicker of hurt on his face was terrible and hilarious both. She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. The taste of his sweat was surprising and immediate, and Clara wondered whether she’d just crossed some unspoken boundary. And if she had, whether the boundary was his or her own. Vincen’s light brown eyes were fixed on hers, his cheeks flushed. She didn’t realize they’d stopped walking until someone passed them.

“My work’s here,” she said. “But I hope you’ll stay with me.”

“To avenge your husband,” Vincen said, and she could hear the complexity of sentiment in his words.

She shook her head and pressed two fingers to the huntsman’s lips. “To redeem my country,” she said. And then, a moment later, “By betraying it.”

Marcus

Looking back at it afterward, the journey from the heart of the Lyoniean rainforest to the rocks and crags of the northern coast took on the feeling of a dream. Marcus remembered bits and pieces—the bone-deep exhaustion, the day an annoying welt on his leg had opened and spilled out live maggots, the tension between taking time to search for food and pressing on to reach the end of the forest—but they formed no single coherent string. They had walked and hidden and been bitten and starved and tried to find water that wouldn’t fill their guts with worms when they drank it. When Marcus thought back to the morning he had stepped out from the trees and onto a paved road, his ribs showing through his skin and half naked where his clothes had rotted away, he saw the scene as if he had witnessed it, as if he had been outside of his own body watching it happen to someone else.

It was only on the ship back north that his mind returned to him enough that he understood. After months lost in the interior, he’d been starving and fevered and prey to insects that had been feasting on the blood of humanity since before the dragons. He told himself that the sword and its venomous magic likely didn’t have much to do with it. As weak as he’d been, he would likely have fallen just as ill, been just as confused. Still, as their little ship bobbed on the summer waves, Marcus left the green scabbard in with his things. He had no need of it on board, and less time carrying now meant more time later.

The only disturbing thing was coming back to his cabin to find a circle of tiny dark-carapaced bodies around his bags where the fleas and insects had come out to die. It wasn’t that Marcus had doubted Kit about the sword’s nature, but seeing it confirmed was unsettling.

Kit was looking skeletally thin as well. But as the days passed and the pair ate the sailor’s diet of fresh fish and old limes, salt pork and twice-baked bread, the flesh of the actor’s cheeks began to fill in, and Marcus felt his own strength returning. By the time the expanse of the Inner Sea began to break into islands and reefs, Marcus was near enough himself that he could keep pace with the sailors. Or at least with ones his own age.

Kort was an island city, and ancient. In the story it told of itself, Kort was the site of the last battle, where Drakkis Stormcrow arranged the death of Morade, the mad Dragon Emperor. Its bay, wide and shallow and protected by a massive chain of dragon’s jade, went by the name Firstwater on the strength of being the first saltwater claimed by humanity for humanity. The high, narrow houses that rose up the steep rise from the shore were, it was said, the first built by free men, or at least they stood where those houses had. It was not the largest of cities. Carse in Northcoast could have swallowed six like it. It didn’t claim the imperial beauty of Camnipol or the wealth of Stollbourne. Its streets were narrow, its trade restrained by the constant wars and turmoil of Pût and the Keshet, its people a rough-spirited crew. But even if the flowers of Kort bloomed tough and simple, their roots grew the deepest. Marcus might even have found himself moved by it, if he hadn’t known three other places that made the same claims.

They pulled into port near evening, the summer sun flinging gold and crimson across the clouds. At the chain towers great fires burned, a guide to ships at sea and a warning. The air smelled of brine and smoke and the subtle homecoming scent of land and stone. Marcus found himself standing at the bow and watching the city as it fell into twilight. Windows flickered with candlelight all up the side of the mountain like an army of fireflies.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you look so content in weeks,” Kit said.

“I’m home,” Marcus said.

“I didn’t know you came from Kort.”

“Never been here before,” Marcus said. “But after that, it’s home.”

The inn sat at one end of a public square so small that only the thin cistern distinguished it from a widening of the road. Seven lanterns hung around the door, the ochre wall seeming to eat as much light as it reflected. The keeper was a Yemmu man with yellowed tusks and a friendly demeanor. Marcus stood in the street, letting Kit make the negotiations. The moon above was the blue white of snow. It was summer now, and Marcus had gone a full winter without seeing snow or feeling cold. It made time seem odd. He wouldn’t have thought that a rhythm so slow and deliberate would affect him from day to day, but looking up at the moon, he felt how much he missed cold.

The room was hardly wide enough for the straw ticking, and it had sawdust on the floor instead of rushes, but Marcus couldn’t help grinning as he lay down. Kit poured a cup of water from the earthenware jug and drank it, leaning against the wall.

“I’m not going to ask how we’re paying for this,” Marcus said, throwing an arm over his eyes. “I’m just going to be here enjoying it.”

Kit chuckled.

“I’ve proposed to the keeper that I perform in the common room. Songs. Stories. Nothing fancy, of course, since I don’t have props and the others aren’t here. But I would be surprised if I couldn’t raise enough to pay for the room and make good inroads toward a ship to the mainland.”

“Malarska?”

Kit made a disapproving sound in the back of his throat. “It’s farther south than I would like. I believe there are some fishing villages on the border of the Keshet that would serve better.”

“Borders of the Keshet,” Marcus said. “Didn’t know they had borders there.”

“I find the term has a more diffuse sense than they use in Northcoast,” Kit said, chuckling. “If you’d care to come down, it might not be a bad thing to have an ally in the crowd. Laugh in the right places. Quietly threaten the hecklers.”

“I’m in a real bed. I may never move again.” After a moment’s silence, Marcus moved his arm and squinted up. “No choice, then?”

“No choice,” Kit agreed.

After the cramped feeling that the rest of the city gave, the common room was a pleasant surprise. The wide wooden tables had benches enough for two dozen people, and a firepit—empty now except for a few blackened ends of logs—had enough for seven more. Kit sat by the empty fire, smiling and at ease as if he’d been there a thousand times before. Marcus took a place nearer the door, watching with admiration as Kit began speaking. There were sixteen people in the common room, men and women both, Firstblood and Tralgu for the most part, with two Timzinae huddling together in one corner. Their annoyance at the interruption lasted less than a dozen heartbeats, then, one by one, they turned, leaned elbows against the tables, and fell under Kit’s spell. The story was one Marcus had heard before about how Haris Clubhand had tamed the Haaverkin tribes and become the first Hallskari king. Kit’s retelling had more humor than most, and Marcus found himself enjoying the story for its own sake and joining in with the laughter more than leading it. There were no hecklers, and the keep dropped a plate of chicken legs and a mug of beer in front of him with a wink.

Marcus wondered, though, how much of Kit’s skill came from the taint in the man’s blood. When the actor lifted his hands, describing how Haris Clubhand walked up the mountain at Zanisstun with a mug full of Astin Look’s blood in his good hand and an axe strapped to his bad wrist, Marcus half believed it had happened. He knew he would shrug the feeling away once the tale was told, but in the moment it was hard to remember that it was only a story, and that sounded too much like the power the spiders held. Even after the performance ended, his rumination was so deep that he didn’t notice, when the door to the street swung open and four men in light armor stepped in, that he knew one.

“Well, Marcus Wester. As I live and breathe.”

The Jasuru man’s face had the lines of a map too detailed for its own legibility, the bronze scales falling into the folds of underlying skin. A white scruff of hair clung to the back of the man’s skull like frost hidden from the sun, and a black tongue lolled behind vicious pointed teeth. Scars from a life of violence seared the man’s thick arms and neck.

Marcus grinned.

“Merrisen Koke,” he said, standing and embracing the old mercenary captain. “God, but you’re looking old.”

“What I get for being the best,” Koke said. “No matter what contracts I take, I keep not dying, yeah? These are my boys. Terrin, Saut. That one’s Davian. You’ll have met him before at Orsen.”

“I remember,” Marcus said, taking the lieutenant’s hand in his own. “Good to see you again.”

“An honor, sir,” the young man said.

Kit stepped over from across the room, curiosity in his gaze. Marcus waved an open hand toward him.

“This is Kitap rol Keshmet. We’re traveling together.”

“A job?” Koke asked.

“Small size, high stakes,” Marcus said.

“Pay?”

“Miserable.”

“And that,” Koke said, slapping Marcus on the shoulder, “is the man I knew. You’re eating. You mind if we come join?”

“As long as I’m not paying for you.”

Between them, they took up the better part of one table. The keep’s initial surprise at his two actors falling in with fighting men washed away quickly as Koke and his men paid for sea bass in black sauce and good ale. For the better part of an hour, Koke retold the things that had happened since he and Marcus had last seen each other. Marcus traded stories of his own, many of them changed to omit details. The food was all eaten and the dishes cleared away when Koke leaned forward, his scaled fingers laced together.

“So Marcus, old friend,” he said, the softness of his tone meaning that the business discussions had now begun. Marcus felt a chill run down his back.

“Was too much to hope this was only a social call.”

“I’ve got a fair number of hired eyes in this town and one of them told me Marcus Wester had come ashore.”

“You were watching for me?”

“I was. Seems there’s people looking for you. Offering a bit of coin for information about where you are and what you’ve been up to.”

Kit’s gaze sharpened, his attention sudden and focused. The two Timzinae at the far table broke out into peals of laughter that no one at the table took up.

“Admirers or enemies?” Marcus said.

“You tell me,” Koke said. “It’s Yardem Hane.”

“Really? Imagine that,” Marcus said. He idly cracked a knuckle. “And what’s old Yardem doing these days that he wants to know about me?”

Koke’s eyes narrowed, and his gaze jumped across Marcus like he was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.

“Don’t know what he wants with you. We’d all assumed he was still padding around in your footsteps trying to get square with you saving his life. Now the story is he’s hooked up with a bank in Suddapal,” Koke said.

“Porte Oliva,” Marcus said. “The bank’s in Porte Oliva.”

“Not this one. Karol Dannien’s set up a gymnasium in Suddapal. Yardem found him there and offered a fair trade for anything anyone heard of you. Said it was an open offer, and Karol spread the word. The place to send to’s Komme Medean’s branch in Suddapal.”

Marcus drank a sip of his beer to hide the sudden stab of dread. He’d imagined Yardem back in Porte Oliva with Cithrin, but that was as much hopeful fantasy as anything. The last he’d heard of Cithrin, she’d been caught in a civil war in Antea. If she’d escaped it, surely she would have gone back to her branch in Birancour. That Yardem was still with the bank but in Elassae raised a thousand questions, and Marcus’s neck prickled with the fear of the answers. If Cithrin had died in Camnipol because he hadn’t been there to protect her …

He put down the beer and belched.

“So,” he said through his smile. “Dannien’s remade himself as a teacher, has he? God, we are getting old, aren’t we?”

“Not a permanent thing, I don’t think. A few of us found something else to be doing when Antea lost its mind. Until that war’s over and we see what shape the world’s taken, it’s hard to know what’s a safe contract.”

Until that war’s over. All the time he’d been gone, the Antean civil war had been burning. Every night he’d spent digging through the vines and trees was another one where Cithrin might have been captured or killed. Every day was one she’d been in dangerous territory.

“Camnipol’s still burning, is it?” he said, forcing his tone to be casual. From Koke’s reaction, he saw he’d failed.

“God damn, man. Where have you been? I’d thought this spending coin to track down Marcus Wester was a joke, but you’ve been outside the whole damned world, haven’t you? Camnipol’s fine. Palliako’s invaded Sarakal.”

Most men wouldn’t have noticed the change in Kit’s expression, but it was plain as daylight to Marcus. Not surprise. Maybe despair.

“How’s that going for him?”

“Better than it has a right to,” Koke said. “And you’re looking to change the subject.”

“Am I?”

The old Jasuru sighed and leaned forward. The first time Marcus had met him, his scales had been bright and burnished, his hair dark and pulled back in an oiled braid. Now he looked spent. Still the same man, but worn down by the years and the battles and unable to break free of the patterns and demands of a life spent fighting for pay.

“I can clear three hundred in Birancour silver for writing a letter about you, old friend,” Koke said. “And the truth is my company can use whatever falls off the trees. But I don’t have to if I don’t have to.”

The other fighters looked down, pretending not to be there. Kit turned toward the door as he he were expecting someone to barge through it at any moment. No one did.

“You’re asking if I want to better the price to keep you silent?” Marcus said.

“If it’s worth that to you,” Koke said. “Seeing how we’ve worked together, I wouldn’t ask more than matching. I’m not greedy.”

Marcus pretended a yawn and stretched his arms. His body felt as tight as a bowstring and his mind was cold and sharp.

“I appreciate the thought, but if I were you, I’d take all the coin Yardem’s got to hand out. In fact, if you’re sending to him, give him a message from me. Let him know as soon as I’m free, I’ll come see him.”

Koke chuckled, low and mirthless.

“More than one way to hear those words,” he said.

“Don’t jump at shadows,” Marcus said. “I’m guessing our mutual friend has a contract he’d throw my way or something of the sort. Nothing sinister in that.”

“For three hundred silver?”

“Maybe he needs my help badly,” Marcus said. “I am awfully damned good at what I do.”

“Which is what, in this instance?”

“Same as always. Whatever needs doing,” Marcus said, and rose to his feet. “Good seeing you again, Koke.”

“You’re going to bed already?” Koke said. “Night’s only just starting.”

“Not for me, it’s not. Kit, you’re on your own. But this bastard’s clever, and if he tries to get you drunk, he wants something.”

“My boyish affections, perhaps,” Kit said with a perfect timing that set Koke and his men laughing.

Koke stood and embraced Marcus again. “Take care of yourself, old friend. We’re in odd times.”

“Always have been,” Marcus said, then retreated to his room.

The bed that had been so comfortable not hours before seemed lumpy and awkward now. The rest his body had ached for couldn’t be coaxed back. Marcus lay in the darkness, hands behind his head, and listened to the murmur of distant voices like the rushing of a river. Yardem’s name had ripped off a scab he’d forgotten was there, and now he felt exposed and stung and less than halfway healed. He wanted to know why Yardem was in Suddapal, and what he meant by paying for information about Marcus. And he needed to know whether Cithrin was all right and what had happened to her in Camnipol, whether she’d lived, and if she had, at what price. The dread was like a weight on his breastbone. His mind flitted to all the sacked cities he’d been through, all the innocent victims of war he’d seen, and his imagination put Cithrin in their places.

The nightmares would come back tonight. The old ones of Alys and Merian. Women he’d failed to protect. If Cithrin was dead or hurt, someone would die for it. Yardem first, and then whoever had done it. Marcus knew from experience that the effort wouldn’t redeem anything, and that he would do it anyway.

He hadn’t fallen asleep when the door opened and Kit stepped in. At some point in the evening, something had spilled on him, and he smelled beery. The actor sat on the end of the bed and began unstrapping his boots.

“Asterilhold and Antea last year,” Marcus said. “Now Sarakal.”

“Apparently so,” Kit said. The first boot thumped against the floorboards.

“Your spider goddess eating the world. This is the beginning of that, isn’t it?”

The other boot thumped and Kit turned to lean his back against the wall. The light spilling in under the door flickered, barely more than darkness.

“I think this began long ago. Perhaps very long ago. But yes, this is what I feared would come. This and worse,” Kit said. And then, “I hear there is a ship leaving in five days for Suddapal.”

“Suddapal’s farther from the temple than Malarska.”

“It is. But if your unfinished business with Yardem Hane—”

“After,” Marcus said. “Job is we kill a goddess and save the world. Let’s not complicate it.”

Geder

You’re most kind, Lord Regent,” Ternigan said. “Your visit is an honor I hadn’t looked for.”

Geder smiled and shifted his weight, stretching his legs under the camp table. The tent was thick leather stretched on iron frames, almost as solid as a true building, but movable provided the work of enough servants. Lord Ternigan’s bed stood against one wall with a real mattress and wool blankets. An unlit brazier squatted in the room’s center, tinder and sticks already laid out in case the Lord Marshal should want to warm himself later. A decanter of cut crystal held wine, and Geder couldn’t help wondering whether it always did or if this was something special put together to impress him.

“I thought it was important to see the men in the field,” he said. “Raise their spirits. Let them know that the strength of the empire is with them.”

“Yes,” Ternigan said. “They were quite excited when they heard. I hope the journey wasn’t unpleasant?”

“Much more pleasant than the first time we were in the field together,” Geder said, and Lord Ternigan laughed. Geder’s first campaign—his only one, really—he had been under the command of Alan Klin, Klin under the direction of Lord Marshal Ternigan. Then, Geder had ridden with a single squire and a tired horse from Camnipol to Vanai. Now he rode in a wheelhouse almost wider than the road, slept when he wished to, ate where he chose. He lifted his eyebrows and glanced toward the decanter. Ternigan rose from his chair and poured a glass for him. Outside, the army of Antea waited in their own less elegant tents. The smoke from their cookfires tainted the air, reminding Geder of another night, another city, another fire.

The wine was decent, but a little acid. Too much, Geder suspected, would upset his stomach, but a glass wouldn’t do any harm.

“What is the situation?” he asked, and Ternigan sat back down, spreading his hands like a merchant in a stall.

“We knew this would be a siege,” Ternigan said. “They call Nus the Iron City for good reason. But we’ve cut off all approaches from land and Skestinin’s done a fair job keeping relief from coming by sea. No food is going in, and they have only the water they can draw from their wells inside the walls, much of which is brackish.”

“Why haven’t they surrendered, then?” Geder asked. “If they don’t have good water, they have to know they’re going to lose.”

“They don’t have good water, but they aren’t dying from thirst either, and we”—Ternigan paused to sigh—“don’t have a great deal of food. When the farmers retreated, they burned their crops and collapsed their wells. They took to the countryside. If we send out parties to forage, they’re harassed by the locals. There’s no one to buy food from, and if there were, there’s reason to expect it would be poisoned. It will take time and fortitude. The traditional families are wagering that we don’t have those. We will have Nus, my lord. Don’t mistake me, the city will fall. And when it does, we’ll be able to make whatever terms we want in the peace.”

“I don’t want Nus,” Geder said. “I want Sarakal. Nus and Inentai and every garrison and farm in between. It doesn’t do me any good to come here and half win.”

Ternigan’s face pinched in, and he pressed the backs of his fingers to his chin. When he spoke, his voice was measured and careful.

“There are constraints, my lord, that are outside our control. However much I want to break the city today, the enemy is in a strong position. Even the most noble causes sometimes have to compromise.”

“How long?” Geder asked.

“How long for what, precisely?”

“How long before Nus falls?”

“It will be ours by winter,” Ternigan said without hesitation.

Geder sat, letting the silence stretch. Over the course of a minute, Ternigan’s expression went from uncomfortable to embarrassed to angry to a kind of petulant confusion. Geder smiled without meaning it.

“You’ll tour the city’s fortifications with me and Minister Basrahip in the morning,” he said.

“If you like, Lord Regent.”

“Good to see you again, my lord,” Geder said, standing. “I think it’s good that I’ve come.”

The walls of Nus stood grey and seamless on three sides of the city. The iron gates that gave the city its name rose to the height of ten men one atop the other, and great bands of the metal reinforced the stone so that the whole city had the sense of being a single great mechanism devised by a huge, inhuman mind. Which might, after all, have been true. The dragon’s road came to the sea here, and had since before the dragons fell. There had likely been a city in this place since before history itself began.

Though, as Basrahip pointed out, not before the goddess.

They rode in a company of twenty. Geder wore his black leather cloak against the morning chill, but pulled it off almost at once when the sunlight warmed them. Ternigan wore bright steel armor like a boast, Basrahip and his two fellow priests the brown robes that they always wore. And Geder’s personal guard. If there were assassins in the brush, they didn’t trouble the group. All around the city, Ternigan explained the difficulties of an attack. The long wings of the wall hung over the water and forced any approach from the sea to suffer under the defenders’ bolts long before they could come to shore. Here, the walls were topped with spouts to pour down stones or flaming oil. Here, the shape of the land itself forbade the siege ladders. There, a team of engineers might be able to tunnel under the fortifications and collapse them, and Ternigan had in fact begun the project, but it would take time. Weeks at least, months more like. The seawall couldn’t be surveyed, but Ternigan brought diagrams and maps with him to fill any time that wasn’t already rich with discouragement.

As the hours passed, Ternigan’s tone shifted from defensive to conciliatory as Geder began to understand the scope of the problem. Geder had helped to take and even briefly ruled the Free City of Vanai, and he realized now that the experience had set his expectations poorly. When he thought of taking a city, he imagined Vanai. Nus was no Vanai. It was one of the great cities of humanity.

When near midday they returned to the army’s main camp, the arrayed forces of Antea that had seemed vast as an ocean only hours before had shrunk in his view. They were the same men, the same horses, the same engines of war. What they weren’t was plausible.

“You see my situation,” Ternigan said as they dismounted. Geder’s thighs and back ached, and a sense of growing embarrassment sat in his gut as uneasy as the first pangs of illness. He nodded to Ternigan as he passed his reins to the groom, but didn’t say anything.

If Ternigan’s tent was near to a house, Geder’s was like a movable palace. It was still the same framed leather walls, but arranged into half a dozen different rooms, including a separate latrine for his own private use and a copper bathtub that they’d apparently hauled all the way from Camnipol in the event he might feel dusty. Rosemary and lilac had been scattered on the ground so that every footstep belched forth perfume. A plate of dried apples and flatbread waited for him, and he sucked at the fruit disconsolately. Ternigan was right, damn the man. Nus would have to be starved out or its walls undermined. It would take months. It would take longer than he could afford. This was his war, and he’d managed to lose it already. His ears were already burning with the whispers at court, the jokes told where he couldn’t hear them. He could already see the brave loyalty on Aster’s face as the boy tried to lift his spirits. He could see the pity in Cithrin bel Sarcour’s eyes, should he ever be lucky enough to see them again.

By the time Basrahip joined him, he had worked himself into a bleak and self-pitying despair. The priest stood across the desk, his expression a question.

“What?” Geder snapped.

“You seem troubled, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said.

“Of course I’m troubled. You saw it all just as well as I did. Those walls?”

“I saw walls,” Basrahip said.

“We can’t beat that.”

Basrahip grunted deep in his throat, his eyes narrowing as if in deep consideration. He turned, stepped to the leather wall. When he struck it, it sounded like a massive drum.

“What are you doing?” Geder demanded.

“I am trying to think why you would beat a wall.”

The rush of anger in Geder’s throat felt like a dam ready to burst.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“A wall is a thing, Prince Geder. A gate is a thing. A well, a granary, a ship. Things. You don’t defeat things. You defeat people, yes? So we see all these beautiful, strong things and think that the ones behind them must be beautiful, strong people. But they are Timzinae and the puppets of Timzinae. They are the slaves of dead masters. There is nothing in this place to stop us.”

“They could be toys made of sticks and tree sap, but we still can’t get to them,” Geder said, but he felt the darkness and anger slipping in him. Losing its hold. Basrahip sat at the desk. In his fingers, the apple seemed tiny. When he bit it, the white of the flesh seemed vaguely obscene.

“Have faith in the goddess,” Basrahip said. “You have kept your promise to her. She will keep faith with you. These walls will bow to you, if you wish them to.”

“How?”

Basrahip smiled.

“Speak to the enemy. Do this.”

“Call the parley, you mean?”

“This,” Basrahip said. “Let us hear our enemy’s voice.”

It took the better part of three days, but on the fourth, a lesser gate swung open and a small group came out carrying the banners of parley. The man who led them was old, his broad scales greying and cracked, but he held himself with a haughtiness and pride so profound they radiated. Mesach Sau, patriarch of his family and war leader of Nus sat across the table from Geder and folded his arms. The nictitating membranes under his eyelids slid slowly closed and open again, blinking without breaking off his stare.

“You wanted to talk,” Sau said.

“Open the gates of the city,” Geder said.

“Kiss my ass.”

Geder looked over. Ternigan and Basrahip both sat on camp stools like matched statues, Ternigan the image of dour seriousness, Basrahip serene and smiling. Geder cleared his throat, and Basrahip’s smile grew a degree wider.

“You cannot win,” the priest said. “Everything you care for is already lost.”

“He can kiss my ass too,” Sau said.

“You should listen to him,” Geder replied.

“You have no hope but surrender. The armies of Antea are powerful beyond measure. Their mercy is your only hope.”

“Is that what I’ve come here for?” the old Timzinae asked, then turned his head and spat on the grass. “We have the food and water to sit on our thumbs and grin until this time next year. Your boys will be starving in a month. We know all about your engineers and their mining, and that’s not going to do you any damned good either.”

“Listen to my voice,” Basrahip said, and it seemed as though his words took on a wild music. Geder felt himself almost lifted by them. “Prince Geder cannot be defeated. He cannot be stopped. It is not in your power to defeat him. If you stand against him, your children will die before your eyes. And their children as well. It is inevitable.”

“This is shit,” Sau said, standing. Geder lifted his hand and ten men approached, bare blades in their hands. Sau turned, his mouth a gape of rage. “We’re under parley! You kill me and you’ll never get another chance, boy.”

“Don’t call me boy,” Geder said. “I’m trying to save your life.”

“You cannot win,” Basrahip said again, as old Sau retook his seat, his hands in fists at his sides. “The dead will rise and march with the soldiers. Any you cut down will stand again, stronger and without fear. You cannot win against the power facing you. Everything you love is already lost.”

The hours of the parley passed slowly, but with every one, Geder felt his fear lose hold. Nothing had changed. The walls of Nus were just as tall, the defenses just as vicious, but what had seemed doomed before began to take on the mantle of possibility, and then credibility, and before sunset, it was certain. Old Sau sat just as proudly in his seat, his head just as high, but tears leaked out of his eyes, the scales of his cheeks black and bright as a fountain.

“I won’t do it,” Sau said, but his voice broke when he said it. “I’ll die before I’ll do it.”

“Another will come,” Basrahip said. His voice had taken on a dry rasp from the hours he’d spent talking. “If you will not, the next one will, and then his family will be the one to take Prince Geder’s mercy and your grandchildren will die bleeding in your streets.”

“I won’t do it. Won’t do it. Better we die than give in to bastards like you.” Sau broke off, sobbing. Geder didn’t clap his hands in delight—it would have been rude—but the impulse was there.

“Go,” Geder said. “We can continue the negotiation tomorrow.”

Sau stood up and turned without a word. He stumbled as he left the camp. The red of the setting sun made the walls of Nus glow like iron in a forge. Geder watched the old man make his journey back to the city, watched him disappear within it.

“I’m damned,” Ternigan said, and his voice was soft with wonder. “He’s going to, isn’t he? We’re going to take this bastard of a city after all.”

“It may take time,” Basrahip said. “Perhaps as long as two full weeks together. But yes, Prince Ternigan. The gates will open to you. The city will fall. Your victory is certain.”

Ternigan shook his head again, pressing a palm to his temple.

“I don’t understand all that I saw here today, my lord,” he said. “But …”

“You don’t have to understand,” Geder said. “Just have faith in it.”

They walked back toward camp slowly. In the broad arch of sky, a handful of stars appeared in the twilight. Then a scattering. Then countless millions.

“We will have to make arrangements for a protectorate,” Ternigan said. “That may be a trick. I thought I’d have much more time. Did you have someone in mind to take control?”

Jorey Kalliam, Geder almost said, but stopped himself. Now that it was asked, he realized it was a question he should have been considering from before he’d left Camnipol. Jorey was still reestablishing himself in court, and while having a few visible honors like the protection of a conquered city would help in that, it would also mean being away from Camnipol. He wished he’d thought to ask. But there would be other cities. Other chances.

That night, they all dined on fresh chicken and a sweet mash made from sugar beets and rice. Ternigan had the captains he commanded compete in extemporaneous poetry praising Antea, the Severed Throne, Geder, and Prince Aster. The night was like something from the histories Geder had read of the great generations of the empire, a bit of the past with new life breathed into its nostrils. It was as if he’d taken all the romances of campaign life and made them real. The comradery, the joy, the bluff masculine competition. All of the things he’d hoped for and never found were his now. All evening, Basrahip and the other priests walked through the camps, speaking with the soldiers, laughing with them, cheering them, and near midnight the whole camp broke into song at once, literally singing Geder’s praises.

He went to bed drunk as much on the affection and loyalty of his men as on any sort of wine, and lay in the darkness grinning and satisfied. He let his mind wander, remembering the darkness of his mood the day he’d seen the city’s defenses. The thought was almost pleasant now, and he turned it in his mind like a glass marble held to the sun, watching it glitter and flash. He’d been so sure that he’d have to return humiliated. He imagined Aster looked up at him again, solid and encouraging even in defeat, and Geder was filled with a kind of love. Aster was such a good child. Geder felt the depth of his own good fortune in getting to deliver the prince a vastly expanded empire when the time finally came for his coronation. A world at peace. It would be a beautiful thing.

And then, after. When Geder was only the Baron of Ebbingbaugh again, he could return to his own life. His books, his holding. Perhaps a wife, or since Cithrin bel Sarcour wasn’t of noble blood, at least a consort. If she’d have him. Or he could travel. Aster could name him as a special ambassador to Birancour, and he’d have reason to visit her in Porte Oliva. He closed his eyes and conjured up the feeling of her body against him, the sound of her breath. He didn’t know he was falling asleep until a servant’s apologetic voice woke him.

Mesach Sau hadn’t slept. Fatigue showed in his clouded eyes and the droop of his shoulders. He hadn’t bothered with the formalities of parley, but walked directly to the camp, to the sentry. It was as if the old man didn’t particularly care whether he was brought before Geder or killed on the spot. As Geder arrived, Ternigan came trotting from his tent as well. Basrahip, serene and pleasant, was already there.

“I’ll do it,” Sau said, his voice breaking on the words. “Swear that you’ll spare my family, and I’ll open the fucking gates for you.”

Geder turned to Ternigan and swept a hand to indicate the weeping man, defeated even before the sack began.

“And that, Lord Marshal, is how it’s done,” Geder said. “Now. Bring me Inentai.”

Cithrin

Living in the midst of a family changed many of the small details of life. Privacy was often a matter of politeness and etiquette in a way that it wasn’t when she’d had rooms of her own. Bits and pieces of other lives seemed scattered through the halls like fresh rushes, and had Magistra Isadau and Maha, her cousin’s daughter, been speaking of matters of family or politics, even questions of finance and the running of the bank, Cithrin would not, she told herself, have eavesdropped. But instead, she walked down the wide polished granite hall bright with the light of morning, heard the voices of the older Timzinae woman and the girl, and picked out the words love and sex. Her journey to the kitchens suddenly became less immediate. Curiosity sharpened her ears and softened her footsteps and she edged closer to the office chambers.

“That too,” the magistra said. “But not only that.”

“But if you really love him, doesn’t that make it all right? Even if there is a baby from it?”

Maha’s voice was strong, but not confrontational. This wasn’t an argument, but a deposition. A discovery of the facts. Magistra Isadau’s laughter was low and rueful.

“I have loved many, many people,” she said, “and I’ve never meant the same thing by the word twice. Love is wonderful, but it doesn’t justify anything or make a bad choice wise. Everyone loves. Idiots love. Murderers love. Pick any atrocity you want, and someone will be able to justify it out of something they call love. Anything can wear love like a cloak.”

There was a pause, and then the girl’s voice again.

“I don’t understand. What does that mean?” Maha said. Cithrin felt a warm glow of gratitude for the child and the question. She didn’t understand it either.

“Love isn’t a word that means one thing,” the magistra said. Her voice was gentle. Almost coaxing. It was the voice of a woman trying to gentle an animal or call it out from under a table. “You love your father, but not the way you love this hypothetical boy. You love your brothers. You love that girl you spend all your nights with. Mian? You love Mian. Don’t you?”

“I do,” the girl said as if she were conceding a point to a magistrate.

“Someone may love their country or their gods. An idea or a vision of the world. Or because it can mean so many things, it’s possible to call something love that’s nothing to do with it. If the edict comes to march north into Sarakal, chances are it will say it is for the love of our brothers and cousins in the north. But it will be really be fear. Fear that the war will come here otherwise. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“Love is noble,” the magistra said. “And so we wrap it around all the things we think perhaps aren’t so noble in hopes no one will see what they really are. Fear. Anger. Shame.”

“I’m not ashamed,” the girl said.

“You want this hypothetical boy. Don’t. Lie to your mother about it if you’d like, but not to me. He opens your body in ways you can’t control. He fills your mind in ways that disturb you and wash your best self away. You’re drunk with him. And so you want it to be love, just the way the generals want their fear of Antea to be love.”

“But …”

“I’m not telling you what decision you should make. God knows you have enough people to do that for you. But I am reminding you that you love a great many people you don’t want to take your dress off for. Longing isn’t love. Not any more than fear is.”

A discreet scratch interrupted, and then the sound of the office door sliding open.

“Courier come for you, Magistra,” a man’s voice said.

“Bring the reports here, then.”

“Can’t, ma’am. Courier says he can’t give ’em to anyone besides you or Miss Cithrin.”

In an instant, Cithrin was powerfully aware that she was standing in the bright corridor, bent like a child trying to overhear her parents. She turned, back the way she’d come, took a half dozen near-silent steps, and then turned again, collecting herself as if she were only now beginning her interrupted errand.

Maha came into the corridor. The brown, insectile scales that covered her face and neck, her hands and arms, were darker than Cithrin remembered. Perhaps it was how Timzinae blushed. She didn’t know.

Cithrin smiled, and the girl nodded back but didn’t speak. Cithrin strolled down the corridor, wondering what to do. On the one hand, she wanted to go back and see what the courier had brought; on the other, doing so without it being mentioned to her might lead the magistra to suspect she’d been spying. With a sigh, she went on to the kitchens as if she didn’t know anything that she wasn’t expected to.

In truth, Maha wasn’t much younger than Cithrin herself. She wondered what it would have been like to be first coming into herself with older women there to speak with. Her own mother was little more than a few fleeting impressions and entries in an old, yellowing ledger, but had she lived, she might have given Cithrin advice on questions of love and sex, men and hearts. In the kitchen, Cithrin exchanged banter with the cooking servants as they made her a bowl of stewed barley with butter and honey, but her mind was elsewhere. Even the rich sweetness of the first bite hardly registered.

Whom did she love? Did she love anyone? Did anyone love her? Now that she asked the questions straight on, she realized she’d been thinking at the edges of them for some time.

Since, in fact, the day she’d heard that Captain Wester had gone. Now that was interesting.

She considered whether she loved Wester the way she might have a proposal of business. Dispassionately, and from a careful distance. Yes, she thought, maybe she did. She didn’t feel any particular desire toward him, but that was the point Magistra Isadau had been making. Desire and love weren’t the same thing.

Cithrin sat at one of the low stone tables, looking south over the wide sprawl of Suddapal’s third city. Where the land ended in a spray of small islands, she could just see the traffic of tiny boats, black against the throbbing morning blue. Desire wasn’t the same as love. Love, she decided, was when something went away and left you emptier. By that definition, certainly—

“Magistra?”

Cithrin looked up. Yardem Hane towered in the doorway. He looked older than she imagined him, but perhaps it was only the light.

“Yes?”

“A report’s come. Magistra Isadau wanted to consult with you on it.”

“Something from Porte Oliva?”

“Carse,” Yardem said. “I think it’s about the war.”

The pages themselves were fine linen, made without a watermark. Paerin Clark’s hand was, as always, neat and precise.

“More information from the mysterious source?” Cithrin said.

“Or a forgery,” Magistra Isadau said. The cheerfulness in her voice was as false as paint. “Komme wanted you to look it over. See whether you had any insights to add.”

The information was clear and succinct. The first section was a rough accounting of the armies in the field. How many sword-and-bows, how many mounted knights. The supplies of food and fodder. Cithrin found a map of Sarakal and plotted each of the groups against the small nation on the desk before her. With each new mark, her belly grew heavier. Nus, the Iron City, had capitulated, but the garrisons on the path to Inentai hadn’t fallen. Not yet.

“I thought Antea was losing,” Cithrin said.

“They were. They should be,” Magistra Isadau said. Her expression was unreadable. “They go into battle with fewer men and barely enough to supply them. And then they win. They reach a town that should be ready to hold back a siege for months, and it falls in weeks.” The older woman spread her hands.

“They can’t come as far as Elassae, though,” Cithrin said. “They don’t have the men or food. And we’re seeing the refugees from Inentai starting to come through.”

“They don’t have the men or food to take Sarakal either,” the Timzinae woman said. “But they’re doing it.”

Cithrin turned back to the report. The unknown writer went on to list a half dozen other forces outside of the churn of war and violence in Sarakal. These were smaller groups with less than a dozen soldiers, but better supplied. The names of individual captains leading these smaller forces were listed with them. Emmun Siu and fifteen men, the report said, moving into the northern reaches of Borja. Dar Cinlama and twelve men traveling over water to Hallskar. Two groups totaling fifty men answering to Korl Essian bound for Lyoneiea. Another group, the smallest, with only seven people, two horses, and a cart, led by someone named Bulger Shoal requesting diplomatic passage into Herez.

“What are these?” Cithrin asked. “Scouting missions for new invasions?”

“We don’t know,” Magistra Isadau said. “I think Komme was hoping you might have some insight.”

Cithrin cast her mind back through the long months into the darkness under Camnipol. Hallskar, Borja, Lyonaiea, and Herez. She tried to recall whether in the long hours of darkness, Geder or Aster had said anything to connect those places. The office with its gentle arches and brilliant sunlight seemed to defy the memories of darkness and dust.

Magistra Isadau’s nictitating membranes clicked closed and open. Cithrin felt the pressure of the older woman’s attention and frowned, willing herself to think of something—anything—that would justify it.

Nothing came.

“There’s no hurry,” Magistra Isadau said, folding the papers and putting them back into her private strongbox. “I don’t need to send a reply for a day or two. If anything does come to you, I can add it.”

“How old is the information?” Cithrin asked.

“Weeks, at the least. But Inentai isn’t under siege yet. So perhaps it still counts for something.”

The Timzinae woman shrugged and smiled. Cithrin thought that she saw unease in her dark eyes and the angle of her mouth. It was hard to be sure.

“Do you still think that the war won’t come here?” Cithrin asked, and the physical memory of making the same query assailed her. She’d said almost identical words once to a man now dead, in a city now ashes.

Magistra Isadau lifted her hands in a gesture of confusion and despair.

“I don’t know any longer. The truth now is that your opinion carries more weight than my own,” she said. “All I have is the numbers and reports. You know the people.”

“The person,” Cithrin said.

“The person. So. Knowing what you do of Geder Palliako, will the war come here?”

Cithrin sat forward, her hands clasped. Memories of the Lord Regent of Antea rose before her mind like fumes from a fire. His laughter. The roundness that fear gave his eyes. The rage as he slaughtered the traitor from within his own court. The taste of his mouth and the feel of his body. A cold shudder passed through her. Magistra Isadau made a small clicking sound at the back of her throat and nodded as if Cithrin had answered.

Perhaps she had.

A thin fog rose just after nightfall, the first Cithrin had seen in weeks. The summer in Suddapal rarely grew cool enough to allow it, but now wisps and patches littered the streets as if a cloud had shattered and fallen to earth. Cithrin sat in an open garden with a lantern behind her, sluggish moths beating at the glass with thick, furry bodies. She had contracts and ledgers spread before her in the buttery light. The wide carved timbers above her gathered the shadows in close, cradling them. The history of the Medean bank in Suddapal seemed less important now than its future.

The trade of Elassae relied on the traffic of metalwork from the north, textiles and cloth from the Free Cities, and spice and gold from Lyoneia. The mines and forges of Sarakal might fall under the control of the Severed Throne, but the trade would remain. Or she thought it would.

Or the armies of Antea might burn them all, as they had Vanai. Surely Magistra Isadau was selling letters of credit to the nervous and wealthy, transferring the gold and jewels of Elassae into paper that could go west, to the safer ports, father from Antean blades. There would be a way to move that wealth away from Suddapal before the end came. Before the armies. Before it burned.

She shook herself, turned back to her books, and found she’d lost the thread of them. Her fingers were on a payment entry, and she could no more say what deposit it came from than she could will the sun to dance on the seashore. She said something vulgar and closed the books. She could sit here enjoying the moment of cool in the midsummer’s heat with her mind scattered and lost or go back to her rooms and stare sleepless at the walls. The knot in her belly didn’t permit anything else.

She snuffed out the lanterns and stacked the wax trays with her notes in a corner with a strip of red cloth that would tell the servants to leave them undisturbed. The sensual music of reed flute and sanded drum that made their hymns murmured even in the darkness of midnight. More than any other race she knew, the old men and women of the Timzinae turned away from sleep. The compound—indeed the five cities of Suddapal—only rested. They never slept. She found herself drawn toward the music and the promise of company and warmth, but it was an illusion. She didn’t know the songs. The snapping of her pale, soft fingers wouldn’t give the sharp percussion of Timzinae hands.

She wondered if Yardem was on guard duty. Or any of her little retinue from Porte Oliva. She wondered where Cary and Sandr and Hornet were tonight. She wondered what Captain Wester was doing and what would make him think that Yardem Hane would ever betray him. She wondered where Geder Palliako slept that night and if he ever thought of her. She hoped he didn’t.

In her own room, the servants had left a lamp burning low. Her window let in a spray of moonlight, the cool blue mixing with the gold of the flame. She changed into her night clothes and slipped her legs beneath the thin summer sheets, sitting with her back against the wall.

Sleep wouldn’t come. She already knew it. She could lie in the darkness and stew in her own thoughts or turn up the lamp and read through the essays and histories Magistra Isadau had assigned her along with the books of the bank. Both options sounded equally unpleasant. For an hour she only sat, listening to the fire mutter in its stove, the distant whisper of drums.

She rose sometime in the darkness well after midnight, turning up the lamp’s wick more for variety’s sake than from any real desire. The floor cooled her feet. The papers waited on her bedside table, held down against the breeze by the old dragon’s tooth. Cithrin lifted it now, running her finger idly along its serrated edge, as she considered the writing beneath without really caring what it said.

The war was coming. It was all happening again, just the way it had in Vanai. She could feel it like a storm. The blades of Antea wouldn’t be stopped. As much as she wished otherwise, she knew the violence would spill past Sarakal. Perhaps to Elassae. Or into Borja. Or turn west toward Northcoast and Birancour. It was like a fire. She might not know where the flames would jump, but wherever it landed it would burn. And Magistra Isadau knew it too, as much as she pretended doubt. Cithrin understood the impulse to pretend the danger away. She’d done it herself in Vanai, and she’d had so much less to lose. Isadau had family—sister, brother, nieces, nephews, cousins. Cithrin had only had Magister Imaniel, Besel, Cam. Or perhaps it was the same. Losing everything was still losing everything, however little someone began with.

But Herez? Hallskar? Lyoneiea? None of them shared a border with Imperial Antea. Perhaps Geder and his counselors were looking farther ahead, to a wider, greater conquest. She tapped the dragon’s tooth against her palm. The thought didn’t sit comfortably. There was something else. Something about the dragon’s roads and the places they didn’t pass through.

Understanding came to her with an almost audible click. She stood up, her heart racing and a grin pressing her lips. She didn’t even pause to throw a cloak over the night clothes. The dragon’s tooth firmly in her hand, she strode out into corridors darker than mere night. Her footsteps didn’t falter. She knew the path.

Magistra Isadau was in her office chamber, reclined on a divan with a book open on her knees. She looked up without any sense of surprise as Cithrin entered the room.

“May I see the new report again?” Cithrin asked.

The Timzinae woman marked her place and closed her book. Opening the strongbox was the work of a minute. Cithrin took up the pages, turning them silently until she found the passages she sought.

A small group to Borja, led by someone named Emmun Siu. Two groups to Lyoneia under Korl Essian. And one to Hallskar, led by Dar Cinlama.

Dar Cinlama, the Dartinae adventurer who had once given her a dragon’s tooth. Cithrin tapped the page.

“Something?” Magistra Isadau asked.

“These aren’t scouting groups for the armies,” Cithrin said. “They’re looking for something.”

Clara

Someone in the house was screaming. Clara found herself out of her bed before she had wholly woken, wrapping the thin summer blanket around her waist, alarm running through her blood. The sound was constant, barely pausing to draw breath. A woman, she thought, or a child. Her first thought was that one of the new maids had encountered Dawson’s hunting dogs again. Except that was wrong, because Dawson was dead, and the dogs sent back to Osterling Fells or set loose in the streets. Somewhere nearby, a door slammed open or perhaps closed. Footsteps pounded down the hall. Clara dropped her blanket and snatched up the pewter candlestick from beside her bed, holding it in a clenched fist like a tiny club. She willed away the last confusion of sleep and prepared herself for the onslaught, whatever it was.

A man’s voice came from just outside the door of her rooms. Vincen Coe.

“My lady?”

“Vincen? What’s happening?”

“Stay where you are. Bar the door. I will return for you.”

“Who’s hurt? What’s going on?”

The man didn’t answer. His footsteps went away down the corridor, then to the rough stair at its end before being lost under the shrieking. Clara hesitated in the darkness. Only the faintest moonlight shouldered its way through her window, and the room hadn’t lost the stale heat of the day. The air felt close as a coffin. She put down her candlestick and walked to the door. The rude plank that assured her privacy was already in its brackets, but she put her hands to it all the same, as if touching the wood might assure her safety. The screaming paused, and masculine shouts took their place. She winced at each new sound, then strained at the silences. Footsteps pounded across the floor below her, and a man shouted once, wordlessly, but in triumph. It wasn’t a voice she knew.

Her rage surprised her. The sane thing, the right and expected one, would be to stay where she was, cowering in the heat and gloom and hoping to be overlooked by violence. For most of her life, it was what she would have done. With both hands, she heaved the plank up, then dropped it to the floor, and then stepped back for her candlestick, making a short internal note to herself that provided she lived to see morning, she would want a weapon of some sort in her bedroom in the future. A cudgel, perhaps.

The woman’s voice was screaming again, but there were words in it now. Vulgarities and threats. Clara made her way down the hall, her chin forward and her head high. The sharp sound of metal against metal announced swordplay, but she didn’t pause. As she marched down the stairs, the screaming resolved itself. Abatha Coe, the keeper of the boarding house. Her voice came from the kitchen. Clara pushed her way in.

The ruddy light of the open stove showed two Firstblood men, young and thin, their ragged beards hardly enough to cover their naked throats, holding Abatha on her knees while she screamed. An older Kurtadam man, broad across the shoulders, his pelt shining red in the firelight, was loading haunches of meat into a rough canvas bag. Vincen lay on the floor, a fourth man—also a Firstblood—kneeling on his shoulder blades, pinning him in place. Vincen’s sword was in the kneeling man’s hands.

“What,” Clara said in the stentorian voice she kept for intimidating servants, “is the meaning of this?”

As if for punctuation, she swung the candlestick against the kneeling man’s head, just above the ear with as much power as the close quarters allowed. The pewter candlestick jarred her fingers, the kneeling man yelped and put a hand to his ear, and chaos erupted. One of the men restraining Abatha let go and turned toward Clara, drawing a cruelly curved dagger. Vincen surged forward, reaching for his sword, the kneeling man struggling to get back atop him before he could. Abatha screamed, wrenching herself around, trying to free her one trapped arm.

The young man with the dagger slid forward, knife at the fore, and Clara threw the candlestick at his head. It bounced off his temple without any clear effect, and Clara’s righteous anger drained from her in an instant. She stepped back into the corridor, her hands held before her. Because better he cut off my fingers before I die, she thought, ridiculously. The man feinted to the right, then the left. In the dim light, she could see his teeth as he grinned.

“Ossit! Behind you!” the Kurtadam man called, and the knifeman turned in time for Abatha Coe to come boiling out of the kitchen, her face a mask of supernatural rage. Clara reached forward and grabbed the knifeman’s wrist, pulling it toward her so that the blade might not find its home in Abatha’s belly. The man was stronger than he looked. Clara pulled at his wrist, drawing the blade closer to herself as Abatha shrieked and cursed and flailed at him.

Someone barreled into her side, breaking her grip and pushing her into the wall. She stumbled, and the bite of the knife caught her arm, the pain bright and intimate. She grabbed at her wound with the opposite hand and felt the slickness of blood. Men were surging around her, and she braced herself for the next blow. But it never came.

They ran past her, the Kurtadam man at the lead, his canvas bag hanging heavy against his back. The three Firstblood toughs followed him with blades drawn. Clara saw joy in their faces. Abatha, crouched on all fours in the frame of the kitchen door, called out threats and epithets, her voice raw and ragged. The door to the street flew open and then closed again behind them. One of them whooped in victory when he reached the street. One of the Firstbloods. One of the men of her own race. Her kind.

“The food,” Abatha said bitterly. “They took the food. That was everything for the next week. How’m I going to feed everybody now?”

“Are you hurt?” Clara asked, clasping at her arm. As long as she kept her palm pressed against the blood, she didn’t have to see how deep the cut had gone. Better to tend to Abatha before that.

“Hurt?” Abatha said, as if the word were one she’d heard before but never used. “They took the food.”

“Vincen?” Clara called. “Are you all right?”

There was no answer. Clara felt her heart go tight. The pain of her arm faded to nothing as she rose to her feet, floating, it seemed into the ruined kitchen. The bench by the little table lay on its side. The pale bodies of dried beans were scattered across the dark planks of the floor. Vincen sat with his back against a cabinet, his sword in his hand. As Clara watched, he heaved a breath, and then another. His gaze struggled its way into focus, and he frowned.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

“Vincen?” Clara said, kneeling at his side. Behind her, Abatha stood in the doorway. “Are you well? Can you walk?”

He lifted his left hand as if he meant to scratch his nose. The fingers were black with blood and gore. Clara heard herself gasp.

“Don’t believe so, m’lady,” he said, and then, more softly, “Oh dear.”

Abatha’s hand tugged at her shoulder, pulled Clara back and up. Vincen couldn’t die. It was unthinkable. He was young and healthy and he had no enemies. And he was in love with her, and she, God help her, was in love with him, and he couldn’t—could not—die stupidly in a fight over ham. Clara’s breath came in sips and gasps. The world seemed to narrow. Abatha was saying something, and shaking her while she spoke. Clara tried to bring her mind back, but it was slow, difficult work.

“It’s three streets to the east, two to the north,” Abatha said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

“Three east,” Clara said. “Two north.”

“It’s a low house. Green with a red roof.”

“Three east, two north. Green with a red roof.”

“The cunning man’s named Hoban.”

Clara nodded. Of course. A cunning man. They needed a cunning man. She would go and get one.

“Three east, two north. Green with red. Ossit.”

“Not Ossit. Hoban.”

“Hoban,” Clara said. “I’ll be back. Don’t let him die while I’m gone.”

“Wait!” Abatha said, shrugging out of her house robe and holding it out. “Take this. Y’ain’t decent.”

Clara looked down at herself. The simple sleeping shift was torn and soaked down one side in blood. What a sight that would be. Lady Kalliam half naked and bloody running through the streets before dawn. She would have done it without a second thought.

The air in the streets felt cool against her skin, the rough cobbles scraped at her bare feet. The half moon dodged between rooftops, here and gone and back again, as she ran. Three streets to the east, then turning left into a thin passage hardly more than an alley that stank of shit and piss and old blood gone to rot. She’d feared that in the dim light she might not be able to make out the colors, but the green was the green of new grass and the red almost crimson. Even by moonlight, there could be no mistake. Clara hopped up the single step and hammered on the door until a huge First-blood man with a greying beard to his navel and strange tattoos up both of his arms answered her. His accent spoke of Stollbourne and perhaps cities even farther to the west. She had to assure him twice that she wasn’t the one in need of help, but once he understood, he came quickly.

Abatha had laid Vincen out on the kitchen table like a body being prepared for his funeral. His skin looked like wax, and webs of dark blood marred him. His eyes were closed and his mouth drawn back in a grimace of pain and determination. The greatest wound was in his side, just below his lowest rib, and the skin there hung loose and open. The cunning man crouched, placing his palm over the injury, closing his eyes and murmuring prayers and invocations that seemed to echo in a space larger than the kitchen.

With the violence done, other occupants of the boarding house began to creep out. The Southling girl who always ate by herself. Two Firstblood workmen who’d just come to Camnipol from the north and taken a room together. They haunted the shadows, drawn to the blood like flies. Abatha’s cold gaze kept them at bay, and Clara ignored them. The cut on her own arm had begun to hurt again, but she paid it little attention.

Without warning, Vincen howled. Light poured from his mouth and nose, from the cuts in his skin. His back arched until only his toes and the top of his head were touching the table. Clara cried out in alarm, but as quickly as it had come, it was over. The cunning man sat heavily on the bench. The terrible wound in Vincen’s side was still there, but instead of blood, a thin, milky fluid ran from it. The kitchen filled with the smell of onions.

“He will live,” the cunning man said. “He will be weak for a time, but this is not the wound that kills him.”

“Thank you,” Clara said. Her vision went wet and blurry. “Thank you so much.”

“Now. Will you let me see to that arm?”

Clara looked down. Fresh blood was still sheeting down to her wrist. When she moved, the living muscle shifted and twitched. She felt dizzy.

“If you would,” she said. “That would be very kind.”

The first light of dawn pressed at the windows as Abatha counted coins into the cunning man’s hand. The boarders who hadn’t made their way out already began to appear, and Abatha enlisted three of the strongest to carry Vincen to his room while she put together something edible from the ruins of her kitchen. Clara went with Vincen, and when the others left, she remained with him, watching him sleep. The reassuring rise and fall of his breast. The calm in his face. Her own skin itched where the cunning man’s words and herbs had knit it closed, and she scratched at it idly.

He was so young, and yet older than her youngest son. Older than she had been when she’d married Dawson and become the Baroness of Osterling Fells. There were scars on his body, testaments to the life of a huntsman. And new ones now. She remembered the half-kiss she’d given him, the roughness of his stubble against her lips. The softness of his mouth. She let herself weep quietly without any particular sense of grief. Exhaustion and the aftermath of violence were surely enough to justify a few tears.

She heard Abatha’s steps long before the woman appeared. She’d put on clothes and carried a carved wooden bowl of wheat mash that she held out to Clara. It tasted sweet and rich and comforting.

“How is he?” Abatha asked, nodding to her cousin unconscious on his bed.

“Well, I believe,” Clara said. “I don’t know.”

Abatha nodded and looked down at her feet. Her lips moved, practicing some words or thoughts. When she looked up again, her expression was hard.

“This is your fault, you know.”

Clara wouldn’t have been more surprised if the woman had spat out a snake.

“Excuse me?” she said. “If I’d stayed in my room, you would both have—”

“I told him we had to leave,” Abatha said. “I told him that food was coming short, and people were going to get desperate. Get mean. Get out of the city, I told him. Close up the house and good riddance to it. There’ll be more than enough work needs doing on the farm. And he’d have gone too, if it weren’t for you and your letters, whatever they are.”

Clara’s lips pressed thin. The sudden mixture of guilt for keeping Vincen in harm’s way, annoyance that he had spoken to Abatha about her work, and outrage that she should be asked to carry the responsibility for the actions of thugs she didn’t even know confused her into silence.

Abatha waited for a moment, then shrugged.

“He’s a man grown, and he makes his choices,” she said. “I do too. He’s family, and I’ll stand by him as long as he needs me. But the day he dies, you’re sleeping on the street, m’lady, because I am done with this shithole of a city.”

At the end, the woman’s voice wavered. Of course it did. The woman had been attacked in her own home by men with knives. She’d been held helpless while her food was stolen. She’d seen her own family nearly killed before her. This anguish grew from seeds that Geder Palliako had planted. This was what Clara had chosen, in her way, to stand against. It was uncharitable to forget that, and so she wouldn’t.

“I understand,” she said.

“I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing here anyway.”

“I understand,” Clara said again. “Thank you.”

That afternoon, the sun shone warm as a fire. Clara wore a grey dress with strong lines. It wasn’t her most attractive, but it gave a sense of authority without being overbearing, and even if no one agreed with her opinion of it, it helped her play the part she had chosen for the day. Vincen was still asleep when she stepped out into the street, and the smell of cooking lentils followed her. All the meat for seasoning it was gone, and meals were going to be a bit bland around the place for a time. Small price.

Clara walked to the south with a pleasant smile and a nod for every familiar face. She forced herself to own the road without commanding it. To take it for granted, and by doing so, make the city itself wonder if perhaps it was hers. She had four people to call upon, and no assurance that any would be able to help her. There was no option but to try.

She found the third house she’d sought in a cul-de-sac near the western wall. A dozen children raced through the dim, grimy space playing as children did everywhere. Even in the shadow of evil. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing here anyway, Abatha said again in her memory.

Clara stepped up to the door. It was thin wood held by a leather hinge well on its way to rot. She rapped on it smartly with her knuckles and set her shoulders. Inside, someone stirred, grunted. A bar was pulled away and the door swung open. The man standing in the shadows blinked at her, as astounded by her presence as he would have been at a gryphon or a dragon. Baronesses were clearly well outside his experience. Even fallen ones.

“Good afternoon. I’m Clara. You must be Mihal,” Clara said.

“Yes,” he said, then bowed as if only then remembering to do so.

“I’m a friend of your mother’s,” Clara said. “I don’t think we’ve met formally.”

“She … ah … talks of you. On occasion. Ma’am.”

Clara smiled, nodding. It was always so difficult to put young men at ease. They all seemed to look at her as something out of a myth. All except Vincen.

“Your sister’s wedding. It went well, I hope?”

“Quite, ma’am,” Mihal said, scratching himself sincerely and indelicately. “It was a nice dress you gave her.”

“I’m glad it suited. May I come in?”

Mihal’s expression went uncomfortable and he glanced back over his shoulder in concern.

“I have three boys of my own,” Clara said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“Well, then. Certainly?”

The rooms were tiny, squalid, close, and repellent. Clara sat on a stool and crossed her ankles as if this were the finest drawing room in the Kingspire.

“I was wondering, Mihal, if I might put upon you for a favor.”

“Ah. Sure, I suppose,” he said as she drew out her pipe and packed it with tobacco. She lifted her eyebrows, and he brought her a burning candle to light it from. The smoke tasted wonderful and smelled much better than the room. Clara took the bowl in one hand, tapping her teeth with the stem.

“I am looking for a young man. A Firstblood. He probably thinks of himself as a tough, and he associates with a Kurtadam man of middle years,” she said, “and his friends call him Ossit.”

Marcus

After his season in Lyoneia, the plains of the Keshet in summer felt as strange and exotic to Marcus as walking into a dream. The wide horizons under the uncompromising bowl of sky felt too large, and the desert air strangely cool now that it wasn’t too humid for his sweat to dry. A few distant clouds scudded overhead with the dim quarter moon showing pale in the blue among them. The caravanserai, as near a thing to a permanent city in this part of the Keshet, centered on a stand of massive obelisks that rose in a circle toward the sky. The stones curved like the claws of some massive beast that could hold a hundred wagons and their teams in its palm, and in the center a spring of clear water trickled from a broken stone into a wide and shallow pool. Half of the travelers in the little oasis were Tralgu, the other half Yemmu, and so two Firstblood men on foot and without so much as their own tent stood out like blood on a wedding dress. Everything smelled of dust and horse shit, and the suspicious looks from the caravan guards promised violence if Marcus or Kit spoke the wrong words or laughed at the wrong jokes. Marcus suspected that it said something unpleasant about his choices in life that he felt so comfortable there.

He sat beside the water, his little pack at his side. He’d wrapped the sword in cloth and bound it with leather straps. No particular use if he wanted to draw the thing, but there was less chance he’d need its use if it wasn’t obvious he was hauling magical treasures from the Dragon Empire about with him. His own blade still hung from his hip, though in a new scabbard. The old one had rotted through with his clothes. The sand-colored cotton robes they’d bought on the Lyoneian coast weren’t so different a cut from the local. Kit made his way through the camps, listening and talking, being charming and using the power of the spider goddess to ingratiate himself to the carters and guards and nomadic hunters. Marcus only saw him when he came back with money or a bowl of boiled millet and roasted goat.

“What’re we looking at?” Marcus asked, biting into the meat.

“I think it could be worse,” Kit said softly enough that his words didn’t carry. “I haven’t found anyone heading in our direction, but I have been promised a mule for a reasonable price.”

“That’s the good news?

“That and no one seems to have decided to kill us and take our things.”

“Counts as a good day, then,” Marcus said. “Let’s go meet our new mule.”

It was a good mule, as mules go, sturdy across the shoulder and placid-eyed. Marcus and Kit had little to carry besides sleeping rolls, food, and waterskins. The Yemmu man who’d agreed to sell it lumbered along behind Marcus as he looked the animal over, his expression vaguely disgruntled as if he might be regretting the agreement.

“He limps sometimes,” the Yemmu said. “Have to rest him for a day or two so he don’t go lame.”

“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Kit said in a pleasant voice that meant the man was lying. The more Marcus saw the spider goddess’s power in action, the more useful it seemed to be. Not much in a battle, maybe, but in everything that came before and after. And in his experience, before and after were what determined who bled in the field.

“Marcus?” Kit said.

“She’ll do,” Marcus said, putting his hand on the beast’s shoulder. The mule didn’t respond even to look at him. “Get us where we’re headed, anyway.”

The Yemmu sighed and accepted a pouch of coins from Kit. They stood together as the huge man counted through the silver and copper, nodded to himself, and waved at the beast.

“She’s yours now,” he said. “Too damn small to be any use to me anyway. Where you poor bastards going anyhow?”

“Borja,” Marcus said.

“Trying to keep clear of the war, then,” the Yemmu said. “That’s wise. Uglier than a camel’s asshole, that is.”

“There’s a charming image,” Marcus said.

“Have you had word from the west, then?” Kit said before the Yemmu could reply. “I have friends in Sarakal, and I’d be glad of any news.”

The man’s shrug was massive.

“Had word. Don’t know how much of it’s true. Say Nus fell and the fucking empire stripped the damn place to the walls. Put half the city in chains for their crimes.”

Marcus lifted an eyebrow. A black fly as thick as his finger settled on the mule’s ear, and the mule twitched it away.

“That’s a fair load of crimes, if you’re depriving half a city of their freedom over it,” Marcus said.

“Timzinae were behind the coup last year,” the Yemmu man explained. “New Lord Regent took it personal. He’s a strange one. Stories are he’s some kind of cunning man, only more powerful than I’ve ever heard. Talks with the spirits of the dead’s what they say. Dead march with him. It’s why he can keep going. No one thought he’d win as far as he has. No one’s sure when he’ll stop.”

No one’s sure if he will hung in the air, unspoken.

“Inentai’s a hard city to take,” Marcus said. “Anteans will be getting harassed by the locals and river raiders from Borja. Supply lines’ll be vulnerable.”

“Oh, and you know all about war, do you?”

“Some,” Marcus said.

“Well. Probably you’re right. Can’t see it going over the winter. So long as the bugs can hold out until then, the empire’ll go home by first frost.” The Yemmu man nodded, agreeing with himself. Talking himself into believing what he only hoped was true.

The Keshet spread out before them, dry and vast. The shallow hills rose and fell, their sides green and grey from the thick-stemmed, tough brush. In the mornings, Marcus woke before dawn to the sound of birds. They made some simple meal, packed what there was on the mule’s back, and headed for the next oasis or creek. Twice they saw the great dust plume of a princely caravan, the moving cities of Jasuru and Tralgu who dominated the plains but didn’t settle them. Both times, the larger groups passed without bothering them. Two men and a mule were probably too small a group to care about, and Marcus was fine with that. As long as there were rabbits and lizards enough to eat, creeks and wells enough for water, and fodder for the mule, he’d walk from one end of the Keshet to the other without seeing an unfamiliar face, apart from the occasional stop at a caravanserai for food, and count himself pleased to do it. The days grew subtly longer, the midday sun more intense, but the nights were still bitterly cold.

Kit didn’t complain. Marcus assumed that his years wandering the world with his acting troupe had left him accustomed to long journeys in the empty places of the world. The old actor’s face was thinner, his body narrowed by months of living without steady food and too much work, but it didn’t make him look worn. If anything, he seemed younger, fuller, more vital. Even at the end of a punishing day’s walk, on rationed water because they hadn’t found fresh, Kit’s step seemed to bounce. Marcus tried to imagine what it would be like for him. They were walking back across decades toward the place where Kit had been a boy. He imagined the years and losses and adventures peeling away from Kit and being left behind on the open plain. The fear was there—Marcus could see it by the light of the fire at night, could hear it in the man’s voice when he spoke—but there was a joy that came with it.

The circle, Marcus thought, closing. Something was ending for Kit, and the sense of impending completion was pulling the man across the Keshet like the north calling a lodestone. Marcus didn’t have that, but he kept pace. One leg in front of the other, eyes sharp for snakes, mouth too dry for comfort. He wore the poisoned sword across his back; the mule had refused to carry it after the third day. So far as he could tell, he hadn’t suffered any particular bad effects except that his dreams seemed more vivid and confused than usual and his food all tasted bad.

Then one day, the horizon thickened. Dark hills marked the edge of the world, and beyond them, mountains. Marcus sat by the low, smoking fire as the setting sun turned the world the color of fire. His shadow stretched toward the hills, toward the temple and its goddess. Beside him, the mule sighed and closed its black eyes.

“How far do you think they’ve gotten?” Marcus asked.

Kit lay back on his bedroll, his hands behind his head and staring up at the stars.

“You mean the Anteans?”

“Them and the ones we’re here to stop. You think they’ve gotten to Inentai yet?”

“Probably,” Kit said. “But perhaps not. There might have been illness in the ranks. Or they might have run short of food or water. I’ve found armies to be large, unwieldy things, haven’t you? It seems they’re always finding some new way to break.”

“Nothing I’d care to bet on,” he said.

“Me either,” Kit said. “Still, I can hope.”

“You know they shouldn’t be winning.”

Kit’s sigh was hardly more than a breath and degree more hunch in his shoulders. Marcus sat forward, his palms toward the low flames. When the darkness came, the firelight would ruin his night vision, but for now he could still see his companion’s expression.

“What else can your goddess do?” Marcus said. “Raise the dead? Can you do that?”

“I don’t believe anyone can bring back what’s gone,” Kit said. “But I imagine there are other ways to win battles. Interrogate prisoners when they cannot lie, and how can they keep their secrets from you? Or frighten the enemy with stories of grand magics against which they couldn’t possibly stand. Or tell them that they have already lost until they think it true. I believe that the priests are making these victories possible.”

“Inentai?”

“I expect it will fall. If they are taking slaves, I expect they will do so there as well. And build a new temple. And begin taking converts to school in the holy secrets of the goddess. All of it. In the end, it won’t matter if Antea outstrips its own abilities. It won’t matter if the empire falls. The goddess will be back in the world, and men who can do what I do will be everywhere. Men with blood like mine. That is all she will need.”

“To do what? What is it she wants?”

Kit’s smile surprised him.

“Peace.”

“Peace?”

“On her terms. The death of those that oppose her. The creation of a narrow world that holds her word to be unquestioned and unquestionable. Only the world she believes and the world that I’ve experienced aren’t the same place, and so for there to be peace, the world as it is must die and be reformed into the one she dictates. They cannot both be, and so … and so she will eat the world.”

“This hairwash about the Timzinae plotting against Antea,” Marcus said.

“There were levels of initiation into the secrets of the temple,” Kit said. “Not all servants of the Righteous Servant were equal. I didn’t learn everything there was to know before I left. But the Timzinae … the story is that they aren’t entirely human. That the twelve true races are all related, and that they all rebelled against the dragons, but the Timzinae were fused with dragonets hatched early from their eggs and fashioned to resemble humanity. They were the one race that remained loyal to the dragons.”

“But that isn’t true.”

“I don’t believe it is, no,” Kit said. “But when I came out from the temple, I brought the stories with me. Timzinae sacrificing the young of other races to their ancestor dragons and so on. It was why I chose to travel to Suddapal. To live among them and see if what I had been told was … true’s a strong word. If it was plausible. It wasn’t.”

The massive disk of the sun dropped lower, touching the horizon like it was setting fire to the world. Kit glanced over at Marcus, his expression reluctant. Almost shy.

“I don’t believe this is a war, Marcus.”

“A culling, then?”

“A purification. The slaughter of a race because …” Kit shook his head, coughed, and tried again. “Because the men I used to know and love and to whom I dedicated my life for a time have a wrong idea.”

“Well, I don’t see talking sense to them about it and hoping for the best,” Marcus said.

“I can’t permit this destruction. Whatever the price, I can’t permit it.”

“Destruction’s inevitable,” Marcus said, and spat. “You do know we’re about to destroy Antea? If you’re right and their success is all based on your incarnated goddess, when we take her away, we’ll take their successes away with them, and they’re in the middle of a fight. Soldiers of Antea are just men. Some of them are bastards and some aren’t. Some have children and wives. It’s not their fault that your old pals came and made their homeland into a tool for a spider, but they’ll die because of it.”

“Or, I suppose, kill for it if we don’t.”

The angry disk of the sun slid away out of sight. For a moment no longer than two breaths together, the plain was in shadow and the mountains to the east still burned, and then the darkness took them too. The world faded to the grey of twilight and ashes.

“I don’t see there’s any choice, though,” Kit said.

“Isn’t. And since I’ve got business in Suddapal, I’d rather the place was still standing when I got there. Just didn’t want you to get your hopes up about this being clean.”

“I appreciate that. Should we keep watch tonight?”

“Always. I’ll take first, if you’re tired.”

Kit settled into his bedroll, the meat of his bent arm for his pillow. A breath of wind moved across the plain. Made visible by the shifting of the low scrub, it reminded Marcus of a vast banner. In the high darkness, stars were spilling out from behind the twilight. Already, the temperature was beginning to drop. There wouldn’t be frost by morning, but it would be cold enough that he’d be damned glad to see that same sun coming up over the mountains.

“Whatever the price, you said. You’ll lose the spiders too.”

“I expect to,” Kit agreed.

“Any idea what that will be like?”

Kit shifted to look up at the stars.

“I feel I have been astoundingly lucky,” he said. “Imagine living a life of constant eavesdropping. Of wherever you go, knowing more than the people around you intended you to. I have heard a million lies from a million lips, and I feel it’s taught me all I know of what it means to be a living part of humanity. It taught me to love.”

“Lies taught you to love?”

Kit lifted a hand, motioning Marcus to silence.

“There was a woman I saw once in a market of Sara-sur-Mar. Young Firstblood girl with a child in her arms. The child was asleep. I don’t know how they came to be there or why the child was sleeping in the marketplace. But this woman—this girl—was stroking the child’s back and saying over and over, I love you. Your mother loves you.”

“Only it was a lie, wasn’t it?” Marcus said. “She didn’t love the kid.”

“It seems she didn’t.”

“And that’s what made you love humanity? Because I don’t think I’d have taken that lesson.”

“You can’t choose who you love,” Kit said. “Or at least I’ve never been able to. A mother is supposed to love her child, but when that doesn’t come, what? That girl knew that something beautiful and profound and important had abandoned her, and so did what she could do. She lied. She told her sleeping babe that it was loved and cared for not because it was, but because she wanted it to be. Not because she cared, but because she wanted to care. And if I hadn’t carried the spiders in me, I would never have seen that. Almost every day, it seems, I’ve come across something like that. Some moment in a stranger’s life that’s unfolded before me, shown me what I wasn’t meant to see. And Marcus, there is a great nobility in ordinary people. The world disappoints us all, and the ways we change our own stories to survive that disappointment are beautiful and tragic and hilarious. On balance, I find much more to admire about humanity than to despise.”

“And if we win, you’re going to lose all that.”

“If we win, I’ll become human,” Kit allowed. “I think it isn’t so terrible a price to pay.”

They were silent for a moment. Marcus leaned forward and put a fresh twig on the fire. There weren’t enough trees in the Keshet to gather real wood, so the night was going to be spent feeding in small twigs and bits of scrub every few minutes. Kit laughed.

“And,” he said, “I’ll finally get to find out whether I’m any good as an actor.”

“Well, even if you’re terrible, I’ll tell you that you did well.”

Kit’s grin was brilliant in the gloom.

“Thank you. I would very much appreciate that.”

“Least I can do. Sleep now. We’ve got a long way still, and I want to be in those hills before nightfall tomorrow.”

Geder

I wish I could have gone too,” Aster said, pitching a stone into one of the garden pools. It struck with a dull plop and set ripples opening out across the water.

It was striking how changed the prince looked. Geder had been gone for only a few weeks on his trip to Nus and then back, but Aster seemed almost a different person—taller, thinner, more awkward in his movement. It wasn’t magic, just the normal progression of child to youth to man, but Geder had never had the chance to see that happen to someone else. And maybe there was a little magic in it, even if it was only the ordinary kind.

“I couldn’t take the crown prince into a war,” Geder said from his bench. “The Timzinae had raiders and assassins. Anything could have happened.”

“You went.”

“I’m just the Lord Regent,” Geder said. “If someone stuck an arrow in my neck, they could get you another protector. You’re the prince. You aren’t replaceable.”

Aster sat on the grass, disappointed and petulant.

“They’d find some cousin or other,” he said. “They always do. I just wanted to see a war. By the time I’m old enough to go, there won’t be any left.”

Geder had stayed in Sarakal to watch Nus fall and to witness the sack of the city. He’d even gotten up before dawn to walk down the line of troops, Basrahip at his side, and encourage the men. Then, as the still-unrisen sun lit the horizon, the army moved into position. If he thought about it, he could still feel the cool of dew soaking his boots and weighing down his cloak. He hadn’t been able to keep Vanai entirely out of his thoughts, even though he knew this was different. And then the great iron doors gave out a massive boom and cracked open a fraction.

The foothold was all his army needed. They roared like a single being with ten thousand throats and charged. Geder was almost sorry he wasn’t riding with them. In the moment, he’d wanted nothing more than to grab a horse and a sword and spill into the city streets.

By afternoon, the siege was over and the matched banners of Antea and the spider goddess hung from the walls as an announcement and a boast. Any lingering resentment he’d felt over Dar Cinlama and the other expeditions was gone. The Lord Regent had gone to Nus, and the city had fallen. Geder left the next day, but ten of Basrahip’s priests remained with Ternigan. Sarakal would fall before autumn, and the rest of the empire had gone without his attention for long enough.

Aster threw another stone into the pond as the ripples of the first reached the edge and either echoed back faintly or died.

“Lord Regent?”

Geder turned to look over his shoulder. The servant at the edge of the garden bowed until he was bent almost double.

“Yes?”

“Your advisors await you, my lord.”

Geder rose, but Aster only scowled at the surface of the pond.

“Are you … would you like to sit in?” Geder asked, then when Aster didn’t answer, “All this is going to be yours. Probably best that you see how it all works.”

“Not today,” Aster said, and threw another stone. This one skipped twice before it sank.

“Is something wrong?”

The prince didn’t respond, and Geder, for want of a better idea of what to do, let the servant lead him away. As they walked along the paths of crushed marble, he brooded. He’d been selfish, perhaps, to go to Sarakal and leave Aster behind. The prince was usually so mature and well contained, it was easy to forget he was still a child, and more than that, a child who’d lost his father. Who’d been the target of assassination. Geder was his protector, and he’d gone off to the war. And now he was making jokes about his own death and his replaceability. He reimagined the conversation that he’d just had, but from Aster’s point of view, and he cringed. He’d only meant to make Aster see that being prince made him special and important, and instead he’d brought up the idea of yet another person Aster relied on dying. Little wonder the boy hadn’t taken comfort in it.

“Stupid,” Geder muttered to himself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“My lord?” the servant asked.

“Nothing. Keep going.”

The official meeting room was halfway up the vast Kingspire, so it wasn’t used except for great ceremonial occasions. The more common business of the empire took place at ground level. Today, the men Geder had set to help him manage the kingdom were seated at a low stone table not far from the dueling grounds. The Kingspire rose up to Geder’s left, the vast chasm of the Division away to his right, and the gorgeous sprawl of Camnipol before him.

Canl Daskellin sat to his right with Cyr Emming, Baron of Suderland Fells, at his side. Across from them were Noyel Flor, Earl of Greenhaven and Protector of Sevenpol and cousin to Namen Flor, and Sir Ernst Mecilli. Had Lord Ternigan and Lord Skestinin been in the city, they would have sat at a larger table. As Geder sat, it occurred to him that a year ago this same group would have included Lord Bannien and Dawson Kalliam, both of them dead now as traitors. And the year before that, King Simeon would have been in his own seat. Of them all, only Canl Daskellin and Noyel Flor had served as steadying hands on the rudder of state for more than three years. It was sobering to realize that so much had changed in so short a time.

“Well,” Geder said, “thank you, gentlemen, for keeping the city out of the flames while I went to help Lord Ternigan. And now that that’s done, where exactly do we stand?”

Noyel Flor stroked his beard and made a sound like a cough but with greater intent behind it. Mecilli nodded, took a breath, held it, and then spoke.

“The food, Lord Regent, that we had hoped to gain by attacking Sarakal is not in as great a quantity as we had expected. In specific, the grains we’ve recovered are half what we’d projected, and the livestock hardly better than a third.”

“On the one hand,” Daskellin said, “Ternigan’s not moving as quickly as we’d hoped, so more of it’s being eaten by the locals. And on the other, they’ve been slaughtering their own stock and leaving the grains to rot rather than let us put hands on it. We’re looking at a thin year. But I’ve been talking with my friends in Northcoast, and if we’re willing to pay a small premium, I think we can import enough of their wheat to see us through.”

“I don’t like it,” Lord Emming growled. Between his tone of voice and the bulldog flatness of his face, he seemed almost a caricature of himself. “We should be sustaining our own, not buying from Northcoast like we were servants at market.”

“It’s one season, Cyr,” Daskellin said. “Be reasonable. There’s more than enough precedent for—”

“Is it one season?” Emming snapped. “Is Ternigan going get the job done and get our men back here in time to prepare the farms this autumn? Because my people have had the most productive fields in Antea for three generations, and I’ll tell you sooner than anyone that what you do before first frost tells whether the spring’s hungry or full.”

“With the money we’ll have from Nus, we could import food for at least three years,” Daskellin said. “And as long as we’re buying from Northcoast, they aren’t likely to get nervous about us or start talking to dissident factions in Asterilhold about whether they should throw off the yoke of Antean rule.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” Emming said.

“Actually,” Geder said, “I think if we can make it through one year, the problem will go away. I have a plan that will give us full production from the farms and let us keep a standing army.” Noyel Flor coughed again, and this time it sounded almost like laughter. Geder waited for the cutting remark. Something like, And will it make all the cows shit gold too? But the men stayed silent, waiting. Geder felt a stab of nervousness, but he kept it hidden. “You’ve all seen the prisons I’ve built over the winter? Well, the time’s come to use them. I’m having all the children of Sarakal sent here to live as hostages. We can distribute the adults as workers on the farms to replace the men we’ve put in the army. If the farms produce as they were doing before the war, then the children are kept safe. If there’s trouble, we have a census of which slaves are at which places, and all their children will stand as communal hostage. So even if there’s one troublemaker in the group, all the other Timzinae will put them down to protect their own children.”

“And so if there’s a problem, you kill all the children?” Daskellin asked.

“All the ones that belong to the people on that farm. Or in that group. Yes,” Geder said. “I haven’t worked out all the details yet. I was basing it on an essay I read about how Varel Caot enforced peace after the Interregnum.”

The four men at the table were silent. Geder felt a flush of annoyance and embarrassment that he couldn’t entirely account for.

“It might be difficult to … maintain enthusiasm when the time comes to kill these children,” Mecilli asked.

“Enthusiasm or loyalty?” Geder asked.

“You could spell them the same,” Mecilli said.

“The point is we won’t have to,” Emming said. “I think the Lord Regent’s right. The threat alone will keep the roaches in line.”

“Thank you,” Geder said, and leaned back, his arms crossed before him. “It’s not like I want to kill children. I’m not a monster. But we have to get the farms producing again. And anyway, I’ve already had the census made and the children are being marched here now.”

“Well, then there’s nothing we need to argue about,” Daskellin said. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

The meeting continued for the better part of the morning, but Geder felt distracted. There were questions upon questions upon questions. The remaining high families of Asterilhold—the ones who had survived the purge that came after the death of King Lechan—were eager to cement relations with Antea, resulting in a swarm of proposals of marriage between the young men and women of the two courts. There were even suggestions that Aster and Geder make alliances with several young women, none of whom Geder recognized by name. Once that was all disposed of, they moved on to whether the spoils of Sarakal would support Ternigan’s army or if a tax should be called, and if it were whether to accept payment exclusively in coin, or if food and horses would suffice. Through it all Sir Ernst Mecilli’s expression was sour and he didn’t meet Geder’s eyes.

They ended before the midday meal, and Geder excused himself to his private rooms, feeling out of sorts and not at all in the mood to be fawned over by courtiers. He would much rather eat a simple meal of bread, cheese, apples, and chocolate by himself where no one else’s needs or judgments could intrude. When Basrahip lumbered into the room, Geder only nodded at him. For the briefest moment, he imagined dressing down the guard for letting him be disturbed, but the thought was gone as soon as it came. Of course the rules that bound the rest of the palace didn’t apply to Basrahip. Everyone knew that.

“How is the rededication going?” Geder asked.

“It will be time soon, Prince Geder. You are very kind to offer your servants such beautiful rooms in your home.”

Geder shrugged as Basrahip settled himself on a chair. The priest looked worried, which was a rare sight. Geder popped a sliver of tart apple into his mouth and spoke around it.

“Is there a problem?”

“You have taken a new city,” Basrahip said.

“And I’ll have at least one more by winter,” Geder said. “And the goddess is going to have a temple in both of them. At least one. More if you want.”

“She sees your generosity, Prince Geder. I know this to be true.”

“You’re not going to ask if you can bring more priests here, are you? You know you can. Just tell me how many we need to accommodate and I’ll make the room. It’s the least I can do.”

“It is not that,” Basrahip said. “You have always been kind to me. I have seen the truth of your heart, and you are the great man that was foretold. Your greatness has exceeded my small powers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your new cities in the west. Now more to the east. The priests of the goddess march at your army’s side and stand in your court. We walk through the streets of your cities and hold the people’s will to the will of the goddess. But we are only a single temple. To do these new temples justice, they must have the faithful and the holy, and I have few more that I can bring forth.”

“Oh,” Geder said. It was an odd thought. Now that it was said aloud, of course there were only so many men at the temple in the Sinir mountains east of the Keshet. Somehow he’d always assumed there would be more if they were needed, as if they sprang full-grown from the earth out there. “Well. Can you initiate new priests? I mean, you must be able to … make more?”

“It will be necessary,” Basrahip said. “But the rites of the goddess are not simple things.”

“All right. I can write to the seminaries. We have temples and priests of our own, and with half the court coming to your sermons as it is, I’m sure there are plenty who’d be interested in learning from you. And really, the rededication’s a perfect time for it.”

Basrahip smiled and lowered his head to Geder in a half bow. “My thanks.”

“Basrahip? Can I ask you a question? Have you spoken with Aster at all lately? I just notice that he seems … unhappy. And I wondered whether you might have some idea why?”

“I do not,” Basrahip said. “But if you would like—”

“No. No, that’s all right. I was just wondering.”

“Have you asked him?”

Geder broke off a bit of cheese and chuckled ruefully.

“I suppose that would be the most direct way, wouldn’t it?” he said. “It’s just hard. I don’t want to make him feel like he’s on trial.”

“Ask gently, perhaps,” the priest said.

It was almost twilight when Geder found Aster again. The boy was at the dueling ground alone, walking the dry strip where questions of honor found their answers. He held his wooden practice sword carelessly, swinging it through the air more for the sensation of movement than against an imagined foe. The shadows of the coming night cut across the ground, leaving part of it bright as midday and the rest almost blue with darkness. Geder motioned his personal guard back and took another practice blade from the rack. When he stepped out, Aster took a guard position, but even then, it wasn’t serious. Geder lifted his own blade.

“How was the council?” Aster said, circling to Geder’s right.

“Frustrating,” Geder said. He feinted and pulled back. “Mecilli seems to dislike everything I do. I’m starting to wonder about him.”

“Take him before your private court?”

“Probably,” Geder said. Aster stepped in, swinging his blade low. Geder blocked it. “It may just be he had some bad fish and it made him disagreeable. But we can’t have another Dawson Kalliam.”

“Can’t we? Some days I think it’d be nice.”

Geder thrust, and Aster trapped the blade, the report of wood against wood resounding from the buildings.

“Why would you want that?” Geder asked, pressing in.

“I don’t know,” Aster said as made his release. He let the wooden blade’s tip sink until it was almost on the ground. “It’s just … I keep having this dream where we’re back in that hole with Cithrin’s actor friends sneaking us food and the cats that wouldn’t come close to us. I dream that I’m asleep, and that when I wake up, I’ll be there. Only I’m not. I’m here. And it’s always disappointing.”

Geder’s own blade sank. Across the wide gap of the Division, a flock of pigeons wheeled in the the air, grey bodies catching the light of the falling sun. It was coming close to summer, and the nights were short. Geder felt the weariness in his body that came from having been awake since first light. Kalliam’s insurrection had been terrible, violent, and uncertain. For weeks, Camnipol had been a battleground, and the scars were still there. Burned-out compounds that hadn’t yet been rebuilt or razed. Street barricades pulled aside or into alleys, but not dismantled. And it wasn’t only the city. Geder felt it in himself too, as much as he tried to deny it or find some joy. Dawson’s betrayal had changed him too.

But in those days and nights squatting in the darkness, hoarding the candles and eating whatever the actors had snuck to them, there had been a kind of distance from the world, a sense of time standing still. He’d spent more time talking to Aster in those few weeks than he had in the whole year since. No council meetings, no servants plucking at him, no duties or expectations or demands. It might have been terrible at the time, but looking back, it seemed benign. A kind of golden moment, barely recognized when it happened.

“It is disappointing, isn’t it?” he said. Aster sighed and looked up at the massive expanse of the Kingspire looming above them.

“I miss Cithrin.”

“I know,” Geder said, swinging his sword through the empty air just the way Aster had been doing not minutes before. “I do too.”

Cithrin

The stream of refugees from Inentai began with a handful that arrived after the fall of Nus. At first they were the sort of people who moved easily through the world—people without work or with the sorts of trade that called for travel, with family in Suddapal to support them or without family anywhere. They came to Suddapal to find new places for themselves, and some petitioned the Medean bank for the coin that would help them begin again. Cithrin sat with Magistra Isadau and listened to the requests, discussed which to accept and which to reject. The woman who needed a loan to join the tanner’s guild had years of experience in Inentai and would be nearly certain to find the work to repay them. The three young men looking to buy a boat had lived all their lives in a landlocked city, and by giving them the money the bank would also be providing them the means to flee the debt should it go bad. Cithrin learned the etiquette of the market houses: when she could step into another conversation and when it would be rude, how to bid up a competitor’s contract to lower their profit and how to build temporary partnerships with them to increase them again. The deep structure of the city slowly became clear to her, like a musician learning a song composed in a foreign style.

But the stream did not stop. More people in larger groups, and of a different nature. As the summer ran its course, whole families came together, carts laden with the possessions of lifetimes. Almost weekly, Magistra Isadau offered the hospitality of the compound to groups too large to find shelter in smaller households. The stories weren’t unexpected. The war in Sarakal was too dangerous, and they had a child or a mother or a cousin in health too fragile to withstand a siege. Often the men of fighting age stayed behind to defend city and country, but not always. Magistra Isadau and her siblings fed their guests and welcomed them to their table. And as if following their example, the fivefold city of Suddapal opened wide its arms and gathered the fugitives of Sarakal into its vast bosom. Even as she watched it, Cithrin understood that the generosity was a symptom of something rotten.

History was clear: refugees of war were seldom if ever welcomed in the cities to which they fled unless they brought with them something of value. And yet all, or nearly all, of the citizens of Inentai were welcomed. And so they all, even the poorest, had something of value. The explanation was simple: by their presence, they carried the story that Suddapal was safe. That image of the city was powerfully reassuring, almost intoxicating, to its citizens, because they knew it wasn’t true.

It was a matter of time before the grand and glorious fabrication collapsed. It would begin with one or two pessimists and dissenters, then a handful more, and then everyone. And when it came, it would come as letters of credit. The carefully coded instruments could be purchased with anything—coin, cloth, spice, steel—and presented at any of the Medean bank’s branches for nine-tenths of the value they’d been bought at. Lightweight, portable, and valueless to anyone besides the one named on them, the papers were perfect for anyone who had come to the conclusion that Suddapal had become a place to flee from rather than to. And they were not greatly in demand. Not yet.

After the day’s work at the trading house was finished, Cithrin followed Magistra Isadau on her walks through the city. They would stroll through the wide commons where the tents and carts of the refugees had become almost a township in themselves, or down to the massive piers where ships from across the Inner Sea came and went. Isadau had introduced Cithrin to many of the secret wonders of the city: an herb market in the third city where three full streets were lined with tables filled with living plants and the scent of soil; an ancient Tralgu cunning man whose talents let him turn berries and water into a sweet, icy slush; the hidden cove at the city’s edge where the Drowned had been bringing the wreckage of old ships and constructing some vast and arcane sculpture just below the waves. Often they would talk about the day’s trades as they walked, or the history of the bank, or more general topics: family, childhood, food, coffee, the hungers of men and of women, the pleasures of books. Cithrin tried to push past her reticence, sensing that Isadau was offering something that she deeply wanted. A better idea, perhaps, of how to become the woman she pretended to be. And Isadau listened carefully and deeply, and tried to make herself clear in reply.

Still, Cithrin felt that half the time they spoke past each other. Isadau was a Timzinae who had lived her whole life among not only her people, but her family. Cithrin was an orphan half-breed who’d never had a close friend among the Cinnae, much less a mother or sister. But she tried, and usually Isadau tried too. So when one day they left the trading house early and walked directly back toward the compound, Cithrin knew something was amiss. And what it was.

“Sold more letters of credit than usual today,” she said.

“I suppose we did,” Isadau said.

“May be there’s a market growing for them.”

“Oh, I think it’s early to say that.”

Cithrin scowled. Isadau’s stride was brisk and wide, and Cithrin had to scurry a little to keep up. They crossed a wide and grassy square, where a spire of black stone in the center was dedicated to the memory of someone or something. Cithrin fought the urge to pluck at Isadau’s sleeve like a child asking for attention.

“This isn’t the usual pattern for the season,” she said. “I’ve been looking through the books. You’ve sold most of them in the autumn or early spring, and even then, not more than ten or fifteen in a season. We took five today.”

“We did,” Isadau said as they turned the corner. The familiar lines of the compound hove into view and Isadau’s pace seemed to increase. Far ahead of them, Jurin and Salan—Isadau’s brother and nephew—were shoeing a horse. They were too far away to hear even the sound of their voices, but the positions of their bodies were eloquent. Jurin with his head turned slightly away from the beast as he spoke to his son. Salan upright and serious. Father and son as they had been since the beginning of time, it seemed. Isadau’s steps faltered, and Cithrin managed to reach her side. The older woman wasn’t even breathing hard. Her gaze was fixed on the men, her smile serene and content. Cithrin felt a moment’s frustration until she saw the tear that streaked down Magistra Isadau’s cheek and was quickly wiped away.

“Tell me, Cithrin,” she said. “Do you think the Porte Oliva branch might be able to make use of our extra capital?”

“I think they’ll need it if they’re to make good on the credit we’re selling,” Cithrin said.

Isadau turned her smile on Cithrin and nodded once.

“We should arrange that, don’t you think?”

Cithrin had been in Vanai when the Antean army came in conquest. This was the same, and it also wasn’t.

She remembered being the only one among many who had feared the coming battle in Vanai. The others had seen it as an evil and an inconvenience and prepared themselves for Antean rule with an air of resignation and the sense that whether it was the prince in the city or the king in Camnipol, taxes would be taxes and beer would be beer and not much call to worry about it. Even Magister Imaniel had been more concerned with keeping the wealth of the bank away from the prince than with fleeing the city himself. He was dead now. They were all dead now, burned with their city.

Suddapal, on the other hand, knew its danger. The fear bloomed in the market houses and the streets, on the piers and in the coffee houses. The whole city waited with bated breath for runners from Inentai with news of the siege, perched to fall on any scrap of information like carrion crows. Every rumor spread through its citizens, ripples in a pond. The debates in the taprooms changed from whether Sarakal would fall utterly to when, from why Antea wouldn’t march on Elassae to whether. The very rich who could afford it and the very poor who were no worse off anywhere left first, some by ship, others on foot. The governor and the council repaired to their estates, pretending to be in conference, though no one expected them to return. The stores of silver and gold, tobacco and spice, silk and gems and rare books filled the storerooms of the compound, and letters of credit left Isadau’s private study, written in cipher and sewn with knots as individual as a written chop.